Against the Current: Police Surveillance

CEWV Newsletter

     This newsletter, distributed by the University Committee to End the War in Vietnam (CEWV), is held in the Bert Gerding Papers (1959-1980, 1994) at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. The image shown is not the full newsletter but rather the mailing address panel used to distribute it. What's significant is the "with Love" annotation and what it suggests about the relationship between the watchers and the watched; whether it's sardonic, affectionate, or taunting, someone thought it was worth writing.

     Lieutenant Burt Gerding of the Austin Police Department was Austin's designated "red squad" cop, omnipresent at activist meetings and events and, by his own later admission, always operating with informants embedded inside the organizations he monitored. "If you had a meeting, I had a quorum there. They lived among you," he recalled (Dreyer 2006). Among those informants were SDS treasurer Jeff Gardner, who provided detailed accounts of meetings and internal factional disputes, and Daily Texan editor John Economidy, who supplied names and photographs directly to both Gerding and UT Traffic and Security Services Chief Allen Hamilton (Dreyer 2006). Gerding made no apologies for his methods. He viewed the students as having "started the cultural revolution" and said he "felt strongly about my culture" (Dreyer 2006). SDS campus leader Gary Thiher, now a philosophy professor, recalled moving into a new ground-floor apartment on Rio Grande only to look up and see Gerding's face drifting slowly past the window in an unmarked car—twice. When Thiher went outside to confront him, Gerding simply smiled and said, "Well, everybody has to be somewhere" (Dreyer 2006).

     The handwritten "Lt. Gerding (with Love)" on the mailing panel is unsigned, and its author is unknown. It may have been written by another officer, an informant, or a student who was aware their mail was being collected. What is not ambiguous is that this newsletter, sent by students organizing against the Vietnam War, ended up in the personal files of the detective assigned to monitor them, and whoever wrote the note captures the strange intimacy of that surveillance relationship.

Postcard From Alice

     Alice Embree sent this postcard to UT Traffic and Security Services Chief Allen Hamilton in March 1965. Written on a Christmas luminaries card from the First Presbyterian Church of El Paso, it reads: "Dear Chief Hamilton, Campus traveling in the Great Southwest. At Texas Western now. Literature table was set up by local group. Big mob gathered, literature was torn up, egging, table was overturned & fist fights. Bird ran for campus police, they replied 'It's none of our affair.' Appreciate you people more now! Your friendly campus agitator, Alice Embree. P.S. (Picket sign on front)"

     Embree is reporting an incident at Texas Western in which a student organizing effort was violently disrupted, with literature destroyed, a table overturned, and fistfights; campus police refused to intervene, telling students it was "none of our affair." The irony she is pointing to is deliberate: the same campus security apparatus that monitored, photographed, and kept files on student activists showed no interest in protecting them. The tone is sardonic throughout. By signing herself "Your friendly campus agitator," Embree makes it clear that she knows exactly who Hamilton is and what his office does. This was a pointed message to the man running the surveillance operation, written with full awareness that she was one of its subjects. Lt. Burt Gerding had told Embree as much, once approaching her to inform her that he had infrared photographs of her and other SDS members skinny-dipping at Hamilton's Pool (Dreyer 2006). Embree knew she was being watched.

UT Police Investigative Report on Student Drug Activity

     This undated campus police investigative report, authored by Chief Hamilton or one of his officers, documents a drug surveillance operation coordinated between UT campus police, the Austin Police Department, and the Texas Department of Public Safety (Embree Papers 1933–2023). On its surface, it is a narcotics report tracking alleged drug use at specific student addresses, cultivating informants, and coordinating with federal Customs agents investigating narcotics traffic in the Austin area. But read in the context of the broader surveillance apparatus documented in this exhibit, it reveals something more troubling about the environment in which Embree and her fellow students were organizing.

     The report mentions "Peyote Pete," identified as James C. Hershberger of 2810-C Nueces Street, alleged to be supplying high school students with peyote. Several women are named or described, including an unidentified student who had received a letter that the report notes "involves peyote" and who was applying for a counseling position at Brown School, and Fontain Clinton, daughter of a local attorney, noted simply for associating with the group under surveillance. What Dreyer (2006) documents about Hamilton's files more broadly is that police surveillance had a particular and somewhat prurient focus on women's behavior and sexual activity, with female students described in terms of their relationships, their academic failures, and their associations rather than any actual criminal activity. Dreyer (2006) notes that Hamilton's files described female students as "sexually promiscuous" and fixated on their personal lives in ways that went well beyond any legitimate law enforcement purpose.

     But the report prominently features a student named Robert Zani, a resident of Prather Hall, who approached the campus police office and was subsequently taken to the Department of Public Safety (DPS) to meet with the head of the Narcotics Division, apparently being cultivated as an informant (Embree Papers 1933–2023). The significance of Zani's appearance in a Hamilton surveillance file becomes clear in light of subsequent events. On July 23, 1967, George Vizard, one of Austin's most visible radical activists and a committed opponent of the war in Vietnam, was found murdered in a frozen food locker at the convenience store where he worked. Fourteen years later, Robert Zani was convicted of the killing (Dreyer 2006). According to Democratic political consultant Kelly Fero's The Zani Murders, as cited in Dreyer (2006), Hamilton's papers reveal that Zani had a relationship with police as an informant in at least one narcotics case, a detail that this report may itself be documenting. Dreyer's (2006) investigation raised, but left unresolved, the question of whether Zani acted alone or was in some way connected to the broader effort to suppress Austin's activist community. As Vizard's widow put it, "Was Zani a 'lone nut' or a missile aimed at the heart of Austin's antiwar movement?" (Dreyer 2006).

     This document cannot answer that question, and it would be an overreach to claim that it does. What it does establish is the presence of informants embedded within activist circles that point to a climate in which political dissent carried real and serious risks (Embree Papers 1933–2023; Dreyer 2006). As Embree herself later said when she called Gerding the morning Vizard's body was found, the lieutenant told her, "I always told you this kind of thing was dangerous," a remark she noted "may have just been rattling cages" but whose message was unmistakable: that political activism had put Vizard in danger and that the same applied to the rest of them (Dreyer 2006).

The Rag, August 23, 1974

     Published in The Rag on August 23, 1974, "Texas Department of Public Surveillance" exposes the broad reach of the Texas Department of Public Safety, which monitored not only student radicals but also environmentalists, peace activists, and ordinary citizens engaging in routine civic activity. The article carries no byline. The reporter opens by comparing the DPS to the Gestapo and noting that whenever such abuses surface, there is briefly a big stink and an investigation before everything lapses back to normalcy. They reference a column by Houston Post environmental reporter Harold Scarlett, who imagined two furtive environmentalists meeting with elaborate passwords, only to be surveilled with binoculars and a radio locator, with one suspect having "given himself away" by picking up a gum wrapper and putting it in a trash can. The reporter then reproduces an actual DPS intelligence report on a Dallas man, Robert W. Pomeroy, a Continental Airlines pilot whose offenses included attending a city council meeting to oppose the construction of a nuclear power plant and being observed speaking with a longtime socialist party organizer. "Respectfully submitted, David A." Though published several years after the events documented in this exhibit, the article makes clear that the surveillance Embree and her peers navigated at UT was part of an entrenched apparatus of political monitoring that extended across Texas and well beyond the university. For Embree, who had been named in Hamilton's files, photographed at demonstrations, and approached by Gerding with evidence of his surveillance, the absurdity documented in this article was the texture of daily life as an activist at UT (Dreyer 2006).