Students in Washington
Walzer, Michael
The size of the recent student peace demonstration in Washington only inadequately suggests its importance. Both in organization and ideology the demonstration differed from all that had...
...The Turn Toward Peace Student Council now includes all these groups, and independent or local organizations as well...
...And undoubtedly the claque can be resumed at any time, unless TOCSIN's initiative is followed up, for many of the students in Washington probably preferred the style of political action represented by the "Ban the Bomb" and "Peace or Pieces" posters which they carried...
...We want the movie audience to believe in tomorrow...
...The policy statement carefully distinguished between yielding the bases and throwing over the commitments— for the latter would leave the Turks as exposed to Soviet coercion as are the Finns...
...But it should be said that that was almost the only paper the marchers carried...
...Some of the marchers, reading this sort of thing, might have been convinced that they had come to Washington with no program at all...
...Both in organization and ideology the demonstration differed from all that had gone before in the student movement...
...And because neither of them has produced any significant intellectual effort, the reasons for these wars are often obscure and impenetrable to most of the students involved...
...But, according to Jack Cardiff, the director, the film will adhere to the basic literary and philosophical values of the novel "'Daedalus worries the life out of me,' said the British director...
...Perhaps it derives from the continuous debate the TOCSIN leaders are engaged in at Harvard with friends of the Kennedy administration...
...The SPU has been influenced by both the pacifists and the socialists—the rhetoric of its leaders often manages to combine the worst elements of the two jargons—and tends to adopt the stance of a political movement whose long-range goal is not merely disarmament, but a totally non-violent world...
...In a sense, it was spontaneous, an unexpected response to a call issued from Cambridge...
...They represented political commitments which might better be upheld by other means...
...6. After the long march, there was a meeting on the grass behind Washington Memorial...
...It is even possible that Turn Toward Peace, the recently formed coalition of peace groups which provided an umbrella for the students, will really come to represent a new turn—if not toward peace than at least toward a vastly more sophisticated and intelligent agitation on such issues as testing and civil defense...
...Its leaders profess a great aversion to pacifism...
...Something of this attitude will, of course, always be found in the peace movement...
...2. Who organized the demonstration...
...But TOCSIN hardly had the resources to win a nationwide response...
...3. It was TOCSIN which brought a new element to the student movement: a highly sophisticated awareness of the realities of the cold war...
...On the other hand, the columnists of the Hearst papers asserted flatly that the demonstration was a Communist plot...
...The students have made the socialist leader a hero of their own, perhaps knowing only vaguely that he represents a continuity with the past they would do well to explore...
...Students, responding in terms of their own limited experience, have fought the SANE leadership as if it were McCarthyite...
...They have confronted the dull highmindedness of the committed minority with a weary sophistication about politics which was at least equally unearned...
...It was in this spirit that the students set up interviews with congressmen, members of the administration and officials of the Russian Embassy, but rejected the idea of a vigil in front of the Pentagon or the White House...
...But in the newer peace groups, like TOCSIN, one meets the bright and idealistic student, bringing enormous intellectual energy to his own encounter with radical politics...
...Curiously enough, it is the kind of student who diligent...
...All of them seem to have worked hard on the demonstration, despite a considerable amount of local feuding...
...The ideological sources of the feuding can be summed up briefly, though the summary will not be equally accurate for all campuses...
...The students drifted away, fleeing the wetness and the earnest, antique rhetoric of a young SPU leader...
...It is not easy to tell...
...there is no reason to repress it...
...The arguments of Seymour Melman's The Peace Race [reviewed in DISSENT, Winter, 1962] have apparently had some effect on the campus...
...One of the most serious problems of the new student movement is likely to be a growing gap between leaders and followers, between the sophistication of the leaders and the simplistic Ban the Bomb fervor of their followers...
...Hollywood, Calif., March 5—James Joyce's 'Ulysses' will be more optimistic as a movie than as a book...
...He must not reject Bloom in the movie as he did in the book...
...The talks were mostly passionless and dull, except for the brief excitement of Emil Mazey's promise to bring the unions into the peace movement...
...But students need to be convinced that serious political involvement necessarily will carry them beyond such obvious sentiments—and that if they don't get beyond them, they are something short of being involved or serious...
...In both cases, it encourages simplemindedness...
...The students on the lines looked very good, not so carefully dressed up as the YAF counter-pickets, nor so beat as the photographers hoped for —who ran about after beards (there were very few beards...
...The policy statement was largely their effort and it represented a sharp break with the statements of previous peace demonstrations...
...They came from some 150 colleges, mostly in the Eastern half of the country...
...And the press does not only inform the nation...
...All this was impressive and exciting...
...1. Over 5000 students were in the capital for the February 17 demonstration...
...SPU provided the Midwestern support and manpower and SANE brought the New Yorkers to Washington...
...I am writing them under the impact of a wonderful day in Washington...
...Instead, its members somehow managed in tortuous meetings last November and December to bring together the two largest (rival) campus peace organizations, the Student Peace Union and Student SANE...
...peace!, perhaps because it does not compel him to take a stand in re gard to the cold war...
...President Kennedy set the tone for the liberal press (the press of the vital center!—and that now includes the New York Times) when he sent out coffee to the students who picketed in the snow on Friday...
...it also helps shape the self-image of the marchers...
...On the march to Arlington Cemetery, Saturday afternoon, the line stretched for almost two miles—and the student leaders, amateurs all, marched their followers three and four abreast...
...Student leaders expected far fewer, though 5000 was the goal they had set themselves last November...
...Indulgent, even a little permissive, unwilling (of course) to argue, but eager to urge responsibility and congratulate the students for not being apathetic—this was the line also of the Times' editorial on Sunday, which did not even mention the policy proposals of the students...
...5. There was an even greater gap, of course, between the official policy of the demonstration and what was reported in the press...
...They were high spirited enough to come to Washington and sober enough once there to accept the discipline which the demonstration leaders outlined in a mimeographed paper...
...The standing ovation given to Thomas was one of the high points of the day...
...From the N. Y. Times, March 7, 1962...
...It serves to convince the students that rational argument is not possible and that it is necessary to adopt a stance of absolute opposition and denial in the face of the cold war...
...These were the students who visited Bundy and Wiesner and the others, and made up the delegation to the Russian Embassy: those talks would have been worth hearing...
...The line in front of the White House was the largest and liveliest in many years...
...His portrayal must not be too downbeat...
...The ginger group, which first proposed the project and maintained a rough sort of ideological initiative and control throughout, was Harvard's TOCSIN, an undergraduate club which broke away from Student SANE last year...
...Daedalus is a baffled intellectual, a lonely man who rejects everything and everybody...
...4. The easy and unearned aura of righteousness which has marked the peace movement in the immediate past has undoubtedly put off many of the brighter students...
...One of their "initiatives" was a proposal that the U. S. close down military bases overseas which could be used only for a first strike against the Soviet Union...
...Daedalus is Hamlet, but Shakespeare handled the ending better than Joyce did...
...And then Norman Thomas brought the mass of students to their feet...
...There were a surprisingly large number of high school students...
...In a sense, it represented the unity experienced on the lines and the march, and it overwhelmed the memory of bitter feuds—in which Thomas, on the national board of SANE, has been very much involved...
...The size of the recent student peace demonstration in Washington only inadequately suggests its importance...
...The sophistication of the TOCSIN students (they had allies, of course, in the SPU and other of the independent groups) may be illustrated by a single example...
...ly reads the National Guardian who is likely to prefer the vague rhetoric of peace...
...The following notes are an attempt to weigh the possibilities and difficulties of the new turn...
...First, it treated the cold war as a real conflict of interests and values and not merely as an invention of evil or insane men, and it proposed non-military ways of carrying on that struggle...
...Such bases as those in Turkey, the statement argued, would never survive a Soviet first strike and therefore added nothing to our retaliatory capacity...
...There was unfortunately little effort to distribute literature and so to begin to educate the students who were already, in a minor way, activists...
...This is especially (and dangerously) true of the recent efforts of National SANE to purge the Communists from its youth organization...
...These two groups have inherited, so to speak, the wars of their fathers...
...I find this sort of thing very much preferable to the wilfully naive (often deliberately irrational) and self-righteous peace claque which has often substituted for argument in the past...
...And the marchers, reacting, might decide that that charge was never anything but redbaiting...
...They have defined their own position in the terms of that debate and they went to Washington very much prepared to argue with the people already there...
...Secondly, the policy statement did not naively declare the various defenses of deterrent strategy to be examples of wickedness and immorality, but argued the inadequacy of deterrence and produced a list of "initiatives" which the U. S. might take in the cold war without weakening its own second-strike capacity...
...arriving in busloads, largely from New York, all Saturday morning, and they undoubtedly added to the elan of the picket lines...
...Student SANE (a group not very effectively controlled by its adult organization) is a more narrowly conceived peace movement, whose style often shows the lingering effects of the Popular Front or Progressive Party, but which is also more oriented toward practical politics than the SPU...
Vol. 9 • April 1962 • No. 2
