Fall 1962 - Spring 1963

Fall 1962-Spring 1963

From October 22 to October 29, 1962, the SDS office at 112 East Nineteenth Stre a turmoil. The phones were occupied at all hours, the ancient typewriters clacked incessantly, the new $300 multilith machine, the organization's proudest symbol « becomingness, churned out broadsheets and announcements far into the night. Li of people would gather at any time of day and start talking animatedly about bolc sudden trips to Canada and Sweden, or at least some kind of protest right here in City. And in the center of this storm, Jim Monsonis, who had been National Secret just three months, did his best to cope—he would talk on the phone to distant col take phone calls from SDSers in Michigan and Georgia, hold impromptu meetings: was little he could do.

This was not a sudden deluge of memberships, or another lockout by the LID, or | unexpected collapse of the leadership. This was the Cuban missile crisis.

It was a Searing event in the lives of people everywhere, one of those few what-were-youdoing-when moments of history, but the terror of it went especially deep into those under twenty, who had grown up never knowing a world without nuclear annihilation: "It's remarkable," recalls Steve Max, who was around the SDS office at the time, "how many people thought they were going to die in the missile crisis—really remarkable." But for many the event held more than terror; it showed that the United States government was, for all its talk and all the energies of the peace movement, prepared to use nuclear weapons when it chose to, and it showed that the majority of the population, including many of those trumpeting themselves as liberals, was quite willing to let it. Those SDSers who still had liberal scales on their eyes were prepared to shed them now.?

It was clearly a moment for action, but SDS did not know how to act. There was no machinery in the organization for swiftly organizing a national protest in the face of an unforeseen event; there was not even any provisional mechanism by which SDS could officially issue a press release—written by whom? approved by what?—or officially approve a joint march or statement. SDSers spontaneously ignited local protests at such places as Cornell, Michigan, Texas, and New York, but when they called the National Office to find out what the SDS position was or what SDS as an organization was going to do, Monsonis could tell them nothing. As he ruefully said later, "That's one of the problems in the way we're currently set up." One of the problems that would nag.?

Monsonis did at any rate keep his wits. In a letter he sent out during the tense first week when Russian ships were steaming to Cuba, he wrote, "We're all ready to head to the nearest ILGWU local—if radical change is going to come to our society (e.g., a bomb), the ILG will be the last place to change."

The National Office—the NO, as everyone called it—was obviously incapable of responding to crises with anything more than wry humor, but it was nonetheless the core of the SDS operation during the 1962-1963 school year. It wasn't much—a few desks, some wooden chairs, typewriters that worked fitfully, telephones, piles of paper, and file cabinets in uncertain order—but when everyone returned to school that fall and the Port Huron euphoria wore off, it was still the only real manifestation of the new organization.

In a sense—a sense that even SDSers of the time subliminally realized—the NO was a contradiction. A student group that wants the growth of decentralized communities where participatory democracy can operate has at its center a single, centralized office. People who bridle at rigidity, bureaucracy, form filling, and parietal rules establish an office with all the inevitable trappings of the system they condemn. Burgeoning anticapitalists express themselves through a classic capitalist organization, the Home Office. Utopians cluster around a dystopian organizational form.

And the organizational form is not merely trivial, lightly to be circumvented. Organizations are shaped by the societies in which they live, and they shape even those who ostensibly control them. Mid-century American organizations partook of their culture as the maggot partakes of the corpse. SDS almost without even thinking of it became an organization of officers at the top and bureaucratic administrators below, constitutions and bylaws, parliamentary meetings and points of order, conventions and committees, mimeograph machines and official documents, letters in triplicate and bills paid monthly, lists of members and calculations of dues, accounts receivable and payable, mailing lists, files, phones, a central office. Plus all the attendant habits and characteristics that this suggests: the dominance of males, especially those who can talk and manipulate (sexually or politically) best; the emphasis on form, legality, precedent, rules; the unconscious division into those who lead and those who follow, those who talk and those who listen, those who propose and those who do, those who write the pamphlets and those who mimeograph them.It was not that the NO didn't try. The three officers—Monsonis, National Secretary, Don

McKelvey, Assistant National Secretary, Max, Field Secretary—were diligent, active,

dedicated people. But neither their long hours nor short pay nor selflessness could

overcome the fact that they were organizationally trapped.

Monsonis was a serious, hard-working, rather colorless type who had gotten interested in SDS through his work with the National Student Christian Federation and SNCC and retained an essentially wide-eyed social-worker attitude—it was his apparent moderateness that made him so attractive to the LID when they were searching for a "safe" National Secretary. He was not without a sense of politics, but he had neither the solidness of a Haber nor the bite of a Hayden: he complained at one point, for example, that The Port Huron Statement failed to make any mention of class but at the same time he wondered why the statement didn't take account of the work of organized religions. He was nothing if not earnest: as he put it a couple of months after taking over the job, "I'm gradually getting acclimated to a sixteen-hour day, no money, and lots of problems." And for the earthly reward of $300 a month ($54 of which went for his Lower East Side apartment), and that was paid sporadically.*

McKelvey was quite a different type. A 1960 graduate of Haverford, he was somewhat older than the others, and, he says today, a Maoist even then (though he managed to disguise it neatly enough at the time). A chubby, sloppy, personable fellow, he was always regarded as something of an oddball. He undertook the job of being a part-time office worker for SDS in the fall of 1962 because he had read and liked The Port Huron Statement and because the people he knew in YPSL and the Student Peace Union had told him the SDSers were dangerously radical: "My friends all told me you'd better stay away from Hayden and Haber, so naturally I went to them first." The part-time job turned out to take upwards often hours a day, at $28 a week, and it lasted two years—"a real martyr," someone said of him later, "but a real worker."

The third stalwart was Steve Max, whom the LID had reluctantly agreed to let SDS have as Field Secretary, though they refused to pay him a salary because they were still suspicious of his Communist background; the NEC at its meeting after the NSA convention in Columbus decided that individual members would pledge themselves to keep him alive with monthly donations out of their own pockets, but inevitably these materialized only occasionally and Max was kept alive mostly by guile and petty cash. Max was a tireless traveler, up and down the East Coast, though most of his work that fall was concentrated around the Boston-area, where he not only had a girl friend but (quite consistent with his realignment politics) could also infiltrate the Senatorial campaign of H. Stuart Hughes.

To a remarkable degree, these three were SDS after things settled down that fall, and remained the nucleus throughout the year. Haber had been shunted off to Ann Arbor, where he occupied himself in graduate work, "Savoring a return to the books," as he put it after two years away; and Hayden did a lot of traveling as SDS President—visiting several chapters in the fall, speaking to a university-reform conference in December, to the NSA in January, to Michigan-area colleges in the spring—but at the same time he was going to school at Michigan, was involved with personal problems in part having to do with his wife, who went south to join SNCC, and was doing a lot of rethinking about his future in the wake of the LID blowup. The burden on the NO was enormous: at one point during the year, in what seems a fairly typical letter, McKelvey wrote to Burlage: "Am tired and have feeling of doing little except little grubby things like writing letters (which I've been doing all night)

.. » however, will plug along and occasionally, hopefully, will try to get some thinking in edgewise." But the organization had set up nothing else to take the place of the NO, or to shift or decentralize the burden of work. A proposed scheme for greater regional autonomy that was passed by the Columbus NC never came about, despite faint moves toward regional organizations in New England, Michigan, and Texas. The NO remained practically the only visible manifestation of SDS as a live national organization.

Visible but barely.

For one thing the LID, which was supposed to pay the salaries of the National Secretary and his assistant, as well as the rent, utilities, and phones, was broke. Monsonis told the NEC in a confidential memo, "LID has been just about out of money since we returned from Columbus, not even paying salaries to their own staff .... no money has been available for executive mailings, shipping of material, etc." The ILGWU, as usual, was hit for "a few thousand dollars," but it was only temporary sustenance and a month later Monsonis reported, "The LID is totally broke, even has been borrowing to pay my salary and hasn't met the payroll upstairs [in the LID offices] for two weeks." The Port Huron Statement, which was found to be an essential aid in the formation of new chapters, was sent out only sporadically because there wasn't enough money for stamps, and by the middle of November, when the NO first ran out, there wasn't even enough cash on hand to get more copies mimeographed. SDS went progressively into the red: $173.57 by February, $183.85 by March, $241.32 by April.” The irregularity of LID paychecks to the office staff produced its own complications, which Haber at one point described as "the feeling that you can't go to a movie without jeopardizing the next mailing." And as it became clear that SDS would never reach the $19,000 budget which it had projected at its Columbus meeting, many of the more ambitious plans—a university-reform study center in Berkeley, regional conferences in Michigan and New York, a "Center for Research in Southern Politics" (CRISP)—had to be scrapped. The heavy cloud of penury hung over the organization for the entire first year of its new life.”

It wasn't only the lack of money, though. Communications simply weren't kept up. The Columbus NC had mandated the publication of a regular bulletin to keep members informed and give them a place for the regular percolation of ideas, but it didn't mandate anyone to do it, and mostly it fell to an already overworked McKelvey. So the first SDS Bulletin of eight pages didn't get out until December; there were only two more during the entire spring (though the March-April one, it should be noted, was no less than seventy-eight mimeographed pages long, heralded by SDS as the largest student publication ever produced). To supplement this somewhat infrequent journal the NO started to put out less formal mailings to a selected eighty or a hundred of the top people, but they were not exactly regular: the first of these "Work-list Mailings," which was supposed to be out in September, eventually appeared in November; the second appeared in February.

The result was that people had to depend upon occasional conferences or visits from national officers to find out what their organization and its separate parts were doing.

Monsonis would travel to as many meetings as his budget would allow—he saw his role as one of courting other organizations into the SDS orbit—and Max would go up and down the East Coast, concentrating on existing chapters. He describes his effect:

I went around mostly to campuses where there was already a chapter, trying to convince them SDS was a national organization. This was very important for all of them—showing them the presence of a national official, bringing them documents from the National Office. You've got to remember this was before the media picked up on us, and talked about us—when they did that you could read in the papers and find out you were a member of a big organization, but until then you didn't have any real way of knowing. So that's what I did.

But that just wasn't enough, not for an organization with visions of communality and collective action. Campuses where there were only one or two people who had joined SDS tended to be ignored, and several of the smaller chapters languished; as Barbara Gerson, a Vassar SDSer, complained:

If we go around urging people to set up chapters whose raison d'étre is not an ongoing thing but is the program of SDS itself then some constant stimulus must be provided for these chapters ... . [But] SDS sends its chapters no unifying program suggestions or reports .... Yes, if we had some sense we'd do stuff on our own, besides listen to lectures. But we don't have sense; that's why we formed an SDS chapter, if you get what I mean.

By January there were only nine chapters—Brandeis, Hunter, Johns Hopkins/Goucher, Oberlin, Michigan, New York (the FDR-Four Freedoms Club), North Texas State, Swarthmore, Vassar; several places which had had chapters before Port Huron—Central State, Earlham, Temple, and Syracuse—were floating adrift, uncontacted, unorganized.

McKelvey would shoot off late-night letters at the slightest pretext urging distant strangers to form SDS chapters at Mount Holyoke, Bowdoin, Wheaton College, Findlay College, even (for the first time, presaging a later SDS impulse) Lexington High School; but once the gauntlet was thrown nobody stayed around to see if it ever got picked up. Little was done to bring in new members in any systematic way or to follow up on the contacts Max and Monsonis made on their various trips. There were only 447 paid-up members by Januaryplus another 500 or so who considered themselves members in everything but dues—and it was only happenstance that brought in the slim trickle of new official members—19 in February, 35 in March, 36 in April—that swelled the organization to perhaps 1,100 (600 paid) by the end of the school year.

Not all the fault was the NO's, of course. Rennie Davis, spending that year at the University of Illinois, described bitterly how difficult it was to organize there:

Our efforts for the most part this first semester have been to move people cross-grain against the horrific pressures for anomie and create the basis for some sort of intelligent political grouping (community, maybe). We suffer in extreme form all the usual political illnesses of American collegiate institutions: single issue groups generating their own Madisonian art for check and restraint of political-social action by pig-headed faction wars among themselves, a student leadership of "nice-guys" but frankly half-men without vision, a university administration opposed to academic freedom in principle and boasting of a vision of which the hallmark is bureaucracy and good business practices, and a terrestrial lay-out that is truly freakish in its stultification of the human mind.

Then, too, on several campuses, administrations put barriers in the way of people trying to get university recognition for their chapters (which was often necessary to get campus rooms, invite speakers, hold rallies). There was trouble at Boston University, at Hunter, at North Texas State, and others, but the crowning (though rather charming) example occurred at Georgia State College, where Dayton Pruitt, the one-member "chapter," reported the attitude of the dean of men: "He is going to ‘approve our Constitution,’ but warns us that Jimmy Hoffa and Communists will not be allowed to speak at our university and that—would you believe it?—if we picketed the school in our underwear he would take appropriate actions against our club—he was serious, too."

The tensions that were experienced during a period of near bankruptcy, incommunicativeness, and inactivity surfaced at the National Council meeting at Ann Arbor over the Christmas vacation. It was, as all NCs were to be, a freewheeling affair, not very carefully planned, with some thirty-five of the faithful present to share in a mixture of chaotic meetings, friendship renewals, lots of politics and gossip, a few love affairs, and beer drinking. This one, however, was unusually acerbic.

The meeting was dominated by discussion of a letter which Haber and Barbara Jacobs (soon to be married to Haber) had sent out to top SDSers on December 15 complaining about SDS's failures; specifically it charged that "the basic work isn't getting done" by the NO, that there is no "program that is directed to local organization" or even "an operating consensus on what it means to have an SDS group somewhere," and that "we are setting out on adventures beyond our physical and intellectual capacities." It was a presumptuous letter, Haber having generally retired from SDS affairs and therefore remote from the ongoing problems, and bore certain marks of one who had retired from office convinced that he was irreplaceable. The New York staff workers, certainly, took it that way, and throughout the four days of the meeting had their backs up; the camaraderie which had characterized so many other meetings just wasn't there. Jacobs, in a letter to Burlage, though asserting that it was good to get SDS problems "out on the table, talked about, and maybe even thought about," acknowledged that

... the meeting has left me with a sour taste that is still quite strong. I am glad that some of my ideas are getting recognized and used because I think they are good. But I feel demoralized by the kinds of interrelations that occur

when, even in as fine a group as SDS, someone rocks the boat. I am discouraged by what I perceive to be a kind of arrogant resistance to the

"new people," and a sincere belief on the part of some members that they, and SDS, have "the Word" and that their ideas can't be improved upon. I am not disturbed by this tendency only because I am affected by it, or because of some abstract egalitarian notions I have, but also because my experience tells me that there is more to be learned—particularly from people whose life experience, and particularly educational experience has been different from the "important people" in SDS. In short, I think that incest is beginning to lead to inbreeding, with all its defects, and that new characters are needed on the scene.

What became clear at the meeting was that SDS could not simply rest on Port Huron, no matter how diligent and official that was. On the simplest level, what was needed was a lot of plain dirty fund raising and a lot of laborious chapter organizing, but on a deeper level something more obviously was wanted, though no one could yet put a name to it. Somehow the organization had to overcome the limitations imposed on it by—by just being an organization; somehow it had to work outside of the institutions formed by the very society it criticized so bitterly. The question was—and it was asked by growing numbers that spring—how?

Partly as a result of its organizational malfunctioning, SDS remained relatively quiet during this school year. On the peace front, it did succeed in establishing a Peace Research and Education Project (PREP), which was to be a kind of leftish clearinghouse for gathering and publishing research on peace, disarmament, and foreign policy and was kept going largely by Dick Flacks, the balding, bespectacled graduate student who operated chiefly out of the basement of Tom Hayden's Ann Arbor house. But PREP confined itself to quiet academic research, avoiding action like the radioactive plague, and SDS itself made no effort to draw in the considerable numbers of students who might have been attracted to a multi-issue organization that fall after the disillusioning experiences of the government's hawkery in the missile crisis and by the complete failure of peace candidates at the polls in November. The Student Peace Union, for example, which had perhaps four to six thousand members at the start of the fall, was on the brink of collapse by December, and its followers might easily have been attracted to an organization which gave them some explanation for their failures and an ideology by which to revive their energies; but SDS never pressed the point and only a few of the better—and most bitter—peaceniks made the switch to SDS then.

On the civil-rights front, SDS began the year largely by trying to enlist support for the Northern Student Movement, itself a support group formed in 1961 to raise money for SNCC but which took an initiative this school year in establishing tutorial projects, mostly in Northeastern cities, to educate ghetto blacks; SDS joined NSM for an Election Day fundraising appeal at the polls in November, but through halfhearted organization managed to collect no more than $3,000. Individual SDSers were intimately involved with SNCC in the South—Betty Garman, Casey Hayden, and Bob Zeilner prominent among them—but SDS as an organization provided little financial or ideological weaponry, and the Council of Federated Organizations established that winter to unite the voter-registration groups in the South functioned entirely without SDS assistance. By the spring, however, SDS chapters had thrown themselves once again energetically into civil-rights action: Martin Luther King's Birmingham march woke up the campuses again (not to mention the white press and the Washington establishment) and direct-action confrontations (in Danville, Albany, Cambridge, and elsewhere) drew widespread student support, in spite of the more than twenty thousand arrests made in the course of the year. SDSers at Swarthmore joined the Political Action Club's initial efforts at community organizing blacks in Cambridge and Chester; the Baltimore chapter was instrumental in "stand-in" civil-rights demonstrations at which several were arrested, VOICE demonstrated and leafleted in downtown Detroit; other chapters tried meetings, leaflets, and fund raising.

Aside from this, most of the life of SDS during these months was around Boston, largely thanks to Robb Burlage. Burlage was a bright young man—a professor of his at the University of Texas had called him one of the three best students he ever taught—who had been the editor of the Daily Texan and, through contact with Haber, became an early recruit to SDS ranks around civil-rights issues; he was then a graduate student in economics at Harvard (though the tug of his Southern roots was soon to prove too strong, and within a year he was to return to the South and get involved in less academic enterprises). Personable, charming, energetic, with sparkling eyes and a strong sense of humor, he became a natural focus for SDS activities in the Northeast that year.

In September Burlage began holding meetings with interested students, mostly those around the peace-oriented club TOCSIN and the Harvard/Radcliffe Liberal Union, an ADA affiliate. During October, when the peace dreams of these groups were shattered by Kennedy's missile-rattling, he began (with help from NECer Ann Cook at Tufts, and visits from Hayden and Max) to swing them around to SDS's more radical vision. The next month he began a series of "discussion groups" whose radicalism was limited to Paul Goodman, C.

Wright Mills, Herbert Aptheker, Gandhi, the Fabians, and David Riesman, but which succeeded in drawing a lot of the bright young troubled people of the area and lasted enthusiastically through the spring. Max and others in New York kept pressuring for a fullfledged, card-carrying chapter, but Burlage wanted to work slowly, through TOCSIN and the Liberal Union, adding individual members but not forcing the creation of an official chapter: "Harvard, man, is hard to crash." It was the right way. Before the year was over he had enlisted a dozen top-flight people, including three who were to prove important in the organization: Todd Gitlin, a Harvard senior and president of TOCSIN, Richard Rothstein, a leader of the Liberal Union, and Lee Webb, a peace activist and a senior at Boston University.

Burlage also was instrumental in organizing the only two important SDS conferences of the year, both around still another issue then faintly beginning to make itself felt on the nation's campuses: university reform. The first, on "The Role of the Student in Social Change," was held at Harvard at the end of November. There were a number of perceptive speechesRoger Hagan on the need for a "revolutionary consciousness" among students; Noel Day, a young black politician in Boston, on racism; and Hayden on the manipulative "postideological" society—but the most important was given by Paul Potter, who had just gotten through his term as NSA vice president and was getting ever closer to the SDS mainstream.Universities, Potter maintained, are inextricably part of the world around them, and always have been, their job being to buttress "the vagaries of nationalistic concerns," perform "the truncated examination of the methods of manipulating existing institutions," engage in the "task of creating the men who will lead the existing system," and so on. Those who can get to see this

.. stand in a fundamentally different tradition from the vast majority of students and professors in the country; we recognize that we cannot accept their terms of analysis, that we demand a more fundamental, systematic and humane approach to the problems of mankind. We recognize that the Universities are currently concerned with the development of none of these approaches and are in fact, because of their historic commitments to the nourishment of the existing system, a commitment intensified ultimately by the Cold War, in some sense in opposition to their development. And we recognize that the only course for us is to stand outside the existing traditions and on our own intellectual, economic, political and human resources develop alternatives to the system so compelling as to obtain basic concessions from

it.

And the alternatives will have to be quite far removed from anything now being suggested.

They will involve totally new models, totally new behavior:

We must ... begin to search for a revolutionary model which is dynamic enough to extricate us from the continually narrowing concentric circles which define the limits of change within the established political power structure .... In order to develop a revolutionary model, concerned faculty and students will for the most part have to move outside the University-defined spectrum of lectures, seminars and officially sanctioned research. And more importantly ... they will have to move outside the societally defined spectrum of what is relevant since relevance is defined today as that which is directed at adjusting the current power structure.

The point is profound: recognize that the universities are as corrupt as their settings—how could they be otherwise—and leave them before they corrupt you. What makes this so especially important is that it stands in polar opposition to The Port Huron Statement's ideas of what universities and students can be and do—and the tension between these two impulses will continue throughout the decade to be faced by each wave of activist students: Is the university "a potential base and agency in a movement of social change" (The Port Huron Statement) or is it "ultimately committed to the nourishment of a national and international system in which the Cold War is inextricably rooted" (Potter)? Is the university the nest for those who can create real social change, or the hothouse for those who would resist it? Are students operating within the university truly agents of social change, or must they leave the campuses and operate in the "real" world outside? Are the universities bases from which assaults can effectively be made on the social system, or are they bastions of that system producing instead its minions? The former impulse leads to the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, to student power, to the explosive rebellions of the campuses; the latter leads to SDS's ghetto-organizing projects, to the "free universities," to the "dropout" culture of the youth ghettos, and more.

The second conference, at Brandeis in March, was an even more ambitious one on "University Reform." Eighty people showed up, and there were speeches by Paul Goodman, Herbert Marcuse (then teaching at Brandeis), and Hayden, three pretty incandescent stars even then. Goodman attacked the university for its handmaiden role with the Establishment and, possessed of a faith in the young that he was to abandon in not too many years, argued that it was the students who could turn the university around to "become a new center of initiative for our society." The contradiction in this—universities are supposed to be isolated from social and governmental influence on the one hand, yet to partake in social and political transformation on the other—was underscored by Marcuse, who wanted to have it both ways: "In the first place, the university should have nothing to do with the Cold War; in the second place, insofar as it does have to do with the Cold War, its purpose ought to be to end it." Hayden was perhaps wisest in recognizing that the only way to resolve it all was to change the society, for "the university cannot be reformed without a total social revolution.

The Brandeis conference was important in raising the university-reform issue almost two years before the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley forced it upon the attention of the country. But it also raised certain problems, as noted by Shelley Blum, an SDSer at CCNY who reported on the conference for CommonSense:

At several different occasions, effective critiques were made of various aspects of the university experience by both students and faculty, but responses to the "what can we do?" question left much to be desired ... . While personally useful, such discussions did not get even then to the question of what it is that we ought to be doing within the university today to create the kind of educational experience which is what we are led to expect from the liberal rhetoric regarding education ... . It became clearer than at most previous discussions that we don't know just what it is that we are trying to construct and how we think it can be done. So much more must be done on the constructive as well as critical level.

The 1962-1963 school year was such a difficult one for the fledgling SDS that it might have seemed remarkable that SDS continued to exist, to command such fierce loyalties from its members, and, slowly, to grow. The thing that kept it alive was the special quality of its vision, combined with the special quality of its people.

SDS was, for many young collegians, the only organization anywhere, young or old, which enunciated the things they wanted said. Todd Gitlin, who had gravitated toward SDS at Harvard in the spring of 1962, became a confirmed follower around the time of the Cuban missile crisis, when the politics he had been following with TOCSIN became "completely discredited" and there were only a few people around during those days who "integrated their political and personal salvations at once"—and they were SDSers: "The way the SDS people operated was commensurate with the enormity of the problems of the society." Once he got to know them, he was also struck by "the whole thing about interrelatedness—that made a lot of sense to me then." By Christmastime he had resigned the chairmanship of TOCSIN and was, without being an official member, philosophically an SDSer.

This same quality was mentioned by another young student, from Piedmont College, who said, "I just decided that these are the best human beings around, and figured it is with them I should make the good fight. That way, even if you lose, you gain something very valuable." Another SDSer, quoted in Kenneth Keniston's Young Radicals, put it this way:

Bill Westbury came and sort of complimented me for what he felt was a good job that I had played .... He said, "SDS is holding a series of seminars this year, and would you like to get involved?" I said, "I would love to," because I really felt the need for intellectual stimulation .... At the time, I was for peace, I was for dissent, I was for civil rights, and then sometimes, if the situation presented, I would wind up arguing for socialism. But I would also argue for better Medicare, higher minimum wages, or something like that. I considered myself a sort of liberal. A very militant political liberal .... [He went to an NC.] I heard several people whom I was unimpressed with, but it was [Clarkson] who just overwhelmed me with his mind. He didn't turn me on and say I should become involved or anything like that. I was just impressed

with his mind and his grasp of politics. So I decided at that point that I wanted to become part of that. That was what I was going to do, to be a part of, because I could learn a hell of a lot. And they were nice, they were good people. And I had a lot to learn. So what I did for the next year and a half, was just to listen ... . I didn't say a word, I never even opened my mouth. I took notes, and I'd come back at night and study them and try to remember what was said. I read all the literature ... .

The thing that I was thinking about was what was I going to do with my life, what kind of job am I going to have? And I wound up feeling that I might want to go to graduate school, but I never applied .... I wanted to learn, I wanted to learn how America was organized and I wanted to find out more about myself. I figured that these guys and publications and the books that they read could help me to do that .... Another thing I felt was kind of the ideology of the alienated: "The old values have been destroyed; the old structures and institutions of the past no longer fit our needs; therefore we must rebuild." That's how I personally connected into it.

Still another reaction comes from Jeremy Brecher, who was a freshman at Reed College when he first ran into SDS:

When I went to my first SDS NC meeting it was like, here is exactly what I'd been looking for for three years, all the things I believed in. It was unlike anything I'd been in before—an enormous sense of dynamism—a feeling of expansiveness—"Dynamism" is the only word for it. The other great thing was you had a feeling of breaking out, that SDS was becoming a mass movement, it was on the verge of relating to much broader groups on campus: the same way you can tell between a crowd ready for civil disobedience, ready to fight the police, and one that isn't, a whole different stance and attitude.

The feelings of many were perhaps best and most simply put by Douglas Ireland, a highschool student in the Boston area, who wrote after a few meetings with Burlage and his friends: "I feel at home in SDS."

It is possible to make some cautious generalizations about these early SDSers which help to explain some of their rather extraordinary effect. They were, for a start, often extremely bright and, more than that, intellectual, having gotten good grades in high school, moved on early to the best universities, proved themselves then among the top ranks academically, and many were planning (or engaged in) graduate work and professorial careers they were diligent readers, active thinkers and talkers, and, as the later literature lists of SDS will show, prodigious writers. They tended to come from middle-class and upper-middle-class (often professional) homes—there are no exact figures on this, but it was acknowledged often enough (and sometimes worried about) by the members themselves—with parents who could give them money, security, often a stable family life, and usually the more enduring middle-class values and ethics, often combined with that vague liberal perfectionism that is characteristic of the American middle class.” They were overwhelmingly from the East and generally from the cities (although there was a sizable minority from the Midwest), and many (perhaps a third) were Jewish, all of which went to produce a kind of sophistication, a cosmopolitanism, and a grounding in urban traditions.

And they were often from families whose parents had had some contact with the left, usually during the thirties—a couple which was young during the thirties would tend to have children by the early forties, and these would be of college age by the early sixties; probably only a handful of the early SDSers were true "red-diaper babies"—Flacks, Max, and Ross among them—but since more than two million people went through the ranks of the Communist Party at one time or another in the thirties, and since there were millions more who moved in or near the other eddies of the left, it would not be surprising if a number of SDSers had some brush with the ideas and the ideals of the left during their upbringing.

They were, indeed, a remarkable group of people. They were committed, energetic, perceptive, political, and warm; they had a vision and they backed it up with unstinting if not always successful work; they were—not unimportant—personable, charismatic, articulate, and (many) good-looking; they were serious in a time that called for seriousness, yet still deeply and often self-consciously human, friendly, warm, working daily at knocking down the egocentric barriers their society had taught them to construct and trying to open themselves to others. Jack Newfield, who was of them and among them during all these early days, says simply: "The finest political people I have ever seen—and that includes those around Bobby Kennedy and anyone else—were those in the early days of SDS."!”

The school year ended with the annual convention, this time held June 14-17 at Camp Gulliver, a Summer camp near Pine Hill, New York. It was some measure of the success of the organization that more than two hundred people showed up, representing thirty-two colleges and universities. The main business of the convention was to draft another general statement of principles—in the early years, conventions were supposed to set organizational principles and the quarterly National Councils were supposed to set specific programs—and for that Dick Flacks had prepared a paper over the spring (with considerable help from the theoretical apparatchik: Booth, Haber, Hayden, Ross) called America and the New Era.

When he presented it to the convention it quickly became known as "Son of Port Huron." America and the New Era is less impressive than The Port Huron Statement, in part because it comes after, but also because of its narrower focus. The Port Huron Statement is more visionary, more philosophical, more theoretical, while this is concerned more with the tangible aspects of American policy and immediate ways to change it; The Port Huron Statement surveys a wide range of problems, from overpopulation to parietal rules, while America and the New Era says almost nothing about foreign policy, is only secondarily concerned with the Cold War, and concentrates its attention almost wholly on an analysis of broad contemporary economic and political problems of the United States.

But there are two central perceptions in America and the New Era, and their enunciation by the Pine Hill delegates marks a step forward for SDS and the student movement of which it is a part.

The first is that America has reached a point of crisis, that considerable new forces are at work within it, that it stands teetering on an unknown brink: in short, "that a new era is upon us, and the simple categories and grand designs of the Cold War no longer serve." Internationally, the "conception of an American Century" has been shattered; a colonial transformation has taken place; the Communist bloc is no longer a monolith; Western Europe is challenging American power; the strategy of eyeball-to-eyeball deterrence has outlived its usefulness. Domestically, all the attempts "to manage social conflicts" are beginning to come unstuck, poverty is a stain that can no longer be ignored, the racial crisis is coming to a peak, government complicity with business—what is called here for the first time "corporate liberalism"—has resulted in a stalemate for both; and new voices in labor, the media, the middle classes, minorities, and even in Congress are beginning to be heard:

The structure of quiescence is beginning to break down. The development of the civil rights movement and other centers of independent insurgency has for the first time since the war created centers of power outside the university to which intellectuals could turn for creative as well as political involvement. The beginning of a breakdown in the American consensus provides the possibility for genuinely critical and independent participation of intellectuals and students in national life. The bureaucratic and ideological structures of American institutions of liberal education have been penetrated.” The second perception, which follows directly from this, is that there is in response to this new crisis "a new discontent, a new anger ... groping towards a politics of insurgent protest"—a "new insurgency":

There seems to be emerging a collection of people whose thought and action are increasingly being radicalized as they experienced the events of the new era. Moreover, the radical consciousness of these individuals is certainly representative of wider currents of urgency and dissatisfaction which exist in the communities from which they come. The militant resolve of Negroes North and South, the urgency and dedication of middle class peace advocates, the deepening anxiety of industrial workers, the spreading alienation of college students—this kind of motion and discontent in the population has given new stimulation to the development of radical thought, and is leading to a search for new forms of insurgent politics.

It is hardly an accident that SDS itself will very shortly come to take on one of these new forms, following the almost inevitable consequences of its analysis.

One immediate response to the sense of a new insurgency was a decision by the convention to amend the constitution so as to give more power to individual chapters and local members at national meetings; it was decided that chapters should elect delegates to the convention on the basis of one for every five of its members, with each delegate having two votes, and that chapters with more than twenty-five members might elect two representatives to the National Council. Another response was to put new and younger people into the leadership of the organization: though Hayden had been a successful president and was still perhaps the most powerful single figure in SDS, it was felt that he should not continue in office and that a regular rotation of the national officers allowing for new blood was necessary to insure true "participatory democracy."

It was an understandable decision, perhaps inevitable, and one sanctioned by SDS's (and SLID's) history of annual turnovers, but it was to have two serious consequences: for one, the previous year's officers, despite their considerable organizational skills, were mechanically prevented from exercising continued leadership or else had to exert power from behind the scenes through informal and hidden personal manipulation; for another, the values of continuity, political experience, and cohesive politics were inevitably denied the organization, forcing it to reshape its national machinery each year, a process which later on would serve to lessen SDS's impact and efficiency and eventually threaten its ability to carry out any national programs at all. An SDS in which Hayden, Haber, Booth, Davis, and others continued to exercise formal leadership year after year throughout the sixties, instead of retiring to the sidelines and then dropping out entirely, would have been a far different, perhaps a more powerful and enduring, organization than what actually evolved.

One immediate consequence of this second response was a long scramble to find someone to replace Hayden, the difficulty of which might have suggested its artificiality. None of the old leadership wanted to go against the insurgent tide and keep the reins in practiced hands—Burlage, Davis, and Potter all were nominated for the presidency and all shied away—and finally the convention had to settle on Todd Gitlin, able and personable but still very new to the national organization. Gitlin recalls how, though trepidations, he came to take the job:

Davis and Potter both wanted me to accept, and the three of us ended up walking on the lawn outside. I don't exactly remember what we talked about. All of us were going to be in Ann Arbor the next year—I was going because I wanted to be around all this commotion—and they all had personal agendas that seemed more urgent than mine. What came through my mind was a paper, "Five Characters in Search of a Vision," I had written at Harvard just before, about what makes a person choose commitment, choose to become a radical, and that was it, I said yes. I was so stunned and overwhelmed that when I came out to give the acceptance speech I don't know what I said.

For National Secretary the convention chose Lee Webb, fresh out of Boston University and equally as inexperienced in the ways of national organizations, and though some continuity was kept—Booth was again elected Vice President, Max continued as Field Secretary, and McKelvey as Assistant National Secretary—the impulse toward the new insurgency was clearly dominant.” The Pine Hill convention ended with ritual, begun in nascent form at Port Huron, that would continue to mark SDS conventions, and many National Council meetings, for the next several years. It was called, usually, the "fund-raising orgy," and it followed something of the pattern that Dick Flacks later described:

The scene might have been written by Genet; it was worthy of filming by Fellini. A young man, well clothed and well groomed but with his shirt collar open now, and his tie pulled down, shouted to the audience like an oldfashioned revivalist. "Come up," he cried, "come up and confess. Put some money in the pot and be saved.

And they came. The first youth, clutching the green pieces of paper in his hand, recited for all to hear: "My father is a newspaper editor. I give twentyfive dollars." His penitence brought cheers from the assembly. The sin of the next young man was a father who was assistant director of a government bureau. He gave forty dollars. "My dad is dean of a law school," confessed another, as he proffered fifty dollars for indulgence.

Few other SDSers recall these affairs as being as full of peccancy as all that, but there was certainly a sense of liberation, of kicking over, about them, as the young delegates emptied their pockets and made their pledges, Clark Kissinger, a former Chicago University student, recalls the sense of euphoria that clung, to that final day: "The convention closed with a tremendous feeling of solidarity and comradeship," not the least of which was that "$1,700 was donated to SDS by the delegates on the last evening, and notable personalities were ceremoniously tossed into the lake."