A history of Harvard activism

AN UNFAMILIAR visitor would say this has been A Typical New England Autumn At Harvard College except, perhaps, for the good weather. The leaves have turned yellow, brown, and red. The football team has been winning without the the aid of aerodynamics. And nobody has studied much of anything.

But to a more experienced observer things would seem different. This is no longer the Harvard of John Finley, John Kennedy, or even Barney Frank. It is not just the so many pairs of striped pants, or of locks freaky hair, and round and metal rimmed glasses. Most striking is the air of restlessness among the natives. Cries for action are heard from all corners. The HUC and HPC are chaired by impatient activists with alarming ideas. As one surprised administration official put it, "students have not been taking 'no' for an answer."

I.

Although most of the new activism has been directed toward particular campus issues, a growing impatience with the Vietnam War is its raison d'etre. Strong student commitment against the war effort has spiraled, increasing by more than one-third in the last year. In fact, student criticism and military escalation seem to be increasing in a dialectic manner.

The turning point for the "activising" of many students arrives when they begin to feel a personal stake in halting the war. For a very few, the mere existence of the war is enough to make them feel like Right being frustrated by Wrong.

For most of the anti-war students, however, political idealism has not been enough to induce personal involvement. But the U.S. Congress has hammered out an issue which may yet create an activist student majority. It is the draft.

This lever works on all students, hawk, or dove, and inevitably raises the war to a personal life and death matter. In a few months every senior will have to decide whether or not he is willing to die in Vietnam. Still the lines are forming for graduate fellowships and nobody seems to be very much alarmed. In a short time they will be, and the resulting shift in perspective will be greater at Harvard than anywhere else.

When a student becomes personally involved with the war, he experiences a type of frustration which is unusual for the affluent. To them the war is wrong and it seems like nothing can be done about it. The distinct possibility of being sent to Vietnam to die brings home the feeling of powerlessness and awareness of the student's inability to control his own fate.

On the issue of the war, the critical student sees the decision makers as isolated from the rest of society. They reason, in this way: in 1964 Johnson thought it politically expedient to run on a peace slate, so he waited until two months into 1965 before bombing the enemy. The critic sees a distortion of the traditional view of democracy in America. He wonders about the lack of bottom-to-top communication.

Such feelings of frustration and ineffectiveness are usually reserved, it seems, for the oppressed segments of society. A person born into a situation of thick frustration and little expectation for change is immobilized. But when somebody who has always had it pretty good--who has had a relatively easy time getting his wishes fulfilled--experiences this inability to control what happens to his own life, it is often a radicalizing experience.

For years, radicals have been trying to mobilize society around the needs of the dispossessed. At first, there was pure community organizing, and then the civil rights movement. Now radicals in the anti-war movement have attempted to organize the student elite around issues such as the ideals of democracy and the atrocities of war. At best, they have succeeded in arousing an intellectual understanding.

RARELY DOES an intellectual understanding generate mass movements. But President Johnson, as a de facto member, has come to the aid of the movement. The unique character of his war and the new draft policies are bringing gut reactions from disillusioned and newly-cynical students.

The enormously increased activism on campus is being brought about by this new group of middle-of-the-road radicals attempting to influence seriously American society. These radicals are concentrating on local college issues, instead of broader national questions, for two reasons. First, there are distinct similarities between the student-administration relationship and the student's connection to the U.S. government concerning the Vietnam War.

In both situations, the student feels a strong sense of powerlessness in the decision-making process. Ten years ago students did not question the government's right to conscript in the interests of national security. Nor did they question the Administration's authority to regulate parietals. Today, more sophisticated students are insisting that their own opinions on such issues have to be recognized. The sanctity of authority has been tarnished and the priming device has been students' experience with the Vietnam War. Of course disillusionment with authority doesn't necessarily lead to activism. But given the examples of anti-war protest in the nation at large, and the more particular protest on campuses like Berkeley, the critical student's great frustration has found vent in active protest on campus issues.

The second reasons for focusing on local issues is that it provides the best chance for successful student activism. Success is what will prevent the new activist from becoming a pure radical. For if it is possible to effect basic change in the University, the society can't be all that bad. Success would provide some hope and some rationale for staying within society, and working for change through the established channels.

The adoption of activism as the method of petitioning for change separates the new activist from traditional campus politicos, who would instead petition through the established student representative body, like Harvard's Undergraduate Council.

Both groups, however, direct their petitions to the Administration as requests. The more stubborn the University is in its refusal to change, the more radical each group becomes. Middle-of-the-road radicals adopt more extreme methods in an attempt to force University compliance, and the traditionalists turn to activist politics. Of course, everybody could just give up and go back to reading for tutorial. But for many students the personal stakes are too high.

The dynamics of this process can be seen at work in student activity at Harvard. Last spring the HPC proposed a fourth course pass-fail option to the University's Committee on Educational Policy. The CEP tabled the proposal. It has since asked two HPC members to present the proposal directly to the Committee.

HPC chairman Henry Norr is willing to give it a try, but he and other members have reservations about this method of administration-student communication. Asked one, "Are we just going to sit around and keep knocking on the administration's door? I hope not, because if we do, they'll just keep listening to us and never open it up." There is talk about setting up a student group to study educational policy independent of the administration. The group would try to build student activism around its proposals.

Also last spring, a grass roots campaign was organized around parietals while the HUC simply stood by and watched. This year the HUC hitched up its pants and made a public request to the Committee on Houses. Dean Ford's reply was negative, stating, in effect, that the Committee would increase parietals when it was ready to. An independent Student Committee on Parietals has begun to flex its muscles while the HUC has salvaged a weak prize, a joint informal dinner meeting with the Masters and Deans.

The established representative groups and the independent activist movement form two sides of the triangle of student politics at Harvard. Whether all student politics could be decided by the operations of the triangle's third side, SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). The future form and content of student politics is what's at stake in the interplay of these three forces. If the Masters make no concessions at the joint meeting on October 31, the HUC could disband or fully endorse the independent activist movement. If SDS becomes involved, the HUC could withdraw and then student action would be connected with more radical issues such as university complicity with the government. As a result, there would probably never be a mass movement.

II.

POLITICAL debate has not always steamed the windows and bored the ascetes of college dining halls. In fact, the tab collar set of the '50's were just so un-radical they were dubbed "The Silent Generation." Growing up under McCarthyism, they had an instinctive fear of speaking out against the status quo. The newness of the hydrogen bomb and the strength of the Communist monolith validated the Cold War with an incredible rationality.

Even the '50's rebels were quiet ones. Their "Beat Generation" represented a personal rather than political revolt. Politics became "absurd," and the Beatniks chose an existential answer, expressing discontent with the personal outrages of American life like IBM and increasing automation. The radical cry of the '50's was "impersonalization" perpetrated by the centers of economic power; today's radicals concentrate on the central power's "manipulation."

In November, 1960, students staged what would become known as a "sit-in" at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. They were trying to integrate that restaurant through direct action instead of working for the election of a sympathetic mayor or city councilman. It was an historic moment in the evolution of American dissent. This rejection of electoral politics caught the imagination of students around the country. SNCC grew out of the Greensboro lunch counter sit-in.

At about the same time SDS was born. It evolved from an extreme left-wing group which managed to survive the silent '50's, the League for Industrial Democracy. The Student Department of the League was a group of about 100 kids whose parents were veterans of the Old Left. In 1959 they asserted their independence and named themselves Students for a Democratic Society. For the next three years SDS consisted of 150 to 300 student activists from traditionally radical campuses like Swarthmore, Oberlin, and the University of Michigan. It was a small coterie of personal friends attempting to create a distinctive group identity and gropping around for effective levers for mass popular organizing.

While SDS was trying to define a distinct home for itself on the far Left, the civil rights movement was capturing the attention of the country. For the next four years, until the end of 1964, civil rights marches and non-violent protests were the training and recruiting grounds for the nation's activists.

As usual, political activism at Harvard lagged behind the rest of the country. The first popular dissenting group of any kind was a non-partisan study group on nuclear problems called Tocsin (warning bell), which started in 1961. But Tocsin was also subject to the sweep of militancy and soon changed from study to protest They marched on Washington in February 1962 to protest American flirtation with nuclear war.

In September 1962, Professor H. Stuart drew the whole of Tocsin into his independent campaign for the U.S. Senate. He received only two per cent of the vote. This set-back combined with the test-ban treaty and the Cuban missile crisis to finish the effectiveness of Tocsin. Finally, protest against the Bomb ended at Harvard.

That fall Harvard became involved in the civil rights movement. A few SNCC veterans started the Civil Rights Coordinating Committee (CRCC), an organization designed to recruit and educate Harvard students to the ways of activism and to the cause of the Southern Negro. In two years, SRCC grew to 1000 members with about ten to fifteen regular activists. It was the biggest thing at Harvard.

AFTER FOUR years of steadily increasing activism, protest groups began looking for a multi-issue approach to American ills. It was clear to many activists that peace, discrimination, and poverty were not autonomous events. In the fall of 1964, Tocsin, by then operating at a bare subsistence level, officially became SDS. CRCC and the Harvard Socialist Club joined up to create a single organization including all elements of the Harvard radical community.

This amalgamation reflected the amazing expansion of SDS. The 1962 Port Huron Statement, still the group's basic document of purpose, established SDS as the student spear-head of the New Left. It articulated a unique philosophy of white activism based not on economic exploitation but on "participatory democracy."

One old SDS member describes the beginning. "In those days we were not big, not popular. SDS had to sell its own ideas, without the help of the War. And we did come up with distinctive ideas all our own." The philosophy stressed quality of life, poor-white organizing, and community power within a critique of corporate liberalism. There was militant anti-anti-communism, i.e., the true enemies in this country are the closed-minded red baiters.

By the end of 1962, SDS had grown to a real national organization with about 500 members. A year and a half later, summer 1964, the strength of community organizing as a tactic had gained general acceptance among the nation's activists. That summer SDS started the Economic Resistance into Action Project (ERAB) in Boston, Newark, Cleveland, Baltimore and Chicago. About 150 radicals worked full time to organize ghettos on unemployment, rent, and welfare considerations.

That was also the summer when the great wave of Northern students went South to work for civil rights. There they viewed community organizing first hand. Many came back itching to create a SNCC in the North. When they found SDS was doing just that, they joined up.

The 1964 presidential election was a dividing point in the evolution of post-war radicalism. Radicals still trusted the traditional electoral process. Martin Luther King called off the marches during the campaign. Radicals worked for Johnson. After the election there was a lessening of desire to work through the conventional system because radicals felt no basis for trust. Civil Rights was a radical cause which gained through national popularity. It appeared that radical demands were being satisfied with traditional politics: the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It appeared that the United States had a president deeply committed to a radical cause. After the election, when emphasis shifted to obstructing the war, radical policy found no sympathy with the administration.

But in 1964 there was overwhelming cooperation. Radicals joined with Kennedy liberals to support LBJ, believing that underneath his assertion to "support all the people," there was a resolve to start a liberal revolution. While Harvard SDS worked for Johnson, they also supported independent Noel Day in his campaign to unseat House Speaker John McCormack. Their campaign slogan expressed the radical mood: "Part of the Way with LBJ; the Rest of the Way with Noel Day."

While Johnson was gaining the biggest consensus of all time, the ground-work was being laid for a mass movement which would seriously challenge his tenure in office. In August, Congress adopted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, enabling the tremendous involvement of the United States in Vietnam. Late November saw the birth of University Reform at Berkeley. Students served warning about what they could do when they found a cause.

In February of 1965 something happened which brought students a cause and brought to the country the beginnings of a mass protest movement. It involved people to the political left and right of the civil rights movement. It changed dissent from an intelligent association to a moral cause. The United States began daily bombings of North Vietnam.

Harvard's first peace march occurred in February of that year when 100 students marched from the Cambridge Common to the post office. "We were chanting 'Bring the boys home now!' and man, did we ever feel radical," says one marcher.

With the bombings, dissent at Harvard and around the country became more and more radical. The most effective anti-war propaganda came from a Progressive Labor front organization, the May 2nd Movement. TheS-