Spring 1969

Dark days for national SDS, perhaps, but there was more to SDS than its national presence, more to the Movement than SDS, and the first six months of 1969 were illuminated by flashes of activism that swept across the nation like summer lightning.’

On the campuses, protests were more frequent, more diverse, and more violent than even the previous year. The spring saw the longest and most violent student strike in American history, at San Francisco State, where black and "Third World" students, aided by white radicals and a large number of sympathetic faculty, boycotted classes for four and a half months, suffering 700 arrests and innumerable injuries in the process; the first open display of firearms by student protesters, at Cornell, where black students took over a campus building, armed themselves in self-defense, and later walked out brandishing rifles and bandoliers for press photographers; the first death at the hands of (presumably) protesters, at Santa Barbara, where a custodian was killed by a bomb he picked up on the patio of the faculty club; and the first white death at the hands of the state, at Berkeley, where police opened fire on a crowd of white demonstrators for the first time, killing one, James Rector, blinding another, and injuring at least a hundred.” All told, there were major protest demonstrations at nearly three hundred colleges and universities, in every part of the country, at a rate of nearly two a day, involving a third of the nation's students, roughly 20 percent of them accompanied by bombs, fires, or destruction of property, a quarter by strikes or building takeovers, and a quarter more by disruption of classes and institutional functions.”

Elsewhere, protest movements blazed as never before. A GI resistance groundswell appeared, on the crest of which was the well-publicized mutiny trial of the "Presidio TwentySeven" for a sit-down protest at the San Francisco base, but which also included GI protests at more than a dozen army camps, the establishment of coffeehouses and GI newspapers (at least nineteen by June) in many of the basic-training towns, the development of campus and church sanctuaries for AWOL and deserting soldiers, and a 25 percent increase in the armed forces desertion rate over the previous year. The black and Chicano movement took on new and more militant forms, especially on the campuses, where more than half the protests were led by blacks for black causes, but also off the campuses, with the emergence of the Black Panther Party on the national scene as an important influence both among ghetto blacks and radical whites, the growth of the Young Lords Organization in Chicago and New York, and the formation of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers among dissident blacks in the automobile plants of Detroit. Militance moved downward into the high schools, with 60 percent of secondary-school principals reporting student protests, an estimated two thousand demonstrations taking place from November to May, and radical high-school unions being formed in many of the larger cities of the country. And accompanying all this, a myriad of uncategorizable actions of the growing American left: street-fighting in Washington, Madison, Berkeley, a massive antiwar march on April 5 of 150,000 people in fifty cities from Washington to Pasadena, women's groups going after Wall Street, Playboy magazine, the New York City Marriage Bureau, and a dozen other targets, the spread of underground newspapers to more than a hundred cities, and the continuing growth of communes, collectives, and "free schools" across the land.?

With it all, violence, political violence, escalated still another notch. There were at least eighty-four bombings, attempted bombings, and arson incidents on college campuses in the first six months of 1969, twice as many as in the fall, and another twenty-seven bombings and attempts in the nation's high schools. Total property damage in the nation's schools and college—"trashing," incidental wreckage, and vandalism, in addition to building destruction—amounted to $8,946,972" in the first eight months of the year, according to the American Insurance Association. In addition there were ten other major bombing incidents at off-campus targets associated with the white left; the most spectacular was a series of explosions in Denver from January 20 to 28 destroying four electric transmission towers of the Colorado Public Service Company, for which a federal grand jury indicted Denver SDS activist Cameron David Bishop and the FBI placed him on its ten-most-wanted list, a distinction which Bishop honored by going, and subsequently remaining, underground. There was no mistake: violence had become a real part of the lexicon of American left-wing politics.

SDS—SDS as catalyst, as progenitor—had clearly done its job well: protest was percolating into every part of the porous republic. But SDS—SDS the ongoing organization, the national presence—was no longer under any illusions that this meant its message was sweeping the country. It is true that the continual expressions of activism throughout the spring were encouraging signs that the left was on the move, and New Left Notes could be forgiven its Beatleoid jubilance in labeling its roundups of campus actions, "We made the news today, oh boy!" But as the national leadership worked itself out of the dark days of that winter, there was none of that earlier "optimism and aggressiveness," none of the hubristic gusto of "No class today, no ruling class tomorrow." The fall's multiplicity of troubles—infighting, PL factionalism, distance, repression—had produced a kind of bitter realism about what it is like to wage a serious war in the grown-up world of power. The people at the top levels of the organization no longer had the sense that the revolution was going to happen by itself, just because it was right—if it was going to come it would take a new and even more sustained effort, a new seriousness.

For the national leadership, the new seriousness meant a new way of operating, of confronting power, and it took the form of a search for a new discipline, new ideology, and new allies.

Discipline meant primarily that the NO would try at last to establish in the organization the principles of "collective leadership" at the top and "cadre responsibility" in the ranks, the sort of things people had been talking about ever since Greg Calvert's down-withparticipatory-democracy article in December 1967. The NO began to take itself seriously as a "national collective," working out "collective positions" to which all leaders were expected to adhere, gathering around it like-minded people while weeding out those with PL sympathies, becoming almost a sect unto itself—to the point where Staughton Lynd, in an unusual criticism, warned that "both PLP and the national collective are working to recruit a revolutionary cadre out of SDS no matter what the cost to SDS as an organically evolving revolutionary movement."° Regional organizations, too, were held on a fairly tight rein, with Regional Office staffers and the several dozen travelers chosen from people who generally shared NO politics and who generally attended the more or less monthly NIC meetings where RYM strategy was hammered out; ROs with clashing politics—for example, the office in Philadelphia run by SDSers who styled themselves the "Labor Committee" —were thrown off the roster and deliberately ostracized; while those sharing the RYM perspective—for example, the groups in New York, Michigan, Ohio, Washington, and Chicago—were allowed a considerable degree of autonomy and given whatever largesse in terms of money, speakers, and literature the NO could afford."

At the same time the theoretically inclined leadership—people like Les Coleman, Don Hammerdquist, Noel Ignatin, Howie Machtinger, and Jim Mellen—set to work to fashion the RYM ideas into a serious ideology that would both attract militant students and dispel the PL challenge. The best expression of their work is found in a paper written by Bill Ayers and Jim Mellen and passed by the National Council meeting in March, a skillful refinement of the original Klonsky article. The focus on youth, especially working-class youth, was still central: "It is clear that SDS must begin to consciously transform itself from a student movement into a working class youth movement ... by emphasizing the commonality of the oppression and struggles of youth, and by making these struggles class conscious." But to it were added two crucial extensions, alliances with the black liberationists—"To recognize the vanguard character of the black liberation struggle means to recognize its importance to the ‘white’ movement"—and with the Third World—"All our actions must flow from our identity as part of an international struggle against U.S. imperialism." And to make any of this serious, to transform SDS into something that really could lead a revolutionary movement, what was necessary was a commitment to discipline—°

In order for SDS to succeed at this task it will take tremendous selfconsciousness and discipline from the membership ... . Through collective political experience and study, cadre can be developed who can bring these things to SDS.

—and a dedication to action:

The reactionary nature of pacifism, the need for armed struggle as the only road to revolution [are] essential truths which were not predominant within our movement in the past .... We [must] recognize the urgency of fighting white supremacy by building the material strength of the white movement to be a conscious, organized, mobilized fighting force capable of giving real support to the black liberation struggle.

Weatherman was now only a step away.

Partly as a result of this RYM analysis, but also because it saw outside alliances as a practical way to build up strength against PL, the national leadership worked hard to establish ties with revolutionary groups beyond the student movement. Chiefly through Bernardine Dohrn, now operating at peak energy, SDS established links with and gave support to the black movement, GI resistance groups, Third World revolutionaries, highschool unions, and even labor unions and strikes. During a single month at the beginning of the year, for instance. New Left Notes in successive issues carried front-pages devoted to the tenth anniversary of the Cuban revolution, interviews with two Fort Hood GIs ("Revolution in the Army"), a report on high-school organizing in Denver, and plans for joint SDS-Black Panther Party celebrations of Huey Newton's birthday.

The SDS leadership gave particular attention to the Panthers, developing a symbiosis in which SDS gained a strong ally against PL and a great cachet among young white radicals, and the Panthers gained a valuable buffer against the severe campaign of repression now being visited upon them; as Illinois Panther leader Fred Hampton acknowledged, "We work very close with the SDS, and they help us out in many ways, and we try to help them out in as many ways as we can." In fact SDS passed a special resolution at the March NC citing the Black Panther Party as "the vanguard force" in the black liberation movement, pledging its backing for the party and its "essentially correct program," and establishing local "defense committees" for money and propaganda in support of Panthers being jailed and tried. Internationally, SDS made ties with European student movements (it helped sponsor a trip to this country by German SDS leader Karl Wolff, who made a certain splash by walking out of a Congressional hearing in the middle of his testimony), with Vietnamese groups in both Paris and Hanoi (Dohrn had struck up several close friendships with Vietnamese women during a trip to Europe in the fall, giving one a ring from her own finger as a gesture of comradeship), and with the Arab guerrillas in the Middle East (Sue Eanet visited leaders of Al Fatah in the Notes).” But by far the most important international turn was toward Cuba, to which RYM adherents looked for inspiration and where SDS sent an official delegation in honor of the tenth anniversary of the revolution in January; this visit in turn laid the groundwork for a scheme to send Movement people to Cuba to cut sugar cane for the 1970 harvest, a project which eventually evolved into the Venceremos Brigade, one of the most imaginative enterprises ever undertaken by the American left. '

The national leadership, then, was clearly putting, or trying to put, SDS through some major changes, as significant as anything in the organization's history. But whether it knew it or not, it was fighting a battle not only against time but against power.

Power: in the end it came to that. Not with reform, when suasion and reason can suffice, not even with resistance, when fear and drama can avail—but with revolution, power is ultimate.

Aroused, the administrations of most institutions of higher education proved that they had, and were willing to use, considerable power to resist any significant alteration in their ways of governance or the character of their schools. Despite the enormous number of protests during these months, it appears that those which demanded major changes were successful less than 10 percent of the time, and even then the concessions were made without real shifts in the balance of power, as for example with the discontinuance of ROTC (twelve schools dropped it or made it extracurricular, seventy-seven granted lesser changes, usually making it voluntary). Worse than that. Some of the most ambitious protests, into which considerable time, money, effort, prestige, and hope were poured, were blunted or defeated outright, leaving SDS and its campus allies disillusioned and disarrayed. At Stanford, where after a long, carefully researched, and occasionally violent campaign SDS succeeded in forcing the university to sell its $58-million-a-year defense research institute, it discovered that the facility was quickly bought up by others and simply carried on its business of warmaking under a different management. At Berkeley, Wisconsin, Columbia, Michigan State, Kent State, Colorado, Chicago—the list could go on—demonstrations by SDS groups, for all their storm and publicity, ran up against intransigent administrations, immovable faculties, and resistant governments, ultimately producing factional splits, mistakes, exhaustion, and usually defeat.°

The San Francisco State strike was perhaps the paradigm, a stark lesson in the dynamics of power. The students had the moral power of their cause against institutional racism and against police brutality, the support of a faculty union local which also went on strike, an organization which united blacks, Chicanos, white radicals, and others under a single banner, and the courage and commitment of those who promised to wage a protracted guerrilla-style "war of the flea." Against this the university administration, led by a megalomaniacal S. I. Hayakawa and supported by a hardline public, used the full power of the police (more than 700 arrests, countless beatings, and daily occupation of the campus), the courts (injunctions against demonstrations, costly trials, a legal embargo on the use of student funds by students), and its own authority (suspension of student publications, canceling of experimental courses, threats of dismissal for striking teachers). After nearly four months of battle, the strikers could no longer resist: they had been unable to build strong community support for their cause (despite major attempts in black areas and alliances with striking workers in nearby Richmond), they had been unable to interest the predominantly white student body in what was seen as a black issue hardly important enough to jeopardize their upward-mobile education, and they began to suffer fatigue (who, after all, thought it was going to take this long?), dissension, power plays, defections, and confusion in the ranks. Finally the teachers broke ranks and returned to classes, and the students reluctantly agreed to negotiations, out of which they wrested only the most facesaving crumbs and Hayakawa emerged a national hero. Todd Gitlin, who was there through it all, noted that "the strike, a didactic morality play with a cast of thousands, teaches that the enemy is not the police, not red tape, not fumbling administrators, but the State itself." And that in the war of the flea, the State owns the fly swatters.*°

Or, as the SDSers at the University of Chicago put it, after deciding to leave a building they had occupied for sixteen days without winning a single demand or realizing a single victory: "There will be no rational discourse between those with power and those with none."

And that was the nub of it: SDS was essentially without power, at least power sufficient for its revolution. True, the weapons it had held in the past—the capacity for disruption, unfavorable publicity, and embarrassment, for engendering guilt and awakening consciences, for creating sympathy, outrage, support, and commitment—were still at hand to be sure, but they were no longer adequate when the war to be waged was for the total dislocation of the society. And the one weapon SDS needed on its side above all others, the one without which political action of any kind was impossible, was the support of the students themselves, at least the important minds and talents among them, at least enough to make a visible and sustained campaign of protest. This, however, was a weapon slipping slowly from the SDS grasp. SDS was losing its campus base.

Part of the problem was a growing change in SDS's style. The paranoid temperament that had emerged in many chapters in the fall developed still further in the spring—not without cause, it should be added—often leading to a confusion of priorities and a paralysis of action: "Always looking over our shoulders," Todd Gitlin wrote in February, "we risk stumbling over our feet."’4 Moreover, a sense of hardness and self-importance descended upon many who felt themselves to be revolutionary, all too often growing into a dogmatism, an impatient righteousness that scorned the winning of converts, even at the cost of making enemies. Seriousness hung like cigarette smoke over every gathering, and morerevolutionary-than-thou poses were struck as often as matches. Even the vaunted and sometimes exciting SDS demonstrations themselves as likely as not turned into harangues by the rebel rousers against their fellow students for their "narrow class interests" or "bourgeois values," or else drew unwary demonstrators into actions and politics beyond their comprehension, a process which SDSers saw as radicalizing but many others regarded as manipulation. A fair example of the deficiencies of this style is seen in this account (from someone sympathetic to SDS) of what happened at Columbia during this spring:

SDS failed for a large number of reasons ... . SDS isolated itself by appearing to be manipulative and by not dealing with the issue which primarily concerned students: restructuring ... it appeared to be disrupting for disruption's sake. It continued to opt away from dealing with those issues which directly affected students’ lives such as restructuring and the draft.

(Restructuring may be a misleading issue and students may be naive; but at times in order to lead and expose it may be necessary to particpate [sic] in what one finds stupid. SDS was unable to do this, I fear, because many of its members were more concerned with appearing to be radical than with succeeding as radicals.) SDS members continued to talk in a rhetoric which many students saw as cant, irrelevant, and intellectually embarrassing ... .

On top of everything else, SDS tended to be boring. It seemed to be repeating itself and was very predictable ... .

The right mood was absent this spring, given that fact it might have been advisable to wait. But SDS did not wait. It didn't because it felt compelled to act in some way and disruption seemed the only course. ...

SDS did not have to be contained; it contained itself. Buildings may have been occupied, but the normal processes of the university went on. As last year's events demonstrated, if power is in the people and you have the people, you can shut down an institution with very little force.

But without the people you are without the power.

Part of SDS's problem, too, lay with its failure to transmit its political ideas to large masses of students as it went headlong into revolution—it failed to make potential recruits or even sympathizers out of the liberals, and, worse, it failed to make true radicals, sophisticated connections-makers, out of the militants. Neither the disciplined style nor the RYM ideology of the national collective seemed to attract any great following on the campuses, and the kinds of political positions which surrounded them must have confused vast numbers of students (even SDSers) and repelled still others. SDS papers and pamphlets talked of "armed struggle," "disciplined cadre," "white fighting force," and the need for "a communist party that can guide this movement to victory"; SDS leaders and publications quoted Mao and Lenin and Ho Chi Minh more regularly than Jenminh Jih Pao. and a few of them even sought to say a few good words for Stalin;” SDSers even leveled attacks against such old standbys as participatory democracy: Dohrn complained that it only led to meetings "where struggle is not allowed under the guise of 'respect for one another’ and antiauthoritarianism" and Chicago SDSer Christopher Hobson added that it was in practice a "classless and non-revolutionary" concept. And with this went as if inevitably an increasingly sterile rhetoric, phrases borrowed from long-forgotten sectarian debates of middle Europe and pamphlets written when Lenin was young: "class struggle," "enslaved masses," "running dogs," "people's war," "principal contradiction," "exploitation of labor," "lackeys of the ruling class." Carl Oglesby, as sophisticated and committed a person as anyone in SDS, tells what effect SDS's new political hardness had upon him:?”

For a long time I was baffled. Last fall [1968] the word began to reach me: It was being said that I had "bad politics." How could that be, I wondered, since I thought I had no politics at all. But by winter I conceded the point: no politics was the same as bad politics. So there followed a time in which I experimented with only the "mass line." Could Klonsky and Coleman be right? It didn't come to much. My mind and my instincts only became adversaries.

By spring I had to deactivate, couldn't function, had to float. What I know now is that this did not happen to me alone. On every quarter of the white Left, high and low, the attempt to reduce the New Left's inchoate vision to the Old Left's perfected remembrance has produced a layer of bewilderment and demoralization which no cop with his club or senator with his committee could ever have induced.

Thus across the entire political spectrum of the campus, disenchantment with, and hostility to, SDS began to grow as never before. Conservative groups at many schools felt free for the first time to form their own groups in explicit opposition to SDS without general disapprobation, and at a number of schools—Cornell, Kent State, Columbia, Brooklyn, Berkeley, and Florida among them—open fights broke out between the two. Moderate students denounced SDS in a way that would have been unthinkable just two years earlier, and a certain fraternity-style chic became attached to making fun of SDSers and their troubles; for example, a cartoon booklet from Northwestern called "New Laugh Notes" (subtitled "Let the Right People Decide") pictured a busty Bernardine Dohrn lolling around the NO saying, "Let's raise the dues, I want to go to the Riviera," and showed a PLer hanging by a rope from a tree while SDSers beneath say, "Tomorrow we will give him a fair trial." And in fact SDS was no longer even the dominant leader of the militant students who were out doing the protesting. According to one poll of 232 major campuses during the spring,*?

.. the striking finding about white student protests is that they were not dominated by the New Left. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and other organizations with identifiably radical views, commitments, and rhetoric, were active in less than half of the white protests, and in only 28 percent of all protests.

Nor was SDS succeeding, despite all the rhetoric, in establishing constituencies elsewhere, in building a new base among the "revolutionary youth" in the high schools, the army camps, and the factories to take the place of the crumbling campus base.

SDSers concentrated on high-school organizing as never before, and in such cities as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, and Boston this became a high-priority program both for regional staffs and college chapters. And there is no question that SDS had an impact, both in bringing some of the new perspectives of the sixties into out-of-theway schools where radicalism had never touched before and in providing assistance, information, and models in those schools where some of the students were already on the move. SDS organizers at this point, however, had as hard a time getting through to the high-school population as they did to the college one. A New York high-school activist complained:

One SDSer went to the Seward Park Student Union meetings. She went to all their meetings. At first she just spoke a little and then more and more until she was running them. Before long the group was broken up and splitting into factions. This chick from the regional office of SDS just went in there and split them up ....

And:

Brooklyn College SDS asked if they could send somebody to one of our meetings to present a proposal. We agreed and five Brooklyn College SDS kids came to the meeting. They got into a two-hour discussion among themselves about the definition of what a working class is. They tied up the whole meeting and they didn't give a shit about what the kids there thought

It didn't take long for high-schoolers to react to this kind of "organizing": the response described by a high-school student in Madison, Wisconsin, seems to have been typical:

Whenever SDS has come in to high schools we've either said, okay, you can help us in this way: give us your printing press and give us some paper, and that is it; or you can help us by giving us this information and getting us these pamphlets that we want. But we've stopped them coming into the high school and organizing for their own, and we've stopped them coming and speaking for the most part. We've kept them out of high schools because we don't want them there. The SDS of late hasn't been able to relate to high schools and many times they don't relate to their own ideas. They have certain ways of going about things, and it relates to college life and the college system, but it doesn't apply for high school.

As a result, SDS not only failed to attract significant numbers of those "working-class kids" who were regarded as essential for the Revolutionary Youth Movement, but it didn't even win over many of those militant students already in motion.

The army camps proved to be similarly unfertile ground for SDS. In the first place, few SDSers were really prepared to go into the army itself, where any serious organizing would have to be done, and so when GIs felt the need to organize some kind of national group they chose their own forms—the Movement for a Democratic Military, for example, and the American Serviceman's Union—rather than appending themselves to SDS and what they saw as a bunch of college kids. In the second place, the GIs, like the high-schoolers, were concerned with far different issues than the SDSers: their complaints stemmed from the immediate stifling conditions of their servitude, not the grander injustices of capitalism, and their opposition to the war in Vietnam sprang from somewhat more concrete and frightening considerations than a theoretical opposition to imperialism. SDSers were instrumental in starting the Fort Dix Coffeehouse in New Jersey’ and working with other GI coffeehouses in Texas, South Carolina, and Washington, and the NO put out a handsome fifty-page booklet on "GI counseling" edited by New England traveler Russ Neufeld and intended for use by chapters near army bases. But for the most part SDSers regarded the world on the other side of the barracks gate as a conquered province.

Nor were the RYM practitioners able to make any significant connections with young factory workers, despite considerable rhetoric, and in some cases considerable work, in that direction. SDSers tried to forge ties with workers through such techniques as strike support in a dozen cities, primarily Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and San Diego, but though their help was welcomed on the picket lines little was done in the way of establishing lasting relationships and alliances. SDSers from several campuses in San Francisco, for example, were active in supporting a union strike against Standard Oil in Richmond, picketing, leafleting, organizing campus boycotts, and passing a resolution for a national Standard Oil boycott at the March National Council; the strikers were responsive and union leaders grateful—"Student support," the union head acknowledged in a New Left Notes interview, "had a tremendous effect"—but when the workers settled and went back to work very little contact remained. Similarly in Mahwah, New Jersey, where SDSers (chiefly from Columbia, the New York RO, and Rutgers) joined a black wildcat strike at a Ford assembly plant and helped to force the management into a settlement, little common ground remained when the strike was over, and no lasting student-worker contacts were established. All that talk about how "our struggles must be integrated into the struggles of working people" proved very hard to realize in practice.

Campus support eroding, "revolutionary youth" unmoved—and SDS was even losing some of the people who had heretofore been in or close to the organization, committed radicals whose numbers and energy had proved so helpful in the past. The most serious defections came from the ranks of the women and the alumni.

The separatist trend among SDS women grew considerably stronger through the spring, despite the position of the December National Council, as women increasingly felt that SDS's formal acceptance of women's liberation was still unmatched by practice within the organization even after more than two years:

We were still the movement secretaries and the shit-workers; we served the food, prepared the mailings and made the best posters; we were the earth mothers and the sex-objects for the movement men. We were the free movement "chicks"—free to screw any man who demanded it, or if we chose not to—free to be called hung-up, middle class and up-tight. We were free to keep quiet at meetings—or if we chose not to, we were free to speak in men's terms .... We found ourselves unable to influence the direction and scope of projects. We were dependent on the male elite for direction and recognition.

And if there was even one chapter which could put out a pamphlet, such as the one which appeared this spring saying, "The system is like a woman; you have to fuck it to make it change," then obviously SDS was not getting the message.

A variety of radical women's groups were now taking shape outside of SDS—the Feminists, Radical Feminists, Bread and Roses, Redstockings, WITCH—and their appeal to their SDS sisters was infectious: "You're always sucking off other people's oppression—why don't you dig your own?" Women indeed seemed to be looking for a place to talk about their own problems, find strength from other women, learn that their private agonies were in fact shared by others, and come to make connections between their individual oppression and the political system beyond: in short, looking more for a 1962-style SDS than the 1969 model. For a while the women's caucuses within SDS chapters served this purpose, but they were greeted with increasing hostility and insults, not just from the men who felt themselves threatened but also from the revolutionary elite of the organization who challenged their personalistic politics; as Bernardine Dohrn herself wrote in March:

Most of the women's groups are bourgeois, unconscious or unconcerned with class struggle and the exploitation of working class women, and chauvinist concerning the oppression of black and brown women ... . These women are flailing at their own middle class images. To focus only on sexual exploitation and the tyranny of consumption does not develop a mass understanding of the causes of oppression, and it does not accurately point at the enemy.

But here again the SDS leadership showed itself distant from much of the SDS membership, a gap which self-righteousness and invective did very little to close. More and more the feminists in SDS began to "get off the treadmill," form their own organizations, hold their own marches, and attend their own conventions, relating to SDS less and less.

As for the alumni, they partook of the Movemental activism of the spring, but increasingly with organizations of their own making and in directions of their own choosing. SDS's evolving program simply had no place for the large number of alumni who had gone on, inevitably, to such "middle-class" jobs as teaching, social work, and journalism—and in fact the RYM ideology was set in terms which specifically scorned such professions as irredeemably "bourgeois." Ex-student radicals were therefore faced with the choice of supporting the Movement from the sidelines—hence the growing involvement in radical propaganda, underground newspapers, Newsreel, left research groups, printing shops, and the like—or getting on with the business of changing their own circumstances—hence the New University Conference, the proliferating "radical caucuses" within academic associations, the citywide coalitions of professionals on the model of New York's Movement for a Democratic Society, and independent ad hoc groups like the Honeywell Project in Minneapolis and the Conservation Research and Action Project in Wisconsin. SDS might have found in these alumni an invaluable lode—they were people whose commitment to postgraduate radicalism was proven beyond a doubt, people whose politics was generally now just as "revolutionary" as the current SDSers,’ and people who were often working in areas (high schools, welfare offices, hospitals) where they had intimate contact with just those poor, black, and working-class youth that the SDS leadership theoretically wanted to reach. Yet with the exception of a few joint conferences in smaller cities and occasional cooperative demonstrations, current SDSers made little effort to tap this lode and align with those who should have been their natural allies; far more often they were heard to speak of those "liberals" in NUC or those "wimps" at NACLA.

How ironic it all was: at precisely the time of the greatest explosion of the American left in all of the decade, SDS, its leading organization by every index—size, fame, geographical scope, energy—was gradually but unmistakably isolating and diminishing itself, losing its student constituency, its women, its alumni, failing to connect with the high schools, the soldiers, the workers. The SDS revolutionaries were on the barricades, but they had forgotten to look behind: their troops were no longer following.

As it turned itself into a political collective and engulfed itself in revolutionary theories, the National Office functioned less and less well as a secretariat for SDS. Correspondence and literature orders piled up in boxes and pigeonholes became stuffed with unanswered letters: somehow the minutiae of bureaucracy seemed an insignificant contribution to the revolution. (Bernardine Dohrn was apparently the most regular letter writer, though she showed a notable disinclination to respond to the dozens of requests from various gasoline companies for immediate payment on her numerous credit cards.) New Left Notes still came out regularly—now blessed with another logo, this one with the clenched fist of revolution prominently displayed and the slogan ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE supplanting the threeyear-old LET THE PEOPLE DECIDE—but most other literature was hopelessly backlogged and even the perennial "sds" pin was out of stock. The office itself began to disintegrate, and landlord John Rossen, disenchanted both proprietarily and politically (he shared few of the perspectives of the RYM people), remembers that it became "a mess, an incredible messthey used the place like a garbage dump": books and clothes everywhere, tattered signs and posters on the wall (one, a picture of Christ with a rifle, was labeled "Dig It!"), din piling up on the floor, broken furniture, malodorous unmade beds in the back room, papers and pamphlets littering every horizontal surface.

It is very doubtful that any records were being kept about anything any more—certainly none have survived—and so there is no way of knowing with any accuracy the number of chapters or national members. Mike Klonsky used the figure of 100,000 campus members when talking to the press, but there's no clue as to how he arrived at that; other estimates ranged from 30,000, according to one government committee, to 70,000, according to the Associated Press, but both those are undoubtedly sheer guesses, too. There is one source for the number of extant chapters, the Senate Committee on Government Operations, which listed 304 chapters as of June—and since its operatives were said to be investigating out in the field for more than a year, there is some chance that the figure is approximately correct.” In any case, all the evidence suggests that through splits, defections, alienation, and distance SDS was actually losing old chapters and members and not gaining new onesfor the first time in its history.

Financial woes seemed to be a bit worse now than usual, a reflection of diminishing support.

Clearly the organization was operating very close to the chest: it had only $600 in the bank in February ("WE'RE BROKE—SEND MONEY," shouted New Left Notes in inch-high letters), still only $550 in May ("The bail money that we've been forced to put out recently, added to our regular expense, has put us in bad financial straits," said the paper then, somewhat more plaintively), and by the end of the year it had managed to work itself more than $3,000 into debt (bank deposits amounted to $112,443, withdrawals to $115,587, and somebody was stuck with rubber checks). It was this kind of existence that no doubt led Mike Klonsky, responding to a request from the California Department of Education for reprint rights to SDS's 1966 "High School Reform" pamphlet, to ask for the immediate payment of one million dollars plus the withdrawal of criminal charges against Eldridge Cleaver and students at Valley State College and the declaration of May 25 as "a school holiday in honor of the founding of SDS"; the California Department of Education was apparently not moved to respond to the honor.?®

There is no sure way to know where SDS's funds were coming from, because the NO took it as part of its internal security to withhold such information. Klonsky in public always said that the money came simply from the membership (dues were still $5 a year), and no less an observer than J. Edgar Hoover conceded in April that he figured "nearly 60 percent" of SDS's funds came from "contributions, dues, sales of literature, benefits, advertisements, and its publication and fund drives," with "the majority of gifts .... in the $10 to $50 range." Some additional funds also came from other left organizations—Resist (with alumni Dick Flacks, Florence Howe, and Paul Lauter among its advisers), the Chicago Peace Council (which shared the Rossen building with SDS), and a new dummy corporation called Cambridge Iron and Steel (headed by SDS veterans Michael Ansara and Daniel Schechter) each gave several hundred dollars to SDS during the spring.” And some undoubtedly came in from those SDS leaders who were born far on the other side of the poverty line (among them Bill Ayers, Les Coleman, Chip Marshall, Diana Oughton, and Mark Rudd), whose parents either supported their political work or at least did not halt the influx of family funds because of it. Only this is sure: wherever the money came from, there was never enough of it.

Something of the spirit and the troubles of the NO is suggested by the symbolic adversity that was visited upon the offices in the early morning of May 12. Chicago police, responding to a report of a shooting at the SDS National Office which they said was phoned into them by an unidentified "Mr. Brown," barged up the stairs at 1608 West Madison and demanded to inspect the premises. Klonsky, doing some fast talking, had just about convinced them that there had been no shooting and that their investigation was unwanted, when a truckload of firemen descended on the office, having responded to another anonymous phone call saying there was a fire raging in the place. Both cops and firemen now wanted to get into the office and the staffers inside just as steadfastly wanted them to stay out.

Klonsky, again acting as the voice of reason, suggested that the fire chief alone be allowed in to inspect the premises, which that official finally agreed to, and he had just entered the door when the rest of his crew suddenly barged in behind and started shoving the SDSers aside. The youths shoved back—they were perfectly convinced that the whole scheme was a "pig" plot to destroy the national headquarters and steal the files—and the cops immediately joined the melee, seizing the opportunity to hand it to the pesky troublemakers. Very quickly five SDSers were arrested—Klonsky, Coleman, and Tim McCarthy of the NO staff, Ed Jennings of the Chicago Circle chapter, and Dave Slavin from the New York Regional Office—and dragged off to jail, where they were held on $12,000 bail on charges of "battery on an officer," "interfering with a fireman," and "inciting mob action." The money was raised during the night and the five were released before morning, but there was now no longer any doubt in the minds of all those around the NO that serious repression was going to come down and that they were going to be in the thick of it. New Left Notes responded in rhetoric characteristic of the time:

It is clear that until the power to control the institutions of this society is in

the hands of the people, the people will never have

justice or freedom.

Power to the People!

DEATH TO THE PIG!”

In January of 1969 the Progressive Labor Party issued a series of formal statements setting forth its official stand on the questions of nationalism in general and "black nationalism" in particular. These statements, which formed one of the cornerstones of PL's future development, were regarded with such special importance that their presentation and discussion occupied 40 percent of all the articles (14 out of 35) in the party's theoretical journal, PL, during 1969. The PL position—incidentally, similar to the PL racism proposal passed at the Ann Arbor NC, both presumably having been established at the same timewas based on a theory that PL had been evolving for several years that "all nationalism is reactionary" because it is based on national identity rather than class identity; as applied to the American situation, it made the assumption that the identity of the black population was also something which could be called nationalism and therefore was similarly reactionary.

The party announced:

The ruling capitalist class urges on the workers a nationalist ideology to replace their loyalty to the international working class .... It is in the class interests of U.S. imperialists to promote nationalist ideas among workers since it diverts them from loyalty to their own class. Nationalism is a bourgeois idea, which infects workers and prevents them from winning their freedom from the capitalist class.

Thus the whole black "nationalist" movement was seen as a danger, within which the most dangerous groups were the two most visible, the Black Panthers and the black student associations. The Panthers "ignore the working-class demands ... don't attempt to organize Black workers ... helped to serve the interests of downtown by not joining the side of the people ... have not stressed political study and development ... have no class outlook and believe they are out to fight a war against white people in general ... [are] giving no political leadership." The black student groups "don't have a working-class orientation ... are limited to securing a better deal for themselves from the schools and from the ruling class ... are not aimed at defeating the system," and their demands for black studies departments with black administrators are "false and dangerous ... founded on the illusion that under capitalism the university can serve the needs of Black workers and students, and that students can see to it that the university serves Black people by joining the administration."

At the same time the Progressive Labor Party reiterated its stand against the government of North Vietnam and the "revisionist" National Liberation Front for having agreed to negotiations with the United States instead of continuing to wage an all-out war:**

The People's War has beaten the US military machine in Vietnam, the negotiations process is turning this victory into a defeat for the revolutionary forces in Vietnam and in the world .... US imperialism, with the cooperation of the Soviet Union and the north Vietnam leaders, will use negotiations to achieve its goal of keeping a troop concentration based in Vietnam ....

Negotiations, whether in Cambodia or Disneyland, are a setback for people's war .... EVERYONE KNOWS THAT THE ONLY WAY SOCIALISM CAN BE WON IS BY DRIVING OUT THE OPPRESSOR. And this is what the Vietnamese people were doing so well until the revisionists in Moscow and Hanoi agreed to sell them out to US imperialism.

Simultaneously it renewed its attack on Cuba, which for PL had been in disfavor ever since 1966 when Castro had begun attacking China for economic blackmail and China had reciprocated with charges of "revisionism" for accepting Russian aid:

What the people of Cuba participated in was a bourgeois democratic revolution .... Castro has misused the great confidence bestowed on him by the people. He has taken the people into alliance with the most reactionary forces on earth. His one-man paternalistic rule smacks more of feudalism than socialism ... [Castro's] is a "socialism" whose policy towards its working class ranges through four choices: bribe 'em, starve 'em, chain 'em, replace 'am.

Neither position, of course, sat well with the large majority of students. But PL was never one to let popularity interfere with dogma.

That's PL in theory. What of PL in practice?

We differ from PLP in our understanding of socialism, of history, of culture, and therefore in our understanding of the dialectics of the struggle for human liberation. These disagreements must be debated, for they run to the heart of our battles and our goals.

Debated they were, and endlessly, wherever PL appeared. The March National Council meeting in Austin, for example, was another Donnybrook, as contentious and unpleasant as the one in Ann Arbor, the only difference being that this time the NO came prepared with its own proposals, its own selected speakers, and its own supporters out in force: in the end PL's favorite items—organizing May Day student-worker marches, the formal adoption of the worker-student alliance strategy, a denunciation of drugs—were all defeated, whereas the NO’s issues—support for the Black Panthers, repudiation of PL's December racism program, a defense of Hanoi and the peace talks, and the new Ayers-Mellen RYM proposals—were all duly passed. But the era of bad feelings was clearly at its peak: NO people were castigated for being "tools of the imperialists" when they spoke in favor of drugs, PL was accused of "spreading lies" about the NLF and "working objectively in the interests of the U.S. ruling class," and fist fights between the two sides actually broke out on the floor.”

But while the NO was winning its political debates—at least these debates—PL was up to its own games. The two most interesting examples of how PL was operating during this climactic spring were provided in the South and during the Harvard strike.

In the South, Progressive Labor saw as its chief target the Southern Student Organizing Committee, an offshoot of SDS set up in 1964 to carry on SDS-style politics with a slightly gentler Southern accent. PL had begun its operations within SSOC at the same time that it began infiltrating SDS itself (early in 1966) and at one point in 1967 it loaded a SSOC convention and won approval for its own Southern Labor Action Movement project. This scheme so repulsed the anti-PL leadership of SSOC that it shortly sabotaged the project, proceeding then to change SSOC officially from a membership organization to a service organization precisely to forestall any other such outside political interference—and so PL set out to destroy SSOC from without. During 1967 and 1968 PL, with power bases in the New Orleans Movement for a Democratic Society and the Austin SDS chapter, kept up a running attack on SSOC for being "liberal," "reactionary," and "separatist" and for accepting operating money from liberal foundations.

SDS in its revolutionary phase had no special love for SSOC, which had not made the same leap to Marxist ideology, but SSOC was officially a "fraternal organization" and was jealous of its "organizational hegemony in the South," so the national leadership left it alone until early in 1969. Then it became clear that PL was successfully expanding its influence in the South because of SSOC's moderateness and accordingly both Mike Klonsky and NICer Bartee Haile made several Southern trips, searching out people on the campuses who would ally themselves with RYM against PL or would work to push SSOC leftward into the current SDS camp. This campaign produced severe tensions within SSOC—many staffers accused SDS of being "full of communists" and railed against the "SDS carpetbaggers" and "Yankee meddlers"—but there were enough pro-SDSers who accepted SDS's position and began slowly to change SSOC's image.

But too slowly. PL saw the danger, mounted its forces, and at the March National Council meeting it suddenly sprang a resolution, signed by Fred Gordon and sixteen other SDSers close to PL, denouncing SSOC as "one of the main tools of the ruling class," calling for an end to SDS's fraternal relations, and proposing a strong new campaign to "build SDS in the South" in SSOC's stead. The national collective was taken completely by surprise. Klonsky made a last-ditch effort to postpone the challenge, but with the realization that a public defense of the still-moderate SSOC would be impossible and with the hope of supplanting it anyway with a new RYM-oriented group, he finally capitulated and gave the resolution his support. The NC voted overwhelmingly to discard SSOC and this effectively sounded the death knell of that organization. Under continuing pressure from PL and with its own ranks divided, SSOC voted at its June convention to dissolve itself out of existence. PL had very neatly accomplished its task: it had destroyed its main opposition in the South and paved the way for its own ascendance as the dominant radical organization on the campuses there.

Progressive Labor at Harvard was in quite a different position. PL had always been strong in the Boston area and was always well represented in the Harvard/Radcliffe chapter—there are some theories that only the sons and daughters of the aristocracy have sufficient guilt to join disciplined parties laboring on behalf of the working masses—and its task here was to gain control over the chapter and push its politics onto the campus at large.”°

PL and its Worker-Student Alliance caucus began their serious push in the late fall of 1968 when by plain hard work and fancy bloc voting they came to dominate most of the committees into which the chapter, in a fit of "anti-elitism," had decided to split. Regular SDSers, slow to respond to this sudden challenge, took until the beginning of the year to establish their own bloc-voting group, the New Left Caucus, and even then found themselves in a minority. By early spring PL not only controlled two of the three top offices and a majority on the executive committee, but had committed the chapter to its own two pet projects, the elimination of ROTC and an end to university expansion.

Neither of these issues attracted much attention on the campus, however, and PL efforts to mobilize the students were unavailing. When at last it looked as if the administration, despite several avoidable blunders, would be able to ride through the spring unmolested, PL decided to act. On April 9—defying a chapter meeting the night before at which the New Left Caucus and its allies won three separate votes explicitly rejecting an immediate building takeover—some thirty-five of the PL "cadre" marched into University Hall, expelled the resident administrators, and took over the building. To New Left SDSers who objected, PL's reply was simple: "You're as bad as the administration—you have to be fought, too"; and when asked if it wasn't more important to fight Harvard than their fellow SDSers, one PLer answered: "No, you and the administration are the same thing, and we will smash you both."

The building occupation itself did not succeed in galvanizing any considerable student support (though several hundred SDSers and other stray actionists did join PL inside), but the administration's decision to end it seventeen hours later with an onslaught of local police and all the attendant brutality did do just that. Within hours Harvard students, prouder than most of the campus sanctuary and shocked by its bloody violation, had declared a student strike, and much of the university community was set to do all-out battle with the administration. Here was PL's chance at last: it could lead a popular strike, publicize and probably realize its demands, win over the student body, introduce people to its own radical politics, and widen the circle of those committed ' to revolution. PL welcomed the opportunity with folded arms: it decided to castigate the student "moderates" who had called the strike ("These guys are the enemy"), it denounced every effort by other students and the faculty toward a settlement as a "Sell-out," it scorned all attempts by the New Left Caucus to build bridges to the student majority, it rejected a proffered alliance with a black student group on the grounds that it was "reformist," and it showed its general contempt for student opinion by choosing to continue with its own strike even after a massive student vote to return to classes. (Not that PL wrought any triumphs among their much-vaunted working class off the campus, either: despite a flurry of attempts to get Cambridge-area residents interested in the expansion issue, no links were made with any community groups, working class or otherwise, and one Cambridge block association in fact explicitly repudiated SDS and its cause.) Indeed, it seemed as if PL saw the crisis chiefly as an opportunity to attack—"smash" was the favorite word—the New Left Caucus: it issued leaflets dredging up old issues ("The right-wing of SDS plays to [the] bad aspect of student radicalism"), it repeatedly criticized the caucus's use of such tactics as guerrilla theater and rock bands for student propaganda ("creeping carnivalism"), it physically obstructed the caucus's attempt to hold a "mill-in" to confront the administration, and it turned the daily chapter meetings into what it called "struggle sessions" whose brawls and feuds would have made the Hatfields and McCoys seem blood brothers.

Because of the PL-created vacuum, the faculty and student "moderates" took control of the strike and forced the administration's retreat—helped in large part, ironically, by a group of ex-SDS graduate students—and the SDS chapter was isolated. PL's politics and strategies, and the inability of the New Left Caucus to circumvent them, had managed to give SDS a fixed reputation for inflexibility and dogmatism, and had destroyed SDS's chances at this opportune moment to become a major political group on campus. Instead the chapter was reduced to a shambles, its leaders spent and embittered (some to the point of dropping out of politics altogether), its ranks cut to perhaps half of what they were before the strike. PL, it is true, had succeeded in its two primary aims of consolidating its hold on the chapterthe WSA caucus was still strong enough in May to elect all its own people to the delegate positions for the upcoming National Convention—and of pushing its politics onto the campus, and from every indication that seemed to PL to be victory enough. But at what a price.

And still with all of this the screws of repression tightened—a stark display of power aroused.

The Nixon Administration which took office in January came on like—well, like gangbusters. It did not hesitate to carry out its law-and-order campaign promises—including those about unruly students—and to use the Department of Justice as a political arm of the White House to that end. Attorney General John Mitchell, Nixon's campaign manager in 1968, announced that the government intended to prosecute "hard-line militants" who crossed state lines to visit campuses and stir up trouble; Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, Barry Goldwater's field director in 1964, promised that the Administration would go after "radical, revolutionary, anarchistic kids" and take swift action to repress student radicals and "draftdodgers." Kleindienst in fact singled out SDS for the department's special concern:

If that or any group was organized on a national basis to subvert our society, then I think Congress should pass laws to suppress that activity. When you see an epidemic like this cropping up all over the country—the same kind of people saying the same kinds of things—you begin to get the picture that it is a national subversive activity ... . If people demonstrated in a manner to interfere with others, they should be rounded up and put in a detention camp.

Various branches of the Department of Justice were instructed to step up their investigation and infiltration of militant and left-wing groups—most notably the FBI, but also the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, the Community Relations Service, and a special thirty-man "campus rebellion" task force which Mitchell began to organize to carry out the "vigorous prosecution" of students who interfere with federally guaranteed civil rights or federally funded programs (that is, just about every university). And then to make known the kind of actions it had in mind, the department ordered the prosecution of eight people it determined were responsible for the troubles at the Chicago Democratic Convention, depending for its evidence of this "conspiracy" on a variety of infiltrators and informers and on unauthorized wiretaps which, though illegal, Mitchell justified on the grounds that they were being used against people he had determined on his own were going to "attack and subvert the government by unlawful means."

Throughout the spring, the Administration kept up its pressure. Nixon began by warning that "this is the way civilizations begin to die," then demanded that college trustees, administrators, and faculties show more "backbone," declared that campus disorders were nothing less than "attempts at insurrection," and finally—at tiny and unaccredited General Beadle State College in South Dakota, probably the only campus Nixon could visit safely, and a wonder that his staff found it—he issued his government's ultimatum:

We have the power to strike back if need be, and to prevail, ... We have a Constitution that sets certain limits on what government can do but that allows wide discretion within those limits .... To challenge a particular policy is one thing: to challenge the government's right to set it is another—for this denies the process of freedom.

As his right-hand strong-arm man, Mitchell was given the job of driving this point home, and in a series of extraordinary appearances across the country he sounded the alarm:

The time has come for an end to patience. The time has come for us to demand, in the strongest possible terms, that university officials, local law enforcement agencies and local courts apply the law.

I call for an end to minority tyranny on the nation's campuses and for the immediate reestablishment of civil peace and the protection of individual rights.

If arrests must be made, then arrests there should be. If violators must be prosecuted, then prosecutions there should be.

It is no admission of defeat, as some may claim, to use reasonable physical force to eliminate physical force. The price of civil tranquility cannot be paid by submission to violence and terror ... .

Campus militants, directing their efforts at destruction and intimidation, are nothing but tyrants.

And he made it perfectly clear who he regarded as chiefly responsible for the tyranny: "The Students for a Democratic Society, despite a loose organizational structure, appears, through its local chapters, to carry out a national SDS policy keyed to widespread unrest among large segments of the otherwise peaceful student community." No government agent, police official, judge, lawmaker, or administrator could fail to get the message: the Administration wanted to see "reasonable" physical force used against SDS and its kind and would support any effort in that direction.

The FBI, for one, hardly needed the encouragement. Hoover had already determined, as he told the House in April, that the New Left was "a firmly established subversive force dedicated to the complete destruction of our traditional democratic values and the principles of free government," and that "at the core of the New Left movement in the United States is the Students for a Democratic Society." Accordingly, he was now assigning more than two thousand of the FBI's full-time agents to New Left investigations, paying (at roughly $300 a month) an unknown but at least equal number of informers, and soliciting information on activists and presumed activists from college administrators, campus police, ROTC units, banks, credit companies, and telephone companies; as one former agent has said, "There are hardly any limits on the bureau's activities in compiling political information, particularly about the new left." As far as SDS went, there seemed indeed to be no limits: The New York Times reported quite matter-of-factly in May that "the Federal Bureau of Investigation maintains lengthy dossiers on all of its important members and has undercover agents and informers inside almost every chapter."

But the FBI was not the only one operating in this area, only the most visible. No fewer than twenty federal agencies had now been geared to maximum surveillance, disruption, and harassment of the New Left, among them the army (with political dossiers on at least eighteen million civilians), the Civil Service Commission (with fifteen million names of "subversive activity" suspects), the Secret Service (with fifty thousand dossiers), the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (with two offices devoted to gathering intelligence on students), and even the Internal Revenue Service (with a file on practically everybody, plus a secret seven-man unit whose sole job was to spy on the finances of political organizations and their leaders), and, in the legislature, the House Internal Security Committee (with an admitted 754,000 cards of "subversives" on file). Every good-sized city now had its own Red Squad,” usually concerned with infiltrating and in some cases entrapping SDS groups, always devoted to elaborate surveillance of them; Philadelphia Police Inspector Harry Fox gave some idea of the extent of this in his testimony to the Senate:

Police have now become "watch-dogs" and "observers" of vocal, subversive and revolutionary minded people ... . They cover all meetings, rallies, lectures, marches, sit-ins, laydowns, fasts, vigils, or any other type of demonstration that has ominous overtones ... . These officers know by sight the hard core men and women who lead and inspire demonstrations. They know their associates, family ties, techniques, and affiliations with organizations leaning toward Communism both on and off the Attorney General's list. They see them day in and day out recruiting, planning, carrying signs, and verbally assaulting the principles of democracy.

And state intelligence agencies were also in on the game to the point where Illinois State Police Superintendent James McGuire acknowledged that "our growing concern about subversives and militants, with their talk of armed revolution, has brought us to a temporary shift in emphasis away from the organized crime problem," and he added ominously: "I've never seen anything like the intensity of the current investigations in all my years in law enforcement."22

As the spring wore on and campus battles became more frequent, the press and public began to loose an even greater outcry, as if student protest, only now in its second year of escalation, was something as execrable as the Vietnam war, in its fifth, as if the amount of damage done by demonstrators, perhaps $8 million at most, represented something more than what the American government admitted spending in Vietnam every two hours. The enormous publicity given to protests by the media—salivating over the violent few, somehow picturing the beaten and bloodied as aggressors, turning the picture of those Cornell students with unloaded rifles acquired in self-defense into the suggestion of gunshooting killers on the loose in academia, and more—served to produce an unquestionable fear in the already jittered population.* "It is not easy to shake the indifference of the quiet majority in this country," wrote James Reston, voice of American respectability, "but the militants have achieved it," producing a "great pressure on the politicians from the middle class to get this movement under control."°* Time magazine, noting what it called "an enraged government and public," added that there was "a growing feeling throughout the nation that the rebels have at last gone too far. If there was one word that summarized the feelings of much of the U.S. toward the radicals last week, it was: 'Enough!' " As if in proof, the Gallup poll determined that 82 percent of the American public thought that student demonstrators should be expelled, and the Louis Harris poll determined that 52 percent of the public opposed demonstrations by students even if they were peaceful and legal.

To this last finding New Yorker analyst Richard Harris wryly remarked, "As usual, a position supported by more than half the people, even if it meant denying rights guaranteed under the First Amendment to some seven million citizens who happened to be students, was enough for Congress, and a move to impose strict federal penalties on students and teachers who disrupted college activities quickly gathered momentum in both houses." Four bills were introduced in the Senate, nineteen in the House, most of them concerned with cutting off federal funds to recalcitrant students and universities, one allowing administrators to go to federal courts for injunctions against disruptions, one suggesting the establishment of a Department of Youth Affairs, and one, from Senator John McClellan, subjecting student disruptors to penalties up to $10,000 fines and life imprisonment; as usual, the legislation was furious rather than sound and, since the federal government's actual power to prevent protests was nil, signified nothing except the appeasement of voters. Congressional committees quickly got into the act, too, with the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations going after SDS, the Panthers, SNCC, and the Republic of New Africa ("Testimony will disclose," Chairman John McClellan declared, "that they advocate the use of violence and disruption as a means of attaining their goals and that they and their supporters are dedicated to callous and cynical exploitation of issues and grievances in urban areas and on campuses"), and the House Internal Security Committee specifically investigating SDS ("In view of its probable membership strength and potential for acceleration of incidents," said Chairman Richard Ichord, "a serious threat is posed to the country's internal security").° And Congressional denunciations of SDS in particular, students in general, were as common as pork in a barrel; the pithiest came from Representative Elford A. Cederberg of Michigan—"The so-called Students for a Democratic Society is dedicated to the destruction of our democracy and should be called the Students for the Destruction of a Democratic Society"—and the most long-winded from Senator Russell Long of Louisiana (during Senate floor debate): °?

They're about the most contemptible people I know of. They're the most overprivileged group in this country. Is the Senator familiar with the fact that the parents of these people have put up the money to pay all their expenses and buy soap for them? But they refuse to take baths. That they have put up the money to buy them razor blades? But they refuse to shave. That they put up the money to buy food for those children? And they spend it on marijuana.

They are the most sorry, contemptible, overprivileged people in the world and I say those people are a good element for the Communists to move in on.

State legislatures followed suit. Something on the order of four hundred bills were introduced (more than a hundred in California, thirty in New York, twenty in Wisconsin) in thirty-nine states (all but Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, Nebraska, Vermont, Virginia, and Wyoming), and within months twenty states had enacted some kind of punitive measures against the colleges and their students. Indicative of the pervasive climate of anger then was the enactment of laws ordering the immediate expulsion of students who violate university rules (passed in Louisiana, Ohio, South Carolina, and Wisconsin), firing faculty members who violate rules (Louisiana, North Dakota), instituting criminal charges against those involved in sit-ins and takeovers (California, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Louisiana, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas), and in one instance, giving police a license to kill on campus without legal reprisal (West Virginia). Rarely in the history of American legislatures have so many acted so quickly and with such force to control or eradicate an imagined social evil; one wonders what might happen to air pollution, for example, or drunken drivers, were it deemed possible to devote such purposive efforts to those public problems.

None of this quite remarkable vociferation was lost upon the administrators of the nation's colleges and universities, no matter how ivory their towers. The message was unmistakable: universities had better take strong measures to stop student protest or else the government would step in and do it for them. It was the one threat that universities feared most, challenging as it did their special position as strictly unaccountable bastions of privilege, and Harvard's Nathan Pusey, at his patrician best, acknowledged, "Many of us, I think, are terribly afraid about that kind of reaction from outside the campus communities, and it is something that we ought rightly to be frightened by." With an alacrity rare among the dons of American education, presidents and deans descended upon Washington urging that no punitive legislation be enacted, thirty-nine top-ranking presidents signed a public statement promising future hard-line responses to disruptions, and professional education organizations like the American Council on Education and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities went on bended knee before Congressional committees to assure that universities could really take care of themselves.

And take care they could: once aroused, the academy displayed an ingenuity more infinite than the spider's. University admissions offices were told to screen out the "protest-prone" (Cornell's dean of admissions said bluntly, "It didn't help a candidate's chances any if he noted he was an active member of SDS"); university psychiatrists were encouraged to find and "treat" students active in politics ("The use of psychiatric counseling to control student dissidents takes place at many colleges and universities," one 1970 study reported); university scholarship offices were instructed to put pressure on activists who depended upon financial assistance from the school, and aid was actually withdrawn from protesters at no fewer than nineteen schools; university records offices furnished to the McClellan Committee the names and records of student activists, usually SDSers, and added a little "chilling effect" by making it known that they were doing so (among them were such prestigious institutions as the University of California, all branches, the City University of New York, Columbia, Cornell, and Harvard); and so on it went.*° Faculty members, aroused now as a result of finding themselves increasingly the targets of student attacks—including the disruption of classes, academic picket lines, threats, and even physical assaults—rallied to the administrators’ cause under the banner of "academic freedom," which was, in fact, "professor power." Polls indicated that more than 80 percent of all faculty members disapproved of both the aims and methods of campus demonstrations and regarded them as "a threat to academic freedom," more than 76 percent favored the expulsion or suspension of disruptors, nearly half (46.8 percent) had decided that demonstrations were "created by left groups trying to cause trouble," and a quarter (25.2 percent) argued that there should be no demonstrations at all—so it was not difficult to enlist faculties on the side of campus law-and-order in these days." In fact, in many places professors now took the lead in attacking student protesters: LID mentor Sidney Hook, for example, was instrumental in banding a number of conservative teachers into an anti-SDS "University Center for Rational Alternatives," and a hundred senior teachers at Columbia put out a much-publicized call for faculties to crack down on political militants—"demonstrate the will to act"—by a variety of methods including informing on them to the police and the administration.

The ultimate weapon of the university, however, as we have seen, was naked force, and administrators resorted to it now more than ever before. In the cool words of the American Council on Education investigators, "Major civil or institutional action (arrest, indictment, dismissal, or suspension) was taken against individual students at fully three-fourths of the institutions where there were violent protests; similarly severe punitive measures were taken against individual students at more than one-fifth of the colleges that had nonviolent disruptive protests." Police or National Guardsmen were called in on at least 127 campuses during the school year, sometimes for weeks on end, and more than four thousand people were arrested in campus protests from January to June. In addition at least one thousand students were expelled or suspended from school this spring—compared to 293 by the NSA's figures for the spring of 1968—making them instantly eligible for the draft and a possible future in Vietnam, a punishment ("signing a death warrant," as it was called) that until now administrators had been reluctant to mete out. Universities also went on to press charges in court for a variety of crimes ranging from trespassing to kidnapping, and punishment could often be severe: to take just a few examples, a Harvard PLer was given a one-year prison term for assault (actually, grabbing a dean by the arm), two San Francisco SDSers were given a year for three misdemeanor counts, seven Voorhees College students were given eighteen-to-twenty-four-month sentences for "rioting" in connection with a building takeover, a Washington University SDSer was given five years for attempted arson, and three San Femando Valley State students were given one-to-twenty-five years (and eight others one year) for conspiracy, false imprisonment, and kidnapping for holding administrators temporarily captive during a takeover.”

And with all this, university administrators were still being accused of laxness, not only by President Nixon, but by such as Tennessee Congressman Dan Kuykendall who attacked "spineless campus administrators," and columnist William Buckley—the only person still alive for whom the slogan "For God, For Country, and For Yale" went in ascending orderwho accused college presidents of being "made out of Cornell jelly."

SDS, as the Administration had declared, was the prime target for the national campaign of repression, for both university administrators, civil authorities, and government agents.

On campus, punitive action (arrest, expulsion, withdrawal of aid) was taken against New Left organizations (chiefly SDS) in 76 percent of the spring's disruptive demonstrations, yet against other student groups only 37 percent of the time; and New Leftists were expelled or suspended twice as often as any other students. SDS was banned outright at half a dozen campuses (Arizona, Colorado, Florida Southern, Kent State, Maryland, and Saint Bonaventure), the March NC was kicked off the Texas campus despite an earlier signed contract ("We are not about to let the university be used by subversives and revolutionaries," the trustees announced?8), and the California Board of Education took steps to prohibit SDS from public high schools and junior highs (carried out throughout the system in the fall). SDS and pro-SDS faculty members were fired or suspended at City University of New York, Connecticut, Dartmouth, Harvard, Queensborough, San Francisco State, and Tulane (among others), and at Connecticut the administration even got a court injunction against one left teacher which forbade him from practically any overt activityincluding the telling of falsehoods. Freelances, too, entered the fray: a Cuban exile threw a bomb into a meeting of the Columbia SDS chapter in January (it did not explode), an Army ROTC commander ordered the members of the Pershing Rifles Club in the "Big Ten" schools to spy on their fellow students in SDS, and conservative students at many schools took it upon themselves to disrupt SDS meetings and rallies with strong-arm tactics. And the ubiquitous FBI, with its agents, informers, and wiretaps, produced its own debilitating effects by methods somewhat more subtle; as one of its investigators said in May:

The S.D.S. can't be a dangerous organization as long as we know what they are up to. So we keep watching it. Nothing the S.D.S. does surprises us. If they are going to have a rally, then we know what kind of tactics they are planning and we are ready for them if they want to cause trouble.

Our inside information has caused S.D.S. to get more conspiratorial in a lot of places. They make their plans at the last minute now to fool us. But that doesn't leave them much time for getting the word around, and it causes them confusion and makes it harder for them to draw the kinds of crowds they used to get at their rallies.

We also find that the more conspiratorial S.D.S. becomes, the less they appeal to the hippies and people like that who think everything should be wide open and who are afraid of political secrets and secret political planning.

I think the conspiratorial mood is hurting S.D.S. a lot.

Off the campus, SDS leaders were regular targets for municipal police, usually on wrung-in charges: in addition to the five arrested in the NO (and subsequently slapped with a ban to keep them from traveling), Mark Rudd and Columbia SDSer Peter Clapp were arrested in upstate New York (and faced the prospect of fifteen years in jail) for allegedly having two ounces of marijuana, Rudd was indicted by a grand jury for actions going back to the spring of 1968, Bill Ayers was arrested for assault in Michigan, Connie Ullman was arrested for vagrancy in Texas, and four members of the Labor Committee in Philadelphia were arrested for possession of explosives (a patently fabricated charge which it turned out was impossible to substantiate in court). In Denver in April a member of the Colorado State University SDS chapter, Susan Parker, was hauled before a grand jury investigating the January electric-tower bombings and because she refused to testify about her friendships she was put in jail on an indefinite sentence for as long as she declined to talk. The offices of the Michigan regional staff and the Radical Education Project in Ann Arbor were broken into on February 7, apparently by professionals, and addressograph plates, financial records, contact-card files, mail, and other SDS materials were stolen, though none of the valuable equipment or money in the office was touched, leading SDSers to the natural conclusion that the job was done by police or FBI. Five other ROs were vandalized, rifled, and damaged during the spring. Things became so bad, in fact, that Mike Klonsky, on national television—a CBS "Face the Nation" program on May n—went out of his way to charge that Mitchell was "planning within the next ten days the 1969 version of the Palmer Raids, that he has got it all mapped out, in over fifty cities in the United States, trying to pick off so-called leaderships," Klonsky presumably hoping that national exposure of the plan would forestall any escalation of the harassment and arrests. Perhaps it did—at any rate no publicized raids occurred—but in the next few days there was the invasion of the NO, police warfare at People's Park, the killing of a black student at North Carolina A&M, and grand-jury indictments delivered in New York, Memphis, Ithaca, and elsewhere ("more than 400" in all, according to New Left Notes), and that kind of official wrath was bad enough.

Repression proved to be ultimately very debilitating for SDS both nationally and locally, exacerbating the paranoid style, wearing down individuals and eating into groups, tying up people in courts, exhausting both finances and energy, forcing chapters to give up some confrontational tactics, sending leaders into jail and exile, and over the whole organization casting the dark realization of what the stakes are in even an infant, proto-revolution. But its effect was gradual and diffuse, like a slow poison, and its victims initially skeptical and unimpressed, so very little was done to combat or circumvent it: to the SDS leadership it seemed that a few security precautions, some words of legal advice, and a bloody-butunbowed response would suffice. Accordingly, the NIC sent out word that SDS offices should institute "night watches," told chapters to outlaw tape recorders and burn notes, and announced in May that "security considerations, which should be in effect normally, MUST BE particularly emphasized to all movement people now." The NO itself began what it called "armed security," doubled its door locks (telling anyone coming to the NO to call first), and made sure that no business of importance was carried on over the telephone (a wise precaution—subsequent government publications revealed that the phone was indeed tapped); Bernardine Dohrn had long since given up putting anything down in her appointment book, the 1969 version of which was thrown aside untouched. New Left Notes published several warnings to SDSers about the power of grand juries, the dangers of talking to juries or FBI agents, and the ubiquitous penetration of undercover agents in campus chapters. Four New York SDSers (Kathy Boudin, Brian Glick, Eleanor Raskin, and Columbia law student Gustin Reichbach) prepared The Bust Book*® to give Movement people advice on how to avoid arrest and what to do when detained by the cops; it proved valuable (and necessary) enough that it was shortly picked up by Grove Press for overground publication. SDS even tried to use the courts in one instance—despite a conviction that they were hardly interested in SDS's welfare—by suing to block the Senate Investigations Subcommittee from subpoenaing chapter membership lists and records ("punishing, harassing, and intimidating," it said); predictably, the effort failed and the case was dismissed.

Perhaps one of the reasons for SDS's rather muted response was that in a curious way the leadership actually greeted the repression visited upon the organization more as a confirmation of its revolutionary power than as a peril to its functioning; as Mike Klonsky wrote in New Left Notes:

The only reason SDS is being attacked so hard right now is because we have begun to learn the lessons of history while building our revolutionary youth movement.

Our attack on white supremacy, which in practice over the last six months has helped shake the whole racist foundation on which this system of exploitation is built, has forced the racist power structure to move to crush us. We must respond by taking the issues to the people in a mass way and doing mass education around the fights that brought the repression down.

Obviously, if we weren't hurting them they wouldn't be resorting to such force. And when the force became increasingly blatant—arrests and jailings, gassings and bearings, shootings and killings, in New York, North Carolina, Chicago, Texas, Colorado, Berkeley—the revolution seemed increasingly imminent. And when the force seemed unable to stop the rising insurrection, on the campuses, in the high schools, in the army camps, and on the streets—well, then, what more natural than to feel, to hope, that it could even be triumphant? Certainly that was the mood of many people around the NO—despite the harassment, despite the factionalism, despite the setbacks, despite the defections, the mood was confident, expectant. It was more than bravado, more than false courage, more than Mao-modeling, it was a wish attaining the stature of a belief that led Jim Mellen, enunciating what all of the leadership was apparently thinking, to tell the students at Kent State:

We are no longer asking you to come and help us make a revolution. We're telling you that the revolution has begun, and the only choice you have to make is which side you're on. And we're also telling you that if you get in the way of that revolution, it's going to run right over you.

It may have been delusory; but it was real. As spring turned into summer, the question of power really seemed to be resolving itself, at least in the minds of the SDS leadership, in favor of revolution. The main preoccupation of the national collective and those who felt themselves to be its allies was how to keep that revolution going, how to mobilize the left into "a fighting force," how finally to take that revolution to victory.

It is remarkable, really, what had happened to SDS. By now both those who sided with the national collective and those who favored Progressive Labor—and a number of various stripes in between—were in general agreement on certain bedrock points: you can't make a revolution with a loosely controlled organization without substantial internal discipline ... a dedicated cadre is necessary in any revolutionary group only a vanguard party, or band, has the toughness and discipline to undertake the organization of masses of people, to withstand repression, to forge a militant force, to lead the revolution. The points of disagreement among these factions were many and in some cases crucial, but they all tended to agree, if not necessarily consciously, that there was no longer any need for something like SDS. All that had been essential for SDS—a student constituency, membership in autonomous chapters, bases in the universities, a loose national structure, the absence of rigid rules and internal discipline, freewheeling debates and open disagreements, resistance to ideological prescriptions and space for a multitude of tendencies, political consciousness founded on the ability to make connections, and a selfinterest in one's own liberation as necessary for the liberation of others—were no longer cherished, no longer protected: they were for the most part seen as impedimenta to the revolution. The shapers and movers of SDS no longer cared particularly for students—or for a democratic society. Something new was wanted, a new kind of organization for the new revolutionary job at hand.”

This, combined with the repression from above, the defections from below, and the factionalism within, wrote the death sentence for SDS. That sentence was read, amid much cacophony, at the June National Convention.