Fall 1968

"There's a whole new set on campus," wrote Terry Robbins and Bill Ayers, the travelers for SDS in the Ohio-Michigan region at the start of the 1968-69 school year. "The Movement is opening up all over the place: the first generation of high-school SDS coming onto the campus, the no-choice election-fraud bullshit, Columbia, and Chicago all have contributed to a new atmosphere of optimism and aggressiveness and the possibility for continued, prolonged action." Both travelers, committed actionists, devoted themselves to pushing SDS within that atmosphere for all they were worth:?

We're saying to people that youth is the revolution that politics is about life, struggle, survival .... We're saying that there ain't no place to be today but in the Movement .... And we're saying to kids all over the place that if you're tired of the Vietnamese eating napalm for breakfast, if you're tired of the blacks eating tear gas for dinner, and if YOU'RE tired of eating plastic for lunch, then give it a name:

Call it SDS, and join us.

"Join us"—that was the slogan for SDS now: and it was as descriptive as it was hortatory.

SDS grew in the first few months of that fall as never before. Students at hundreds of campuses flocked to SDS chapter meetings in record numbers—at major universities like Stanford and Colorado, where there had been only minimal chapters before, and at isolated schools like Montana and Cazenovia Community College, where there had been neither SDS nor any other noticeable political groups before. "Across the country," New Left Notes reported, "first SDS meetings have seen two, three, and four times as many"? participants as before: more than five hundred students attended the first chapter meeting at Stanford, which had been used to fifty people; four hundred participated in the first meetings at Texas, which had never had more than one hundred or so at any time before; more than two hundred turned up to join SDS at such generally sluggish campuses as Kent State, Penn State, and Trinity College; and up to one hundred appeared at Case Western, Long Beach State, University of Miami, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming, most of which had less than twenty interested people the year before. At Princeton, 106 students out of the freshman class of 851 applied for SDS membership during their first week on campus. At an East Tennessee high school one student passed around a petition to see how many people wanted to start an SDS chapter and it ended up with 150 signatures; a charter was duly granted. A GI at Fort Hood, Texas, sent in $25 in dues from five soldiers there who wanted to start a chapter. "I got my freshman orientation watching the Democratic Convention on TV," went one letter sent in to the National Office. "Count me in." Five dollars was enclosed.

At least a dozen new chapters were started in the first few weeks of the term (including Georgetown and Missouri Universities and high schools in New Jersey, Louisiana, New York, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina) and dozens more were renewed after fallow periods (including North Texas State, Swarthmore, and Kentucky). But chapter applications poured in to the National Office so fast that Cathy Archibald, hastily put in charge of such minutiae, reported that "we can't keep track of them all"; the best estimates were that before the term was out somewhere between three hundred and fifty and four hundred chapters were in existence, at least one hundred of which were new. Membership figures were similarly chaotic—Archibald said that so many came in "we just stopped counting"—but the NO claimed 80,000 chapter members by November, and Carl Davidson estimated 100,000 the same month, both of which are probably conservative figures.

At the same time, SDS was enjoying an extraordinary flush of national publicity, based apparently on the media assumption that SDS was really at the bottom of all the nation's troubles. Newsweek carried a long back-to-school article on CAMPUS REBELS: WHO, WHY, WHAT, which declared SDS one of the prime "magnets for students who feel themselves alienated from 'the system,' " and acknowledged that "most serious campus activism begins with the SDS." Life presented a lavish twelve-page article profiling SDS as "the most vocal representative" of the Movement and featuring long and surprisingly sympathetic interviews with Oglesby, Spiegel, James, and other luminaries. This was matched by an even more sympathetic article from the other barrel of the mass-media shotgun, Look magazine, which named SDS as "the center of the vortex" of "campus explosions" and argued that "the idealists, visionaries and truncheon-scarred campus guerrillas of Students for a Democratic Society have shaken the American university to its roots." Its conclusion:*

Sometimes inspired, often chaotic, the Students for a Democratic Society represents an effort by a key minority of the Nuclear Generation to break out of a political and moral maze built by their elders .... What began on the campus may well prove educational for our entire society.

On the wings of such approbation, SDS's membership, and hopes, went soaring.

One further indication of "the whole new set on campus" was a survey taken for Fortune by the Daniel Yankelovitch company in October (and published in January). Though no obviously "revolutionary" types were included in the poll, the results showed clearly that young people in general, and in particular the opinion-making college students (what Fortune called the "forerunners") were farther to the left than most people had suspected.

The "forerunners" showed an "extraordinary rejection of traditional American values," half of them holding that the U.S. is a "sick" society and refusing to support any political candidate, and more than two-thirds agreeing that the Vietnam war was a mistake and that both draft resistance and civil disobedience were justified under any circumstances; for them, Ché Guevara was a more popular figure than Johnson, Nixon, Humphrey, or Wallace. Most surprisingly, more than one million youths identified themselves as part of the New or Old Left, including 27 percent of the "forerunners," 8 percent of other college students, and 5 percent of noncollege youth. Fertile ground indeed for SDS.

The National Office was the focus of most of the new attention and of course was barely able to cope with it. The staff, in addition to the three National Secretaries, fluctuated between ten and fifteen people, anchored by Sue Eanet Klonsky, Cathy Archibald, and Assistant National Secretary Tim McCarthy. Salaries were only $15 a week—when there was enough money at hand—which didn't do much to lure additional workers to the revolution, and it even became necessary for National Secretary Mike Klonsky to moonlight: "I have a wife and kid and we can only afford to pay me $15 a week, which means that maybe a couple of days a week I'll have to go out and load trucks or pick up a part-time job on the side." On top of which the workload was prodigious—Klonsky spoke of working twelve to sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, and that seems to have been the general pattern throughout most of the year. Even so, it was impossible to keep up with the barrage of material: two to three hundred letters a day (most of which were answered with a form letter or some available pamphlet stuffed into an envelope with a note like "Hope this helps"), more than two hundred magazines and newspapers a week (four of which—The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek—were clipped and filed, though with increasing haphazardness as the year wore on), and an incredible variety of pamphlets, newsletters, bulletins, and press releases from organizations all over the world (most of which was addressed to Bernardine Dohrn—fully 90 percent of it with her name misspelled "Bernadine," a mistake made by most SDSers, too—since she was nominally in charge of interorganizational matters, but which piled up unopened in boxes near her desk).

Literature production could not keep up with the demand—the NO announced at one point that it would need an immediate influx of $7,000 to produce ten pamphlets in enough quantity to fill back orders—but the NO print shop did put out a considerable amount of material: a new eight-page introduction-to-SDS pamphlet, form letters on high-school organizing and forming new SDS chapters, ~ and of course weekly issues of New Left Notes, usually of eight pages. In fact, New Left Notes went through a change symbolic of the exciting period the organization was going through: under editor David Millstone it took on more the look of the counterculture papers, its small gray front-page logo replaced by a big stark one with "SDS" in 120-point type, huge cartoons and drawings in place of most of the type on the front-page, and borders, designs, and photographs splashed liberally throughout.

Regional Offices enjoyed an influx of new life, too. New regional centers were established in Ann Arbor, Chicago, Dallas, Newark, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, joining those already functioning in Cambridge, Ithaca, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington. Though still not the self-sufficient kind of organizations that SDSers envisioned. Regional Offices did put out newsletters, hold regional conferences, and coordinate interchapter activities; they also provided centers where area SDSers and other political people could gather, as in New York, where the RO—which the regular SDSers had wrested back into their own control, mostly by ignoring rather than besting the PLers—also became the headquarters of a newly formed Teachers for a Democratic Society, in which Ted Gold was instrumental. Regional Offices were augmented by the full-time travelers, including most of the NIC representatives, who regularly made the rounds of regional campuses. One of the most successful was Mark Rudd, still riding on the media wave, who became SDS's official traveling fund raiser and managed to round up more than $3,000 by November through his appearances on college campuses from New York to California." His fund-raising style seems not to have been wholly fraternal, however: the story has it that after one appearance at Kent State that fall, when he got into an argument with a local SDS leader who wanted to keep a small part of the gate receipts to defray local expenses, they ended up brawling in the chapter house and Rudd went away with the whole take.

SDS seemed to be at its peak, acknowledged on every side to be the dominant organization of the resurgent American left, and its move into revolution seemed to be confirmed with every passing week.

SDS's optimism took formal shape at the fall National Council meeting, held at the University of Colorado, in Boulder, on the weekend of October 11-13. Some 450 people were gathered, the largest number yet at a fall meeting, and the general spirit among them suggested that SDS was ready to take its place as a national power in the promising days to come. The clearest expression of this came in a proposal submitted to the NC by Bernardine Dohrn, John Jacobs (her current inamorato), and Jeff Jones of the New York Regional Office:

We believe that now is a time when the national political situation calls for our vocal, demonstrative presence more than ever. SDS now has a national identity and the election period is the opportunity to both inject the ideas of SDS into the political arena and to make that national image a local reality by simultaneously involving thousands in militant regional actions all over the country.

Because political conditions are very open right now, and may be increasingly repressive in the coming period, we should think in terms of what programs now will develop the seeds of revolution most broadly. "Developing the seeds of revolution" goes beyond having large numbers of people understand or agree with our ideas. What's also needed is to turn masses of people on to looking at their own role as active agents of change. What does this is for people to decide for radicalism not in the abstract, but concretely through their own decisions to act in specific cases. Involving large numbers of people directly in decisive actions will make the difference between a movement which depends overly on its "leaders," and can be repressed easily, and one with resilience and depth which continues to multiply and grow under adverse conditions. The goal of regional mobilizations is, like the Red Guard movement, to guarantee revolution by insuring the self-activity, involvement, and experience of masses of people.

The target of these mobilizations, they proposed, would be the November Presidential elections: they called for a two-day national student strike, the first day for on-campus teach-ins, guerrilla theater, and rallies, and the second for massive citywide marches and demonstrations.

The student strike is an important political statement by the student movement to the rest of the country. It is possible to expand the politics of Columbia, to denounce the universities and schools as an intrinsic part of the capitalist system, and to link that assault to the broader issues of the electoral apparatus and the political parties of racism and imperialism.

The Dohrn-Jacobs-Jones proposal ran into some predictable opposition from the PLers assembled—probably as many as a hundred of them—on the grounds that it looked like more of the old resistance strategy and was bound to alienate the working classes. But it clearly spoke to the enthusiasms of the majority of the delegates and it passed by more than four to one, while a PL proposal for a march on Washington on Election Day was defeated easily. The strike call was even given a slogan thought to be only slightly hyperbolic: "No class today, no ruling class tomorrow!"

*This phrase was deleted in the final version of the proposal submitted to the NC.

As if that weren't ambitious enough, the NC also approved with similar enthusiasm an elaborate campaign to recruit high-school students into SDS and "organize in the high school to move students to overthrow [the] system by confronting the issues that directly affect them." This was an area with a long history in SDS. In 1966 SDS had printed five thousand copies of a booklet on "high-school reform" by Los Angeles high-school SDSer Mark Kleiman (whicah right-wing publicist Alice Widener at the time called "one of the most dangerous documents ever printed in the United States"); in 1967, at the Bloomington NC, and in 1968, at the Lexington NC, SDS had also approved programs for establishing highschool organizers in the regions, producing pamphlets on students’ rights, and publishing a national high-school newsletter. But the subject was given special importance now because it had become obvious that student politicization was moving rapidly down the age ladderhigh-school SDS chapters mushroomed in the fall, radical high-school organizations (like New York's High School Student Union) began to take shape in the larger cities, and highschool protests started erupting in the fall in cities from coast to coast, affecting nearly 20 percent of the nation’s secondary schools by the end of the school year. So the Boulder NC directed that high-school organizing be "a large part" of chapter and RO programming, authorized the hiring of a full-time traveler for high schools, and proposed that the Los Angeles high-school underground, the Free Student, be made into "a high-school New Left Notes. "

With these two programs out of the way, the NC fell into another round of sectarian bickering between Progressive Labor and its opponents, typified by PL's attack on student drug use—it represented a hippie "do-your-own-thing" philosophy, it was "escapist" and "objectively counter-revolutionary"—and the regulars’ assertion that telling college students they shouldn't smoke marijuana was like telling workers they shouldn't drink beer. But the fiercest battle came over a PL proposal, written by Jared Israel and other Boston PLers, for a Student Labor Action Project—SLAP—which had been presented at the June convention but postponed for lack of time. The SLAP program was simply an embodiment of PL's worker-student alliance:®

Behind SLAP ... is the notion of worker-student alliance. This does not mean we give up student organizing. It means we realize that U.S. Imperialism is based on class exploitation, that to defeat it in the long run—indeed, even to win immediate victories against it—we must develop a class approach, build support for the working class in a// struggles, defeat all anti-working class ideas, support workers' struggles, and launch anti-ruling class battles that concretely link workers and students in fighting their common enemy.

The SLAP idea found an unexpectedly sympathetic reception, reflective of the growing sense among SDSers that industrial workers would be necessary allies in any successful revolution (or at least of the sense that arguing against that notion was no longer politically effective in SDS councils); as Carl Davidson reported in the Guardian, "Nearly all delegates accepted, as a political given, the necessity of building an alliance between students and workers." However, it also met serious opposition. There were those who would have voted against the dictionary if it had been written by Jared Israel, but there were also more substantial critics: some (especially chapter delegates) attacked its glaring neglect of students' interests, others (who had done actual working-class organizing) maintained that PL's unimpressive record in attracting workers to its party indicated its real misunderstanding of the working class, and others (including both members of the NO and the Motherfuckers) argued that SDS's role should be to win over high-school and working-class youths rather than to try to convince their elders. After several hours of wrangling, sometimes quite bitter, SLAP was defeated two-to-one. NO spirits soared.

The decisive defeat of SLAP plus the strong approval of the Election Day strike inspired the national leadership to a frenzy of activity in the days after the Boulder NC. NIC members were dispatched to campuses and the top officers scheduled Election Day appearances. In the three weeks before the election the NO spent, Klonsky later figured, "several thousand" dollars just in the Chicago office. A special WATS line was established in the NO for quick national communications. Some two hundred fifty thousand form letters, press releases, exhortations, and other election literature were sent out to chapters, individuals, and the news media. And fifty thousand copies of a special pre-election issue of New Left Notes were printed and distributed, the back page of which was an instant wall poster setting forth in sixty-point letters the SDS election platform in brief:?

THE ELECTIONS

DON'T MEAN SHIT.

VOTE WHERE THE POWER IS.

OUR POWER

IS IN THE STREET.

Alas, wherever SDS's vaunted power was, it was not in the streets. The operation was an abject failure. SDS, according to the Guardian, "failed to interrupt education by a strike at a single high school, college or university" and its "anticipated massive street actions were abortive at best." Campus actions were limited to a few small-scale boycotts, rallies usually numbering no more than several hundred students, and a few sparsely attended teach-ins;* particularly disappointing were the small turnouts at places like Berkeley, Columbia, Michigan, and Wisconsin, normally the Concords of campus activism. Citywide marches took place in some areas where the Regional Offices had made special efforts, but with the exception of Boston, where some four thousand turned out, none of the demonstrations drew as expected: only a thousand people marched in front of the White House in Washington (a hundred twenty of them were arrested), another thousand turned out for a rock-music rally in Chicago, less than a thousand participated in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and no more than six hundred joined the rally in New York (partly as a result of pre-emptive police arrests—effective, if illegal—of more than a hundred people in the hours before the event). Coverage in the overground media was virtually nonexistent—the NO charged afterward that there had been a deliberate news blackout so as to give the impression of national acquiescence to the elections—and most of America went blithely along without the slightest notion that the largest left organization in the land, so much ballyhooed in the previous months, had even protested the elections at all.

SDSers were also involved in sizable demonstrations at West Texas State, San Femando Valley State, and Brooklyn College, but these had nothing specifically to do with the election actions and occurred coincidentally.

What had gone wrong? SDS went through much anguished soul-searching in the solemn days after the election fiasco. The NIC meeting in the middle of November was one of the somberest affairs to date. Certain deficiencies were obvious: three weeks was not enough time for mass national organizing; too much responsibility had been given over to the Regional Offices, which turned out to be financially and operationally too weak to do much more than mobilize the already militant; too many organizers, carried away by the experience of Chicago, had spent their time trying to get media coverage rather than getting people into the streets; the withdrawal of Johnson, the beginning of peace talks in Paris, and a promised bombing halt in North Vietnam served to diminish the war as an issue and lessen general student activism; and many students, it seemed, were too truncheonscarred after a year of militant confrontations to want to take the chance of going up against the police again in a case they saw as essentially hopeless and considerably remote from their own immediate concerns on campus. But obviously the election failure signaled something more than just that, something more even than similar strategic failures like the draft exams in 1966 or the Ten Days of Resistance in the spring. Underneath the mediaized success of SDS in the past months, serious problems were festering.

These problems took three shapes: factionalism and infighting on the chapter level, increased pressures from Progressive Labor, and ever widening distances between the national leadership and much of the membership.

The most immediate problem of the fall was the factionalism inside the most basic SDS units, the chapters. Chapter fights, which had begun to surface with the action-praxis debates in the spring, now became almost commonplace, occurring with more regularity and at more campuses than ever before. As Klonsky himself noted with some perturbation, there were "a lot of bullshit things that have been keeping chapters and regions disfunctional [sic], like personal conflict, action vs. education debates, dope or no-dope fights."’* Almost inevitably chapters suffered, some growing weaker, some dividing into contending camps, others disintegrating entirely.”

Most of the infighting centered around the old confrontation vs. base-building issue, now brought to new heights by the conflict between those SDSers ready for the leap into revolution and those advocating what was called "consolidation,"' emphasizing education and recruitment, especially of the new crop of disgruntled McCarthyites. This produced splits with varying degrees of severity at almost every sizable chapter, including well-established ones like Berkeley, Columbia, and Wisconsin, and new and struggling ones like Kent State, American University, and North Texas State. It was as if SDSers, as they took their political tasks more seriously now, became more intolerant; as they saw themselves capable of exercising real national power, more righteous. Debate tended to become contentious and positions rigid, friendships would be formed and broken on the basis of whether this or that dogma was acknowledged, and the consentient and tolerant spirit of the early days of SDS gradually disappeared. Greg Calvert and Carol Neiman—now married—bemoaned the consequences:

Sitting in an SDS gathering, which had once been a cross between an encounter group and a Quaker meeting, became a hellish agony when intellectualization and parliamentary manipulation had replaced a sharing of experiences and consensus decision-making. The anarchist style of earlier days had, by 1968, been replaced by rigid debates of organized factions who no longer talked about people's feelings and experiences but spoke in the pseudo-scientific language of Marxism-Leninism. It should have been clear to anyone in possession of their instinctual sanity that these Talmudic exchanges, ideological debates, and resolution-passing indicated symptoms of a deep malaise in the body politic of the New Left and were not part of an arena of meaningful confrontation.

The most notable of the chapter battles—indeed so representative that New Left Notes gave it lengthy coverage on the grounds that it was "typical of many SDS chapters throughout the country"—took place at Michigan. On the night of September 24 Michigan SDS held its first meeting of the term and some two hundred people packed into the smoky classroom.

For a while everything seemed smooth and normal. The old proconsolidation leadership of the chapter presented its assessment of the campus, urged greater "education work" among the students to make them aware of the oppressive nature of the university and the society, and argued against any hasty confrontation that might alienate the general student body.

As the presentation went on, however, some of the audience began hooting and hissing, and at length one man stood to denounce the discussion as "one long stream of bullshit." He derided the old leadership for its fiasco of the spring, when, after a long campaign, it had finally arranged for a student referendum on the issue of war research on campus only to suffer a humiliating defeat when the engineering students turned out in force to swing the vote against it. And he announced that a new SDS caucus, the Jesse James Gang, had been formed at the beginning of the term to push for "aggressive confrontation politics" in the style of Columbia and Chicago. "If you think the only thing to do with war research is to burn it up," he said, "and the only thing to do with bad classes is take them over, and the only thing to do about bullshit candidates is to run them out with your own lives, then let's talk." Many did.

Thus began the split in the Michigan chapter: on the one side most of the chapter veterans and some of the newer recruits, who formed themselves into something called the Radical Caucus, and on the other the Jesse James Gang, including several veteran activists like Bill Ayers, Terry Robbins, and Jim Mellen (an ex-M2Mer now connected with REP) and a number of underclassmen attracted to the politics of activism. For the next four weeks as the two factions faced each other in increasingly bitter meetings, tempers grew short, minor disputes turned into major hatreds, and matters of personality became differences of politics (and vice versa). The James Gang's patience with parliamentary debate, none too weighty to begin with, eventually vanished to the point where they began indiscriminately shouting and heckling ("communicating openly," they called it) at the chapter meetings. The Radical Caucus responded with cries of "brown-shirts" and "crazies," and soon began spreading the idea around campus that SDS was being taken over by a bunch of outside "power-grabbers." At one meeting early in October the James Gang won two key victories over the vehement arguments of the Radical Caucus, one to push for the student strike and rally on Election Day, the other to begin direct confrontations in the classroom around issues of class structure, ideology, and the politics of individual professors. Six days later, on October 14, the Radical Caucus in a private meeting voted to disaffiliate from SDS and set itself up as a completely separate SDS chapter: the first time in SDS history that it ever had two competing chapters on a single campus.

The James Gang rejoiced—"This particular movement," they said in New Left Notes, "is gaining a sense of itself, and learning from our own experience about growth ... how liberating it can be"*—but it was not long before they realized how disastrous it could be, too. It soon became apparent that the effect of the chapter fight had been to drive away many of the students initially interested in radical politics, to splinter the finite radical base from which any programs, confrontational or educational, could be launched, and thus unintentionally to weaken the SDS presence, and thereby the left, at Michigan. When the James Gang called for strikes on the day before Election Day, virtually the only classes it was able to turn out were those canceled by sympathetic teachers, and when it marched on the president's house that night it mustered only two thousand people (a considerable number of them anti-SDS athletes) out of twenty thousand students; its call for a sit-in at the president's office the next day drew barely four hundred people and ended in inconclusive disarray. Shortly thereafter the Michigan Daily accused the James Gang of practicing fascist tactics, chapter meetings dwindled to fifty people and fewer, and before the fall was over SDS in general had fallen into disrepute on the Michigan campus. And this at the very school which had been in many ways the fountainhead of SDS, where the original SDS activists had established their base, where for many years the largest chapter in the organization had flourished.

Such splits as these were exacerbated at many places by the second current problem, the all-out invasion of SDS by the Progressive Labor Party. PLers—concentrated chiefly in Boston, New York, and California, with some strength in Chicago and Michigan—were positively cyclotronic in their ability to split and splinter chapter organizations: if it wasn't their self-righteous positiveness it was their caucus-controlled rigidity, if not their deliberate disruptiveness it was their overt bids for control, if not their repetitious appeals for basebuilding it was their unrelenting Marxism. Nowhere were they more successful than at Berkeley.

Progressive Labor had been gaining strength at Berkeley since the spring term, when with some skillful manipulation, repeated bloc voting, and day-and-night energy it managed to inject its politics into the chapter both in general sessions and on the various committees the chapter was broken into. Regular SDSers were somewhat dilatory in combating PL influence and some chose to drop out altogether rather than bother with internecine battles—the New Left was supposed to embody harmony, after all, not acrimony—and it was not until the fall that they found a way to counterattack. Then the regulars, over the bitter objections of the PLers, committed the chapter to a sit-in at Sproul Hall to protest a decision by the California regents not to give credit for a course being taught by Eldridge Cleaver, Minister of Information of the Black Panther Party and then a Presidential candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party. The sit-in was a disaster, with 122 people arrested and very little student support engendered; and the regulars (with help from other campus political groups) followed it with a building takeover that proved equally unpopular, ending up with 80 more arrests and a widespread feeling that such suicidal tactics had no more place in the protest armory.’ In the wake of this errant misadventure, the chapter was plunged into an angry series of recriminations and renewed factionalism, but PL came up smelling like roses—red roses. Within a month PL and its sympathizers had effectively taken over the chapter and the regulars subsequently walked out, "fed up with the phony ideological discussions with PL,"!° forming a new group, the Radical Student Union, which no longer even bothered to call itself an SDS chapter. At the fountainhead of student activism, SDS became nothing more than another sect.

PL's influence also operated on the national level, not only in national meetings (like the June convention) but inside the National Office itself, producing no end of trouble for the leadership trying to guide the organization into some overt form of revolution. PLers resisted and ignored policies they didn't like, generally working to sabotage the Election Day demonstrations, for example, when they themselves couldn't direct them and select the speakers. PLers also barraged the NO with articles for New Left Notes, a problem which the national officers generally solved with the undemocratic expedient of refusing to publish them, ultimately forcing PL to start its own student publication, Fight to Win. PL's work-in pamphlet, submitted to the NO in the early fall, was also withheld from publication, though in this case the NO came up with the excuse that it couldn't publish anything that wasn't signed, for the PLers had left their articles in it anonymous so as to be able to return to the factories next summer. "PL paranoia," as it became called, even resulted in the firing of the staff printer, Al Camplejohn, for "political and office security reasons" and on the grounds that he was a "PL agent" in the NO. Finally, there was an embarrassing defection to PL among the national officers: Fred Gordon, who had not been part of the original NO clique and who found himself ostracized by most of the national collective as soon as he moved to Chicago, apparently was befriended by a few local PLers and this in time grew to open PL sympathy; though he was not a member of the party, so far as is known, he gradually became an effective spokesman for its policies and a useful opponent of any moves to purge it from SDS. Relations between Gordon and the NO became so bad that in December he wrote a brief piece in New Left Notes to complain that the national leadership was "anticommunist"—this was PL's way of saying anti-PL—and that the literature program had suppressed both worker-student alliance views and a pamphlet he himself had written; he denied, however, the rumor then common in SDS that he was being "held captive" in the Chicago office.?”

The open enmity now between PL and the SDS regulars, and the obvious growth of PL power in both chapters and national meetings, prompted the NO to try various schemes to stifle and possibly eliminate PL from the organization. During the fall it approached members of the left wing of the Communist Party in the hopes that their long-standing opposition to PL and their superior knowledge of Old Left ideological debates could be used to blunt PL's effects at national meetings and perhaps drive it from the organization voluntarily. NO allies Les Coleman and Howard Machtinger, a 1966 Columbia graduate now at the University of Chicago, established ties with the Chicago-area Black Panther Party and campus black student associations, both known to oppose PL, with the idea of building up anti-PL strength in area chapters. There was even considerable talk in the air about a merger of SDS with the left-wing Communists and the National Mobilization Committee to form an entirely new group which would outlaw PL from the start; Dohrn labeled this talk "pure and simple trash" in a New Left Notes article in December, but it certainly had wide currency in the organization and represented the thinking of at least some SDS veterans.

No one doubted now that SDS faced a very difficult challenge in the months ahead; as San Diego SDSer Jim Prickett noted unhappily: "The general malaise in SDS is apparent to all; people who barely know each other write fearful letters about the dangers of an upcoming split in the organization."

All this turmoil was compounded by the third major problem, the intensification of the old distance ailment brought on by the determined plunge into revolutionary politics. The people in and around the NO, and the national leadership in general, were unabashedly on the side of the actionists, had developed ideologies generally couched in Marxist terms, and saw themselves as allies of Third World freedom fighters and black revolutionaries; they were joined by most of the Regional Office staffs, the action factions, some of the veterans, many of the more hippie-identified street people, and a number of younger recruits coming to SDS after bellicose high-school careers. Out in the chapters, however, there were many others not so convinced of the successes of confrontation, nor so taken with the Marxist themology: the consolidation factions, many of the nonideological veterans of the early New Left days, others whose identification was more with radical life styles and culture than with radical politics, and a large number of the younger collegians only recently weaned from liberalism. The gulf was wide, but bridgeable, and many in SDS councils appealed for a period of moderation, going slow, or "evening out" as it was called: NICer Morgan Spector, for example, argued that "we should be as prepared to burn our little Lenin Library as to refer to it." But in the flush of a conscious dedication now to revolution, such appeals were generally ignored and the NO had the power to see that they did not swerve the organization from its path.’®

As a result, SDS did not effectively win over the audience of potential radicals on the campus, did not even succeed in holding on to many of those who participated in the initial meetings of the fall. At a time when many young people wanted some explanations for the failure of electoral politics, SDS was led by people who had long since given up caring about elections and were trying to organize for revolution. To students just beginning to be aware of their own radicalization and their potential role as the intelligentsia in an American left, SDS offered the wisdom that the only really important agents for social change were the industrial workers, or the ghetto blacks, or the Third World revolutionaries. For college students who swarmed into chapter meetings ready to take on their administrations for any number of grievances, SDS provided an analysis which emphasized "de-studentizing," dropping out, and destroying universities.” And for youths in search of an integrative ideology to supplant the tattered theories of corporate liberalism, SDS had only the imperfectly fashioned tenets of a borrowed Marxism and an untransmittable attachment to the theories of other revolutionaries; not even the serviceable explanations of an earlier day were available—The Port Huron Statement, for example, or Oglesby's Containment and Change, or the initial explorations of the new working class—having by now been assigned to the junkheap of history. It did not matter that the SDS leadership was in certain ways politically justified in its posture and far more sophisticated in its world view than the newcomers; what was important was that in organizational terms it simply failed to reach great segments of the membership or potential membership. And more than that, it failed to provide a radical politics for a subgeneration of militant students who were then forced to look elsewhere or, more often, chose not look at all. In coming months, and years, college and high-school youths would continue to turn to activism out of the inevitable condition of their lives and their society, but less and less were they guided by particular theoretic structures or worked-out politics, not even from the one political group on the left that had been able to fulfill this crucial function.

The accelerated distance problem had another effect, too. It meant that SDS was unable to achieve a unified political identity for itself, even the kind of loose identity it had managed to forge in earlier periods when, though embracing a multitude of tendencies, it stood for a certain shared analysis of America and the means of altering it. SDS now was a spectrum so vast as to be undefinable, almost more a state of mind than a political organization, more a flag of convenience than an umbrella. Any kind of self-proclaimed leftist, and there was an infinite variety these days, could call himself or herself an SDSer and join an SDS group without identifying with any ongoing tendency or having to learn the body of political thought stored up in the organization over the previous eight years. Any chapter (or faction within a chapter) could define for itself what "SDS" meant and act according to that definition without much regard for anybody else, certainly without any scrupulous attention to the resolutions out of the last NC or the latest article by the National Secretary. At any time in SDS history this might have proved dangerously disintegrative, but at a time when the leadership was hoping to forge a mass body of people committed to an all-out revolution it proved absolutely calamitous.

Not all the blame for the apparently sudden misfortunes of SDS should be laid to these three problems, critical as they were. Much of the crisis was brought on by the response of the very social institutions—the government, the cities, the universities—which felt themselves, or convinced themselves to feel, threatened by the growth of revolutionary politics and at last chose to launch a serious counterattack.

The atmosphere for the counterattack was set by both media and politicians. A time-tocrack-down theme was piped with increasing shrillness as the fall wore on, exemplified best by an article in the nation's largest-circulation periodical, the Reader’s Digest, entitled "SDS: Engineers of Campus Chaos." This accused SDS specifically of violence, arson, rioting, looting, brawling, public fights, "anti-democratic tactics," and plotting the destruction of society itself; the organization was "Subversive," a "totalitarian minority," inspired if not directed by Stalinist masterminds in Moscow, and readers were assured by no less than J. Edgar Hoover that, "to put it bluntly, they are a new type of subversive, and their danger is great."’? Hoover himself, testifying in Washington at the same time, proclaimed:

The protest activity of the new left and the SDS, under the guise of legitimate expression of dissent, has created an insurrectionary climate which has conditioned a number of young Americans—especially college students—to resort to civil disobedience and violence .... The aim of the SDS attack is to smash first our educational structure, then our economic system, then, finally, our government itself.

Also in Washington the House Committee on Un-American Activities, acknowledging "persistent and growing demands" from Congressmen for legislative action against the New Left, saw fit to begin several days of elaborate hearings, with full TV and newspaper coverage, on what it called "subversive involvement" in the August Chicago demonstrations.SDS, said Committee Chairman Richard Ichord of Missouri, was one of the organizations in Chicago "determined to effect a general breakdown of law and order, preparatory to their long-range objective of seizing the powers of government"; among those subpoenaed were Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden, apparently on the assumption that they were SDS leaders, but no current officers were called to testify.”

Similar inflated pronouncements on the dangers of SDS were being made elsewhere, by similar inflated people. In California Governor Ronald Reagan declared: "This is not just the hijinks of overenthusiastic students. This is insurrection. Organized society cannot back down without giving up our rights." And in Virginia the head of the State Board of Education urged the expulsion of all radicals from the campus—specifically SDS, the DuBois Clubs, and YSA—and proposed that the unlimited powers of the state be used to this end, for "like their heroes Ché Guevara, Fidel Castro, and Ho Chi Minh, the only language student extremists understand is force." The speaker was Lewis Powell, four years later to take his seat as a Nixon appointee to the Supreme Court.

All of this was capped by the climate of genuine fear and uncertainty engendered by an election race in which all three leading Presidential candidates exploited what was called the "law-and-order" issue, warning of black dissidents, student radicals, Communist agitators, unmanageable youths, and criminal malcontents who, it was held, were responsible for America's manifold problems. Campus militancy and student protest became key discussion points in the campaign and every candidate sought to show that he was firmer and fairer on the subject than the next man; both Democratic and Republican Vice Presidential candidates, as a matter of fact, first came into their own through their handling of the student issue, Edmund Muskie by his adroit put-downs of disrupters at college appearances, Spiro Agnew by his blunt and uncompromising denunciation of student protesters of every stripe. Student militants themselves did little to diminish the impact of the law-and-order issue, picketing, heckling, and disrupting candidates whenever possible and gaining considerable publicity in the process. Ultimately it was Richard Nixon's particular manipulation of this issue which produced for him his narrow victory.

With the national mood thus primed, federal law agencies felt comparatively free to harass, intimidate, and ride herd on SDS and other campus political groups. The Army Intelligence operation, now directed by the former head of intelligence in Vietnam, "was moving at top speed," according to The New York Times, in receipt of more than a thousand reports a month on students and other radicals. The FBI, according to a former agent, issued "an order directing intensified investigations of student agitators and expanded ‘informant penetration’ of campus SDS groups"; presumably every major SDS group was watched and infiltrated, and undercover agents are known to have operated during this time at Chicago, Essex County Community College, Kent State, New Orleans Movement for a Democratic Society, Owego, and UCLA. The FBI also sought to deepen the factional crisis within SDS by writing anonymous letters designed "to play one faction off against another,"”? and it regularly planted stories in sympathetic newspapers giving information from its dossiers to suggest that SDSers were conscious agents of "the Communist conspiracy."" The bureau also instructed all of its field offices to begin inquiries into the Chicago demonstrations, assigning 320 full-time special agents to the task, and before the fall was out the FBI had made no fewer than 1,400 "investigations," visited more than 1,000 people on campuses, and put taps on the phones of those against whom it was preparing the case that ultimately produced the Chicago "Conspiracy."

Universities, too, moved in a concerted way to control or weaken radical groups on their campuses. The school year began with a special summit meeting of college presidents in Denver devoted to the single topic of how to handle student dissidents. Back at their desks, administrators beefed up campus police forces (many of which were allowed to carry arms for the first time), installed electronic security systems, removed important college records to secret safes, and established new offices for police liaison, legal advice, and the like; at a number of campuses administration officials are known to have opened up confidential files to local police and FBI agents seeking to spy on radicals. But the favorite administration tactic, despite the example of Columbia, was simply to call in the police and arrest demonstrators. At least twenty-one institutions summoned police and at least 1,265 campus arrests were made—not counting those arrested for off-campus actions, including the two hundred or so arrested during Election Day demonstrations—almost three times as many arrests as were made in the spring (when the NSA figured 417, excluding Columbia). And where police invasion and its threat were not enough, administrators banned SDS groups outright, for example at Colorado, CCNY, Illinois Institute of Technology, Texas, and Wisconsin (Oshkosh). ‘

Universities, however, had more at their disposal than just strong-arm tactics. Cooptation and melioration were also used in good measure at many campuses, especially those in the liberal tradition; as Berkeley Chancellor Roger Heyns said that fall, "most campuses today have developed the skill and the will to breach their divisions, to keep things cool." On the one hand administrations could blunt the immediate effect of the protesters by making accommodations to satisfy student grievances (more students on committees, studentselected courses, liberalized social codes, upgraded food and housing facilities, appointment of ombudsmen and student aids), and on the other they could enhance the position of student moderates by giving them privileges and power (placing them on university committees, giving them access to administrative insiders, appointing them to well-funded and well-publicized study groups). Columbia, for example, was a model of this technique: it fired the president and dean who had been most disliked by the university community, appointed as acting president a longtime professional diplomat, abandoned construction of the unpopular gym, created a new academic senate giving students and faculty a voice for the first time in university affairs, dropped charges against the large majority of arrested students, established a new campus judiciary system, installed a "Director of Student Interests," agreed to move toward disaffiliating from both the IDA and ROTC, and created no fewer than fifteen campus committees involving moderate students in issues of campus reform. Largely as a result of this, student sympathy for SDS declined and the chapter fell into increasing factionalism: "Somehow," moaned SDSer Juan Gonzalez, "we were imprisoned by the past. We thought we could come back to the campus and the whole university would come falling down. It didn't."

The maneuvers both of the university and of the society at large had a real impact on campus activism in the fall. It did not by any means halt student protest or the further radicalization of campuses, because these were too inextricably a part of the era to be wiped out overnight merely by repressive punishment or moderative reform: there were at least seventy-four instances of major campus disturbances from September to January, ranging from the student strike at San Francisco State to the disrupting of the Saigon ambassador's speech at New York University, and including twenty-one sit-ins and buildings takeovers (plus one campus takover, at LeMoyne-Owen College in Tennessee), eleven locally based student strikes, and five destructive window-breaking demonstrations. But it was clear that both the number and intensity of demonstrations were reduced in the fall at most campuses; no matter how mild the protest, no one could be sure any longer about being able to make a political/moral point without getting thrown out of school, beaten into hospital, or packed off to jail. After years of demanding to be taken seriously, activists found that they were.

SDS chapters, the prime targets of most of this reaction, began to show the effects.

Experience of course varied widely but in practically no instance were chapters prepared to deal with phone-tapping, daily surveillance, police infiltration, large-scale arrests, and administrative rigidity. As infiltration grew, fear and suspicion began to infest formerly easygoing organizations and the early SDS spirit of openness and honesty suffered the pall of secrecy and incipient paranoia. As arrests and jailings mounted, chapter resources, both of money and of time, tended more and more to be concentrated on raising bail and providing legal defense. As summary expulsions and other forms of university discipline became more commonplace, chapters found it increasingly difficult to attract large numbers of liberal students to campus demonstrations. And at a time when chapters already had troubles enough of their own, this kind of pressure had a steadily debilitating effect.

Political violence increased during the fall, partly as the result of the closing off of other avenues of protest and partly because of the growth of self-consciously revolutionary groups ready to follow Guevara's advice to "pick up the gun." The number of major incidents of presumably left-related bombing and arson, almost all symbolic, rose to forty-one, four times that of the spring. ROTC facilities were burned or bombed at Berkeley, Delaware, Oregon (twice), Texas, Washington University, and the University of Washington; this last was the most dramatic, causing an $85,000 fire in whose flames a group of students danced to the chant of

This is number one

And the fun has just begun,

Burn it down, burn it down, burn it down.

Campus buildings were bombed at Bluefield State College, Georgetown, Michigan, NYU, and four California state colleges (Los Angeles, San Fernando Valley, San Francisco, and San Jose), for the most part without serious damage; in each instance the target was symbolica classified military research building at Ann Arbor, the administration offices at NYU—and one or more campus groups tried to broadcast the political reasoning behind the attack. The Detroit area experienced a rash of bombings during September and October, and Oakland and San Francisco city and government buildings were attacked five times during the fall.

SDS's relation to all of this was ambiguous. In general the national leadership—and of course the "consolidation" factions—frowned upon violence if it tended to alienate the bulk of students, though most of them would say at the same time that this would hardly be likely to happen with the bombing of a ROTC building. PL was especially loud in its scorn of violence outside the campus walls—trashing in the streets, for example—because this was thought to estrange the working class, and not a few others agreed. However, the style of SDS rhetoric and its avowed promulgation of revolution certainly did nothing to discourage political violence. A St. Louis SDSer, Michael Siskind, was the one responsible for the Washington University bombings and was sentenced to five years in jail. Various counterculture papers associated with SDS, like RAT in New York, published diagrams of how to make simple explosives. Copies of a non-SDS pamphlet called "Sabotage," giving instructions on bomb-making and fire-setting, apparently were scooped up with unabashed enthusiasm when they made an appearance at the Boulder NC. California SDSers Terry Cannon and Morgan Spector produced another pamphlet, more decorous, on "a strategy of total resistance" which also made the rounds of campuses. Probably many SDSers would have sympathized with the statement from the San Francisco State chapter, reprinted in New Left Notes, specifically defending student resistance to police on campus:

Pacifism obfuscates the class nature of violence and is used by the ruling

class to keep movements from winning. The ruling class uses any means

necessary to keep people in their place, and we must use any means

necessary including people's violence to defeat them.”° Perceptibly, if slowly, the path toward violence was widening.

The people at the upper levels of SDS spent many gloomy days in the weeks before the December National Council trying to cope with the problems exposed by the abortive Election Day actions. It was a critical period for the organization, for it was faced with an absolutely crucial choice: whether to develop the unformed but original ideas born in the early days of resistance into a new kind of Port Huron Statement appropriate for 1968, or to link itself with the great Marxist tradition and adapt the pre-molded ideas of the most popular and successful ideology around. As Todd Gitlin saw it then, with his usual perception:

Either the post-scarcity Left comprehends its own unprecedented identity as a social force, grasps its caused-ness, elaborates that identity into vision and program for its own trajectory on the campus and in youth ghettos, uses its reality as a strength from which to encounter anti-colonial and working-class energy and to devise common approaches; or it turns from its identity, throws the vision out with the narrowness of the class base, and seeks a historically pre-packaged version in which students or déclassé intellectuals are strictly appendages to really "real" social forces or are either the vanguard or the tail of the really real. Either it painfully accepts the reality of our class base and moves outward from there; or it denies the unprecedented possibilities by denying its own caused reality, and defines the student Left either as class-appendage or class-substitute. Either it takes itself seriously as a specifically post-scarcity and visionary force with revolutionary democratic vision; or it buys clarity on the cheap, taking refuge from the distinctness of metropolitan conditions in mirror-models of the underdeveloped socialism of Russia and the Third World. Either it accepts the awesome risk of finding new paths, or it walks the beaten trails, pugnacious and sad. A grave choice, where the stakes are immense and under the pounding pressure of the State there seems no time for placid reflection. Literally an existential choice.

SDS chose—not by referendum or by resolution, but more by osmosis and happenstancethe latter. In the haste to make itself revolutionary, to justify its revolutionism, to live up to the image it (and the press) was now creating, it chose the easier course, opting for what was at hand rather than what had to be constructed, for what was sanctioned by history rather than what was new and untried. The new-working-class theories, for example, so eagerly embraced a year and a half before, were now abandoned, still unshaped and untried, and the membership—the theoretically inclined membership, at any rate—rushed pell-mell into the comparative safety of one or another variety of Marxism.”

The choice of the national leadership was a variety that embraced wholeheartedly a class analysis of the traditional Marxist kind—workers against the rulers, proletariat against the bourgeoisie—and committed the organization to work among the classical proletariat, with the emphasis upon the youthful proletariat. A strange bird no doubt to emerge from the ashes of the election debacle, one with wings perhaps exhausted from overexposure and overuse, but a sturdy beast also and to it the SDS leadership tied all its plans for the year ahead. The formal enunciation of this final attachment to Marxism came with an article written by Mike Klonsky after long consultation with the theoretical heavies and featured in the issue of New Left Notes distributed at the National Council meeting.

"Toward a revolutionary youth movement" became a central document in SDS's final months. Klonsky began by trying to tip the whole balance of the student organization toward the working class:

At this point in history, SDS is faced with its most crucial ideological decision, that of determining its direction with regard to the working class. At this time there must be a realization on the part of many in our movement that students alone cannot and will not be able to bring about the downfall of capitalism, the system which is at the root of man's oppression ... .

The main task now is to begin moving beyond the limitations of struggle placed upon a student movement. We must realize our potential to reach out to new constituencies both on and off campus and build SDS into a youth movement that is revolutionary.

The working-class identification was neatly meshed with the new attachment to street action born in Chicago, producing the idea of organizing among the young members of the working class:

The notion that we must remain simply "an anti-imperialist student organization" is no longer viable. The nature of our struggle is such that it necessitates an organization that is made up of youth and not just students, and that these youth become class conscious. This means that our struggles must be integrated into the struggles of working people ... .

Because we can organize—as a student movement—around those contradictions which affect youth specifically, we can organize young working people into our class-conscious anti-capitalist movement. These young workers will (a) strengthen the anti-capitalist movement among the workforce, (b) provide an organic link between the student movement and the movement of working people, and (c) add to the effect that we will have as a critical force on older working people today.

Two means of implementation were offered: first, building "class consciousness in the student movement" by organizing in working-class colleges and high schools, allying with campus workers, attacking the privileged positions of students, and moving off campus into working-class communities; second, attacking the university's "institutional racism" by pressing for black and brown admissions, challenging racist teachers, and attacking campus police institutes and counterinsurgency centers.

With this new theoretical underpinning—one which, incidentally, seemed to steal much of the thunder away from PL's association with Marxism—the SDS leaders came into the National Council meeting ready for supreme battle. They got it.

The meeting, held in Ann Arbor from December 26 to 31 with perhaps as many as twelve hundred people, dissolved into one long battle between the myriad varieties of SDS regulars and the into-the-breach PLers. Whatever the issues, petty or grand, the plenary sessions debated them venomously, providing all the "hellish agony" the Calverts attested to, and the truly serious nature of the issues in this particular time made the debates all the more anguished. The three most important had to do with racism, women's liberation, and of course the "Revolutionary Youth Movement" proposal.

The racism resolution was introduced by PLers from San Francisco State and reflected a whole new campaign for PL to make racism into its major prism for viewing the way "the bosses" divide and exploit "the workers." PL's officially approved line was that racism was simply a device of the ruling class to oppress the working class and that blacks were strategically important only because they were the most exploited segment of the working class. The NO faction, following the traditional New Left line, greeted this position with the retort that racism was a malady inherent in all parts of the white world, including the white working class, and that blacks were important chiefly because their struggle for liberation was in fact the cutting edge of the revolution at this moment. The haranguing was bitter, heated, and lengthy, but ultimately when it became clear that the NO had no counter-proposal of its own to offer and the delegates were faced with the choice of coming out against racism or not, the PL proposal won by a narrow margin.

The same PL line was offered again during the debate over the resolution on women's liberation. PLers here argued that women were not a special category, really, just a specially oppressed part of the working class whose battles had to be fought as part of those of the class as a whole; most of the women, and the regulars, maintained that women were in a separate fix since their oppression came from men everywhere and not just the "ruling class." PLers repeated at increasing length their conviction that the basic "contradiction" in America was between the working class and the "bourgeoisie" and that any "contradiction" between men and women was secondary to that; the women replied that however secondary the "contradiction" may seem to PL, for women at this time it was the battle they certainly felt most acutely about. This time the dynamics of the convention worked against the PLers, since the NO forces had a concrete proposal on the floor (written in part by a man, Noel Ignatin, the Chicago SDSer close to the NO, and modified and presented by a women's caucus) and PL had none; the women's resolution was passed, affirming that the "oppression of women through male supremacy" was both qualitatively and quantitatively greater than the oppression of working people in general. (The resolution, however, did not suggest that women should go outside of SDS to join or form separate women's groups of their own, as a number of SDS women and feminist groups had been urging; it argued that inasmuch as women's liberation was "an integral part" of the battle against capitalism, women should remain in organizations primarily concerned with fighting that battle. This shortly became known as the "SDS position" in the women's movement, against which a variety of separatist groups were to array themselves in the coming year.)

But the sharpest fight of the NC came over Klonsky's proposal for a Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM, pronounced "rim"), for the PL forces were perfectly aware that it was designed to undercut their influence in SDS and take away their exclusive identification with working-class politics. Led by Fred Gordon, Jeff Gordon (no relation), and San Francisco PL organizer John Levin, the PLers attacked the strategy at every point: it placed too much emphasis on youth and the "phony" youth culture and suggested that youths themselves would make the revolution; it invited more of the old resistance politics of street violence, leading to dangerous "wild-in-the-streets" attitudes; it exaggerated the importance of students over that of the working class, forgetting that students are really members of the bourgeoisie. Klonsky himself took on the burden of answering PL, and his defense of the proposal was impassioned and skillful. He began by acknowledging that some attacks on PL in recent months had been unprincipled, declared that the NO was not planning to expel PL ("PL has done a lot of good things in SDS, and don't think for a minute that when the Man comes down on PL, we won't stand beside them"?°), and argued that the RYM approach was really the best way to accomplish PL's stated goal of a union between students and workers; he adroitly defended the thrust of the RYM strategy, accused PL of not being sufficiently committed to the kind of action necessary for change, and upheld the role of youth and students in prodding others toward the revolution. It was by all accounts a winning performance, and Carl Davidson reported in the Guardian that it was "a decisive turning point in the NC." Shortly thereafter the RYM proposal passed, and SDS was formally set on a new path toward "class-consciousness" and working-class organizing, an acknowledgment of the victory of Marxist (and often pseudo-Marxist) ideas at the ideological levels of the organization, and of the final triumph of the "organize-the-left" tendency over the "organize-students" position within SDS. Davidson called it "the most most important change in its political thinking since the organization embraced the politics of antiimperialism two years ago." The power of the resolution was muted somewhat by the fact that it passed by a very narrow margin—twelve votes, the chair announced—and individual chapters were therefore under little obligation to follow the RYM line unless they wanted to.

Nonetheless, for those inclined in this direction already—and they included the national leadership, the action factions, and such future SDS strategists as Ayers, Dohrn, Jacobs, Machtinger, Mellen, and Rudd—the passage of the RYM proposal gave the national imprimatur to the kind of politics that would eventually become the basis of Weatherman.

After five days of rampageous political battles, lasting well into the early hours, setting delegate against delegate, producing despair and frustration and anger, the final session of the Ann Arbor NC should probably have come as no surprise. The ugliness and discordance of the scene, however, surpassed anything known in the organization before and left a bitter taste in the mouths of most SDSers that lasted for months to come. Carl Davidson caught it all:

The chairman then moved into a fund-raising session, traditionally a time of merrymaking and song at SDS gatherings, while members are emptying their pockets of cash. This time the two opposing camps delivered volleys of chants back and forth. "Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh" came from the national collective supporters, answered by "Mao Mao Mao Tse-tung" from the other side. When someone started singing "The Worker's Flag is Deepest Red," the studentworker alliance side of the room came up with "Don't use the red flag against the red flag" and "Defeat SDS's Khrushchev." The final blow came when the singing of "Solidarity Forever" was interrupted by the chant "Defeat False Unity." After that, everyone went home.

Such a stark and rapid change from the time, only a few months before, when Ayers and Robbins had felt the "new atmosphere of optimism and aggressiveness"—and it augured dark days ahead.

1 Robbins and Ayers, NLN, October 7, 1968 (ellipses in original). For SDS growth, NO files; LNS, "SDS Membership Mushrooms," October 18,1968, part reprinted in Guardian, October 26,1968; Guardian, November 16,1968, and January 4,1969; Jack Gerson, Movement, November 1968; Newsweek, September 30, 1968.

2 "Across the country" NLN, October 7, 1968.

3 "T got my," NLN, ibid. Archibald, "we can't" and "just stopped," LNS, op. cit. Davidson, Guardian, November 16, 1968.

4 Newsweek, op. cit. Life, October 18, 1968. Look, October 1, 1968. Yankelovich survey, in Fortune, special issue on "American Youth," January 1969, subsequently published in book form by Time, Inc.; this survey expanded and compared, in The Changing Values on Campus, Pocket Books, 1972.

> Klonsky, anonymous interview, copy in archives.

© Rudd at Kent State, reported in James A. Michener, Kent State: What Happened and Why, Random House, 1971, p. 99. Dohrn-Jacobs-Jones, "Boulder and Boulder," mimeograph, and NLN, October 18,1968.

” "No class today," NLN, ibid. "organize in the high school," ibid. Kleiman, "High School Reform: Towards a Student Movement," SDS pamphlet, February 1966.

8 Widener, "Student Subversion," published by U.S.A. (New York), 1968, p. 34. High school protests 20 percent, see Congressional survey, "Protests Found," N.Y. Times, February 23,1970. SLAP, printed in NLN, June 24 and October 7; responses by Les Coleman, October 18 and December 18, by Jim Prickett, December 4, and by Jared Israel, December 18, all 1968; SLAP also reprinted in "Riots, Civil and Criminal Disorders," Part 18, p. 3620, and PL.

October 1968. "Behind SLAP," the Boulder version, NLN, October 7, 1968.

° Davidson, Guardian, October 26, 1968. "THE ELECTIONS," NWLN, October 25, 1968.

1° Guardian, November 16, 1968. NIC meeting, minutes, and NLN, November 19, 1968.

11 Klonsky, NLN, October 25, 1968.

12 "Sitting in," Calvert and Nieman, p. 140.

13 Ann Arbor report and "typical of many," NLN, November 11, 1968. (On the Ann Arbor meeting, see also Powers, pp. 77 ff.)

14 "This particular," NLN, November 11, 1968.

15 Some of the Berkeley story is in a document prepared by the "legal affairs staff" of California Governor Ronald Reagan, printed in "Riots, Civil and Criminal Disorders," Part 22, pp. 5079 ff.; also. Guardian, October 5 and November 2, 1968, and February 15, 1969; Movement, April 1969.

16 "fed up," Movement, April 1969.

17 "Dolitical and office," NO memo, archives; see also Israel, NLN, December 18, 1968.

Gordon, NLN, ibid. Dohrn, NLN, ibid.

18 Drickett, NLN, December 11, 1968. Spector, NLN, May 20, 1968.

9 Reader's Digest, October 1968; "To put it bluntly," is originally from his February 23,1968, House testimony.

20 "The protest activity," September 1968, quoted in "Investigation of SDS," Part 1-A, p. 6.

HUAC hearings, October 1, 3,4, and December 2,3,4, 5,1968, in "Subversive Involvement in Disruption of 1968 Democratic Party National Convention," Parts 1-3; Ichord, Part 1, p.

2239. Reagan, quoted in LNS package, December 1968. Powell, quoted by Davidson, Guardian, November 23,1968.

21 "to play off," article on Wall, N.Y. Times, January 13, 1972.

22 "was moving," Richard Halloran, N.Y. Times, January 18,1971. "an order directing," Robert Wall, New York Review, January 27,1972.

3 Police arrest figures, from NLN, Guardian, and testimony in "Riots, Civil and Criminal Disorders," throughout, esp. Part 18, pp. 3679 ff.

*4 Heyns, Newsweek, September 30,1968. Gonzalez, quoted by Randy Furst, Guardian, October 12,1968. "Seventy-four instances," based again on NLN, Guardian, campus and commercial press, plus a survey by the Senate Investigations Subcommittee, in "Riots, Civil and Criminal Disorders," Part 18, pp. 3669-3712.

2° Bombing incidents, similarly based. "This is number," quoted by Andrew Kopkind, Hard Times, November 1, 1968.

6 "Dacificism obfuscates," NLN, December 23,1968.

27 Gitlin, "New Chances: The Reality and Dynamic of the New Left," mimeographed paper, November 1969, author's files; for additional analysis, see James Weinstein, Socialist Revolution, July-August 1972.

28 Klonsky's "Toward a revolutionary youth movement," NLN, December 23, 1968; revised, NLN, January 8, 1969; reprinted in a REP pamphlet, spring 1969; Guardian, January 18, 1969; and Wallerstein and Starr, p. 216.

2° PL racism resolution, NLN, January 8,1969, and PL, February 1969. Women's liberation resolution, ibid.; and Guardian, January 18, 1969; see also Ignatin's earlier version, NLN, December 23,1968.

3° RYM debate described by Davidson, Guardian, January 11, 1969, including Klonsky, "PL has done."

31 Davidson, both quotations. Guardian, op. cit.