Fall 1966

Student power on the campuses: Jeff Shero describes the organizing process.

When you'd go to organize a campus, you'd first have to find a contact, or meet some people, you'd have to have a lot of just discussions to figure out where people were at, and at some point you'd leave the group you'd found to talk to other kinds of people, to develop a sense of the campus. And you'd come back and you'd relate to different issues but put them in a coherent way. You'd try by the time you left to have an organizational meeting, try to sign people up in SDS, give them pamphlets to read to develop their analysis, and find the one issue they could begin to move on.

Organizers always understood how issues were related, and as soon as they got students into motion on one issue, as soon as they came in conflict with the authorities in the society, people would begin seeing the relationship to other issues, and the organizers could accelerate that process by explaining it. But it wasn't crucial which issues you began moving around: it could be racism in Florida, it could be the draft in New Mexico, it could be arbitrary university rules like smoking on campus in Utah. We had that dialectical sense that by getting people in motion and giving them an analytical overview, they would in a short period of time make all the connections.

The National Office worked hard to keep the motion going. New Left Notes provided weekly coverage of campus actions, cross-fertilizing the chapters with new ideas, issues, tactics.

Literature production was stepped up with the reprinting of a number of the best-selling items, including a "Chapter Organizers Handbook," the Potter and Oglesby Washington march speeches, the "Guide to Conscientious Objection," Christopher Hobson's "VietnamAny Way Out?" and an additional twenty thousand copies of The Port Huron Statement. An elaborate survey of chapters was begun in an attempt to get a detailed profile of what the campus organizations really looked like and how they could best be served. Egleson, Calvert, and Davidson went on regular tours of the campuses, talking to chapter organizers and often—for SDS's reputation had now penetrated everywhere—drawing considerable crowds to public speeches and debates; Oglesby, too, was much in demand on the campus lecture circuit, and in at least one place (Colorado) his mere presence was enough to generate an SDS chapter overnight that remained active throughout the year. At the same time a half-dozen official campus travelers like Shero were working out of the Regional Offices, usually on salaries of no more than $30 a week, armed with piles of literature in the back seats of whatever cars they could cadge, servicing the chapters and spreading the SDS message to places where it had not yet taken hold; and a dozen unofficial travelers, committed SDSers who had dropped out or were giving only halfhearted attention to schoolwork, performed the same function with the same zeal.

All of this—combined, of course, with the continuing war, the rebellions in the black ghettos, the failure of the "war on poverty," the daily duplicity of the Johnson Administration, the lack of success of peace and liberal candidates in the Congressional elections, and the ongoing plague of American life—had its effect. The fall of 1966 was the beginning of active student resistance.

On many campuses the process began, as Davidson had envisioned, around strictly local grievances. At the University of Nebraska, for example, where Davidson's own influence lingered, SDS helped to form a left-wing campus party which organized on the issue of a student bill of rights and in the student-government elections managed to place three SDSers in power. At Penn State, the SDS chapter challenged the administration over its in loco parentis role, led a successful boycott of the campus elections, and after lengthy negotiations with a vacillating student government exposed its sandbox stature. At San Francisco State, students organized a boycott of the university eating facilities, complaining of high prices and inferior quality, and then went on to demand student control over the corporation that ran the cafeteria and the campus store. At New York University (downtown), SDSers organized a thousand-person rally against a proposed tuition increase, went on to hold a strike that was said to be 50 to 80 percent effective, and finally participated in a four-hundred-strong sit-in at the university's Main Building.

But by far the greatest number of student protests were directed at noncampus issues, usually the war, in which the university was involved; and here the protests were directed in classic fashion against the administration for its complicity with outside organizations. On many campuses (Antioch, Buffalo, CCNY, Columbia, Cornell, Oberlin, Michigan, and Wisconsin among them), SDS renewed its campaign against student ranking and the scheduled second round of Selective Service testing, again pointing to the role the universities were playing on behalf of the war machine; the Antioch drive was successful in getting the college to drop ranking. On several campuses, SDS devoted itself to exposing and protesting heretofore hidden university links: at NYU, SDSers wrote and distributed a document called "Who Controls the Board of Trustees?" which showed the connections between the university and various American corporations involved in overseas exploitation or the war in Vietnam, and at Pennsylvania, SDSers got nation-wide publicity for uncovering the extensive research in chemical and biological warfare the university was carrying on in secret. And at many universities the most significant issue of the fall was the recruiting of students on campus by Navy, Marine, CIA, or Dow Chemical Company recruiters—an issue particularly successful in galvanizing students because it blended so much: it exposed the university's complicity with the war, it showed up the administration's attitude toward free speech, and it allowed antiwar expressions in general a visible, tangible, local outlet. SDS led at least a half-dozen successful antirecruiting demonstrations that fall (at Brown," Columbia, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, and Queens), but none was more striking than the one at Berkeley.”

Yes, Berkeley—again. There a team of Navy recruiters put up a table in the student union at the end of November, despite a rule that only student organizations could use the hall, and the Berkeley SDS chapter seized the opportunity to set up its own table right next to it, distributing antiwar literature. Administration officials demanded that the SDS table be removed. SDS refused. SDSers and sympathetic students began a sit-in around the Navy table to prevent anyone from going near, and the administration called the police. More than a hundred local policemen swarmed on the crowd, and when one of the demonstrators was attacked by a heckling student, the cops moved in and started making arrests—of the demonstrators, not the hecklers. Ten people in all were carried off, including Jerry Rubin and Mario Savio, and SDSer Stew Albert. The Berkeley administration was reliving its past: by arbitrarily denying students freedom to speak and organize, by showing itself subservient to outside (and unpopular) interests, and then by calling in the police to arrest its own students, it once again radicalized a large part of the student body. That night a wide segment of the campus, including the teaching assistants, the National Student Association chapter, and the student government, supported a call for a student strike. An administration spokesman tried to head it off by arguing that the student government had specifically recommended that Navy recruiters be allowed on campus; the studentgovernment vice president rose and denied it flatly. The strike began the next day, with an estimated 75 percent success, and a prostrike rally at noon drew fifteen thousand: again the issue of calling the cops on campus proved to have swung general student support behind the minority activists. For five days the strike continued, with SDS pushing a wide range of demands, until December 6, when the faculty (apparently mindful of criticism of its role two years before) voted to support the administration, the administration agreed to appoint a high-level student-faculty commission to study governance of the university, and student enthusiasm began to wane. Many of the students and most of the rest of the university chose to regard the crisis as an educational one; the student-faculty commission inevitably treated the issue as one of educational reform and eventually recommended a much greater role for students in both the educational and disciplinary machinery of the university. But SDS had made its point: the university was cooperating improperly with the agencies that were fighting the war, it was incapable of governing its own campus without recourse to the police, and it denied its students their proper voice in university affairs.

From such acorns do radical oaks grow.*

Direct protest against the war also became a commonplace on the campuses now. At almost every school where there was an active SDS chapter (nearly two hundred), and many where there weren't, students organized against Administration policies: at places like Texas Western and Arizona State, SDS was generally confined to setting up tables in the student centers for the distribution of antiwar literature; at larger schools like Michigan and Wisconsin, it could organize the heckling of prowar speeches and disrupt Administration spokesmen; at a campus like San Fernando Valley State College, SDS even tried Kissinger's Kamikaze Plan, speaking to National Guardsmen at a nearby base about the war, and several dozen were arrested.” But the most successful—and most publicized—antiwar demonstration of all was at Harvard.

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was invited by the Harvard administration and its John F. Kennedy Institute of Politics to give a lecture on November 7 to a select group of fifty students. The Harvard/Radcliffe SDS chapter, demanding that the university live up to its claims for free speech, proposed that the Secretary engage in a debate with Ramparts editor Robert Scheer, coincidentally there on the same weekend, or at least face a public forum of antiwar questioners. Harvard refused. SDS then circulated a petition calling for a public debate, which got sixteen hundred signatures within a few days. Harvard refused again. SDS vowed confrontation. Let New Left Notes take the story from there:?

By 4 P.M., close to a thousand demonstrators (the Crimson said 800) ringed Quincy House, covering virtually all the exits. SDS heads ran a James Bondtype operation, with walkie-talkie equipped spotters on all sides of the building. After several false alarms and one attempted decoy maneuver, McNamara emerged in a police car on a narrow back street. While a dozen SDSers sat down around the car, others passed the signal over the walkie talkies around the block, and the thousand began running towards McNamara. Within moments, he was surrounded by what must have looked to him like a mob of howling beatniks; they were actually normal Harvard people, including faculty like Michael Walzer, delighted to have trapped the Secretary.

McNamara told the crowd: "I spent four of the happiest years on the Berkeley campus doing some of the same things you're doing here. But there was one important difference: I was both tougher and more courteous." After laughter and shouts, he shouted vehemently, "I was tougher then and I'm tougher now!"

The audience loved it. Mac was blowing his cool—unable to handle himself, quite possibly scared. The first question was about the origins of the Vietnamese war. "It started in '54-'55 when a million North Vietnamese flooded into South Vietnam," McNamara said. "Goin' home!" someone shouted. Mac countered "Why don't you guys get up here since you seem to know all the answers?" The next question asked for the number of civilian casualties in the South. "We don't know," Mac said. "Why not? Don't you care?" came the shouts. "The number of casualties .... " Mac began, but was drowned out by cries of "Civilian! Civilian! Napalm victims!" A few PL-types in front were jumping up and down screaming "Murderer! Fascist!" Mac tried to regain his composure ' and said "Look fellas, we had an agreement ... ." A girl shrieked "What about your agreement to hold elections in 1956?"

hings seemed to be breaking up. The police moved in and whisked McNamara into Leverett House; an SDS leader, fearing violence in the streets, took the microphone and ordered all SDS people to clear the area.

The disciplined shock troops of the revolution turned and dispersed quickly, McNamara was hustled out through steam tunnels, and everyone went home to watch themselves on TV.

SDS was in the news again. The New York Times and the Washington Post carried the story on their front-pages, as did most major newspapers, and all the network news broadcasts featured the event; conspicuously absent was any mention of SDS's prior attempts to arrange an organized public debate with the Secretary. The Harvard administration officially apologized, as did some twenty-seven hundred students; SDS did not. Three students wrote to The New York Times:

We entered into this demonstration as our only means of expressing our repulsion to and disapproval of the war in Vietnam and those who propagate it. We consider any attempts to apologize on our behalf to be spurious. We do not apologize.*

This adamancy, and the unusual means of confrontation, disturbed a number of Harvard students, perhaps the majority, but there was no question that SDS, again, had made its point: Harvard was shown to be high-handed rather than high-minded, devoted to free egress rather than free speech, dependent ultimately on the power of the police rather than the power of suasion—and on top of it all apologetic to the chief architect of the Vietnam war.

From Berkeley to Harvard—it was happening all over, and on a scale never seen before in the history of American higher education. It is sometimes easy to forget what a remarkable development it all was, since within a few years the campus protest tended to seem as hallowed a university institution as the library, but in fact up to this point student disruptions (with the exception of Berkeley in 1964 and Chicago in the spring of 1966) were little noted nor long remembered. We must remember that it is only now that student protest becomes a part of American politics."

Progressive Labor influence was noticeable throughout the fall. A number of articles in New Left Notes put forth PL lines. PLers, along with other varieties of SDSers, were important in running a Boston Labor Committee, doing strike-support work and general labor theorizing during the fall. PLers were persuasive in putting across their party's strong anti-imperialist line in a number of chapters, mostly in New York and Boston: on Vietnam, for example, the PL National Committee statement, published in the October-November issue of PL, read:

To defeat imperialism we need the broadest movement possible around a clear anti-imperialist program: the demand for the United States to "get out of Vietnam, now." ... This demand will expose the phony slogan of "negotiate now," with which the ruling class is trying to control the peace movement and turn the mass discontent to their purpose.°

By December, Brooklyn SDSer Sue Simensky wrote to Greg Calvert that PLer Jeff Gordon "represents the views of most SDSers" at Brooklyn College and that the PL position was winning adherents at New York regional meetings; traditional SDSers like Max, Ireland, Bob Gottlieb, Sue Eanet, and Sarah Murphy, she said, are loud talkers, but people find them "pretty much irrelevant." Calvert responded with what was presumably the National Office attitude at the time: Jeff Gordon may be a good guy,

.. but PL politics are not SDS politics and why is it no one can talk from an SDS perspective? ... I know that cadre discipline is impressive, but I do not think that Maoism is the answer to our problems ... . It just seems to me that if PL wants a delegate to the NC then they ought to become a fraternal organization of SDS like any other independent group and get their delegate openly and forthrightly.°

National SDS basked in the light of that fall's student protests. Not that it was getting the kind of national publicity that had attracted attention to it before—there was practically no attention paid in the national press (Reader's Guide, for example, lists only one entry for the whole year) and the National Office went out of its way to avoid the Booth pattern of seeking publicity. Rather it was depending now upon interest generated on the campuses, where something new, active, visible, and immediate always attracts attention. Chapters were rejuvenated at several better-known schools (Amherst, Bard, Colorado State, Princeton, New Hampshire, Rochester, and Rutgers), and new chapters were formed during the fall at some eighteen other widely diverse places from Boston College to Bowling Green, University of the Pacific to St. Olaf. The total number of chapters on paper was now at least 265, of which the number of solid and active chapters, according to a mid-fall issue of New Left Notes, was somewhere around 175. National membership rose to some 6,000, while the total chapter membership was probably around 25,000'—though the looseness of what this latter category meant is suggested by the provision in the Brandeis chapter's 1966 constitution that "a person will be considered a member when he has attended two membership meetings."”

Even finances were, after a serious drought, beginning to perk up. The National Office began the school year $4,300 in debt, and operations for the five months from August turned a neat profit of exactly $57.04 (largely thanks to contributions of more than $9,000 from SDS "alumni"). But by the end of the year Calvert had launched SDS on an elaborate fund-raising drive, with 25,000 printed form letters of appeal ("Let's put our bread where our hearts are, brothers!") and of thanks ("Your contribution is another link in building a true alternative to helplessness"), aimed to supply an annual budget of $84,000 (or, as he figured it, $14 X 6,000 national members). At the same time he made renewed contacts with big givers—Anne Farnsworth was top on the list—in the attempt to establish a system of small, regular contributions. It is somewhat difficult to tell exactly how effective these fiscal operations were, but something must have happened: by the end of the year there was $2,000 in the bank.

Although Nick Egleson was the first SDS President since Haber to live near and work out of the NO, he chose to spend the bulk of his time traveling the chapters. The dominant force in the office itself was Greg Calvert, who proved to be an able administrator as well as an effective campus speaker and a continuing source of organizational energy; he would close his letters with the Wobblies' "Don't mourn, organize"—and mean it. With Jane Adams, who became Assistant National Secretary, and also Calvert's steady companion, he directed an office staff of ten in an operation not structurally much different from that of Booth's, but with a much greater sense of camaraderie and purpose, which the success of their campus organizing strategy did nothing to diminish.”

It soon became clear that the prairie people around the National Office were revising their notions of just what should be done at a national level. It didn't take long before Davidson was urging SDSers to "work for better communications, internal education, and more thoughtful national programs,"® sounding for all the world like Paul Booth; and Calvert was somewhat petulantly berating those who "think that national programs are irrelevant": "Maybe we ought to refuse to be a national organization and decide that the only real problems are neighborhood problems and that involvement in anything larger is 'unreal' and that if we just hold on to each other hard enough in our little corners of this monster called America everything will be all right and straight and clean and decent until the bomb comes."

For Calvert especially the idea of an effective national organization was important, because he had a strong vision of what was needed now. In an extraordinary National Secretary's report in November he set that out—and, incidentally, spoke of SDS as "revolutionary" for the very first time. Responding to those who had despaired of SDS, and Movement work in general, because it had not lived up to their expectations of instant (or even gradual) bliss, Calvert wrote:

In the face of frustration and confusion, our task—our revolutionary task—is not to purge ourselves of the desires, the vision, and the hope which brought us to the revolutionary movement. Our task is to examine ourselves and our movement and our work in order to sustain our revolutionary hope—in order that, despite the reality of frustration and despair, we might continue the building of the movement which we know is right because it corresponds to what we want for ourselves and what we understand to be necessary for the survival of the race.

The old guard of SDS, Calvert suggested, had been wrong in thinking that the organization could create among its members a truly free community, a "beloved community" as it was called, inside the pervasive and corrupting system:

Let's quit playing games and stop the self-indulgent pretense of confusion ... .

We tried to get close to each other, we tried to create community in the midst of an anticommunitarian world, we tried to find love in the midst of lovelessness and it ended up as either a fruitless mutual-titillation society or as a disruptive self-destructive chaos. The results were catastrophic: let's face up to that.

What is needed, he argued, was not the abandonment of the ideal of freedom, but a new kind of organization to realize the goal:

I am finally convinced that a truly revolutionary movement must be built out of the deepest revolutionary demands and out of the strongest revolutionary hopes—the demand for and the hope of freedom. I do not, however, believe that such a movement can be the beloved community; it can only be a revolutionary community of hope ... .

We are not the new life of freedom: but that does not mean that we cannot be the force which gives it birth .... Our freedom is not to be free but to be a force of freedom.

It was a clear call for a new level of struggle, a new perception of what SDS could do, and be. And inherent in it was the notion of revolution—not fully comprehended, perhaps, but ardently stated and openly sought, and no more shilly-shallying about it. SDS had the potential to be the crucible of revolution, and nothing less than that.

Nor was Calvert alone in feeling that SDS stood at the threshold of a new level. Davidson, too, argued that "the system must be fundamentally changed" and asserted that among the choice of weapons, "my own choice is revolution." Talk about the need for an ideology became increasingly common, references to Karl Marx were studded without apology through various pieces now, and regularly the idea of "socialism"—which no early SDSer could have used without embarrassment—was being championed, as in a long article by Steve Baum and Bernard Faber: "At this point, we in SDS must begin to write about and talk about socialist theory, so that we will be prepared to play a major role in developments, creating larger numbers of socialists, and developing socialist consciousness in all institutions in which we organize." Naturally, within this atmosphere certain of the Old Left ideas which had previously been scorned began to take on a new attractiveness, and both the International Socialists (a splinter from the American Socialist Party) and PL were quick to come forward with their own version of those ideas. It was too early for any significant change in policy by either national SDS or most of the campus chapters, but a new acceptance of the idea of revolution is visible now, and growing.

On December 17, 1966, the National Committee of the Progressive Labor Party adopted an official statement, "Road to Revolution II," the importance of which was meant to be suggested by the fact that it was named after the party's first major theoretical statement in March 1963. Though the bulk of it was taken up with a long, scornful, and blistering criticism of the Soviet Union and the American Communist Party for their "revisionism"revising communism so as to fit in with their "imperialist" practices—the two most important elements were an attack on North Vietnam and a warning to PL members of dangers within their own ranks.

Hanoi was taken to task for accepting aid from a revisionist, reactionary power like the Soviet Union, since the Russians were really out to crush true revolutionaries: "There is no basis for partial and temporary unity with the revisionists. Revolutionaries should not enter into Soviet-inspired alliances. They are traps to thwart the revolution." Revisionism, however, also exists closer to home, in PL itself:

It would be most naive of us not to recognize the danger of revisionism in our party .... The main manifestation of revisionism inside our party at the present time is the continued isolation of too many members from the working people .... Revisionism is fundamentally the substitution of individual bourgeois interests for the interests of the working class, and that is precisely what happens when members refuse to join the people.

Among the "numerous" examples cited are members who don't want or don't try to get jobs, who get fired too frequently, or who ignore their fellow workers, and one man who refused to go to a party held by a fellow working-class tenant because he wanted to go to a party given by some students instead.

Among student members the idea of a worker-student alliance is advocated on paper, but to get some people to actually go out and meet the workers is like pulling teeth .... Essentially what these members—most of whom come from middle-class backgrounds—are saying is that working people are a drag.

You have to spend time with them (because that's the line) but mainly others should do it .... That is revisionism ... . If it is not fiercely opposed and overcome by our party, our party will never lead the working class, and no matter what these members might secretly wish, socialism cannot be achieved without the leadership of the working class.

The first concrete indication that SDS was heading toward a new organizational level came at the Berkeley National Council meeting late in December. And the issue that prompted it was, of all things, the draft."

SDS, as we have seen, had been dragging its feet on the draft issue for two years now. Earl Silbar, called "our man on the draft"!* by New Left Notes, had been working out of the Chicago office during the fall trying to generate some kind of program, but with little success. The local draft unions proposed by Clear Lake had come to nothing, and the membership referendum authorized at that convention had produced only a little more than a hundred votes by December. SDSers were now agonizing over the issues of whether to denounce the 2-S deferment, which would be consistent with an anti-draft position but would make them liable to induction, or whether to openly refuse induction, which would be more honorable than escaping to Canada or going underground but would expose them to penalties of five years in jail and a $10,000 fine, far harsher than anything they had had to face in the civil-rights days. Even many of those willing to take such personal risks—and there were a number in SDS—tended to acknowledge that this was more an expression of middle-class guilt, or a "politics of masochism," than an effective way to build up a mass anti-draft organization.

In the meantime, however, a spontaneous anti-draft movement was growing without any organizational direction at all, as draft calls now rose to some 40,000 a month. As early as July a group of eight young men met in New Haven with Staughton Lynd and signed a "We Won't Go" statement pledging to "return our draft cards to our local boards with a notice of our refusal to cooperate until American invasions are ended."!? The following month a larger meeting (which Calvert helped to organize) was held in Des Moines at which the idea of a mass draft-card burning was first mentioned, but not supported, and afterward a dozen or so men began traveling the campuses to get others to sign the pledge. At the same time, the case of the Fort Hood Three continued to attract attention and CO counseling by such groups as the War Resistors League in New York and the Quakers in Philadelphia continued to draw in several hundred men each month. The number of draft resistors indicted by the government rose to 680, nearly double the year before. In October SDSer Jeff Segal was sentenced to four years in jail for having refused induction in February 1965, the first time a major SDS organizer fell under the ax; and in December Peter Irons, a longtime SDSer and founder of the New Hampshire chapter, was sentenced to three years in jail for refusing military service. At the end of October a group of men around the Committee for Nonviolent Action and the Catholic Worker signed a statement refusing to "cooperate in any way with the Selective Service System," including registering, carrying a draft card, accepting deferment or exemption, or being inducted. In November several young men burned their draft cards outside a Boston courtroom where a draft protester was being tried; the next month Cornell SDS president Bruce Dancis, whose father had been a CO in World War II, became the first SDSer to destroy his draft card publicly, outside a meeting at which the Cornell faculty, with all deliberate speed, was discussing university policy toward Selective Service. And that same month a hastily organized conference at the University of Chicago drew a surprising five hundred people, thirty-two of whom—including SDSers Jeff Segal and Paul Booth—signed a "We Won't Go" pledge, the largest organized anti-induction protest to date. A week later New Left Notes publicly introduced the idea, in a proposal from Dartmouth SDSer John Spritzler, of having a mass draft-card burning by ten thousand young men.4

The stage was set, therefore, for the Berkeley National Council. It was not only that the draft issue was hot—it was also that SDS was coming off a successful fall term of flexing its muscles, and feeling the power of confrontational politics on campus, and becoming aware of the need for a new organizational stance "beyond the beloved community"—but also, of course, the fact that the meeting was being held in Berkeley. For the first time everyone wanted to talk about the draft, and for the first time everyone wanted SDS to do something about it.

Not that anyone was sure what. In fact the debate on it, begun at two o'clock on the afternoon of December 27, went on for nineteen hours over two days before it was finally resolved. It was a debate typically SDSian. The tentacles of Robert's Rules had not been thrown off—there were regular votes on amendments to amendments—but at the same time no one hesitated to use any occasion to bring up almost any subject for discussion. In the middle of it all Carl Davidson announced that he had drawn up a proposal for an SDS antidraft program, but he didn't actually want to submit it until the National Council agreed that it would go into this area seriously; he was met by the argument that the NC couldn't very well go into it without knowing what kind of proposal the Vice President had to make.

Davidson put it forward, and the fur started to fly. Does the NC have the power to commit the organization to draft refusal? Yes, because the membership referendum (which stood at 104-15 for refusal just then) gave a mandate, even if it represented only 1 percent of the membership. Should SDS have a national program at all, after having rejected the idea at Clear Lake? Yes, because, as Calvert put it, "a national draft resistance program would promote a ... break of consciousness and force a re-examination of the assumptions that support the current system." But suppose the individual chapters aren't willing to go along, suppose they think that advocating an illegal program will turn away innocent freshmen who might be potential recruits? At this point Davidson, troubled now about the implications of a national program on an organization committed to decentralization, said he would withdraw the whole proposal. The parliamentarian told him that was impossible. Well, then, Davidson replied, the idea was really a mistake for SDS, so we should let some separate stafforiented group handle it. Berkeley SDSer Mike Smith said no, SDS ought to make the effort, and it had to be an ambitious effort or else there was no point at all. But, the response came, the National Office can't handle an ambitious program (a point concurred in by several of the NO staff), having its hands full at the moment just getting out the paper and answering letters, and all you are proposing here "is a flight into the realm of fantasy," more "empty rhetoric" that will come to nothing. Nonsense, the National Office can do the job if we make it do the job, and besides we'll simply work twice as hard to see that it does.

By the end of the first evening, after ten hours of wrangling, with the ranks dwindled and the remaining few bleary-eyed, it was decided to go ahead along the general lines of the Davidson proposal. Next day seven parts of the proposal, four subsections, and a stream of incidentals were voted upon, one by one; the final vote for adoption was lopsided: 53 to 10, with three abstentions. SDS was on record with the strongest antidraft program in the land.

The resolution was full of rhetoric about SDS's opposition to the "immoral, illegal, and genocidal war" and to "conscription in any form," with special subsections swiping at imperialism (though here called still "the economic system and the foreign policy of the United States") and paying homage to nonstudents ("poor, working-class, and middle-class communities"). But at its heart were these provisions: ?°

We maintain that all conscription is coercive and anti-democratic, and that it is used by the United States Government to oppress people in the United States and around the world ....

SDS opposes and will organize against any attempt to legitimize the Selective Service System by reforms. The proposals for a lottery or for compulsory national service would not change the essential purpose of the draft—to abduct young men to fight in aggressive wars ... .

Since individual protest cannot develop the movement needed to end the draft and the war, SDS adopts the following program:

SDS members will organize unions of draft resisters. The members of these unions will be united by the common principle that under no circumstances will they allow themselves to be drafted. The local unions will reach out to all young men of draft age by organizing in the high schools, universities, and communities. Courses of action will include (a) direct action during preinduction physicals and at the time of induction, (b) anti-draft and anti-war education among potential inductees and their families, (c) demonstrations centering on draft boards and recruiting stations, (d) encouraging young men already in the military to oppose the war, and (e) circulating petitions stating that the signer will refuse to serve in Vietnam or submit to conscription in any form. National SDS will coordinate the local unions on a regional and national level, providing staff (including travelers), supplies, and financial

The resolution was important not only in what it said but in the spirit that lay behind it—as Calvert put it (in a phrase that was soon to sweep the Movement), SDS had moved "from protest to resistance." In a report on the National Council in New Left Notes, Calvert indicated why he felt the draft program was so important:

That program does not talk about politics or the taking of power. It does not talk about the new society or the democratization of ' decision-making. It talks about "resistance." And, finally, behind its rhetoric and its programmatic details, it talks about the only thing that has given life and creativity to "the movement." It talks about the kind of struggle which has been most meaningful to the new left—the revolutionary struggle which engages and claims the lives of those involved despite the seeming impossibility of revolutionary social change—the struggle which has the power to transform, to revolutionize human lives whether or not it can revolutionize the societal conditions of human existence.

.. It offers no clear path to power, no magic formula for success, only struggle and a new life. No promise is made, only the hope that struggle and confrontation with the existing system of humanity will create freedom in the midst of a life-destroying society.*® And, with a keen perception, Calvert understood what such a program said about SDS as an organization:

At its present stage of development, SDS cannot be understood in terms of traditional political organization. Neither ideological clarity (as political analysis) nor organizational stability are fundamentally important to SDSers.

What counts is that which creates movement. What counts is that SDS be where the action is. What counts is that SDS be involved in the creation of a cutting-edge in the freedom struggle.’”

"From protest to resistance"—and so it was. The drive toward resistance that had begun with the antiwar marches nearly two years before—bodies in file—and had gone on to the confrontation at the universities this year—bodies sitting-in—now found its first overt and programmatic form in the refusal to fight the war—bodies on the line.

It was a step from which there would be no retreat.