Student activists: Free-form revolutionaries

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Editor's note: This article from the January 1969 issue of Fortune details the diverse, and fragmented, array of protest movements organized by young Americans in the late 1960s.

Charles Burck In the washroom of a Wisconsin high school, a member of the Wisconsin Draft Resistance Union teaches an incipient radical high-school group how to mobilize sentiment not only against the draft but against restrictive school policies-e.g., dress codes, pressures to train for occupational slots, a ban on an underground high-school paper. To members of the Resistance at Ann Arbor, Michigan, organizing seems the best tactic, and proselytizing its method. Some 20 people make their home in the commune of Trans Love Energies, which is set amid the pillared mansions of the University of Michigan's fraternity row. Now four years old, Trans Love gets most of its income from the MC-5, a rock band that moved in a year and a half ago. It also regards the much-publicized band as its foremost revolutionary tool. What to do comes the revolution In the many-tiered Movement, the people are diverse, and their attitudes and styles far-ranging. Militant confrontation has been the byword at San Francisco State College. At upper left, black and other minority group leaders listen to President Robert R. Smith during the early days of the revolt that closed the school down and forced Smith's resignation. Young Socialist Alliance Progressive Labor W.E.B. DuBois Clubs Peace and Freedom Party In Los Angeles, a staff member of Open City, an underground newspaper, clutches a just printed issue whose front cover declares that "Revolution is Poetry." Open City, circulation 20,000, keeps a staff of eleven and many occasional contributors busy writing and printing news, satire, and cultural criticism. The new left's new directions Many in the Resistance regard the way they live as their most important revolutionary act. Education at the Midpeninsula Free University in Palo Alto, California, also pivots around "the process of living" -- a heavy percentage of its 270-odd courses deal with personal development and relationships.

By Komsomol, the Soviet youth organization, considers it a petty bourgeois student movement. The Red Guards would run it into the ground. Castro would have no use for its lack of discipline. The radical movement in the U.S. is, on the whole, quite distinct from revolutionary movements in other times and places. Like them, the Movement, as it is called, has the sense of social obligation that characterizes leftist movements in general. The Movement finds itself in agreement with the thesis that U.S. society has institutionalized exploitation, and it seems to be coming to an informal acceptance of the view that capitalism is inextricably linked with most of the country's ills. But it rejects the ideologies and organizational forms of the old left, and strongly espouses the notion of individual freedom. It finds no applicable model elsewhere in the world, or in history, for what it thinks the U.S. ought to be. The fact is that the Movement is incredibly diverse -- as multileveled and varied as American society itself. Its members have neither blueprint nor party line, neither national office nor secretariat. There is no unanimity among them about appropriate tactics or even appropriate ends except in the most general way. The "window breakers" are only one element. The Movement also encompasses hippies and doctrinaire Leninists, anarchists and populists, the "campus cong" and peaceful communards, militant confrontationists and mystics, Bakuninists and humanists, power seekers, ego trippers, revolutionaries whose domain is the individual mind, Maoists, rock bands, and cultural guerrillas. As a result of this diversity, and its heartfelt commitment to individualism, the Movement has defied all attempts to bring its members together into disciplined cohesiveness. Most of its work is carried out at the local level by numberless, almost anarchistic, groups. Its national organizations, which often seek to set the tone for those who work under the national nameplates, are not really representative of the Movement's fluid groupings, and are frequently little more than advisers to their local chapters. These national organizations are a far cry from the old Communist party, U.S.A., with its rigid central control, adherence to official dogma, and ruthless suppression of heretics. Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.) is the Movement's largest and most prominent organization. Some 6,000 dues-paying members ($5 per year) in 300 to 400 chapters across the country command a following of ten to fifteen times their number. S.D.S. was organized in 1962 as an umbrella for radical and left-liberal activists; the Port Huron statement, the organization's manifesto, set forth -- in fifty-two single-spaced pages -- a broad critique of society, an idealistic affirmation of the individual, and the goal of searching for "truly democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation with them." S.D.S., it proclaimed, would seek "a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; [and] that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation." Since the days of the Port Huron statement, S.D.S. has evolved from a somewhat reformist organization into a revolutionary one. It is convinced that "the system" will resist all meaningful reform, and is dedicated to forcing the processes of change. This shift has been accompanied by growing pressures from some of its members for more discipline and central control, the necessary elements of a strong classical revolutionary body. But S.D.S. has resisted such pressures. The leadership remains mainly advisory, and local chapters are highly autonomous. The national council tries to develop theoretical positions as guides for the membership, but not a chapter today would accept any doctrine handed down by fiat. S.D.S's national office in Chicago is mainly a coordinating center and clearinghouse for information; at its national conventions, members let off steam, debate, hold workshops, and sometimes arrive at a consensus on issues -- and then go back to their local chapters to resume their main work. Frequently this work amounts to organizing, proselytizing, and -- through meetings, speeches, demonstrations, personal contacts, pamphlets, and leaflets -- "educating" other students in a university or high school. This is the quiet majority's way of doing something that is, according to the Movement's own lights, constructive. Sometimes the work consists of mobilizing forces for a demonstration or a strike. And it is the S.D.S. that wants, and gets, credit for precipitating the major disturbances at Berkeley and Columbia. The New York chapters are more dedicated to militancy than many others, and they claim to have organized the recent guerrilla attacks at New York University, when students doused a South Vietnamese diplomat with water and silenced a scheduled speech by James Reston, executive editor of the New York Times. Organizers of the regional office in Los Angeles state that they look forward to the day when radicals will overthrow the U.S. Government by force. Looser yet than S.D.S., and entirely different in orientation, is The Resistance, the Movement's second major grouping. The Resistance began in 1967 as a sort of accumulation of small anti draft groups on the east and west coasts. Its basic purpose was to give political substance to the scattered but growing number of individual "personal witness" acts of draft resistance -- e.g., turning in draft cards and refusing to be inducted. Since then, the Resistance has gradually broadened its scope. It is supplementing the personal-witness acts, some of which invite jail sentences, with more organizing of small community and campus groups and communes. There opposition to the draft is used as a starting point for an attack on other institutions and issues. The Resistance is an ideological anomaly: a functioning anarchy. It has no officers, no national headquarters, and no membership per se. Its larger local offices print literature, serve as coordinating centers and stations in a communication network, and help generally to expedite the travels and efforts of Resistance people. A slightly older and slightly more organized manifestation of the same general approach to revolution is Resist, formed in 1967 by a group of professors and social critics, including M.LT. Professor Noam Chomsky and Paul Goodman, author and social critic. Resist does have a national office and national officers; most of its members belong to the faculties of universities. But, basically, its nonstructure is the same as that of the Resistance, and its local groups organize not only around a peace and antidraft position, but around a variety of other political and community issues as well. National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam is the other major organization of the Movement. It is more than an antiwar group; it addresses itself also to "racism and imperialism." The Mobe, as it is called, is a coalition group, and has a sort of freelance national organization -- i.e., a national organizational structure ready to serve disparate elements in the Movement by coordinating their efforts. Among other things, the Mobe served as a coordination center and headquarters for the various student groups at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and is now mobilizing people for demonstrations at the time of the presidential inauguration in Washington. Rennie Davis, 28, its national coordinator and a long-time Movement activist, is a touring speaker and -- often jointly with another fixture of the Movement, Tom Hayden, 29 -- frequent author of articles for the underground press about strategies and attitudes. A smaller umbrella group, centered around the campus, is the New University Conference, a national organization made up mainly of teachers and graduate students. It was formed last March at a conference of some 300 graduate students and faculty members. With a membership today of about 1,000, the N.U.C. aims at bringing together people who consider themselves a part of the new left, and who are living and working within universities. It has a national office in Chicago, and a national director. But, like the majority of other radical organizations, the main office is chiefly a communication and coordinating center. Most N.U.C. activities originate at the local level. S.D.S., Resistance, Resist, and the Mobe are the most broadly based in terms of ideology of all the Movement's organizations. N.U.C., though mainly limited to campus affiliations, is also ideologically free-form. The other radical groupings mostly belong more to the old left, and consequently are much more narrowly constituted: , which is loosely tied to the Socialist Workers party, is a Trotskyite group with a fairly narrow campus base. Its members regard it as new left, but also as the American equivalent of the old-style student organizations in France, Germany, and Japan. They point out that, unlike other new-left groups, they have a program -- they know what to do when the revolution comes. Y.S.A. claims to have close to 1,000 members on 100 campuses. , the most left of these leftist groups, originated in 1962 as a militant, pro-Peking group that broke away from the Communist party. P.L. is small, tightly knit, well organized, and rigid in its party line. Its youth arm, the May 2nd Movement, was disbanded in 1966, and its younger members now usually attach themselves to the local S.D.S. unit, sometimes trying to take it over. This has caused the S.D.S. no end of bother in some of its chapters. P.L. people, clean-shaven, short-haired, and generally neat -- they resemble students of business administration rather than radicals -- stand out in any campus demonstration. represents the attempt of the Communist party, U.S.A., to cash in on the new-left movement. Formed in 1964 as a youth arm, it never fulfilled its hopes and hardly counts today, owing to its devotion to party line and central party control. , a radical political party that took shape in 1967, holds itself out as a potential unifying force for new-left radical groups. Part of its program of action includes working through the regular electoral process, primarily to get its views publicly aired. The Movement is also accompanied by a horde of smaller, single-purpose national organizations -- e.g., the National Committee to Abolish HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee) and the Caucus for a New Political Science. Some are little more than a state of mind. The Women's Liberation movement, which hopes to overcome male chauvinism, has no organization, but crops up wherever it can find a following. Still smaller regional or local groups work in the modes of the S.D.S. or Resistance. Any given demonstration, cause, or campus strike will usually bring at least one ad hoc group to the scene. Nowhere are the Movement's richness and variety better reflected than in its journalistic outpourings. Small magazines, theoretical journals, newsletters, and scholarly periodicals flourish. Radical Education Project, originally a creation of S.D.S. and now independent of it though closely allied, prints and sells a variety of radical economic and political writings, analyses, and critiques. The North American Congress on Latin America collects exhaustive research on the behavior of American businesses abroad, among other subjects. The Newsreel produces news films, such as a film on the Columbia rebellion, from a radical perspective. No other revolutionary movement in history has been accompanied by such a proliferation of underground newspapers. Some 200 papers, with a joint circulation estimated at better than one million, have accompanied the Movement. There is one paper -- or there may be several -- for every conceivable taste. Some are "head" papers notable chiefly for a psychedelic orientation in art and content; others are heavily political, tending toward militant old-left rhetoric. Most are somewhere in between, covering national and local political news about, or of interest to, the Movement, and a variety of cultural phenomena. Their art work, ranging from excellent to awful, is a mixture of photography, cartoons, and drawings in a plethora of original styles. They serve as vehicles for ideas, philosophies, news, art, and sometimes dogma that the Movement -- and people outside it -- wouldn't know about otherwise. Much of the material they publish is tawdry and vulgar. But at their best, the papers represent a genuinely new form of journalism, somewhere between magazine, paper of record, and local weekly. Interpretive, eclectic, pungent, frequently well written, they have attracted some excellent young writers and editors. The underground press has even generated two news agencies, both named Liberation News Service. Following a series of disputes last summer, one faction split off and set itself up as a commune in western Massachusetts, taking with it the presses from the New York office. The group left behind reconstituted itself. Today, both publish mailings to an overlapping group of 300 to 400 subscribers. Both do original reporting and reprint from underground and straight papers and magazines. LNS-New York is generally more militant in tone, and heavily political; LNS-Massachusetts devotes itself more to the lighthearted and the cultural. Underground Press Syndicate, formed two years ago by editors of New York's East Village Other, but now run by a different group from a Phoenix commune, is just beginning to emerge as something akin to a trade association. Originally it was little more than a pooling agreement between subscribing underground papers. But today, among other services, it also solicits national advertising for member papers, gives information, help, and technical advice, and maintains a library of underground periodicals, books, films, and literature. Among the syndicate's biggest advertisers are record companies -- e.g. Columbia -- and movie makers. It is no easy matter to determine where the Movement is going. "The Movement advances at so many different levels and stages," says one of its prominent figures, "that many of the most developed groups are least relevant to the mood of young people." Militant activists within those groups are its most visible element. But the present mood appears to be moving away from the strategy of confrontation. Some Movement leaders are convinced that the polarization created by confrontations, both within the Movement itself and between the Movement and society in general, are no longer desirable. For the strategy to be effective, moreover, each confrontation should be larger than the last one -- and how do you arrange confrontations bigger than the ones at Columbia or at the Chicago convention? So the stress seems to be shifting toward what the Movement rather blandly calls "education" -- organizing, writing, and proselytizing. More and more small groups are setting up "parallel structures" -- communes, free universities, elementary schools, community economic enterprises, and adult radical clubs. Philosophically, what seems likely to be most durable is the Movement's strong individualism and its quest for personal freedom. The Movement may someday be pulled together into a tightly structured, militant revolutionary organization -- but it doesn't appear likely. All attempts to impose order or uniformity on it so far have failed. The fusion that is taking place is between the political activists and the onetime hippie subculture, and that seems likely to create different "life styles" and ways of thinking in U.S. society, not a rigid political ideology.