1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  Linda LeClair’s boyfriend, Peter Behr, seems to have almost never been consulted in the controversy. She dropped out of school and the two joined a commune. Behr, who did get his Columbia degree, went on to be a massage therapist. Barnard relaxed the rules, saying only parental permission was needed to live off campus. But in the fall of 1968, Barnard women rebelled against even this.

  There was one thing Mark Rudd, growing up in an affluent New Jersey suburb on the edge of impoverished Newark, always wished his parents could make him understand. Why had they not done more to stop the Nazis when they first came to power? Surely there must have been something they could have tried to do. Despite this nagging notion, he had not been a politically active high school student. He lived in well-to-do Maplewood, where his parents had moved late in life when his father started to succeed in the real estate market. His father was a lieutenant colonel in the army reserves who had anglicized his Jewish-sounding last name to avoid anti-Semitism in the military.

  Like many of his age, Mark Rudd had as his introduction to radical politics Sing Out! magazine, a journal of folk singing and protest songs that led him to the music of Ledbelly, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger. He loved to study, and many of the books he read came from his politically savvy girlfriend, the school intellectual. She even knew Herbert Marcuse’s stepson, Michael Neumann, who later became Rudd’s college roommate. Neumann’s older brother, Tommy, was a member of the affinity group the East Village Motherfuckers.

  Rudd never played sports. Years later he liked to say that sex was his exercise—reading and sex with his girlfriend, who then went away to Sarah Lawrence. Rudd wanted to go to the University of Chicago, a school that had distinguished itself by canceling its sports program. In the end he chose Columbia so that he could be close to his girlfriend. But as often happens, once in college, both formed other attachments.

  Aside from its Ivy League conservatism, Columbia was a reasonable choice for Rudd. In this institution that had originated the phrase generation gap, Rudd was not a good match with the administration, but he was with the students. Like Rudd, most Columbia students were not athletes. Rudd was told that Columbia had managed to run up a record twenty-year streak without winning a football game. The half-time band performed distinctive numbers, including one titled “Ode to the Diaphragm.” Fraternities barely existed. In the summer of 1968, Rudd and his friends rented a fraternity house on 114th Street for the summer, renaming it Sigma Delta Sigma—SDS.

  In 1965, when Rudd first went to college, SDS was beginning to give up on its unsuccessful efforts to organize in the inner cities and recognize that college campuses offered the most fertile ground for recruitment. One night early in Rudd’s freshman year, a man named David Gilbert knocked on Rudd’s door and said, “We are having a meeting discussing things. Maybe you would like to come.”

  That was all it took. “It was a social thing,” Rudd recalled. “People hang out. And the subculture is fun. There were drugs and girls. It was what was happening. Nobody thought about going to Wall Street in those days.”

  Rudd’s life at Columbia was reshaped. He became an SDS campus radical, going to meetings and discussions, knocking on doors himself, and planning protests. There were many hours of meetings for every protest. “I liked talking about revolution—changing the world—make it a better place. Meetings were discussing important things, and it led to action. I must have gone to one thousand meetings in this five-year period. It was vastly different from my classes. The SDS people knew a lot. They knew a lot about Vietnam, about anticolonial revolutions, and nationalist movements.”

  But what was always important to Rudd was that the talk translated into action. “I’ve always valued people who could read, think, discuss, and act. That is my idea of an intellectual,” Rudd recently said. He became known among radicals for his impatient taste for action—“the action faction,” was what the SDS started calling the Rudd contingent at Columbia. Rudd had returned from Cuba with a quote from José Martí that had been used by Che: “Now is the time of the furnaces, and only light should be seen.”

  He came back from Cuba in March, in his own words, “fired up with revolutionary fervor.” Square inch by square inch, his walls became covered with posters and pictures of Che—Che smoking, Che smiling, Che smoking and smiling, Che reflecting. In early spring Rudd had to go to a dentist, and confronted with the prospect of pain, he asked himself, What would Che do?

  The business of the action faction at Columbia was deadly serious, though at times their pranks seemed more Yippie! than SDS. Or perhaps the activists, like most twenty-year-olds, were part adult and part teenager. Against the wishes of Rudd, the SDS voted in a meeting to confront the head of the Selective Service for New York City, an officer with the improbable name of Colonel Akst, who was to deliver a speech on campus. Rudd hated the idea of dignifying the Selective Service with probing questions. “What wimps,” he complained, resolving to find another course of action.

  At that time the SDS had recently acquired a new chapter that fit well with Rudd’s action faction. The East Village Motherfuckers had joined the fast-growing SDS organization. The other necessary component for Rudd’s plan was someone who could approach the colonel without being recognized, since by early spring 1968 Rudd and his comrades had already become too well known. By blind luck, a self-proclaimed Berkeley radical fell into Rudd’s lap. He remembered hearing a friend complain of an irritating houseguest who talked a great deal about the revolution and violence and the importance of Berkeley as the revolutionary center of all that was happening. Rudd enlisted his help.

  The colonel was to deliver his speech in Earl Hall, the religious center of the Columbia campus. “Red face shining beneath his proud cap,” was Rudd’s description of the colonel. Suddenly, from the back of the hall, the snare drums and fifes of “Yankee Doodle” were heard. While the audience turned to see the East Village Motherfuckers dressed as a hairy fife and drum corps, having given themselves the name “the Knickerboppers,” the unknown Berkeley revolutionary ran to the stage and perfectly planted a coconut cream pie on Colonel Akst’s red face. Rudd escaped down Broadway with the pie thrower, who, to Rudd’s dismay, had gotten carried away with the theatricality of the moment and pulled a bandanna over his face as a disguise. Rudd, for lack of a better idea, hid him in the closet of his girlfriend’s apartment.

  Grayson Kirk, born in 1903, the president of Columbia, lived in a stately Ivy League home in Morningside Heights, the high ground in the north of Manhattan on which the campus is perched. He was a patrician who saw himself as the guardian of a tradition. Rudd termed him “a ruling-class liberal, a man who wanted to be progressive but whose instincts always held him to the power elite. He denounced the Vietnam War, not as immoral or wrongheaded, but simply as unwinnable.” Kirk’s only discernible fear, as he sat in his Morningside Heights mansion in the first week of April, was of seething and simmering Harlem below. He did want to placate “the Negroes,” as he and many others still called them.

  Looking out his window, Kirk could see chaos and the glow of fires. Martin Luther King had been killed, and Harlem was burning. As head of a university on the hill over Harlem, this was exactly what he dreaded.

  Mark Rudd could see the same flames but had a very different reaction. Now the nonviolence movement—or, as Stokely Carmichael had put it, “this nonviolence bullshit”—was over, and Rudd, as he stood on Morningside Drive smelling smoke, was looking forward to a new age of Black Power. He was with his friend JJ, who believed in a world revolution in which the impoverished nations would overthrow the empires in a great global movement that would include the unseating of white power in America. Come the revolution and its overthrow of the power centers, everyone, black and white, would taste a new freedom never known before. JJ and Rudd, each with his thick mop of long, blondish hair, spent the night wandering through Harlem, watching burning and looting, police attacks, and barricades quickly constructed to block fire trucks. There is a strang
e ghostlike way an observer can walk unseen through the middle of a race riot simply by not being involved. “I saw the rage black people carry inside them,” Rudd said later. He and JJ were convinced they were witnessing the beginning of the revolution.

  Five days after the King assassination, Columbia was to hold a memorial service. Spied on, abused, smeared, and belittled in his short life, in death Dr. King had become a saint to be eulogized by many of the same people who had obstructed his cause. Here was Columbia University, thoughtlessly expanding into Harlem, taking over parks and low-cost housing to build more facilities for its wealthy campus. In 1968 a study of Harlem showed that in the past seven years Columbia University had forced 7,500 Harlem residents out of their homes and was planning on pushing out another 10,000. The university’s connection to city government was demonstrated in 1959 when over the objections of a few Harlem leaders, a lease was negotiated for more than two acres of Morningside Park on which to build a gymnasium. Leasing public land to a private concern was unprecedented in city policy, and the rent charged was only $3,000 per year. After ground was broken in February 1968, six students and six residents of Harlem staged a sit-in to block the first bulldozers. A new gym to be built by tearing down housing—a gym to which the people of Harlem were to be denied access—was particularly controversial. Student protest eventually succeeded in creating a small door down on the Harlem side for local use. But that was a student issue. The people of Harlem didn’t want the gym at all. They wanted housing. The university was also trying to prevent a union from organizing their black and Puerto Rican workers. Now Martin Luther King, killed in Memphis, where he had gone to support the very kind of union Columbia was trying to keep out, was to be eulogized there.

  SDS students called a meeting. Something had to be done with this Kafkaesque moment. Some argued that this was the turning point—the time to break in and announce the death of nonviolence and the age of Black Power, the beginning of the real revolution. But others argued that to do this would be to cede the figure of Martin Luther King to the white establishment. “Don’t do that,” some students argued. “He was one of us.”

  What did happen, as Tom Hayden described it, was that “Mark Rudd, a young SDS leader, simply walked on stage, took the microphone, and denounced the university elders for the hypocrisy of honoring King while disrespecting Harlem.” Rudd does not remember himself as the nonchalant figure Hayden and others described. In truth, his legs were shaking in his boots as he managed to step in front of Vice President David Truman. He said into the microphone, “Dr. Truman and President Kirk are committing a moral outrage against the memory of Dr. King.” The microphone went dead. But Rudd continued, lecturing on how the university “steals land from the people of Harlem,” praises King’s nonviolent civil disobedience, but crushes such demonstration on its own campus.

  It was the beginning of Columbia University’s most memorable spring.

  It is remarkable how many of the movements of 1968 took on importance only because governments or university administrations adopted repressive measures to stop them. Had they instead ignored them—had the Polish government not closed the play and had they not attacked the protesters, had the Germans ignored the demonstrators who were largely protesting U.S., not German, policy—many would have been forgotten today. As in the civil rights movement, by 1968 it was easy to find a bad sheriff to keep a protest alive.

  The SDS could count on Grayson Kirk and the Columbia administration. In April the university for unclear reasons banned indoor demonstrations, which was Rudd’s cue to lead 150 students into the Low Library with a petition against IDA, the Institute for Defense Analyses. The students had demanded to know if Columbia was part of this organization that researched military strategy. The university had refused to confirm or deny participation, and the SDS now claimed that not only did the university belong, but Grayson Kirk and another Columbia trustee were on the board of the organization. The university fell into step, singling out six students, including Rudd, for disciplinary action. Instead of focusing just on the gym, the April 23 demonstration was now also about what had come to be called “the IDA Six.” Then, as though to fuel the protesters even more, the day before the demonstration the university placed the six on probation. Now it was a demonstration not only against the gym and the IDA, but to “free the IDA Six.”

  That also happened to be the day Rudd issued his open letter in response to Kirk’s speech about the “nihilism” of “growing numbers” of youth and the generation gap, in which he had called the Vietnam War “a well-meant but essentially fruitless effort.” This was particularly offensive to an antiwar movement that saw the U.S. effort as an immoral attempt to bully a poor nation into submission.

  Rudd’s reply, in keeping with the tone of the rest of the letter, was titled “Reply to Uncle Grayson.” It began “Dear Grayson.” In it, he redefined what Kirk had called the generation gap. “I see it as a real conflict between those who run things now—you, Grayson Kirk—and those who feel oppressed by and disgusted with the society you rule—we the young people. . . . We can point, in short, to our meaningless studies, our identity crisis, and our repulsion with being cogs in your corporate machines as a product of and reaction to a basically sick society. . . .

  “We will take control of your world, your corporation, your university, and attempt to mold a world in which we and other people can live as human beings.”

  He promised to fight Kirk over his support of the war, over the IDA, over his treatment of Harlem. But it was the ending for which Rudd’s letter was most remembered:

  There is only one thing left to say. It may sound nihilistic to you, since it is the opening shot in a war of liberation. I’ll use the words of LeRoi Jones, whom I’m sure you don’t like a whole lot: “Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up.”

  Yours for freedom,

  Mark

  The SDS’s Todd Gitlin remarked, “It is interesting to note the civility preserved in Rudd’s polemic, however: the correct grammatical ‘whom.’ ” But to Rudd, a normally pleasant and not particularly rude person, who in an earlier speech had referred to Kirk as “that asshole,” this manner of speech was a deliberate attack on the polite decorum of the Ivy League social order. He was acutely aware that this was not the way things were done at Columbia, and that was why he did them this way.

  On April 23, a cool and gray day, the protesters were to meet at a sundial in the center of the gated Columbia campus. Rudd had been up the entire night before, preparing a speech by studying Mario Savio’s “odious machine” speech. Looking on at the demonstrators from the nearby Low Library were about 150 right-wing students, the short-haired students the rest of Columbia referred to as “the jocks.” One sign said, “Send Rudd Back to Cuba.” Another, more disturbing one, said, “Order Is Peace.” Only about three hundred protesters turned out at the sundial. But as speeches were made by various student leaders, the crowd grew. By the time it was Rudd’s turn to speak, an event that was to be a prelude to marching on the library—thereby again violating the rule on indoor demonstrating—two things had happened. Vice President Truman had proposed a meeting, and the Low Library had been locked.

  Suddenly the Savio-like speech seemed irrelevant. This was not the moment for grand oratory, Rudd reasoned. It was a moment in which to act. But SDS leaders never acted. Their job was to organize the debate out of which came a decision. So Rudd asked the demonstrators what to do. He told them about Truman’s offer and that Low had been locked. Suddenly a demonstrator stood on the sundial and shouted, “Did we come here to talk or did we come here to go to Low?”

  “To Low! To Low!” the crowd chanted as they began marching. Rudd, because he was a leader, desperately ran to catch up and take his place at the head of the march, linking arms with other leaders as the pulsating crowd pushed them toward the library.

  “Here I was,” said Rudd, “at the head of a demonstration about to burst into a locked building or else run he
adlong into a mob of right-wingers, and I had only the vaguest idea about what we were doing.” The one idea he did have was that disruption would provoke the police and school administration into actions that in turn would build their own support. He had noted that this approach worked well at the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin. But what specifically they were going to do in a few minutes when they climbed to the top of the library steps, he did not know. When they got there, the doors were indeed locked.

  Rudd looked around for something on which to stand and found a trash can. He climbed on top, from which commanding heights he would present the options for what to do next. But by the time he had mounted, the crowd was running away. A demonstrator had yelled, “Let’s go to the gym site!” Rudd was standing on a trash can watching the entire demonstration deserting him in a dash toward Morningside Park, which was two blocks off campus. He shouted after them in an effort to remain relevant, “Tear down the fucking fence!” and then he jumped down and ran to regain the head of the group.

  By the time Rudd reached the fence, the demonstrators had already tried to tear it down, to no avail. One SDSer was in handcuffs, and police were moving in. For lack of a better idea and because more and more police were arriving at the park, the demonstrators retreated to the campus. A group from the campus met them. It seemed to Rudd that everyone was tugging on him and offering opinions on what to do. He had surely failed as a leader. “Mark, you should act more aggressively,” he was told, but also, “Mark, you should stop the anger in the crowd.” He saw himself drowning in a deluge of competing advice. He stood on the sundial and weighed the options, along with a black student leader who did the same. Clearly neither of them was sure what to do, although at the moment, in Rudd’s estimate, they had about five hundred students ready to do anything.