It is revealing that "Movement" by now had become the word the young left in America used to talk about itself, for it suggests sweep and action and drive, implies power without demanding precision, and can encompass civil rights as well as antiwar activists, small ad hoc demonstrations as well as SDS and SNCC.
Almost as if it were aware that after the march on Washington it was becoming a new organization, SDS chose for its 1965 convention a site some distance from New York State, where the last two conventions had been held, and only two hundred miles from Port Huron, its geographical fountainhead.
At Camp Maplehurst, near the tiny town of Kewadin, in the resort area of northern Michigan, some 450 SDSers met from June 9 to 13 in a convention that foreshadowed both a new style and a new direction for the organization.
For this convention, as those past, the life style was spare: delegates brought their own sleeping bags, often slept under the stars; the food, included in a $20 registration fee, was inadequate and unappetizing, and the nearest city of any size eighteen miles away; park regulations allowed no one in or out after 11:00 P.M.
There were some familiar faces—a number of SNCC people showed up, the last convention they were to appear at before black power sent them in an irrevocably different direction; and observers came from all the groups on the left from the National Student Christian Federation to the Progressive Labor Party. Talk, as usual, centered around Movement gossip, Movement plans, and Movement rhetoric: "organize," "participate," "alienation," "consciousness," "moral," "relevance," "dialogue," "community," "initiative," "involvement."” But it was clear that this convention would be like none before.
For now SDS was starting to become the home for a new breed of activist, a younger, more alienated, more committed student, part of that strain that had been growing in SDS over the last year and had increased even further with the escalation in Vietnam and the Washington march.
They were new to national polities, had never before attended an SDS convention, knew the organization essentially as the caller of the April march, but when they looked around for a group that seemed to share their concerns, all that was on the horizon was SDS, and so they flocked to Kewadin—much to the bewilderment of the older SDSers, now irrevocably christened "the old guard."
For the first time at a convention most of the people were unknown to each other, the proceedings were out of the hands of a group of old friends, the Port Huronites no longer dominated.
"All sorts of things went on," Lee Webb says with some dismay, "all the traditions stopped." "It was an odd convention," Paul Booth recalls, "a loony convention: everyone was loony." Looniness is in the eye of the beholder, but there is no question that SDS was changing, and Kewadin was a signal of that change. The period of resistance was taking shape.’
The new breed brought to SDS a new style and a new heritage. For the first time at an SDS meeting people smoked marijuana; Pancho Villa mustaches, those droopy Western-movie addenda that eventually became a New Left cliché, made their first appearance in quantity; blue workshirts, denim jackets, and boots were worn by both men and women.
These were people generally raised outside of the East, many from the Midwest and Southwest, and their ruralistic dress reflected a different tradition, one more aligned to the frontier, more violent, more individualistic, more bare-knuckled and callus-handed, than that of the early SDSers. They were non-Jewish, nonintellectual, nonurban, from a nonprofessional class, and often without any family tradition of political involvement, much less radicalism.
They tended to be not only ignorant of the history of the left and its current half-life in New York City, but downright uninterested: they didn't know Dellinger from Dillinger, Rustin from Reston, Trotsky from Chomsky, Liberation from Liberator, the Socialist Workers Party from the Socialist Labor Party, and they didn't really care.
Jack Newfield, surveying twenty-five of this new breed in 1965, found that:
.. none had ever read Rosa Luxemburg, Max Weber, Eduard Bernstein, John Dewey, Peter Kropotkin, or John Stuart Mill. Less than five had actually read Lenin or Trotsky, and only a few more had ever read Marx. Almost all of them had read C. Wright Mills and Camus, and about half had read [Paul] Goodman, Frantz Fanon, and Herbert Marcuse. More had read The Realist than had read Mill's "Essay on Liberty," or the "Sermon on the Mount."
Not that they were all simply "anti-intellectual," the phrase with which many of the old guard and more of the Old Left dismissed them; rather, they were generally without exposure to this kind of learning, being underclassmen from mediocre colleges or conservative state universities; they were nervous and often inarticulate in public debates with well-versed old guard radicals; and they emphasized "morals" and "values," action and bodies-on-the-line, honesty and courage, not ideology and theory and what they called "Old Leftism" and "all that thirties horseshit."
Their notions of politics had been formed ab ovo in the civil-rights struggle or with the impact of Vietnam escalation, so most of them had yet to make radical connections, to develop much beyond a moral view of race and war.
Al Haber later in the year expressed the old guard's fear of the danger of these "moral activists" in SDS:
The force of their energy and enthusiasm for action [ends up] preempting organizational resources and allowing no time for educational work. Why?
Because self-education is hard; because it is slow; because they are not sure and secure in their beliefs; because the urgency of direct moral expression outweighs for them all other considerations.
In this he was prophetic—but he might just as well have tried to warn Detroit against having anything to do with the Model T.
The "energy and enthusiasm for action" which the new breed brought was accompanied by a sense of alienation, a bitterness, and a commitment that would help, in the next few years, to fuel the fires of resistance within SDS. As people often still in their teens, five, six, and seven years younger than the old guard, they had already experienced while still in high school the idealism-disillusion-revulsion syndrome that many of the older SDSers had gone through, they had lived through Selma, Dallas, Atlantic City, Santo Domingo, and Vietnam before they even came to SDS.
For them, "We Shall Overcome" had already given way to "Blow-in' in the Wind." They were in a sense more thoroughly anti-American than the early SDSers had been, quicker even than they to write off labor, liberals, the Democratic Party, reforms, and "the system" in general, emotionally inclined to plague both—all—houses. And they had made a break from their past more thorough than their predecessors; Texan Jeff Shero, spiritually a part of the new breed despite his year's experience in SDS, recalls:
We were by instinct much more radical, much more willing to take risks, in a way because to become a part of something like SDS meant a tremendous number of breaks. If you were a New York student and became a member of SDS, it was essentially joining a political organization, which was a common experience. I
n Texas to join SDS meant breaking with your family, it meant being cut off—it was like in early Rome joining a Christian sect—and the break was so much more total, getting involved with something like SDS you had to be much more highly committed, and you were in a sense freed, 'cause you'd get written off. If you were from Texas, in SDS, you were a bad motherfucker, you couldn't go home for Christmas. Your mother didn't say, "Oh, isn't that nice, you're involved. We supported the republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and now you're in SDS and I'm glad to see you're socially concerned." In most of those places it meant, "You Goddamn Communist." There was absolutely no reinforcing sympathy ... . So we were strong, the commitment in those regions was stronger than it was in the East.
Finally, the new breed brought to SDS a kind of centrifugalism: a distrust of centralization, of leadership, of "top-down" organizations, and instead, an instinctive, ERAP-like reliance on small groups, locally based, operating individually. Most of the newcomers had joined SDS chapters on their campuses in the previous six months, largely around antiwar actions, and the success these chapters had during this time inclined them to reliance on this kind of local organization. Then, too, there was an under-the-surface antipathy to the national leadership, based in part on nervousness, awe, and unfamiliarity, in part on the remoteness and inaccessibility of the old guard. The newcomers were by heritage more individualistic, as well; some said at the time even something of the frontier.
Though in numbers the new breed was not a majority at the convention—perhaps not more than two hundred—its energy was infectious and its style was evident throughout. Steve Max, not one to be sympathetic about it all, noted some of the effects:
The role of chairman vanished; at this year's convention, full plenary sessions of 250 people were chaired by members picked at random with no regard to ability, while workshops debated having a chairman at all. Convention credentials went unchecked, and some key votes went uncounted. What constituted two thirds, a majority, or a quorum of the delegates remains a mystery to this day.
Beyond that, plenary sessions often deteriorated into mumbles and tangents, with people just as likely to be spending time out under the trees as in the smoky rooms. Workshops called to confront such issues as "The Political Program and Strategy of the Movement" or "Democracy and Organizational Structure" quickly turned into meandering discussions of whatever problems anyone wanted to bring up.
The effort to draw up a document representing current SDS thinking was denounced as "statementism," and the more than twenty lengthy papers that had been submitted to the convention as drafts of the new Port Huron Statement were summarily discarded.
An attempt to get the convention to agree to at least a unified position on foreign policy was similarly frustrated, and the resolution that finally passed ended up being a denunciation of foreign-policy resolutions. Efforts to fashion SDS into the leading organization against the war were sabotaged by old guarders resisting single-issueism and by newcomers resisting "top-down" unanimity. Attempts to centralize organizational direction in Chicago or give national officers additional power were similarly frustrated, the dominant attitude of the new breed being that the strength of SDS lay in the chapters, not in the National Office.
And when it came time to select national officers the new breed really made itself felt. In the first place, they almost managed to do away with national officers entirely. The plenary session debated for some time as to whether a truly democratic organization should have such a thing as a president, and at one point there was general agreement that the positions should be abolished—a move which was halted only by a decision to put the issue to the entire membership before taking action. (A membership referendum was held in the fall on this point, with Jeff Shero arguing for abolition, Paul Booth against, and the abolition move lost by about three to one—though fewer than six hundred people bothered to vote—but by then SDSers had had a whole summer to learn from.)
When it came to the position of National Secretary, however—a position normally filled by the National Council people meeting after the convention—the centrifugal spirit was victorious, and not only did the delegates fail to find someone to fill Kissinger's shoes but they didn't seem to care very much. Max viewed these new-breed effects wryly, concluding, "To destroy formal structures in society is unfortunately no small task, but to do so in one's own organization is not only possible but easy."® And when the delegates finally did agree to fill the top two positions, they filled each with a person distinctly homo novo.
The presidential race among Larry Gordon, Clark Kissinger, and Dick Magidoff of the old guard, and Carl Oglesby and Bob Pardun, more or less representative of the newcomers, was won easily by Oglesby. He was a fresh figure, the first President not from the old guard, a slightly remote person (by virtue of age and intellect) who could be counted on not to try to gather power or to play NO factional politics (about which he was presumed to be ignorant anyway, as a member for only half a year). He was also a non-Easterner, a country boy up from the mills of Akron, not (yet) versed in the ideologies of the Old Left, and a person whose obvious honesty and integrity appealed to the younger members ("Everyone felt a kind of intuitive trust in Carl," as one delegate put it).
For Vice President, the convention chose Jeffrey Shero, a veritable symbol of the new breed. Short, slim, bearded, with steady brown eyes and a gentle Texas drawl, Shero was Western rather than Eastern, his politics were instinctive rather than inherited, his style was shy and sensitive rather than articulate and probing, his manner was quiet, honest, bluntly—even naively—earnest. He grew up with a supportive mother and an unsympathetic stepfather (an Air Force colonel, no less), went through high school in Bryan, Texas, and then spent a checkered college career in and out of various universities, finding classes increasingly irrelevant in the face of the growing civil-rights movement.
"I'd be going along," he recalls, "half putting up with it, sliding through, and then we'd have a civil-rights thing or a sit-in, which had immediate repercussions in human terms, and taking a test on Dickens' Christmas Carol in junior-level English literature seemed lucking ridiculous. And you could see on the one hand academic irrelevance if you spent the time on a test and on the other the real differences in people's lives."
Shero was instrumental in making the SDS chapter at the University of Texas into a major civil-rights force in 1964 and 1965, leading one fight over the integration of bathroom facilities (for which the outstanding slogan was "Let My People Go"), establishing a tutorial program for ghetto high-schoolers in Austin, and working in several Southern states as a white support group for SNCC. His politics were formed here:’
Our sense of direct action and tactical sense came from the civil-rights movement. The civil-rights movement lent a whole plethora of tactics of direct action, confrontational in nature, which suited the psychology of people who had an idealistic sense of the country, its politics, and how institutions were supposed to be founded. Rage, and disillusionment, and a moral impulse to create something better—that was our background.
It was the background upon which the resistance movement would be built.
Carl Oglesby elected president
Jeffrey Shero - University Of Texas SDS
The convention did agree on one substantive issue, to take the anti-Communist "exclusion clauses" out of the constitution. The preamble had said that SDS advocates "a radical, democratic program counterposed to authoritarian movements both of Communism and the domestic Right"; this was changed to "a radical, democratic program whose methods embody the democratic vision." The membership clause, adopted in 1960, had read:
S.D.S. is an organization of democrats. It is civil libertarian in its treatment of those with whom it disagrees, but clear in its opposition to any totalitarian principle as a basis for government or social organization. Advocates or apologists for such a principle are not eligible for membership.
The convention voted to change "totalitarian" to "anti-democratic" and "government or social" to "governmental, social, or political," and to drop the last sentence entirely. These changes, suggested by Kissinger, were opposed by some undergraduates who had developed an antipathy to the tactics of the PL and the CP—"If I'd wanted to [work with Stalinists] I'd have joined the DuBois Clubs," one wrote, and another said, "I don't agree with those people on principle, and I think we ought to say so"—and by some who simply felt the need to "proclaim some standards" and "have our politics up front." But they were approved by an overwhelming majority of the delegates: the younger members tended to feel that the clause was simply irrelevant—"The DAR doesn't say that it excludes Communists, so why should we?"—or unnecessarily divisive—"That's more of that old-left Red-baiting again, and we should be beyond that"; and the older SDSers tended to view it as a way of making a clear break with LID politics and washing away the last stains of Cold War exclusionism.
SDS thinking was summarized and defended in a long paper later that year by Al Haber, who felt "non-exclusionism" was right both pragmatically and politically. Exclusionism—or anti-Communism—had been destructive to the left in general in the past, he argued, it was a waste of time and energy among people who had limited resources of both, and it can't work in an organization like SDS which has no very severe qualifications for membership in the first place and has no clear-cut factions to expel even if it wanted to. In the Movement, he said,
people shall be judged by their behavior. If privately they smoke pot (or don't) or belong to YSA or the SP or the CP or DP or YAF or SDS or the Chamber of Commerce (or don't), that's their affair—with which others may agree or disagree, privately. When their public actions weaken the movement, or when they refuse to discuss and argue their beliefs with their colleagues, then they lose their right to speak in the Movement or for it.
That was to prove a somewhat optimistic assessment of the quality of the Movement in the years to come, but it seemed logical enough, and morally right, given the kind of organization SDS was at the time.
Obviously the LID observers at Kewadin—shades of Port Huron—were aghast. Tom Kahn spoke vigorously against any constitutional change and warned that the LID elders would look upon it as a further slap in their faces which, coming on top of the move of the NO out of New York, the "pop-front" march on Washington, and the already frigid relations, would likely lead to a permanent break between SDS and its parent body. As it turned out, LIDers certainly were upset at the news, and many responded like venerable Harry Overstreet, who had been in the LID for fifty years and a member of its National Council for most of that time: in a series of angry letters he denounced SDS, warned of its becoming part of a "foreign-based, worldwide force," and resigned forthwith. The majority in the LID, however, was not quite ready to make the break with their younger charges, hoping once again to keep them around long enough to realize the error of their ways; to Harry Laidler, "Most of the [SDS] members are new and naive. They are teachable." And so at its June meeting the Board of Directors adopted, unanimously, a carrot-stick proposal reading:?
The League for Industrial Democracy in its long history has stood firmly, as a matter of uncompromising principle, against totalitarianism of both the right and the left. We are therefore deeply troubled that the 1965 Convention of our student department, Students for a Democratic Society, removed from its Constitution and membership card the long-standing reference to Communism as an authoritarian movement.
We urge the SDS to carry on in the coming year a thoroughgoing discussion of the nature and function of democracy in society. We pledge our support, through literature and speakers at the campus level, to aid SDS in these discussions.
Toward this end, the Board seeks to continue and deepen the "dialogues" that have been initiated by the Student Activities Committee. We seek a reaffirmation of SDS's adherence to the traditional opposition of LID to totalitarianism of both the right and the left.
But things had gone too far for "dialogues," and 1962 was three years ago. So little did SDS regard this emergency meeting that not one of the four students who were members of the Board bothered to appear. Tom Kahn, at least, was under no illusion as to the SDS mood; in an angry letter to the NO in June he wrote:
I am ... aware that there are those within SDS who have decided a split with the LID is inevitable and desirable. They are encouraged by others on the periphery of SDS who spend a great deal of energy attacking the LID and individual Board members as enemies and sell-outs. [If this continues,] the crossfire will intensify and pressures will be generated all along the line.
The effects of the Kewadin spirit upon SDS, however, went far beyond the relations with the LID. In two quite crucial ways, in program and in leadership, it sent SDS askew.
First, the Kewadin spirit meant that the organization would have no effective strategies for the coming year, no ongoing projects, no programmatic plans. The whole emphasis was upon the individual chapters, which were to be allowed to function as they saw fit, pick issues as local conditions demanded, and operate as much as possible without any national direction at all. This was, of course, a continuation of the honored SDS tradition of the Haberesque perception that SDS should build itself around the strengths of ongoing campus groups rather than imposing national strategies, and of the SNCC and ERAP legacies that SDS should avoid anything smacking of a powerful centralized organization. But it meant, in the short run, that SDS would flounder in a sea of strategies over the next few months, and, in the long run, that SDS would miss the opportunity, now at hand in the wake of the April march, to point itself in the direction of building a strong national organization, around either the war or the universities.
The decision not to make SDS into the leading organization of an expanded antiwar movement, which it could have been, had many causes beyond simply the decentralizing attitudes of the new breed and what can only be called the bewilderment of the old guard.
There was a fear that the war was I too much of a single-issue trap, too likely to make SDS into s some kind of peace organization where its tentacled radicalism would shrivel up.
There was a conviction that nothing could really be done to end the war until there was, in the SDS phrase, "a movement to change America" that would eradicate the root causes of its war-making: "We must organize," the usual rhetoric went, "not against this war but against the fifth and sixth and seventh war from now." There was a traditional antipathy to dealing with foreign policy issues at all as somehow remote from the immediate and overwhelming evils like poverty and racism. And there was a suspicion that the whole antiwar movement was fated to have as short an effective life as the antibomb movements earlier—"Where would we be," the question was often asked, "if peace were to break out tomorrow?" Todd Gitlin, looking back, blames the old guard:
Our failure of leadership—which was undeniable—was a reflection of the fact that our hearts were not on the campuses .... We were just plain stupid .... The leadership was already a closed elite, we didn't understand what an antiwar movement would be, we didn't have any fee/ for it. My own feeling then was that it was an abstraction ... because that kind of movement is so big, because I couldn't see what it would be, day to day. What we surrendered then was the chance for an anti-imperialist peace movement."
Or as Steve Weissman was to put it: SDS was guilty of "a consistent underestimation of the importance of the Anti-war Movement ... to the creation of a permanent political force in America." Here was that chance to build an American left, to go beyond the students into the other strata of America, and SDS didn't realize it.
Likewise SDS didn't see the possibilities of forging a massive campus-based organization, something like a national union of radical students, though that too may have been possible then. Again, there were many causes. There was the lingering sense that SDS's job should still be to build a multilayered left—as Dick Flacks said in a position paper to the convention, "I want to see us take seriously the possibility of radical workers, scientists, doctors, city planners, economists, sociologists, poets and mothers"—and not to fasten upon students alone. There was a perception that, as Potter had noted, universities were so much a part of the national sickness that they could not possibly be instruments for national health; this blended neatly with the attitude of the new breed that, as Shero had expressed it, the needs of the country were so great that it hardly made sense for students to continue academic lives (an attitude, incidentally, which animated the dropout phenomenon beginning now to lead young people away from the campuses and into the Movement offices, the youth ghettos of the cities, and the community projects). And there was a weariness among the old guard with the whole idea of student issues and student concerns, what Paul Booth called at the time, "a kind of shell-shock," a function "of too many years of campus experience, alienation and frustration: one only wants to get out—out of thinking about campuses, out of being on them or interested in them."!? Thus at the moment it might have played a cardinal role in fashioning this student generation into an ongoing political organization of national consequence, SDS chose not to.
The Kewadin spirit led SDS away from the assertion of national leadership and into a continued reliance upon local initiative. It was, in truth, perhaps the easiest and surest direction for the organization, then still young and small, and because of it SDS would be able to grow and prosper at the chapter level as no other campus organization had ever done. But for this, in the long run, it had to pay a price.
The second unfortunate effect of Kewadin was to turn the National Office into a shambles for the entire summer and to throw upon the organization a problem of leadership that would not be settled for more than a year.
The decision not to set a national strategy, coupled with the downgrading of the NO and the belief that SDS could get along without a National Secretary, wrought much trouble in Chicago. A cluster of people put in time in the National Office, but most were woefully inexperienced. Jeff Segal, an eighteen-year-old who had volunteered to do a little work around the place, found himself elected office manager by the rest of the staff (after a month he would take on the title of "Acting National Secretary"), but he was little known to the rest of the organization and new to the hurly-burly of Movement offices. Nor was there anyone around to give him, or anyone else, direction. Immediately after being elected Oglesby set off on a long swing through Cambodia, North Vietnam, and Japan to show American "solidarity" with foreign antiwar elements and didn't get back until August.” Shero, who had agreed to be editor of the Bulletin as well as Vice President, had disappeared without a word into the Southwest, thinking that his services wouldn't be required until the fall. It was, Paul Booth, believes, a distinct failure of the old guard:
We didn't have enough of our heavies there because most people said, Aw fuck it. We didn't fully dominate it and other kinds of people—Segal, Shero, and the like—got into the NO and couldn't control it, couldn't do as Clark had done, which was to go his own direction and keep on top of things even though the heavies were elsewhere. And finally the thing got out of hand.
That's an understatement. With its newfound publicity—since the march a spate of newspaper articles and columns on SDS had appeared, and The Nation, the New Republic, The Reporter, and U.S. News all ran pieces in the early summer—SDS seemed to have attracted the attention of disaffected kids across the land. Letters poured in during the summer at a rate at least a hundred times greater than anything the NO had known before:
"I saw an article on you and I wondered if you'd send me more information" ...
"I heard from a friend what kind of things you're doing, and I'd like to join" ...
"Please send me anything you have about the war" ...
"I don't make much, but maybe this five dollars can help."
The office set up regional desks to answer the flood of mail, and most of the staff put in ten and twelve and sometimes eighteen hours a day, but even so correspondence fell way behind; classically typical of the confusion around the place was one letter sent out in August which ended, "Thank you for your inconvenience."
Literature orders were also cascading in, and they received even less attention than the letters. It seems that the staffers, in a move to put into effect the kind of society they were hoping to achieve, had decided that there would be no "elitism" around the office and everyone would participate in all the chores—"shitwork," as it was called—including mimeographing and mailing the literature; to achieve this egalitarianism they instituted a system whereby the person who mailed out the last copy of any pamphlet or paper would be the one to mimeograph, collate, and staple new stacks of them. What happened in practice was simply that no one sent out the last copy of any item requested, and the literature shelves were papered with single copies undisturbed for weeks on end. By the end of June almost no literature was going out at all, and only a few worklist mailings trickled out from time to time.
And then the old bugaboo, money, reappeared. Kissinger's final financial report for the 1964-65 fiscal year showed that SDS had taken in the phenomenal sum of $65,147 ($50,000 from contributions) during the previous twelve months, the great bulk of it since the April march: that was wealth beyond anything Max and McKelvey could have imagined.
Yet SDS had found no difficulty in spending even that sum—$45,000 went for NO business, and another $20,000 or so went to PREP and ERAP projects. By the end of June SDS was broke. In July the phone was disconnected for ten days—an ignominy that had not befallen the NO for two years—and to top everything off the New York Consolidated Edison company forwarded a bill for gas and electricity for May and June, since no one had told them to disconnect the service in the old New York office. Kissinger spent time on fund raising as planned, but without much success; at the end of the summer one staffer, wryly referring to the standard NO diet, joked, "Clark has found a richy in Chicago who has agreed to provide the movement with all the peanut butter it can use one of the biggest peanut butter magnates in the country, Clark is now working on jelly."!°
And when, in late July, $10,000 did come in, an anonymous donation from Anne Peretz, the NO managed to squander that with truly remarkable facility. Most of it went into a "photo project," the brainchild of one D. Gordon, a friend of Shero’s from the University of Mississippi (possibly the only SDSer from there) and another representative of the new breed, who argued that nonverbal communications were the only effective way to reach the post-Gutenberg crowd on the campuses and somehow convinced the rest of SDS to endow him with a darkroom, enlarger, cameras, and various other photographic equipment. The paraphernalia, however, remained largely unused, the project floundered, and the next time anyone looked the money was gone.
Small wonder that Kissinger, a few months later, would refer to this summer as "the most dismal period in SDS history."
In the summer of 1965 the Progressive Labor Party held its first convention. The party had grown, by its own estimate to some fourteen hundred members, by other estimates to less than a thousand; its leaders judged the time ripe for a sharp new turn in policy and practice, which they spelled out for the party faithful during this meeting. Party chairman Milton Rosen, reviewing the decisions of that convention, wrote:?”
The key ideological breakthrough of the convention was posing the question of having a serious party, or having more of the same. What differentiated the two was whether or not the party was to be a party of the working class, or whether it would preserve all the same middle-class aspects of the other new formations among Black and white student types. We chose to become a party of the working class. For PLP this was a profound decision. Because, to accomplish this meant not a partial transformation of the party, and the individual member of the party, but a total transformation of both.
Total transformation indeed: Rosen later admitted that of the two hundred people at that convention probably no more than four were workers. The convention also decided to stress the war as an organizing tool:
At our founding convention we made certain political estimates ... We pointed out that the U.S. war of aggression in Vietnam was part of a worldwide counter-revolutionary strategy of the U.S. We felt that the war was against the interests of most Americans and that opposition would surely mount as the consequences of the war were felt in the country.
Finally, PL named what it considered to be the enemy:
We posed liberalism as the main ideological danger to the developing radical movements .... We estimated that liberalism had received a crushing defeat and had lost a good deal of its potency.
It was with this basic strategy that PL worked for the next three years.
It is not surprising that after Kewadin SDS was unable to capitalize upon the antiwar spirit it is only surprising that it tried so hard. The mechanism was a project which operated out of the National Office—totally without sanction, be it noted, from the Kewadin convention, though in line with one of the resolutions passed at the April NC—which tried to establish committees in various cities to create and coordinate "grassroots" sentiment against Vietnam: "ERAPize the war," as one SDSer put it.
Coordinators of the project were Dena damage, who had come into the NO in January to help on the April march and wouldn't be budged, and Mel McDonald, a graduate student at Texas who dropped out after the bombing of North Vietnam, started organizing SDS groups at little Texas colleges, and finally drifted up to the NO. Committees to End the War in Vietnam were established over the summer in Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Madison, Milwaukee, New York, Oakland, and Portland, and SDSers began working with the Berkeley Vietnam Day Committee in California. damage and McDonald did their best to service and coordinate these groups, chiefly by putting out several issues of a mimeographed National Vietnam Newsletter, the political character of which is perhaps suggested by an unattributed map of Vietnam’® printed at the end of the third issue, on which the "Enemy-occupied areas" turn out to be places controlled by the U.S. and South Vietnamese.
The coordinators, however, were never able to establish any real national direction for the separate committees, largely because SDS had not established any national direction or any real notion of what they wanted the committees to do.
Their one notable achievement over the summer was in enlisting a fairly considerable turnout for an August antiwar march around an Assembly of Unrepresented People—and here it was SDS itself that messed things up. After the failure of the Kewadin convention to push SDS into becoming the coordinating antiwar organization in the Movement, a group of independent antiwar activists (among them Staughton Lynd, David Dellinger, Robert Parris Moses, and Stanley Aronowitz) got together to establish a National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam—the organization that, in many guises over the years, became the coordinator of most of the major marches of the decade—anzd its first action was the August march. Now SDS had determined at its June NC that it wanted to get out of the march business and had specifically chosen not to endorse the summer's action, all in line with the Kewadin spirit; but, not able to leave well enough alone, the NO went on to issue a statement (on what authority it is impossible to determine) just a few weeks before the Washington march dissociating SDS from it and effectively suggesting that SDSers had better things to do that weekend. The statement came too late to halt the work of the city committees and many SDSers simply ignored it," so there was a respectable enough turnout of five thousand on August 9; but the NO's gratuitous attempt to stifle the just-born antiwar movement rankled many activists, and feeling ran high against its "irresponsibility" and "divisiveness." Stanley Aronowitz, for one, was livid: "He never forgave SDS for that," Paul Booth says.*?
As it turned out, SDS got most of the blame for the march, anyway—at least in the halls of Congress. The Chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Edwin E. Willis of Louisiana, first accused SDS of bringing all the rabble to town, and then, inspired by recent publicity given to a few war resistors who had burned their draft cards, went on to charge it with plotting "a mass burning of draft cards" right there in Washington. Representatives Wilbur Mills and Mendel Rivers and Senator Strom Thurmond introduced legislation making draft-card burners liable to a fine of $10,000 and five years in jail, which Congress dutifully passed on the day after the march and which President Johnson dutifully signed into law on August 30.
By the end of the summer it had become quite clear to the SDS membership that the NO was in a shambles. Angry letters poured in complaining of poor (or nonexistent) service, "absolutely inexcusable" membership mailings, and the failure to send out the membership referendum on whether to have national officers or not; typical was one missive beginning, "Dear National Office (if we still have one)." Brecher remembers that the bitter joke going around that summer was that the NO was divided into two factions, "those that thought you should sleep in heaps and those who thought you should sleep in mounds. That," he says, "was the important issue in terms of where they were at." By the end of August, the NO itself confessed its failure, the August 28 worklist mailing saying simply, "The National Office is in a general state of collapse and failing to perform the most rudimentary functions despite the presence of 11 full-time staff members."
And finally the old guard rallied around. Kissinger reluctantly agreed to take charge of things until the next National Council could pick a National Secretary, and his first move was to get Paul Booth to leave the ERAP project he had been working on in Oakland and come back to the NO. "Clark realized that we had made a major blunder," Booth recalls, "in not taking charge of the war movement, and he called me back to be National Secretary. But by then it was too late, there was now another vehicle, it was too late for us to be the antiwar movement, which is what we should have been." Booth nonetheless accepted the invitation, and with Kissinger, Gitlin, Rothstein, and a few other SDS veterans began to try to find some new direction, to establish some coherence, for the organization. And Al Haber, who had been elected to the National Interim Committee in June after two years away from the seats of power, played his usual role of angry, insightful, slightly disappointed father figure; at the end of the summer he shot off a list of complaints about SDS which seemed to embody all the unhappiness that the old guard was feeling:
SDS cooperates freely, and apparently uncritically, with groups like the May 2 Movement, the DuBois Clubs and Progressive Labor ... yet there is little discussion as to the basis for cooperative action .... SDS seems to have a general hostility to the LID, our "parent" group, and to the intellectuals of the "democratic socialist" community .... Many former SDS supporters have left the organization or are deeply alienated from its present activity, organizational form and rhetoric .... Organizational involvement does not seem to produce, except for the leadership, a stable attachment to the radical community that lasts beyond college ... There is a certain hostility or intolerance to people whose vocation is not obviously "radical" and who pursue interests apart from the organizing objectives of the "movement." There has been a de-emphasis on the national organizational structure and leadership. Decisions are evolved rather than made.
Haber may not have been happy with it but SDS, in short, was changing—adjusting, if imperfectly, to the new postreform movement it found itself in, groping for new forms, new methods, new allies, new theories, new structures, and doing so with a new breed of member. The old guard rallied around, but the organization was inexorably changing even as it did so.
One of the problems not discussed, according to firsthand accounts, was how to recruit and train young Americans for guerrilla warfare and service on the side of the National Liberation Front. This fabrication was put forth over the summer by right-wing columnist Fulton Lewis III, who was not there, subsequently repeated and embellished by the New York Journal-American, among other papers, and then picked up by Reader's Digest, which ran an article suggesting that the Kewadin convention was used for nothing but to entice youthful college students into the black-pajama force of the "Viet Cong." The story was widely publicized through a lengthy series in July sent out by United Press International, right-wing publications like Human Events and U.S.A., and angry editorials in papers like the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. It sparked campaigns by some local rightists and hostile campus administrators to move against SDS chapters, but the effort by a group in Indiana to oust SDS from the University of Indiana, the best-publicized instance of this round of witch-hunting, was resisted by both students and administrators. The origin of all this appears to have been the presence of some young hangers-on—M2M people by one version, members of the Spartacist League according to the NO later on—who, as the NO phrased it, "were going around selling beer and talking about the ‘International Brigade,' " an idea that gained no support there or after, and which was apparently treated with scorn by the SDSers. (NAC mailing, January 1966.) SDS at one point considered bringing legal action against Reader's Digest and other publications, but reluctantly concluded that neither the legal nor the publicity game would be worth the financial candle.
* “ One reason for his selection, as Shero himself recalls it, was that he had actually taken on Tom Hayden in debate.
"Tom Hayden was the guru of SDS and we were in an Agents of Social Change workshop chaired by Robb Burlage, and Tom Hayden was arguing the classical ERAP theory about social change, and I didn't really understand who Tom Hayden was and wasn't too impressed by him—I thought he was a smart dude, but I wasn't in awe of him at all. So I started saying. Hey, I don't think that's right, I think the middle class is gonna move, et cetera, and I made up this big argument in defense of the middle class and students, and so, like, the workshop never came to a conclusion. So that night in the general plenary I was supposed to debate Tom Hayden on this, and after the workshop people began coming around saying. Well, you're a pretty good guy, Jeff, but you're gonna get chewed up tonight, I mean you're debating Tom Hayden, and I got a little scared. At any rate, that night I was supposed to speak first, so I talked, and I was waiting—I was kinda resigned, you know, to getting smashed—but then for some reason Tom decided not to argue: he got up and gave about a five-minute somewhat Zen speech, and sat down, and didn't come head to head against me. I got a certain amount of respect that night for taking him on." (Interview with author.)
* The other national officers elected to the National Council were a fairly mixed bag, though the absence of ERAP types is noticeable. Chosen were Stanley Aronowitz, Paul Booth, Jeremy Brecher, Nick Egleson, Dick Flacks, Helen Garvy, Todd Gitlin, Al Haber, Ed Hamlett (a Southern Illinois University dropout, SNCC member, and SSOC founder), Clark Kissinger, Dick Magidoff, Carol McEldowney, Robert Pardun, Liora Proctor (who had been doing peace work with a Canadian group, the Student Union for Peace Action), and David Smith.
“ Oglesby tells of meeting an airport attendant in Cambodia with whom he struck up a conversation in inept French: "Haltingly he asked me if I am an American. Quietly: oui. Then: am I a soldier? A man of the government?
With what French gestures do I deny these guesses! A student, I say. A radica/ student. I felt compelled to spill the beans about myself. But how do you translate 'teach-in'? So finally I just blurt it out with all the French-sounding accent I can muster up: Pas un soldat! Pas un homme du gouvernment! Je suis un representif de la—teach-in! His head pops forward. His eyes go like pinwheels. "Teach-in?" he says—like that, as plain as anything. He takes my hand and nearly shakes it off. Oui, oui! he says. Teach-in. The marsh in Washington d'avril! The balloon in my chest pops. Some Cambodia! Some airport attendant!" (SDS Bulletin, Vol. 4, No. 1. Fall 1965.)
* Participation in the symbolic Assembly on the 9th should be seriously questioned because of the likelihood of being arrested and facing trial, but more important, because the Assembly will not be real ... . This so-called Assembly represents no-one except those participating and this is even in doubt at this point. No elections have been held, no plans are on the boards for creating a permanent counter-congress out of this Assembly, and last, there is no possibility of those participating achieving their desired goal of entering the House of Representatives en masse and declaring peace." (Worklist mailing, July 28, 1965.)
* Among the SDSers who had signed the call for the Assembly of Unrepresented People were Carl Oglesby, Dena damage and Mel McDonald of the Vietnam Project, Ed Hamlett, Bill Hartzog, Florence Howe, Paul Lauter, Staughton Lynd, Barry Weisberg, and Steve Weissman. (See, for example. Liberation, August 1965.)
1 For the Kewadin convention, Jacobs and Landau, pp. 27 ff., 174 ff.; Guardian, June 26,
1965; mimeographed "working papers" for the convention; Booth, Brecher, Shero, and
Webb interviews; Max, Viewpoint (SDS-LID, New York), summer 1965, mimeographed by
NO, December 1965.
2 Webb, interview. Booth, interview.
3 Newfield, p. 87. Haber, "Non-exclusionism," SDS paper, December 1965, excerpted in
Teodori, p. 218.
4 Shero, interview.
° Max, op. cit.
® Max, ibid.
? "Everyone felt," Brecher, interview. Shero biography and quote, interview.
8 "If I'd wanted," Paul Pipkin, convention working paper, June 1965; other quotations,
letters to NO. Haber, "Non-exclusionism," op. cit.
° Overstreet, letters to Harry Laidler, Laidler papers, Tamiment. Laidler, letter to Overstreet,
July 13, 1965, Tamiment. LID Board of Directors, statement, June 22, 1965.
10 Kahn, letter to NO, June 29, 1965.
11 Gitlin, interview. Weissman, NLN, February 4,1966. Flacks, "Some Problems, Issues,
Proposals," working paper for 1965 convention, excerpted in Jacobs and Landau, pp. 162 IF.
12 Booth, letter to Brecher, January 18, 1965.
13 Booth, interview.
4 SDS articles, in Nation, May 10, New Republic, June 19, Reporter, May 6, U.S. News, May
10 and 17, all 1965. NO letters, 1965, archives.
1S "Clark has found," note from Sam Bennett, October 1965.
16 Kissinger, "There's a Change Gotta Come!" mimeographed paper, December 1965.
17 Rosen, report to the March 1968 PL convention, reprinted in "Build a Base in the Working
Class," PL pamphlet, June 1969; see also PL Constitution, Jacobs and Landau, pp. 187 ff.
18 map, National Vietnam Newsletter, August 26, 1965.
19 Booth, interview. Willis, quoted by AP, August 5, 1965, reprinted in SDS Bulletin, Vol. 4,
No. 1, undated (fall 1965); see also Ferber and Lynd, p. 22.
20 Brecher, interview. Booth, interview.
21 Haber, letter to NC, September 5, 1965.