The Campus Radical in 1960

...But beyond such pressures there was the intuitive perception of the futility of radical politics in the old sense...

...Very few young people can stomach this...

...Nevertheless, the hero was always visible, and the realpolitiking could always be seen in terms of his ultimate victory...

...Furthermore, pockets of the older radicalism still exist, especially in New York City...

...Both leadership groups were terrified by the threat of disaffiliation: the Shachtmanites because they saw themselves about to be sundered from a potential agent of the world-historical spirit, the opportunists, because they saw themselves about to be sundered from $16,000—SDA's annual subsidy from ADA, and most of its budget...

...At the 1955 SDA convention there was a strong left wing determined to bring the organization's position into the open...

...In a way, it makes for a more honest political life...

...There is little of the windy appeal to theory through which in the past simon-pure revolutionists kept themselves from radical action...

...No slogans, no programs: just a direct emotional response...

...As it is, the student anti-war movement, without much theoretical equipment but with a fair amount of conviction, will probably continue to grow, though with something less than revolutionary speed...

...tion of moral and emotional instincts to reason leads to default, is no surprise to them...

...They told me that they were 'people of broad tastes and views...

...To overcome these obstacles, the pacifists sometimes work through other groups, such as SANE or Acts for Peace...

...Moral indignation in the face of injustice was always the mainspring of socialist activity and today's young radicals are by no means incapable of logical thinking...

...This reaction stems largely from a deeply-felt notion that the older kind of politics, with its resolutions, machinations and polemics is both futile and totally unnecessary for dealing with such clearcut questions as Strontium 90 and the right of a child to be decently educated...

...quently arouses the same enthusiasm that would greet a summons to a sixth three-point course...

...atomic policy, it may even spread to some of the campuses where a radical today is someone who doesn't join a fraternity...

...At the same time, obvious problems await the new groups, precisely because of their aversion to theory...

...But there are those who once did, and time moving as it does, many of their children are now in the colleges...

...A changing environment shows the incapacity of certain formerly thriving species to survive or accomplish anything under new conditions...

...The problem is illuminated by a friend's account of a recent protest meeting against antiSemitism...

...Desires to fit into the plush positions which await the compliant college man, a feeling that there is an intimate connection between radicalism of any sort and the Russian horror, the gradual disappearance of the student veterans who had transmitted a residue of both radicalism and reality to some campuses, and the sheer intimidation caused by McCarthyite inquisitors— all these were important...

...Their sentence was imposed on the spot—their trousers were ripped open along the seams and a bald strip was shaved down on the back of their respective heads...

...The alienation of youth takes many forms...

...Their betrayal of the immediate issue—the right of a Communist to teach—in the name of an ultimate goal—Socialism—won them no decoration from ADA but only led to the infliction on their leaders of a persecution similar to that which they had refrained from protesting publicly in the interest of the telos...

...The left wing leadership consisted primarily of two groups: one extended out in concentric circles of diminishing orthodoxy from a pair of young "Shachtmanites" who saw as their ultimate goal some day to push both ADA and SDA into a labor party...

...And these are the kinds of problems to which today's campus radicals address themselves, not the victory of socialism in Ceylon or, for that matter, the problem of fascism in France...

...We can see this reaction among the rebellious delinquents of the street gang, as well as among the beats and their withdrawn, suspicious counterparts who may be found on any campus in the country...

...But of course the Democratic liberals had no intention of ruining their presidential chances by sending the South over to the Republicans...

...In the anti-bomb campaign, too, a chasm frequently appears between the spheres of analysis and action, with the latter often assuming the guise of moral protest...

...To these problems one need apply no dialectic, but simply an immediate response of emotion and will...

...These 'Huguenots' tried in vain to prove that they were not stilyagi, but that they simply preferred narrow pants and fancy hairdos...

...Speak Truth to Power, a pamphlet which combines the notion of individual nonviolent resistance with a foreign policy program for massive economic aid to underdeveloped countries, is the best example of the ideological side of this work, and such organized campus activities as those under Robert Pickus' West Coast Acts for Peace, or the Student Peace Union in the midwest, guided by the AFSC, represent the organizational side...

...the failure of one's associates to interfere . . . these are the things that have brought these fellows to court...

...Their fascination for direct unthinking response has made them rebels whose goals are so undefined and whose means are so undiscriminating that they can easily exhaust themselves in actions peripheral to their main purpose...

...The cultural life of all the world interests us.' [But] there is a surprising emptiness and a shocking spiritual squalor behind these phrases...

...It is this fact which gives a certain interest to the posture and moods of the current generation of radicals...

...The effect of this humiliating defeat on the morale of the left-wing was devastating...

...These are often youth in search of a cause...

...But there has been a decided shift in emphasis...

...To be a Communist today requires defense of Russian intervention in Hungary, denial of Russian anti-Semitism, and loathing for Howard Fast...

...The enthusiasm has both good and bad sides...

...For the latter the futility of the old liberal and radical politics brings little disillusionment...

...Hopes of the left leadership that a forthcoming ADA convention would take a stand favorable to SDA on Communist teachers proved illusory...

...Next to the nearly three and a half million college students, the few thousands involved in the new radicalism seem less than puny...

...The ADA, in turn, accepted the same kind of relationship to the "left wing" of the Democratic Party...

...To fully appreciate the reasons for this shift, I want to relate an incident—trivial in its own right but revealing as a symptom—in the life of a quasi-radical student organization functioning under the old dispensation in the mid-fifties...

...It indicates a reservoir of energy...

...In short, each party of principle, realizing its impotence, played the game of realpolitik by supporting, while hoping to convert, the larger group to its right, until the chain reached the Democratic party —all realpolitik and no principle— which by this system received, with little expense, the support of everyone to its left...

...One of them is a withdrawal from and hostility to an adult world which offers no perspective for the development of the potentialities intuited by the adolescent...

...A solution for this part of the problem could only come from the development of a new radical theory, which could explain their social predicament in their own terms, Restless Youth in Russia The November 14 issue of Literaturnaya Gazeta describes the arrest of a group of Moscow stilyagi on the charge that they had speculated on the foreign currency market...

...The attempt to bridge this chasm as well as to provide an organizing center for the anti-bomb sentiment has so far been the work of the pacifists...

...I exaggerate, of course...

...And perhaps more serious, there is a certain poverty of leadership, a tendency to chew over a few simple slogans and dicta, an absence of intellectual development...

...The Shachtmanites, with their Marxist analysis, saw the future in a Iabor party, but had not the slightest confidence in their powers to produce such a thing...

...There would seem to be a kind of natural selection that goes on in political life...

...The SDA left wing was puzzled by this move, since it was clear that the right wing was in a minority on this issue...

...they counted on an amalgam of the labor movement and ADA to bring it into being...

...This attitude is one of the major elements in the current student antiwar movement—if a few hopeful spurts of activity on perhaps a score of campuses can be called a movement...

...Often they join student SANE, where, with their inherited sense of political obligation and organization, they may be the backbone of a local chapter...

...The pacifists have always been a tiny fringe on the campus, but today, owing to the rise of the beat attitude, and of one other source of radical strength yet unmentioned, they have a considerably larger arena for their activities than previously...

...Thus it is significant that in the two spontaneous student movements that have developed recently— movements against segregation and bomb testing—there has been a notable coolness toward programs and realpolitik...

...Then there came a telegram from a leading ADA officer who threatened disaffiliation if the resolution was voted down...

...This sense of futility was endangering the survival of any sort of left on the campus, when in 1954 the H-bomb fallout that showered a Japanese fishing boat with deadly ash provided student radicals with a new cause: the fight against nuclear weapons...

...If there is to be an American political left in the 1960s and 70s it will be led, for the most part, by radical students of today and tomorrow, rather than by those who received their political training in the 1930s and 1940s...

...But today this species has become as rare as the whooping crane, and its occasional appearance evokes little attention except among political ornithologists...

...But the New York chapters of SDA were prevented from publicly protesting against the purges of Communists in the city school system by SDA's senior organization, Americans for Democratic Action, which supported the firings...

...The young leaders of the affair proposed a picket line around the German consulate...

...The indignant reply was that anti-Semitism was not a political but a moral problem, and must be dealt with by moral protest...

...FAILURE TO DISCUSS the student Communist in an article on campus radicals may once have been unpardonable...

...Instead, the right wing of SDA submitted a resolution which would have permanently surrendered the organization's right to take a public stand on matters concerning academic freedom...

...What is significant, however, is the political pattern revealed by the case, a pattern which does much to explain why radically inclined students in 1960 no longer join groups like SDA, but, when they join anything at all, favor campus SANE groups or go on Quaker work projects...

...Even with the hero present, and all the wheels of progress gyrating wholesomely around his frame, one often had to choose an attainable lesser evil over an immediately unattainable ultimate goal...

...This proposal, however never reached a vote...

...Like the beats, they are enamored of moral causes...

...ADA could not dream of embarking on an independent political venture, but could only hope that the Democratic liberals might finally break from the southern Democrats and form a genuinely liberal party...

...IN 1953 AND 1954, at the height of the McCarthy era, conventions of the liberal Students for Democratic Action passed resolutions supporting the right of Communists to teach unless proved incompetent...

...There are wonderfully few "apparatchniks" among the new radicals...

...He then proposed that if they really wanted to protest, the logical objects would be the rearmament of Germany in particular and the arms race in general...

...The radical generation of the thirties and forties, whose poignant specter hovers around the above proceedings, had as one of its cardinal assumptions the notion of history as the story of progress...

...and show the place of the struggle against the arms race and the garrison state in the context of that predicament...

...Each group on the left side of a pair was firmly convinced that the agent of historical progress, lay in its partner to the right...

...Because ADA insisted that the issue did not primarily concern academic freedom, SDA never made public its stand favoring the right of Communists to teach...

...The beats have a desire not to conform and a passion for moral and emotional directness...

...All three of the elements merging in the campus anti-bomb movement have their virtues...

...ADA did not alter its stand, but SDA did...

...During the evening, 'Huguenots' wearing narrow pants and modish hairstyles were grabbed and dragged off to police headquarters...

...Thus, it is usually the committed pacifist who plays the leading role in organizing and giving form to campus antibomb sentiment...

...The area of vision is different, and the organ of response has shifted from the brain to the intestines...

...When SDA, which had originally been independent, affiliated with ADA, the adult group agreed to grant it autonomy in regard to academic freedom issues, provided the SDA did not contradict any ADA position on other matters...

...Their education and ability to think rationally are of no use here because they tend to identify both education and rational thinking with the adult world which, in their politics at any rate, they reject...

...The hero of that story was to be the proletariat...

...They tend to dissociate themselves from their parents' mistakes, but try to salvage their ideals...

...Getting control of SDA was a step toward this objective...

...Should the government proceed to give atomic bombs to everyone in sight, it will grow more quickly, and if the Teller faction at any point assumes total control of U.S...

...That the subjuga...

...The other group, in my judgment, was essentially opportunisitc, with no more significant political aim than that of obtaining paid positions with the national organization...

...Yet if one steps back for a moment, the total picture remains uninspiring...

...And the possibility of nuclear explosions—the highest achievement of scientific rationality— filling the world with poison, offers them a unique opportunity to accuse the world—the world of reason, abundance, compromise, and adjustment— of its ultimate hypocrisy...

...However, the Protestant religious background of the pacifist movement sometimes places obstacles between itself and those groups it wants to organize...

...But it is noteworthy that often the most political expression of the pacifist outlook, such as Speak Truth to Power, will not arouse much enthusiasm, while a pacifist-sponsored demonstration may...

...I talked with the accused several times...

...The unrestrained worship of everything foreign, the indifference to politics, the bourgeois cul tof money, and...

...Yet is this enough...

...Perhaps the trouble now is that the students in the anti-bomb movement and in such groups as SANE, have failed to be sufficiently ideological— that sin of former times...

...Example: SANE adherents have for two years been circulating petitions of their senior organization that do little more than support the government's own decision to negotiate a test ban...

...My friend interposed that perhaps the anti-Semitic outbursts might be related to the persistence in the German government of unrepentant Nazis, and the latter phenomenon to American policy toward Germany since 1945, especially to the effort to put Germans back in uniform...

...This is why the suggestion of a discussion group fre...

...Literatura i Zhizni (December 2, 1959) offers the following account of an incident in a southern city: "It was decided to conduct a Saint Bartholomew's Massacre against the stilyagi...

...The author of the article writes: "During the investigation...

...A phone call by the left wing leadership to a sympathetic New York editor, then a member of ADA's national board, brought the reply that he could do nothing to prevent the threat from being carried out...

...Where, then, does one go from the stage of vehement excoriation...

...Both groups decided to ask their followers to abstain from the vote...

...The measure surrendering autonomy passed by about twenty-five to five, with some thirty-five abstentions...

...the situation described at the beginning of this article is a reductio ad absurdum of the older politics, with the hero, of course, missing...

...THERE ARE MANY REASONS for the withdrawal from politics by American students in the mid-1950's...

...In the complex string of relations between the Shachtmanites and SDA, SDA and ADA, ADA and the liberal Democrats, and the liberal Democrats and the Democratic Party, one common factor emerges...

...Since I have little experience with the desegregation movement, my further comments will be directed exclusively toward the antibomb campaign...

...A classic response of one of them, when asked why she put in so much time for SANE, was that she didn't want to feel responsible if she heard of someone dying of leukemia...

...The children of the disillusioned may have a little less of these, but they do have a sense of political commitment and a talent for organization...

...Of SDA's national membership of about 750, between 50 and 100 good liberals became exhausted in a sequence of futile maneuvers...

...It tells us that apathy is not univer• sal on the campus, and that at least some of the juices of rebellion are being directed against society without taking the form of vulgar delinquency...

...The pacifists have a great deal of conviction and a level of analysis that at least lends consistency and direction to their efforts...

...With the decline in numbers and spirit of the leftist contingent that resulted from the convention debacle, SDA's national committee was soon able to purge the leadership of the left caucus...

...The attempt of the SDA radicals to blend high idealism and realpolitik was quickly frustrated...

...Gradually, the students have come to read the petitions they have so avidly circulated, and often a sense of weariness has been the result...

...THIS INCIDENT is clearly devoid of intrinsic importance...