In the fall of 1964, onSproul Plaza of the UC Berkeley campus in Oakland, a young physics student climbed on top of a parked police car and made a speech. The car was surrounded by several thousand students, all sitting on the pavement, making a coordinated effort to prevent the police from approaching it and driving it away. This was the beginning of the Free Speech Movement and the student on the police car was Mario Savio, its main spokesperson. The Free Speech Movement began when the administrators banned political speech at Berkeley, primarily to prevent student activists from educating others about the Civil Rights Movement which was approaching its peak at the time. Robert Cohen’s biography Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s does a quality job of bringing the days of the FSM to life for readers in our current times.
As any biographer would, Cohen starts off with the family upbringing of the young subject, showing how Mario Savio’s childhood prepared him for his role in later life. His parents were working class immigrants from Sicily who raised Savio in Brooklyn. The youth was an academic high achiever who suffered from a severe stutter that was caused by anxiety and got worse when in the presence of authority figures. Cohen returns to this fact repeatedly throughout the book to illustrate how overcoming this problem propelled Savio to be an advocate of free speech and an effective speech-maker throughout the rest of his life. Other contributing factors in Savio’s development into a political activist were his grandfather’s membership in the fascist party of Mussolini and the trauma of childhood sexual abuse which made him feel a deep solidarity with all the downtrodden people of the world.
Mario Savio went on to be involved with activism as soon as he left high school. He went to Mexico to help indigenous people build modern housing for themselves and spent time in Mississippi working with SNCC to register African-American voters while the KKK were trying to terrorize and kill them. When he returned to Berkeley he participated in non-violent demonstrations in favor of equal representation for Black people in the labor market. When SNCC, CORE, and other leftist political organizations began setting up tables on UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza to educate students about Civil Rights, the pro-establishment administration called the police to have them arrested and removed. That led to the spontaneous demonstration where Mario Savio made his groundbreaking speech.
From there, Cohen details what happened with the Free Speech Movement and their two committees that worked on solving the conflict they had with the authorities. The FSM not only had conflicts with Berkeley’s management team, they also had internal conflicts that had to be overcome. Mario Savio was also a man who had his own deep, internal conflicts. The biography examines these issues both sympathetically and critically, never shying away from pointing out where the FSM’s weaknesses were even though he wholeheartedly admires what they did.
Other topics covered are Mario Savio’s relationship to the New Left movement and the hippie counter-culture, neither of which was he enthusiastic about in his support, his battle with mental illness, his career as a college physics professor, and his lifelong commitment to advocacy for minority and low-income students in their struggle to pursue higher education. The final part of the book is a collection of Savio’s speeches and essays. This was the least memorable part of Cohen’s biography, mostly because all the key ideas there were already addressed in the first three sections. The final essay, an effective explanation and defense of affirmative action, hits all the right notes and is well worth your time even if it is a bit dry.
Aside from the clear and precise details, a strength of this biography is how well Cohen explains the methods of the Free Speech Movement which provides a good contrast to the political activism of our current times. Mario Savio saw the educational institutions of America as being run like machines so they believed in shutting down their operation through demonstrations and forcing the authorities into a position where they would have to negotiate in order to get the machine running again. When the Berkeley students seized the police car, they held it for ransom and the price was a place at the negotiating table, not some outlandish over-the-top abstract claim like ending the patriarchy now or stopping capitalism. The FSM risked their safety to put themselves into a position where they could make demands. Their activism was done with the intention of reaching short terms achievements that could lead to more short term achievements which collectively would result in a larger transformation of society at a later time. Political activism today is mostly done by ineffective street demonstrations and picking fights with strangers on the internet, neither of which have proven to be effective. The end result of political correctness was Donald Trump. Occupy Wall Street is a great example of the colossal failure of the 21st century American left; it was a massive demonstration where nobody made any clear demands and so nothing got accomplished. Today’s activists should learn a few lessons from the Free Speech Movement and the Civil Rights Movement to see how things actually get done. Demonstrations are not magic spells that correct the world’s problems. Arguments on the internet have never, ever, succeeded in convincing anybody to change their mind about anything significant. Without direct action that leads to realistic demands and negotiation, activism amounts to nothing more than vanity, publicity stunts, and whining.
Mario Savio is here portrayed without any embellishments. His style was plain and down-to-Earth. There was nothing flamboyant in his character which again stands in stark contrast to the celebrity boutique activism we have now and the McLeftist-tainment costume shows we get from activist at the street level. Savio acted out of conviction more than egotism. For him, change was more important than fame and that is why he was able to lead the Free Speech Movement to victory armed with nothing but the minds and bodies of the people who supported the cause. Mario Savio comes off as any ordinary man on the street, albeit an ordinary man on the street who made a significant difference in the conduct of our nation.
While the cause of free speech in the 21st century has become the domain of loony conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and other bizarro right wing ideologues, leftists have come full circle and are now demanding censorship for offensive speech. UC Berkeley has become a big part of the reactionary left’s blunders since they have banned Bill Maher, Ann Coutler, and Milo Yiannaoulis from speaking on their campus; the latter two individuals deserve all the humiliation the receive at the hands of the public and then some, but they still should have the right to make asses of themselves on any college campus they choose. Colleges are supposed to be places for the free exploration of ideas, not factories, as Mario Savio would say, for producing pre-fabricated workers for big business and government bureaucracies. Universities are also not meant to be indoctrination centers which is what they become if speech is censored in the name of not offending people. It is a sad irony that UC Berkeley, after having put a commemorative plaque to Mario Savio on Sproul Plaza, is now a hotbed of censorship and cancel culture being propagated by the people who have benefited the most from the Free Speech Movement. Without Mario Savio, some of the advances made in the name of minority rights, women’s rights, and LBGTQ rights would not have been possible. Activists of today’s left owe it to themselves to read a book like Freedom’s Orator so they can raise their awareness of how freedom of speech benefits everybody and censorship only benefits the people of privilege they claim to be fighting against.
Cohen, Robert. Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s. Oxford University Press, New York et al: 2009.
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