Visiting the UW-Madison campus today, it would be hard to believe that it was the scene of the most powerful and the most damaging domestic terrorist bombing in the U.S. up until 1995. On Aug. 24, 1970, at 3:42 a.m., the bomb, consisting of more than a ton of ammonium nitrate fertilizer soaked in fuel oil and packed in a Ford van, exploded outside Sterling Hall, killing a physics researcher and damaging 26 buildings.
The explosion devastated the physics department, which occupied the basement and first floor of Sterling Hall. The bomb's target, the Army Mathematics Research Center, a Department of Defense project that occupied the second through fourth floors, was scarcely damaged.
The bomb was built and triggered by four campus anti-war radicals who had dubbed themselves the New Year's Gang. Dwight and Karl Armstrong and David Fine were convicted for their roles in the bombing, served time in prison and have been paroled. A fourth suspect, Leo Burt, has never been found and is either dead or living under an assumed identity.
Many say the bombing of Sterling Hall was the culmination of an intense period of student activism and violence in Madison.
Fred Harvey Harrington, the president of the university from 1962 to 1970, said the explosion was a violent response to increasing repression by authorities against protesters. ``There's a sharp... difference between protesting, even vigorous protesting, and violence,'' Harrington said in the Feb. 1995 article. ``In like fashion you can also have repression, you can crack down too hard.''
Harrington continued, using the police beatings at the 1968 Democratic convention as an example, saying, ``That was a use of repression which was not only bad, but it was counterproductive, just as the bombing of Sterling Hall was bad and was counterproductive.''
The gains of the peaceful protests from the early 1960s were largely forgotten by 1970, when the U.S. expanded the war into Cambodia, Harrington said. By May of that year, National Guardsmen had killed four student protesters at Kent State University in Ohio.
Earlier, the Armstrong brothers, as part of the radical New Year's Gang, had firebombed the Old Red Gym, unsuccessfully bombed the Badger Ordnance Works near Baraboo from the air, and bombed the university's primate lab in an ill-directed attempt on the Selective Service office. But it was the bombing of Sterling Hall that made people notice and to reconsider the anti-war movement.
The Wisconsin State Journal has compiled a collection of newspaper stories on the Sterling Hall bombing, beginning with the first news reports on that fateful day in August 1970 through the present time.
The links to the left, arranged chronologically by headline, will take you to pdf copies of each story, allowing you to revisit and research the explosion and its aftermath.
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