The first anti-napalm demonstrations led by SDS took place at the University of California, Berkeley, with marches in October 1966. Students demanded that Dow Chemical cease its manufacture of the incendiary weapon, and that colleges divest from Dow as well as forbid the company’s campus recruiters. Berkeley, which had a large SDS chapter, was previously the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement in 1964-65. The Free Speech Movement, through bold protests, resisted UC Berkeley’s ban on political activity on the campus—established only to suppress students who raised money for the Southern civil rights movement.
The fall of 1967 saw two significant protests, one at the UW-Madison and another at Harvard, as students staged sit-ins against Dow Chemical’s on-campus recruiting. Dow’s presence on campuses uniquely represented, for the student New Left, the significance of universities to capitalism and the defense-industrial complex—in a decade of unprecedented college enrollment of young men and women. On Oct. 18, hundreds of Wisconsin students blocked the hallways of Commerce Hall, the campus building that hosted Dow recruiters, to preclude other students from attending their interviews.
The anti-war students staging a peaceful yet disruptive sit-in at Commerce Hall were met with UW-Madison police, who later called in the city’s police department for reinforcements. The initially peaceful protest escalated into violence once the city of Madison’s police officers assaulted demonstrators with clubs and tear gas, which provoked anti-war students into resisting arrest with rocks and bottles.
Paul Buhle, then a history graduate student at UW-Madison and editor of New Left magazine Radical America, participated in the Dow sit-in and managed to avoid the blows of nightsticks. He later recalled that the events of that day were more accurately described as the “Dow Police Riot,” because of the aggressive actions of police officers. Buhle recalled that Madison’s police officers were mostly conservative and pro-war who saw student protests as unpatriotic or dangerous. Buhle also noted that Madison’s police and state legislators largely blamed campus radicalism on "outside agitators," particularly Jewish students from New York. In 1968, Wisconsin’s legislature, driven by anti-Communist and antisemitic fears about the student Left, curtailed the admission of out-of-staters at UW-Madison, including by slashing tuition remission for out-of-state graduate students.
The Dow sit-in brought national attention to Wisconsin students’ participation in the anti-war movement, and it inspired similar actions at Harvard and other schools. On Oct. 25, 1967, 300 students at Harvard and Radcliffe, many affiliated with SDS, conducted a sit-in at Mallinckrodt Hall that locked a Dow Chemical recruiter in his office for seven hours.