Fall 1967

On Monday morning, October 16, 1967, the thirty thousand students of the University of Wisconsin in Madison were met with a two-page mimeographed handout, without date or signature. "From Tuesday to Friday of this week," it began, "Dow Chemical Company will be recruiting on this campus. On Tuesday, this fact will be brought to the attention of the entire campus. On Wednesday, students will block Dow from recruiting."* Just like that. The rationale that followed was simple, a straightforward presentation of the radical case: Dow was part of the war machine ("The work of the government cannot be separated from the daily operations of American corporations or universities. To end the war, it is necessary to comprehend its true nature, to understand the extent to which major institutions such as this university and Dow Corporation are committed to its continuation"), the war machine has not been halted even after two years of opposition ("On this campus, opposition has become 'in': Not one faculty member in a hundred will defend the government. But the war effort has not even slowed down"), and therefore to stop it something more must be done ("We must move from protest to resistance. Before, we , talked. Now we must act. We must stop what we oppose").2

Wisconsin was a campus with a history of protest—including a sit-in against Selective Service ranking in May 1966 and a demonstration against Dow in February 1967—but this promised to be on a different scale. On the one side were the students, many of whom had already become familiar with the university's complicity in war-making through previous SDS exposures’ and who were already active in getting recruits for the upcoming march on the Pentagon; loosely formed into an Anti-Dow Coordinating Committee, with members of SDS and the Committee to End the War in Vietnam prominent among them, they had now explicitly warned of open resistance. On the other side was the administration, led by a newly appointed chancellor, William Sewell, who had vowed to protect the visit of any recruiter from anywhere and had made preparations with campus and local police to provide that protection; and behind him stood the company that profited from making jellied death, and the whole horror of Vietnam. It was all set for—the word of the day on the campusesconfrontation.

On Tuesday morning, October 17, some two hundred pickets walked back and forth in front of the Commerce Building, home of the business faculty and site of the recruitment interviews. They carried signs saying HEY, HEY, LBJ, HOW MANY KIDS DID YOU KILL TODAY? and HELL NO, WE WON'T GO, which turned out to be an unexpectedly all-purpose slogan. Students were allowed to come and go, no attempt at obstruction was made, and around noon the picketers dispersed. A lunchtime rally was held on the mall in front of the library, but it was sparsely attended.

Wednesday morning began quietly enough, with a regrouping of picketers in front of the Commerce Building. But, as promised, this time they moved from protest to resistance. At around ten-thirty more than a hundred picketers walked purposefully into the building, sat down in front of the office in which the Dow man was meeting with a student, linked arms, and notified the anxious officials standing around that there would be no more interviews that day. Within an hour the corridor on both sides of the office was blocked from wall to wall with milling students, perhaps 350 in all, while outside another 2,000 of the curious and/or sympathetic gathered, sensing trouble as sure as any turkey buzzard. Administration officials inside pleaded and demanded that the demonstrators leave; no one budged. Police from the university's office of "Protection and Security" and twenty more off-duty Madison policemen hired for the day took up places menacingly on the fringes; still no one budged.

Nominally in charge was campus police chief Ralph Hanson, who had expected a docile crowd, the civil-disobedient pacifists he was used to, types who would move along when threatened or submit meekly to arrest. But this bunch seemed different: they were, Hanson reported to his superiors, "hostile." A little after noon, Hanson called the Madison police for more reinforcements, and shortly some thirty riot police showed up, ostentatiously donning their riot helmets and plastic faceguards, brandishing heavy riot sticks, and forming ranks outside the doors of the building.

Inside, tension and worries mounted. Hanson, seeking some way out, offered a compromise: if the students would leave, Dow would leave. The demonstrators quickly agreed, and dispatched a delegation to get confirmation of this from Chancellor Sewell.

Sewell, however, would have none of it. The delegation returned to the ranks and warned that violence would be next; those who want to may leave, the rest should remove their glasses, take off sharp objects like earrings and buttons, and prepare to pull their coats over their heads for protection: "We are serious about this."

At 1:30 P.M., Hanson, on consultation with administration officials, decided to move in.

Giving a final warning to the students that they faced arrest, he moved outside, gathered around him a force of fifty policemen, and charged the front entrance to the building.

Suddenly, chaos. Hanson and the first ranks of cops were pushed aside by the students inside, but in their wake the Madison riot squad rushed wildly, nailing and pelting, using sticks and fists, without supervision—even (as Hanson acknowledged later) without any clear instructions about what to do. Students poured out of the building, their heads oozing blood, groaning and crying, limping and bruised. A young woman was hurtled out, stumbled, and fell unconscious into the arms of two students; a young man blinded by blood from his forehead and screaming with rage staggered about. In a matter of twelve minutes, by official estimate, the building was cleared.

Not so the area outside. There the thousands of students gathered were shocked at the brutality before them. Some called to stop passing cars to carry away the wounded students. Others milled about, pulling demonstrators out of the arms of police and sheltering them in the crowd, obstructing arrests, yelling and chanting. At one point when six students were hustled into a paddy wagon, the bystanders surrounded the wagon, began pounding on it with their fists, let the air out of the tires, and finally lay down in front of it; the police, stymied, took the names of their captives and let them free. More shoving, hitting, taunting, and then, tear gas—tear gas for the first time on a major college campus.

There was no sudden pain [one student recalled], no hurt comparable to that of being hit or having a toothache or getting burned, nor any of the other pains one is used to in normal life. There is simply a sudden total change of consciousness ... nothing matters but eyes and nose and throat. Burning, tearing, corrosive—all are inadequate words for it; tear gas does not hurt or cause pain, but it has an absolutism, an ability to take over one's whole being that is shocking at the same time and puzzling afterwards.

Several hundred students received this baptism of tears, gagged, retreated, assembled again, angrier now, and moved back toward the lines of police, only to be repulsed by another smoky wave of gas.

It was sometime in mid-afternoon during this tear-gas attack that the student crowd, reinforced now by indignant liberal and thrill-seeker alike, turned from defense to offense. It began to throw rocks from the campus gardens, bricks, even shoes, anything to try to respond to the brutality it had witnessed. Police retaliated with the next "crowd-controller" on their list, the nerve gas. Mace; it worked on immediate individuals—one young man writhed in agony on the ground for several minutes after being sprayed—but it failed to dispel the crowd. One policeman was struck in the face with a brick, and fell unconscious to the ground; another was hit in the leg by a rock, collapsed in pain, and was descended upon by students beating him with their fists and feet until scattered by a phalanx of cops. Then, reinforcements. The county sheriffs office sent in a squad of men with riot equipment and police dogs, and the student crowd, grown weary now, unused to its own fury, losing adrenalin, sensing a victory, yet wanting to lick wounds, gradually dispersed. By six-thirty the last of the crowd had gone and the traces of tear gas were only faint whiffs in the nearby trees. Seven policemen were treated in the university hospital, three with broken bones; sixty-five students were treated, several with serious injuries, one thought to be permanently blinded.

Within an hour a mass rally was begun on the library mall to fashion a student response to the invasion. An estimated five thousand students and perhaps two hundred faculty members showed up, and the mood was bitter, angry, militant: overwhelmingly they agreed not to attend any classes until recruiters from the Dow Chemical Company were forever banned from the university. The student newspaper, the Daily Cardinal, supported the strike, then the student government, finally even a right-wing campus party. The student front was solid.

For the next two days the boycott of classes was nearly total, despite outraged cries from the state legislators down the street and a strong pro-administration stand by the faculty.

Over the weekend attention was diverted to the Pentagon demonstration, but the strike was still strong enough on Monday to prompt the faculty into a second meeting to see if it could defuse the crisis. That night it voted to establish a student-faculty committee to look into the issues of recruiters on campus, student obstruction, and the use of outside police, and that seemed to be enough to satisfy the bulk of the student body, whose anger was now spent and whose docility was being reasserted. By Tuesday the strike had fizzled out, sixteen students had been suspended, three teaching assistants had been fired from their teaching jobs for joining the strike, and Dow recruitment had been temporarily canceled.

None of the issues—recruitment, protest, police, complicity, or violence—had been settled, but the lamina of sweet reasonableness had been successfully applied, and the crisis was over. But though the university was intact, it had been severely shaken, and for the rest of the year the Dow issue would continue to nettle the campus; ultimately the administration decided to readmit the Dow recruiters, though it was forced to do so at a remote point on the campus heavily guarded by policemen—and at the end of the year Chancellor Sewell resigned. The victory in the move from protest as one wrote:

A demonstration earns its name when it demonstrates something, preferably when it demonstrates something in a context that is not normally seen. In a society such as ours, where advertising, education, public relations, group dynamics, operations research, systems analysis, and so on and so forth are all generally directed toward masking reality, demonstrations of reality are one of the most valuable institutions we have. At the University of Wisconsin, then, we have just had two of the most educational weeks in the university's existence.

Resistance came to American politics that fall with—literally—a vengeance. The process that had begun in the spring with the first widespread university confrontations now became absolutely polymorphic.

There was the spread of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense through the ghettos of Oakland and the subsequent frame-up of its leader, Huey Newton, in October; the formation of the Committee of Returned Volunteers, ex-Peace Corps workers who had seen the fruits of imperialism firsthand and came home to do something about them; the establishment of the Committee to Aid the National Liberation Front, the first organized expression of the growing pro-NLF sympathies of the American left; the publication of a manifesto of open defiance to the government, "A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority," signed by 158 (and later 2,000) older supporters of draft resistance; the first use of the epithet "pig" to describe authorities, appearing in print in the September 25 New Left Notes; the arrest of a Kansas SDS leader, Charles V. Blackmon, on charges that he threatened to kill President Johnson; the creation of black student organizations at, among other schools, Cornell, Harvard, Howard, and San Francisco State; the wishing-into-being of the Yippies (putatively the Youth International Party), joining provo, counterculture, and left politics in one mercurial lump; the formation of the Peace and Freedom Party to contest the 1968 elections with a left-wing slate, an antiwar platform, and a biracial leadership; the mass draft card turn-ins organized by the Resistance, in which more than 2,000 young men publicly dissociated themselves from the draft during the fall; the first raid upon a Selective Service office, at the Baltimore Customs House, where in October a group including the Reverend Philip Berrigan destroyed draft records by pouring blood on them; and above all, the swelling tide of confrontation in the streets, on scores of campuses from coast to coast, even in the nation's capital.

In the streets. On Friday morning, October 20, some ten thousand people marched on the draft induction center in Oakland, California, prepared to do battle, and to win—and they won. They had been organized by a loose and uneasy coalition of Berkeley leftists, of which the SDSers represented one militant wing, around the campaign to make October 16-20 "Stop the Draft Week." They had just been through most of that week and each tactic out of the past that they had tried had proved a failure: civil disobedience and symbolic arrest on Monday turned out to be fruitless, frustrating, and self-defeating when the sit-inners got swiftly carted off to jail without more than a ripple of disruption; unplanned violent confrontation on Tuesday proved suicidal when the vastly more numerous and better equipped police force proceeded to flay and arrest the marchers without worry, provocation or noticeable signs of mercy, leaving them in a shambles; and peaceful picketing on Wednesday was seen by most to be sterile, empty, and ultimately demoralizing when the draft inductees got carted off anyway. So now on Friday they were back for more, only this time the tactic was new: to be mobile not stationary, to attack, disperse, and regroup, to be aggressive but not foolhardy, to come prepared with helmets and shields and signs mounted on serviceable plywood poles. Karen Wald, a Berkeley SDSer who had just finished a summer as coeditor of New Left Notes, reported back to the paper the feeling of that morning:°

It was soon evident that there were more of US than THEM, and this combined with our mobility enabled groups of demonstrators to carry out actions unimpeded by the police. Trash cans and newspaper racks were pulled into the streets. Writing appeared on walls, on sidewalks: "Free Oakland," "Ché Lives," "Resist," "Shut It Down." Soon, unlocked cars were pushed into the intersections, along with large potted trees and movable benches. The sanctity of private property, which had held white students back from this kind of defensive action before, gave way to a new evaluation ....

The real change came about when one line of demonstrators, instead of simply backing up before a line of police, dispersed to the sidewalks—then quickly, instinctively, converged on the streets again behind the line of cops. The cops suddenly, uncomfortably, found themselves surrounded ... . Nervous and demoralized, the cops stood there, shuffling their feet, looking worried and unhappy ....

Word spread among the various bands of demonstrators who were now beginning to feel and even act somewhat like urban guerrillas .... For the first time demonstrators, unarmed, saw police lines retreat in front of them. It was our first taste of real victory ....

Today we had tasted something different—we had taken and held downtown Oakland for the past four hours, we had seen the cops back away from us .

Not only the sanctity of property, and the sanctity (invulnerability) of cops had been destroyed that day we had begun to establish new goals, new criterion [sic] for success in what were clearly the early battles of a long, long war.

Something indeed was different. Frank Bardacke wrote afterward:

Stop the Draft Week changed the movement. We did not do anything as grand as "move from dissent to resistance," as some leaders claimed. But we went through a change—we became a more serious and more radical movement ... . We did not loot or shoot. But in our own way we said to America that at this moment in history we do not recognize the legitimacy of American political authority. Our little anarchist party was meant to convey the most political of messages: we consider ourselves political outlaws. The American government has the power to force us to submit but we no longer believe that it has the authority to compel us to obey.

One month later, at the opposite end of the country, the Foreign Policy Association held its fiftieth anniversary dinner, with Secretary of State Dean Rusk as its featured speaker, at the New York Hilton—a combination that was irresistible: the Foreign Policy Association was a collection of elderly, rich, powerful, and influential Cold Warriors ("the architects of American imperialism," as New York Regional Office leader Steve Halliwell put it in New Left Notes), Dean Rusk was the personification of the soft-talking government committing genocide in Vietnam, and the New York Hilton was the New York Hilton. A demonstration was organized chiefly by the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee, an ally of the National Mobilization Committee, but it was clear in advance that many people in New York wanted to make it more than a symbolic, peaceful, gentlemanly affair. The SDS Regional Office worked to build it into a major confrontation, and local chapters were alerted that plans were afoot to storm the police barricades, create general disruption, make the evening unpleasant for the dignitaries and, some hoped, stop Rusk from speaking altogether. In the afternoon before the event the Columbia chapter of SDS, somewhat guilty about having been desultory in organizing previous demonstrations, held a rally on campus where some two hundred people were exhorted by chapter leaders Ted Kaptchuk and Ted Gold to take the battle into the enemy's home ground and give them a taste of "direct action." As Halliwell described the strategy, "The idea behind direct action is disruption; that is to say, since picketing has proved completely ineffectual in producing official response and is now carefully enough controlled to prevent confrontations with the target group or individual, people have begun to find ways to prevent events from occurring or at least make those events the scene of enough disquiet to indicate the growing level of dissent to the public."

That night, November 14, a crowd of somewhere between five and ten thousand people—an accurate head count was impossible, since the area was crowded and most of the demonstrators never stood still for long—greeted Rusk and his fellow diners with banners, jeers, and appropriate obscenities as they made their way through the heavy police lines into the hotel. Those who tried to crash through the barriers were roughly pushed back, and a number were arrested. Then one group—New York police say it was Columbia SDSersstarted throwing bottles, bags of red paint and cow's blood, and any available trash at the police and arriving limousines. Several people thought to be responsible were dragged from the crowd by the riot squads, roughed up, and arrested, but others managed to dart away, repeat the attack, then fall back again, eluding arrest. Soon knots of protesters were gathered at half a dozen intersections, yelling and jeering, overturning trash baskets, denting anything that looked vaguely like a posh limousine, pulling fire alarms—and then moving on to the sidewalks and down the side streets when police approached, only to reappear moments later farther down the avenue. For more than three hours the middle of Manhattan was chaos, the police befuddled by these new hit-and-run tactics (and in their befuddlement often taking it out brutally on the other demonstrators still massed peaceably), the mobile bands of demonstrators growing increasingly elated and increasingly uncontrolled, and the throngs of Times Square onlookers puzzled and angered by turns.

When it was all over, sometime after eleven o'clock, forty-six people had been arrested, at least twenty-one demonstrators had been hospitalized, and five policemen had been treated for injuries. Despite the failure of the demonstrators to escape arrest entirely, and despite the arrest of Ted Gold, Mark Rudd, and Ron Carver of the Columbia chapter on potentially serious charges of "incitement to riot," most of the rank-and-file SDSers there were excited by the new escalation of tactics. "It was the first time we ever tried to take the offensive," one has said, "and, you know, it worked."

The New York Times that week was somewhat less enthused. Assuming its most outraged perch, it accused the demonstrators of being "junior-grade stormtroopers," and added:

The organizers of this sorry spectacle ... apparently did not even attempt to discourage the militant minority, notably those led by the Students for a Democratic Society, who they surely knew would seek to stir up trouble. The leaders of both groups share a heavy responsibility for a disgraceful episode that only debases dissent, obstructing development of the national debate on Vietnam policy that is so urgently needed.

The Times, alas, understood neither the extent nor the rationale of the opposition to the Vietnam war, a poignant measure of the chasm between the Establishment and its children.The paper, even in the fall of 1967, had not come out in opposition to the war, still believed that there was room for "national debate" on the subject, and still imagined that the forces of the left were interested only in inaugurating such a debate. The circles around SDS had long discarded "debate," had tired of the peaceful "dissent" which finally had come to seem respectable to the Times editorialists, and were now on to something, the politics of resistance, that at least could make the policy makers sit up and take notice and maybe start to drag the country, kicking and screaming, to a position of honor.

On the campuses. Resistance was not new here, of course, but its extent, its militance, and the response to it were all at unexpected heights.

Though many of the milder demonstrations still involved demands against university administrations over purely student-power issues, those which moved on to resistance were in greatest part those relating to complicity. Complicity was understood by more students now—even liberals came to see the point—and radical researchers at hundreds of campuses, large and small, continued through the fall to produce papers and pamphlets exposing in detail the links, sometimes quite nefarious, between campus and government. And as these revelations grew, and the nature of the system became clearer, so the reaction to it all increased. In the words of Michael Kazin, a leader of the Harvard SDS chapter at the time, "The level of tactics has changed because the analysis has changed."

The means of attacking complicity were, as before, demonstrations against recruiters from the military services, the CIA, and war-connected industries such as Dow, plus for the first time a significant number of protests over the presence of units of the Reserve Officers Training Corps on campus. According to one survey, nearly a quarter of all institutions, and more than 60 percent of the large universities, had recruiting protests during the school year, and in another survey no fewer than 106 campuses acknowledged recruiter demonstrations during the fall months alone. Of the sixty largest and best-publicized demonstrations of the fall, forty involved recruiters (twenty of them Dow recruiters), six attacked ROTC, and six others were broadly against the war, while only eight attacked administrations for various local grievances. But what made this fall different was that student tactics now tended to begin with obstructive sit-ins and go on up from there; as Carl Davidson, rejoicing on the sidelines, put it:

No one goes limp anymore, or meekly to jail. Police violence does not go unanswered. Sit-ins are no longer symbolic, but strategic: to protect people or hold positions, rather than to allow oneself to be passively stepped over or carted off .... While the anti-recruiter sit-ins last Spring were primarily acts of moral witness and political protest, an increasing number of the sit-ins this Fall displayed the quality of Tactical Political Resistance. Their purpose was the disruption and obstruction of certain events and actions BY WHATEVER MEANS NECESSARY."

Thus at least twenty of the largest demonstrations involved sit-ins designed to imprison recruiters or prevent them from operating, and at three campuses the recruiters were chased right off the premises; according to a survey at the time no fewer than 45 percent of the recruiter actions (i.e., forty-eight of them) involved personal violence of one kind or another. Administration reaction in at least twenty of the demonstrations was to call in the police, marking the first time that outside force had ever been used on college campuses on such a scale—Berkeley had sent for the cops twice and police had invaded a few black colleges in the South, but this was the first widespread use—and the inevitable result was simply to escalate the confrontation, create violence, and usually muster broad student support; again according to the survey of recruiter demonstrations, the level of the protest was expanded in half the cases where police were called in and 73 percent of the cases where students were arrested. At a half a dozen campuses (including Brooklyn, Rochester, San Francisco State, and Wisconsin) the ultimate weapon of student resistance, the strike, was attempted, with varying degrees of success.

It is of particular notice that resistance should have focused so often just now on Dow, for that marks a growing sophistication among many students of the role of corporations in propagating the war and is a solid indication that at least a rudimentary understanding of imperialism was catching hold. Dow had been making napalm (among other war supplies) since 1966, and the evils of napalm in producing violent disfiguration and death among the Vietnamese civilian population were well enough known, but before this fall there had been only a few scattered attempts to use the presence of Dow's recruiters as occasions for protests against the war. During the 1967-68 academic year, according to the Dow people, its agents made 339 campus visits and were demonstrated against or prevented from recruiting at 113 of them. Connections were very clearly being made; as the Wisconsin demonstrators had put it, "We pick this week to demonstrate against Dow, against the university as a corporation and against the war because they are all one."

It is also of notice that the strategy of resistance, though practiced with a flourish at the larger state universities and traditionally liberal colleges, extends to quite staid and remote campuses where there has been very little protest before. SDS is largely but not wholly responsible for this, since its influence and its chapters had reached many of the smaller schools by now; not every place that had an SDS group had a confrontation, of course, but almost every place that had a confrontation had an active SDS presence. At Indiana, for example, in what was that university's first major action, nearly a hundred students (including a large number of SDSers) surrounded the office a Dow recruiter was using and demanded a debate, only to be rebuffed by the recruiter, harangued by the administration, and arrested and beaten by the campus police and Bloomington riot squad, thus precipitating what the official faculty report on the incident called "a crisis in the life of the university." At Brooklyn College, a place not known for its radicalism, students were so shocked by the calling in of police to arrest Jeffrey Gordon and other SDSers for setting up a table next to a Navy recruiter's, and were so outraged at the resulting blood and brutality, that they closed down the campus for the next five days, until the college gave in to their demands that the police would be summoned no more and the military would recruit no more. Resistance came, too, to Adelphi, where a Marine recruiter was locked up for four hours; to Goddard College, where anti-recruiting sit-inners were told by the administration, "When you come to college you lose your rights"; to Princeton, where thirty-one people were arrested during an IDA sit-in; to Colorado, Arizona, Vanderbilt, Pratt, Kentucky, and Stony Brook ....

In the capital. At mid-afternoon on October 21 some one hundred thousand Americansstudents in the main, but older people, dropouts, housewives, others, too—marched through long lines of bayonet-ready soldiers and baton-wielding federal marshals toward the locus of American power, the Pentagon. They had assembled where told to assemble, listened to the droning speeches, sung the desultory antiwar songs, followed the usual leaders—but now, it was clear, something new was about to happen. The front ranks ran up against a line of soldiers, paused, backed off ... a few moral protesters deliberately crossed the lines and were arrested ... leaders of the National Mobilization Committee, which had called the march, gave reassuring speeches through their bullhorns ... there was a tense pause ... and suddenly a group of young people—an SDS contingent and some New York Yippies—made a breakthrough in the line of soldiers, swept over the weather fences, ran past more startled troops, and presented themselves directly to the walls of the Pentagon itself. Several dozen people made a dash for a side door, assaulting the war machine where it was apparently vulnerable, but they were halted at the entrance by a group of young paratroopers, beaten with rifle butts, hauled away, and arrested. By then, however, several thousand more had come up behind them; troops and marshals flailed desperately at the crowd, fired tear gas, used their clubs, but still the demonstrators poured through, until finally something between five and ten thousand demonstrators were encamped on the Pentagon lawns, facing rows of bayonets and the prospect of violence, but victorious still, and exhilarated.

An NLF flag was raised on a liberated Pentagon flagstaff, its gold star winking up at Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and the other military brass observing from the windows overhead. A group of inspired hippies—"witches, warlocks, holymen, seers, prophets, mystics, saints, sorcerers, shamans, troubadours, minstrels, bards, roadmen, and madmen," according to the East Village Other—began their planned exorcism and levitation of the massive building with elaborate rituals and calls. One young man helped his woman over a barbed wire fence, lay down with her in front of a line of bewildered soldiers, and they proceeded, unperturbed and undisturbed, to make love. Another man threw a rock and broke a window, the only overt act of violence by the demonstrators during the entire day.

As evening approached, food appeared from somewhere, people began relieving themselves against the walls of the Pentagon, plentiful supplies of marijuana passed through the crowds, little knots of people sang, a few political types gave impromptu speeches, and then, quite without warning, a draft card was burned, and then another, and another, until perhaps a hundred little fires could be seen aloft throughout the crowd.

As the night wore on, the demonstrators tore up weather fences and movable benches to build bonfires against the whipping cold, waiting with some trepidation for the expected order at midnight that the rally permit had expired and the crowd was to disperse. SDSers were conspicuous among them—the police later claimed that "SDS played a very prominent role in prolonging and sustaining the actual siege of the Pentagon itself—and when midnight came, the order was given, and the troops slowly moved toward the crowd. It was Greg Calvert who had the bullhorn; he spoke of the people who had made the war, the people who were now directing these troops against their fellow countrymen, and he told them: "The troops you employ belong to us and not to you. They don't belong to the generals.

They belong to a new hope for America that those generals could never participate in."** Fanciful as it may seem, perhaps someone was listening to that. For after a sweep by one line of troops down the right side of the mall, with no visible signs that the demonstrators were prepared to budge, the soldiers suddenly stopped, and re-formed their lines: apparently the chaos of confrontation, the battle of soldiers against countrymen, was not to be. Into the dawn, huddled around dying fires, embracing to keep warm, the demonstrators kept their vigil, while just feet away stood the weary soldiers, their lines intact but immobile.

Fully seven hundred people had by now been arrested, at least twice that number had been beaten and bloodied, tear gas and truncheons had been used and loaded guns were only feet away—and yet the demonstrators would not give an inch. Even when sparks of violence ignited during that night, and the threat of a full-scale explosion seemed very real, the reaction from the crowd was unflinching:

An SDS girl from Boston was dozing about 2:30 A.M. in the morning [sic] about 15 feet and several rows from me. The guy next to her was grabbed by marshals and she awoke startled. In waking she must have brushed against a soldier—it isn't quite clear. She was then grabbed by a marshal, dragged through the line, whereupon the marshal started clubbing the hell out of her.

We focused a spotlight and a camera on him. The look on his face could only have been that of someone having an orgasm. Pictures were taken. The girl, who ended up getting three broken ribs, was carried to a paddy wagon; the marshal came up to a line of soldiers, and with a sadistic look on his face, ominously held his club high towards the crowd. The crowd near the girl rose to its feet, started screaming, and had difficulty restraining itself from a suicidal assault into the several rows of readied troops.

Then, toward dawn, most of the demonstrators agreed that their point had been made, their attack on the headquarters of the American war machine (which no one would really have believed possible a week before) complete. At sunrise, the large bulk of the crowd marched down the Pentagon walkways to the parking lots and streets, and home.

It was, for all concerned, a truly educative experience. The government, on the one hand, bewildered and angry in turns, had for the first time used its own troops to threaten its own white middle-class children and had seen in this mild, containable form what a true revolt might possibly look like; for failing to predict and contain the Pentagon militance, according to The New York Times, "senior officers caught what one source described as ‘undiluted hell’ from high political leaders, apparently including President Johnson,"’° and began scurrying around inaugurating a whole series of intelligence and security operations designed to protect the government from its own citizens. The Movement for its part felt that it had moved right up to the brink of insurrection—and though it had shied away unprepared and unsure, it was left with the taste of resistance, defiant mass resistance, and it liked the taste; REPer Mike Goldfield, writing in New Left Notes, drew these conclusions:

Symbolically ... the invincibility of the greatest military power in the world was attacked. Hawks, and military men especially, have chided weak-minded university administrators about their inability to put the clamps down on unruly, sissy students. Yet several thousand of us outwitted the Pentagon plans for making us look silly, kept McNamara up all night, the government confused about what to do, and blatantly broke several laws in plain view of all (i.e., draft card burning, pot laws, defacing government property, and the obvious one of charging the Pentagon) .... The move from protest to resistance has been made.

Even the Progressive Labor Party—which, as we shall see, was hardly receptive to the resistance strategy—found some of the confrontations that fall exhilarating. Milt Rosen, the party's chairman, wrote of the Brooklyn College demonstration:

Very often a united front on one question can lead to a broader united front on other questions. This can lead to involving more people in struggle and winning more people to the more fundamental point. The recent Brooklyn College experience is very germane. At the school the united front—PL and SDS—were acting against some aspect of the war. The school attacked. The students defended the right of the united front to carry on its actions without harassment. The school called the cops. The focus of the united front shifted momentarily away from the war to "cops on campus and student-faculty control." ...

Ten thousand students supported the strike and the anti-war united front. Many of these students previously supported the war or were passive.

Because of this broader involvement some changed their minds and some were won over from passiveness to opposition. The SDS grew, we will grow, opposition to the war will grow, and opposition to the administration will grow. Naturally, there will be attacks and complications. But the action proved our basic premise that the majority of students can be won to struggle against the system.

The national leaders of SDS, though they had by no means planned or foreseen this explosion of resistance, were quick to pick up on it, promote it, and turn it insofar as they could into a kind of national program for the fall.”

Following the Pentagon, Carl Davidson evolved a new strategy for SDS called "Toward Institutional Resistance," which called for students to embark upon "the disruption, dislocation and destruction of the military's access to the manpower, intelligence, or resources of our universities" so as to produce "two complementary goals: 1) the weakening of the resisted dominant institution and 2) developing a consciousness of power among those resisting the dominant institution." His article was widely reproduced on the college campuses and proved very influential among a number of radical groups. SDS Regional Offices, now numbering five (New York City, upstate New York, Southern California, Boston, Washington), held regional conferences to find targets and occasions for resistance actions, put out newsletters telling what the campus demonstrations were, and sent campus travelers around to push the resistance theme.?”

In neither money nor efficiency was the NO notable. It seemed that no matter how much came in by way of contributions the organization always found a way to spend it and be on the lookout for more. This fall, for example, Mike Spiegel inveigled a handsome $12,000 gift from an anonymous figure—it was, he agreed, "a charitable handout from the middle class which likes our libertarian ideas"—but a month later the coffers were virtually empty.

Throughout these months income averaged around $1,800 a week (mostly from contributions and literature orders), and expenditures (chiefly for printing supplies, salaries, and overhead of the NO) were about the same." For the calendar year the NO filed a tax report listing a total income for 1967 of $70,698.85 ($33,931.00 from contributions), expenses of $68,754.47, and profit of $1,944.38. Office organization was equally haphazard. The new three-secretary scheme and the new national officers did not work particularly well: Davidson was bored with his role as Inter-organizational Secretary and spent most of his time traveling and writing in his role as a semiofficial guru; Pardun, as Education Secretary, tried to keep up the elaborate file on chapter activities and contacts but felt rather more comfortable on the road; and Spiegel—well, Spiegel found himself a little out of his depth as a twenty-year-old National Secretary for an organization of national prominence, and his reaction was to spend his time on quotidian minutiae while letting others take the spotlight.

But it hardly seemed to matter. This was another instance of SDS's being there, with good politics, experience, charisma, and a dedicated hard core of activists, when the general mood of the young, principally the campus young, needed it. And the SDS leadership, especially those around the National Office, felt itself in the vortex of a swirling movement whose momentum hardly depended upon financial or bureaucratic efficiency. Something crucial was happening now: SDS began to feel itself revolutionary. As Greg Calvert expressed it some time later, the feeling was that "in the resistance movement there is a truly radical and potentially revolutionary movement among whites." In an interview that December he said:

I think that what happened in the last six months happened first in the ghetto rebellions and then it happened in a new wave of militancy in the white student movement. People began to identify themselves as powerful or as an historical force for the first time. Suddenly we were no longer the isolated bright-eyed Utopians of America dreaming about a future which we really didn't think we could realize ... . I think it's possible to realize a powerful organization linked together. It may be the first serious American revolutionary organization in 175 years.

This was pretty heady stuff, and its effects on the organization were quickly evident. For one thing, the SDS leadership, feeling that perhaps they could now realize that dream of forging a broad American left that had haunted SDSers from the beginning, turned swiftly away from the students-first idea that had energized the student-power strategy. The student movement seemed no longer sufficient: what was wanted was a broad alliance of young whites, blacks, the working class, the poor, all those ready for revolution. In a special issue of New Left Notes designed for wide campus distribution that September, NO staffer John Veneziale argued:

Students as students, in my opinion, are not necessary for a revolution. The only reason even to attempt a campus movement is that students are useful and universities have a large concentration of young potential people whose middle class and bourgeois values are not irreversibly entrenched; otherwise they are not worth the trouble .... If a person in the U.S. in 1967 considers himself or herself a student, he or she negates the meaning of being a revolutionary.

And in a most remarkable turnaround, Carl Davidson said in the same issue:

What can students do? Organizing struggles over dormitory rules seems frivolous when compared to the ghetto rebellions. And white students are no longer wanted or necessary in the black movement ... . Draft resistance tables in the student union building—the arrogance of it all. We organize students against the draft when the Army is made up of young men who are poor, black, Spanish-American, hillbillies, or working class. Everyone except students. How can we be so stupid when we plan our strategies?

Students are oppressed. Bullshit. We are being trained to be the oppressors and the underlings of oppressors.

For another thing, as a result, the SDS leadership turned increasingly away from the student-oriented new-working-class theories that had surfaced in the spring. Those theories, and their defenses, because they had to be created new, seemed too hard to formulate and polish in the instant, especially in the face of attacks from people like the PL dogmatists and especially at a time when action brought its own rewards and resistance seemed enough to create visions of the revolution. SDSers involved in theory tended to give up the hard work of fashioning their own, of finding formulations that were new, particular to their time and place, valid for a postindustrial system, consistent with the Movement they had seen develop, true to their own experience, coherent with their own reality. They turned more often instead to something ready-made, something so all-encompassing that you needed only to consult its index to find the correct solution for your particular nagging problem. The feeling grew that what SDS lacked was a series of engraved ideological tablets along its organizational walls and a bearded nineteenth-century portrait over its hearth. And the inevitable result was a turn toward the traditional standby, Marxism.

Now it may have been that this was simply the collective perception of an inevitable truth— as Ché Guevara was fond of noting, "It's not my fault that reality is Marxist"—or it may have been a response to the ease and surety with which the new PL people (and behind them the Communist Party members) answered all questions by referring to the Marxist standards.But the more reasonable explanation was, as Oglesby later said, that when the SDSers began to be led by their own logic toward the idea of revolution, they found that "there was—and is—no other coherent, integrative, and explicit philosophy of revolution." He added:

I don't think the American Left's first stab at producing for itself a fulfilled revolutionary consciousness could have produced anything better, could have gone beyond this ancestor-worship politics. It was necessary to discover—or maybe the word is confess—that we had ancestors in the first place.”

Of course the acceptance of—or at least reading of—those ancestors who had been scorned by the New Left for so long came only haltingly and was still in its infancy here; but gradually quotations from Marx, then Lenin, and then the modem European Marxists found their way into SDS and other Movement literature. Carl Davidson was now talking easily about "class analysis" and "imperialism"—"Who among us today," he asked in November, "would argue that America is not an imperialist power?"—and when he went on to assert, in a discussion of whether Dow recruiters had the civil liberty to operate on campuses, that "to respect and operate within the realm of bourgeois civil liberties is to remain enslaved," he felt himself comfortably within the Marxist-Leninist tradition—as indeed he was. These same burgeoning perceptions led many in the upper levels of SDS to relish the new contacts being made this fall with leftists and revolutionaries from other countries, especially North and South Vietnam: Steve Halliwell, for example, reported back to the SDS membership after meeting revolutionary Vietnamese in Bratislava that fall:

For those present, the manner of the people from both North and South who presented [their] information is of crucial importance, for their manner is that of men and women struggling in a society in revolution ... . It is that total endeavor by a society in revolution that came across in the course of our conversations. Against a society demanding freedom and independence from an imperialist force, there is no weapon save destruction of every individual in revolt that will bring about any end other than victory for the liberation forces."

Finally, the SDS leadership began to see itself more and more (in the Marxist phraseology) as a "vanguard" in the impending revolution, or at least as the core of that potential vanguard. The people around the NO itself became an increasingly close-knit group: a number of the staff lived and slept together in nearby apartments in a quasi-communal style; they shared drug experiences (marijuana mostly, but also LSD), out of which came, initially at least, a sense of closeness and unity; and they developed their political ideas together both through informal contacts around the office and in formal meetings which they held to "advance their political education,"“* in the words of the National Administrative Committee. Davidson and Calvert (who still spent a good deal of his time in Chicago) were especially important figures, providing the solidarity of continuity that the NO had lacked since Haber's time, and acting as the centripetal force for many of the people around the NO who were several years younger. Then, too, there was the feeling of being a bastion against the forces of a repressive society, a feeling enhanced by the regular harassment of the Chicago police and by one destructive raid made upon the SDS building that fall by unknown attackers; in response the NAC voted to put wire mesh on the office windows, to admit visitors from the street only by buzzer, and to station one of the staff each night in the office as a security guard (though it was decided he would not be armed unless someone could "procure some type of tear gas"*’). It was left to Greg Calvert to enunciate the new level of understanding, and he did so in a remarkable article in New Left Notes in December. Starting with the premise that "our organizational structure and style are proving inadequate to cope with the strains which the new upsurge of activity and the new political seriousness have produced," he proposed to scrap that old idea of participatory democracy: "The basic problem with participatory democracy lies not in its analysis or vision, but in its basic inadequacy as a style of work for a serious radical organization." What SDS needs, he said, is "responsible collective leadership," or a "steering committee responsible for the development of long-range organizing strategies and programs which can be intelligently discussed and criticized by the members." Only with such a collective can SDS become a "revolutionary organization" capable of "serious analysis" and enlistment of "those elements in the society which can form the base of a mass movement." How far had SDS now come.

Or at least the leadership. For it should not be thought that all of SDS was swept up in the same celebration of resistance and anticipation of revolution. Many in the membership, and not alone the newest and most innocent members, complained about the new trends and the ever-more-obvious "distance" problem. New Left Notes was full of complaints from people asking what they were supposed to do on the day after resistance. What happens after a confrontation, no matter how successful, when the administration seems conciliatory, the faculty votes reforms, and the students end up not having seen the bedrock issue of complicity anyway? What happens when, as one Wisconsin SDSer put it, "the many liberal students and faculty members who struck against police brutality are still not convinced that Dow or the CIA should be thrown off campus. They don't believe the university is part of the corporate hierarchy that rules America; they don't even believe that a corporate hierarchy DOES rule America”? It is all very well for the NO to see and to relish a pattern of nation-wide events which to them forms resistance, but the realities on a single campus are different. If Davidson scorns the idea of SDS tables in the student-union building, that might make sense from his perspective—but, as one angry SDSer from the University of Nebraska told him, "In case you don't know, sitting behind an SDS literature table involves taking a very large step, if you happen to be a Nebraskan fresh off the farm and don't even know who Marx is." Of the national officers, only Spiegel seemed truly worried about the distance problem—"There is the inevitable tendency for the NO to become further and further alienated from the membership; it takes on an internal logic of its own"—but, he argued, it is up to the chapters to advance more rapidly, not for the NO to hold back:

As SDS grows and assumes a more primary political role on the left, its internal structure must be examined. We cannot afford to become more mature politically while permitting a weak spot in our internal structure to continue to hold us back.

What really lies behind this continuous fissure is the absolutely crucial question of how to build a movement for rapid and wholesale change in America: by raising the level of confrontation so as to threaten the sources of power, or by educating and organizing to gain as wide a following as possible? Are more recruits brought in by militant action and a sense that things are happening, the enemy is weakening, the stakes are getting higher, and victories are being won? Or does this turn away potential allies, alienate those whose consciousness is not yet identical, serve to isolate and splinter the minority, and stiffen the backs of those in power? Is the task one of regular, sustained resistance, putting one's body on the line, acting out of one's felt anger and need, moving when and where possible with whoever is ready, building militance ever higher? Or is it one of long-range base-building, appealing to other segments of the population, holding one's own feelings in check so as to win new converts, waiting until the time is right, spreading the message ever wider?

Even in the flush of resistance, this issue began to trouble the organization. The national leadership, without a direct and immediate constituency to worry about and with a perception of the broad national effects of resistance, tended to favor the resistance strategy. Many of the chapters—by no means all but especially those which found their lances blunted after actions of resistance or which found themselves coopted and isolated in their immediate locales—tended to opt for base-building. In the next year this tension will continue to grow, continue to pose the most serious question for the continuance of SDS as a national organization. It would have been small comfort for SDSers, even if they had been aware of it, to know that this question was one faced, and agonized over, by every revolutionary organization in history.

"We should have moved then." Steve Weissman, then in Ann Arbor working for the Radical Education Project, has looked back on these fateful months with the perspective of the old guard:

We should have done more to stop them when they took over in 1967. It was clear enough that a new Marxist group was taking over, and a new style, without a vote, nothing connected to the chapters, or to the organization as a whole. It was just a decision by a few people, the people around the National Office. The NO had always been its own separate organization, that's true, but it had always thought of itself as just trying to keep things going, nothing like this. Now it became a collective unto itself.

But the old guard did not move then. The older members found little welcome, except as monuments, among the chapters or in the regional offices, and there was no regularized way for national SDS to use their talents; they felt, moreover, little inclination to assert themselves in a students' movement, especially at a time when it seemed that the left could branch out into other parts of the population. Then, too, there was other work to occupy them—although the ERAP projects were all but finished now (except for JOIN, and it had almost none of the original people), there was REP, now producing pamphlets by the thousands (some sixty different items by the end of the year), organizing conferences (notably one on "the university and the military" at Chicago in November), running a speakers bureau, and starting a "Radicals in the Professions" newsletter for communication among (mostly academic) Movement alumni; there was NACLA, moving into complicity research in a major way; there were left-wing publications like Ramparts, the Movement, the Guardian, and Radical America, plus a host of counterculture newspapers and several specialized media projects, such as Newsreel, for making and distributing Movement films.

Haber and Flacks were teaching, Hayden and Davis spent much of their time traveling abroad, Oglesby was writing and lecturing, Booth was doing union work, Kissinger was living out his dream of an independent political party, Webb was enticed to the Institute for Policy Studies, Potter was organizing in the Boston area, Egleson and Grizzard were doing draft resistance in Boston—and so it went. The alumni had not left radical politics, but they had other tasks, and, thus isolated, with their own preoccupations, they were in no position to move anywhere in the new SDS.

Part of the strategy of the Progressive Labor Party after the defection of much of its West Coast membership—in addition to the emphasis on the student movement—had been an attempt to rebuild strength among the working class. The party reasserted stern discipline over its remaining members and saw to it that they worked in factory jobs and lived in working-class communities; party chairman Milt Rosen detailed the directive: "We have to have more discipline based on collectivity, based on understanding, people have to become more accountable to the party, people have to work, people have to go to school, people have to accomplish something in the community."*° At the same time PL thought to pull in its horns, avoid the confrontational tactics it had used before, and present itself to the working public as a more moderate political force; Rosen said:

In the past we put a lot of emphasis on open agitation. Our ability to grow from this has been very limited. People in the community are not generally ready to organize directly against the war, or under revolutionary banners, although huge numbers are opposed to the war, and some forces are deadly opposed to the system. Therefore, we must continually probe for the level around which people are ready to organize.”

This process, in PL, became known as "base-building," and it stood in opposition to "resistance." "Without real base-building," Rosen told the members, "the party will shrivel up and die," and he added, "We reject tactics like 'resistance’ because these tactics will not only isolate radicals from workers, but from other students and intellectuals that could be won." "Base-building" became the central watchword of Progressive Labor throughout 1967 and 1968, precisely at the time that resistance was at its height; thus neatly did PL assert its territoriality in the debate that was just beginning to emerge in SDS.

On the campus level, the new PL strategy took several forms. PL members argued against most confrontations, as at Harvard, on the grounds that they tended to alienate both the campus majority and the surrounding working-class community. PL chose tactics, as at Brooklyn College, which were calculated to appeal to liberal and moderate elements and thus, as Jeffrey Gordon put it, "win over thousands of other students to our position." PL avoided student-power issues which might strike the working class as elitist; California PL organizer John Levin wrote in the November-December issue of PL:

Student power ... tends to emphasize the individualistic nature of the student movement, that students are somehow a privileged class which is to be treated nicely ... . Student power ... tends to isolate I itself and would eventually lead us into conflict with the workers of this country. It is most important that SDS take the lead in breaking the antiwar movement out of its isolation and bringing it into alliance with the working class.

Above all, PL put the finishing theoretical touches on its "worker-student alliance" strategy and prepared to launch it into the student movement with all its skill.

Though actual party membership seems to have remained well under a thousand this fall, the PL approach attracted a number of students into the PL orbit, especially in the strongholds of Boston, Chicago, and New York. Those who had early doubts about resistance, or who had been burned by unsuccessful confrontations, were sympathetic to the base-building idea, though often not to the specific notion of a working-class base.

Those who had groped their way to radicalism through opposition to the war but had still to surround it with any developed analysis found an undeniable appeal in PL's ready-made formulas—and this was enhanced by the fact that there was little theoretical opposition, either from the old guard, represented by The Port Huron Statement and the REP prospectus, or from the present SDS leadership, represented by a still-unpolished newworking-class position that was being totally ignored in the heat of resistance. And those who were simply young and easily swayed could be impressed by the PLers' open espousal of revolution, thoroughgoing anti-Americanism, unselfish devotion to the workers' cause, forthright declarations of communism—and, not least, their readiness to take on the hard jobs involved in running a chapter, a devotional task willed upon them by the party and applauded by all their fellows.

The SDS leadership was aware of these attractions, and aware, too, that PL was moving in a greater swath through the organizational fields. Jeff Shero recalls the PLers' impact at about this time:

They'd raise questions that'd take up everybody's time, their theoretical Marxist questions, like every matter you'd debate they'd bring up their traditional political view of the working class, and you had to deal with it, and it skewered all debate—even if like eighty per cent of the people thought that it was nuts. They had an internally disciplined faction that could always keep up that pressure ....

PL had a comprehensive ideological structure with which they could interpret the world, and at any time on any subject they could give a classical Marxist analysis of what the problem was and rally their solid support behind that.

And then you'd have the other people who were trying to debate and discover what America was about, the American system and how it worked, but were uncertain and needed to talk out things, and had a lot of ambiguity. But there was no way to mobilize ambiguity and searching against a classical Marxist analysis. They had an ideological tradition—and it was almost impossible to solidify a counteranalysis to that.

PL couldn't be outmaneuvered or outdisciplined, and it couldn't even be outthrown, for that would fly in the face of SDS's antiexclusionist tradition. It had, therefore, to be borne, with the hope that SDS could rely upon the good sense of American college students, the open traditions of the past, and the practices that had so far brought such success.

The December National Council meeting, held in Bloomington, Indiana, over the Christmas holidays, was the first chance for SDS to air the tensions that had been swirling around since the first major outbreak of resistance on the Wisconsin campus, and no opportunity was lost to do just that. There was a Southern caucus, the first organized and sizable Southern contingent since the days of SNCC delegations, which presented an endless document on Southern history and traditions, condemned "the 'New Militancy' of the past six months" in no uncertain terms, and came down on the side of what it called "basebroadening." There was a strong gathering of community organizers of the JOIN stripe who wanted now to cut all student ties and move alone as a separate organization called the National Community Union ("We, as people of the white working class, believe the course taken by SDS and the Radical Movement is no longer relevant to what we consider to be our role in the movement"”’), a step which the NC applauded and endorsed with $1,000 besides. There was Progressive Labor, advancing its old idea of a summer "work-in" to get students into the factories, a notion that received little debate and less interest, but passed by a clear majority because no one really cared. And there was, for the first time, a vocal high-school contingent which wanted to set about officially organizing the more-militantthan-thou high-school set and whose proposals for a team of national organizers and national publicity were endorsed almost without a murmur.

But the basic tension that had to be aired in Bloomington was that between the resistance forces on the one hand and a variety of moderating forces (smaller chapters, the Southern caucus, PL, and the like) on the other. The lines were drawn over the question of the planned student strike for the spring.

It seemed to the national leadership and many of the large-university delegates that the time had come for a massive display of student resistance, a proposal which Carl Davidson and Greg Calvert spelled out for the membership in an article called "Ten Days to Shake the Empire." The basic premise was that the American empire was weakening:

The crisis we are confronting is the disruption and dislocation of the political economy of imperialism in the face of wars of national liberation, of which Vietnam is only one front. The struggles of Third World movements abroad and black America at home have marked the beginning of the end of U.S. corporate capitalism .... The conclusion we must draw is that the primary task for the radical student movement at this time is to develop a political strategy of anti-imperialism.

The expression of this anti-imperialism would come during ten days in April when SDS would inaugurate a "program of actions in resistance to the war in Vietnam," selecting "a variety of targets for direct action on and off the campus," preferably "financial and corporate industrial targets." Nothing more definite than that was enumerated, but it was clear that the NO forces had discarded the whole notion of student strikes in favor of a more elaborate attack on the corporate structure which they saw underlying the empire.

The Progressive Labor contingent, which showed up at the NC in numbers surprising to the other SDSers (perhaps a quarter of the three-hundred-odd delegates), was naturally opposed to any scheme so dependent upon resistance, and one which was likely to involve factories and blue-collar workplaces as well: "We are for sharpening the struggle with U.S.

imperialism," it announced, in a proposal drawn up by John Levin and Earl Silbar, "but only on our own grounds—where we come out stronger both ideologically and numerically." PL proposed instead a spring program which would stick to the campuses and concentrate on the issue of university complicity, possibly including a student strike.

The informal reception this proposal received as it was handed around before the plenary sessions indicated that it spoke more directly to the interests of the chapter delegates, but there was still a strong reluctance to follow any scheme laid down by the PL people and so three New York SDSers, Naomi Jaffe, Bob Gottlieb, and John Fuerst, hastily drew up a compromise scheme that still included ten days of resistance but would allow chapters to "develop tactics based on analysis of their own specific situation and in response to their own local needs." Anti-imperialism would still be the emphasis: but a kind of base-building among other groups would also be essential:

The links we want to build are those which really unite fragmented groups because we experience similar problems and similar sources of oppression. These links have to be developed organically, not mechanically or on paper or in rhetoric about the "working class" but in terms of our politics and chapter programs.

When the issue finally came to a head at the last plenary session, it was quickly apparent that the Davidson-Calvert scheme was unpopular and that the national leadership had become, in the words of John Maher, "too remote from chapter work to know if this program or another makes sense for any area, much less for the whole organization." The NO people didn't even come forth with much support on its behalf, shrouding themselves in a cloak of "nonmanipulation" (Davidson, it should be noted, was absent on a trip to Cuba), and the delegates roundly expressed themselves as being against all such grandiose national programs and especially those with such overinflated rhetoric as "Ten Days to Shake the Empire." When it finally came down to a vote, the NO withdrew its plan in favor of the Jaffe-Gottlieb-Fuerst proposal, and that handily outdrew the PL scheme, 40 to 22."

It was not so much that the National Council rejected the resistance strategy—resistance would continue to characterize the coming spring—as it sought to close the distance gap and slow down the movement of the national leadership toward ideas more militant than the membership was ready for. Mike Spiegel, in reporting to the membership on the NC, somewhat petulantly maintained that the Davidson-Calvert proposal had been rejected because "it is comprehensive only to that minority of SDS members who work at the national level and are in daily contact with the national demands. Those demands and the resultant perspective are alien to the political experience of the majority of members working at the chapter level."*? That is possible; yet, as one woman from San Francisco State argued in New Left Notes:

There is something wrong when the national officers in Chicago, untied to any base of their own, see different perspectives and national demands than the majority of SDS members. The success or failure of the movement and the revolution depends on the chapter people who do the daily organizing and on the correctness of their perspectives and analyses.

Note, however, that she, too, with all her emphasis on the chapters, is talking about revolution.

1 "Erom Tuesday," handout, author's file.

2 For Wisconsin, NLN, October 23 and November 6, 1967; Durward Long, in Foster and Long, pp. 246 ff.; James Ridgeway, New Republic, November 4, 1967; Patrick Quinn, interview.

3 "There was no," NLN, November 6, 1967.

4 "A demonstration earns," ibid.

° For Stop the Draft Week, NLN, November 6; Ferber and Lynd, p. 140 ff.; Goodman, pp.

476-85; and Movement, November 1967.

” Halliwell, NLN, November 27, 1967.

8 "It was the first," anonymous SDSer, interview, Columbia, November 1967.

° N.Y. Times, November 16, 1967.

10 Kazin, American Scholar, Autumn 1969. Demonstration surveys, in Foster and Long, the first by Peterson (pp. 59 ff.), the second by Foster and Long (pp. 81 ff. and pp. 419 ff.). The sixty "largest and best-publicized" demonstrations, author's compilation from NLN, Guardian, campus and commercial press, and "Riots, Civil and Criminal Disorders," Part 18, pp. 3671 ff.

11 Davidson, NLN, November 13, 1967. "Survey," Foster and Long, op. cit.

‘2 Dow figures on protests, Newsweek, December 1, 1969. "We pick this week," Wisconsin handout, op. cit. Indiana information and quotation, Foster and Long, pp. 306 ff.

13 Sources for Pentagon: NLN, October 30,1967; Liberation, November 1967; WIN.

October 30,1967; Ferber and Lynd, pp. 135 ff; Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night, NAL, 1967; Rader, pp. 60 ff.; "No Game," Newsreel film, 1968.

14 East Village Other, November 1, 1967. "SDS played," in "Riots, Civil and Criminal Disorders," Part 20, p. 4304. Calvert, quoted in Ferber and Lynd, p. 139.

S "An SDS girl," Mike Goldfield, NLN, October 30, 1967.

16 N.Y. Times, Richard Halloran, January 18, 1971. Goldfield, op. cit. Rosen, report to 1968 PL convention, "Build a Base in the Working Class," op. cit., p. 25.

‘7? Davidson, NLN, November 13,1967, reprinted in Wallerstein and Starr, Vol. II, p. 129.

18 Spiegel, NLN, December 4,1967. Tax figures, "Riots, Civil and Criminal Disorders," Part 18, p. 3515.

‘9 Calvert, "in the resistance," Liberation, May 1969; "I think that," Movement (San Francisco), December 1967. Veneziale, NLN, September 25, 1967.

20 Davidson, ibid.

21 Oglesby, "Notes on a Decade Ready for the Dustbin," Liberation, August-September 1969, italics in original; reprinted in Goodman, p. 737, and William Slate, editor, Power to the People, Tower, 1970; excerpted in Wallerstein and Starr, pp. 300 ff. Davidson, NLN, November 13,1967.

22 Halliwell, NLN, October 2, 1967. "advance their," NAC minutes, NLN, September 4, 1967.

23 "some type of tear," NLN, October 2, 1967. Calvert, NLN, December 18,1967. "the many liberal," Mike Meeropol, NLN, December 4, 1967.

24 "Tn case you," Al Spangler, NLN, October 16, 1967. Spiegel, NLN, December 4,1967.

2° Weissman, interview.

7° Rosen, "We have to have," "Build a Base in the Working Class," op. cit., p. 49.

7 Rosen, all from ibid.: "In the past," p. 21, "Without real base-building," p. 20, "We reject," p. 27. Gordon, NLN, November 13, 1967. Levin, PL, November-December, 1967.

8 Shero, interview.