The new insurgents are active generators of a wide variety of political activities in the neighborhoods and communities where they are located. Local insurgent actions include: mass direct action and voter registration campaigns among Negroes, political reform movements directed against entrenched Democratic machines, political action for peace, tutorial and other community based attempts to reach underprivileged youth, discussion groups, periodicals and research aimed at analysis and exposure of local political and economic conditions. Barely begun are efforts to initiate organized protest in depressed areas and urban slums, to organize nonunion workers, to focus reform political clubs and candidacies on issues and programs directly relevant to the urban poor, and to involve slum-dwellers directly in political efforts.

The outcome of these efforts at creating insurgent politics could be the organization of constituencies expressing, for the first time in this generation, the needs of ordinary men for a decent life ... .

The political insurgency, the rebirth of a populist liberalism, would upset existing American priorities and could rewrite the nation's agenda ....

A concerted effort to abolish poverty, unemployment, and racial inequality will be a prelude to the effort to bring into being a participatory democracy.

The idea of "the new insurgency" combined several strands. First, there was the growing dissatisfaction with university life and the growing realization, as Potter had expressed it at the Harvard conference, that universities might not be the agencies for change after all. By 1963 many SDS undergraduates had begun to feel the need to escape a university system which they saw ever more clearly as an unyielding and uncaring bureaucracy which turned them into holes on the edge of an IBM card, and which they came to realize was an intertwined and equally culpable part of the national system. And those in graduate schoolincluding such influential members of the SDS in-group as Burlage, Davis, Flacks, Gitlin, Hayden, Haber, McEldowney, Potter, Ross, and Rothstein—faced the equally bleak prospect of continuing on for degrees they came to regard as pointless union cards or getting compromising jobs in a rat race they saw as deadening and meaningless. "The university," as Gitlin said, "begins to feel like a cage."

In their search for some way to live which would not violate the way they believed, most of the young activists looked to the civil-rights movement. That movement was a group of people acting on their principles, not sitting on them, taking part in "the real world" outside of the classroom, helping to shake the nation awake. That movement—especially SNCChad shown as nothing had before that the poor and the downtrodden were remarkably savvy people withal, generous beyond understanding, shrewd in a most basic sense, forgiving, tough, decisive, committed, friendly: all of which ran counter to the myths the middle class had absorbed. It had also shown that the way to work with such people was not with top-down liberal paternalism but bottom-up identification and the sort of selfeffacing, nonideological, with-the-people, leaderless, and nonmanipulative organization SNCC had developed. The SNCC mystique was powerful: blue work shirts, jeans, and army boots come into fashion, and the patterns of speech, the gestures, the argot of the SNCC fieldworkers come to be adopted.

And just at this time there also developed a sweeping economic analysis that gave intellectual justification for a concern with the poor and hence found a willing audience among the SDSers. It held basically that the nation was headed for an economic recession of major proportions and that there would soon be an army of discontented unemployed, as automation destroyed jobs, the postwar economy shrank, international economic competition grew stronger, and military-defense expenditures decreased. One of the earliest formulations of the analysis came at a conference in Nyack, New York, in June 1963, from which there grew a National Committee for Full Employment, guided by a brilliant young New York radical, Stanley Aronowitz, and designed precisely to meet the coming economic collapse. At the conference, attended by many SDSers, the most influential paper was one by Ray Brown, then working for the Federal Reserve System—and who should know better?—called "Our Crisis Economy: The End of the Boom":

The labor force will expand by a million and a half each year in the coming decade. Add to this demand for jobs the number of jobs destroyed each year by automation (estimates range from one to one-and-a-half million), and the problem takes on monumental proportions .... The result is [by 1970] 11 million unemployed.

And that doesn't even count the part-time and marginally employed nor the millions who never make it into official job statistics. What more natural, then, than to make this enormous reservoir of human beings into an agency to change the system that has treated them so cruelly? It is obvious that the working classes care nothing for serious changes in the system that has bought them off with such apparent success, and no one could ever count on the middle classes for such a fight; only the poor have the numbers, the geographical distribution, the anger, and the will to press, along with the studentry, for radical change. As Gitlin was to say a year later, "The poor know they are poor and don't like it; hence they can be organized so as to demand an end to poverty and the construction of a decent social order."”°

The economic analysis is not without support elsewhere. Other reasons for SDS to move among the poor seem equally compelling. America was swinging to a rightward racismwitness the rise of Goldwater and the John Birch Society—and if this was to be prevented, it would only be by awakening poor whites, the common fodder of such a swing, to their own subjugated position and their ultimate shared economic identity with the blacks. The "Other America," which Harrington had portrayed so movingly and John Kennedy had deigned to notice, was becoming less invisible, and the time seemed ripe to uplift the poor, now that they had been seen. Then, too, since it was obvious that corporate liberalism had failed, the alternative, following on from The Port Huron Statement's call for "truly democratic alternatives to the present," was the creation of "counter-communities," anarchistic units where participatory democracy could be tried out firsthand.“

Finally, there are some explanations for the impulse to the new insurgency beyond those stated and acknowledged at the time. These things are mixed up in it: a subliminal desire to escape from the bureaucratic and programed world into something explicitly "irrational" and "inefficient," fundamentally, even disturbingly, antiestablishmentarian (Hayden: "The Movement is a community of insurgents aiming at a transformation of society led by the most excluded and 'unqualified’ people"); a restless need of students to break out of the constrictive social mold in which they have dutifully spent their lives and to thumb their noses at it (Hayden: "Working in poor communities is a .... position from which to expose the whole structure of pretense, status and glitter that masks the country's real human problems"); a drive to do something that gives meaning to a person's life (Hayden: "Students and poor people make each other feel real"); an ingrained American belief that action, confrontation, and putting bodies on the line is what really matters, where intellectuality and passivity and book-larnin' is too sissified (Hayden: "These problems [of organizing the poor] will be settled, if at all, more by feel than theory and mostly in immediate specific situations"); a very deep-seated wish to be selfless, to do for others instead of having everything done for you, to work out in demonstrable ways the moral fervor inside (Hayden: "Working in poor communities is a concrete task in which the split between job and values can be healed"); and finally a psychic drive to identify with someone else who is, as you wish to be, outside of the system, is by circumstance nontechnical, nonmoneyed, nonmanipulative, alienated and powerless (Hayden: "Radicals then would identify with all the scorned, the illegitimate and the hurt"). SDS's new strategy arises, then, because it is a healthy impulse in the most basic sense, for it allows, as psychologist Kenneth Keniston says in discussing Movement work in general, "a new harmony .... between will and conscience, between ego and superego, between self and principle.”

By the summer of 1963, the cause therefore seemed clear: organize the poor and the unemployed. The means seemed to have been given: a SNCC-inspired movement. The agents were to hand: the dissatisfied students of the university. Even the money was available: early in August, the UAW gave SDS $5,000 for "an education and action program around economic issues." (Hayden wrote to Gitlin: "It is time to rejoice. We have the $5,000—more than that ... Maybe we're beginning to move. Pacem in terris."®)

All that was needed was a mechanism, and it was to this that the SDSers now bent themselves.

Hayden's first notion was that the best way for SDS to make itself felt was by aligning with what was statistically the most deprived and at the same time what seemed the most militant and approachable segment of the poor: unemployed black and white youths. After a full day and half a night knocking the idea around with Gitlin and Booth (then both in Washington, D.C., at a Peace Research Institute) in July and then testing it out with some people in New York who had had slum-organizing experience, Hayden was ready to propose it formally to the September National Council meeting that was to be held after the NSA convention that year in Bloomington, Indiana. But one thing intervened:

several SNCC workers at that NSA, including one by the name of Stokely Carmichael, were beginning to develop the rudiments of a black-power ideology, and were pushing the idea that the blacks could do the job in the South and that what young whites ought to be doing was organizing whites. SDS's target, obviously, should then be unemployed white youths.

The NC, pressed by its most articulate leaders—Hayden, Webb, Gitlin, and otherswelcomed the idea and the money that made it possible, and then and there established a program for the fall. A young white University of Michigan sophomore, Joe Chabot, would drop out and go organize, somehow, the unemployed white youths of Chicago; at the same time, not to get too far away from the intellectual tradition, a central office would be established in, say, Ann Arbor, away from the ghettos themselves, and run by some scholarly, dedicated soul like, say, Al Haber. And the program would be given a name having to do with the economy, to please the UAW, with education, so as to continue the SDS tradition, and with organizing, to suggest the new thrust: The Economic Research and Action Project, conveniently acronymed to ERAP (Ee-rap). That September ERAP officially began.

But something was wrong. The first three months of ERAP didn't work out at all the way they were supposed to. Haber seemed to be spending a lot of money in Ann Arbor, but nothing much seemed to be coming out of it other than a fancily printed brochure designed to raise money from rich liberals and a few pamphlets on economic matters written by SDS academics. Nor was Chabot's work in the real world any more promising. He spent the fall on the near northwest side of Chicago, a white working-class area fast decaying into slums, trying to talk with the teenagers hanging around the street corners. But it turned out that he had no alternatives to offer the street youths, who never could figure out just what he was after, and he had no organizational support within the community, not even a storefront to work from. Early in November he sent this gloomy report back to the National Office:

I have had [a] little experience on the streets with the unemployed fellow[s] around 19. I tried to enter into associations with these fellows by way of the settlements as they were my best source of introduction to the community, but I have not been accepted by any group of older teenagers of this neighborhood. They don't understand me. They are suspicious of me as well as everyone else who tries to have anything to do with them ....

Communication is very difficult on every level—almost impossible when I try to ask direct questions of how a fellow thinks about anything in particular.

Just to understand the slang would be a matter of probably six months. If I try to be accepted by some gang, it would probably be a process involving at least a year, and needless to say I don't have time for any such luxuries ... .

It is glum if it sounds that way. There is nothing to make them think socially at this time and nothing to give them confidence that in action their lives can improve. The kids feel totally at sea when an idea of joining together to press your demands is raised. They accept their state although dissatisfied and in revolt at the moment they have no leaders and no program. And at this point it is disenchanting to know that I've not met one fellow in the age group I would like to work in who is thinking socially.

the end of December the ERAP treasury was more than half empty: over $500 had been spent in the National Office, almost $1,000 went to keep Chabot functioning in Chicago, and more than $1,500 was used up for Haber's operations in Ann Arbor.” And nothing to show for it. Steve Max—never much disposed to ERAP anyway—limned the problem:

The SDS program is considered too vague. We are always complimented on having the best critique of the political and economic situation, but when it comes to what we want and how we are going to get it, we start losing people ... . It is simply not enough to tell our members to go and be locally insurgent. Our people already want to be insurgent; that is why they are in SDS. What they want to know is how and where.?

Ironically, it was not in Chicago or in Ann Arbor that the ERAP idea bore fruit first but, of all places, in Chester, Pennsylvania.

Chester in 1963 was an economic and political sinkhole of some 63,000 people, 40 percent of them black, controlled by a Republican machine. It was fortunate in one thing: three miles away was the campus of Swarthmore College—small, Quaker, and leftish—and there a group of some thirty to fifty people in the Swarthmore Political Action Club, SDSers and those who had been influenced by SDS, were ready to engage themselves in the problems of just such a city. Many of the young SPACers had gotten interested in the integration movement in Cambridge, Maryland, in the spring of 1963 and had worked there with SNCC and its local affiliate during a formative summer of black organizing, mass marches, redneck violence. National Guard tear-gassing, and ultimately a compromise victory wrought by Robert Kennedy in Washington. When they returned to school in the fall the SPACers were ready for more action, and it wasn't long before they joined up with a black mobilizing committee in nearby Chester. From November 4 to 14 nearly 100 Swarthmorians and Chester blacks picketed, marched, sat-in, petitioned, and pressured the city hall and the local school board on a broad range of demands, and in the course of it some 57 students were arrested—the first large-scale violent action by any white campus-based group in the North. On the fourteenth the city caved in, all the demands were met and charges against all the demonstrators were dropped. And still the movement went on: in the next two months three large community groups were organized and a concerted drive for economic improvement and political control was launched among the blacks.

The leader of SPAC was a tall, thin, blond named Carl Wittman, a shrewd young politician and SDSer whom Lee Webb called "brilliant, just brilliant" in the Chester actions. The SDS National Office worked with him during much of it, and Webb himself, chafing at office routine in New York and discovering that he wasn't really cut out to be a National Secretary, spent several days a week in Chester through the fall, seeing firsthand what a communityorganizing project actually might look like and feeding this sense back to others in the organization. Meanwhile, rent strikes and similar community actions took place under the noses of SDSers in Baltimore, New York, Cleveland, and Chicago that fall, largely led by blacks, and this too suggested a new militancy and a new means for operating among the urban poor. Finally Wittman and Webb went out to Ann Arbor to talk to Hayden—he was still nominally a journalism graduate student—and for the first time since the summer, Webb remembers, Hayden "really got interested"; before their weekend was over they had hammered out a whole new idea for a revivified ERAP and determined to make the upcoming December National Council the battleground for its adoption.

The new idea was embodied in a paper called "An Interracial Movement of the Poor?" that Hayden and Wittman wrote in the next few months to sell the membership on the new ERAP idea. Long, discursive, and well-nigh unreadable, it nonetheless had an impact on many in SDS circles. Its main argument, a product of Wittman's Chester experience, was that whites could work together with blacks to mobilize a community, and that the job of organizing ought to be directed toward a// the poor, black and white, young and old, and around any issue that moves them, not simply the question of jobs. Organize, the authors say, [around]

... demands for political and economic changes of substantial benefit to the Negro and white poor. Examples of these include improved housing, lower rents, better schools, full employment, extension of welfare and Social Security assistance. They are not "Negro issues" per se; rather, they are precisely those issues which should appeal to lower-class whites as well as to Negroes.

And this organizing can't be done either with research centers or street-corner strangers—it needs people willing to live among the poor: "We are people and we work with people. Only if conscious cooperative practice is our main style will our ideology take on the right details; only then will it be tested and retested, changed, and finally shared with others."

At the December 1963 NC some seventy people—the largest number so far at an NC—met in New York with a sense that big things were going to happen. Paul Booth recalls, "By that time we were it. We were the wave of the future."!? Perhaps this feeling was heightened by the presence at the NC of two diametrically different people who both touched resonant chords among the SDSers: Bob Dylan and Alger Hiss. Dylan, who had just finished "Blowin' in the Wind" and was already a celebrity among the college generation, dropped by the hall and was persuaded to say a few words, which Jeremy Brecher remembers as being something like: "Ah don' know what yew all are talkin' about ... but it sounds like yew want somethin’ to happen, and if that's what yew want that's what Ah want." Hiss had come by to deliver a message to one of the SDSers and as soon as it was known that he was in the back of the hall, a number of people insisted that he be introduced; he was, and to cheers: it was as much his outcastness, his defiance, as his politics that impressed the delegates, and he was for them a symbol of all their closely held anti-anti-Communism.

Webb, as he now admits, "staged" the meeting so that it would be heavy with those, especially from the Swarthmore area, who shared the into-the-ghetto view; he even had Jesse Gray, leader of the Harlem rent strike then going on, and Stanley Aronowitz, whose National Committee for Full Employment was by then a reality, come down to propagandize.

Against them were ranged the realignment faction (Max and cohort) and an assortment of others, led chiefly by Haber, who thought "ghetto-jumping," as they put it, was remote from the needs both of students and of the nation as a whole. The result was the longremembered "Hayden-Haber Debate," at which SDS as an organization took a decisive turn.

Haber, quiet, bespectacled, somewhat older, opened by presenting a report on the first three months of ERAP under his egis and urging its continuation on the same essentially academic lines. ERAP, he held, should be a place for research and writing about the problems of the poor, an "independent center of radical thinking," formulating the programs around which other people organized for themselves. Students should concern themselves as students, avoid the "cult of the ghetto," and use their own problems and talents to organize around, on the campus. If SDS spread itself from campus to ghetto, it would be spreading itself too thin.