Dow Chemical and Student Activists

DOW CHEMICAL AND STUDENT ACTIVISTS

Student Protests

For many, student protests are remembered as synonymous with the 1960s. At first associated with the civil rights movement, protests spread as college students soon found other reasons for demanding change in the status quo: at Berkeley, California, for example, the 1964 free-speech movement led students around the country to attack their universities as huge impersonal places, with largely irrelevant curricula. By 1965 and 1966 the more-radical students found another cause—"the illegal war in Vietnam." Starting out as teach-ins at colleges and universities across the country in 1965, the protests against the war grew to huge marches and rallies by decade's end.

Dow and the Vietnam War

Dow was one of America's largest chemical corporations and had a fine reputation. Although its major business involved selling chemicals to other companies, most consumers knew the firm as the maker of the convenient kitchen products Saran Wrap and Handi-Wrap. But in the mid 1960s Dow became widely known for a relatively small government contract that amounted to one-fourth of 1 percent of the company's total sales. The contract was for the manufacture of napalm, a gasoline gel, packed into canisters and dropped from bombers during the war in Vietnam. Napalm was designed to stick to its victims and burn them. For antiwar activists, it came to symbolize the inhumanity of the war.

The Battle against Dow

On 28 May 1966 one hundred people paraded around Dow's facility in Torrance, California, protesting its making of napalm. Meanwhile, the same day, another seventy-five demonstrators stood in front of Dow's New York offices, chanting slogans such as, "Napalm burns babies, Dow makes money." Over the next couple of years the anti-Dow campaign spread to antiwar groups at universities across the country. In 1967, when a Dow employment recruiter went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he was harassed by student activists. A riot ensued—leaving seven police officers and sixty-five students hospitalized. In addition to these protests, Dow became the target of more aggressive opposition: on several occasions its offices were vandalized and files destroyed.

Dow Quietly Backs Down

From the beginning of the protests Dow defended its actions. Early on, it explained: "Our position on the manufacture of napalm is that we are a supplier of goods to the Defense Department and not a policymaker. We do not and should not try to decide military strategy or policy." The public opposition, however, clearly had an effect; when the government napalm contract was up for renewal, Dow intentionally did not pursue it aggressively and lost the contract to a lower bidder.

Sources:

Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987);

Allen Matusow, The Unraveling of America (New York: Harper & Row, 1984);

Milton Moskowitz, Michael Katz, and Robert Levering, eds., Everybody's Business (New York: Harper & Row, 1982);

Don Whitehead, The Dow Story: The History of the Dow Chemical Company (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968)'