Summer 1967

The summer of 1967. It was the best of times: "For white radicals it was a time of politics of affirmation rather than a politics of guilt" (Staughton Lynd); it was the worst of times: "To be white and a radical in America this summer is to see horror and feel impotence" (Andrew Kopkind). It was the epoch of belief: "They were ... sustained by the satisfactions they derived from their work, from their associations with friends in it, and from the deep, if usually unstated, conviction that what they were doing was politically and ethically important" (Kenneth Keniston); it was the epoch of incredulity: "It was a tough summer ....

We had no idea of what to do with our lives" (Frank Bardacke). It was the summer of hope: "The new tone ... is one of victory. A little premature perhaps, but inevitable victory nonetheless. And the beauty of it all is that it's happening everywhere" (Larry Freudiger); it was the summer of despair: "I am very pessimistic about the prospects of change, even of meaningful reforms, in this country .... I think violence is necessary, and it frightens me" (Michael Zweig).+

It was not, one should hasten to add, really the beginning of a revolution, or at least not perceptibly so, but in many ways it was not so far from it. The American political scene, the new world of the youth, was a maelstrom of activity, swirling with the flotsam of every conceivable emotion and idea.

There was the emergence of the hippie movement into a powerful and pullulating force in America. The pinnacles were in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco and the Village byways in New York, but everywhere in between was the evidence of the new culture: bell-bottoms, workclothes. Army jackets, flowers, beads; guitars, Theremins, amplifiers, transistors, hifis, light shows; runaways, dropouts, teeny-boppers, Yippies, Diggers, proves, groupies; marijuana, amphetamines, acid, Leary; be-ins, love-ins, camp-outs, orgies, pot parties, communes, panhandling; underground papers, records, psychedelic posters, buttons. A counterculture had hit America, for the first time in at least forty years, and it was real enough for the sociologists to study it, for the media to promulgate it, for the businessmen to make money off it, for the youth, a large segment of the youth, to live it.

There was Vietnam Summer, the left-liberal bell-ringing campaign that sent upwards of 20,000 people out into the streets to get community people, mostly from the middle class, actively behind the antiwar movement. Of liberal origins and of liberal sponsorship primarily the Martin Luther King entourage and Spring Mobilization types (neither of whom advocated immediate withdrawal yet), probably with funding from Robert Kennedy—it was immediately suspect among most SDSers; Lief Johnson, a New York City SDSer, said it all in New Left Notes:

Vietnam Summer is a liberal protest. It was initiated by top liberals, it acts upon liberal assumptions, it proceeds on liberal undemocratic methods of organization and leadership. The underlying purpose of this liberal strategy is to recapture leadership of the peace and civil rights movement, to blunt the awakening of our radical, anti-liberal identity, and finally to lay the groundwork for leading us into a coalitionist liberal-progressive third party movement.

But it was also broad enough, short enough, and single-issued enough to scoop up a whole fishnet of people, and among them were many SDSers: those, like Oglesby and Potter, who served on its steering committee; those like Lee Webb, who became its executive director, and John Maher and Marilyn Salzman (later married to Lee Webb), who served in its national office; and those, like the people in SDS's Niagara region, who became the bulwarks of the local operation.”

There was the revolt of the urban blacks, breaking out most noticeably in Newark and Detroit that summer, but with fulgurations in no fewer than fifty-seven other Northern ghettos as well. It was on a scale that had not been seen since the Watts rebellion of 1965, and the police and National Guard response was on a level that had not been seen anywhere in the sixties: at least twenty-four blacks were killed in Newark, forty-three in Detroit, and ten more in other scattered cities. One man who closely observed the Newark uprising wrote:

This is not a time for radical illusions about "revolution." ... But the actions of white America toward the ghetto are showing black people, especially the young, that they must prepare to fight back. The conditions slowly are being created for an American form of guerrilla warfare based in the slums. The riot represents a signal of this fundamental change.

That was Tom Hayden, who left Newark after that summer and in the face of that change, his dream of the interracial movement of the poor, even of a black community union, having altered considerably during the three years he worked among the black people of that city.

But his sense of reality was still intact.

There was the "T-O" experiment which SDS bravely went ahead with, despite impoverishment, and it turned out to be remarkably successful—though for none of the expected reasons. The Los Angeles group disintegrated after a few weeks, the Chicago people spent more time worrying about harassment from the police than Marxist seminars, and the Boston collective went about its organizing work without much concern for the grand plan of it all. But when it was over, several dozen people had gone through a communal experience that left its mark, and somehow their casual work for the Movement in the process committed them to the cause. The cadre-building notion suffered from the hippiesummer atmosphere—including a new indulgence in drugs, hallucinogenic and otherwiseso the seminars were seldom held, the books went unread, and the elaborate training never took place. Still, in the words of one California recruit, previously a hippie dropout for whom "'Movement people' were always a bummer," the T-O experience taught something: "You become serious about the Movement if you're serious about your life, and the Movement is a healthy meaningful thing."*

There was a spasmodic spate of conferences, a succession of week-long answers to where the left, or American politics, or Movement veterans, should go next. First there was the "Back-to-the-Drawing-Boards" conference organized by SDS old guarders in June, at which all attempts to forge a new political force were frustrated by a do-your-own-thing hippiness symbolized by the presence there of Abbie Hoffman and the "anarchist" Diggers from New York. Then came the Radicals in the Professions Conference, in Ann Arbor in July, drawing several hundred Movement alumni who were trying to solve the problem of how to hold down a job and be a radical without doing violence to either. Then there was the National Student Association meeting at the University of Maryland, where most NSAers went about blithely as if the CIA had never existed, and where a counter-conference organized by SDS served to challenge but not, as planned, dissolve the NSA forever. Last came the ballyhooed convention of the National Conference for New Politics in Chicago, which disintegrated into a bitter black-white feud, failed to inspire either side with its idea of middle-class electoral action, and soon thereafter brought down the whole NCNP organization around it.

There was, in the middle of all this, increased surveillance and harassment from the punitive branches of government, from the national level to the local, marking the beginning of the Establishment's stepped-up campaign of repression. Among the items: on June 20, sixteen blacks, said to be members of a Revolutionary Action Movement, were arrested in New York with the story that they were planning assassinations; on June 23, Los Angeles police violently broke up an antiwar demonstration cosponsored by SDS, arrested fifty-one and sent forty to the hospital; on June 26, SNCC chairman H. Rap Brown was arrested for incitement to riot; in July, President Johnson told city and state officials confronted with violence "not to analyze but end the disorder"; in the same month, on orders from Johnson and other high Administration officials, the Army's secret surveillance net, the Continental United States Intelligence, stepped up its spying operations on all dissident political groups, and made its information known to the FBI and local police and Red Squad officials; throughout the summer local police engaged in petty harassment of SDS groups in Norman, Oklahoma, Dallas, Los Angeles, and New York City; and in Chicago the National Office suffered open daily surveillance, arbitrary arrests of at least ten NO staffers for simply driving to the office (located in a black ghetto area), and the expenditure of more than $1,000 for bond posting. Nothing on this scale had been seen since the darkest days of the McCarthy era.

And there was draft-resistance organizing, free universities, demonstrations against Johnson, working with California farm laborers, work-ins and strike supports, picketing and marches and sit-ins. REP and NACLA had summer programs for research on complicity, big business, and imperialism. ERAP was in the last summer of ghetto programs in Newark, Cleveland, Chicago, and Minneapolis. A "Revolutionary Contingent" was formed in New York to enlist young Americans to fight in guerrilla revolutions in Guatemala, Colombia, and Venezuela. A Southern Labor Action Movement was formed by SSOC to enlist young Southerners to start wildcat strikes and labor radicalizing in the South. Abbie Hoffman and a group of proto-Yippies showered dollar bills on the Stock Exchange in New York. Mario Savio and other Free Speech Movement activists went with much fanfare into jail in California on four-month sentences stemming from the 1964 demonstrations. Liberation News Service was established to provide Movement news to underground papers, and an Underground Press Service was begun to coordinate the twenty or so existing underground—or, more properly, counterculture—newspapers. In Sweden there was a summer-long tribunal, led by Bertrand Russell (and including SDS's own Carl Oglesby), to assess U.S. war crimes in Vietnam; and in Moscow there was one conference (attended by Jeff Shero) to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, while in Havana there was another to plan a new one for the Third World.

That was the maelstrom of the summer of 1967: the explosion of a real American left, of a true if youthful counterculture, onto , the American consciousness, unlike anything seen for thirty years at least, and more probably for sixty.

At the core of it all was a new generation of Americans, the youth of the sixties, and with the summer came the books, reports, articles, and academic studies to try to explain them to a troubled land.

Time magazine began it all by citing the new generation as its "Man of the Year," proclaiming that "this is not just a new generation, but a new kind of generation," and going on to determine that "today's youth appears more deeply committed to the fundamental Western ethos—decency, tolerance, brotherhood—than almost any generation since the age of chivalry." The Nation, with an issue devoted to the class of 1967, took an almost antithetical tack, finding the young obsessed with immediate gratification, dominated by emotions ("They often seem to throb rather than think": Wallace Stegner) and mired in disillusionment ("The belief of the new generation that everything is SHIT": Karl Shapiro).

Erik Erikson, in that summer's issue of Daedalus, argued that "more than any young generation before and with less reliance on a meaningful choice of traditional world images, the youth of today is forced to ask what is universally relevant in human life in this technological age at this junction of history." Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, in Columbia University's Teachers College Record at the same time said that, "looking at undergraduate sub-cultures in historical perspective, we are inclined to predict that the dissident minority will continue to grow." And to cap it all, Paul Goodman, in Playboy, examined the souls of radical students and catalogued®

.. their solidarity based on community rather than ideology, their style of direct and frank confrontation, their democratic inclusiveness and aristocratic carelessness of status, caste or getting ahead, their selectivity of the affluent standard of living, their effort to be say and their refusal to be processed as standard items, their extreme distrust of top-down direction, their disposition to anarchist organization and direct action, their disillusion with the system of institutions, and their belief that they can carry on major social functions in improvised parallel enterprises.

On a more scholarly level, there also appeared a series of works on student activists. A special issue of the Journal of Social Issues appeared in July devoted to "Student Activism and the Decade of Protest," the first such academic attention given to the New Left; in Boston, Yale psychologist Kenneth Keniston spent the summer interviewing the Vietnam Summer office people in depth, for his Young Radicals; and a detailed report on campus activism, by Joseph Katz of the Stanford Institute for the Study of Human Problems, was published by no less than the U.S. Office of Education. From these and other sources there began to emerge a rough picture of the activist of 1967.

The academic evidence painted a flattering—perhaps overly flattering—picture of the New Left. The activists were found to be brighter than average, usually academically superior, the best performers in high school, high in verbal (though not in mathematical) skills, and normally attracted to the best colleges and universities. They were seen to be psychologically "healthy," by whatever laboratory tests used to determine such things: high in self-esteem and a sense of autonomy, self-confident and self-expressive, socially mature, flexible, tolerant, and far better adjusted than their conservative colleagues or much of the nonactivist middle; "activism," reported one psychologist that year, "is, presently, a generally healthy aspect of the process of maturation."” They were found to be from the "better" homes, predominantly from families with above-average income, education, and occupational status, where one or both of the parents were in the professions, and where parental values, overwhelmingly liberal and permissive, were emulated and extended rather than resisted and rejected. (So much for the generation gap.) They were judged decidedly moralistic, highly concerned with the right-or-wrong consequences of individual acts (and ready to condemn others—presidents and administrators not excepted—for transgressing them), though their moral codes were often at odds with those pronounced by society and they had very little concern for conventions about sex, drugs, marriage, and the like. And they were grouped in large communities where they numbered between 5 and 13 percent of the student bodies, thus being able to achieve a certain social cohesion and to exert a clear political influence (especially in a country where it is reckoned that no more than I or 2 percent of the adult population is politically active).®

The activists, in short, the young men and women in the ranks of the campus protests, the antiwar marches, the draft-card burnings, and the SDS chapters, were found upon examination to be of the kind that America usually regards as its best. They were, moreover, precisely those that the nation depends upon for the propagation and development of its values, its culture, its traditions, its ideas—i.e., the intelligentsia.

Whatever one might think of them, it seemed clear that they mattered.

What, then, of SDS in all of this? Where did it stand? What had it become? The summer of 1967 is a particularly good time to assess the organization, for it stood at one of its clearest points: suspended now between reform and revolution, between personal protest and political, between action and ideology, between local strength and national promise. And it is appropriate to examine a body in suspension.

The figures are easiest: a national membership of 6,400, a total membership of perhaps 30,000, an annual budget of at least $87,000 a year, a formal presence on 250 campuses (and influence on many more), eight regional travelers, off-campus projects in six major cities, and an established national office with a dozen or so full-time workers.

It was vast, containing multitudes: the old guard, the East Coast intellectuals, the prairiepower people, the hordes of the upper Midwest, the small-college and backwater students, the West Coast activists, the politicized hippies. The political range extended from naive liberals caught up by student power or marching against the war, through connectionsmaking radicals without formal ideology, to red-book Maoists of the Progressive Labor stripe; as Carl Davidson assessed things in February: "We have within our ranks Communists of both varieties, socialists of all sorts, 3 or 4 different kinds of anarchists, anarchosyndicalists, syndicalists, social democrats, humanist liberals, a growing number of ex-YAF libertarian laissez-faire capitalists, and, of course, the articulate vanguard of the psychedelic liberation front." Davidson also gave his view of the various types of SDSers on the campus during these days:

The bulk of the membership, about 85-90%, is made up of what I call the "SHOCK TROOPS." They are usually the younger members, freshmen and sophomores, rapidly moving into the hippy, Bobby Dylan syndrome. Having been completely turned off by the American system of compulsory miseducation, they are staunchly anti-intellectual and rarely read anything unless it comes from the underground press syndicate .... They are morally outraged about the war, cops, racism, poverty, their parents, the middle class, and authority figures in general. They have a sense that all those things are connected somehow and that money has something to do with it. They long for community and feel their own isolation acutely, which is probably why they stick with SDS.

The second SDS type makes up about 5-10% of the chapter's membership.

These are the "SUPERINTELLECTUALS." Most are graduate students in the Social Sciences or Humanities; a few are married .... They spell out grand strategies for the chapter's activities, but will rarely sit behind the literature tables. They talk a lot about power structure research, the need for analysis, and are turned on by the REP prospectus. They join most of the demonstrations, but rarely help make the picket signs .... Without a doubt some of the most brilliant young people in America today ....

The third ideal type within SDS, the final 5%, are what I call the "ORGANIZERS." These are the people that keep the chapters going .... An increasing number are dropping out of school, but staying near the University community. Many more would probably drop out if it weren't for 2-S and the draft. They do the bureaucratic shitwork (reserving rooms, setting up tables, ordering literature, etc.) or see that it gets done. They are constantly trying to involve new people or reinvolve old people in the chapter's activities ... .

There is not much political analysis here. Most of the organizer's projects are experimental, spur-of-the-moment decisions ... . Their politics tend to be erratic, changing whenever they finally get a chance to read a new book ....They are the people who try to attend the regional and national conferences.

Davidson is somewhat sardonic about the way these three types interact:

The superintellectuals are intensely cynical toward the younger shock troops, especially the hippies. In retaliation the younger troops put the superintellectuals in the middle class bag along with their parents and the Dean of Men .... For the most part ... our intellectuals view the organizer as a sloppy-thinking mystic with no sense of history. In return, the organizer often looks at the superintellectual as a new kind of Fabian Society opportunist who lacks the guts to break with the middle class .... The organizer's attitudes toward [the "shock troops"] are truly ambivalent, almost schizoid ... likely to be the result of the fact that he is not too far removed from that whole scene himself. He certainly shares their pain .... When he is particularly worn out and burdened, he measures his exhaustion against their frivolity, feels cheated, and reacts with bitter harangues about bourgeois decadence. The younger troops' feelings toward the organizer are mixed as well. Sometimes there is a great deal of admiration and the resulting shyness, especially if the organizer is particularly charismatic. Sometimes, they feel guilty, because of their failure to be more involved in the chapter's daily work. But they often justify this by attributing a lack of sensitivity to the organizer.

MI that is unduly grim, no doubt, but it also has the ring of truth " to it. SDS was nothing if not diverse.

But what of its strengths?

SDS was without question the largest, best-known, and most influential student political group in the country, easily more important and dynamic than such preadamites as the Young Democrats, Young Republicans, or Young Americans for Freedom. It was now the only real student group on the left, M2M and the Student Peace Union having folded and the DuBois Clubs breathing their last, and such groups as the Socialist Workers Party's Young Socialist Alliance and the Socialist Party's Young People's Socialist League, though formally extant, being hardly noticeable. Though there were radical groups on various isolated campuses, and any number of ad hoc student organizations for single-issue politics, SDS was the only organization with a national presence. Its chapters instigated or participated in most of the campus protests, its strategies and tactics guided virtually every university action in some measure, and its newspaper, travelers, officers, and meetings were the source of much of the ferment that politicized campuses, left administrators sleepless, and raised the issue of campus governance for the first time in this century.

But SDS was more than that. It was the leading activist and most fulgent intellectual group in the entire left spectrum, old or new. The Old Left parties, though feeding off the resurgence of antiestablishmentarian politics, were still quite minuscule, and the ongoing pacifist organizations—War Resisters League, Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the like—still attracted only a dedicated few. The only potential rivals just then were the Spring (soon to be National) Mobilization and the draft-resistance movement," and both were essentially ad hoc, single-issue, uncohesive, non-membership coalitions, more temporary bases for action than permanent organizations. It was SDS, both collegiate and alumni, which was the wellspring of many, and transmitter of most, of the ideas that began to create a new consciousness among at least a minority of the college generation and the recently graduated professionals. It was SDS, though by no means alone, and often standing on the shoulders of others, which produced the developing analysis of the war, capitalism, imperialism, complicity—and, of course, their connections—that came to be fairly commonplace within the political arena in the next few years. It was SDS that people looked to for new theories about the agents of change, new literature on the glaring ills of campus and nation, new information about Defense Department contracts, Selective Service machinations, hidden university research. It was SDS, in short, more than any other single group on a national scale, which was pushing people left.

All that said, SDS was still an organization wracked by problems, pulled in different directions, containing the seeds of its own demise. What of its weaknesses?

The first, inevitable, perhaps unsurmountable, problem was of "distance," and it had many components. SDS was a national office that had a turnover of people and ideas at least once a year, a welter of varying chapters operating on their own, and very little in between. This resulted in a continual separation of the National Office from the interests of the chapters, a separation exaggerated during a time like this when the NO activists were trying to develop and push a heightened political consciousness on the rest of the organization. So, while Calvert and Davidson were worrying about building "revolutionary consciousness," the SDSers at Bowling Green were wondering how to answer redbaiting from the conservatives; while Davidson was trying to get a team of people to teach radical politics, the chapter at Arizona State wondered if it dared set up an SDS literature table in the student commons room; while the National Council scorned the idea of mass marches, kids in every SDS chapter went out and organized for them. Slowly the NO, and with it the veteran leaders and other friends in the inner circles, began to draw away from the constituency at large, but now with the growing feeling that it was harder and harder to bridge the gap.

One possible means across the gap might have been the SDS alumni, but they were generally neglected. SDS seemed designedly gerontocidal, changing its basic leadership with every convention and sending the older people, often with acutely developed skills and irreplaceable experience, out to fend for themselves in other pastures. After all, something like thirty-five or forty thousand people had gone through the SDS experience by now, and they had to be a resource worth tapping. But no. Though they did radicalizing work of inestimable value, they felt cut off from the life lines of an involving, meaningful movement; as Barbara and Al Haber expressed it that summer:

On the one hand, many of us can no longer tolerate psychologically the demands of orthodox jobs or the training they require. Radical consciousness has produced a painful awareness of the personal emptiness and social evil of most traditional career patterns .... On the other hand ... the alternatives which have been created by the movement, and the radical generations before us, are too narrow, too limited and too unsuccessful.

All of which tended to create among the alumni a sense of isolation from the new people, younger, with a new style, and new strategies, and even new politics. The Habers, again: "The most pervasive problem [is] the feeling of isolation from the mainstream of the movement. The movement people [are] remote physically and psychologically." So the alumni went off elsewhere, to their own concerns—they were not included, they were not used.

The distance problem was compounded by two others, not specific to SDS but found throughout the New Left—and of course throughout the entire society from which it springs—which now began to be named and confronted: "elitism" and "male chauvinism." Elitism is the tendency of a handful of top leaders—the "heavies," they were called, since "leaders" was a bad word—to dominate an organization by virtue of their elected positions, or manipulative skill, or oral felicity, or administrative brilliance. No matter how much an organization like SDS was aware of the problem—and its unwavering antipathy to leaders from the very start was evidence of that—it was unable to avoid the trap: good souls became active, activists became leaders, leaders became an elite.” Various chapters tried to deal with it by various means—rotating chairmen, governance by committees, conscious withdrawal of heavies—but the problem of course persisted. And it elided very easily into male chauvinism, since the leaders were usually men, or women who identified with and modeled themselves after men, and the followers, bearing the flags, at the mimeographs, in the beds, were usually women. But where elitism had been seen as a problem all along, it is only now, with a growing women's consciousness and Self-identification, that male chauvinism takes on a special malevolence of its own and that the special quality of sexism comes to be recognized—by the women, at any rate, if not yet by the men.

The earliest impulse to "women's liberation" in SDS was the paper presented at the December 1965 "rethinking conference," but in the time since then attention to the issue had grown enormously. Movement gatherings began including special workshops dealing with women's problems—a special session on the "role of women" had been part of the December 1966 draft-resistance conference in Chicago, for example (though, to be sure, concerned with their role in support of draft-resisting men)—and at a number of the traditionally active campuses women's groups began meeting in tentative examinations of sexism in American society. In SDS Jane Adams appeared to carry on the battle almost single-handedly. In an article, "On Equality for Women," in a January 1967 New Left Notes, for example, she argued that women must begin "demanding equality within the organization one is in, refusing to be intimidated by the male chauvinism which does exist, even within the movement"; three months later she added:

And I don't see how we can build a strong movement for a free, democratic society as long as women are treated like "second-class citizens" and retain a submissive role .... AS long as almost all the organizers and staff are male, the fears that bind girls in chapters will be perpetuated; the habit of looking to men for leadership (by both men and women) will be continued. That has to be broken down by women assuming initiative and responsibility.

It is only a symbol, but one that would never have appeared before, that the cover of the convention issue of New Left Notes this summer showed a picture of a smiling young blond woman with a rifle in her hand, under the caption THE NEW AMERICAN WOMAN.

Problems and promises, SDS was at this point, whatever else, a force to be reckoned with by students in general, by the world of the left, by the universities where it was generally housed, by the society at large at which it was aimed. It was—perhaps it is all that need be said—the touchstone of American radicalism.

The mingle-mangle that was SDS in the summer of 1967 can be seen in relief at the SDS National Convention, held in Ann Arbor from June 25 to July 2.

The convention drew between two hundred and fifty and three hundred people, of whom maybe two hundred were voting delegates. Their appearance was now firmly hippiesquemen in longish hair, often with mustaches and occasionally with beards, and blue workshirts and jeans predominating; women tending toward long, straight hair, with eye make-up but not lipstick, usually in jeans, occasionally barefoot. Buttons were routinely worn by both: "sds," "Make Love Not War," "Resist," "October 16" (the last a reference to the Resistance's planned mass draft-card turn-in for the fall).

Though many old familiar faces were present—including both Steve Max and Jim Williams, probably the only left-liberals in the place—the majority of delegates were newer, many of whom had gotten caught up in the student power sweep of the last year and were attending their first convention, and this would prove a source of some tension throughout the week.

Progressive Labor made a respectable showing—perhaps forty or fifty people—and distinguished themselves by shorter hair and a caucus-like discipline." Also present were a number of young Communist Party people, cut loose from the nearly defunct DuBois Clubs and trying now to rebuild a base among the students by surreptitiously using SDS. A good number of people identified themselves as anarchists, including one group with ties to the small IWW office still hanging on in Chicago.

SDS conventions were always bizarre affairs, part reunion, part student-government meeting, part cruising strip, part smoke-filled room, part serious politics. In one sense, by these days conventions never really changed much for the organization, since individual chapters went their own ways and determined for themselves what SDS would be during the year; this was what was being expressed by Jim O'Brien, a Wisconsin SDSer who went on to be one of the most dedicated historians of the Movement, when he reported after this meeting:

If the national SDS convention just held in Ann Arbor showed anything, it was that SDS is not a national organization. Sooner or later, every new delegate learns this; when he does, he sits back, relaxes, endures the long debates and parliamentary hang-ups with a happy passivity. Occasionally he goes out for donuts or Blimpy Burgers without wondering too much what will be going on in his absence. The convention is a place to meet people and exchange experiences, and the formal resolutions are important only as they in some way symbolize those people and those experiences.

Not untrue, and fashionably cynical. And yet, in another sense, SDS conventions were extremely important: in bringing to the surface the problems and passions of the organization, in weighing and calculating the strengths and directions of the factions, in electing people who will establish the national presence over the next year, and in charting the actual direction and programs for the year ahead—or, equally important, failing to.

The "distance" problem surfaced at the very first plenary meeting on Tuesday night in the form of a separation between the Calvert-Davidson wing and the more moderate chapters.

Of particular issue was a front-page New York Times article in May which had begun with a quotation from Calvert that "We are working to build a guerrilla force in an urban environment," and had gone on to warn menacingly that "the threat of violence in his words characterizes the current radicalization of the New Left." Now in fact the article was largely an unfounded scare story which depended for proof of violence on such things as Ché posters and draft-card burning, and Calvert had subsequently explained to the membership in New Left Notes that he was opposed to violence and had been misquoted: "I felt that young Americans who worked for the radical transformation of this society were similar in many respects to guerrilla organizers in the Third World."!° But the quotation, and the wide circulation it was given by a press growing discomforted with the increasing tide of resistance on the nation's campuses, disturbed many in the campus constituency: not only was a national officer presuming to speak politically for the organization as a whole—shades of Paul Booth!—but he seemed to be setting policy for SDS on an issue that had never even been discussed, much less approved, at a national meeting, and one which alarmed most of the constituency, which shied from violence and was by no means ready for guerrilla warfare. Calvert did some fast talking that night. He acknowledged that, in the light of how exaggerated the whole thing had become, sitting for the interview "was a stupid thing, a trap," another example of the way in which the "capitalistic media" distorted events for their own ends; but, he argued, the membership had to understand that the national officers inevitably functioned in political roles just by virtue of their positions, that nothing in the way of real policy had been made at all by the quotation, and anyway this was no excuse to try to damage the national leadership. Ultimately he was forced to proclaim that the debate was "really a matter of who will control this convention," and upon that appeal the battle subsided and Calvert breathed easier. But it was clear to all that the problem of growing distance between national leadership and constituency was a real one, and not to be disposed of easily.

A "direction" problem also surfaced, inevitably, and that was less easy to solve. Workshops would meet for long hours during the day to hash out proposals to put before the plenary sessions at night, but as likely as not the workshop participants couldn't agree on any one proposal or else on one with such a low common denominator that it had little effect, and the plenaries were only worse. People were arguing lines by this point, not really listening to the other sides, trying to win an audience over to the correctness of their point of view, or scorning completely ideas that were too "reformist" or "liberal" or "Wimpy." This was particularly true of the PL people, of course, because they not only had a line but were convinced of its holiness, but it also tended to characterize others who had made up their minds and the National Office people to some extent. Arthur Waskow believes that this convention marked a turning point:

For the first time in SDS people were extremely hostile to any organizing except their own, for the first time they had a sense of real competitiveness and restricted options—that is, if people chose X they would not be able to choose Y, and if they did they were wrong. I don't remember that kind of feeling before that.

What this kind of "correct-line-ism," as it was called, meant for SDS was that it was almost impossible for it to agree upon strategies or programs for the coming year (a task which the convention had now assumed), and in general only the most uncontroversial proposals could be adopted. PL thought that new-working-class organizing was dangerous and wrongheaded, most chapter people thought PL's blue-collar interest was doomed to failure, chapters who advocated election work and third-party priorities were laughed at by the anarchists and the hippieized "cultural" radicals, and these in turn were scorned for their frivolity and lack of "politics" by the veterans and other heavies. Divisions were not homogenized as they so often were in the earlier years.”

So when a "relations with other groups" workshop proposed that SDS establish immediate fraternal relations with such leftist foreign youth groups as the German SDS and the Japanese Zen-gakuren, this was resisted by many, young and old, who thought it pointless and didn't know anything about the foreign organizations anyway. Dozens of elaborate suggestions were presented as to how SDS might join with and politicize the "cultural revolution"—the hippie counterculture—and all were ultimately discarded in favor of a simple resolution to join the Underground Press Service and something called the Haymarket Riot Fan Club. On the draft, the convention agreed to some very sharp rhetoric over the objections of PL, which now wanted to mute the draft issue so as not to frighten away sons of the hawkish working class, but it would not settle upon any tactics for the year ahead beyond those already approved at Berkeley. And on the item which the NO had counted upon to provide the whole thrust of SDS for the year ahead—a mass student strike in the spring based on student issues but "united in the common demand for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam"—there was so much hostility from the chapter representatives, skeptical of its chances and fearful of ending up with egg on their faces if it failed, that the whole thing was put off to the December National Council with the specific proviso that at least ten chapters had to guarantee its chances of success before the NO moved.?”

The convention did find certain things to agree upon. It voted a statement of support for SNCC and the Revolutionary Action Movement, vowed to oppose government repression against "militant, radical, and revolutionary groups," called upon SDSers to support "ghetto rebellions" and "by direct action, including civil disobedience if called for," and authorized the Harvard chapter (more than half PL) to go ahead with a Labor Research and Action Program in Boston. It approved the establishment of a Radical Education Center, a scheme of Davidson’s for carrying on internal education through a literature program and regular articles in New Left Notes. It also approved, with a few modifications from the floor and a great deal of uneasiness from the men, a report from the women's workshop calling upon women to assert their independence and men to deal with their "male chauvinism"; it was the first time the issue of male chauvinism had been joined in SDS, and the first time a New Left organization took a stand on it. Thus, in a significant sense, did the women's liberation movement begin.”

On two other issues the convention passed statements but with so little general agreement on their implementation that they remained rhetorical flourishes without the guise of program. They are significant, however, in demonstrating the political development of SDS by this point, at least the development of the conventiongoing types. The first was the Vietnam war, the discussion of which was brought on by the prospect of still another Washington march in October, which the convention only grudgingly supported:

We urge all SDS chapters which do participate in the march to support immediate withdrawal. Only such a position is commensurate with our recognition of the real role of the U.S. in Vietnam—not a mistake of any essentially good government, but the logical result of a government which oppresses people in the U.S. and throughout the world.

That passed almost without a murmur, and as if that weren't enough the convention then adopted by an overwhelming voice vote an additional statement put forth by a Rutgers PLer, Larry Poleshuck:

SDS holds that the position of "Stop the Bombing" and "Negotiations Now" are not in the best interests of the Vietnamese or the American people.

Allowing the National Liberation Front token representation in the government which has existed because of U.S. military involvement is no just solution to the Vietnam War. The U.S. has no right in any way to determine the future of the Vietnamese. Therefore we must call for an immediate U.S. withdrawal.

The growing sentiment among Americans for an end to the war is a threat to the small minority who benefit from the domination of Vietnam. Leaders like Bobby Kennedy who call for negotiations are trying to channel legitimate desires of American people for peace into a solution which is acceptable to the basic interests of that minority. The anti-war movement must not unintentionally support continued oppression of the Vietnamese. We must insist on an immediate withdrawal of the U.S. from Vietnam.

Here was SDS's first official stand on Vietnam since the "end the war" demand of the 1965 march and the "immoral, illegal, and genocidal war" position of the 1966 antidraft resolution, and it is quite a measure of how the organization, or at least its resolutionpassing wing, had come in just two years. It easily encompassed the idea of imperialism and the link between oppression at home and abroad, and it called for immediate withdrawal long before that was a popular idea even on the left. Only a month before, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. had told his right-thinking countrymen how scandalous that was"No serious American," he wrote in the Times, "has proposed unilateral withdrawal; and this, after all, would be the only action which could hand the game to our enemies"—and here were a bunch of America's "Man-of-the-Year" kids proposing exactly that. Yes, and they would be joined by a lot of serious Americans, and Arthur Schlesinger too, within the next two years.

The second subject of rhetorical agreement was the draft:

SDS reaffirms its opposition to conscription in any form. We maintain that all conscription is coercive and anti-democratic, and that it is used by the United States Government to oppress people in the United States and around the world .... The draft provides a manpower pool for an aggressive and imperialistic foreign policy. Americans who cannot freely determine the shape of their own lives are in turn forced to suppress those abroad who struggle for self-determination .... A draft-resistance program must move beyond individual protest to collective action. SDS reaffirms its call for the formation of draft-resistance unions. Tactics such as civil disobedience and disruption of the Selective Service System are among those advocated.

Nor was that all—Jeff Shero popped up from the floor proposing an amendment that SDS help men already in the service "in opposition and disruption within the armed forces" and give "aid to servicemen who wish to terminate their association with the armed forces by going underground." By a lopsided vote SDS went on record in favor of desertion from the military—and this was an organization which only two years ago couldn't even pass a mild resolution against the draft.

The failure of the 1967 convention to decide upon a course of action for the year ahead was serious—it had happened really only once before, in 1965, with unpleasant consequencesfor it meant that chapters would tend to operate in isolation or take their direction from other sources, like the media. As Paul Booth later analyzed it, "Once they stopped passing programs and started arguing stupid lines—or however good they were—they lost the ability to set any course for the student movement, and then the course was set by The New York Times and the TV stations, so that whatever was most dramatic was then emulated, whether it was good or not." And when chapters did do imaginative and effective things on their own, there was no organizational way to communicate and duplicate them; as Booth says,

During this whole period ... there was a tremendous development of a lot of very healthy things—working-class community organizing, campus actions around community issues of a planned character—but there was no way to find out about them. For example at Cornell, where they fought and won a tremendous fight for low-cost public housing in Ithaca, done by SDS, and I never found out about it until I ran into a guy from there. There were a lot of these things, but New Left Notes became an organ for /ines now rather than news, so you never knew about them. Independent of whether it was good politics or not, it was bad organizationally.

Added to this was a failure to come up with either the plan or the personnel for effective leadership. The process was begun when the NO introduced a long-awaited plan for the reorganization of national officers and the elimination of the presidency; the proposal was to replace them with three equal officers, a National Secretary in charge of the NO and responsible for implementing national programs, an Education Secretary for internal education and chapter communications, and an Inter-organizational Secretary acting as liaison with other political groups. The basic scheme was Calvert's and the basic motives were, aS near as one can tell, ingenuous: to eliminate a presidency which had become largely a figurehead position, to allow the open election of the National Secretary where the real power had come to reside anyway, to eliminate a needless and antiegalitarian hierarchy within the NO (the kind that had produced frictions in the last several years), and to define clearly the specific administrative roles of each top official, which had always been murky in the past. The effects of it, however, as time was to show, were to concentrate even more power in the hands of the National Secretary, who could now operate almost without restrictions (the old National Secretary had been responsible, at least in theory, to both the elected national officers and the quarterly National Councils); to make the NO even more of a closed-off world, with officers who were virtually forced to move to Chicago and work full time in that potentially insulated environment; and, by allowing de jure power to coincide with de facto power, to concentrate forces almost beyond reach of any other organizational tendency or influence and to permit the leadership to go its own way virtually unchecked until the next convention. Apparently these effects, however, were unrealized at the time and the general egalitarian caste given to the whole thing seemed convincing enough to the delegates present: not one voice was raised in protest about the elimination of the presidency, the whole debate took scarcely an hour, and the reorganization was approved by even more than the two-thirds vote which the constitution required.

The evening session, devoted to filling these three new posts, completed the leadership muddle. For the post of National Secretary there were nominated Jeff Segal, prominent because of his draft-resistance organizing during the spring, Eric Chester, the former VOICE leader now organizing for SDS in San Francisco, who had been vocal on the floor, and Mike Spiegel, prominent for nothing much other than being one of the first two Harvard SDSers to grab onto the bumper of McNamara's car during the December 1966 confrontation.

Spiegel was elected with a clear majority on the first ballot. Spiegel was young (then just twenty), a bit over six feet, well-built, good-looking, with impelling dark eyes behind hornrimmed glasses, short though somewhat bushy hair, and an SDSer's full, drooping mustache. Born in Portland, Oregon, he had been outstanding in high school, went to Harvard in 1964 as a sociology major, became politicized during the summer of 1966 while working in a Michigan auto assembly plant, and returned to Harvard to join SDS. He said later:

I think I could have come as close as anyone with a name like Spiegel to becoming a member of the ruling class, but I have always had this thing about reality. I could never skirt things. I have to meet them head-on. This is why I went to SDS. No one else had an explanation for the reality.

The explanation, especially with regard to Vietnam, convinced and radicalized the young junior, and he went off to the national convention full of fire. But no one would have predicted his election, being so young and so unknown: only Paul Booth and Vernon Grizzard, of all the top SDS officers over the years, were undergraduates when elected, and only Booth, at nineteen, was younger; and both then had reputations of a sort, and the organization was a thirtieth of its present size. Moreover, no one would have predicted that the convention, just after having established the office of National Secretary as a politically powerful lever, would have put there in the flesh a man whose name was known only to a few—the issue of New Left Notes reporting his election called him "Spiegal"—and whose politics were known to fewer still.

This election was followed by one for the Education Secretary, and the muddle was compounded. Carl Davidson, who had been so involved with internal education, would have been a natural choice, and he was willing to run. But the nominees were Art Rosenblum, Texas traveler Bob Pardun, and New York organizer Sue Eanet, and Pardun won easily on the first ballot. Pardun, twenty-four, who had been born in Pueblo, Colorado, but migrated to Texas, was blond and tall, with a faint Will Rogers look about him, an unruly forelock, and a soft Texas drawl. He had already developed a reputation in SDS for his regional work and he had a strong Texas chapter behind him, "more close-knit," he says, "than the other chapters, we felt more like brothers and sisters." But he was the kind of person, one could have predicted, who was better off traveling the Southern plains than stuck behind a Chicago desk.

The last election was for Inter-organizational Secretary. This time Carl Davidson was nominated, he ran against VOICE delegate Mark Seher and West Coast organizer Bob Speck, and he won handily. It was the first time that a national officer repeated since Paul Booth had served two terms as Vice President (in 1962-63 and 1963-64) and one as National Secretary (in 1956-66)—but it still made only bizarre sense to put this student-syndicalist and chapter-oriented man into a job where he had to be nice to the Young Christians and decipher letters from the Zengakuren.

And so the convention ended, without a national program, without even local directions, without a cohesive team in the National Office, with all its problems intact. Yet nothing could hold back SDS now, for it was an organization of resistance in a time of resistance, and oddly enough it was about to enjoy one of its most successful years.