The Lessons of Isla Vista
By Louis B. Lundborg
Chairman of the Board, Bank of America
The following is a speech Louise B. Lundborg delivered before
the Seattle Rotary Club on June 17, 1970. Excerpted by Carmen
Lodise.
On February 25, 1970, a rampaging mob of demonstrators--some
students, some non-students--set fire to the Bank of America
at Isla Vista, California, and totally destroyed it.
(H)ave we learned anything from our experience at Isla Vista?
Can we see through and behind the burning of a bank there and
behind all the continuing disturbances that keep flaring up
there and elsewhere, to find any lesson in it, any consistent
thread of principal to guide us?
. . . I think we can.
The
. . . (lessons) are several, they are subtle, they are complex.
(They) are easier to say in words than to follow in practice.
But, . . . they are ignored at our peril. . . .
1) Perhaps one of the greatest errors . . . has been the tendency
to assume that all . . . the resultant disturbances, can be
laid at the door of an extremely small fanatically militant
hardcore minority of students or even non-students. That such
an assumption is comfortable in no way influences the fact that
it is also grossly inaccurate.
While the actual burning of our Isla Vista branch may have been
perpetrated by a violent few, there is no question that there
was widespread agreement among the students of the Santa Barbara
campus that the causes leading to the protest were both serious
and legitimate.
2) There are many other issues than Vietnam. Having once been
aroused by the war, having felt trapped into it by their elders,
and impotent and frustrated in all their attempts to make themselves
heard, these young people have begun to question everything
their elders were doing; and to question everything about the
society their elders created.
With
so many involved, and feeling so deeply, the activist movement
is not something fleeting that will go away if we can just keep
it cool for awhile. And keep it cool we must, unless we want
bloodshed . . . .
3) It won't be easy to cool it because we've already begun to
choose up sides in ways that typically lead to trouble. We can
see the polarizing taking shape with people on both sides tending
to lump whole segments of the population together as "we"
and "they" . . . .
4) The job of cooling it off is not made any easier by the fact
that violence must be rejected and completely controlled, yet
dissent and protest must not be rejected.
We can say, and I have said, that violence can be stopped by
simple law and order methods. . . . (B)ut those methods alone
will not eliminate the seething that in the long run can cause
us more difficulty than we have known up to now.
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