Spring 1967

Spring 1967

On a Saturday afternoon in the middle of February 1967 Greg Calvert addressed some three hundred scholars and activists gathered in Princeton University's McCosh Hall for the first regional conference of the Radical Education Project. His speech, which had been hammered out with a number of the top SDS people over previous weeks and which Calvert had stayed up all night to polish, represented the conclusions of the new generation of SDS after six months in power. "It is said," Calvert began,

that when the Guatemalan guerrillas enter a new village, they do not talk about the "anti-imperialist struggle" nor do they give lessons on dialectical materialism—neither do they distribute copies of the "Communist Manifesto" or of Chairman Mao's "On Contradiction." What they do is gather together the people of the village in the center of the village and then, one by one, the guerrillas rise and talk to the villagers about their own lives: about how they see themselves and how they came to be who they are, about their deepest longings and the things they've striven for and hoped for, about the way in which their deepest longings were frustrated by the society in which they lived.

Then the guerrillas encourage the villagers to talk about their lives. And then a marvelous thing begins to happen. People who thought that their deepest problems and frustrations were their individual problems discover that their problems and longings are all the same—that no one man is any different than the others. That, in Sartre's phrase, "In each man there is all of man." And, finally, in the struggle to destroy the conditions of their common oppression.

That, it seems to me, is what we are about.

Then, turning to the contemporary American scene, Calvert scornfully dismissed the theory, advanced by Old Left journalist Max Gordon the night before, that the desire for material goods was the impulse behind revolutionary movements. On the contrary, he said,

there is only one impulse, one dynamic which can create and sustain an authentic revolutionary movement. The revolutionary struggle is always and always must be a struggle for freedom. No individual, no group, no class is genuinely engaged in a revolutionary movement unless their struggle is a struggle for their own liberation.

And then, the crucial distinction:

The liberal reformist is always engaged in "fighting someone else's battles." His struggle is involved in relieving the tension produced by the contradictions between his own existence and life-style, his self-image, and the conditions of existence and life-style of those who do not share his privileged, unearned status ....

The liberal does not speak comfortably of "freedom" or "liberation," but rather of justice and social amelioration. He does not sense himself to be unfree. He does not face the contradictions between his own human potential, his humanity, and the oppressive society in which he participates. To deal with the reality of his own unfreedom would require a shattering re-evaluation of his subjective life-experience.

Liberal consciousness is conscience translated into action for others ... .

Radical or revolutionary consciousness ... . is the perception of oneself as unfree, as oppressed—and finally it is the discovery of oneself as one of the oppressed who must unite to transform the objective conditions of their existence in order to resolve the contradiction between potentiality and actuality. Revolutionary consciousness leads to the struggle for one's own freedom in unity with others who share the burden of oppression ... . Our primary task at this stage of development is the encouragement or building of revolutionary consciousness, of consciousness of the conditions of unfreedom.

It may have seemed a very ordinary perception, this distinction between liberal and radical, but it was not. It was a sharp pinpointing of where the Movement, and SDS, had come to"the struggle for one's own freedom"—as a result of having been told by Black Power to consider their own problems, having been led by student syndicalism to a concern with the student's own power, and having finally seen in draft resistance the potential of young men acting out of their own oppression. It was also a profound realization of where the Movement and SDS were heading—a "unity with others who share the burden of repression"—in the move to create a community of identity beyond selfishness, a sense of mutual need, a "revolutionary consciousness." Carl Davidson a year later was to call the Calvert speech "a fundamental principal [sic] for the white new left," and he added, "No one can understand the new left unless he grasps the dynamic of Calvert's argument." For the next year SDS would live out the implications of this new dynamic, as it moved consciously now from protest to resistance.

Draft resistance depended ultimately upon young men making both a personal and a political decision of the kind that Calvert described. It meant first a "perception of oneself as unfree" and a willingness to act on that perception by declaring public opposition to the draft, giving up the 2-S sanctuary, refusing the consequent induction, and then facing the real possibility of jail or exile. It then meant forging "a unity with others” by writing, speaking, leafleting, organizing. It was, in many ways, the perfect radical process.

In January New Left Notes published an article that was as instrumental as any other single item in promoting this process. Peter Henig, who had been researching the draft for REP in Ann Arbor, came across a Selective Service document that told with embarrassing clarity just what the purpose of the Selective Service System was:

Delivery of manpower for induction, the process of providing a few thousand men with transportation to a reception center, is not much of an administrative or financial challenge. It is in dealing with the other millions of registrants that the System is heavily occupied, developing more effective human beings in the national interest.

Chief among them are college students, and the document makes it clear that they are allowed to defer military service only as long as they seem likely to prove themselves useful—in the national interest, of course, not their own—in some other way. To channel them in these useful directions, constant pressure is necessary:

Throughout his career as a student, the pressure—the threat of loss of deferment—continues. It continues with equal intensity after graduation. His local board requires periodic reports to find out what he is up to. He is impelled to pursue his skill rather than embark upon some less important enterprise and is encouraged to apply his skill in an essential activity in the national interest. The loss of deferred status is the consequence for the individual who acquired the skill and either does not use it or uses it in a non-essential activity.

The psychology of granting wide choice under pressure to take action is the American or indirect way of achieving what is done by direction in foreign countries where choice is not permitted.

At last, "the American way" laid bare. It was, as Greg Calvert later noted, "at least in SDS the first time anybody had bothered to read the material that came out of the Selective Service System," and it was a bombshell on the college campuses. The general response, as SDS printed it on a very successful button, was: NOT WITH MY LIFE YOU DON'T

In the first months of 1967 fledgling draft-resistance groups were started at several campuses, most notably at Wisconsin, Berkeley, and Cornell, where the groundwork had been laid as early as the previous fall. The existence of the Cornell group was largely due to former SDS regional traveler and chapter founder Tom Bell, who had now dropped out of school to work full time on draft organizing, and SDSers were prominent elsewhere as well.

By March, according to Jeff Segal, then out on bail from his draft sentence and acting as SDS's national draft coordinator, there were maybe twenty-five groups on college campuses. At the same time there had sprung up parallel "We Won't Go" groups of men who pledged themselves to refuse service in Vietnam (though not necessarily refusing service elsewhere or resisting the draft in toto), and who usually announced themselves in bold advertisements in the college papers. As the spring wore on, 350 students in the New England area signed such statements, some 300 at Stanford, 391 at Cornell, 150 at Wisconsin, 126 in Milwaukee, no in Portland, and 257 at various medical schools, plus smaller groups at campuses from Queens to San Francisco State.*

The role of SDS in all this was mixed. SDS was not the shaper and shaker of the draftresistance movement as clearly as it had been, for example, of ghetto organizing, the initial war protests, or campus protest. Primarily this was because draft-resistance organizing was basically so intimate a process, depending upon face-to-face conversations and a sense of close-knit community in the face of imminent danger, that no national organization, not even one as devoted to decentralization as SDS, could have molded it. But it was also true that SDS, coming in late as it did, found that much of the seedwork had been done, so that where it was successful this spring was largely in those areas where it ' joined with existing groups or previously committed individuals. Moreover, the enthusiasm for draft resistance as expressed in Berkeley turned out not to be universally shared among the membership and less than half the chapters chose to swing themselves over from student power or complicity campaigns to draft work." And on top of it all, as the National Office underlings had predicted in Berkeley, the Chicago office had its hands full already with all the other operations of a large and growing organization.

“ The line was taken from a Grade-B film running at the time, Not With My Wife You Don't. But what a difference.

But it is safe to say that without the impetus from SDS as a national organization, and especially from individual SDSers working on their own with all the skills they had learned from other political work, draft resistance would never have reached the proportions that it did. After initial uncertainty as to how to follow out the Berkeley resolution, the National Office began to devote considerable energy to general support and propaganda for the draft movement. Calvert and Davidson both made extensive tours on campuses pushing their conviction that the time had come to move from protest to resistance and urging draft refusal as one of those ways. Calvert, particularly, who had been in on the earliest days of draft refusal and who, despite the safety of his age (then twenty-nine), had returned his draft card to his local board with a statement that he wanted to "resign from your system,"” was an influential force: he played a pivotal role at a wide-spectrum student conference in February that ended up with a group of organizations from the Young Americans for Freedom to the DuBois Clubs supporting a surprisingly strong antidraft position, and he added his personal testament by joining a group of SDSers at his old Iowa State campus who chained the wheels and blocked the path of a bus carrying men for induction. The NO put out two buttons with wide popularity on the campuses—NOT WITH MY LIFE YOU DON'T and one reading simply RESIST—and cranked up the printing presses to grind out five thousand copies of the Berkeley resolution and ten thousand copies of the old "Guide to Conscientious Objection." New Left Notes periodically ran a column of news and suggestions called "On the Draft," and on March 27 devoted a special twelve-page issue entirely to draft resistance and "We Won't Go" strategies which eventually sold ten thousand copies. In addition to Segal, who worked out of the National Office with considerable help from Assistant National Secretary Dee Jacobsen, SDS had eight full-time draft organizers: Levi Kingston, Doug Norberg, and Mark Kleiman in California, Morty Miller in New England, Bob Pardun in Texas-Oklahoma, Mark Harris at Antioch, Tom Bell in Ithaca, and Mendy Samstein in New York (though only the first five got NO salaries, of up to $30 a week, and then only sporadically). All of this was important in helping to crystallize those organizations which had been only tentatively formed before, and in pushing the idea of draft refusal to the foreground of student politics, where it was to stand for months as the touchstone of radicalism.

And it was SDSers who were largely responsible for the most propelling antidraft action of the spring, the mass draft-card burning in New York City during the April 15 Spring Moratorium. This was planned and led by the people around the Cornell draft-resistance group, inspired by SDSer Bruce Denis’s draft-card destruction in December, who argued that "powerful resistance is now demanded: radical, illegal, unpleasant, sustained," and issued a call in early March for five hundred people to join them in a mass "burn-in." As April 15 approached, however, it seemed that no more than fifty or sixty people could be found to declare their commitment: this explicit move from protest to resistance was condemned by many "moderate" groups, denounced even by the Spring Mobilization's steering committee, and feared by many young men who were otherwise actively against the war. The Cornell group, nervous and fearful, but determined now, vowed to go ahead anyway.

Just before the mass march was to begin in the late morning of April 15, several hundred people crowded onto a large knoll in Central Park's Sheep Meadow. A few people tried to speak above the excited hubbub, there was a song or two, and then as the first hesitant matches touched the first small cards in the center of the crowd a gasp and then a cheer went up, dissolving into a steady chant of "Re-sist, Re-sist, Re-sist." Twenty cards were aflame, then fifty, and soon men began pushing in from the fringes holding their cards above the waiting matches, cigarette lighters, and a flaming coffee can. Before it was over more than a hundred and fifty people—no one knows for sure since no one bothered to keep close count and the FBI and New York Red Squad agents made a quick scramble for the scraps—had put their lives "on the line" for their politics.” One of them, Martin Jezer, felt, he said, that "not to have burned a draft card on April 15 would have been tantamount to living in Boston in 1773 and not to have dropped tea in Boston harbor." It was an important symbolic moment for the antidraft movement. Combined with the beginnings of the West Coast group called Resistance, which was launched this same day with a call for the mass turn-in of draft cards in the fall, this was to reverberate throughout ivied halls around the country. New York Times columnist Tom Wicker was not alone in calling up visions of what the future might hold:

If the Johnson Administration had to prosecute 100,000 Americans in order to maintain its authority, its real power to pursue the Vietnamese war or any other policy would be crippled if not destroyed. It would then be faced not with dissent, but with civil disobedience on a scale amounting to revolt.

By the beginning of summer, there was no doubt that on the draft front at least, resistance had begun. According to Jeff Segal and Martin Jezer, some sixty antidraft unions had been established by June and at least two thousand men had signed "We Won't Go" statements." Other national groups—the DuBois Clubs, the Student Mobilization Committee, the Southern Students Organizing Committee—adopted draft-resistance programs; and several local organizations—the Boston Draft Resistance Group, New England Resist, CADRE (Chicago Area Draft Resistance), the Draft Denial in New York City—had sprung up to launch successful drives on a regional level. No one knows for sure how many young men were affected, but the Justice Department announced that it had just finished prosecuting 1,335 draft cases in the fiscal year ending July 1, up from 663 in the previous fiscal year, and the figure would continue to mount. By now, in Staughton Lynd's words, "draft resistance was a cutting edge or growing point for the Movement as a whole."

Student protests in the spring of 1967 were another expression of the Calvertian "struggle for one's own freedom in unity with others who share the burden of oppression." This was not new—it had been embodied in the student power drive for several months now—but the feeling that the struggle was moving to a higher stage certainly was. Jack Smith, during a long profile of SDS for the Guardian, wrote that "virtually the entire leadership and most SDS activists to whom this reporter spoke maintain that ' a broad movement can be developed based on a radical rejection of American life and culture and on resistance to the demands of society." Calvert and Davidson, who between them visited more than a hundred campuses that spring, were heady with the success they found in reaching the students.

Davidson, describing for Smith the "Guatemala guerrilla" approach he used with students, said, "You'd be astonished at the reception this gets, when people realize that they aren't alone, that the failures and the problems they ascribed to themselves stem in large part from the society in which they live and the images of themselves they accepted from society." And Calvert even saw "an indigenous revolt"—though as yet "impotent, personalized or evidenced by apathy"—among the young, a great many of whom, he felt, were "turned off on America." SDS's job was simply to perfect this process:

For SDS, organizing people, in one sense, is detaching them from the American reality. When we break them out of that reality, that America, they begin to see their own lives, and America, in a new way .... The process, really, is to allow the real person to confront the real America.

Increasingly students, like draft resisters, having done with protest and negotiation, were "confronting the real America" and putting resistance into practice. By May, in a long frontpage dispatch on student radicalism. The New York Times could say flatly: "The spirit of resistance and direct action constitutes perhaps the major attitude in the New Left today."

Resistance at Cornell (January 20): when the local district attorney tried to confiscate copies of the student literary magazine, he was met by an angry crowd of two thousand students who sold the magazine in open defiance of his authority; and when five students were arrested, they surrounded the police car and forced the DA to give up his prisoners.

Resistance at Penn State (February 10): thirty-five SDSers began a three-day sit-in at the office of the president until he agreed to answer SDS's questions about university policy with regard to releasing student organization lists to the House Internal Security Committee. Resistance at the University of Wisconsin (February 27): eleven students were arrested for disrupting the recruiting efforts of a Dow Chemical Company representative, and several hundred others sat in at the administration building until the university president agreed to post a $1,200 bond out of his own pocket for the arrested students and to call a faculty meeting to reconsider the university's blanket policy of open recruiting.

Resistance at Columbia (March 13): a student strike was threatened if the administration did not abide by a student referendum that had voted 1,333 to 563 against giving class ranks to the Selective Service, and, under pressure, the University Council voted two to one to go along with the student wishes. Resistance at the New School for Social Research (April 13): an antiwar strike organized by SDS succeeded in keeping some 65 percent of the thirteen thousand students from attending classes, and angry students shouted both New School President John Everett and Senator Eugene McCarthy off stage that night when the two of them tried to circumvent the strike. Resistance at conservative Los Angeles City College (May 30): four hundred students defied a college ruling and the threats of administrators to hear Carl Davidson and student speakers talk about student power, free speech on campus, SDS organizing, and the Vietnam war—and, with unheard-of boldness, twenty-five of them afterward marched on to the deans' offices to protest the threats.

Resistance at the black colleges and universities: at Howard University (March 21), students prevented SSS director Lewis Hershey from propagandizing on stage and defied the administration when it tried to crack down; at Texas State, Jackson State, and Fisk University (May), student protests led to the invasion of local police, attacks by the police on the students, and, at Texas State, the killing of one policeman, presumably from a ricochet. And resistance even in DeKalb, Illinois (February 17-19), where SDS's Midwestern Regional Conference that spring ended with a feeling, according to Bill Murphy of the Northeastern Illinois University SDS,

.. that we are emerging from a period of disenchantment, of near despair, of disorganization, of relative inactivity. We have entered into a new spirit centered around the themes that ran thru the conference—namely: that we in SDS—involved in the radical movement—are participating in DEAD SERIOUS BUSINESS. We must open our eyes to the fact that resistance in one area is not enough. Our resistances must be total and absolute. This must lead to a revolution unlike any other in history. It cannot be solely political; it must be all encompassing—starting from within our own hearts and proceeding outward and upward.

Resistance, clearly, was on the rise. And yet, though the scale of student protests escalated, the issues, on balance, remained the same. At many campuses student-power issues (parietal rules, curriculum complaints, arbitrary administrative authority) ignited protests; SDSers at a number of campuses (notably Cornell, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Princeton, Queens, and even Virginia's staid Old Dominion College) turned these into clearly political struggles. On a few campuses (Colorado, Iowa State, Indiana, Michigan, Michigan State, Northwestern, Stanford, and Wisconsin), SDSers and other self-named "radical" candidates won student government presidencies and used them to raise political demands. The war continued to generate some protests as an issue by itself (especially at Columbia, Florida, San Fernando Valley State, Stanford, and Texas), usually when a local politico, an administration figure, or one of the White House apologists appeared in public to proclaim its virtues.

But by far the greatest number of protests continued to center on the issue of complicity.

There were referenda and demonstrations against the draft and the still persistent practice of class ranking (Columbia, Cornell, CUNY, Howard, Iowa State, San Francisco State, Stanford); protests against secret military research and big-business interference in university affairs (Chicago, Columbia, New York University, Pennsylvania, and Stanford); and sit-ins, pickets, and disruptions of recruiters from Dow, the CIA, and the armed forces (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Iowa, Iowa State, Missouri, Nebraska, New Paltz, Northern Illinois University, Old Dominion, Pomona, San Francisco State, Toledo, UCLA, and Wisconsin). As the role of the universities became clearer with each passing month, the extent of their intertwining with the worst of America became similarly clear. And though there was little opportunity to protest it, the complicity anger was not diminished with the revelations that many college administrators were working on behalf of the FBI to spy on and send regular reports about students who were active in political affairs. In Berkeley during this spring the admissions officer admitted that in "three or four cases in the last few months" student records were given to the FBI; at Brigham Young University the president acknowledged that he had recruited students to spy on eight professors whom he regarded as too liberal, six of whom were forced to resign; at Duke University the administration admitted to compiling dossiers on the political views and social habits of each of its students, some of which found their way into FBI hands; at the coolest of all imaginable hotbeds. New York State College at Brockport, one administrator affirmed that there were no fewer than five people on the campus "in regular contact with the FBI" and said "surveillance work is occurring on every campus in the country"!!; and documented evidence indicated that at least six other universities—Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Ohio State, Michigan State, and Texas—collaborated with the FBI. All this, as many students realized, could only be the visible tip of the clandestine iceberg.

The complicity protests were for the most part local responses to national troubles, but insofar as they had any coherent national character it was due to SDS. There was almost no attention paid by the national media—the best, albeit accidental, source for coordinating national actions—and what there was tended to treat all campus disruptions as essentially about local educational issues. It was left to New Left Notes, and the regional travelers and chapter activists who learned from it, to spread the word. Though the circulation was only a little over five thousand at the time, careful work by editor Cathy Wilkerson, a Swarthmore SDSer who joined the NO in December, and cooperation from various campus correspondents made it into an effective coordinator of the whys and hows of complicity protests. During the spring it printed several exposures by diligent campus sleuths of ongoing projects where universities were involved with the government: "Project Themis," a $20-million program using fifty universities (out of 171 which wanted the job) for research relating to overseas "defense missions"; the Institute for Defense Analysis, a Department of Defense offspring linking twelve major universities in a $15-million-a-year program of classified (predominantly military) research; and a network of thirty-eight universities or university-connected institutions working on chemical and biological warfare. In addition, the paper gave steady coverage to complicity protests, giving the details of organization and follow-through, the assessments of victory, and, perhaps most important, the honest confessions of defeat, with the addenda of how to do better next time.

The unquestionable escalation in campus protests in the early months of 1967 was aided considerably by the reports by Harrison Salisbury of massive U.S. bombing of civilian targets in North Vietnam and the scalawaggery of the United States Congress in refusing to seat the duly-elected Harlem Representative, Adam Clayton Powell. But nothing shook the student world so much as the exposure of the National Student Association. On February 13, in advance of a story it was running on the NSA, Ramparts magazine took a full-page ad in several major papers to declare that it had uncovered information that NSA was funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. Ever since 1952, it seems—though more probably even since NSA's founding in 1948—the CIA had been paying substantial portions of the NSA budget, controlling its top positions, influencing its policies, recruiting its members into the spy business, and using the organization to promote its Cold War policies both within the country and in student affairs abroad. The handsome NSA building in Washington, the $500,000-or-so yearly budget, the delegations to this or that youth festival, the annual meetings—all had been provided by the CIA, and all with the knowledge and cooperation of most of the students who had been top NSA officials.

To most students, the news was a penetrating shock. Those who had dealt with NSA in any proximity, of course, had long suspected "funny money" somewhere—Tom Hayden, for example, knew that things weren't entirely above board when a lengthy civil-rights memorandum which NSA had hired him to write in 1961 somehow just never got printed; both Paul Booth and Paul Potter (NSA vice president in 1961-62, but never let in on the big secret) felt something was fishy when they were on the target end of mysteriously spontaneous red-baiting campaigns by NSA officials; and as SDS began to grow in the mid-sixties, a number of people starving their way through the NO had begun to wonder how an organization without even a campus constituency (NSA represents official student governments, not students) could keep going for so long, so lavishly. But most students had accepted the myth that NSA was pure and idealistic and believed that an American government would never stoop so low as to manipulate some of its own students to deceive the rest, and for them the revelations hit with special force.

SDS chapters were quick to circulate the news and hold meetings on its implications, often tying it in with past or impending visits from CIA recruiters. Nick Egleson, in announcing to the press SDS's disaffiliation from another CIA student front, the United States Youth Council (of which it had been a nominal member but was a year and a half in arrears in its dues), attacked CIA activities as "just one facet of a larger problem: the involvement of the government and the military in all aspects of American educational life."

Not only must the CIA be uprooted from student organizations; the time has come to separate education from the military, learning from the processes of government. Secret military research in our universities not only compromises the integrity of our scientists and scholars, but also perverts the real education tasks of those institutions.

Ironically, another "moderate" student organization, the Campus Americans for Democratic Action, was going through its own troubles just at the same time. CADA, under chairman Claudia Dreifus (an SDSer at NYU in the early days), had split from the parent ADA over the latter's centrist and stuffy ways, but found itself isolated and crushed in the resulting melee.

In February it disbanded. More ironically still, CADA and the NSA had been hatching grand plans for a "moderate left" national student organization that would rival and, they hoped, supplant SDS. With those two organizations in shambles, SDS, scruffy and long-haired though it may have been, seemed a white knight by comparison.

n the spring of 1967 the Progressive Labor Party suffered a serious lesion as a result of a dispute over the "Road to Revolution II" statement adopted the preceding fall and published in the February-March issue of its magazine, PL. Several PL groups on the West Coast, where the party had acquired an early strength among older leftists dissatisfied with the Communist Party, objected to both the manner by which it had been adopted and several key points it made. The statement, they pointed out, had not been fully debated within the party, had been published without the requisite "prior discussion" with local party groups, and had been approved by the party's National Committee only after it had appeared; one National Committee member who had expressed disapproval had been suspended. More serious than that, the statement's attacks on the "revisionist" Vietnamese put the party in opposition to one of the most dynamic forces for revolutionary change in the world and in isolation from virtually every other Marxist-Leninist party in existence. The Washington State PL group independently published newsletters in opposition to the statement, whereupon its chairman, Clayton Van Lydegraf, was expelled from the party by the New York leaders, and he left, taking several people out with him; the California PL group also raised objections, and some fifteen to twenty of its members were subsequently expelled or chose to disaffiliate. At the same time a group of PLers in Canada, many in the Vancouver area, began complaining about the leadership of Milt Rosen—one of them, Jack Scott, was suspicious about his "apparently unlimited source of funds"’® from Georgia land and Texas oil (this last a reference to Albert Maher)—and about what they regarded as the highhanded dealings of Phil Taylor, one of Rosen's chief operatives in Canada.

The result of this was more than just another split in an Old Left already splintered into an array of toothpicks. It meant that PL lost much of its heretofore supportive Western baseand, with it, many (if not most) of its non-student, nonintellectual, working-class and tradeunion members, the very kinds of people it declared itself to be of and for. Party membership was thereby narrowed primarily to the group in and around New York, which had always been the intellectual center of the party, and to people who were PLers first and workers (because the party told them to get working-class jobs) second.

This, in turn, meant that PL had to search elsewhere for new support, and it saw in the burgeoning and increasingly militant student movement a natural—and for many, both cadres and leaders, a congenial—source of recruits. Jeff Gordon, in an article in the February-March PL, developed the idea, still new in PL circles, of a worker-student a/liance as a means of tapping this source. "The student and intellectual movement," he wrote, "is simmering" but "activists on campus are turning inward, moving to secondary and often esoteric issues or doing nothing at all." The way to enlist students, he argued, was to get them to join with the all-powerful working class so that they will feel they have a good chance to win at least in the long run." This worker-student alliance, he felt, should engage in a variety of actions including support for striking workers, support for the demands of campus workers, and involvement of workers in antiwar actions. Thus was born a PL strategy, the worker-student alliance, that was to have important ramifications for SDS in the coming years.

Three months later, at the start of the 1967 summer vacations, PL announced another program to enlist students: a "Vietnam Work-In." This would be an effort to enroll students in summer jobs on assembly lines and in the shops, wherever the true working class might be found, and have them talk to their fellow workers about the war. "Thousands of students," PL announced somewhat optimistically, would be organized "to bring the ideas, the politics and the urgency of the anti-Vietnam war movement, among the workers on their jobs."

The most natural source of students for programs such as these, and for eventual recruitment into the party, was of course SDS. From this spring on PL redoubled its efforts to push its politics in and recruit its membership from the ranks of SDS.

The idea of a worker-student alliance was first put to the student organization at the April National Council meeting in Cambridge, a PL stronghold, but since New Left Notes had not found space to print the proposal beforehand and since many SDSers were innately suspicious of any new scheme coming from the PLers, no action was taken on it. It was not until the May 1 New Left Notes that SDSers at large learned about the idea. Al Greene, an SDS member, wrote that "the potential which exists for a radical worker-student alliance is very much apparent," and urged the official adoption of a policy by which SDS chapters (which he called "locals," adopting PL terminology) would support local strikes, unionize unrepresented employees, discuss the war and American politics among workers, and "cultivate at least the seeds of a real alliance between working people ... and radical students." There was no identification of Greene as a member of PL or any mention of the worker-student alliance as a PL strategy.

The work-in proposal made its appearance four weeks later, in the May 29 New Left Notes. A page-one article, sounding for all the world like a Milt Rosen polemic, argued that

.. conscious and directed working-class opposition to the war is the most powerful anti-war movement imaginable. To be with, to move and move with American workers, we've got to work with them. To bring anti-war, anti-racism, and radical ideas to the workers we've got to know what moves them, what their attitudes really are; we've got to know where they live. This can best be done by sharing their work, their on the job problems.

It urged every SDSer to "go out and get a job" for the summer, "preferably in large industries or places employing many area residents." And it even, for perhaps the first time in serious SDS discourse, threw in a (not quite apposite) quotation from Lenin: "There can be no revolutionary practice without revolutionary theory." Of the twelve signers, all designated as SDSers, only three were listed as being members of PL; none of the ten regional work-in coordinators whom SDSers were asked to contact was identified as a party member.

Meanwhile, the general antiwar movement in the land continued to grow. Plans for the newest series of marches, on April 15 in New York and San Francisco, were laid by the largest popular-front organization to date, the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, which had grown out of the ashes of the National Coordinating Committee in the spring and summer of 1966. SDS, as usual, despite repeated blandishments, officially said it would have nothing to do with the organization, treating it with the same sympathetic scorn it had shown its predecessor: as ERAPer Mike James told the Mobilization high command, SDS policy was "Don't mobilize, organize." But in the early months of 1967, as the war in Vietnam escalated, American deaths approached the 9,000 mark, and President Johnson seemed hell-bent on the leveling of North Vietnam, sentiment on many campuses shifted toward support. Debate rimed the pages of New Left Notes for some weeks, the "no-more-parades" people arguing against the "telling-truth-to-power" advocates, but slowly it became clear that most of the chapters were caught up in the mobilization idea, and the April National Council, meeting just two weeks before the marches, finally lent its grudging support.

On one level, the Mobilization was a singular success. Some 300,000 people gathered in New York and San Francisco, Martin Luther King made a dramatic speech appealing to the Administration to "save our national honor," and the whole thing, according to the organizers, represented "the largest demonstration of any kind ever held in the history of the U.S. for any reason."!® Many of those who marched did so under SDS banners, providing the SDS leadership with a bitter sense of its political distance from the chapter constituency and reinforcing Calvert's complaint that "in effect we have been used to make other people's political points and to help build others' organizations."

But on another level, the Mobilization marked for many the end of trying to change national policies through peaceful protest; and this time it was not only the SDS veterans who spoke of the futility of marches, but many of the younger recruits as well. To them it was clear that this mobilization, despite its size and now generally favorable press coverage, was as fruitless as the previous ones, a conviction which the subsequent increases in American troops and draft inductions did nothing to dispel. In the words of Dotson Rader, a Columbia SDSer who suffered the additional ignominy of getting his head beaten by New York City cops during the Mobilization:

The meaninglessness of non-violent, "democratic" methods was becoming clear to us in the spring of 1967. The Civil Rights Movement was dead.

Pacifism was dead. Some Leftists—the Trotskyites, Maoists, radical socialists, anarchists, some of the radicals in SDS, Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, Tom Hayden—knew it early. But it took the rest of us a while to give up the sweet life of the democratic Left for revolt.

"Revolt"—is that too strong a word? Perhaps, but not by much. For many others wrestled that spring with the feeling that there was something more, something stronger, that needed to be done, were led to their first real contemplation of what a revolt, a revo/utionhow odd it sounded, how dissynchronous, yet ...—would mean. Now for the first time the people around SDS began toying with the idea of revolution. It was not seen in terms of students' taking to the hills or (in spite of a growing fad for Ché Guevara posters) of armed guerrilla warfare; it was something only tentative and experimental, a faint nibble at the forbidden fruit; and it was for the most part still meant jocularly, as in such New Left Notes lines as "We can't fight the revolution on an empty stomach," or "If you believe in the revolution, pay your dues." But it signaled a willingness, on the part of the most active SDSers at least, to confront the idea of a sweeping and total change in the institutions of America brought about through a conjunction of the forces for resistance and the attitudes of the alienated counterculture. This is what Calvert meant when he spoke of building a "revolutionary consciousness."

The problem, as those of the SDS leadership saw it, was how to move more people from personal action to political commitment, how to raise the level of those who were so obviously potential recruits—the draft resister, the campus demonstrator, the antiwar marcher—to that of "revolutionary consciousness." Davidson put it simply: "We need to move from protest to resistance; to dig in for the long haul; to become full-time, radical, sustained, relevant. In short, we need to make a revolution. But again, how do we go about it?"

SDS came up with two answers that spring.

The first, the simplest, was as old as Haber's first memo to the LID: internal education. Only this time it was to have a new name, not noticeably chosen for its greater felicity: "institutes for teacher-organizers."

The idea of the "T-O institutes," as they became known, was a queer mixture of the familiar graduate-school seminar, the ERAP communal-living projects, and the political "cadre schools" that Old Left groups like the Communist Party used to run during the summers.

SDS was to set up three summer-long institutes, in Chicago, Boston, and Los Angeles, where potential T-Os would live together, take seminars in subjects like political theory, community organizing, and Marxian economics, hold regular "round-table" sessions on the student movement and the State of American politics, and undertake short-term "field projects" with local students in summer jobs or attending school. At the end of the summer, it was hoped, there would be at least thirty regional travelers who would be equipped to go around to existing chapters to push the political level of SDSers toward a revolutionary consciouness.

The idea was sensible enough, but somehow SDS and internal education never could mix well. The National Office started the project on the assumption that it could use the Radical Education Project to run its seminars, and came in for a rude shock when REP answered that it hadn't been a part of SDS since its independent incorporation a year ago and in any case had no intention of giving up its independent research work to become a minor figment in an SDS dream. Then the NO tried to raise $20,000 to launch the projects, even putting out a small promotional brochure (showing pictures of the current campus travelers and lauding them as "the backbone of the student movement"), without getting so much as a nibble from the charitable foundations. Ultimately SDS was forced to set up its own education project and dip into its own coffers for most of the money. But it went ahead, selected the T-O trainees, enlisted some of its most experienced people as project directors, and on June 16, the T-O institutes began.

The second answer that SDS came to was another old one, the "need for an ideology." Now in truth SDS had never lacked an ideology, and for most of its early life The Port Huron Statement and America and the New Era enunciated it; moreover, each of its previous ventures—civil rights, university reform, ERAP, Vietnam protest, the draft, student syndicalism—had been accompanied by comprehensive and radical theories, protoideologies really, no matter what the critics said. But at this stage something different and even more comprehensive was wanted, some unified way of talking about the war, the military machine, imperialism, complicity, university governance, corporate liberalism, and the "postscarcity" economy, all in such a way as to develop that "revolutionary consciousness."

There were a number of entries in the ideological lists in the spring of 1967. Carl Oglesby's book, Containment and Change*' (distributed in large numbers by the NO), had just been published and circulated widely among SDS's theoretical types; its careful and detailed construction of the methods of American imperialism offered the scaffolding of an original ideological analysis. A new quarterly. Radical America, was begun by Paul Buhle and other SDSers, the only theoretical journal of the American New Left now that Studies on the Left had disintegrated. And New Left Notes itself offered a monthly section called "Praxis" to present what Cathy Wilkerson called "the large number of longer, more ‘theoretical’ articles which come in" and to satisfy "the wide-felt need for a more current analysis."

But the most successful ideological contestant was a concept called "the new working class," which SDS this spring seized upon as the theoretical foundation for its new revolutionary ideology. The idea of the new working class was originally presented to SDS by three students at the New School for Social Research, Bob Gottlieb, Gerry Tenney, and Dave Gilbert, and it formed part of a long paper which they delivered to the Princeton REP conference, called, with conscious geographical parody, "The Port Authority Statement."” The concept, though presented at times in the most excruciating jargon and accompanied by self-conscious charts and tables and footnotes, was essentially simple. The new working class, unlike the traditional working class, is made up of those people with "technical, clerical, and professional jobs that require educational backgrounds" and of those in the schools and universities who provide them with those backgrounds. The new class "lies at the very hub of production" and is crucial for the operation of a highly industrialized, technocratic, computerized, and sophisticated society. Students, "in that they will by and large constitute this new working class, are becoming the most structurally relevant and necessary components of the productive processes of modern American capitalism"; they are, therefore, increasingly important "for the maintenance and stability of American society" and "socially necessary for the functioning of the economic system." If the members of the new working class can recognize "their structural, technical role in maintaining, developing and rationalizing American capitalism," they will understand "their own power as a force for social change"—and in this process students can form the vanguard when they "begin to articulate demands of control and participation," first at the university and then on the job. This is what makes the whole movement toward student protest so important, important beyond the comparatively small numbers involved, for "the organizing of students on the campus around the questions of student control, the draft, and the universities’ servicing of the military can develop a radical consciousness concerning the role and nature of their future work positions.”

Here, in theoretical form, with the fillip of a class analysis, was an ideological formulation of considerable power. It explained why the Selective Service was forcing students into nonmilitary jobs valuable for "the national interest," it supported Davidson's idea of student power being used to transform the society by transforming the university, and it justified Calvert's instinct that students were right in operating out of the desire for their own freedom. It accounted for the new militance being shown by teachers, social workers, and hospital employees, for the growing support of such adult groups as REP and a Movement for a Democratic Society and a new "Radicals in the Professions" organization, and for the increasing numbers of people from the so-called middle class now to be found in the antiwar marches. Above all, it meshed with the mood of SDS just then, justifying the past and programming the future, and it did so in a way that any SDSer on any campus could grasp, and be led on to a revolutionary consciousness. It did, in short, everything a good ideological concept should do.

And Greg Calvert knew it instantly. After hearing the paper at the Princeton conference he stayed up much of the night to work it into his speech the next day. It was, he said, "a powerful tool":

It enables us to understand the special role of students in relation to the present structure of industrial capitalism. Students are the "trainees" for the new working class and the factory-like multiversities are the institutions which prepare them for their slots in the organizing students. Students are in fact a key group in the creation of the productive forces of this super-technological capitalism. We have organized them out of their own alienation from the multiversity and have raised the demand for "student control." That is important: because that is precisely the demand that the new working class must raise when it is functioning as the new working class in the economic system. It is that demand which the system cannot fulfill and survive as it is.

That is why it is potentially a real revolutionary demand in a way that demands for higher wages can never be.

.. We can see that it was a mistake to assume that the only radical role which students could play would be as organizers of other classes.

Liberals operate out of other people's oppression; the radical operates out of his own.

During the quite considerable turmoils of this spring, the National Office in Chicago was operating with surprising energy and perhaps with more efficiency than it had ever shown before.

The three top national officers were especially diligent in their campus travels, the NO estimating at the end of the school year that they had "visited approximately 150 chapters and filled almost 200 speaking engagements."”* A nascent film library had sent out its five films for more than a hundred showings, some hundred thousand pamphlets and papers were printed and mailed, orders for three thousand bumper stickers, eight thousand posters, and ten thousand buttons were filled, and more than six thousand individual letters of organizational business were sent out. New Left Notes, after someone in the NO figured out the postal regulations, now actually got sent out the same week it was printed, and during the spring some 120,000 individual newspapers were addressed and mailed. The office itself, expanded now to the third floor of the Rossen building, had achieved a kind of efficient chaos; along one wall a five-shelf bookcase was stuffed with pamphlets and printed forms, neatly stacked and labeled; a twenty-eight-drawer file cabinet was filled with cards attempting to keep memberships and dues payments in reasonable order; the floors were swept, occasionally, and the random pop bottles, coffee containers, crumpled papers, and old lunch bags were removed with some periodicity.

Officially, by the end of June, SDS had 6,371 national members, although of that number only 875 had paid their second-term dues—"the rest," NO staffer Jim Fite complained, "seem to think that the only thing they have to do is pay their dues once and then forget it.

That is a lot of bullshit." But in addition there were perhaps five times that many people who counted themselves members, according to Davidson and Egleson after an extensive tour of the campuses. Davidson wrote:

According to our modest, if not conservative, estimates, about 30,000 young Americans consider themselves members of SDS chapters. [This] is remarkable in two ways. First, we are much larger than we thought we were. Second, starting from almost zero, we have achieved that number in 7 years; we have grown tenfold in only 2 years.

The question of the exact number of chapters was somewhat murky, since chapters would fold as their activists graduated without letting anyone know, or they would sprout up with equal anonymity ("Hardly a week goes by," Davidson reported, "that the National Office doesn't discover an active SDS chapter somewhere that no one knew existed"). But after careful tabulation in December 1966, the NO figured they had exactly 227 chapters starting the new year, down from the figure of 265 it had been using; in the course of the spring 20 new or revivified chapters joined,” making a total of 247 by the end of the school year. Membership was still concentrated in New York, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and California.

The bedrock problem of the NO during the spring was the old one, money. Income (mostly contributions) averaged a little over $100 a day at the beginning of the year, and rose somewhat during the spring as a result of the general upsurge in political activity and the three-part series in the Guardian. But it simply wasn't enough: by April SDS was more than $7,000 in debt, with only the dubious consolation that it was now more in debt than the entire annual income of the organization had been in the early years. It seemed hardly inappropriate for one NAC report to read, "Current Financial Status: The grim financial situation was again reviewed; prayers were offered, beads rubbed, and a young white mouse (who had fortuitously wandered into the room) was offered as a sacrifice to the Gods of the liberal corporate establishment," or for Dee Jacobsen later to report that NO staffers sat around trying to figure out how to pilfer the coffers of the Brink's depository in East Chicago.”°

The April National Council meeting decided that the time had come for escalation. It voted to raise SDS dues to $5.00 forthwith, to impose an immediate chapter tax of $5.00 a head payable by June 1, to ask all SDS members with jobs to contribute 10 percent of their incomes over $4,000 to the national coffers, and to go on a "binge" to raise $25,000 by September. Now the effect of this was really more ethereal than real—by the beginning of May only Columbia, Harvard, and Wisconsin had paid their chapter taxes, and there were no signs of any others rushing forward—but it apparently convinced the NO: in May it plunked down $2,500 toward a $7,000 justifier machine for printing New Left Notes, bought $4,000 worth of composition equipment, and added a press, a camera, and a darkroom. As if that weren't enough, the NAC then decided to buy a house (apparently from their landlord, John Rossen), at the "extremely low" price of $11,500—with visions, in Jacobsen's words, that it would "provide enough space for two staff apartments (the rent from which will pay for the property in 10 years), an education center with a library and two offices, a conference and literature production room, a small apartment for teacher-organizers and visiting chapter people, a large storage room, and a cellar for housing a wine press and political prisoners." Small wonder, then, that by July SDS was $16,499 in debt. It was injury added to insult when one of the NO staffers came down with infectious hepatitis, the entire staff had to be given special serum shots, and the Chicago Health Department informed them that they'd have to fork out $100 to get treated since most of the serum, normally given free, had been sent off to Vietnam.

But, withal, the stalwarts of SDS did not lose their sense of humor. In April someone came across a cartoon showing dozens of little children, happy smiles on their faces, dashing out of the gates of a school, while six big angry guards with flailing nets raced after them in fruitless pursuit. By instant and common agreement, the cartoon was made part of the official letterhead on SDS stationery.