I like Hebert comparison of Savio to Mozart in his essay "Mozart, Hawthorne, and Mario Savio: Aesthetic Power and Political Complicity," He liken Mozart to Savio through their commonality of improvisation and how effectively their "product" moves people. He writes, " Like Mozart, Mario was improvising. Attacking oppressive machinery is a theme readily traceable to the Luddites, whose struggles are now hardly more remote than 1964 in Berkeley, before the Vietnam War, before the Nixon presidency. The Free Speech Movement may be remembered mainly for having helped construct a sound-stage where Ronald Reagan practised his knack for political movie-making, of the sort he later displayed in Grenada. The intense play-by-play on campus has mellowed into fond reminiscence. The police-car rally, the incident in the Greek Theater, and the Resolutions of December 8 are now freshly remembered only when diehard nostalgics get together, if then." (406) I think Savio was ultimately successful in his rhetoric because he established a sincere connection with audience which translated to activism and arrests (the product of civil disobedience). Even though the student movement exists in a different form today, Savio's legacy of student activism persists on college campuses across America.

The end goal of civil disobedience is to get arrested. Like Thoreau going to jail for not paying his taxes in protest of slavery and the Mexican-American war, Savio and the Berkeley students sat on the steps of Sproul hall in an act of civil disobedience protesting the college. Robin Cohen reflects on this sentiment in her essay, "Berkeley Free Speech Movement: Paving the Way for Campus Activism." Cohen writes, "More than one thousand students joined in this Sproul Hall sit-in, which was to provoke a chain of events that would carry the FSM to its final, decisive victory. As with the police car sit-in, the December 2 Sproul Hall occupation extended through the night. But this time, police forcibly broke up the student protest. On orders from California Gov. Edmund Brown, over 600 police officers moved in to Sproul Hall at 3:45 a.m. The police spent the next 12 hours going from floor to floor, picking up students (who, in the nonviolent style of the civil rights movement, resisted arrest by going limp,) and carrying them off to jail. Eight hundred were arrested."(17). https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0I_AvUqi3GydXA4VTBObTBnZk0&authuser=0

T Walter Herbert likens Savio's rhetoric to the transformative power of Mozart and Nathanial Hawthorne's impact on the music and literary world. For Herbert, hearing Savio's speech was a kind of transcendental experience that lasted in his memory and empowered social justice advocacy; published in *College English **he writes in his essay, "Mozart, Hawthorne, and Mario Savio: Aesthetic Power and Political Complicity," "For me, however, Mario's sentence emerges uniquely from that feverish war of words and retains the magic I'm trying to specify here. Coined on the spot and bearing the imprint of a complex political moment, it survives as a piece of literary found art. The day after I heard it, I discovered I could recite it verbatim; I'm not sure whether it ever appeared in print. Is Mario's sentence "great art" to be likened to the creations of Shakespeare, Hawthorne, and Mozart? I have no corroboration to offer in support of this claim. The sentence stands alone, forms no part of a body of work. There is no institutional arrangement promoting Mario Savio as an American author, and if-against all probabilities-one should appear, the key point is that such an arrangement does not exist now. The sentence is a note in a bottle, an inscription on the gravestone of a person you do not know, a stray bit of language. The point comes clearest if you do not feel the magical energy to which I'm testifying. It would not be difficult to spell out the social energies locked up in Mario's sentence or to offer a formalist account of the rhythm-and-blues verbal systems that embody and enact its meaning. Yet no amount of historicist or New Critical argumentation could persuade anyone for long that this sentence is worth analyzing or worth preserving." https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0I_AvUqi3Gybkx4eTEtOWNFc1k/view

Here, Savio uses the President of the University's words against him--convincing his audience the people in charge of the institution they are students of do not have the best interest of the student in mind. The student's are the "raw materials" in the President's machine. This exposes the student's devaluation by the school administrators.

Savio's speech was surely motivating, but was it effective? There was movement in the Free Speech Movement and Student Movements around America, however, the movements largely died out after the 1960s, and student voices in educational institutions are mostly overshadowed by administrators and shareholders hoping to push their own agenda. While Savio is an impactful orator, the legacy of his speech is fraught with the reality that rather than radical change, the student movement mostly accomplished small-scale reform. A lasting question regarding the affectivity of Savio's speech, and more largely the free speech movement, is can students change the world? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEDrWL5c180

Savio's goal in this speech was to motivate the students to action. The students felt oppressed by the university that their education was being censored. Censorship was effecting students education and they were restricted in the rights to express their political views. Savio was inspiring activism in his speech, so the students would participate in protest and activism to enact change. A question I have is whether or not Savio effectively translated the anger of his audience into productive change through resistance and civil disobedience?

This reminds me of civil rights rhetoric, and falls in line with that tradition of civil disobedience. In the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr advocated for the same nonviolent civil disobedience which inspired Freedom Summer and the Student Movement the following year. Like Thoreau in his prison cell, King famously wrote “A Letter from Birmingham Jail,” expressing his grievances with the government and our moral obligation to to break unjust laws, he wrote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Both Thoreau and King write about agency and the responsibility of individuals to resist the greater injustice. Thoreau uses the metaphor of “the machine” for government, and he mediates a solution of acting against a corrupt or immoral government in the Democratic system. He believed jail was the “true place for a just man” when the law was unjust or immoral. Thoreau not paying his taxes to the government symbolized a small cog in the machine, as he hoped to fundamentally change the operation “the machine” operated.

This is an evocation of Thoreau's tradition of civil disobedience. In which Savio borrows the metaphor of the machine, “If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go; perchance it will wear smooth — certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.” (Thoreau, Civil Disobedience). Savio uses a similar metaphor evoking Thoreau in his speech on Sproul Hall hoping to motivate students and activists to participate in nonviolent civil disobedience on their university campus. He compares the university administration to the managers of machine, the faculty to employees, and the students to raw materials to be sold for profit, implying they are less than human in the eyes of the administrators.

Again, Savio’s rhetoric is casual and powerful, sometimes simultaneously. He is speaking to an audience of peers, fellow students and activists whom would have been familiar with his own activism on campus and from Freedom Summer Project. He speaks for all of them, motivating them to participate in these acts of civil disobedience, with the understanding that their united resistance is essential to preventing the machine, or the university from working at all. In this sense, Savio establishes an ethos with his audience, for he is not a single leader but as an individual part of a greater and necessary whole. This ethos is apparent in his utilization and repetition of the plural pronoun “we”, which is fundamental for uniting the students against their oppressors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlYk-WoBEEg

In the “raw materials” part of his speech, Savio uses his rhetoric to turn the President of the University's word against him. Savio establishes logos when he convinces his audience that the administrators of the university, or “managers of the machine,” are not looking out for the student's best interests. The students, or “raw materials,” are confronted with their devaluation and the administration is exposed. In Savio’s analogy, he suggests through sit-ins and civil disobedience the students can shut down the university. He appeals to pathos, by confirming their perceived oppression by the university and suggests their passive participation is essential to operation of the unjust machine. In his speech, Savio guides the student’s oppression and feelings of anger into agency and mobilizes activist protest.

At times this speech is very casual and the start is a good example of this. Mario Savio is speaking in front of a group of his peers, fellow students and activists. On December 2, 1964, student activist Savio spoke on the steps of Sproul Hall at the University of California Berkeley campus. He spoke in front of 4,000 students and campus faculty in response on behalf of the Free Speech Movement of which he was a prominent leader. The Free Speech Movement protested the university administration for banning political activity on campus, as well as the university's efforts to restrict their academic freedoms and right to free speech. The members of the Free Speech Movement, Savio included, participated in the Freedom Summer Project of 1964, which led up to the clashes between students and administrators in the fall semester. The Freedom Summer Project helped African Americans vote in Mississippi, as well as provided information and solicited donations for civil rights causes back on campus in California. When Savio returned to Berkeley in order to raise money for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he learned of the university’s ban on political activity and fundraising. This is the context of his speech. http://berkeleyplaques.org/e-plaque/mario-savio/