Half a century ago, Sterling Hall bombing left its mark on Madison and the world
Fifty years ago, a bomb blasted through a UW-Madison building in the early morning, reverberating across the city, killing a university researcher, injuring several others and forever changing the anti-war movement. The bombing of Sterling Hall at 3:42 a.m. on Aug. 24, 1970, represented a turning point on college campuses after years of protests against the Vietnam War.
Four young antiwar radicals known as the New Year’s Gang planned to target the Army Math Research Center, which was partially funded by the U.S. Army for war efforts and located in the upper floors of Sterling Hall. The group’s homemade bomb instead decimated most everything around it.
Graduate student David Schuster was one of a handful in the building at the time the mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil ripped through Sterling Hall. He spent the next several hours buried under rubble, fading in and out of consciousness. As a physics researcher from South Africa, he considered himself “pretty politically naive” before the bombing, but the experience made him more politically engaged and philosophical about the happenstance of life.
Schuster remembers seeing Robert Fassnacht, the postdoctoral researcher killed by the bomb, in the hallway just moments before it detonated. Schuster ducked into a graduate student office nearby and should have been killed instantly, firefighters later told him, but a building support pillar shielded him from the direct blast.
If I had been two feet over or the other way, I would have been taken instantly,” said Schuster, who was hospitalized with a broken shoulder and sustained permanent hearing loss in one ear. “If the bomb had gone off five minutes later, I might not have been injured at all and Robert may not have died. It was a matter of chance.”
The explosion, the worst act of domestic terrorism in the United States until the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, forced students to confront the violence, the loss of an innocent life and their own political convictions.
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Alumni still disagree on whether the bombing was justified and what effect it had on the antiwar movement. “Even though what they did was stupid and inexcusable, it woke me up,” Marysue (Vail) Mastey recently told On Wisconsin, the university’s alumni magazine. “I think it caused a lot of people — not just myself, but others I knew — to focus on the Vietnam War. It forced me to think about the two sides and to pick one.”
The death of Fassnacht, a 33-year-old father to three, put things in perspective for many students, dampening the near-daily demonstrations.
“It really quieted or killed the antiwar movement on campuses,” said Michael Molnar, a graduate student studying astronomy whose office in Sterling Hall was destroyed by the bomb. “It really sobered a lot of people about where this was going. I don’t think it helped the cause at all.”
https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/education/university/half-a-century-ago-sterling-hall-bombing-left-its-mark-on-madison-and-the-world/article_864d72cc-2b5a-53ee-acef-1b294e023676.html
When innocent lives are lost, protests have gone too far.
