Summer 1968

On the walls of the huge room in the Student Union on the Michigan State campus in East Lansing were pictures of Lenin and Trotsky and a few hammer-and-sickle emblems, on the stage were the red banner of communism and the black of anarchism, and on the floor were people with red armbands, large red and black flags, and "little red books" of Mao's thoughts. The young men and women cheered their colleagues and greeted photographers with the raised clenched fist of revolution—no longer seeming the least incongruous—and when lining up to cast votes they passed their time singing songs from an IWW songbook or renditions of the "Internationale" in which no one seemed quite certain of the words.

Motions from the floor outdid one another in their claims to be "revolutionary," one calling for a "movement which plays a revolutionary role," another for "the destruction of this capitalist, imperialist, racist system," and still another for creating an organization of "professional revolutionaries." And in workshops and plenaries, in caucuses and informal meetings, on the floor and over the dinner tables, one theme predominated: in the words of one reporter, "throughout the convention 'the revolution’ was the binding topic of conversation."

This was the 1968 convention of SDS, the organization's acknowledged, if somewhat tentative, step into the waging of revolution. Some eight hundred people gathered from June 9 to 15, perhaps five hundred of them actual delegates or voting members and the rest observers of every political stripe from IWW to FBI.” There were postcollegians in their mid-twenties who were new to national SDS (people like Bill Aycrs and Diana Oughton) and had been drawn to it by its reputation as the only serious revolutionary group around; there were many who had been drawn into SDS chapters during the spring confrontations (the Columbia contingent among them), looking to SDS to carry on that impetus on a national scale; there were quite a number of Progressive Labor Party SDSers, noticeable for their purposely straight dress, starched workshirts and coats-and-ties, fifties-short hair, and smooth-shaven faces; there were a considerable number of Old Left groups for the first time, Separatists, Wobblies, Communists, International Socialists, Socialist Workers, and Lord knows what else, chiefly concerned with buttonholing likely recruits and hawking their books and pamphlets; there were several groups of politicized hippies (represented most dramatically by the Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker collective from New York) who were concerned to meld the cultural revolution with the political and were usually dismissed as "anarchists" by the more conventional; and there were in the interstices of all this many undefined people with various shades of revolutionary fervor attending the convention through habit, hope, or boredom. Nothing if not diverse, and even contradictory, but they went to East Lansing out of the pervading sense that SDS, coming off a triumphant year (its deficiencies unknown or overlooked after the success of Columbia), was the likely organization to be the cutting edge of the second American revolution.

In the year and a half since Greg Calvert first put forth the tentative notion of "revolutionary consciousness" at that Princeton conference, SDS—and with it much of the white Movement—had been heading inexorably toward thinking of itself, and feeling itself, revolutionary. By the middle of 1968 there were many thousands of people who could, with no sense of hyperbole, agree with the SDS convention paper which argued that "our movement is an element of the revolutionary vanguard painfully forming from the innards of America."

By no means a majority of the young shared this attitude, of course, not even all of the politicized young. What is remarkable is that so many did, and many more would come to in the course of the next two years: university students, yes, but dropouts and nonstudents, too, and academics and community organizers, the denizens of the youth ghettos and hippies, kids still in high school and in the community colleges, and Movement alumni and adults along the left as well. The numbers are impossible to reckon, really, though one cautious survey in the fall of 1968 found approximately 368,000 people enrolled in colleges who considered themselves revolutionaries and another in the fall of 1970 counted no fewer than 1,170,000—which suggests, given the character of the left at the time, that there must have been something like twice that many again who thought of themselves as revolutionaries and were to be found not in the colleges but in the Movement organizations, high schools, and the streets. What they all meant by "revolution," of course, was as varied as their lives. For many there is little doubt that romantic and momentary impulses were predominant and that the wellsprings of alienation were more powerful than any tide of analysis or ideology. Still for many others, and these the significant actors on the stage—the leaders of SDS and the ad hoc campus groups, the Movement organizers and communicators, the heavies and the in-groups—revolution was precise enough to be a coherent and sensible goal, something real enough for them to give their lives over to, day after day, month after month. That this should have happened at all is remarkable; that it should have happened in so short a time is almost incredible.

Revolution: how had it come to that? It was a blend of many things: bitterness, hatred, and alienation, hope, confidence, and conviction, energy, passion, and need. It was the pattern woven by all the threads of the sixties, the inevitable product of the awakened generation as it probed deeper and deeper into the character of its nation. At least as it applies to SDS, its leading exemplar by the summer of 1968, the impulse to revolution can be explained, if oversimply, as follows.

There was a primary sense, begun by no more than a reading of the morning papers and developed through the new perspectives and new analyses available to the Movement now, that the evils in America were the evils of America, inextricably a part of the total system that gave them a home; and the eighteen-year-old now, if political at all, stood a good chance of already knowing this, starting with the analysis that it had taken the SDSers of the early period years to learn. Clearly something drastic would be necessary to eradicate those evils and alter that system: various reforms had been tried, confrontation had been tried, there had been civil-rights agitation, university pressures, antiwar marches, doorbell ringing, electoral action, student power, draft resistance, demonstrations, campus uprisings, even tentative political violence—all to little avail, not even when the ranks of protest grew larger, when broad segments of the young and the intelligentsia and the suburban middle classes became aroused. Worse: those who wanted peaceable change, who tried to work through approved channels, seemed to be systematically ignored, ostracized, or—as with the Kennedys and King—eliminated. More was necessary, and in the words of Bob Pardun, "What it came to that year was that people came to the conclusion that the only way to stop the war was make a revolution, and the only way to stop racism was make a revolution."* "The monster"—that was the recurrent phrase now—could not be altered, deviated, halted: it had to be destroyed. And the time seemed to be ripe. The government had shown its weakness in the face of an aroused people—in one form, at the Pentagon, in a more important way, at Tet—and the departure of Johnson and the start of peace talks suggested that it might be beginning to run scared. The almost-revolution in France in May introduced the possibility of the radical overthrow of established regimes even in advanced industrial nations despite their armed might and domestic entrenchment. The almost-takeover of Columbia suggested that serious radical attacks upon American institutions had reached a new level and the feeling was abroad that, in Tom Hayden's words, "what is certain is that we are moving toward power—the power to stop the machine if it cannot be made to serve humane ends." Dissident forces were certainly in motion: the blacks, as the ghetto uprisings of the last two years and the reaction to King's assassination had shown; the students, as the Pentagon, the Ten Days, and the aftermath of Columbia had shown; the Third World, as the tenacity of the Vietnamese rebellion, the rise of the Arab guerrilla movement, and the success of the Cuban revolution had shown, perhaps certain segments of the working class, as the subway strikes, telephone strikes, and a variety of wildcat walkouts had shown; and even soldiers, as the initial achievements of GI organizing had shown. The very fact of highlevel repression was taken as a sign that the government felt seriously enough threatened by the rise of the left to resort to increasingly harsh and desperate means; as SDS traveler Neil Buckley put it, "as a political movement, we are on to something, and They know it."° A multitude of feelings, in short, all pointing to the idea that revolution was not only necessary, but possible.

There were other and more subtle forces at work, too, promoting the impulse to revolution.

The media, with a predictable measure of exaggeration and paranoia, began treating the New Left as if it were a developed and dangerous insurrectionary threat already, the effect of which was to convince many young people that they really were that, or should be, and to sanction all their first steps in that direction—often before they had bothered to think the whole thing through. The additional celebrations of youth culture by parts of the society, and the embracement of it by wide segments of the capitalist economy, also served to convince many that youth had significant power within America and that its expression in political terms might be as devastating as its expression in cultural ones. Within the Establishment, traditionally right-wing forces seized upon the bold proclamations of revolution and the tentative acting-out of those proclamations and trumpeted them before Congressional committees, businessmen's associations, and conservative organizations as justifications of their world view and excuses to increase their powers of control and repression. And within the Movement itself, the more-militant-than-thou dynamic that serves so often to push all kinds of groups to their logical fringes operated to make those unabashedly proclaiming themselves revolutionaries the ones increasingly listened to and emulated; within SDS chapters, for example, it became increasingly difficult for praxis-axis types to withstand the appeal of the action factions, or for the base-builders to hold on to student allegiances in the face of the confrontationists.

The SDS leadership, hoping to ride on the wave of this new political fervor, went into the East Lansing convention with a conscious desire to make SDS into a revolutionary organization. No one knew just how that was to be done, of course, but the paper that Bernardine Dohrn had written with Tom Bell and Steve Halliwell seemed to be pointed in the right direction, and by convention time the NO forces and their allies decided to make that their chief strategy. "The challenge at this juncture in movement history," the proposal said, "is to change the emphasis from building a radical movement to using the radical movement in the work of making revolution." To this end it offered two strategies which the national leadership saw as the chief priorities for the year ahead: first, to develop revolutionary organizations in the larger cities, perhaps based on university campuses but reaching out to wider constituencies beyond the campus where allies for any truly revolutionary movement would have to be found, including high-school and junior-college students, young workers and professionals, welfare workers and recipients, and Movement alumni; second, to start laying "the groundwork for the development of a new left revolutionary organization" that would keep "SDS people who see themselves as life-time revolutionaries" in touch with one another and would be "capable of making detailed strategic decisions, committing resources in the most effective way, and keeping effective administration to assure detailed knowledge of how work is progressing"—in short, an SDS with muscles.°®

SDS just might have been able to start making this kind of an organization, one that would match the new seriousness of those who felt themselves revolutionary, in spite of the fact that its leaders were handicapped by a lack of agreed-upon analysis, a hazy notion of revolutionary history, and only a few brief weeks to put their ideas together. But it was never given the chance. For it was at the East Lansing convention that the Progressive Labor Party, carrying on the offensive it had begun at the New York regional meeting in February, made its first concerted move to impose its politics on SDS, and the resulting chaos produced a meeting that could hardly even agree upon a time to adjourn, much less an organization for revolution.

PL was present in surprising force, and was well-organized. Its fifty- or sixty-member contingent was enhanced by the fact that many bore five-vote delegate authorizations from their local chapters, giving them a weight at the convention far out of proportion to their actual membership; and it operated as a closed caucus, making binding decisions in advance about the proposals on the floor so as to establish a unified voting bloc of considerable power. Moreover, PL had abandoned its previous strategy of "swimming in the sea" of SDS, hoping to entice potential party recruits from the disgruntled and the bewildered; now it decided to push its politics at every opportunity, its members speaking up at every workshop, introducing counterproposals at every plenary, waving their little red books at every juncture. Bob Pardun recalls how PL began its attacks during the workshops that occupied the first days of the convention:

What happened was that time after time, people who hadn't been in SDS too long, who couldn't handle the war, couldn't handle racism, couldn't handle empire too good—people who just came to SDS and were excited by SDS and came to a national meeting—ran into all of these SDS workshops that sounded really exciting but when they'd get in them and started talking, the PL line would come down kavoom!: this is the PL line. People would say, O.K., and try to take the PL line into account and figure out where their [PLers'] heads were at and what was going on—and the PL people would watch it happen and they wouldn't try to adjust or modify anything and they'd just push down the PL line again. And it got very frustrating because you could never argue with the PL people, you could never convince them of anythingespecially if you didn't have the rhetoric or any of that stuff—so you were always at their mercy, especially if you were a young guy, facing a guy who came on like a teacher with a line that you couldn't really understand. People got very frustrated in their conversations, they couldn't take these discussion groups as far as they wanted them, and they got very uptight about it and there was a lot of seething against PL.

The seething spilled out on the floor of the convention with the first plenary session on Thursday night, when the SDS leadership formally presented the Bell-Dohrn-Halliwell proposal. It was, as it turned out, an unfortunate redoubt from which to do battle with PL: its prose was clotted and murky, virtually inaccessible to those newer SDSers who had not spent years in learning New Left mandarin; its ideas of how concretely to go about creating citywide organizations or a new revolutionary SDS were frail to the point of vacuity; and its analysis was loosely based in new-working-class ideas (Halliwell, be it remembered, was close to the original new-working-class formulators in New York) which had never been developed, tested, or substantiated for the majority of SDSers. PLers immediately recognized the weaknesses and, with jugular instincts, attacked mercilessly. They attacked the new-working-class ideas. They picked up a one-line quotation from Herbert Marcuse and ridiculed him for his "misunderstanding" of the working class. They made fun of the sloppy language, scoffed at the idea of trying to organize without the industrial proletariat, scorned the attempt to centralize SDS. And they pointed to the almost-revolution in France as an example of what could happen when students allied with the working classes, suggesting with a little historical sleight-of-hand that this was the model for serious American revolutionaries to follow. (Which evoked, among much else, a bit of impromptu theater from the Motherfuckers, who dressed one person up as "Student," another as "Worker," and joined them into a "Worker-Student Alliance" in an elaborate marriage ceremony.) The PL attack was quite effective, and not even the polemical experts of the NO faction could blunt it: they didn't want to seem to be anti-working-class and they certainly couldn't play down the importance of the events in France. After what seemed to be interminable debate, PL carried the final vote against the proposal, 485 to 355, and the leadership's chief strategy lay in ruins.

At this point the regular SDSers became downright panicky. It was clear that PL had no more than a quarter of the delegates, but also clear that they were able to swing over to their side a great many of the uncommitted people impressed with their arguments, and their positiveness, on the floor. Anti-PL heavies decided to meet in a caucus of their ownnot formally closed, but not exactly welcoming PLers, either, a fighting-fire-with-fire technique that signaled the end of part of the early SDS spirit of openness and camaraderie—but their choices were clearly limited. They couldn't kick PL out, since SDS was still proudly antiexclusionist and took a civil-libertarian, let-the-factions-contend point of view; they found it difficult to outargue PL, since most of them were still working out their own politics, still groping toward what it meant to be revolutionary, and hadn't their own red books and bearded prophets to refer to; and all that was left was to try to outmaneuver them. The NO caucus decided to concentrate its forces on reorganizing the national structure along the lines of a centralized "cadre" approach, which it hoped would put enough power in the hands of the traditional SDSers to either eliminate or curtail PL influence in the organization.

So the NO faction rallied behind a proposal originally drawn up by Jeff Segal and later modified by Neil Buckley which would replace the present ineffective National Interim Committee with a body of seventeen national officers—four National Secretaries in Chicago and fifteen Field Secretaries in the various regions—who would be full-time workers for SDS and who would meet regularly between national meetings to establish and carry out the basic policies of the organization. It was presented to the delegates as a matter of top priority—Pardun, for example, told the meeting that "if this group does not get together in the next two years, we'll be wiped out"—but the delegate response was hardly enthusiastic.

Progressive Labor and the other organized factions correctly saw it as an attempt to lessen the influence they were able to exert in the present freewheeling system—Jeff Gordon called it "a clear attempt at a power grab"? by the NO group—and many of the chapter people regarded it as an unnecessary arrogation of control to the Chicago crowd, in defiance of all the traditions of SDS. The debate was long and acerbic, with lines sometimes ten to fifteen deep at the microphones set in the aisles for speakers from the floor, and when it became apparent that the NO scheme couldn't win a majority, everybody got into the act. Mike Klonsky suggested the creation of a "political committee" which would map out SDS's revolutionary policies while the rest of the organization went its way; the Motherfucker collective pressed its idea for "destructuring" SDS into collectives and affinity groups ("The duty of the revolutionary," read their handout, "is to make a revolutionary organization"); and finally PL itself came forth with a proposal designed to reduce the role of the National Office and strengthen the power of regional organizations. Debate on the reorganization schemes went on for more than ten hours—the watchword from the floor was, "If someone has something to say, let him say it"—with interminable caucuses, speeches, votes, proposals, and amendments, until the convention finally had to be extended into the weekend, the time originally set aside for the National Council meeting.” It was one of the longest debates on a single subject in the history of SDS conventions—and one of the most inconclusive. In the end not one of the proposals passed.

When at last it became clear that the NO faction was going to have a tough time getting any of its ideas through the convention—in fact going to have a tough time continuing SDS along its own lines in the face of the PL challenge—it finally decided to present the PL problem directly to the delegates, a highly unusual admission of factional turmoil. Pardun started things with a speech theoretically on "principle" inside Movement organizations, which in no time developed into an attack on Progressive Labor as an "external cadre," a group, he said, really outside the family of SDS which didn't really care about the survival of the organization and was using it simply for its selfish ends:*°

We must demand that external cadre operate in a principled fashion. It's simply not principled to move into SDS in order to recruit members for another party. Your function should be to bring in ideas. It's not principled either to pack meetings in order to manipulate acceptance of a line or to tie up valuable time discussing issues that the collective does not wish to discuss.

It was a voice out of the past, and it affected PL not at all, but it did not fail to arouse an audible gasp among the assembled delegates—for it was the first open denunciation of PL at a national meeting, and it hinted that the sacred New Left principle of nonexclusionism was being stretched to its limits.

Pardun's denunciation was augmented by others in the debates that followed: no matter what the motion on the floor, NO sympathizers took the opportunity to condemn PL for its rigidity, its cadre discipline, its divisiveness in SDS, its anti-Hanoi politics, its working-class blinders, its short hair, and anything else anyone could think of. But the final gauntlet was hurled down by Tom Bell, who had obviously been brooding on the defeat of the paper of which he had been a proud coauthor. Bell, a longtime SDSer, one of the founders of the Cornell chapter, a Niagara region traveler, an early draft-resistance organizer, now with the MDS in Springfield, took the rostrum with visible anger: he had seen the move toward a revolutionary organization suffer an unexpected defeat, he had watched the NO proposals get clogged in PL glue in every plenary, and felt that SDS might be losing its chance to forge the revolution. Normally a quiet man—in fact his success in building the draft-resistance forces had been due to his low-key manner—he was shaking now. "We came openly and honestly to this convention in order to propose an SDS program," he declared. But the PL people had obstructed every move, descended with their unwavering and unlistening line at every meeting, and the result has been this endless, pointless, frustrating series of debates, with nobody learning anything, nobody deciding anything. "It isn't possible to have a debate on the floor," he charged, "because of the organized opposition of PLP." And unless SDS does something about it now, the organization will surely collapse. At that one PLer from the floor began shouting at the platform; Bell paused. Redbaiting, the PLer called, all you guys from the NO faction are simply redbaiting us because we're communists. Bell was stunned, his color livid, his voice quivering. "Redbaiting! Redbaiting!? I'm the communist here, not you guys from PL!" In fact, he said, it's you guys from PL who are holding this organization back from being rea//y communist, from really getting on with the revolution.

"PL out," he shouted into the microphone, "PL OUT." The cry was taken up immediately on the floor—possibly spontaneously, but more likely by prearrangement among the NO people hoping to stampede PL off the floor and out of the organization: "PL OUT! PL OUT! PL OUT!" Feet stamping in rhythm, hands clapping, chairs banging, and finally people standing, fists raised, dancing about, yelling: "PL OUT, PL OUT, PL OUT!" The din went on for two full minutes, then three, and four, turning the huge hall into a maelstrom of bitterness. And in the middle, through it all, the PLers sat, impassive, unpanicked even if bewildered, recognizing a maneuver of desperation and refusing to be carried up in it. Soon the tumult faded: no more than two hundred of the delegates could be enticed into the outburst, and most of the rest just sat, apparently unconvinced by the NO arguments, embarrassed and confused by the tactics, shocked at the flouting of SDS's antiexclusionism, feeling themselves even sympathetic to PL on civil-libertarian grounds alone, ultimately deciding perhaps that however crazy the PL people might be in their adulation of the working class, the NO people had shown themselves fully as mad, and with a somewhat slimmer justification. NO staffer Tim McCarthy, in the chair, finally gaveled the meeting to a relative quiet, organized a long three-sided debate—pro-PL, anti-PL, and neutralists—and the evening faded into un-memorable bickering. No vote was ever taken, but it was clear that PL not only was not going to be stampeded out of SDS but that most of those in SDS simply didn't want them out.

Jeff Gordon, writing in PL after the convention, gave his side's response to the abortive expulsion attempt:

The ideology of the NO/NWC [National Office/New Working Class] caucus was weak, confused, and easily shot full of holes. It was under serious ideological attack by the increasing number of people who are beginning to support an anti-imperialist, pro-working class perspective. The NO/NWC structural proposals were opposed by many who opposed top-down structure. Instead of responding with a political defense of their ideological and organizational perspective, the NO/NWC caucus came up with the old ace in the hole, the one weapon they hoped could unite their own split ranks—anti-communism.

They intended to use it as the main political tool to push through their proposals and bludgeon down any opposition ... .

The main element of the attack against PLP was the charge that its members in SDS are "external cadre." ... The use by the NO/NWC forces of such terms as "external cadre" is just an attempt to confuse the issue of what are the correct revolutionary politics that must be followed! It is an appeal to narrow organizational chauvinism and to anti-communism. "External cadre" is no different than the term "outside agitator," which is used by the ruling class to attack those it can't defeat by other means ....

Another aspect of the attack is put this way: "PLers are puritanical dogmatists. Just look at their short hair. They want to stop us from doing our own thing." This is really an appeal to the most reactionary aspects in people, the aspect that is most individualist and the most decadent. It is an attack on our belief that freedom lies in collective, class struggle, not going off and doing your own thing. If we are to become revolutionaries, "our own thing" must be to struggle to build the revolutionary movement and make the revolution ....

This appeal to anti-communism was set back at the SDS convention! ... That was an important victory for the revolutionary direction of SDS. But the struggle promises to go on; anti-communism must be met more sharply and decisively each time it raises its ugly head. The future of SDS as a positive factor in the American revolution is at stake."!

The only real victory NO people were able to salvage at the convention was the election of officers. The NO caucus, fearful of PL inroads, decided to propose a slate for the three top officers (the first time in SDS a single slate had ever been presented): Mike Klonsky for National Secretary, Bernardine Dohrn for Inter-organizational Secretary, and Les Coleman for Education Secretary. Progressive Labor people protested the tactic, but they realized that they did not have more than a quarter of the votes themselves and to put up a counterslate of their own would risk inviting defeat, ridicule, and perhaps a recurrence of the exclusionist explosion; they cast dissenting votes, but put up no candidates of their own. So Klonsky and Dohrn both ran unopposed (except for one Motherfucker who walked down the aisles with a wastebasket over his head while his friend yelled, "I nominate this trash can for National Secretary") and were elected decisively. But the spectacle of such rubber-stamping (unparticipatory, not to mention undemocratic) finally aroused the delegates and a contesting candidate, New England SDSer Fred Gordon, was nominated to challenge Coleman; Gordon was elected by a single vote, largely on the strength of the simple argument that the NO faction shouldn't dictate all the officers.

It was certainly an odd trio, befitting an odd convention. Klonsky, who had just turned twenty-five, was a blond and bony Californian, with straight, floppy hair, narrow eyes, a slight mustache, and a truly prognathous jaw that tended to give him the look of a slightly pugnacious longshoreman. He was a red-diaper baby—his father was a former organization secretary for the Communist Party in Eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware and later, after moving the family west, a member of the Southern California District Committee of the party—and he was one of the earliest recruits to SDS in California. He helped to organize the chapter at San Fernando Valley State College in the fall of 1965, and it became one of the most active and imaginative chapters in the area, among the first to try GI organizing and to attack Dow recruiters. Klionsky became active on the national scene early in 1967, writing a few articles for New Left Notes and the Guardian, working in draft organizing, and helping to run the Los Angeles Regional Office (where he met, was arrested with, and later married Sue Eanet, the former New York SDSer). In early 1968 he tried some ERAPoid community organizing among a poor-white and Mexican-American community in the Silverlake area of Los Angeles, and it was during this time that his primarily working-class politics took shape; as he said in New Left Notes, "I think we've got to break out of the bag of debate between Movement intellectuals about which is better, organizing or mobilizing, and develop a program which will make community and working-class organizing a reality." By the time of the convention he represented one of the largest of the new, proto-Marxist tendencies in SDS, non-PL people who nonetheless supported the working class and emphasized community and factory organizing. But there was nothing rigid about his politics: when asked during the convention if he was a Stalinist, he replied, "Having been a communist only a few months, I have difficulty understanding what you mean by that?*"and by "communist," with a lower-case "c," he meant deliberately to distinguish himself from his father's politics, using a formulation that a number in SDS were using now.??

Fred Gordon, twenty-four, short, dark, serious, cleanshaven, was a New Englander, born in Newton, Massachusetts, and a 1966 graduate of Harvard College. He was, as far as is known, a member of no particular political group—he had been friends with PLers in the Boston area, and with them helped run a series of student seminars in the summer of 1966 on such topics as socialism, labor, and imperialism, but he was not a PL member; he had studied for the last two years under Herbert Marcuse at San Diego State College, but gave no indication of associating with a new-working-class position; and he had been active in Southern California draft work, in fact planning a community-organizing draft committee in San Diego for the summer, but had not heretofore been identified with the communityorganizing groups in SDS. At the time of his election his most evident political passion was no more than a desire to make the convention vote more democratic.

And Bernardine Dohrn, as we have seen, was a still different type of SDSer, a firstgeneration radical, campus-oriented, drawn more to the new-working-class analysis, sympathetic to the new youth culture, a supporter of the resistance strategies, and strongly behind the impulses to revolution as they expressed themselves during the spring.

The Klonsky-Dohrn election signaled the last-ditch triumph of the NO caucus, and it was solidified through the election of the eight national officers of the National Interim Committee, all of them generally associated with NO politics.” It was a slim consolation perhaps, but it did mean that the direction of the NO for the coming year would be in sympathetic hands, a not insignificant factor, and it did mean that these hands would be more or less bent to the task of shaping a revolution. Not that anyone among them even now had any sure ideas about how to bring that about, and certainly the convention had given them no guidelines whatsoever, refusing to pass any resolution with an explicit program. But in the course of the next year, as the country coughed up one disillusionment after another—the police riots in Chicago, the nomination of Humphrey and Nixon and the election of the latter, the stalemate of the Paris peace talks, the indictment of the Chicago Eight—and as the youth of America expressed their outrage as never before, the existence of a group of SDS officers unblushingly committed to revolution would have its effect.

The Progressive Labor Party's offensive within SDS in the summer and fall of 1968 was not a matter of accident or good fortune: it was a calculated political move based on a decision of the party's national committee to emphasize recruitment of new members into the party.

The rationale had been announced by Milton Rosen, chairman of the party, in his speech to the May 1968 convention:

How do we move the struggle from one level to another? ... Sell magazines and our other literature, that may be the best thing you can do. You can't get the Columbia students to go and take over City Hall; the workers won't shut down the factories now. Maybe at Columbia or any place one of the biggest things you could do is to recruit people into the party. Why? Because you will politicize guys [sic] and you will have more forces to go among the masses to politicize them, and try to improve them. The revolutionary movement doesn't come out of the air. You have to raise political ideas among a lot of people. That is the most important thing you can do. It gives the revolutionary Left, our party, much more strength and footing.

Now every scintilla of PL theory argued that it should direct its recruitment efforts at members of the industrial working class, but PL was honest enough with itself to recognize that its attempt at working-class organizing, the acknowledged party thrust in the last three years, was having almost no effect. Even the elaborate work-in program of the summer of 1968, which (according to PL) involved some three hundred fifty students, was to end without any noticeable inclination by the students to stay on the production lines or by the workers to flock to Progressive Labor. As the national committee was forced to confess:

While we have concluded that the objective conditions are certainly ripe and full of class struggle out of which workers can be recruited to our party, ... whom have we NOT been recruiting? Industrial workers (except in rare instances).

And so therefore PL was forced to look to the student ranks, chiefly to SDS, where recruitment possibilities seemed much more promising. The growth of a sizable number of people thinking of themselves as "revolutionary" seemed to augur well, especially since many of them seemed to be coming around to PL's emphasis on the industrial proletariat.

The fact that so many present PLers were students or recent students meant that they would be able to understand and infiltrate student groups far more easily than they would the blue-collar ones. And PL's long-standing role in SDS seemed to give it a particular vantage point there, particularly at a time when SDS was drawing in a lot of new and searching students and yet often failing to satisfy their needs. Hence the stepped-up role by PL at all levels of SDS.

At places where PL was strong, or where PL had effective control of the chapter, it was simply necessary to encourage membership in SDS and then select out of those people the ones who seemed likeliest to be suitable "candidate members" of PL itself. But at places where PL was in a minority, or had no more than one or two members, PL chose to form "worker-student alliance" caucuses and under that rubric enlist sympathizers who might be prejudiced against PL itself or unwilling at the start to undergo the rigors and discipline of full-scale PL membership. The strategy of the worker-student alliance—or WSA, as it quickly became known—was pressed in full force when the fall term began: PLers made sure to bring it up at the initial chapter meetings, PL spokesmen built speeches around it at SDS rallies, PL literature both on the national and the campus level stressed it. PL SDSers drew up a lengthy pamphlet on their summertime work-in experiences which emphasized WSA politics ("We are convinced that strikes and economic demands must be supported, that a worker-student alliance must be built if SDS is going to become a viable and politically effective group"). One of the most forceful presentations was by Peter Bilazarian, a Harvard SDSer who addressed a fall rally in Boston: *°

What I am proposing is that the student movement become not a separate interest group for students where students are able to "do their own thing," but that it adopt the strategy of worker-student alliance ... .

It is impossible for any basic change to come about in this country by the actions of students alone—no matter how radical or militant they may be. Just think—even if we could shut down every university in America tomorrow to protest the war, what would this do to seriously injure the war effort? How many factories would stop producing war materials? ... If [students] expect to change things or even win some good reforms for themselves then they must ally themselves with other oppressed groups that have a common enemy, a common interest, and the potential power to change things. The only group which really fits all these conditions is the working class (and this includes black and white workers), and especially the industrial working class.

If the East Lansing convention was SDS's first step toward revolution, the Chicago convention was young America's. Because it was televised, because it occasioned the unmuzzled brutality of the Chicago police, because it displayed the bankruptcy of American liberalism, and because it exposed once again the decrepitude of the American two-party system, the Democratic National Convention in August was one of the most propelling and influential events of the sixties, becoming very quickly the symbolic watershed for the end of the resistance period.

It was ironic that so much of the organization of the demonstrations in Chicago should have been in the hands of first-generation SDSers—Davis and Hayden were project coordinators for the National Mobilization Committee, and they gathered around them such veteran SDSers as Kathy Boudin, Connie Brown, Corinna Fales, John Froines, Carol Glassman, Vernon Grizzard, Mike Locker and the NACLA people, Paul Potter, Jeff Shero, and Lee Webb—because the current SDSers opposed the venture from the start.

The irony shows how transient SDS was, how much it had changed in such a brief time. Davis and Hayden were by no means reformers still, and they were as dedicated as anyone in SDS to the overhaul of American imperialism, but they retained a faith that speaking truth to power, and to the television-watchers under that power, was the means to that end: "Demonstrate that politicians do not speak for us," went the Mobilization call, "encourage and help educate discontented Democrats to seek new and independent forms of protest and resistance." The current leaders of SDS shared no such faith, had long ago assumed that people regarded politicians as frauds, and saw "discontented Democrats" as about the last constituency that anybody would want to organize into the ranks of the revolution.

From the beginning SDSers opposed the Mobilization plans, rejecting as usual the idea of mass marches but doubly scornful of any project mired in electoral politics, and they gave only grudging cooperation to Davis and Hayden, whom they kept accusing of having either "old-fashioned politics" or no politics at all. No sooner had Mike Klonsky settled into the NO, for example, than he wrote scornfully that "whatever the politics of New Left oriented Hayden and Rennie Davis may be (it is still unclear to many of us), it probably doesn't even matter." Note, please, "New Left oriented" now used as a pejorative.’® As August approached, however, and the Mobilization and the Yippies gained more and more publicity for the Chicago action, SDS began to have second thoughts. Though still opposing the demonstration, it could no longer ignore it. In July the NIC decided to take a middle position: though it would not encourage large numbers of SDSers to attend convention week, it would enlist a cadre of "organizers" to go to Chicago with the object of "educating and making contact with McCarthy kids during that week" so as to communicate "the style and juices of SDS politics and organization." A letter sent out to the membership on August 11 said:*°

We hope SDS people coming here for the convention will come as organizers and not as cannon fodder for the MOB. That means we have to concentrate on getting our best organizers from around the country to come here and do what they can how they can to get the McCarthy kids out of their bag and into SDS chapters in the fall ... . This will be an organizing job and not a picnic.

Chicago is "pig-city" and they are up tight.

When convention week began SDS had perhaps five hundred people on hand for its propaganda blitz. It operated out of five "Movement centers," the chief one being installed in a church not far from Lincoln Park, where the bulk of the demonstrators gathered and the initial clashes with police took place. SDS distributed stacks of its regular literature, sold copies of a special issue of New Left Notes (including a dramatic "Open Letter" from Cart Oglesby to the McCarthy supporters), pasted up copies around the town of a daily wallposter called "Handwriting on the Wall," and passed out thousands of copies of a mimeographed MESSAGE TO FELLOW STUDENTS WORKING FOR MCCARTHY. When the crunch came, however, it turned out that SDS had guessed all wrong. It was not the "McCarthy kids" who provided the energy of convention week, nor was it even the several thousand Movement people gathered from around the country—it was the young people from the Chicago area, black and brown and white, who made up the majority of the demonstrators and who proved by their militance that the young were prepared to take to the streets, imaginatively and forcefully, to express their civilized discontents. SDSers in Chicago were hardly dismayed at the turnabout—it confirmed their revolutionary visionand they missed scarcely a beat in adjusting to it. Mike Klonsky took the bullhorn in Grant Park to celebrate the new militancy, denouncing the "reformism" of the Mobilization and urging people to find their politics in direct action. NICer Jeff Jones announced that Chicago was the beginning of the union of "youth power" and "black power," the prelude of revolutionary change. SDS organizers quickly turned from arguing the McCarthyites into radical politics to developing what they called "affinity groups" and "street guerrillas" capable of avoiding the mass police attacks and taking the battle into the streets of Chicago.

(The fact that all this was done without specific membership sanction and at variance with the NIC directives seemed to bother the NO people not at all, but there was criticism of it at later NIC meetings.) "Handwriting on the Wall" concluded:

Those of us who have been in the streets for the past five days didn't give a flying fuck whether McCarthy would win or lose; and now that he's lost, still don't. Only the youth of America and the Vietnamese will stop the war in Vietnam; and only the youth and the black people of America will create the new life. This, not a liberal Senator's political career, is our struggle.

In the end, though, nothing that SDS did, or could do, was as effective in making instant militants and potential radicals out of the demonstrators as what the police did. In a single week Chicago proved itself incontestably to be "pig-city," and with a vengeance that not even the NO anticipated. More than a hundred demonstrators ended up in local hospitals, an estimated 625 were treated by Movement medical centers, and easily that many again nursed their wounds on their own; some 668 people were arrested and one young man was shot to death by the police. Nothing impeded in the slightest the foregone nomination of Hubert Humphrey and the rout of liberal Democrats, but the proportions of that defeat, accompanied by the storm-trooper methods used to insure it, surprised, angered, and "radicalized" a good many people, young and old, during that turbulent week. The impact on the country as a whole was not quite so neat—every survey”? indicated that the public in general favored the response of the Chicago establishment against the Commie-hippiefreaks in the streets—but for many of those who experienced the brutality firsthand and for millions more who watched the agony on their television screens, Chicago 1968 provided the definitive push over the line into activism and radicalism.

For Progressive Labor, the Chicago actions were nothing but a childish outburst, a playacting at revolution, more of the foolish "wild-in-the-streets" resistance that estranged the working masses and prevented the left from building a base among the American people.

PLers lost no opportunity to denounce the whole affair, before, during, and after, and their organs ridiculed the Mobilization leaders, the Yippies, and the NO faction of SDS for getting involved. The September issue of Challenge was typical:

The right-wing of SDS, via its control of the National Office and New Left Notes, echoed Hayden's [classless] line. Jeff Jones of the New York Regional Office put it forward in Grant Park Thursday when he claimed it was "Youth and Black Power in the streets" that would lead to revolutionary change. This after the events of the day before [when police openly beat up demonstrators] and the entire decade had so clearly demonstrated that youth and Black power in the streets, without the power of the working class, can never defeat the organized armed force of the imperialists.

For SDS, the lessons of Chicago were profound, and each of them seemed to confirm the rightness of the move into revolution. Chicago proved once and for all, for those still needing proof, that the country could not be educated or reformed out of its pernicious system, even by establishmentarian reformers like McCarthy. It showed that even resistance, open and defiant resistance, was not enough to wrest changes, for the institutions of American society, grounded in violence, would use violence in their own defense when the threat was regarded as serious enough. It indicated that there was a sizable constituency beyond the campuses—young blacks, high-schoolers, political young workers, street gangs, "greasers," dropouts, and the rest—willing to risk themselves in courageous and drastic ways to defy the system-in-being; "Chicago has shown us," Klonsky later said, "that young people in this country are not necessarily caught up in the bullshit that is the American electoral process." It proved that, temporarily at least, real victories for the left were to be won by people willing to act, that action in the streets was itself a kind of base-building. And it convinced the SDS leadership—kicking itself for failing to have seen the Chicago potential and to have led it from the beginning—that the time had come to discard its fears of being "too radical," of "alienating" potential recruits, and to take its new commitment to revolution directly to the youth of America.