Speaker 1: 00:04 This is the Thank You, 72 podcast brought to you by the Alumni Association. This podcast salutes outstanding Badgers from Wisconsin’s 72 counties. Here’s your host, Tod Pritchard.

Tod: 00:15 I was only six years old in 1969, but I can still vividly remember watching Walter Cronkite on the CBS evening . He’d read the number of American soldiers killed or wounded in Vietnam on that day. I also remember the local news showing film of antiwar protest at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Some of you listening to this podcast were young adults at the time. Many of you weren’t even born yet. But no matter where you land on this timeline, the is an incredibly important part of the history of UW–Madison, Wisconsin, the U.S., and the world.

Tod: 00:49 On this podcast, the story of two UW–Madison grads whose lives were changed forever by that war. We begin with Saint Croix County native and Wisconsin’s 37th governor, Warren Knowles. His time in office intersected with the turbulent era of the antiwar protests, which brought him fame that he did not seek. Like many Wisconsinites, Knowles loved to fish. The water and the quiet simplicity of nature cleansed his soul.

Tod: 01:17 He couldn’t wait for the yearly tradition that he established in 1968 — the governor’s annual fishing opener. It was the unofficial kickoff to the Wisconsin summer tourism season. For Knowles, the environment, jobs, and the quality of life in Wisconsin were intertwined. He was born in River Falls and earned his law degree at UW–Madison. After joining his uncle’s law practice in New Richmond, he ran for the Saint Croix County Board. State Republicans convince Knowles to run for governor in 1964, which was a bad year for Republicans.

Tod: 01:49 On election night, his candidacy appeared doomed. “I went to bed defeated and woke up as governor,” Knowles said. Despite a democratic landslide across the country, he had won. Known for his sense of humor, Knowles was liked by Democrats and Republicans alike. He guided the state’s purchase of land for

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recreation and park use, developed programs to clean up lakes and streams, and helped to create the slogan, “We like it here.” Which emphasized the quality of life in Wisconsin.

Tod: 02:18 Knowles drew national attention when he called out the Wisconsin National Guard to control civil-rights and Vietnam War protests in Milwaukee and at his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Here is governor Knowles in an audio clip from the documentary The War at Home.

Gov. Knowles: 02:34 I will not in any way tolerate violence or disorder, and in carrying out my duties, I feel I have a direct responsibility under the constitution to call the national guard when requested to do so.

Tod: 02:50 The decision to deploy troops took its toll on Knowles’s reputation and his well-being. “I was tired and frustrated,” he said, “I told my assistant that, for the good of my own health and because of frustration, I decided not to run for reelection.” He left office in 1971. On May 1st, 1993, Knowles grabbed his fishing gear and drove to the 25th annual governor’s fishing opener. He passed away that afternoon as he brought in fish he had caught on Lake Arbutus. On that day, then-governor Tommy Thompson said, “If he has to go, I’m sure this is the way he would’ve wanted to go.” Thompson added, “He was an outstanding governor and a perfect gentleman.”

Speaker 1: 03:32 You’re listening to the Thank You, 72 podcast. The Wisconsin Alumni Association is honoring amazing Badgers. For more amazing alumni stories, visit thankyou72.org. That’s thankyou72.org. Once again, here’s Tod Pritchard from the Wisconsin Alumni Association.

Tod: 03:53 Fifty years ago, protestors clashed with police at the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus. Forty years ago, on October 12th, 1979, a groundbreaking documentary premiered at the Majestic Theatre in Madison. That film, The War at Home, chronicled the antiwar movement from the early 1960s through the 1970s at UW–Madison as the Vietnam War tore the country apart. The combination of archival footage and interviews instantly takes you back to that time. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary feature and was recently restored.

Tod: 04:29 One of the directors of that film, 1972 UW grad Glenn Silber, joins us for the podcast. Glenn, thanks so much for dropping by.

Glenn Silber: 04:38 Thanks for having me.

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Tod: 04:39 Your film is so important on many different levels, and one thing, it takes us back to that era so instantly and so many people listening to this podcast may have no idea of what that time in Madison was like. And for the rest of the country for that matter.

Glenn Silber: 04:57 Well, I came here as a student in 1968, and by the time I got here, the antiwar movement was already in full flower, and I didn’t have any knowledge about it. I came from a sheltered suburb of New Jersey and pretty quickly, like the day after my parents dropped me off, someone put a leaflet under my door that said, “Come to a college disorientation session about the draft and what it could mean to you.” And so starting from a personal point of view, my life became transformed pretty quickly coming onto this campus that was already very, very active against the war.

Glenn Silber: 05:31 Okay. So I went through my four years, and I got an education. It wasn’t exactly the one I was expecting to get. And I really was transformed as a young adult. I really didn’t anticipate this, but it certainly, I thought, was putting me in the real world, and I tried to respond to the times and the events, and I became just one of the many people out there in the protest. Not a leader by any stretch.

Glenn Silber: 05:56 And after I graduated and started to develop my film and video career, I spent a couple of years working in a community video group, and then I just got to feeling and thinking about it. My goal was to make epic documentaries. I used to joke, “I want to make epic documentaries and save the world.” And the story that I knew best was the one I lived through and that was being here on the Madison campus and just really coming to terms with events outside of my life, outside of America for that matter.

Glenn Silber: 06:28 In 1968 when I got here, I didn’t even know that there were 585,000 GIs in country in Vietnam, and I was privileged to be here and luckily had a student deferment ’cause the more you learned about the war, it wasn’t something that I wanted to participate in. But when it came time to wanting to make an epic documentary about this story, I went to a guy who I thought was my hero, is a feature documentary maker who had made a number of films and had an Academy Award for a film he made about the Vietnam War.

Glenn Silber: 07:01 His name was Emile de Antonio. And his archive, by the way, is at the Wisconsin Historical Society as is mine now. And I went to him in New York, and I think I was still 24 when I first went to

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see him and hoped maybe he’d want to make this film. And he said, “Glenn, I know all about the Madison antiwar movement, and I think your idea to make a film about what you went through there is superb. But I’m not going to make the film. You’re going to make it. It’s your story, and I’ll help you. I’ll be your mentor.” And he gave me one piece of advice that was our mantra for the next four and a half years as we started from nowhere and wanted to make this film: “Never leave Madison. Don’t go running out to Berkeley or University of Michigan or Columbia University in ’68. You don’t want to be a mile wide and an inch deep. Your story is right there in Madison. And if you can get the footage you need, you can make a great film.”

Glenn Silber: 07:55 And I took that advice and my little group that made it, including my partner, Barry Alexander Brown — he started out to be a film researcher, and eventually we could see this was a bigger project than we anticipated, and eventually I made him my partner and we stuck to it. There’s only a couple of times in the film — because something, one of our participants, our characters in the film does - that we would leave, but we really stayed tightly focused, and we didn’t even get a chance to really talk too much about other aspects of it because we didn’t want to dilute what we were telling one story, which was about what the war did to America and, in this case, to Madison, Wisconsin.

Tod: 08:32 So just for some folks who are listening to the podcast who may not be familiar with the Vietnam War. Glenn just mentioned the peak number of soldiers in Vietnam in 1968, American soldiers, that were there. Just to give you a few other numbers, too, to give you some perspective. Fifty-eight thousand U.S. troops were killed in the Vietnam War. One hundred and fifty-three thousand were wounded, and over 3 million Vietnamese were killed. So that gives you the scope of the conflict.

Tod: 09:06 And the other thing, too, that I think is important, and I don’t know how you feel about this, Glenn, but to me it seems like that was really the first time in American history that there was a widespread resistance to a government policy. And in this case it was the war.

Glenn Silber: 09:22 That’s very true. And what’s amazing about it and what you see in the film — our film, The War at Home — is how it started out so small. The first demonstration we found on film, which is, I think, the first antiwar demonstration anywhere of more than two people, is when about 150 people were on the library mall right next to the Union across from the library mall. And the protesters are wearing suits and ties. It’s hardly what we associate the protest movement about. But it started so small.

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Glenn Silber: 09:55 Of course, Wisconsin had a tremendous history department then that attracted a lot of people. With a great graduate school we had with teachers like William May Williams and Harvey Goldberg and George Mossy. These lions of the history department, and it attracted people that really cared about history and were learning about what was our role going into the early sixties. , our former mayor, was at that demonstration in October of ’63, and he talks about that first demonstration, and I think over time you really get a sense of how the movement grew.

Glenn Silber: 10:29 One of the things you see in the film is how it went from that first demonstration, and then when the bombing starts in February of ’65 — what they called Operation Rolling Thunder. And then you see 25 or 30 people on the library mall carrying signs. And then as that grows into more conflict, you see in 1966 that the draft becomes the major issue, and they have a sit-in at the administration building, and you see the numbers growing and growing and growing. But what I took away from that is you had this core group of progressive antiwar organizers who had learned about the war, and you really sensed that there were people who are more dedicated than others. They’re more committed and they’re the ones who are having these events like when they go out and march to the air base to ostensibly arrest the base commander for war crimes.

Glenn Silber: 11:17 I mean, it seems absurd. On the other hand, you see all the press that’s starting to pick up on it. And in our film we were the beneficiaries because the protest movement, even in those early years, was a curiosity for evening news. And so you’d see some local news about a car crash on I-80, and then you’d see something else, and then we had 50 protesters on the library mall protesting the bombing in Vietnam.

Glenn Silber: 11:39 And over time, because of the way the war escalated, you see how that grows and how there is a relationship. I mean, Margaret Mead, the famous anthropologist, was the one who said, I’m paraphrasing here, “Never underestimate the power of a small, dedicated group of people to change the world.” And in this case, over the period, really from ’65 to ’72, you see how that becomes really from a very small group of people who are sometimes being ridiculed, to by the end of it when it becomes a majority movement in this country.

Tod: 12:13 So do you think that’s why Madison was one of the epicenters of protest?

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Glenn Silber: 12:18 I think it was a combination of things. Madison had a history, and Wisconsin had a history at that point, of progressive politics. The university had this world-renowned history department, and a lot of people who were what they call revisionist historians, who looked at the post–World War II period with a slightly different eye. And then I think especially once you look at how the draft is the fuse that it lights the movement up because every man at that time, if he failed to get decent grades, could be reported to the draft board could be sent to Vietnam. So there were self-interested aspects to it too. But why Madison as opposed to say University of Iowa or anywhere? I think it was happening everywhere, but there were some places that just had a confluence of the character of the students, the character of the place, and the fact that you had these really important professors who are getting people to think a little bit differently.

Glenn Silber: 13:16 My dad was one of the World War II veterans, and he was actually, because he was older, he went over there and was very involved toward the end of the war and was involved with helping to return civilian rule to Germany. I even have a photo of him at a ceremony where it says on the back, “Ceremony to commemorate the return of German law to civilians.” So a lot of us grew up with this “America the Great,” “the greatest generation,” and we can never even think about criticizing it, but then when we see this turn into Vietnam. Korea is something no one really talks about. It was not a great situation and never got resolved.

Glenn Silber: 13:56 But when we get to Vietnam, people like William May Williams who’d been talking about that there is an imperial quality to our country in the post-War era, you hit Vietnam and it starts to make sense to a lot of people.

Tod: 14:09 One of the pivotal moments in the film and in the protests were the demonstrations that targeted the Dell Chemical Company. Dow came to campus to recruit new employees, but students protested the company’s role in making napalm and agent orange, which were both used in Vietnam. So that nonviolent protest, basically a sit-in, turned violent on October 18th, 1967, when police moved on the commerce building and started hitting protesters with their clubs. I’d like to play a little clip from the documentary The War at Home. This is a very young Mayor Paul Soglin describing what he saw as the students were caught up in that moment.

Paul Soglin: 14:53 To this day, it’s debatable as to what happened when the police made their first move into the building. But once they made

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that first move, regardless of what happened there, all they did was come in four or five at a time with clubs swinging and just beat the hell out of everybody in their path. They just swept down the corridor.

Paul Soglin: 15:13 The whole place was like a war zone. The tear gas was going off at that point and that was what ... The critical moment was the crowd began to gather because classes were just over when ... when the cops moved in. And so suddenly, with the crowd getting larger and the crowd getting meaner, they start using tear gas. ’Cause suddenly there’s four thousand, five thousand kids who are being affected by this thing. Well suddenly all these fine middle-class kids at the University of Wisconsin are being teargassed and clubbed. I don’t know if it’s a time shock or what, but there was an awful lot of politicization that took place in that 15, 20 minutes when ... when the cops just let go with everything they had. And that night, something called a strike began.

Speaker 16:03 We might call a general strike.

(music) 16:03 There’s something happening in here. What it is ain’t exactly clear. There’s a man with a gun over there, telling me I got to beware. I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down.

Tod: 16:45 Glenn Silber, one of the directors of this documentary, The War at Home, is with us. Glenn, when I watched this moment unfold in the documentary, I was reminded how brutal the authorities were that day and how that was such a turning point in the protests.

Glenn Silber: 17:04 Absolutely. You have to go back a couple of years, though, because in the film we talk about ... napalm was such a shock that we would use a weapon like this. It’s a petroleum jelly that when they dropped, it burst into flames. I think you have to consider it almost a war crime that we used this. And the students were very moved by that. But the earlier protest that started, I think in late ’65, was when the government sent out these so-called truth teams to explain it all to the concerned students. And at that event, you see the students, a whole lecture hall full of them, confronting these state department employees about the issue of napalm.

Glenn Silber: 17:47 Subsequent to that, there was an important demonstration that we show in the film that also predates the one we’re talking about. In February of ’67, they allowed the Dow Chemical Company to come on campus again to recruit engineers to

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make better napalm or something. And that was an affront. And by that point there was a magazine that had published photographs of children who had been badly burned by this terrible thing. And in that case, again, the students were pretty tame. They tried to bear witness to this, and they were negotiating with the deans about whether this was good. I don’t know why the university couldn’t have just told Dow Chemical to go have their recruiting at the Hilton or wherever they do these things. But the fact that they did it on campus made the students who were aware of the situation very outraged.

Glenn Silber: 18:39 And so then Dow comes back yet again in October of ’67, and this time the students were more militant in there. They still wanted to sit-in passively, but they weren’t going to let them be taken away. And what happens, as you mentioned, it’s well documented in the film that Ralph Hanson, who is the head of protection and security, the campus police, because there was too many students and it seemed a little overwhelming for him, he calls in the Madison police, and they show up in their riot gear and it’s another one of these historical events with unintended consequences. You know, there’s about three, four hundred students who are doing the protest. You see the police come and move in and Ralph talks about, he narrates that section, about how it only took him 12 minutes to clear the corridor or area in the commerce building.

Glenn Silber: 19:29 And then I loved the line he uses. He says, “But then the problem transferred itself from inside the building to outside the building.” And you see these cops, who are then trying to protect the Dow chemical people, just pummeling the protesters. I mean, 65 people were sent to the hospital, many of them with concussions. You can see the blood coming out of their heads. And Paul Soglin was one of the protestors who’s there and was in the building and Paul got the crap beat out of him. We have his former administrative assistant, Jim Rowan, talk about how Soglin was curled up in a corner in a ball and three cops are just wailing on him.

Glenn Silber: 20:04 Well, once they moved outside the building and were clubbing people half to death, the big mistake was, another historical mistake, they start using the tear gas on campus for the first time, and now because it just happened to be near Van Vleck and Commerce, classes are changing. So it goes from being a protest affecting maybe 3,000 people, not just a few hundred who were there.

Glenn Silber: 20:26 And so it’s really one of these historical events, but it also the context is, it is a turning point. You highlighted that perfectly.

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That week was called Stop the Draft Week, and it was not only happening in Madison, but there’s even a sign in the film where it says “Confront Dow in Madison. Confront the ‘real war makers’ in Washington.”

Glenn Silber: 20:47 By that weekend there was the biggest ever protest up to that time at the Pentagon, and that led to a confrontation. In the same time frame on the West coast and Oakland, you had protesters like the people trying to block Dow that were blocking troop trains literally taking troops to the airport to go to Vietnam. That is the turning point, as we say, when the movement turned from protest to resistance. And I think it’s the most important week in the history of the antiwar movement.

Glenn Silber: 21:14 The fact that these pretty innocent middle-class kids didn’t expect what they got just magnified the whole antiwar movement into something much bigger. And now that becomes the character of the movement going forward.

Tod: 21:29 As the protests escalate and it becomes that resistance that you were talking about. The authorities step up their intensity as well, right? The governor calls in the National Guard.

Glenn Silber: 21:41 Yeah. And that was one of the only events that we almost cut, was a black strike. But because of the effect that has on the protesters in terms of tactics, in terms of militancy, we decided to keep it. And I’m really glad we did. And then also don’t forget the national reaction, and here in Madison, to the killings at Kent State. That was chilling. National guardsmen opening up fire on a group of protestors? So that just exploded everywhere. But you know, Madison of course was still in the forefront of reaction.

Tod: 22:10 And so Sterling Hall is bombed in ....

Glenn Silber: 22:13 August 24th, 1970. Between semesters, 4:20 in the morning.

Tod: 22:17 And it was an effort to destroy the Army Math Research Center that was in the building, right? One graduate student was killed.

Glenn Silber: 22:25 Yeah. Working in the basement at four o’clock in the morning. And they’d called in a warning. No one paid attention to it. And what happened was their plan, as he says, was to let the dust settle and then show up, have a press conference saying, “We did it and here’s why and we’re going to go to jail for 10 years.” That was the plan until someone was killed.

Tod: 22:45 And then what happened?

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Glenn Silber: 22:48 There was a lull here. Because after the bombing, the repression was serious. They pointed the finger of guilt at the antiwar movement — you’re killers, all that. And then, because it was like the antiwar movement kept responding to the escalations and as new issues became more prominent.

Glenn Silber: 23:04 By ’72, there was a big discussion about how corporations like Honeywell were creating all these antipersonnel weapons, and it was just new escalations and new targets for the movement. So it really didn’t die at all. It was very strong. And that’s where we more or less ended the film, where you see the reaction. Where you see Nixon making these announcements and he says, “I hope you’ll give the same strong support you always give to your president.” And you see people tearing the town apart again. It was just creating conflict over the war.

Glenn Silber: 23:35 But what’s good about the film is the way the arc of the film, I think, shows you the escalations on their part and the response of he antiwar movement. I mean, I was just outraged. Early in the film one of the best characters, Kenny Caslick, talks about how “I thought the Vietnam War would be over within months. I was trying to create a whole new culture.” And so the fact that that was his sentiment in ’65 and by ’ 72 we’re still at it. I mean, it’s unbelievable.

Speaker 1: 24:03 You’re listening to the Thank You, 72 podcast. As we look back on the Vietnam War era and Madison, Wisconsin Alumni Association’s media and public relations director Tod Pritchard continues his conversation with Glenn Silber, producer and director of The War at Home. The 40th anniversary screening of The War at Home will be held at the Orpheum Theatre in Madison on Sunday, October 13th, at 6 p.m.

Tod: 24:24 The archival film in your documentary is amazing and I’d like you to tell me, how did you get it? Where did you get it? How did all that come together?

Glenn Silber: 24:35 I made a decision that my goal in life at that point, in very early ’75, maybe even ’74, was I wanted to tell the story of the Madison antiwar movement as a microcosm of the larger national movement, and I was starting from scratch. I had no particular resources. But I turned to the Wisconsin Historical Society because they’re the repository of all things historical and all things Wisconsin. And there was a bear of a man there who ran the photo and film department named George Talbot and I had been going and showing up for a couple months and looking for this and looking for that, and it was not going very well.

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Glenn Silber: 25:18 And one day George saw me there again and he said, “Okay Silber, you’ve been a bit of a nuisance, but today might be your lucky day.” And I said, “Really?” I said, “I could really use some luck here.” He says, “Well, come on over here. We just received a collection of local TV news film from WKOW. The news director there, Blake Kellogg, had covered this from 1959 to 1972, and we are now the owners of every scrap of film that his news departments shot on a daily basis, and we went and picked it up yesterday and it is, politely to put it, a mess.

Glenn Silber: 25:58 “They would shoot the film for that daily broadcast, and they would then do the voiceover and the studio and they’d tell you that today there were 50 students at the library mall protesting the bombing in Vietnam or whatever the incident was. And then they throw it in a can or a box and sometimes they have the scripts there and sometimes they didn’t. But it’s such a mess.

Glenn Silber: 26:17 “We’ve tried to look at it. The splices are not always intact and it’s dirty and we have no clue what’s in it. And it’s a ton of footage. So if you, since you’ve expressed what you’re doing, you’ve been here a lot, if you want to look at it, or if you want to hire a film researcher, I’ll make a sweat equity deal with you. You do all this work — and it’s going to be a lot of work — and then if you, what you’re looking for, we will let you use it for free.”

Glenn Silber: 26:47 And that was singularly the luckiest day of my professional life. Even as a 24-year-old.

Glenn Silber: 26:54 So I found someone who was game. A friend of mine had a roommate who had gone to high school here in Madison, a guy named Barry Alexander Brown. And to say I hired him would almost be a euphemism. I paid him very little. ’Cause he was really was desperate to get into film. He hadn’t gone to college here, he hadn’t been really political, but he really wanted to be part of something important. And so he comes out here, and I get him set up at the Historical Society where they have these flatbed editing machines so you can carefully look at things without damaging anything.

Glenn Silber: 27:26 And he tells me. I said after the first day, I said, “Well, how’d it go, Barry?” He said, “Well, you’re not going to believe this, but the first box I opened was from October 1967, and I found this amazing footage that the cops and the students are battling it out in front of the commerce building because of this Dow protest and if there’s other stuff like this. We’re going to make the greatest film documentary ever.”

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Glenn Silber: 27:47 And I said, “Wow, that sounds great.” So Barry was every day, nine to five, going to the Historical Society, taking good notes. And then, meanwhile, I was working with a team of two other researchers, and we were trying to understand, really going through the Daily Cardinal , what the events were. And before we shot ... The film took four and a half years to make. We were young, we had no money. It was a really difficult process. But before we ever shot any of the interviews, we were guided by the history that we learned from the Daily Cardinal and the Capitol Times, and then we’d always turn to Barry and say, “Hey, do you have any footage on that?”

Glenn Silber: 28:23 So before we shot any of the interviews, we knew we had a roadmap. We’d wrote a hundred-page treatment that said, “This is the film we’re going to make.” And we pretty much stuck to it. Over time, when the other two stations heard about — WISC and WMTV, the NBC and the CBS affiliate — heard that, I guess the first station had gotten a big tax write-off for their donation. They did it too.

Glenn Silber: 28:46 So now we not only had the 150 boxes, now we have 300 more boxes. And for a year, Barry never left the archive, and eventually we found someone to support him so we could start shaping the film and shooting the interviews. So I think we were the first film documentary ever, and possibly even to this day, a hundred-minute film, where the visual dimension is almost entirely local TV news film shot on a daily basis and thrown in a box, and then we recovered it and we were able to index it for the society, and now it’s one of the premier local archives in the country.

Tod: 29:20 And I understand Blake Kellogg kept all that film because he was afraid it was going to get destroyed somehow.

Glenn Silber: 29:25 Well, it was being poorly maintained. It was sort of kept outside in a chicken coop, is the way it was described to me. And George, the head of the Historical Society film department, said to me, “When we picked it up, we were afraid it was going to start melting in the summer.” And so, yeah, Blake Kellogg is the unsung hero of the film and George Talbot is his partner because Blake really knew, having been a grown-up as he covered all these things, that he had really been in on something very historically important during the Vietnam era, which of course in some ways was a turning point in its own way for the country’s foreign policy.

Tod: 30:01 Let’s talk about the restoration of the film and how did that come about?

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Glenn Silber: 30:07 Well, after the 2016 election, many of the people I knew were shocked and dismayed by it and we then had this national women’s marches that were protesting the inauguration of our 45th president. And of course I’m a big liberal, and I was upset about it, but I was very uplifted by the fact that the women, by the millions around the country, had led these demonstrations. And where I’d moved to is small Santa Fe, New Mexico. It’s a little town. We had 8,000 people marching.

Glenn Silber: 30:39 And so I thought, “Wow, what can I do to contribute to that? What’s my role?” And I thought about it and I said, “Well, this is reminiscent of the kind of marches we had in the ’60s and maybe the film, The War at Home, has a new role to play.” So I took a DVD down to my local art house cinema, and I introduced myself. I’d only moved there a year or two earlier, and I said, “I’m Glenn. I have this Oscar-nominated documentary, and I think a lot of the 8,000 people that were marching a week or two ago would like to see it.”

Glenn Silber: 31:08 And they agreed, and to my shock, it did really well. It sold out the first couple of nights, it was held over. And then coincidentally, one of the people who I’d known early on back in 1980 when we were distributing it, who’d helped us, was one of our distributors. She happened to call me, and she said, “We’ve set up this new nonprofit a couple of years ago called Indie Collect, and the function of this nonprofit is to restore documentaries that were shot back in the 20th century on either 16 millimeter or 35 millimeter film into the way films are shown today, which is this digital cinema package. And it’s in a high resolution — 4K resolution.”

Glenn Silber: 31:48 And she says, “I think your film would be a perfect choice to do that.” And since, by coincidence, I had just done this test run in Santa Fe, I said yeah. And I basically turned to a lot of Madison alums, people I’d known over the years, and we raised most of the money from them. It cost about 17 or $18,000. About 50 people donated, 90 percent of them were Madison grads. And so we did it. And then the word got out that we had just done this, and there was a theater owner in New York who had seen the film when he was working at a video store like 20 years ago. And he said, “I want it. I want to play this. I want to break it for you.” And before I know it, he then talked to his colleague who is the top director of the New York Film Festival, and he said he wanted it.

Glenn Silber: 32:31 And he wrote this blurb for the film. I’m proud to say it, I would never have had the courage to say it, he calls the film, “One of the great works of American documentary movie making.” Well

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that’s pretty cool. So all of a sudden we have a little launch pad, and this was just that October of last year. And at that point, I had to make a decision: do we want to give it to a distributor which we’d not had success with, or maybe we should just hold it back? So we then did a Kickstarter campaign and raised about $35,000 more broadly. And that was the money we used to hire a publicist to get a film booker and to do the things you need to do to get your film in theaters. And we played it in about seven cities, and we’ve got some terrific reviews.

Glenn Silber: 33:12 And the theme of the reviews was that The War at Home is back, and it feels like it was made for this political moment. So I’ve been really, it’s taken me a year and a half to get to this point of reestablishing the film as our brand of “resistance,” but I think it’s well timed. And now I’ve just made a deal with a very prominent educational distributor, who of course does it the new-fashioned way, which is through streaming, and the film, as of April 15th, is going out to their 4,000 clients, which are colleges, universities, and public libraries.

Glenn Silber: 33:47 Because my goal really always was to get this film to young people today or even the other generation between those young people and myself. Because really, there’s no way a young person could have a clue about what we went through in the ’60s. There’s no book you can read that’s going to explain it to you and I think ... I’m surprised, but we are still the only film that’s dedicated and focused just on the war and the antiwar movement.

Glenn Silber: 34:12 And so I’m proud to bring it back. The response has been incredible. We had a screening tonight here on campus for almost 300 people, and we had a long Q and A afterwards, and some of the kids were just dumbfounded. They just didn’t have any experience with this.

Glenn Silber: 34:26 But I feel there’s one thing that people keep asking me: what’s the connection between what we went through 50 years ago and today with this so-called resistance? And my feeling is when I was 18 and 19 years old as a freshman here, and I was following whoever was organizing the events, I felt like we were just kind of making it up. We were so desperate to try to say no to this really criminal enterprise, was what the war became. Twenty-five million bombs on them. All these agent oranges, napalm, antipersonnel weapons. I mean, come on.

Glenn Silber: 34:58 And so today I don’t think you could have had the women’s marches or the student demonstrations against gun violence or some of the other modes of protest if we hadn’t had those

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experiences back in the ’60s. And when it became acceptable, of course, to protest. Especially nonviolently. We always need to try to keep it nonviolent because you’re not going to convince anyone of what the righteousness of your cause is if you turn to violence.

Glenn Silber: 35:26 But on that topic, when you see the kind of thing that happened at Dow, when you see the desperation people were feeling about the war. One woman in the film says, “I really got desperate cause I got the feeling that that country could be completely obliterated before the war movement would be able to help end it.” And thankfully we didn’t. And look today, Vietnam is now our friend. They just wanted their own country. Their slogan was, “Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom.” And that’s what motivated them. And certainly we had our own revolution, don’t forget. So I think that’s a pretty fair statement.

Tod: 35:58 It’s an awesome film, and I am so glad you could stop by and talk to us about it and share your thoughts. Thank you so much, Glenn.

Glenn Silber: 36:05 Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: 36:07 Four thousand colleges, universities, and public libraries have access to The War at Home via Canopy, an educational video streaming service. DVDs of the film are available at thewarathome.tv.

Speaker 1: 36:20 Thanks for listening to the Thank You, 72 podcast. For more interviews with amazing UW alumni, visit thankyou72.org. That’s thankyou72.org

www.allwaysforward.org/podcast/ 1848 University Ave. Madison, WI 53726, (608) 263-4545