Although the campus is now comparatively peaceful, President Kerr is concerned about how a university is to handle people who, for instance, equate any compromise in negotiations with selling out. According to a young philosophy professor named John Searle, who has probably been the faculty member closest to the F.S.M., the problem should be stated another way. “The militants were forced into the leadership of the F.S.M. because of the intransigence of the administration on an issue on which they were clearly in the wrong,” Searle says. “Of course these people are absolutists. They are radicals. They perform a useful function in society as gadflies, but they have no loyalty to the structure, and once you’ve forced the population to adopt them as leaders, you have trouble. The problem is not how to handle them. The problem is how not to get in a position where a mass movement has to turn to them for leadership.”
Renata Adler
DECEMBER 11, 1965
AT ALMOST EVERY major university in the country, mimeograph machines operate by night in cluttered student apartments, coffeehouses are filled by day with animated political debate, an outdoor platform is occupied nearly every afternoon by speakers deploring some aspect of American foreign policy, and students rush home each evening to pore over copies of the Times, Le Monde, and the Congressional Record as if they contained reviews of a production in which the students themselves were playing a major part. The source of this activity is a student protest movement that offers, as the students are fond of saying, “not an ideology but a rallying cry.” And the cry itself is vague and changeable enough to reflect a curious fact about America in the sixties: there are very few revolutionary positions that the Establishment does not already, at least nominally, occupy. Students who are revolutionary in spirit, however, after protesting a bit for mere protest’s sake, have come up with real social criticism in three phases: the Free Speech Movement, which began as an attack upon the bureaucracy of the large university and turned into a protest against the impersonality of all institutions that, like the government welfare program, have lost contact with the people and values they were designed to serve; the Civil Rights Movement, which began as a campaign for Negro rights and turned into a campaign for eliminating local pockets of poverty; and the Peace Movement, which has begun as a protest against American military involvement in Vietnam and is turning into an attempt to influence all of foreign policy. On many campuses, all factions of the peace movement are united in an Independent Committee to End the War in Vietnam—a frail, tangled coalition of forces and personalities that includes groups ranging from religious pacifists to militant supporters of the Vietcong; sociological types ranging from children of left-wingers of the thirties to what one student called “some of your preppier New Englanders, who are in it for moral reasons”; a few students who simply hope to evade the draft; a few representatives of national, local, and ad-hoc committees; a few hard-line members of the Young Socialist Alliance (Y.S.A.), who are commonly referred to as Trotskyists and are known within the movement, familiarly, as the “Trots”; and a new breed of lonely hangers-on and demonstration enthusiasts who might be described as Sunday Outing Radicals. Most of the students involved regard the United States position in Vietnam as at best unjust, and most of them feel that a post-Nuremberg ethic requires them to oppose a war that they cannot in conscience support. How to go about it is another matter. Since there has been, for good or for ill, no long-standing tradition of student protest in this country (as there is in France, and in other countries that do not regard college students as children), American students seem to have borrowed their tactics from several contemporary sources. From Aldermaston and, more recently, from the civil-rights movement comes the protest march. From the Johannesburg Negroes’ burning of their identity cards stems, apparently, the American students’ draft-card burning. And the extreme form of Buddhist protest against the Diem regime seems to have inspired at least one American student to burn himself to death.
These manifestations, quite naturally, have caused alarm. The possibility that a generation of young might refuse to carry on the military business of their generally permissive society seemed, for a time, to threaten the nation in a not yet demilitarized world. There was also concern for the fact that, in their enthusiasm for the movement, many students were leaving their studies and shuttling back and forth among the campuses of the nation as vagabond dropouts in a vaguely academic orbit. And the unkempt appearance, condescending manner, and frequent acts of civil disobedience of many of the demonstrators added to an impression that this particular lot had spoiled, and that something must be done to keep the rest from being ruined. Militant counter-movements quickly sprang up on many campuses. In August, Congress passed legislation that provides a maximum penalty of five years in prison for draft-card burners. In October, Attorney General Katzenbach said that the Justice Department had found in the peace movement evidence of Communist infiltration. These developments, coupled with a certain predisposition on the part of student revolutionaries to draw a sense of risk from somewhere, confirmed in the minds of students an already widespread suspicion that the government was conspiring against them. Few demonstrators at Columbia now, to take one example, have any doubt that their telephones are being tapped; anyone who brings a camera or a notebook to a demonstration is immediately pointed out to all bystanders as an agent of the F.B.I.; and students seem to stand in hourly expectation of an academic purge of dissidents, followed by a rapid punitive draft. But the peace movement has also matured. Most of the early leaders now concede that radical action on the peace issue was a tactical mistake. (The disruption of an R.O.T.C. ceremony at Columbia last May 7th, for instance, which was once thought of as “a milestone,” or “a hairy idea,” is now spoken of on campus simply as an “aberrant demonstration.”) As for the charge that the peace movement inadvertently prolongs the war by misrepresenting American public opinion, it has been treated in several of the movement’s countless “position papers”—most recently in “A Position Paper on Tactics,” by a student named Robert E. Bogosian, who suggests that communiqués be sent at once to Peking, Hanoi, and the Vietcong informing them that the demonstrators speak only for themselves and that theirs is a minority position, which, obviously, it is. As for the charge of Communist infiltration, the demonstrators tend to dismiss it (Students for a Democratic Society has dropped its anti-Communist clause) as “irrelevant.” Post-Stalinist Communism no longer seems to these well-travelled children of prosperity a monolith, or even a particularly potent expansionist force. “If an American still wants to be a Communist, we think that’s his business,” says David Gilbert, a leader of the peace movement at Columbia. The charge of Communist inspiration for the movement, however, seems particularly wide of the mark. If anything has characterized the movement, from its beginning and in all its parts, it has been a spirit of decentralization, local autonomy, personal choice, and freedom from dogma. On many campuses, even simple majority rule is regarded as coercive of the minority; policy decisions require a “consensus.” As a result, very few policy decisions are made. In fact, it often appears that the movement may be, in the end, more right than left—that it may have picked up a dropped conservative stitch in the American political tradition. Individualism, privacy, personal initiative, even isolationism and a view of the federal government as oppressive—these elements of the right-wing consciousness have not been argued in such depth (least of all by the right wing itself, with its paradoxical insistence on domestic police expansion and on military intervention abroad) since 1932.
· · ·
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, the student peace movement and many other groups of diverse moral and political persuasions—all apparently united by an overriding concern that the United States get out of Vietnam—converged upon Washington. By Sunday night, the student demonstrators had divided into several major factions, and the student peace movement faced a crisis that had very little to do with its attitudes toward the war in Vietnam. The first split, which occurred
well before the march, was down the middle, between a liberal institution and the student groups. In August, more than three hundred demonstrators calling themselves the Congress—and, later (to avoid the acronym “COUP”), the Alliance—of Unrepresented Peoples staged a sit-in on the steps of the Capitol in a protest that combined the causes of peace and civil rights. When the demonstration was over, some of the participants met to form a new group, the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam. The Coordinating Committee was to be situated centrally, in Madison, Wisconsin. It was to have no membership and no specific policy. Its function, under its chairman, Frank Emspak (a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin), and a secretarial staff of four, was to issue a weekly newsletter and facilitate communication among the members of various far-flung organizations—an alphabet heap that included, among others, YAWF, W.F.P., W.I.L.P.F., P.L.P., M. 2 M. (for the May 2nd Movement), C.P., S.P.U., W.R.L., Y.P.Y.F., T.U.P., C.F.R., I.W.W., C.F.IV.I. (for something called the Committee for a Fourth International), Y.S.A., I.S.C., C.N.V.A., M.F.D.P., S.S.O.C., V.D.C., and S.D.S., together with numerous local “independent” and ad-hoc committees. The Coordinating Committee successfully coordinated a number of nationwide activities, most notably the marches on October 15th and 16th (the International Days of Protest). It was decided to hold a national five-day convention of the Coordinating Committee in Madison over the Thanksgiving holidays. Then it was learned that Sanford Gottlieb, political director of SANE (the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy), and other sponsors were urging a national peace march on Washington on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Since the Coordinating Committee wanted no conflict between the two events, it decided to move its convention to Washington. In time, however, it became apparent that SANE’s invitation to march had been what the students refer to as an “exclusionist call.” Although anyone might march, sane reserved the right to authorize the slogans that the marchers could carry. Any poster that could, in SANE’s judgment, politically compromise the movement would be excluded from the demonstration. The Coordinating Committee, which had always stressed its non-exclusionist, non-centralized, laissez-faire character, expressed outrage (“They’re leaning over backwards to define not what they are but what they’re not,” said one student), and the march organizers, having no practical means to censor the posters anyway, capitulated. The rift between SANE and the Coordinating Committee, however, was established almost from the outset—if not in official policy, then certainly in spirit. The next jolt to the student movement came not from what it looks upon as the creeping, ineffectual liberalism of SANE but from the thirties, and from within the Coordinating Committee itself.
The first few hours of the convention in Washington ran smoothly, with the arrival on Wednesday of delegates from all over the country at convention headquarters—a basement in a predominantly Negro neighborhood of Washington. There were a few cheerful posters taped to the bleak stone walls (“God Bless This Office and All the Revolutionaries Who Work Here” and “The Price of Peace Is Confusion”), but the room was basically an office devoted to the serious business of registering fifteen hundred delegates and alternates, and assigning them—two or three to a room, if necessary—to the Harrington Hotel, where twelve workshops, or discussions, on such subjects as Peace and Freedom, National Program, Organization Structure, the Draft, and Community Organization were to be held. A few arriving delegates began to confer in the strange, conditional idiom of Anglo-American dialecticians (“I would be prepared to argue that…” and “Yes, well, in that case I might want to maintain that…”), but, perhaps because the room was overheated, most of the delegates left the basement as soon as they had registered.
Late Wednesday evening, at the Second Act Coffee Shop, around the corner from headquarters, a crowd of delegates gathered, and a kind of civil-rights alumni reunion appeared to be taking place. Ray Robinson, a tall, handsome Negro veteran of countless civil-rights and peace campaigns, seemed to know almost everyone from somewhere or other. He was telling of his participation in a protest march from Canada toward Guantanamo (“Uncle Sam said, ‘Man, you can’t go ’cross that water. Cuba’s over there’ ”) when Stephen Frumin, an intense young delegate who had attended the University of Wisconsin, broke in. “The war and my perception of things have escalated,” he said.
“We may be a minority, but at least the press is giving us equal time,” said another delegate. “They think the fact that some of us have beards is interesting. It’s a sign of the boredom and banality of American life.”
“I hope we get some things decided at this convention,” said Vicki Cooper, a delegate from Pittsburgh. “There are so many issues that are still receiving much heated debate. If we could get some of this clarified, maybe the press would stop describing the people involved in the movement and pay some attention to our ideas. We might even put up political candidates, although it would have to be in a participatory, democratic way. I couldn’t permit any major decisions to be made for me. If I couldn’t have a major say, I wouldn’t follow them.”
At nine o’clock Thursday morning, at the Harrington Hotel, a meeting of the Coordinating Committee’s presiding committee was held, at which, with a great deal of gravity and circumspection, very little was accomplished. Emspak conducted a low-keyed discussion of whether rigid standards should be set up for delegate credentials. It was decided that since few, if any, delegates would want to falsify their registration, standards should be loose.
When the committee adjourned, a young man from Youth Against War and Fascism tried to sell a “Support the National Liberation Front” button to Mary Walker, a middle-aged delegate from the Committee on Non-Violence of Denver. “No, thank you,” she said. “I have a thousand ‘Stop the War’ buttons back in Denver. I think that gets the message across.”
· · ·
“A REVERENT SILENCE IS REQUESTED,” said an old sign above the door to the nave of the Lincoln Memorial Congregational Temple, where the first plenary session of the convention was held, at twelve-thirty on Thanksgiving Day. Within moments, however, there was neither silence nor reverence anywhere in the building, for a power struggle, in a completely unexpected form and at a completely unexpected time, threatened to split the Coordinating Committee. What started it was a leaflet signed by thirty-three delegates and alternates, most of whom identified their local committees as either the Committee to End the War in Vietnam (C.E.W.V.) or the Vietnam Day Committee (V.D.C.), proposing an additional workshop “that would provide an opportunity for the independent committees to discuss their own programs, structure, and tasks.” The workshop, the thirteenth, was to meet concurrently with the twelve others, which were preoccupied with essentially the same problems. This may have struck some of the delegates as strange, but only the most knowledgeable at once besieged the platform with cries of “Point of order!,” “Amendment takes precedence!,” “Sit down!,” “Shut up!,” “Let him speak!,” and “Two-thirds of us don’t know what’s going on!” (At one point, Emspak actually had to restrain someone intent on wresting the microphone from him.)
As Jens Jensen, a delegate from Cambridge, Massachusetts, rose to say that “no one wants to be divisive in the slightest,” Marilyn Milligan, Jack Weinberg, and Jerry Rubin—all members of the Berkeley V.D.C. and signers of the controversial document—gathered around Steve Weissman, a Californian, also of the V.D.C., and one of the early leaders of the Berkeley free-speech movement. “What have I signed?” asked Marilyn Milligan. “I knew we shouldn’t have signed. Those so-called members of independent committees aren’t independents at all. They’re Y.S.A. The Trots seem to be trying to steal the movement.”
“Every generation has got to learn,” said Weissman. “The Trots have still got their sense of imminence. They’re still listening to history and not to people.”
Aside from a few converts to the Young Socialist Alliance, it was difficult to imagine what the “Trots” hoped to gain from splitting and undermining the National Coordinatin
g Committee. Some delegates thought Y.S.A. was trying to bring the whole movement into its own sectarian line. Others thought Y.S.A. was maneuvering to form a hard-core cadre of extreme radicals within the non-exclusionist N.C.C., and others speculated that the urge to take over an organization—no matter how formless that organization might be—was simply a reflex acquired from the bitter struggles of the thirties.
The delegates on the floor, however, most of them still unaware of what was going on, voted to adjourn and to give the thirteenth workshop permission to meet after the plenary session if it chose. The meeting was held briefly in the basement of the church. There were some impassioned appeals to disband, and the workshop voted to adjourn until seven-thirty that night, when it would decide whether to adjourn for good.
The rest of the afternoon was devoted to the twelve scheduled workshops and, for those who wanted them, seething discussions about “structure.” The anti-draft workshop, under the leadership of Staughton Lynd, a professor of history at Yale, began in the church balcony, with a series of reports from various regions: “I’m from New Orleans, and the consensus out there seemed to be that a person should do anything that he feels he can do in conscience,” and “I’m from Chicago, and we simply could not get even a simple majority to endorse any organized program of draft opposition. We don’t feel that without an extreme consensus we ought to get into the anti-draft bag.” Another workshop met in the nave of the church, in full view of the balcony. Practically every remark there was greeted with tempestuous applause, and at one point Professor Lynd leaned over the balcony to shout, “Friends, do you think you could not applaud every time somebody says something?” This was greeted by the first laughter of the afternoon.
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