It was also pretty much of a failure. True, at several exam centers students were impressed enough with the SDS material to get up and walk out entirely, and at campuses where Vietnam activity had been muted—especially in the South, where the SDS-affiliated Southern Student Organizing Committee gave the primary push—reaction was often favorable. But in general students were untouched: they read the SDS exam but they took the SSS one. No large protests took place, no hordes of suddenly awakened students swarmed to join SDS, no significant groups of people were moved to radicalism. Crowning ignominy of all: a press conference called on the steps of the Selective Service building in Washington drew just eight reporters, all local, and another press conference in Chicago drew none at all. Whatever else the exam was, it wasn't news.°

Nor was it especially popular within the wider antiwar movement. Disappointment was frequently expressed with SDS for "copping out" on forging a militant program against the draft. In April Staughton Lynd voiced the feelings of many: "I am puzzled, too. I don't know why SDS decided not to emphasize an antidraft program .... The most obvious and tragic failure of the movement against the war in this last year has been its failure to develop a responsible program against the draft."

The response by the new generation of SDSers to the draft issue was altogether different: spontaneous, local, uncoordinated, growing out of the conditions of individual chapters and universities—and infinitely more successful. The whole notion that university administrations were being used as the handmaidens of the Selective Service through the rank system came as a shock at many campuses, and various local movements were begun to keep the universities from releasing class ranks. At Harvard in February, at Wisconsin in March, at Cornell in April, local committees in which SDSers were prominent sought to block class ranking. Finally in May, just a few days before the exams, disruptions broke out spontaneously at a dozen different schools from Stanford and San Francisco State in the West, through Wayne State and Wisconsin in the Midwest, to City College, Brooklyn, and Columbia in the East. Not just disruptions, but for the first time a widespread adoption of the sit-in technique. The classic confrontation of this type was at the University of Chicago.

It was the SDS chapter at Chicago that initiated the antirank struggle there. The chapter had been a diligent one for the last year or so, under able leaders like Steve Kindred and Brent Kramer, but its membership had increased sharply during the fall of 1965, considerably helped by having around it some of the best SDS hands—not just those in the NO, located not far from the campus, but also junior faculty like sociologist Dick Flacks and historian Jesse Lemisch, and sociology graduate student Bob Ross. It was in early April—two months after the Hershey announcement—that SDS finally decided to make an issue over the question of class rank and university cooperation with the Selective Service System. The issue was a good one, SDSers felt, to awaken and politicize the campus because it could be fought at three different levels: as a protest against the war and the draft system that sustains it ("We feel that now is the time fora ... courageous opposition to an immoral and discriminatory national policy"); as an attack on the university administration for its complicity with the government and the war ("the transformation of this University into a coding and classifying machine for the Selective Service"); and as a principled stand against tainting and distorting the educational process ("To rank is to change a community of scholars into a set of madly competing factions"). The combination was devastating, just as devastating as a similar combination had been at Berkeley a year-and-a-half before: an issue of high moral purpose (civil rights then, the war now), in which the liberal university administration took what could be seen as the side of evil (banning civil-rights organizing, cooperating with the draft), to the detriment of its own students and their free rights, thereby showing up the pernicious character of the university as the servant of a corrupt society. This special mixture of a broad national cause and local, felt grievances would continue to be the hallmark—usually overlooked—of all major student protest throughout the years of the sixties.*

The rest of the scenario at Chicago had familiarities, too. Conventional attempts by students to get the administration to change its policy were met by the official "it's always been that way" and "it's out of our hands"; on April 12, the faculty committee meeting to discuss the ranking issue turned away SDSers who asked to address the group with a curt "You're not welcome here."° A week later SDS decided to start a petition of those who were against ranking, soon signing up some 800 students (out of an 8,500-member student body) and another 20 faculty members. This also was ignored by the administration, which seemed content to play down the whole issue in hopes that its fait would be accompli before too many students noticed. So SDS in some desperation decided to form a single-issue ad hoc committee, to broaden support. Students Against the Rank (SAR) was born at a long and stormy session in front of the administration building on May 4, and at that time the idea of a sit-in was first suggested if the administration refused to change its stand. Seven days later, after continued university footdragging, the suggestion became a reality.

About four hundred people gathered in the rain in front of the administration building on the afternoon of May n and slowly began moving into the building for shelter; by four-thirty, almost quietly and without resistance from administration personnel, the sit-in was accomplished, the administration closed its offices and went home, and the four-story building was in the hands of the students. For the next five days there took place what was later acknowledged to be a memorable and moving experience. The students quickly established their own government, with scrupulous attention to participatory democracy and decisions-by-consensus; areas were set aside for eating, sleeping, studying, and talking; people walked around with the happy sense that they had just taken part in something historic. Paul Booth came over from the National Office to reiterate SDS support, and during the evening telegrams of support began arriving from student groups all around the country. As a later commentator was to write:

Despite the fact that the students were taking a considerable personal risk in challenging the administration, most found themselves having a great time ... It was exciting and fun to get to know each other, to get acquainted and feel close in the unity of the moment. The sit-in was a five-day communal act,

a deeply personal experience for those students involved.°® The wire services were quick to send out reports, and coverage from local radio and television began that first night. The next day the Chicago papers gave the sit-in considerable publicity, with the Chicago Tribune running a long analysis on the front-page and, on the editorial page, predictably blaming "a small minority of students, incited by a handful of experienced revolutionaries." Within days the national media were treating it as if it were another Berkeley.

It is worth pausing a moment to consider a study made of the Chicago antirank protesters, because it is one of the most revealing of such sociological examinations and one of the few to concentrate on SDS. It also shows results similar to other surveys of radical students, suggesting the general validity of its findings. And the fact that it was conducted by Dick Flacks, who could be presumed to have an intimate knowledge of the protesters and a builtin "control," makes it even more reliable.’

The Flacks study reported that the grade average of the protesters was B to B-plus, slightly higher than a random group of nonprotesters, and most came from the top levels of their high-school classes. This is another confirmation of the point that activists in general did not protest their academic environments, in which they were succeeding remarkably well, but rather conditions beyond the university in which they felt the university was culpable. The protesters' families were likely to have high incomes (over $15,000), their fathers were mostly professional men, and their mothers had jobs of their own; individuality within the family, therefore, and a generally democratic (or egalitarian) home life were emphasized.

Their upbringing was, by and large, permissive, and they tended to regard their fathers as lenient—70 percent of the males and 47 percent of the females rated their fathers "lenient" or "soft." The great majority of their grandparents were foreign-born and highly educated; a quarter of the grandmothers attended college. In general they supported the values of their parents—who were further to the left than their adult peers (only 13 percent of the fathers were Republican, against 40 percent of a sample of nonprotesters)—but they were likely to be politically more radical: 97 percent, for example, approved of civil disobedience, but only 57 percent of their fathers did, and 62 percent of them wanted the full socialization of industry, whereas only 23 percent of their fathers did. Nearly half of the sit-inners were Jewish by birth, though most said they themselves had no religion of their own. On a series of attitude tests they scored notably high on romanticism, intellectualism, and humanitarianism, and low on conventionial moralism (i.e., attitudes toward sex, drugs, and the like).

Campus activists of the SDS stripe, in other words, were likely to be among the brightest, most active, most concerned, and well-to-do, the comparative cream of the academic crop.

The Chicago administration, determined not to create "another Berkeley" by calling in the police, decided to just wait it out. It proved to be a shrewd decision, for while it did not diminish the import of the sit-in itself, on campus and elsewhere, it did prevent widespread disruption and student-wide support for the protesters' cause. Gradually, after days of fruitless negotiations with the administration and nights of long participatory-democracy meetings, the sit-inners began to tire. Three days after the initial takeover, when there was no sign their demands were being met, the group agreed to withdraw the bulk of the protesters, as a gesture of its faith in future negotiations, leaving only a token reserve to indicate that the demands were not being forgotten. The administration still would not give in, but a full faculty meeting was scheduled to meet in special session for the first time in the history of the university, and there were signs that a compromise would be reached. On May 16 SAR, heartened, voted to end its occupation completely.

The faculty meeting when it came was, much to SAR's surprise, a total rout for the students. By heavy margins the faculty voted to threaten harsh disciplinary action against future sit-ins or campus disruptions, and to put itself unshirkingly behind the administration policy with regard to ranking. The blow was severe, the students hardly believing that two months of work and negotiations and demonstrations and petitions and letters and arguments had produced not one single concession. But since the end of the school year was at hand, and regroupment was now impossible, there was little recourse. SAR had one last meeting, vowed to continue its fight in the fall, and disappeared into the mists of June.

In the short run, the Chicago sit-in had failed: the administration did not budge from its position, and the faculty supported its stand unhesitatingly. But in the long run the event was to have important repercussions.

In Chicago SAR, with more than a thousand members, was established as a political force among the students, and SDS shared in its glow; when it reactivated its protest the next fall, it was finally successful in getting the university faculty to agree not to give draft boards access to rank figures. At a dozen other universities rank protests were begun in the wake of the Chicago sit-in, among them: an SDS-led sit-in at Roosevelt University (where it was found that one of the trustees was the head of Science Research Associates, the firm that had drawn up the offending exams for SSS), a 50-strong sit-in at Cornell, a 7,000student march and subsequent sit-in at the administration building at Wisconsin, a sit-in and fast at the New York State University branch in New Paltz, a no-member sit-in at Brooklyn College, and a demonstration at CCNY. Protests at San Francisco State led to a unanimous faculty vote to abolish ranking and at two other institutions—Wayne State and Haverford—led to decisions by the administrations to abandon class ranks that spring. And everywhere the issue of the draft became suddenly a legitimate subject of student controversy, which once ignited would continue to send off sparks: whereas the draft occasioned not a single protest in the 1964-65 academic year, by 1967-68 it triggered demonstrations at fully a quarter of American colleges (and nearly half of the large public universities).

More than that. The demonstrations leading on from Chicago put the issue of the draft in the forefront of national issues. Two Presidential commissions were soon established, books were written, conferences were held, and politicians of all stripes came forward with reform proposals. The controversy grew to such proportions that within a year the Selective Service System abandoned both its ranking procedures and the examinations and the government was openly casting about for alternative systems. Among the public at large the connection between the draft and the war, only murkily understood before, was now made clearly, and among both radicals and liberals the idea of draft resistance was given a greater legitimacy.

The two most important consequences, however, the two that were to be integral to the new breed now showing itself in SDS, were the concepts of complicity and of resistance.

Complicity. The rank protests were the first to draw widespread campus attention to the link between universities and the war machine, and to the social and political function universities fulfilled even while styling themselves as ivory towers isolated from political concerns. During this same spring first Viet Report and then Ramparts magazine appeared with issues showing how Michigan State University had been a witting partner of the Central Intelligence Agency in South Vietnam, carrying on various "counterinsurgency" tasks under the guise of impartial academic research; at Ann Arbor at the same time Mike Locker and Jill Hamberg did the research that allowed SDS to show up the activities of a member of the University's Board of Regents who was using his academic position to amass a private fortune; student researchers at a number of colleges began to examine the investment portfolios of their universities, only to find that extensive links with, for example, South African mining interests and Latin American commodity exploiters were common. Gradually, and with some shock, the notion of the independent and beneficent university began to be dispelled, and the extent to which the university was a culpable producer of social ills became clear: it talked of academic freedom but often punished professorial dissidents and stifled any student politics outside of a narrow range; it claimed to foster independent scholarship but was intimately tied to the federal government (mostly defense department) funding for two-thirds of its research work and to corporate and other governmental gifts for most of the remainder; it made much of its role of serving the American people, but tended to keep out blacks, poor people, and women from both the student body and the faculty, while its board of trustees was almost wholly filled with elderly males from mammoth corporations. All this was the beginning of a profound awakening for the New Left.

Resistance. For the first time in its history, SDS, at the University of Chicago, went up directly against a university administration in open confrontation, and if it could not really declare a victory, it certainly suffered no surrender. SDS had successfully taken over the administration building of a major university, it had taken direct action without any punishment, and it had publicized its cause beyond anything imaginable by other, less dramatic, methods. The lesson would not be lost elsewhere, and the sit-in technique? would continue to grow in popularity: whereas there was one disruptive sit-in in 1964 (at Berkeley), and a half dozen in 1966, by 1967-68 it was the chief tactic in protest actions on at least sixty-five campuses, and by then resistance had become commonplace. Nor would the understanding of the weakness of the university be lost. Universities were now seen as vulnerable to confrontation, uncertain of how to deal with protest and disruption, inefficient when they were not simply maladroit, authoritarian when they were not simply ossified.

The realization of complicity on the part of the university, combined with a realization of how readily it could be confronted, was a crucial element in helping to turn attention back to the campus during the rest of the year. The awareness may have been only dim, and surely unconscious, but it was born now, never to be extinguished: the university could stand as a surrogate for the evils in society which it did so much to promote, and a surrogate who could be challenged directly and legitimately by those it had invited within its walls. Campus protest begins now in earnest.

In February 1966 the May 2nd Movement voted itself out of existence. The official reason was that it had done its job: when it was formed, it stated in its official obituary that May, "the existing student organizations represented a variety of unsatisfactory choices for many radicals who wished to take an active part in politics." Now, however, "an anti-imperialist perspective" had taken root, and "Students for a Democratic Society, the independent Committees to End the War in Viet Nam, the Vietnam Day Committees, and other groups have overcome some of the weakness imposed by the liberal-conservative leadership of past movements." To an extent that was true: SDSers like Oglesby and Gitlin had certainly accepted parts of an "imperialist" analysis, at least insofar as it applied to America's behavior overseas, and the kind of militancy that had been part of the M2M style was now fairly commonplace in SDS chapters. But a more telling explanation was simply that M2M's old-style rhetoric, reminiscent of the thirties, had failed to attract many of the new breed; membership was down to six hundred at most. Jeff Gordon, M2M's national coordinator, explained it to SDSers that M2M

.. had more or less atrophied. It had become a cadre organization and often merely recruited the most sophisticated people from the campus and separated them from the dynamic movement. They feel that SDS is a growing organization reflecting the movement and they want to add a new element to the movement by introducing their perspective.

As a consequence, a number of those from M2M immediately joined SDS. Gordon himself applied through the New York Regional Office on February 17, 1966; Sarah Murphy appended an ominous note to his application before she sent it on to the NO: "Note beflowered membership card of one Jeffrey Sheppard Gordon—and think about it."

A warning well given. For in fact the most fundamental reason for the dissolution of M2M was a shift of perspective on the part of the Progressive Labor Party, under whose influence it operated to the end. PL had been faced with real difficulties toward the end of 1965, partly as a result of the conviction of organizer Bill Epton in December on the charges, growing out of that 1964 Harlem uprising, of conspiracy to riot and to overthrow apparently decided to assert a new rigidity, tighten its ranks, reestablish what it called "cadre control," and guide its members and affiliates with a sterner hand. The New Left style that was coming to be associated with the hippies was held to be unpopular with the working masses and denounced as "bourgeois"; marijuana smoking and drinking were discouraged, couples living together were asked to get married, beards and long hair were frowned upon, casual blue-jean attire was renounced. At the same time, the tight rules of the party were reasserted: potential PL members had to undergo a three-month trial period, be approved first by two-thirds of the membership of their local organizations and then reviewed by the national bureaucracy, and agree to forgo membership in "organizations whose policies are objectively counter-revolutionary" or "having a discipline outside the party." Internal discipline was to be rigid: "No party member may make unconstructive statements publicly about the party, gossip about other party members, or disclose confidential information to nonparty members."

Under these circumstances it was felt that a loose and undisciplined student movement like M2M was more of a liability than an asset, and that PL would do better to recruit members from the ranks of such organizations as SDS. Of course few of the new breed emerging on the campuses could be counted upon to be attracted to the old-style discipline and workingclass politics of a group like PL right from the start, but, newly awakened as they were, they were certainly likely material for eventual solicitation. And if the PL "perspective," as Gordon put it, with all its open avowal of communism and asserted militancy, could be put across, PL could draw new adherents gradually and carefully, with far more success than through any youth group of its own. Thus began what later SDSers were to call the invasion of the body-snatchers.

SDS viewed it all dispassionately: "A few Progressive Labor young organizers have recently sent in SDS membership cards," the membership was told in May, "as a result of PL's decision to dissolve the May 2nd Movement and recruit out of SDS (lucky us)."

Another example of the new-breed spirit, with which SDSers at many campuses were involved, was the growing "free university" movement which blossomed in the spring of 1966.2

The roots of the movement go back to the "community of controversy" ideal set out in The Port Huron Statement, Paul Potter's inspired "Cold War and the Universities" paper, and the university-reform groups and meetings which SDS sponsored in 1962 and 1963. In the spring of 1964 a number of Berkeleyites actually began a New School, giving courses in "American History and the Growth of Empire," "Dream Politics and the Cold War," and "Problems of the City in Contemporary America," but that sputtered to a halt during the fall's turmoils. It was not until after the Free Speech Movement's successful sit-in, with their spontaneous seminars on everything in sight, and the teach-ins of the following spring that the idea of a/ternative, rather than merely reformed, universities began to be taken seriously. SDS organized a Free University Committee, under the direction of Rich Horevitz, in the spring of 1965, to push the idea on various campuses, and it was largely through its deliberations that the initial philosophy behind the free university movement was developed.

Then, at the summer convention in Kewadin, several workshops spent long hours wrestling with the notion of what a "free educational atmosphere" would entail and setting out the basic features—open admission, "relevant" courses, unrestrictive curricula, community service, radical development—that future free universities were to adopt. SDS itself chose not to make the creation of free universities a national project—a lucky decision given the chaos that was to befall the NO in 1965—but it encouraged local chapters to "do their own thing" and it endorsed the idea of a "communications net" and campus travelers to maintain contact among those free universities that did develop.

By the fall of 1965, largely under SDS impetus, several free universities were in operation: in Berkeley, SDS reopened the New School largely through the efforts of SDSer Carolyn Craven, offering "Marx and Freud," "A Radical Approach to Science," "Agencies of Social Change and the New Movements"; in Gainesville, a Free University of Florida was established, and even incorporated; in New York, a Free University was begun in Greenwich Village, offering no fewer than forty-four courses ("Marxist Approaches to the Avant-garde Arts," "Ethics and Revolution," "Life in Mainland China Today"); and in Chicago, something called simply The School began with ten courses ("Neighborhood Organization and Nonviolence," "Purposes of Revolution").

By the spring of 1966, the free-university movement was a live force, taking root in perhaps ten different cities. Though it took different shape in different places, it had a common impulse: to demonstrate in a concrete way what a radical and nonestablishmentarian educational experience might be. As a result, there were usually no grades, exams, or other forms of competition between students; anyone could attend (most schools asked only token fees if any at all) and almost anyone could teach; administration, such as it was, was in the hands of the students and the teachers, operating more or less on the theory of participatory democracy, with a premium upon flexibility and openness; no restrictions were put on subject matter (though at a few places, not by any means the majority, right-wing or pro-Establishment courses were discouraged) and the catalogues included numerous courses in Marxism and socialism, community organizing and movement building, Vietnam and the draft, Chinese politics and Latin American exploitation, film making and “guerrilla graphics," contemporary literature and "street poetry," body movement and karate, hippie culture and the student revolt, and even (put-ons, but not by much) "Zen Basketball" (at the San Francisco State Experimental College) and "Paper Airplanes and People" (at the Free University in Seattle). The whole idea, as those who started the Seattle school put it in 1966, was "to establish protest counter-institutions to the unfree universities."

The appeal of the free universities was dual. To those, both students and teachers, who found the normal universities either insufficiently challenging, insufficiently radical, or insufficiently broad, these institutions offered a happy alternative, a kind of place where if the course they wanted wasn't in the curriculum they could always go and teach it themselves; as one of the founders of the San Francisco State Experimental College put it,

We wanted students to take responsibility for their own education instead of having the institution believe it was supposed to meet the needs of students. We wanted it set up so students would come to meet their own needs and come to learn about their whole being, to learn how to think.

And to those who were interested in going beyond educational change to the forging of a wide left movement in the country, free universities seemed to be the perfect training schools; as Carolyn Craven of the San Francisco New School wrote,

There is a vast amount of energy and talent in the Bay Area, and the rest of the country for that matter, among the professionals and intellectuals. There is a vast amount of work that needs to be done for the movement which could be done by these people operating in their own fields. The movement can also give these people the relevance they need in their lives. Hopefully through the New School, the courses and seminars, we will be able to involve and bring together different people and help them to find alternatives in their lives as well as contribute to the movement.

Such was the strength of these appeals that by the end of 1966 perhaps fifteen free universities had been established, several hundred more grew up in the following years, and by 1970 five hundred were estimated to be functioning. Not all of them were great successes—many were short-lived, some fell into the hands of entrepreneurs, others were absorbed into the fringes of existing universities, and a few became dominated by one special interest group or other; however, most of them began as bold embodiments of the idea of resistance to established institutions, and many of them retained that spirit to the end.

One of the most representative of the free universities, which opened with some thirty courses on February 1, 1966, was established on a $300 shoestring by SDSers at the University of Pennsylvania, using unoccupied university classrooms and reform-minded university teachers. Its purpose was to provide courses that were "too contemporary, controversial, broad or narrow to be part of the university curriculum," and its initial offerings included courses in black power, the New Left, contemporary education, and "American Youth in Revolt." Expecting maybe a hundred students to be interested, the organizers were astounded when more than six hundred students signed up for the first term's classes, and soon, without anybody's knowing quite how, the number of courses grew to nearly sixty. By the fall enrollment had jumped to more than a thousand, and both students and teachers started to come from off the campus—dropouts, community people, a couple of disciples of LSD-prophet Timothy Leary. Under the impetus of the free school, students began organizing projects in Philadelphia-area neighborhoods, putting pressure on the university itself for educational reform, and, perhaps most significantly, developing the facts to expose the university's complicity in the governmental war machine through its chemical and biological warfare research center on the campus.

But the Free University of Pennsylvania was a harbinger of the dangers that other free universities were to face. After its first year of operation, a number of the original SDSers graduated and increasing influence fell to the university faculty members, never especially politically advanced despite their interest in educational experimentation. Convinced by its early success that it should expand its operation and curriculum, it decided to cut off its connections with SDS and establish a broad-spectrum steering committee with a disparateness of political views. Enrollment grew further, and the range of courses broadened, but the radical vision and the militant politics which the SDSers had given it diminished; while two-thirds of the courses in the fall of 1966 had been political in content, only half of them were by the spring of 1967. and a bare fifteen percent by the following spring. Finally, the university itself, its eyes finally opened to the obvious appeal and success of the free university, decided to establish seminars of its own to be run along similar lines, and then, in the spring of 1968. moved to have the student government take over the whole operation. By then most of the original organizers, not to mention the original purposes, had gone, radical attention had turned back to the university itself, and FUP suffered its liberal swallow-up almost without a murmur.

Similar fates were to be suffered by other free universities. SDS began to sour on the ventures in early 1967 because, in Carl Davidson's words, they took many of the best people away from the campus, "enabling the existing university to function more smoothly, since the 'troublemakers' were gone," and because "they gave liberal administrators the rhetoric, the analysis, and sometimes the manpower to co-opt their programs and establish elitist forms of 'experimental' colleges inside of, although quarantined from, the existing educational system."’° Liberal student organizations like the NSA came to see that free universities were not threatening alternatives to a beleaguered educational system but, given different organizers and made less political, could become useful agents of reform within it; in the fall of 1968, the NSA was given a Ford Foundation grant of $305,000 to accomplish exactly that.

But the importance of the free-university movement as a vision, especially during its early years, cannot be gainsaid. For in its roots, in its original manifestations, in its early development, it embodied a new and significant notion for the left. The free universities were alternatives to the established order, and opposed to it, independent of (at least some of) the pressures of the surrounding society; those who founded them were not interested in working through the instruments of the society but apart from them, hoping as far as possible to remain untainted by them, trying by forging new shapes to avoid the built-in dangers inherent in even the best of the old. The new universities were part of a whole growing attitude that begins to be expressed now, the attitude that would shortly lead to the establishment of such alternative institutions as the underground papers, Liberation News Service, Newsreel, and the Movement Speakers Bureau; of research organizations like the African Research Group, North American Congress on Latin America, and the Pacific Research Institute; of various theater groups like the Bread and Puppet Theater and the San Francisco Mime Troupe; of local community-organizing groups in various cities, on the ERAP model; of new political groupings like the National Conference for New Politics, the Peace and Freedom Party, and the early Black Panther group in Lowndes County; and such professional organizations as the Medical Committee for Human Rights, Healthpax, and the New University Conference. These all mark the decline of reformism, and the start of revolutionary alternatives.

The influence of Progressive Labor began to be felt within SDS as early as this spring.

Letters from PLers began appearing in SDS material ("There is only one anti-imperialist movement in the world. It is led by the Chinese Communists," etc.!°), and PLers like Jared Israel, at Harvard, Jeff Gordon, in New York, and Earl Silbar, at Roosevelt University in Chicago, played an increasingly visible part in SDS meetings. At the June NC it was the PL position paper on the draft that won the endorsement of the draft workshop. The paper, written by Silbar and Israel, took strong positions against class ranking and student deferments, for the "unconditional withdrawal" of U.S. troops from Vietnam, and for an end to the draft; but its special importance was its advocacy of something that now comes to be called "student power":

SDS, however, was not yet ready to go so far. The NC as a whole rejected the workshop proposal, avoided the question of student deferments, ignored the whole question of student power, and voted down a position for SDS of "No rank, no test, no 2S, no alternate service, no draft, no army, no war." Student power, however, was now in the air, and it had only to bide its time.

The independent SDS-led draft and rank protests and the local SDS-influenced free universities in the spring of 1966 point to a crucial development in the growth of SDS: as the organization gets bigger, its energies are expressed and its political directions are determined more by separate campus chapters than by the NO or the national meetings.

The number of chapters and members continued to grow throughout the spring. By March there were 151 chapters, by June (when 7 were dropped for inactivity but 28 new ones signed on) there were 172. National membership rose to 5,500, and estimates of chapter membership were now being cited as close to 15,000. A survey of the membership—the last one to be done in such detail—showed that in March there were chapters in 37 states, plus the District of Columbia, and members in all the states except Wyoming. Half the members (2,750) were concentrated, as might be expected, in the states with the highest population—California, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Texas—and there were fewer than 10 members in 17 states (Alabama, Alaska, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia).*®

This same survey also determined, in a random sample of 5 percent of the membership, that less than half (40 percent) were registered undergraduates and that they were outnumbered by those who were graduate students or nonstudents (25 and 20 percent, respectively). At the same time, it was learned that fully 10 percent of the members were high-school students. (The status of the remaining 5 percent was unknown.) If the sample can be taken as accurate, it suggests several important developments: first, that in the organization at this point there was a strong influence of nonundergraduates, accounting in part for the lack of interest by SDS in specifically campus problems and in building a student left; second, that SDS influence was reaching down well beyond the college level and beginning to have an effect on the high schools, which were subsequently to become one of the major targets for SDS organizing; and, third, that a sizable group of people who weren't students at all—dropouts, hippies, political professionals (e.g., the PLers), community people, organizers, professors—had grown within the organization. This last development in particular was noted by Paul Booth who, in looking back, believes that the National Council meeting that April was the last one run by students for students—"after that, the nonstudents took over, the pros and the organizers, and the NCs became fights between them."

Too much should not be made of the student-nonstudent dichotomy, for the figures indicate that still some 75 percent or so of the membership operated in university settings. But it is true that, certainly since the Booth regime, there had been a growing campus-off-campus split, with the National Office and national meetings preoccupied with different issues from those of the grassroots membership. The rank protests, held without the slightest push from the NO, and the free universities, largely chapter-created, were two indications. The continued growth of regional organizations, with their own meetings, newsletters, presses, and programs, was another; this spring saw the addition of travelers and offices in the Midwest (Ohio, Indiana, Michigan), the Plain States (Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska), the Niagara Region (upstate New York), the mid-South (Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana), and the Northwest (Oregon, Washington). And the distance in life styles was still another, though less measurable indication—the new college people were the children of pot, LSD, "the Pill," off-campus "marriages," the Beatles, Fanon, Ken Kesey, Godard, long hair and the NO stalwarts were not. One interesting example of this distance occurred in January, when several SDSers at the University of Oklahoma were arrested for possession of a matchboxful of marijuana, and the response of veterans like Steve Max and Clark Kissinger was shock and anger. Max, as a member of the National Administrative Committee, demanded an immediate investigation and urged SDS to outlaw all drugs; Kissinger, at his snidest, rejected the notion that drugs "are a part of the revolution we are fighting for":

Perhaps. Yet while I personally may believe in sodomy, that doesn't mean that I implement the revolution by moving into the staff apartment with my sheep. That is, there are certain little pleasures I am willing to forgo until more important problems are solved (racism, the war, poverty, ... things like that).

The chief instrument by which the NO tried to maintain contact with the growing number of chapters was New Left Notes, a (more or less) weekly newspaper which made its first appearance (with a box on the front-page reading, "SURPRISE!") on January 21, 1966. It was a flimsy, four-page (later occasionally eight- and twelve-) tabloid, pasted up in the back rooms of the NO, never looking the same from one week to another, and regularly in the hands of well-meaning but inexperienced editors; but it had a kind of style to it, a snappiness, an enthusiasm, that made up for its obvious amateurishness. The front-page slogan—as it was to be for the next three years—was the NCUPers "Let the People Decide," and in terms of the paper itself that is exactly how it was edited. Almost any scrap of news, any letter, any essay or comment that came into the paper found its way into print: Hayden on his trip to North Vietnam, Cesar Chavez on the grape strike, Oglesby working out a theory of American "imperialism," Flacks worrying about "Whatever Became of the New Left?," and a variety of anonymous chapter people sending in reports on their latest actions, complaints about how meetings were run, paeans to the eye-opening quality of the New Left, and proposals for this or that future action. For SDS, and a movement that had very few other means of communication—Liberation magazine, a monthly, the National Guardian, a weekly but with other concerns as well, a few newsletters—New Left Notes was, for all its formlessness, sort of a weekly SDS convention, an invaluable and unduplicatable forum.

Aside from those who complained about always getting it three weeks late, the only criticism making the rounds in those early days was that the name sounded like another rock group.

But a newspaper, however much energy was put into it—and the NO devoted top priority to it throughout the spring—could not bridge the gap. The NO, which had thought itself the tip of the SDS iceberg, found itself more of a floe instead, drifting off alone on its own currents while the main body went elsewhere. Its ballot mailings produced apathetic responses from the field, sometimes no more than a tenth of the membership bothering to vote; a referendum of the National Council on whether SDS should issue a statement of support for the Russian writers Sinyavsky and Daniel jailed by the Soviet government drew only twenty responses out of several hundred eligible (the vote was favorable, the statement sent). Its programs—such as the idea of a "national town meeting" to discuss Vietnam during the summer, passed by the April NC, or actions against South Africa, passed by the June NClanguished and eventually withered for a lack of nutrition from the ranks. Its projects, when they did emerge, were not sustained—an SDS Labor Newsletter, which the April NC authorized in a move to further an alliance of students and the labor movement, was edited for one issue by Lee Webb and then put in the hands of an SDS labor-support group in Boston, where it promptly died. Its all-out, last-ditch, "emergency fund-raising campaign," launched in April with the goal of producing a quick $10,000, produced all of $400 when it was abandoned in May: 268 individuals and 16 chapters had responded.

The financial crunch, in fact, was quite serious. Income, which had started out at around $9,000 a month in January, had dropped to under $1,000 by June. The debts mounted: SDS was $1,750 in the hole in January, $2,500 by March, $5,000 by June. The April NC doubled the national dues to $4 a year. New Left Notes carried repeated warnings ("The picture is very bleak," "Things are desperate," "We are broke"), and a series of people from Judy Kissinger (Clark's wife) to Paul LeBlanc and Booth himself devoted considerable energy to bookkeeping and fund raising, but the slow descent continued. As one economy (not to mention sanity) measure, the NO gave up its staff apartment, although it then found it had to increase staff salaries to $30 a week so people could rent their own places. As another, the NO decided to move downtown, to 1608 West Madison Street on Chicago's crumbling, freeway-sliced West Side, where it was given a cheap second-floor office in a downtrodden building (over whose front door was chiseled, no one knew why, "Lomax") in a ragtaggle ghetto; the landlord was John Rossen, a one-time Communist Party functionary who owned a series of movie houses in the Chicago area and who still maintained a lively interest in the left. At the end of the school year, SDS had managed another of those penny-for-penny budgets, and the organizational head was only a little above the fiscal waters.

One of the reasons for the money shortage was, of course, that the LID tax shelter was no longer available; contributions dropped sharply after the break (from $7,067 in November to $895 in March). But another reason was the reluctance of many big givers to get involved with an organization that was now under the watchful eye of the FBI and publicly denounced by J. Edgar Hoover himself. In a statement that February, Hoover said:

One of the most militant organizations now engaged in activities protesting U.S. foreign policy is a student youth group called Students for a Democratic Society. Communists are actively promoting and participating in the activities of this organization, which is self-described as a group of liberals and radicals.

Hence, though Katzenbach had said nothing further about Justice Department action against SDS, the FBI went right ahead, launching a full-scale investigation. Agents made themselves known around the NO—SDS responded by advertising in New Left Notes for someone to "debug" the office telephones—and old friends and employers of such SDS leaders as Booth and Hayden were visited by agents. Students were secretly solicited to work as FBI undercover agents infiltrating SDS chapters, presumably a widespread activity but well documented in at least three cases: William Divale has told how he was recruited to be an FBI agent at Pasadena City College and was instrumental in forming an unrecognized but successful SDS chapter there in the spring of 1966; Gerald Wayne Kirk told the House Internal Security Committee in 1969 how he had worked for the FBI within the SDS chapter at the University of Chicago from the fall of 1965 on; and Tommy Taft has written how he spied on antiwar elements at Duke University for the FBI from the spring of 1965 at least to the spring of 1966. Other agents approached college deans for SDS chapter membership lists, a practice which was widespread enough to come to the attention of Tom Kahn, who reported it to Booth in Chicago. And when the student government at Wesleyan College protested these kinds of tactics. Hoover wrote, and made public, an unusual, indignant letter of justification:

The Attorney General stated publicly in October, 1965, that he had instructed the FBI to determine the extent of Communist infiltration into the Students for a Democratic Society, which was establishing chapters throughout the United States .... These objectively, truthfully and impartially to determine the facts ....

Never was any attempt made to intimidate any student or official of the university. To say so is a misrepresentation of the matter. Your statement that the "FBI investigation is extremely hostile to the goal of academic freedom" is not only utterly false but is also so irresponsible as to cast doubt on the quality of academic reasoning or the motivation behind it.

Nor was the FBI alone. At the same time the U.S. Army's domestic intelligence agency, known as Continental United States Intelligence, or Conus Intel, was beginning secretly to send its agents to college campuses and collect papers and clippings on student activists.

On top of the financial crisis and the witch-hunting came a psychological blow. It is somehow symbolic that it was at this time that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, now with Stokely Carmichael as its spokesman, announced a new policy of "black power" that specifically sought to exclude whites from organizing in the black communities. It was the official pronouncement of the death of the dream, which of course was known to be dying, of multiracial organizing in multiracial communities for multiracial justice. And with it the generation of SDS leadership that had grown up inextricably entwined with SNCC and the civil-rights movement, the generation that had launched ERAP as the dramatic catalyst to an "interracial movement of the poor," the generation that had achieved its political consciousness through integration, found its past, like a rug in an old vaudeville routine, ripped from under its feet. Not that it came, really, as a surpriseCarmichael had been pushing the black-power idea for more than a year, and the ERAP experiences pointed in the same direction—but it was still, if only symbolically, a blow. SDS of course supported SNCC officially, and at a time when the liberal and media reaction was one of shock and outrage; the June NC went on record as feeling

.. a special urgency to restate our support. Let it be clear that we are not merely supporting SNCC's right to its views, we are welcoming and supporting the thrust of SNCC's program .... We must not simply to/erate this "black consciousness," we should encourage it.

But few of the old guard had any doubts that they were seeing the end of an era.

All of this produced what Dick Flacks, in New Left Notes, called "the malaise at the national level," and a renewed leadership crisis was inevitable. Booth was a lonely and frustrated figure, trying to move an elephantine organization in a direction it did not want to go. He did nothing to increase his popularity when he gave an Associated Press reporter (duly printed by the AP) the impression that SDS was solidly behind the election-oriented National Conference for New Politics and "already at work" for such candidates as Robert Scheer, running in the Democratic primary in California.” In point of fact, SDS had never gone on record in support of the NCNP and Berkeley SDSers, in general soured on electoral politics and specifically down on the Democratic Party, had not lifted a finger for Scheer; Berkeley SDSer Buddy Stein was so outraged that in March he called for Booth's resignation: "Your continuance in office means that you will preside over the dissolution of democracy in Students for a Democratic Society." The battle never came to a head, largely because Booth's term was to be up in June, but the NAC, in an unprecedented move, reflected the growing disenchantment by directly forbidding Booth to go to the NCNP meeting in May.

Booth grew weary, then disgusted; the lack of impact of the Vietnam Draft Exam, on which he had worked so hard, left him further disheartened. Friends describe him at the end of the spring as being "totally burnt out"; to one of them he confessed that he was considering psychotherapy.”?

Finding someone to replace him, however, proved no easy task. Appeals for a successor in New Left Notes and in private correspondence produced no takers, and the April NC, specifically charged with finding a replacement, spent the whole weekend without turning up a single volunteer. Finally, at the June NC, Jane Adams, the Southern Illinois graduate and SNCC staffer who had already worked in the National Office and who had spent the last term organizing in the Iowa area, agreed to serve as a temporary National Secretary until the convention—which was to be held this year, for a change, at the end of the summer rather than the beginning. Her selection—the first time a woman occupied a top spot in the SDS hierarchy—and a crop of new people she brought in with her provided manifest proof that a new generation of leadership was coming to the fore in SDS to represent the new breed now dominant.