Tocsin Votes to Broaden Activities, To Include Major Domestic Issues

In what amounted to a fundamental organizational change, Tocsin voted last night to broaden its strict focus on disarmament to include research and action on all the social, political, and economic issues in the United States that relate in some way to peace.

Tocsin will now explore such problems as segregation and unemployment, concentrating on their relation to the arms industry and to other economic and vested political interests that the group feels might shape foreign policy decisions. Action is now being planned in areas as different as American policy in Viet Nam and the unemployment crisis in Hasard, Ky.

"Study of the arms race inevitably led to study of its causes," noted Jennifer S. Gardner '64, Tocsin's president, explaining the organization's constitutional change. "As we got deeper into the complexities of disarmament we realized more and more that American foreign policy is inextricably linked to the domestic situation."

"In the past Tocsin operated on a basically elitist theory of political change," added John Ehrenreich '64, another Tocsin executive. "But arguing with state department officials has not been very effective. Basic changes in foreign policy and the arms race require something more on the level of the mass action that can come from cooperating with civil rights and labor groups."