Spring 1965

It was not only the LID which viewed the "frontism" of SDS with such horror. Many traditional liberals and peace groups got chills, too, and when it was rumored around that banners actually urging withdrawal from Vietnam were going to be carried and that marchers openly urging an NLF victory were going to be allowed in, these people moved to act.

In Washington, Curtis Gans of the ADA (who had been, briefly, an SDSer in 1961-62) started redbaiting the organization among politicians, and eventually enough pressure was brought on Senator Gruening that he almost backed out of the ceremonies; only last-minute persuasion from Harold Taylor kept him in. (The Campus ADA, incidentally, eventually did boycott the march on the grounds that it let Communists in.)

In Ann Arbor, the Center for the Study of Conflict Resolution, the outfit that had housed PREP since the fall, voted early in April to kick it out forthwith, on the extraordinary grounds that it "has developed into a research service organization to the action-oriented SDS.

And in New York, in a statement issued just a few days before the event, a group of prominent liberals including Robert Gilmore (a rich Turn Toward Peace leader, an LID board member, and a prime instigator of the statement), Stuart Hughes, A. J. Muste, Bayard Rustin, and Norman Thomas warned people away from the march because of its Communist taint. They too, they said, were worried about Vietnam, but there were limits:

"In an effort to register such concern with our government and people, we welcome the cooperation of all those groups and individuals who, like ourselves, believe in the need for an independent peace movement, not committed to any form of totalitarianism or drawing inspiration from the foreign policy of any government."

It sounded like Harry Laidler at his best. And then this group managed to get the New York Post to run a prominent editorial on the very eve of the march featuring this statement and going on to issue warnings about "attempts to convert the event into a pro-Communist production" and "a frenzied, one-sided anti-American show."

By an ironic turn of history, the people responsible for this editorial attack on what was to become the most important student organization of the sixties were two of the top leaders of what was the most important student organization of the thirties: Joseph Lash, assistant editorial page editor of the Post and former executive secretary of the American Student Union, and James Wechsler, editorial page editor of the Post and former editor of the ASU's Student Advocate.”

Some members of the liberal community were not so shortsighted. A letter from Phyllis ("Mrs. Gardner") Cox, and Anne and Martin Peretz, for example—three boosters of, and financial contributors to, the organization—took the statement-signers to task for having "gratuitously and unjustly evoked associations of the March with Communism" and for lending "their prestige to a foolish, divisive and destructive lactic"; subsequently Stuart Hughes and Norman Thomas apologized to SDS for having got sucked into it.

And most traditional peace groups still wanted a hand in the march and kept pressing SDS for joint sponsorship so as to print their own stamp on it. This produced another crisis in those busy weeks. The peace groups suggested that SDS give over direction of the march to an ad hoc committee of leaders from the various peace organizations, that these have a bigger voice in selecting speakers, that banners favoring immediate withdrawal be forbidden, and that adults as well as students be urged to attend.

Kissinger and Booth, doing most of the negotiating in New York for SDS, agreed that signs for immediate withdrawal could be banned if signs for any particular position would be forbidden as well—this was later abandoned in favor of a decision to ban only signs identifying particular groups in the line of march—and they agreed that adult groups could issue a second march call directed toward adults if they wished. But the issues of joint sponsorship and speaker selection, which hit at SDS's central role in the affair, were too important for individuals to decide and, in participatory-democratic tradition, had to be voted on by the National Council.

On March 13, the NO sent out a ballot on whether SDS should go along with the peace groups (a ballot which, in classic SDS style, enumerated all the facts and then carried two equally impassioned sections, WHY THIS OFFER SHOULD BE ACCEPTED, and WHY THIS OFFER SHOULD BE REJECTED), and a week later the results were in: twenty-four for joint sponsorship, nineteen against, two abstentions.

SDS's single biggest planned action to date was on the verge of being totally transformed, the organization's own central role about to be overwhelmed. But—and this is also classic SDS—the majority refused to accept the victory. As Kissinger told the worklist, "Since, however, there were violent opinions on both sides, a number of votes were conditional, and the margin so close, a number of National Officers changed their vote from For to Against to avoid embarking on a radical change in plans without a clear organizational consensus."

It was in the best democratic traditions of the organization—and it proved sound strategy as well. SDS told the peace groups it wanted to keep the sponsorship in its own hands but they were welcome to join in the march, and the peace groups, sensing by now that there was really no point in staging another and competing march, decided to go along anyway and urged everyone to join the SDS march.

Not all of them were happy about it,” and the two most conservative—SANE and Turn Toward Peace—washed their hands of the whole affair, but the eventual cooperation of the other peace organizations proved helpful.

Through all of this, be it noted, it was almost always SDS's practice (admitting other left groups) rather than its policies (as embodied in the call for the march) that upset people.’ The policies were mild enough, the call representing more or less the lowest common denominator after several weeks of letters, phone calls, and informal discussion.

The argument was simple: the government of South Vietnam is a dictatorship, so naturally the majority of the people refuse to support it and want to overthrow it, and U.S. presence there simply impedes (but of course cannot stop) this process, and costs lives and dollars, and threatens a wider, nuclear war; besides, the whole thing is immoral, and it kills people.

There was no mention whatsoever of a solution, neither withdrawal nor negotiation nor pulling back to "enclaves," just "end the war." There was no identification with Hanoi or the NLF or "Third World" peoples in general, just "the people overwhelmingly want peace, self-determination, and the opportunity for development."

There was no analysis of American foreign policy as imperialist or interventionist, just "America is committing pointless murder."

There were no attacks on the United States or the Johnson Administration or corporate liberalism, just "this is a war never declared by Congress." The call did challenge some basic Administration assumptions—such as that the war was led by China and Hanoi, that the country was a "domino" in China's expansion game, that the Saigon government was legitimate and popular—with a perception that was rare in those days, and it was quite outspoken in doing so, as befits a youthful organization. But this was by no means an extreme document, even for its times; less advanced, in fact, than most of The Port Huron Statement or America and the New Era.

SDS warmed up for its Washington march with the promised demonstration against the Chase Manhattan Bank for its loans to South Africa.

On Friday afternoon, March 19, 1965, some six hundred demonstrators clogged the streets in front of Chase Manhattan's gleaming offices in downtown Manhattan. Bank officials had gotten an injunction against an invasion of bank property and then closed down the offices to the public, so the demonstrators stood out front, singing freedom songs and holding hands with their arms crossed in front of their bodies in the old civil-rights gesture.

After an hour, several dozen of them (including Potter, Gitlin, Booth, Hobson, and Arthur Waskow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington) sat down in front of the bank's entrance blocking part of the sidewalk, and continued singing. When the police finally ordered them on, they refused to move, locked arms, and waited to be arrested; when the police moved in, they went limp, and forty-three were thrown into waiting paddy wagons. It was SDS's first official act of civil disobedience.

Press coverage was slight, partly because in those early days SDSers knew so little about dealing with the press that they didn't realize Friday demonstrations get scant coverage because Saturday's paper is always the smallest. But the Times gave them some mention on the financial pages, slender stories moved over both AP and UPI wires, and there was some local television coverage.

Around New York especially, where it was SDS's first public action of consequence, it attracted a good deal of attention in the colleges and enhanced the organization's reputation for action. But it remained, withal, a limited action on a moral plane. Though Gitlin and Booth, among others, were aware of the fundamentally imperialist nature of the bank loans and the U.S.-South African relationship—the PREP executive committee in fact had even proposed an expanded "program against American corporations" as having "more long-range potential than the crisis response program on Vietnam"—this awareness was never shared with the bulk of the demonstrators. The anti-capitalist analysis and broader political implication that lay behind the bank loans was put abroad by neither hand nor mouth, and the sit-in remained essentially an isolated and one-dimensional act of outrage, as if Chase Manhattan were a Woolworth's with tellers.

The Chase Manhattan action, incidentally, marked the end of PREP. The South Africa issue seemed secondary to most SDSers in the face of Vietnam, and was left to other groups chiefly religious organizations such as the Student Christian Federation and the Union Theological Seminary—to carry on while SDS looked elsewhere.

The whole notion of "peace research," in fact, seemed somewhat ludicrous after the Vietnam escalation, and certainly no one was worrying much about how the country was going to manage its conversion to a peace economy. Gitlin moved on to the JOIN project in Chicago, Booth went into the National Office, and PREP was left to wither away.

While SDS was preparing for its first major anti-war action, another anti-war phenomenon was unfolding which also had a profound effect on the campuses.

At the University of Michigan in the early morning of March 18, a group of teachers and students (including a large number of VOICE members) finally concluded their long night's discussion of how to demonstrate their opposition to the escalation of the war; their plan: get a group of experts on, and opponents of, the war to informally address and take questions from the university community for an entire night. The event would be called, following the rhetorical precedent of the civil-rights movement's main tactic, a "teach-in."

The University of Michigan teach-in was held on the night of March 24, 1965, and it was an astonishing success. The organizers expected five hundred people; perhaps as many as three thousand showed up during the evening.

And it wasn't all boring lectures, either: there were teachers talking out of their own feelings to a mass of students they now regarded as citizens, not bluebooks, and there were folksingers and hecklers and bomb scares and coffee breaks and a torchlight parade—and it was all very exciting.

"On that night," says Marc Pilisuk, one of the primary organizers, "people who really cared talked of things that really mattered." Most students found that refreshing.

Within days the teach-in idea swept the nation, and within the next two months more than a hundred colleges and universities participated—not just the expected ones like Wisconsin, Berkeley, Chicago, and Columbia, but surprising ones like Arizona, the University of Miami, Kent State, and Goucher, and unheard-of ones like Flint Junior College in Michigan, Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, and Principia College in Elsah, Illinois.

There was even a National Teach-in, in Washington, D.C., with professors from all over the country, radio hookups to 122 campuses, and full coverage by National Education Television for all twelve hours.

And at the end of the school year, May 21-22, the largest and most outspoken of all the teach-ins was held, at Berkeley, of course, with an estimated thirty-five thousand people attending some or all of its thirty-six hours and a list of speakers ranging from liberals to representatives of the DuBois Clubs, the Progressive Labor Party, and SDS.

The huge crowd sat still for a moment, then rose to its feet with the loudest and most sustained applause of the day.

After this speech, the crowd moved out from behind the Washington Monument and began a march down the huge mall toward the Capitol at the other end, there to present an endthe-war petition to Congress. The mood was in large part joyous and even exuberant, but there was an overtone of something darker.

"We Shall Overcome," sung with the huge Capitol dome getting larger and the shadows lengthening across the mall, somehow sounded more menacing than it ever had before—"Deep in my heart/I do believe:/We shall overcome, some day"—and soon shouts of "Get Out, Get Out" and "End the War, End the War" drowned out the singing.

Jack A. Smith, a National Guardian correspondent, and sympathetic, reported that it was "one of the most impressive demonstrations this reporter has seen (including the 1963 March on Washington with its quarter-million people).

Whatever there was of a picnic atmosphere before the walk to Congress totally dissipated, replaced by a determination apparent on every face."’° About 150 yards in front of the Capitol steps, the marchers were supposed to stop so that a small contingent could take the petition up to someone within the Capitol. But as the front ranks slowed, a growing cry went up, "Let's all go, LET'S ALL GO," and began spreading through the crowd. Staughton Lynd recalls that moment:

As the crowd moved down the Mall toward the seat of government, its path delimited on each side by rows of chartered buses so that there was nowhere to go but forward, toward the waiting policemen, it seemed that the great mass of people would simply flow on through and over the marble buildings, that our forward movement was irresistibly strong, that even had some been shot or arrested nothing could have stopped that crowd from taking possession of its government. Perhaps next time we should keep going, occupying for a time the rooms from which orders issue and sending to the people of Vietnam and the Dominican Republic the profound apologies which are due; or quietly waiting on the Capitol steps until those who make policy for us, and who like ourselves are trapped by fear and pride, consent to enter into a dialogue with us and with mankind.

But 1965 was not yet a time of confrontation, of taking over the buildings, and as the crowd approached the police cordon at the Capitol steps the bulk of the crowd slowly halted. A few hundred students moved across the cement walk and up the steps, calling for the others to follow, but behind them SDS leaders were urging people to stay and when they found they were alone, they stopped and sat on the steps. Soon it was announced (incorrectly, as it turned out, but effectively) that the petition had been "pasted to the door of Congress" (actually it was handed to a Congressional aide inside the Capitol) and the crowd cheered, relaxed, began drifting toward the buses, and eventually, around six o'clock, dispersed.

The response to the Potter speech and the apparent militancy of a good number of the petitioners were signals of a growing sentiment toward confrontation—as yet held, however, by a minority. William A. Price, another Guardian correspondent, assessed the sentiment as being" ... a search for greater unity, more radical forms of protest. Clearly a frustration for many was the dispersion of the march at the end of a long day without some form of massive civil disobedience, for which many of the participants were ready."’

A few attempts were made to give vent to it: there was a successful seven-man sit-in at the State Department; a planned "mass civil-disobedience demonstration" of unspecified nature that was even announced twice from the Sylvan Theater stage but never came off because no one apparently knew how to organize it and SDS chose not to; and a short-lived attempt at the White House by about two dozen students to sit in and maintain a vigil, the militant mood of which was expressed by Eric Mann, an ex-CORE hand who was an ERAPer then and later became an important activist in the Boston area:

"This is not a political demonstration.It is a personal witness and confrontation with the power structure. We understand the need for a broad-based demonstration, but in order to change a fundamentally rotten system you have to take a fundamental decision."

But the militance remained muted. For most, this was the first open declaration to the government of their opposition to the war, and the belief that the government might listen, and respond, had not yet dissipated.

The effects of the march on SDS were all things it would not have expected three months before. For one thing, people noticed it. Television coverage was only spotty (and David Brinkley with his usual wry conservatism suggested they were all "loiterers"), but there was some, and newspaper coverage was good, if unsympathetic. The New York Times ran the story on its front-page, with a picture and a three-column eighteen-point headline, but its tone was distant and faintly amused:

More than 15,000 students and a handful of adults picketed the White House

in warm sunshine today, calling for an end to the fighting in Vietnam. Walking

three or four abreast in orderly rows and carrying printed white signs, the

students clogged the sidewalk. The principal occupant of the White House was

at his ranch in Texas.

The Times story, as did all the coverage, emphasized both "beards and blue jeans" and the presence of a small band of Nazi and other right-wing counter-pickets, and substantially ignored the afternoon speeches and the petition. The Scripps-Howard papers ran an editorial calling SDS "highly suspect." And the now-defunct New York Herald Tribune stated that this "civil rights rally" was a "three-hour demonstration organized at a cost of $100,000"—which happened to be wrong on all three counts: it was an antiwar demonstration, lasted closer to eight hours, and cost SDS perhaps $15,000 at most.”

Publicity of this kind disturbed a good many liberals, for whom marches and pickets were out of place and faintly embarrassing, and a lot of agonizing went on in LID circles. Murray Baron, a management relations consultant, for example, resigned from the LID Board of Directors the following Tuesday in protest over the "picketing Students for D.S."

The following week, realizing the size of the gulf between the two generations, the Board itself voted to establish "dialogues" between SDS and the Student Affairs Committee (Harrington, Kahn, Brooks, Fleischman, and Howe, among others) "to explore, informally and in depth, various issues around which differences have arisen."

One right-wing publicist, Arthur G. McDowell of a Council Against Communist Aggression, circulated a letter, primarily among the most conservative LID members, urging them all to resign, and arguing that:*®

... the Communist apparatus had swung behind your Students for a Democratic (sic) Society ....S.D.S. had been the front for a maximum show

of strength of a (for this project) united Communist turnout and mechanical operation .... The group you sponsor was the cover for a Communist mobilization against the President and Government of the U.S."

In point of fact, the FBI itself had counted only seventy Communists during the whole affair.

It wasn't only the older generation that reacted, however. Through its new publicity SDS was looked upon at college campuses now as the leading group, student or adult, in the burgeoning antiwar movement, and it was also coming to be seen as a major force in what by then had been designated "the New Left" as a whole.

In the weeks following the march the formal national membership increased by perhaps five hundred, until it was over two thousand by the end of the school year. The number of chapters increased to eighty, double the figure of the preceding December.’ Far more important, however, SDSers felt was the "unsigned membership," the people who just began to gravitate toward SDS, attend meetings, and join actions, both previously apolitical youths and a number of articulate and talented people on the fringes of other organizations who now found a place to become involved.

SDS was suddenly the place to go. Once there, nobody paid much attention to signing them up officially—the usual response even of Regional Organizers, whose job it is to increase membership, was to draw up a list of the most active people on any campus and regard them as SDS members whether or not they were ever officially registered on Kissinger's lists back in New York. As Kissinger put it that spring to one of the many reporters then coming around,

"We are, de facto, the largest membership organization on the left [but] we don't stress signing people up. We are not trying to make our organization bigger than any other in the sense of organizational chauvinism [but] in the sense that we have a viewpoint we hope many people will accept."!°

Either way, SDS had arrived.

Another happy effect of the march was a National Council meeting right afterward that Kissinger called "one of the most pleasant and productive in recent SDS history." And why not? Everyone was flush from the unexpected success of the march and when the one hundred delegates got together on Sunday the ideas for what to do next were as plentiful as crumbs in an ERAP kitchen. There were several proposals for working on university reform and establishing "free universities": suggestions that the organization had better turn to its own internal education before it found an unbridgeable chasm between the old guard and the new influx; and recommendations that more blacks be systematically brought in to what was becoming an almost all-white SDS. But most of the suggestions concerned Vietnam.

Kissinger proposed a strategy, quickly known as Kissinger's Kamikaze Plan, of sending SDS teams to military bases and induction centers to leaflet, picket, and otherwise persuade eighteen-year-olds not to register, draftees not to report, and enlisted men not to go on serving—all in violation of the 1917 Espionage Act, but which SDS would justify legally on the basis of the Nuremberg Doctrine. This was hotly debated but in the end turned out to be too strong for most of the campus delegates, and was shunted to a committee with the cautious reminder that "before the Kissinger plan can be put into effect the membership must be polled,"*° something the organization had never done before.

Another proposal—a visit to Hanoi by a left-wing American contingent—was also given over to a committee, an idea that would be implemented in time but by someone else.

Hayden suggested a new Continental Congress—carrying the notion of alternate institutions to its logical extreme-made up of people who "really" represented America to meet in Washington over the summer and establish a new government right in the shadow of the old; that one was too bizarre even to go to a committee and was soon dropped, though it continued to lead an underground life on the left for the next several years.

LID relations were discussed, with Kissinger proposing that SDS sever ties immediately and "get the hell out of New York City"; the NC only mandated Kissinger to "look into the possibility" of a permanent break but it agreed that moving the NO was desirable and authorized a transfer to the more central location of Chicago as soon as quarters could be found.

Finally, Carl Oglesby proposed that a group called RIP (for research, information, and publications) be established to fill in the information gaps of the members, especially with regard to Vietnam; Oglesby himself was hired to put it into operation.

Carl Oglesby at that point was thirty years old, had a wife and three children, and worked as a technical writer for the Bendix Systems Division at $12,000 a year—not what one would call the average SDSer. His roots were working class: his father had been born in South Carolina and had left a patriarchal and unpleasant family life on a farm there to get rich up North, ending up in the rubber mills of Akron, Ohio; there he met Oglesby's mother, up from Alabama, whom he married and later divorced.

Oglesby went through the Akron public school system, winning a national oratory prize in his senior year with a pro-Cold War speech, and went on to Kent State University, a place of surpassing dullness in the early fifties which after three years he forsook for Greenwich Village and a life as an actor and playwright. He lasted a year, returned to Kent State, married, and continued writing: three plays, one produced in a small theater in Dallas and the other two later put on at the University of Michigan, and an unfinished novel. He worked at odd jobs for a while, then at the turn of the decade moved to Ann Arbor to work for Bendix and try to get a degree out of the University of Michigan in his spare time.

Though Hayden, Haber, and the VOICE chapter were then active, Oglesby was far removed from the campus political scene and never came in contact with them. Then in the summer of 1964 he happened to read D. F. Fleming's The Cold War and Its Origins, a skillful revisionist work showing American blame for postwar antagonisms, and the Cold War scales began to fall from his eyes.

That fall he wrote an article on the errors of America's Far East policy that appeared in a campus magazine, the alert antennae of SDS picked it up, and a few SDSers went out to Oglesby's suburban home to see if maybe he would become an SDS ally.

We talked. I got to thinking about things. As a writer, I needed a mode of action ... . I couldn't just grumble and go off to the creative spider-hole and turn out plays. From what SDS said about the Movement, it sounded like a direct way I could deal with things. I had to decide: was I going to be a writer just to be a professional writer, or was I going to write in order to make change? I saw that people were already moving, so I joined up.

The first notion that fall was that Oglesby could help establish a "grassroots theater" for SDS, and he was at work on that when the bombing moved into North Vietnam.

Immediately he became active in SDS's Vietnam work, participating in the Michigan teach-in, writing (with Gitlin) a press release after President Johnson's Johns Hopkins speech on Vietnam that dissected it as designed for "conning Americans," and joining in pre-march organizing. But the National Council after the march was his first national SDS meeting, and he was impressed:

A fantastic experience. For three days there was debate on various subjects, and I was absolutely convinced by each speaker. One would get up and defend a point, and I would be convinced. Then another guy would get up and refute the point so well I thought he was right. One after the other they got better and smarter. It was the first time I had seen debate when it wasn't an ego game. They were really beautiful people. Students! I had no idea until then that young people—anyone—could think so well.

And so Oglesby made the irrevocable decision to join the Movement and become a full-time "RIP" worker for SDS.

On May 8, 1965, the Saturday Evening Post, in a long article on "The Explosive Revival of The Far Left," carried a statement from one Phillip Abbott Luce under the headline, WHY I QUIT THE EXTREME LEFT. Luce, twenty-eight, had been a member of the Progressive Labor Party for more than a year and involved with PL members for more than two.

He had gone to Cuba under PL auspices in the summer of 1963 and had been a member of the executive committee of a PL-led Student Committee for Travel to Cuba, which organized a second trip in the summer of 1964. He had been an organizer of a May 2nd Movement antiwar demonstration in August 1964 in Times Square during which forty-seven people, many from M2M, were arrested. He wrote:

The more members of the Progressive Labor Movement I met [in 1963], the more impressed I became with the group. At first appearance and even later, I was attracted by the apparent openness of the movement.

Here for the first time in my life I met a group of young Americans, many of whom openly called themselves Communists and forcefully preached the need for a revolution to end the evils in the United States .... In addition, nearly all of the members and leaders that I met were young, vital, dynamic and extremely personable. They seemed to have a freshness of approach to political problems and a frankness with each other that I had not seen or heard of in other far-left parties ... .

We set up the national executive committee of M-2-M in such a way that Progressive Labor controlled it from its inception. At present a majority of the national controlling body of 12 are members of P.L. But, as with the Student Committee for Travel to Cuba, most of the P.L. members on the national governing body of M-2-M are kept "secret" members.

We decided last January that M-2-M, although set up as a "radical peace organization" specifically concerning Vietnam, should also join in other campus protests, such as the one that led to the riots at the University of California, in Berkeley. Although emphasis is still laid on the need for American withdrawal from Vietnam, the organizers for M-2-M are now busily trying to stir up student grievances on various campuses including Brooklyn College, Adelphi, Harvard, University of Cincinnati and City College of New York. The agitators claim that since the college administrations are the logical extension of the "power structure" (the Government), every student grievance should be the cause for a student demonstration a la Berkeley ....

The philosophy behind all of this action among students—and actually P.L.'s basic tactic—is to involve students in a direct confrontation with the power structure on any and all levels. Progressive Labor contends that any person can be made into a revolutionary if he is led into a fracas with some authority symbol, especially the police. If he is arrested, or better still, beaten and jailed, the chances are then good that he will begin to hate the police and the court system ....

Luce left PL in February 1965, alarmed, he said, over plans for terrorist activity by PL members, and began a career, familiar from the thirties and forties, of warning people against the very organization he had belonged to. Later that year he was a cooperative witness for the House Un-American Activities Committee, and subsequently wrote a book with help from that committee.

In the weeks after the April march, SDS continued to set itself on an inevitable path away from its old roots, its liberal heritage, its period of reformism.

Early in May it sponsored a meeting at Swarthmore, directed by SDSer Patch Dellinger (son of pacifist David Dellinger), which planned Vietnam antiwar committees which were to spend the summer in a variety of cities doing a rough mix of PREP propaganda work and ERAP community involvement. On May 12 it finally moved out of its New York City office—deliberately symbolic of a departure from the past—and set up headquarters at 1103 East Sixty-third Street in Chicago, just south of the University of Chicago campus in what SDSers made sure to point out was "the Woodlawn ghetto."

On May 21 a number of Chicago-area SDSers and several of the NO participated in an antiwar sit-down in Chicago's Loop, during which forty people were arrested, the first time that SDS leadership was involved in massive civil disobedience against the war (and only the second time, including the Chase Manhattan sit-in, that it was organizationally involved in civil disobedience at all). SDS was even beginning to "name the system," albeit with the humor that it reserved for anything smacking of Old Left rhetoric: in one worklist mailing it ended a discussion of Vietnam and the Dominican Republic with, "Crush imperialism—the life you save may be your own."

The new spirit in SDS was the genie that April 17 let out of the bottle. It was imperfectly formed as yet and it would grow far larger, but it was even then unmistakable.

Confrontations, such as the Washington march, seemed more desirable than committees; action, such as Berkeley represented, seemed more effective than agitation; alienation, such as the ERAPers had come to, seemed more inevitable than allegiance. SDS had spent five years, three of them with all the energy at its disposal, trying, in the old Quaker phrase, to speak truth to power; but power did not listen, power did not change.

SDS had tried to wrest reforms in civil rights, in university governance, in economic distribution, in the inner cities, in the political parties, in the corporate institutions: PREP, ERAP, PEP, the vast literature production, the innumerable conferences, the meetings and seminars, the elaborate convention documents, the civil-rights protests and the anti-bomb marches, and even the march on the capital, all were infused with the belief that radical education and moral actions would change the ways of the system if the system would but heed them.

Now, after the election failures, the civil-rights tokenism, the realignment collapse, the foreign adventurism, and the escalation of the war—among much else—it seemed apparent that this just was not enough. Something more was necessary, and the next three years would be occupied with working out just what.

It is no accident that Carl Oglesby came to occupy a prominent place in SDS just as a new period in its life began. For although he was older and supremely intellectual, his very decision to give up a cushy suburban life for the uncertainties of radicalism portended the kind of commitment, the kind of alienation, the kind of uncompromising fixity, that the coming period of resistance would display. Oglesby was perfectly a man of resistance. In his literary way he expressed his own feeling, and the new spirit of SDS, in a note he wrote to Paul Booth that May:

What gives you hope gives me bitterness—this balmy night, soft spring, sweet air. Life looks so little and death looks so big. You don't misunderstand me. What's worth working for is simply worth working for—on its own present terms, on the face value of what it is. I mean I'm not in the movement like a businessman's in business, waiting for the payoff on the investment. The value of my commitment is not pending anything, the commitment isn't waiting to be ratified by success or refuted by failure. Life is better than death, one sides with life always ... .7° To the barricades!