The Political Wastrels

...There were the Freedom Riders of the early 1960's, the Mississippi Summer project in 1964, the early activities for greater academic freedom and personal liberties on the campuses all during the decade, culminating in the abolition, on many campuses, of all rules barring student-invited speakers and regulating students' personal lives...

...Brown in turn picked up his staff at the congress, or some weeks later when the details were worked out...

...But there are parallels on which one can draw for analogies...

...The circumstances that led to the creation of nation-wide network of students was relatively difficult to reproduce, and yet the actions of the last few years effectively destroyed the nationwide student movements so that the entire creative process will have to be gone through again if a student movement is to attain any vitality...

...The youth movement has the advantage of faster generational turnover, but there are no signs that any period of rebuilding is scheduled...

...The NSA had lost a number of conservatives when it established the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee in the early Sixties, but it had weathered that loss fairly well...

...Students in the Students for a Democratic Society, (SDS) when that organization consisted of people who believed in the idea represented by the name, did much to increase the political awareness of their more politically apathetic colleagues...

...Since then the NSA, still bereft of any organizational ability has gone from bad to worse, so that today it represents nothing to anyone...

...They achieved the destruction of their organizations, but without getting the goals they wanted...

...In many ways the student movement in America is a dangerous force, for it acts as a mob, with all the rationality of a beheaded chicken, the insistence of a spoiled child, and the ferocity of a wounded tiger...

...The students most interested in creating a student movement either went into Brown's campaign, or were driven out of NSA as too conservative, in fairly short order...

...In their place came those students interested in a one-shot endeavor, willing to destroy the organization they were in to achieve their ends...

...At the time of the invasion of Cambodia and the shooting of students at Kent State and Jackson State colleges it seemed to many that a nationwide wave of student revulsion might seriously affect the composition of the new Congress, and make it more amenable to "the needs of the people," The "Youth Movement" was coming of age, we were all told, as campuses from New England to California set up centers of communications, presumably so tha...

...DeSapio was destroyed, but with only one exception other than in Presidential years the party has lost every election since then...

...They then left the party themselves, finding the daily routine of yeararound political organization being too time-consuming...

...Lowenstein, the "deliverer" of a year before, was denounced and booed when he spoke for selling out to the Establishment...

...Except for the SDS, which by this point was virulent in its anti-Americanism, however, and for the National Student Association (NSA) and the Collegiate Press Service (CPS), there were no natibnwide groups opposing the war, and both the NSA and the CPS were doing so more at the local level than at the national...

...Other groups are similarly in trouble...

...The damage to CPS was not readily apparent, as all the editors were in essential agreement, but it became more obvious as the war faded as an issue and doubts crept in as to what should be run in the college papers...

...The infrastructure of the liberal student movement, which had been built up since the late 1940's, was destroyed in the McCarthy campaigns and the subsequent efforts of the same group...

...It is difficult to see where the leadership of any student movement will arise until a new, non-ideological student movement is created...

...In 1966-67 however, the story of NSA's funding by the CIA broke, and the students who assembled at the summer convention were very much disturbed about the state of the nation, and the course it was pursuing...

...Over the summer of 1967 graduate student deferments were abolished, and student opposition grew ever more rapidly...

...The Young Democrats never did represent much, but they systematically disestablished themselves in 1968, rather than support the regular Democratic nominee for President...

...The McCarthy campaign, together with the Earth Day celebration and the Kent State and Jackson State incidents should be viewed as a triumph of the ad hoc organizers over the people who believe in organization...

...The Political Wastrels John Moscow At the time of Eugene McCarthy's fling into national politics many people thought that they were viewing the birth of a new political phenomenon, a portend of changes in the national political system...

...Over the summer of 1967 the radicals took control of the CPS, but lost it to a bitterly antiwar, but anti-radical group at the summer convention...

...One year the student movement was interested in pot, the next in politics, then in ecology, now perhaps in heroin, or in the arts, or in anything else not connected with the "real" world...

...As happens with issue oriented campaigns, however, the youth movement that Brown built has collapsed...

...Kent State should be viewed, not as the birth of a student movement, but as its swan song...

...More important, without a national organization there is no effective way a student leader can reach the student leaders at other campuses...

...The Young Republicans are strong on some campuses, but the political in-fighting for spoils seems to occupy them more than recruiting new members...

...He is a club house Democrat and firm believer in the Boss System...

...Just as the New York Democratic Party was destroyed when the people who stayed in year-in and year-out left, so too the youth movement was debilitated...

...In a sense it is particularly ironic that one of the last major operations of the student movement should have been in the field of ecology...

...After all the "student generation" in America changes very quickly, but is quite rich, exceptionally mobile, and replete with leisure time...

...Ten years ago a small wave of "reform" became monstrously large as the "reformers" entered politics determined to destroy the evil "boss" of New York politics, Carmine DeSapio...

...The plight of the New York State Democratic Party is perhaps the best of these...

...Lowenstein started by recruiting Sam Brown, then a Harvard divinty student, who had just been defeated for NSA President and was looking for something to do...

...Without a student organization that is national in scope each student movement will stick to locally appropriate tactics that may repel people elsewhere in the nation, discouraging progress on issues...

...The enthusiasm and idealism that motivated the students originally couldn't be maintained in the face of daily routines and political stagnation...

...Youths were exceptionally active in politics during the 1960's...

...The SDS was destroyed at its 1969 national convention...

...They destroyed the territory, but failed to get their killing...

...More than any labor union member whose selfishness and bigotry they denounce the students ask each candidate "What have you done for me lately?'' and only those politicians with exceptional mental and ethical elasticity stay very long in their favor...

...The speed with which the NSA was willing to denounce their erstwhile hero Lowenstein for selling out was dramatic evidence of the loyalty of students in politics...

...Whether those are still obtainable following the bankruptcy of the student movement onlv time will tell...

...The NSA had the advantage of bringing together students from different political views, with different political styles from different parts of the country, and making them accomodate each other...

...Brown and company went on to reach out for help to their acquaintances on the many college campuses, using their NSA experience to develop an amazingly successful campaign, and a strong political force...

...it remains to see if others can restore matters to their once high potential...

...The best of them had not lost faith in the democratic process, but were wondering how it could serve them...

...the campuses could talk to each other about how wonderful everything was that they were doing...

...Even without a national group bringing people together there will still be national student movements...

...His nomination drive was viewed by many as the backbone of an anti-war movement dominated by students which, if it could not select the President in 1968 would at least serve as the base for a successful drive in 1972...

...They were told how by Allard Lowenstein, a former NSA president, who chose the summer convention as the kick-off spot for his "Dump Johnson" movement-the movement that was later converted into the McCarthy campaign...

...But by a few months after the sending of American troops in large numbers to South Vietnam student opposition to the war began to grow...

...That same summer the NSA split, in a move that has essentially destroyed the organization...

...For the students themselves, over the past five years, have acted like nothing so much as a group of get-rich-quick artists who, not satisfied with a small and steady profit on an investment, insist on ravaging the natural resources of the territory they are in without regard to the future, in the hope of a quick killing...

...Worse than the destruction of Brown's movement, however, was its effect on the NSA...

...The one-issue people came into the party, defeated the regulars, and drove them out...

...n the Boss System...

...It is subject to a great deal of faddishness, so that the pressing issue of today becomes passe tomorrow, as the sophomores become juniors and "outgrow" the issues of maintaining a favorable ecology for mankind, or of peace and war...

...With their defeat the radicals established the Liberation News Service, but split the ranks of the college editors, almost all of whom were anti-war, and ready to politicize their campuses on the issue...

...Two years after the McCarthy campaign's high water mark in the spring of 1968 many of the same students were responsible for the Earth Day celebration that brought "ecology" into the everyday vocabulary of the American .voter...

...Again pundits predicted that the new student movement would effect substantial changes in the way Americans run their country...

...Moscow, a graduate of the Collegiate School and the University of Chicago, is currently studying law at Harvard...

...The Congress that followed the start of the "Dump Johnson" movement was almost lunatic in its politics...

...The traditionalists either left for their crusade, as in Sam Brown's case, or were driven out later...