New Left Growing Pains

...Jack New-field writes for the Village Voice...

...The national convention of the Students for a Democratic Society (sds), held at the same time, was a rambling, hastily organized gathering of students, street people and youthful activists in a seedy old auditorium...

...Events at the aaas convention and other such meetings last year suggest that bully-boy politics plied in the name of the people is not a student phenomenon, but rather the mark of a generation...

...The actions of these young scientists may answer the question of what sds members and sympathizers do once they get out of school...

...Following a pattern set at recent gatherings in the social sciences and the humanities, youthful dissidents sought to disrupt any aaas proceeding that did not meet their approval...

...Those seeking out the sds meetings found only a small hand-lettered sign marking the lone unlocked door along the Coliseum's lengthy front...

...Now it seems bent on suicide...

...sds, it will be recalled, was spawned at a United Auto Workers summer camp, and was originally the youth arm of the League for Industrial Democracy...

...Edward Teller, "father of the H-bomb," was heckled mercilessly and compared the dissidents' behavior to that of the Nazis...

...of the 800 or so attracted to the rally, though, only a handful were unionists...

...Harvey D. Shapiro is a freelance journalist based in Chicago...

...Last summer the Marxist sdsers took factory jobs, the better to build the worker-student alliance, but managed to alienate rather than recruit the laborers...

...Paul Booth is working for the United Packinghouse Workers...

...How to cement this rather improbable coalition was the dominant theme at the convention, for sds has been controlled by the Marxist Progressive Labor Party (plp) faction since last year's power struggle...

...As a result, some members have pulled out of the association, preferring more purely scientific meetings...

...Some came by chartered plane, others drove or hitched, bringing their bedrolls and literature to the homes of Chicago friends...

...For nearly a decade, sds was the meeting ground and clearing house for the New Left...

...The aaas drew 500 reporters, who were provided a luxurious press room in a Hilton ballroom...

...For the final proposals were couched in terms of combating imperialism, especially the U.S...

...Asia--No Deals," and "Build the Worker-Student Alliance...

...The increasing stridency of its confrontations with "the system" paralleled the organization's internal discord...

...Out of S.E...

...Yet most observers of the New Left are still busy trying to fathom the current campus calm, paying little attention to the radicals' movement from student to professional life...

...We may now be starting to find out...

...If sds' former free-wheeling style was not in evidence at the Coliseum, however, its offspring were making their presence felt at the Conrad Hilton...

...Tactical caucuses urged further efforts to win friends and influence people among the working class...

...The nihilistic Weathermen went off to foment immediate revolution, and have succeeded mainly in blowing themselves up...

...When they refused to be quiet until Teller's bodyguards left, anthropologist Margaret Mead said, "If he has bodyguards here, it's because he needs them...

...Throughout the four days of plenary sessions and panel discussions they debated tactics and ideology in a manner reminiscent of an older Left...

...Nearly 10,000 scientists and technicians from a variety of disciplines assembled in Chicago to hear six days of scholarly papers, to inspect the wares of publishers and scientific firms, and to participate in the always unsavory academic job market--which is desperate this year...

...The tired ideological lines, the factionalism, and the intimations of purges indicate how far sds has come from the pluralism and commitment to democracy of its early years...

...In a show of solidarity, the convention ended with a march through the Loop to protest "racist unemployment," but this, like the rest of the proceedings, went unreported by the Chicago newspapers, which have been preoccupied of late with real and imaginary Weathermen...

...Some early leaders have remained visible: Tom Hayden lives in a Berkeley commune and is still a leading theoretician...

...One new element quickly emerged, though...

...Whatever its depth, the aaas soul-searching failed to impress the dissidents...

...During the day they dined on hot dogs and Polish sausages, sold by a Coliseum vendor who was only too glad to exploit those who were planning to expropriate his business...

...All shared a look of grim determination, broken only by an aging Wobbly humming Joe Hill songs at the booth of the iww (yes, it still exists...

...In the fall sds staged a demonstration in support of Detroit's striking auto workers...

...As I passed by, raising my coat over my face Mafia-style, I wondered who the men were behind the candid cameras: They looked too old to be with the Army's local 113th Military Intelligence Group, and too frowzy to be fbi agents...

...Beset by the failure of its first drives, continued factional disputes, and the shadow cast over the entire organization by recent Weatherman activities, 900 members convened in Chicago to ponder the future of sds...

...Lining the lobby was a long row of booths, their managers hawking the latest in ideological lines...

...It seemed like 1932 again as words like "revisionists," "reformists...

...any newsman trying to cover the sds meetings would have been turned away by the security-conscious sergeants at arms...

...Women's Lib and Al Fatah were big this year, but Che Guevara's visage was hardly to be seen...

...The Revolutionary Youth Movement attempted to organize students and blacks, whom it regarded as the true revolutionary classes, and has gradually disappeared...

...Several meetings were devoted to discussions of scientific morality, and scientists in many disciplines tried to relate their findings to ecology, population control, urban growth, drug use, and other "relevant" topics...

...People crowded the doorway, watching the watchers in the parked car and the high-school-age greasers clustered menacingly on the sidewalk...

...Efforts on behalf of college janitorial and food service workers--consisting of outrageous demands on employers and calls for wildcat strikes--have been met with suspicion by the employes and dismay from their unions...

...Moreover, as the scientists were somewhat surprised to learn, both revealed much about what has happened to the New Left and to American society in the last decade...

...Its activist faith in participatory democracy, enunciated in the Port Huron Statement of 1962, won sds members and sympathizers from all sectors of the Left (except the Communists, who were excluded until 1965...

...Last month's convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (aaas) was a prestigious, elaborately coordinated affair headquartered at the Conrad Hilton Hotel...

...The Black Panthers, perhaps the only nonwhites in the place, were diligently selling El-dridge Cleaver record albums amid a variety of other Leftist groups peddling buttons, pamphlets and posters...

...And while local officials turned out to welcome aaas members and entertain its leaders, sds was turned down by several institutions before it was finally able to rent space in the Coliseum, a hall just south of the Loop normally host to religious revivals and wrestling matches...

...If an SDser happened not to be looking in their direction as he approached the Coliseum, the man in the driver's seat would toot the horn, causing the delegate instinctively to turn around...

...The majority of delegates were fashionably long-haired, but otherwise affected a neoproletarian style complete with work boots, jeans or khaki twills, and worn flannel shirts...

...Inside, the Coliseum was a paranoid's carnival...

...They showed films of American atrocities in Asia and indicted various delegates for "the crimes of science against the people...

...They are unlikely, after all, to be working for General Motors, and they can't all be community organizers...

...involvement in Asia, rather than a more moderate antimilitarism...

...the photographer would then snap a better picture...

...Some Boston delegates sought to heighten the emphasis on "direct action," but they were easily voted down as the worker-student alliance advocates won all the offices...

...That left the organization to the plp, a group seeing itself leading the workers...

...The 137th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at first seemed no different from previous conventions...

...Trying to meet critics' demands that it develop a program for social and political change, sds rapidly became a battleground for competing ideological cliques...

...Yet both convocations were attended by earnest-looking, bespectacled sorts, almost entirely white and disproportionately Jewish, and eminently bourgeois in their own peculiar ways...

...A group called Science for the People spearheaded and coordinated such protest efforts as booing, demands for equal time, commandeering the podium, and bits of guerrilla theater...

...Outbursts of hardhatism among blue-collar workers were casually written off as manifestations of the "false consciousness" Marx and Engels had warned against...

...As the discussions dragged on, delegates huddled earnestly in the corridors and recesses of the Coliseum, trying to decide how sds might better relate to blacks and Third World movements...

...adventurists," and "opportunists" studded the discussions, along with less Marxian bons mots like "groovy" and "heavy...

...The rigid dialectics characterizing the 1970 meetings were a far cry from the pluralistic dialogue of the organization's early days, when factionalism was difficult because ideology was so hazy...

...Speakers who could be linked to the military-industrial complex were ruthlessly harassed, most notably those who had conducted research on biological warfare, atomic weapons or riot control...

...But those students whose political consciousnesses were shaped by sds apparently will not permit their professions to function as they have in the past...

...In the assembly hall itself, banners hanging from the balcony were emblazoned with "U.S...

...Formulas had to be carefully worded to please the militant feminists as well as the plp hardliners...

...The disruptions tended to submerge the new tone of social concern that was in fact seeping into the aaas...

...At the curb, a welcoming committee sat in a parked car, photographing everyone who entered and left the building...

...A well-attended panel on science's generation gap demonstrated that the young members--the ones who were in graduate school when sds was focusing on campus issues--thought their elders' repentance too little, too late...

...But what of the countless others who identified with the aspirations and strategies of the New Left...

...It all came to a head at the Coliseum in 1969, when sds finally split into three distinct parts...

...Talk of disrupting rotc activities may have been merely a sop to those who accused the organization of having only off-campus interests...

...Although escalation of the Vietnam war and growing student disaffection brought sds to the height of its prominence in the mid-'60s, success placed new and heavy burdens on its leaders and tacticians...

...Many former New Leftists have moved into academic and quasi-academic organizations, and are bringing to their careers the same confrontation politics they adopted as students...

...No one seemed disturbed that plp's obligatory anti-Zionist diatribes sounded remarkably like anti-Semitism...

...probably the burly foursome with the plaid shirts and slicked-back hair were attached to the Chicago Police Department's red squad...

...aaas president-elect Glenn Sea-borg, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, was unable to deliver his inaugural address...