Summer 1966

It must have been with a sense of some dark humor that the new people in the National Office selected as a site for the 1966 annual convention a remote Methodist youth camp on the shores of Clear Lake, in north-central Iowa. Of course there were good practical reasons—they wanted a spot far from the old guard centers of power, and Chicago University SDSer Steve Kindred's father happened to be superintendent of the Methodist region where the camp was located—but the choice of Jowa must have seemed to them a delectable symbol.’

Not that the people of Iowa were overjoyed about it all. As the Council Bluffs Nonpareil huffed, "The use of a Methodist church camp as a meeting place for a bunch of Communists, and a group of left-wing nuts who can't decide whether to work with the Communists or not, ought to be enough to make the Methodist lay people shudder, if not the hierarchy."” And a number of local toughs, taking the cue, even went out to the camp to beat up on the Commies, only to find that most of the delegates were easily approachable, ready to talk, and glad to have the invaders stay and listen, which many did.

For the Clear Lake convention—some 350 delegates from 140 chapters meeting from August 29 to September 2—was symbolic. It marked the triumph, delayed for a year because of the collapse of the NO the summer before and the reassertion of the old guard, of the new breed in SDS, only a new breed grown overwhelmingly with a year's addition of thousands of new members. Leadership was now transferred from the original members to the newer ones, from the Eastern intellectuals to the middle-American activists,. from those born in the left-wing traditions of the Coasts to those raised in the individualistic heritage of the frontier, from—as the Clear Lake rhetoric had it—the "politicos" to the "anarchists." It was the ascendance of what was now known in SDS as "prairie power."

The prairie-power influence was pervasive. On a blackboard in the main hall someone had written "Revo/t"; underneath it another had added "The revolt has been scheduled by the Steering Committee."* Contempt for steering committees, chairmen, parliamentary procedure, "structure," "top-down organizing," and any other hint at rigidity was evident from the start. So many people walked out of meetings to carry on their debates under the trees or on the raft anchored in the lake that new SDSer Mark Kleiman was encouraged to issue a call denouncing "parliamentarianism" and asking "people who are interested in finding other ways" to contact him at the National Office. (It was an echo of a notable incident at the previous National Council meeting when one delegate publicly burned his SDS membership card as a protest against the "undemocratic" way the council was being run.) All calls for producing "a new Port Huron"—vigorously pushed by such old guarders as Clark Kissinger, who argued that SDS had to "lift its de facto ban on the written word"were disregarded. Attempts to give SDS "a new ideology," though they tied up endless hours of debate, ended in unresolved tangles. When ERAPer Nick Egleson finally told the delegates to stop "overworrying ideology" and "overworking on a new theoretical document," the applause, New Left Notes reported, "boomed up from the floor."

Similarly with regard to a specific program for the coming year. Strong efforts were made for SDS to embark on a new antidraft program by forming local groups, like the M2M's antidraft unions, which would organize overt resistance to Selective Service, and there was enough raw sentiment behind this at one point to pass it with a lopsided 105-15 vote. But since it was felt, just as it had been a year previously, that this represented such a sharp departure from the past and a possible step into illegality, the delegates finally decided to submit it to a full membership referendum before going ahead; on this issue at least, SDS, like the Bourbons, learned nothing and forgot nothing. As a substitute measure the convention adopted an amorphous scheme, redolent with the very flesh of prairie power, of letting each area develop whatever projects it wanted, as long as they would "act on their own authority, raise their own funds, send out their own travelers, organize as they see fit, and be responsible for their activities without involving those SDS members who do not wish to share in their project." At the end of the convention only the blandest resolutions passed: support for the "Fort Hood Three" (three enlisted men who that summer had refused orders to go to Vietnam), further development of the Radical Education Project for internal education, changes in the constitution to remove all references to the LID, and the like.

However, prairie power did put its stamp upon the organization in positive, indeed quite pervasive, ways.

For one thing, the clear consensus of the convention was that SDS would develop what was called an "organizing thrust" toward the campuses, operating not with a national program but by energizing local people in local chapters around local grievances. The National Office would give this top priority by forming "an experimental program of full-time organizers committed to working on campuses" (in the words of the resolution presented by two leading prairie people, Jane Adams and Ohio SDSer Terry Robbins), but the bulk of the work would be done by individual SDSers on a chapter level—or, as Carl Oglesby put it, "Every member a radical organizer."

The convention also pushed for decentralization within SDS, downgrading the National Office in favor of regional and local organizations. More than simply an expression of the impulse anarchism of the prairie-power people, this was seen as an organizational necessity if SDS was to be flexible enough to adapt to whatever ideological levels it found at the nearly two hundred campuses where it now had chapters; the prairie people knew from their own experience that what went over at Michigan, say, would inevitably prove too extreme for Arizona State. But beyond that, the Booth operation and the failure of national programs in the last year had left a bad taste in the mouths of many SDSers, not only those in the prairie-power wing—to the point where at Clear There was a heated debate on this issue—there were still enough old guarders around to put up a spirited fight—but the majority clearly sided with prairie people like Jeff Shero, who took the National Office relentlessly to task:

We have to create situations on campus or in the communities to reveal to people where they really are. Chapters should be strong, and we need organizers on the local level, not national visibility, to get over the feeling of isolation. Sending out NO literature is too impersonal a way of operating—I read New Left Notes on the pot, but I'd get off to talk to an organizer!

In the end, the constitution was changed to provide for regional organizations with their own programs and their own operations, and a motion was passed specifically directing the NO to give its attention (and money) to campus organizing in the coming year.

The election of officers sealed the triumph of prairie power. The old guard had been quietly sounding out candidates for several months, without success. Steve Weissman, for example, who was asked to run for office that year, declined on the grounds that SDS officers never had any real power, anyway; and it was only at Clear Lake itself that they finally decided to push Lee Webb, who had just finished his alternate service in Chicago and was free for the coming year. Running against him for President were Bill Hartzog, an Ohioborn college dropout who had been organizing hospital workers in Topeka and who stood as the pure personification of prairie power, and Nick Egleson, who had been on the fringes of the old guard but was sufficiently distant from them to be regarded as a compromise candidate. On the first ballot Hartzog finished a poor third and was dropped, and on the second Egleson came out the clear favorite. ("Frankly," Webb recalls, "I didn't have any supporters at the whole convention. There were like maybe two or three people on my side, Booth and Ross and a few others, and all these kids were really attacking me.") The other elections were foregone: Carl Davidson, largely on the strength of a "student syndicalism" paper, was elected Vice President by the convention, and the next day, at the National Council, Greg Calvert, similarly identified with prairie power, was named National Secretary. The three officers were good representatives of the new SDS style.

Egleson, twenty-two, fit least into the mold—and would exert the least influence on the organization in the coming year—for he was an Easterner, decidedly dudish in appearance (thin, long neck, glasses, short and curly hair), a graduate of the select Taft School in Connecticut and of Swarthmore College, an ex-nuclear-physics major and a bookish type; as he analyzed it some years later, "My parents [were divorced], and their demands on my brother and me to share their hatred of each other, clearly drove me to run from all emotions. In my endless figuring out of how I should behave may lie some of the roots of my intellectualization." Nonetheless, Egleson had an undoubted honesty, and an unabrasive, soft-spoken manner. (When he accompanied Dave Dellinger to North Vietnam the following May, Dellinger reported that "Nick's natural SDS manner helped to break the ice" when talking with American prisoners of war there.) And his ERAP experiences in Philadelphia and Hoboken had led him to a kind of root anarchism and a commitment to local organizing not so different from that of the prairie people.

Carl Davidson, twenty-three, /ooked like prairie power: tall and lanky, slightly stooped in the shoulder, with longish brown hair and a Pancho Villa mustache, he gave off something of the air of a latter-day Daniel Boone—and he smoked a corncob pipe. He was born in Pennsylvania of working-class parents and went, because it was inexpensive, to Penn State, where he majored in, of all things, philosophy. ("The problem of calling oneself a socialist," he would tell the people at Clear Lake, is that "socialist is what philosophers call 'an essentially contested concept'—that is to say, a word which has so many definitions that you have to define it before you can begin to use it.") At Penn State in the spring of 1965 he helped to organize an ad hoc Committee for Student Freedom to fight the in loco parentis rules of the administration, giving him his first taste of campus organizing around local issues; there, too, he began his exploration of leftism, hung in 1965, he took a job in the philosophy department at the University of Nebraska, where he continued to be active in student politics, operating as a traveler for SDS in the Plains Region and helping to organize a Campus Freedom Democratic Party at Nebraska in the spring of 1966.°

Greg Calvert, twenty-eight, was older than many people in SDS, a dramatic kind of person, raw-boned, good-looking, self-possessed. Born of working-class parents in Longview, Washington, and raised in a middle-America district of Portland, Oregon, Calvert remembers "bumming around the Skid Row area" when he was a high schooler in the early fifties, and meeting burnt-out old Wobblies: "Some of us in the movement," he said many years later, "have wondered whether, after so much hope and so much life, we would end like some of those old Wobblies."’ He majored in history at the University of Oregon, graduated in 1960, and went on to Cornell for graduate work in European history in 1960-61, but he did not get drawn into the radical politics just then making itself felt. He spent some time at the University of Paris (there was even a strong rumor going around SDS circles that he had fought with the FLN in Algeria) and returned to teach European history at Iowa State. It was at Iowa State, where he had spent two and a half years, that Calvert finally became active in campus politics and increasingly involved with SDS. During the summer of 1966 he joined the National Office in Chicago, was made Acting Assistant National Secretary under Jane Adams in July and became the editor of New Left Notes in August; it was under his egis that a special thirty-two-page preconvention issue of New Left Notes was prepared (complete with ads from book publishers, left publications, and greetings from such other-generation supporters as New York lawyers Leonard Boudin—whose daughter Kathy was then on an ERAP project in Cleveland—and Victor Rabinowitz), the largest issue SDS ever produced.

None of the officers, be it noted, was a student or of student age. The same pattern held generally true for the National Council members elected by the convention. Five of the fourteen members (Jane Adams, Tom Condit, Mark Kleiman, Bob Speck, and Lee Webb) had spent much or all of the last year in the National Office; seven others (Carolyn Craven, Mike Davis, Roy Dahlberg, Bill Hartzog, Mike James, Terry Robbins, and Jeff Shero) had been working full time as organizers and none was then a student; of the remainder, one was an undergraduate (Steve Kindred, a Chicago antirank organizer) and one was a graduate student (Nancy Bancroft, finishing up a master's at the Union Theological seminary). They were all, except Webb, associated with the prairie-power faction to one degree or another; it was a measure of the decline of the old guard that Bob Ross could do no better than tie for First Alternate. None was a student leader in the traditional sense, or a campus newspaper editor, or a student-council president; none was regarded as primarily an intellectual or was headed for an academic career; several had dropped out of college entirely before graduating, and none had dabbled in liberal student politics. It was an almost complete turnaround from the SDS leaders of, say, 1962.

Progressive Labor members showed up at the convention, and though, as Shero notes, "there weren't enough of them around yet for anyone to develop an anti-PL line," their presence was felt. Lee Webb, for one, remembers that they were among those opposing his presidency:

PL were the ones who were really pushing the thing against me the hardest, because, I think, in a sense they saw me, or someone like me, as a threat to their attempts of really developing influence in SDS ... . I wasn't at all sympathetic to them: I wanted to kick them out immediately, because I felt that they just weren't going to contribute anything to SDS and were just going to decrease the level of debate and discussion.®

And John Maher, the Boston SDSer, felt concerned enough to precipitate a long, if somewhat disjointed, debate on "Communists in SDS." (His brother, as mentioned, was a PL functionary.) In a convention paper he pointed out the nature of "democratic centralism" in organizations like PL and the Communist Party:

Party discipline in the PLP means that a member is obliged to carry out all the decisions of the Party, while in the CP a member is not obliged to carry out a decision with which he disagrees, though Party discipline will not permit him to work against it. Neither organization condones public criticism of the party line.

This practice, he felt, so foreign to the open individualism of the New Left, would cause difficulty in SDS ranks because you'd never know if you were debating with (or voting for) a person who had an open mind or was simply following some party order. His suggestion was that SDS require anyone who was a member of such a disciplined party to declare so before working with SDSers or running for office in the organization. But the motion gained little headway at Clear Lake: it smacked a little too much of redbaiting (especially coming after a summer in which various Congressional committees had run harassing investigations of "communist infiltration" of student groups); Communist Party members, of whom there were no more than forty or fifty in SDS, were in many cases known to the SDS leaders anyway, though they tended to keep their affiliations from the rank and file; and many PLers had no hesitancy in making their memberships—and their role as "the only true communists"—crystal clear. The National Council dismissed it with a 41-3 vote.

At this point the idea of a PL takeover or "Communist infiltration" was still regarded largely as a joke. The suggestion that Bettina Aptheker, Berkeley activist and CP member, had put forth at Clear Lake that the Communist Party was the logical force to lead the New Left was dismissed out of hand, Carl Oglesby being only the most eloquent in assigning it to the dust bin. The PLers were thought to have some good ideas, but their "Old Lefty phrasemongering," as it was called, and their general squareness of dress and attitude chilled most of the other SDSers; Mao and his little red book excited only laughter on the convention floor. The overwhelming attitude was still that the Old Left was old-fashioned and that SDS was too amorphous to get taken over by anything anyway.

The old guard took its defeat at Clear Lake stoically. Booth fired off one last letter to New Left Notes complaining that Clear Lake hadn't really agreed on anything for the coming year, and he even proposed one last "national action" of demonstrations against President Johnson, but when this was ignored he retired into silence.? Webb moved on to Washington, where he started a fledgling D.C.-area region and began work for Ramparts magazine researching connections between the National Student Association and the CIA. Oglesby went back to Ann Arbor—where, incidentally, he was to meet, and influence, Bill Ayers and Diana Oughton—to complete work on his examination of U.S. imperialism that appeared the following year in a volume called Containment and Change. Max, who had sat as chairman during the plenary sessions, wrote a note to Jim Williams moaning that the old guard had been vanquished and "there's nothing left of the old people any more—it's just all these funny kids,"*° and went back to New York. Others moved off in their separate directions: Kissinger tried organizing in the Chicago area, Gitlin concentrated on writing a book about JOIN, Flacks, Lauter, Lemisch, Ross, and others continued their academic careers; and though they almost universally continued radical work, they did so now outside of the SDS framework.

An attempt was made at Clear Lake to establish an "adult SDS" for these members who had "graduated" from SDS, along with other nonstudent activists springing up among young professional workers in the larger cities. This idea of what was generally called a "Movement for a Democratic Society," to be either affiliated with or the parent group of SDS, was a longstanding one, kicking around SDS circles ever since it had become clear that the LID was not the adult group SDSers wanted to graduate into. The 1964 convention mandated work on a "young adult New Left" organization by Max, Burlage, and others, and a "Young Adult Organizing" committee was actually established as early as the fall of that year, with a big push from Hayden and Wittman. But at that point the numbers of radicals were hardly sufficient for one organization, much less two, and nothing materialized. The subject was brought up whenever movement people got together for the next couple of years (Shero, for example, presented a working paper on it to the Kewadin convention in 1965), and isolated attempts were made at establishing individual MDS chapters: several staffers at the Columbia University School of Social Work actually formed an MDS in the fall of 1965, and early in 1966 starts were made in Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Gary, Indiana.

By the time of Clear Lake many older members agreed with University of Pennsylvania faculty member (and SDSer) Edward Jahn, who wrote to New Left Notes:

Students grow older; they graduate, get jobs, raise families. Many of them abandon radical politics as soon as they graduate—these are the Four Year Radicals .... But what about those who are still radicals after their four years are over—where can they go: SDS if it does not develop an organizational alternative for its older adherents ... will die. The New Left must create an adult organization if the New Left is to survive.*?

But the call went unheeded, and those who did not want to devote themselves to the new “organizing thrust" simply went their own ways.

The Radical Education Project represented the closest thing to a continuing center for the old guard after Clear Lake. After sputtering through several false starts in the spring, REP finally had begun to take shape over the summer, and in July it was officially incorporated, with Haber as its president and Locker its secretary. It had been decided that REP had better have an existence formally separate from SDS, both because it could then put itself forward as a tax-exempt institution for fund-raising purposes and because it was clear that it was not going to get very much help or attention from the new influx of SDSers anyway.

Doing some neat footwork, REP finally phrased it this way: "The RADICAL EDUCATION PROJECT is an independent education, research and publication organization initiated by Students for a Democratic Society, dedicated to the cause of democratic radicalism and aspiring to the creation of a new left in America." Just what that meant was spelled out in a lengthy, detailed, comprehensive prospectus:

Democratic radicalism is renewing itself around a basically moral proposition: that people should have the opportunity to participate in shaping the decisions and the conditions of economic, political and cultural existence which affect their lives and destinies.

This theme is not new. Indeed, it is deeply rooted in the traditions of Utopian and scientific socialism, popular democracy and humanism. But it has acquired a new urgency and concreteness in the radical action movements of the last six years. It has become the unifying point of moral reference in the opposition to the corporate state, in the anti-war movement, in the critique of authoritarianism and paternalism in the university, and in the freedom struggles of Negroes in particular and the American underclass in general.

If that sounds vaguely familiar, it is because this prospectus was no less than the attempted rewrite of The Port Huron Statement that so many of the old guard had been demanding, with much talk about "radical vision," "values and Utopia," "man is the measure," "human potentiality and the good society," "potential agents of change," and so on. But it was a serious and ambitious document, it had a certain impact in academic circles, and it attracted immediate support from a number of well-known people on the left.”

REP began functioning, after a fashion, in Ann Arbor in the fall. The full-time staff included Jerry Badanes, Barry Bluestone, Mike and Evelyn Goldfield, Peter Henig, Jim Jacobs, and Steve Weissman, with help from Haber, Locker, Booth, and Magidoff. Yet by December not one piece of its own literature had been produced (other than three bibliographical "study guides" for radical seminars) and something like $6,000 had been dribbled away. Attempts to reach the projected budget of $85,000’? by barnstorming rich liberals and philanthropic institutions proved mostly futile.”

The concept of student power was of course inherent in much that had already gone on in the 1960s—in the campus civil-rights programs, the university-reform conferences, the Berkeley demonstration of 1964, the various campus political parties, the antiwar (especially the antirank) agitation, and the free universities. But it did not develop into a separate and self-conscious movement, with an enunciated strategy and an organizational shape, until the Clear Lake convention. What it eventually became was something more than that encompassed by SDS, for it developed into the expression, at disparate campuses at different times for diverse reasons, of an entire awakening generation, many of whom had no interest in SDS or even in organized radical politics. But it would not have emerged when it did, and could not have taken the form that it did, were it not for SDS—and Carl Davidson.

Davidson's A Student Syndicalist Movement: University Reform Revisited, passed out in mimeograph form at Clear Lake, made an immediate impact. It was, startlingly, almost wholly free of the strangulating social-science rhetoric that made up the yeast of most of the early SDS papers; it was easy reading, with careful organization, lots of subheads, and concrete examples; and it was about half the length of the usual SDS position paper. But most important, of course, it enunciated an idea that many in SDS had begun to sense for themselves over the previous year.

Davidson's paper begins by restating the connections between universities and corporate liberalism:

What we have to see clearly is the relation between the university and corporate liberal society at large. Most of us are outraged when our university administrators or their "student government" lackeys liken our universities and colleges to corporations. We bitterly respond with talk about a "community of scholars." However, the fact of the matter is that they are correct. Our educational institutions are corporations and knowledge factories.

What we have failed to see in the past is how absolutely vita/ these factories are to the corporate liberal state.

What do these factories produce? What are their commodities? The most obvious answer is "knowledge." Our factories produce the know-how that enables the corporate state to expand, to grow, and to exploit more efficiently and extensively both in our own country and in the third world. But "knowledge" is perhaps too abstract to be seen as a commodity. Concretely, the commodities of our factories are the knowledgeable. AID officials, Peace Corpsmen, military officers, CIA officials, segregationist judges, corporation lawyers, politicians of all sorts, welfare workers, managers of industry, labor bureaucrats (I could go on and on)—where do they come from? They are products of the factories we live and work in ....

How did they become what they are? They were shaped and formed on an assembly line that starts with children entering junior high school and ends with junior bureaucrats in commencement robes. And the rules and regulations of in loco parentis are essential tools along that entire assembly line. Without them, it would be difficult to produce the kind of men that can create, sustain, tolerate, and ignore situations like Watts, Mississippi and Vietnam .... Our universities are already the chief agents for social change in the direction of 1984.

And then Davidson posed the exciting question: "What would happen to a manipulative society if its means of creating manipulative people were done away with?" To which he answered: "We might then have a fighting chance to change the system!" How?

Obviously, we need to organize, to build a movement on the campuses with the primary purpose of radically transforming the university community. Too often we lose sight of this goal. To every program, every action, every position, and every demand, we must raise the question: How will this radically alter the lives of every student on this campus? With this in mind, I offer the following proposal for action.

That every SDS chapter organize a student syndicalist movement on its campus. I use the term "syndicalist" for a crucial reason. In the labor struggle, the syndicalist unions worked for industrial democracy and workers' control, rather than better wages and working conditions. Likewise, and I cannot repeat this often enough, the issue for us is "student control" (along with a yet-to-be-liberated faculty in some areas). What we do not want is a "company union" student movement that sees itself as a body that, under the rubric of "liberalization," helps a paternal administration make better rules for us. What we do want is a union of students where the students themselves decide what kind of rules they want or don't want. Or whether they need rules at all. Only this kind of student organization allows for decentralization, and the direct participation of students in all those decisions daily affecting their lives.

.. The main purpose ... is to develop a radical consciousness among all the students, in the rea/ struggle yet to come against the administration.

And then, the possibility—a dream with a lineage going back to early SDS and the impulses of Kissinger and others of campus orientation—"to organize a mass radical base with a capacity for prolonged resistance, dedication, and endurance. With this in mind, it is easy to see why such a student syndicalist movement must be national (or even international) in its scope."

Davidson's debts are obvious: to the original syndicalists, to the Wobblies, to his own experiences at Penn State and Nebraska. But perhaps most profound is his debt to the SDS thinkers before him. The desire to work at different levels on different campuses is the same concept that animated Al Haber in the first few years of the organization. The recognition of connections between the authoritarian rigidity and dehumanization of the university and that of the society at large is the same that the whole first generation of SDS had enunciated. The connections between the liberal state and the universities are the kind that Potter, Hayden, and Oglesby had made. The emphasis on students as the agents of social change, the idea of engaging people in "those decisions daily affecting their lives," and the importance placed on participatory democracy in a campus context are direct echoes of The Port Huron Statement.

In fact, in some ways A Student Syndicalist Movement is the new breed's own Port Huron Statement, a document for a new generation of SDSers who want once again to turn their attention to the campuses, once again to show the need for students to control the decisions that affect their lives, once again to get students to operate on their immediate felt grievances, once again to radicalize them by having them see the connections between these grievances and the national malaise. The first generation of SDS had started out by seeking its allies on the campus, but after a time turned from there to the ghettos, to the poor, to the black, and later still to the war, to the middle class, to the professionals. Now the second generation of SDS was bringing the organization back: build the student left first.

There were criticisms of the student-syndicalist approach, and they were voiced often within the next few months. The PL people scorned it for its lack of a "class analysis," its failure to see the need for students to join with the working class to carry out any revolution. Others argued that the idea of students’ actually controlling their universities was, even if realizable, undesirable, since those universities still had to operate within and depend for their existence upon a corrupt system; if students were put in charge of universities, as Earl Silbar put it, "we would have to become the pimps of our dream." And many pointed to—as it was now regarded—the "danger of reformism" if the university administrations simply gave in on the most modest student demands (dorm hours, food prices, curriculum changes, and the like) and blunted the movement without altering the basic university structure. /4

But the time for student power was ripe. For one thing, there were now more people in the universities than ever before—6,390,000, up from 3,788,000 in 1960, nearly 40 percent of the college-age population—and thus a larger pool from which to draw dissidents, and a larger group which could view itself selfconsciously as a class. Not that all of them were committed radicals by any means—the best estimates put the activist ranks between 5 and 15 percent, or roughly 320,000 to 960,000—but many were certainly alienated, as the phrase went, disillusioned with much in the world around them, and ready to give vent to their anger, for which the university was at least the easiest target. The youth culture, too, had by now become firmly rooted, nurtured both by affluence and dissidence, and had brought forth its own special fruits in sexual behavior, the growing drug scene, the new styles of music, dress, literature, art, food, and philosophy; which in turn helped to sustain a now sizable group of people who, though not officially students, occupied the fringes of the universities in the burgeoning youth ghettos, more alienated still and far quicker to take the risks that direct action might bring. Apathy might still be the norm at many campusesit is, after all, one of the intended products of the university environment—but it was nowhere near as pervasive as it had been ten years before, and now had to live side by side with the growing political awareness of many young people; students in the fall of 1966, we might remember, had already lived through six years of campus activism of one kind or another, six years of the war in Vietnam, six years of general political ferment within the nation.

Accompanying the heightened political consciousness was a growing change of attitude toward the university itself. The idea of complicity, inaugurated with the rank protests, and the impact of resistance, in the form of confrontations with the university power structure, were as yet imperfectly realized, but they unquestionably helped students to see campus governance in a new light. At the same time the universities came to be seen as important sources of power within the society—they were to the technological society what factories had been to the mechanical one—and thus potential levers for exerting influence on that society; students, especially as their numbers grew, could now think of themselves as a power bloc as legitimate as any other.

The time was ripe for student power within SDS as well. Much of it had to do with the kinds of people who now came to prominence in the organization. True, they were not students themselves and were in fact several years older than most undergraduates—but they had spent their college years as serious radical organizers (something that was not true of most in the earlier generation), and the experience, especially in the last year, had left them generally united in the idea that any chance for building a movement for change in America depended upon organizing and radicalizing the students. Also, many prominent membersDavidson, Shero, Adams, Kindred, Egleson, Robbins, Calvert—had been involved more in university politics and campus traveling than in such nonuniversity activities as antiwar marches, draft resistance, electoral politics, or labor support. They were also, coming from the prairie-power heritage, more comfortable with local actions than national programs and more concerned to have individual chapters operate on their own grievances than follow some national pattern.

But there is also the decisive fact that SDS saw no other avenues for effective radical politics. Vietnam was still thought to be too much of a single-issue protest, one, moreover, in which success seemed hopeless: marches, no matter how big or small, militant or docile, shaggy or clean-cut, had proved quite incapable of halting the war. Civil-rights work seemed hardly possible after SNCC's explicit rejection of white support; ERAP organizing seemed equally mistaken, given the now obvious failure of most ERAP projects and the explosive anger of the black ghettos that had been expressed in Watts. Draft resistance posed apparently insoluble problems of illegality, elitism, membership support. Working with labor unions and unorganized workers was thought to be legitimate but basically old hat and unmilitant, while working with the middle class and professionals seemed somehow like selling out. Campus organizing, in which all of these issues could be raised but none had to be exclusively championed, seemed the perfect answer.”

The choice was almost inevitable, an expression of all that SDS had become. By this point SDS had to move on to some form of resistance, both as an expression of the mood of its leaders and as a means of creating an identity for itself in the absence of a national program or national publicity. It needed to operate in a decentralized and nonbureaucratic way, given both the natural distaste for the opposites and its unfortunate experience in trying them. It needed to orient itself around students, both because they formed its logical and historical constituency and because other constituencies were unavailable or unapproachable. And it needed to keep pointing itself to the question of fundamental social change rather than absorb itself in single issues and the reformist dangers therein. Hence, student power.

And herein lies the paramount point about SDS and student power. For while SDS now wanted to operate at the university level, raising local grievances of individual campuses and building its constituency among the students, it did so not to change the educational system on the campus, not to achieve academic reforms, not even to get more power in the hands of students within the university setting. It did so because it saw among the American studentry the possibility of creating a generation of committed radicals, and thus to change the entire political and social structure of the country. Student power was merely a method, a tool, a prod, a way to awaken students to the realities of the nation by tuning them in to the realities of the campus, to make connections between the demands for democratic control in the university and the same demands in the body politic. Never lost was the cardinal idea that students should be agents for socia/ change: where protest took the form of picketing a Marine recruiter, the real target was the war and university complicity; where the protest was against dormitory hours, the real target was arbitrary authority and the nature of the Establishment's institutions. Student power, in short, was not educational but political.

Much confusion has reigned on this point. The media especially, more out of misunderstanding than malice, were unequipped to conceive of the best of the college generation as bordering on the verge of revolution and regularly saw protest issues in neat little vacuums. University administrators, not unnaturally, chose to regard protest as an educational problem, and thought (or hoped) that it could be meliorated by educational reforms, many of which, it was agreed, were long overdue. Even students themselves sometimes regarded student power as a way of throwing off an unwanted rule or readjusting some glaring error; and on the smaller and more remote campuses where SDS chapters operated, students at various points over the next few years came to be attracted initially because they thought the organization was working merely for educational reform.

But of SDS's intention there never was a doubt. Davidson is quite explicit in his paper in talking about "sabotage" and "abolition" of universities, and his guiding idea is that, once exposed to student syndicalism, students would "never quite be the same, especially after they leave the university community." Calvert, in his report in New Left Notes on the Clear Lake convention, spelled it out further:

There emerged a very clear understanding that SDS had repudiated any attempt to make itself a new version of older left-wing political parties in the United States or in Europe. Politically that meant a refusal to accept socialdemocratic or liberal-labor coalitionist images of our future. It meant that we were, as we have often said, dedicated to the building of truly radical constituencies in this country. The establishment of a new group of SDS organizers was seen as the effective means of carrying that conviction to the American campus.?°

Student power, in other words, was meant to radicalize a generation, not to liberalize their education. Or, as Jeff Shero recalls, "We wanted to build an American left, and nothing less than that."