A History of the Strike

Five years ago today, 400 police forcibly evicted 300 students from University Hall. The students, most of them members of Students for a Democratic Society, had evicted U Hall's usual occupants the day before, to the dismay of most of Harvard's faculty and alumni and probably most of its students as well. But the suddenness and brutality of the police bust forged a new student militance and a massive student strike. The bust and the strike served as a dramatic climax to ten years of Harvard history; and they changed the course of Harvard history, probably permanently. This article discusses the early Harvard events that began making the events of 1969 possible. A second part bringing the story up to 1969 itself will appear on Monday, in a supplement on the fifth anniversary of the student strike.

Any beginning would be arbitrary. So we may as well start with October 26, 1962, with Barrington Moore, then a senior fellow in the Russian Research Center, telling 1000 people in Lowell Lecture Hall (another thousand had been turned away) that "simultaneous revolutions" in the U.S. and the USSR represented the only "realistic prospect of peace." Moreover, Moore told students alarmed by what they considered dangerous American bellicosity over the Soviet Union's stationing missiles in Cuba that "realistic or moderate" protests like theirs "ran the risk" of suggesting that public opinion influenced American foreign policy. Students should leave "constructive alternatives to [McGeorge] Bundy," Moore said; they should engage only in "destructive criticism of a destructive system." People booed.

Most Harvard students probably saw little need even for constructive alternatives to American foreign policy. The Young Democrats and the Young Republicans had both cabled support on Cuba to President John F. Kennedy '40, and the Lowell Lec meeting had been called by the most activist, most pacifist organization on campus, a group called Tocsin that never had more than about 80 members. Tocsin had grown out of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy in the summer of 1960--the same year that saw a minor flurry of small student demonstrations outside the Cambridge Woolworth's, in solidarity with sit-ins to integrate the chain's Southern branches--as a small Harvard study group discussing the Cold War and disarmament. Tocsin quickly went beyond mere discussion, lobbying for disarmament and even joining more militantly pacifist student groups elsewhere in a February 1962 march on Washington which its leaders claimed was the largest such demonstration there since the Bonus marches of the 1930s. But most Tocsin sympathizers hadn't really ventured into anything like conventional politics until the spring of '62.

That was when the group's faculty adviser, H. Stuart Hughes, Gurney Professor of History and Political Science, decided to run for the Senate as an Independent peace candidate--the first of the 1960s. Tocsin members and other Harvard students formed much of Hughes's campaign staff. At first, things went surprisingly well. Hughes got more than twice the 73,000 signatures he needed to make the ballot, and he and his supporters forced his two opponents--Edward M. Kennedy '54, whom the liberals who backed Hughes regarded as an administration stooge with few principles or abilities, and George Cabot Lodge '37--to include him in a couple of debates. In a Crimson poll of Harvard undergraduates, Hughes placed second to Lodge, carrying Radcliffe by a large plurality. The Crimson gave substantial coverage to Hughes's campaign proposals--for a nuclear test ban treaty, an end to CIA-sponsored coups, and a 35-hour work week--and ultimately gave him a somewhat lukewarm endorsement, too. But though the Cuban missile crisis evoked the most vocal radical outcry Harvard had heard in years, it also finished the Hughes campaign--few voters followed him in criticizing its "contrived and theatrical atmosphere." Not even a last-minute endorsement from Bertrand Russell helped; Hughes won only about 2 per cent of the vote--50,000 votes.

And that about finished Tocsin--at least, as Tocsin. Increasingly, students interested in disarmament were also becoming interested in other issues--the civil rights movement, most notably. In a few years, these other interests would lead many of them to accept Barrington Moore's analysis, and to act on it in ways that he, in company with Hughes and the majority of Harvard's other faculty members, would consider misguided or reprehensible. But for the moment, interests in civil rights and community organizing just led many Tocsin people to drift into the other leftist groups that were starting to surface: the Student Non-Violent Co-Ordinating Committee (SNCC), for instance, or the new Students for a Democratic Society, which gradually absorbed most of Tocsin's members and finally, in 1964, its small treasury as well. That was just over a year after a new dean of the Faculty, Franklin L. Ford, told registrants in the 1963 summer session that Harvard was in many ways much like the pre-1789 French monarchy--"irrational, frequently unjust, tradition-bound, and culturally distinctive." If people tried to make sense out of the university, Ford warned, it "would come down in a shower of blood." It was also just over two years after The Crimson ran an article called "Revolution in the Harvard Yard" --about a new spirit among freshmen. "Perhaps the most noteworthy example of this spirit," the article explained, "is among the 100 boys who are playing on the freshman football team."

The civil rights movement seems to have reached Harvard in earnest around the summer of 1963, the first summer that a significant number of students went down South to work in voter registration projects, mostly under the aegis of the Congress on Racial Equality or the NAACP. A number of Harvard students were arrested that summer, and at least one--John N. Perdew '64, shot at and arrested during an SNCC demonstration in Americus, Ga.--spent more than three months in jail, while his friends in Kirkland House raised $2000 for his defense only to have the Supreme Court strike down the anti-insurrection law under which he was arrested. Other civil-rights workers had only slightly less eventful summers, and most came back to Harvard to tell about them. "Although a hundred years have passed since the Civil War, the Negro is virtually a slave in Baker County," Elizabeth Holtzman '62, then a first-year law student, now a U.S. Representative from Brooklyn, wrote in The Crimson. "It cannot be said, however, that the whites are free. Feeding on sadism, glorying in the license the color allows, they lead a depraved existence. Illiteracy, ignorance, poverty is their lot as well."

However that may have been, white and black Harvard civil-rights activists showed a new interest in local matters in the fall of 1964. Archie C. Epps, then a first-year graduate student, now dean of Students, helped organize what became H-R Afro, after a drawn-out confrontation with the university administration over the Afro constitution's apparent exclusion of white members. Epps also joined Thomas I. Atkins, then a graduate student and now a Boston city councillor, in organizing a number of marches on the Boston school committee's offices. In May 1964, activists discovered that Harvard was the largest single share-holder in the holding company that owned Mississippi Power and Light, whose board of directors included several members of local white Citizens' Councils--it was the first time Harvard's stock ownership had been controversial, but it wouldn't be the last, even for the same holding company, Middle South Utilities.

There were other intimations, too. A thousand demonstrators, mostly Tocsin people demanding American disengagement from Vietnam, greeted Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu when she came to Ringe Tech in October 1963. "At Columbia they threw eggs at me like I was a peasant," Nhu complained, "but Harvard was incredible." And in May 1964, Harvard saw its first semi-political riot in years: police used dogs and clubs to break up 1500 demonstrators trying to save 70 sycamore trees, slated for replacement by a Mem Drive underpass at Boylston Street (the plans were later revised). Of course, it was only semi-political: the next week, Harvard students swelled the ranks of the 100 demonstrators against a ban on elevator riding at the Chandler School for Women in Boston, chanting, "We want dogs!" John U. Monro '34, the dean of Students, announced that students' "mere presence" at such demonstrations would henceforth be considered a "serious breach of discipline," and police-rejected the Civil Rights Coordinating Committee's request for a picketing permit for later in the week.

Nevertheless, more Harvard students than ever before joined the civil-rights movement that summer. Twenty-seven were arrested for picketing the old Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria, demanding that it hire more blacks. Several dozen more joined the Council of Federated Organization's Mississippi Summer, once more risking arrest or (many of them thought) worse to help register southern blacks, run "freedom schools," or organize for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. In the fall, 20 SDS members began block-by-block organizing in an integrated Roxbury community, beginning with demands that abandoned and unsafe buildings in the area be demolished. It was the same year the Harvard-Radcliffe Combined Charities dropped the American Friends Service Committee because of its "political activities"--"we found that the Friends Service Committee was spending 13 per cent of its time propagandizing for world peace," the Charities' chairman explained. And 200 students showed up at a Harvard rally in solidarity with Berkeley's embattled Free Speech Movement, to hear Arthur MacEwan (then just a former University of Chicago student president) and later Mario Savio himself, expounding a view of the Movement like one that would become increasingly familiar at Harvard--of a struggle of the "managed" against "a managerial tyranny...a knowledge factory...plugged into the military and industrial--but not to truth."

The spring of '64 saw 200 students sit in at the Federal Building in Boston, demanding federal protection for civil-rights marchers in Alabama, the first of many sit-ins at the JFK building. It saw 30,000 people rally on the Boston Common to support the marchers, the first of many monster rallies there. It saw 500 students, undeterred by a Lampoon counter-demonstration, ride SDS's buses to the first of many marches on Washington. It saw the first of many Harvard teach-ins on Vietnam, an all-night marathon that had to be moved to Sanders Theater and overflowed anyway. And it saw Harvard's first hostile confrontation with a war-maker, an eminently polite debate between ex-dean of the faculty McGeorge Bundy and antiwar professors including Benjamin I. Schwartz '38, professor of History, while 35 picketers demonstrated outside: It saw a group of Harvard students, mostly Crimson editors, organize The Southern Courier, an Alabama weekly designed to provide objective, sympathetic coverage of the civil-rights movement that was reaching about 10,000 Alabama and Mississippi readers, mostly poor blacks, when it finally folded for lack of funds early in 1969. And the spring saw what may have been the feminist movement's first, half-joking intrusion into a Harvard still wracked by controversy over extending parietal hours on football Saturdays and not yet even seriously considering letting women students use Lamont Library. Faye Levine '65, features editor of The Crimson, ran for Harvard class marshall; she got enough votes to make the run-off, but the Harvard Council for Undergraduate Affairs refused to count them. "My campaign was, among other things, an attempt to demonstrate the absurdity of the HCUA," Levine said in a victory statement pledged to "fraternity between the sexes." "But it appears that the HCUA is quite capable of demonstrating its own absurdity." It was just as well that was out of the way, becuase in the fall, there were other things to tend to.

Enrollment in the fall was up a bit because more and more people were being drafted into the army and more and more wanted student deferments to stay out.

But the Indochina war just kept on getting bigger, and to increasing numbers of students it seemed to provide blatant, explosive proof that there might be some truth to analyses like Barrington Moore's or Mario Savio's--that Savio's "managerial tyranny" with little interest in truth or anything else worth respecting was trying to manage their lives, and generally succeeding. SDS, continuing its block-by-block organizing around local issues in Roxbury and North Harvard but increasingly returning to its predecessor Tocsin's roots in antiwar organizing, doubled its 100 members in the fall of '65.

Of course, 200 members didn't represent a majority of Harvard's students--in fact, it was a little over a quarter of the number who signed a petition that fall expressing their firm support for Lyndon Johnson's was policy. If a new, radical perspective was emerging--that fall's freshmen, after all, would still be seniors in the spring of 1969--it was emerging only hesitantly, with lots of glances toward traditional outlooks.

The Spee Club elected the first black member of a final club that fall. Timothy Leary was convicted for the first time, and Harvard put four students on probation for smoking marijuana--one of them, stricken with repentence, had confessed to his mother, who tipped off the University. The Harvard Undergraduate Council opined that letting women use Lamont would cause irreparable harm to the "male emotional stability factor," although the council said it saw nothing wrong with men continuing to use Hilles. "Boys cause less disturbance in a female environment than vice versa, the HUC explained. Nevertheless, the new perspective on other kinds of disturbance occasionally demonstrated startling pervasiveness. Eight hundred Harvard students went to Washington in November to join 25,000 antiwar marchers in listening to such speakers as Coretta Scott King, 81-year old Norman Thomas and 30-year old Carl Oglesby president of SDS. Some of the students defied the march's organizers and carried signs calling for immediate American withdrawl from Indochina. The next fall, a thousand people at registration signed SDS's interest cards.

When vice-president Hubert Humphrey came to Boston in October 1965, there were 150 antiwar demonstrators chanting "Humphrey Go Home." "I didn't pay any attention to that," Humphrey told newsmen startled at the neatly unprecedented impoliteness to a onetime liberal hero. "I just thought the boys got stuck on a broken record."

Defense secretary Robert S. McNamara escaped less blithely. When McNamara turned down an SDS request that he participate in a debate on the Johnson administration's war policy during his November visit to Cambridge for a seminar at the new Institute of Politics, SDS called for a demonstration outside the Quincy House seminar. When McNamara emerged from Quincy House, 800 protesters blocked the surrounding streets and mobbed his car, forcing him to climb on its hood and agree to answer question "for five minutes." "How many South Vietnamese civilians have we killed?" someone asked McNamara said he didn't know, and there were angry shouts of "Don't you care?" University policeman managed to whisk McNamara into McKinlock Hall, through the kitchen tunnels and out at Kirkland House, but things didn't quite go back to normal.

"Our students have always respected high officials," John Monro, the dean of Students, said angrily, denouncing "mob rule" and joining Dean Watson in an official University apology--one seconded by 2700 undergraduates who signed an apologetic petition. McNamaras called the apology "unnecessary," recalling his own student days at Berkeley, but Monro took to meeting with SDS members regularly, and Harvard activism took on a new importance, menacing or hope-laden depending on the onlooker.