The Legacy of SDS
Lessard, Suzannah
The Legacy of SDS by Suzannah Lessard Considering the intellectual caliber of many of the participants, the dearth of lasting literature from the New Left is puzzling. Whatever the cause,...
...The blacks were not: they were symbolically parentless, the Romuluses and Remuses of the new world in which whites would have to prove themselves worthy of membership...
...When at last, at four o’clock in the morning, it all died down, I took a taxi home...
...Like most G. S. students, I was comparatively detached from the university, free-lancing through its resources to wrest what I could from it, two years older than most undergraduate seniors, and far less involved in academic life than most graduate students, many of whom were bound for academic careers, and were therefore more like the younger faculty in their attitude (“this is going to be my world”) than the transient mass of undergraduates...
...Such a practice would probably lead me to categorically dissociate myself from a cause, no matter how worthy...
...But the blacks were always the “toughest,” they always appeared more committed than either the McNamaras or the white students...
...Universities and students appear to have reverted to their former character...
...These conclusions all fall into the category of principles of behavior, which have to be re-learned by each generation...
...Evidently caught between a desire to sound at least semi-radical himself, and a wish to construct a sound history, Sale ends up giving us the shards of a history...
...Putting your feet up on Grayson Kirk‘s desk, drinking his brandy and smoking his cigars was, unavoidably, a juvenile act...
...n e Lasting Impact is Internal The New Left and the student movement now look like a feisty little storm isolated in time: the speed with which it sank into oblivion is eerie...
...However insignificant the activities of the New Left may now appear in an historical sense, the people involved in them-even such a peripheral person as myself-went through an intense political experience which is bound to influence their thinking and behavior for the rest of their lives...
...There is no mention of the fact that during the very first sit-in at Hamilton Hall, the black students in effect kicked the white students out (whereupon they went to Low Library) and that throughout the sit-in, black Hamilton Hall acted with a studied, scornful independence which automatically enhanced their stature and drove the white students to prove themselves...
...The second sit-in at Hamilton Hall was white, and took place exactly a month after the first bust...
...And the same liberal community which had looked upon Panther terrorism with guilty admiration (however exaggerated by the media, the violence was real in the imaginations of the onlookers, and however ambivalent and fearful, the admiration was unmistakable) sealed the double standard which had been taunting white radicals by condemning Weatherman activity without hesi tation...
...But when I wore my jeans and armband to a bridal shower on the East Side, I listened with patronizing disgust to my proper friends’ tentative remarks about Columbia and looked upon the rather expensive presents (I had brought none) with superior distaste...
...We were packed into several cells, which was uncomfortable because you couldn’t lie down and go to sleep...
...In the voting booth they become the enemy...
...It’s sad that so many of the questioners have since either dropped out into aimless inaction, or, unable to make the link between the idealistic theories of youth and the demanding realities of adulthood, have capitulated completely...
...Nobody had...
...Sale retells the anecdote in which McNamara, surrounded by angry students during a visit to Harvard, became rattled and shouted that he too had been involved in left-wing political activity at college, with one difference: “I was both tougher and more courteous...
...Finally I must admit I was revolted by a disgusting tub of spaghetti which was dispensed on Wonder Bread...
...The whites sought a physical confrontation with the police because they needed evidence that their violation of authority had been real and threatening...
...Whatever the case, these are the beliefs with which I emerged from the experience...
...One can argue both that the New Left precipitated a settlement in Vietnam and that it retarded peace, and probably can make a stronger case for the latter...
...They evidently thought of them as peasant revolutionaries might think of a tiny, supremely wealthy, decadent aristocracy, failing to realize that they were most of “the people...
...The bust was an artificial confrontation and everybody went home the next day, but that doesn’t render the realization that such force is the resource of a bankrupt system any less vivid...
...Culinary elitism, I’m ashamed to admit, runs through my abortive relationship to the counter-culture...
...Caught in the Middle Then exactly a month after the first bust, a second sit-in gathered in Hamilton Hall...
...With the compulsion of an addict I kept seeking to put myself in the way of a charge...
...In the middle of the furious debate over whether the minority who had voted to leave should go, a debate suffused with all sorts of auxiliary issues by SDS, a distraught young man darted to the microphone, seized it, and announced that he was leaving because he could no longer make sense out of anything...
...They had a needling effect on another level too...
...Whatever the cause, whenever I hit a direct quotation from an SDS publication or speech, of which there are many in Kirkpatrick Sale’s book,* my eye skidded off the page...
...Those days are now enshrined, but when I hear them proudly retold, I still recoil from the lurid, inhuman colors in which the Southern whites are painted-they were racists only, not people-and the total blindness of the crusaders to the arrogant violation of their own invasion in the eyes of the inhabitants...
...drawn to the campus like a filing to a magnet, I was forced to take a personal stand-or at least to try...
...If what I learned has anything to do with what others who shared the experiences learned, then perhaps one can read something of the future of the left in it...
...I don’t remember any crucial career decisions being made that night...
...They learned to pretend to come at us in a flying wedge, stop dead and charge to the side...
...Weatherman was beginning to take shape...
...First, an almost doctrinaire belief in free speech...
...An Argentinian with whom I was studying Greek stepped out of his stuffed shirt to give passionate, bitter prophesies of a reaction from the right...
...The would-be Che Guevaras inside the building were far more appealing than the perplexed tweedy characters who adopted the half-way (less courageous...
...Here is where the revolutionary changes must be made, they said, and they started asking the questions, from the bottom up...
...The documents, the speeches, the committees and subcommittees, the conventions, the strategies, the factional spats are all painstakingly document ed, immemo rable uninformative...
...I finally ended up with a group which appropriately, though without humor or embarrassment, dubbed itself “The Stepsitters and Sympathizers” (one of my more impressive titles...
...Not only were people with even mildly opposing views not allowed to speak, but the very idea of thinking things out became identified as a weakness...
...No literature of enduring value having been produced at the time, are there now going to be no honest, illuminating dissections of what happened...
...And SDS punctured the deepset, complacent belief in incremental reform, forcing liberals to face such truths as that you will never solve the welfare problem by adding $25 to social security paychecks...
...I’m not sure it was during the period of the strike-it might have be en before-that several invited speakers were prevented by radicals from speaking on campus...
...I latched on to that distaste because in a sea of contradictory reactions this one was clearcut: this I really feel (hence, believe...
...That reverse prejudice was washed away with the sixties-it’s hard to remember how strong it was-but to an extent it actually governed events at Columbia that spring...
...I was tougher then and I’m tougher now...
...The idea that a university should not become financially dependent upon the beneficence of the defense establishment because the automatic pressure to support defense policies would interfere with free thought thus became the idea that a university should be militantly partisan...
...The cops would chase us off campus...
...Redundant vote-taking was repeated, interspersed with strident speeches, but far from turning the tide, SDS’ blatant effort to manipulate the group resulted in an increase in the no-resistance vote...
...Beyond what I know of a small circle of friends, I have no idea how representative I am-the only usefulness of listing my reactions may be that they provide a theory to be disproven...
...On the assembly line they are the mythical “workers...
...It’s sad, but it’s by no means discouraging, because once those questions start getting asked, they don’t go away...
...If you personally participated in that experience, then you also freeze a part of yourself, thus eliminating the possibility of growth, and by extension the growth of a whole political generation...
...I was acutely uncomfortable when that righteousness turned into a loud, heated chant, “Wallace must go,” because the mob emotion it generated against an individual conjured up, for me, a lynching...
...I spent those days outraged by the administration’s reaction to the protest, yet lukewarm about most of the issues, although by the end all the issues were buried under the sheer intensity of the confrontation...
...They took the vote several times, trying to change the terms...
...Furthermore, we learned that the only real recourse such an establishment has to fall back on is force...
...We know he bails out some where between the Port Huron Statement and the explosion of 1 1 th Street, but he apparently doesn’t know where, and this uncertainty puts an odd blur into even the strictly factual material, fogging out completely the truly significant dimensions of the story...
...I list here several unrelated memories which subsequently have become touchstones in my thinking about the New Left...
...The whites couldn’t fold if...
...111 1962 criticism of the U. S. role amounted to procommunism in the eyes of a liberal community which was morbidly sensitive to charges of being unpatriotic and soft on totalitarianism...
...SDS and Old Soldiers The point is not that the black movement dominated SDS from afar, but that the true history of SDS cannot be told as though it took place in a vacuum, unrelated and unaffected by the turbulent world in which it grew...
...They were rumored incorrectly to have guns and explosives (the real McCoy) inside, stories of the discipline and fraternity of communal life in Hamilton (as opposed to the chaos in other buildings) circulated, they negotiated separately with the administration, and when they were cleared from the building rumors abounded that shots had been fired by the resistors...
...Secondly, instant suspicion of any reference to “the people” which clearly excludes the middle classes...
...Years later this sub-pattern of alienation became clear to me with a burst of deja-vu when the sainted Hog Farm served me brown rice-folded into a slice of Wonder Bread...
...Although it ended up with a twisted revolutionary fantasy, the New Left started out in reaction to that malaise in the first place...
...A corollary of this is an awareness of the importance of the rights of minorities-all minorities, not just social underdogs...
...The collapse of the movement-the rapia wilting of commitment-supports this theory, and yet you cannot read this book without being startled by the incisive insights buried in the garbage...
...It’s with this question in mind that I indulged in the preceding bit of autobiography, which is not history but the story of an educational experience...
...There are the highly visible contributions, such as their approach to foreign policy, their exposure of the futility of incremental reform, and their distrust of all solutions imposed from the top-the way to promote prosperity is to pump up a gigantic, useless defense industry-in favor of thinking from the bottom up-what work needs to be done...
...I remember in particular a teak cheeseboard sunk in marble...
...There is a tendency throughout the left-old, new, liberal, and radicalto view the lower-middle and the middle-middle classes as antagonists to the cause and then talk romantically about “the people...
...position on the outside...
...I went into Fayerweather Hall, where the least ideological sit-in was in progress, but soon found myself angered by the pounding futility of participatory democracy and exhausted by the milling of packed-in humanity...
...That afternoon, when I got home, I found a note from my militant younger sister...
...The excuse was that the cause was such an embattled one, such a long shot, and yet so vital that such non-violent travesties were merely pragmatic Ijeccadilloes...
...Kirkpatrick Sale’s book is not helpful because he writes the history of SDS as it officially viewed itself during its lifetime...
...The majority then voted to stay...
...Sale tells it the way SDS wanted it to be, which also, evidently, is the way some members The answer to the February puzzle: remember it...
...The purpose of the sit-in was to protest the suspension of the leaders of the first coup...
...The majority again was not...
...I lived through an intense educational experience at Columbia, from which I emerged with beliefs about political behavior which were mostly in reaction against the behavior of SDS...
...But I hope this squeamishness was not the only reason why I decided to leave Fayerweather that day...
...I was also until this time apolitical, my parents vaguely identified with the anti-McCarthy left of the fifties but more through friendship and professional association than a tendency towards political activism...
...These two questionswhat is the worth of what you do, and what is the effect, direct and remote, of what you do-were arresting, to say the least, in a world of impersonal me ga-in s t i t u t io ns and artificial, padded job slots...
...And some of us may not have been proud of the way we pressed the questions...
...In fact, one of the most interesting parts of Sale’s book is his account of the inflexible reaction to the baby SDS of an old left which saw the face of Stalin in every shadow...
...We became an auxiliary of the faculty group which assumed the role of standing between the police (which were forever rumored to be about to attack) and the students inside...
...We couldn’t know that the apparently fickle young man was actually in the extreme vanguard...
...Random House, 1973...
...The leadership was clearly in favor of resistance...
...My behavior was the fulfillment of that ghmmer of uncontrol which had frightened me on the march to the Theresa Hotel...
...The Legacy of SDS by Suzannah Lessard Considering the intellectual caliber of many of the participants, the dearth of lasting literature from the New Left is puzzling...
...I was disturbed, upon talking to friends close to the leadership, to discover that they reacted emotionally to any criticism, no matter how small or friendly, of SDS...
...If our goals went beyond the university, then we should have been willing to leave it if necessary...
...Was this muddle the fuel for that intensely felt, enduring protest, or did it draw its inspiration from *SDS...
...This was preceded by a general agreement by most individuals to abide by the decision of the majority...
...There are dangers in this, of course: the left has a way of over-learning from its mistakes...
...it was arrogant, but also not very frightening because it seemed unlikely that the administration would suspend this rather respectable group without also suspending the 700 so far more rowdy activists who had been arrested the first time, a speculation which turned out to be accurate, as the suspensions were revoked later that summer...
...The question is, how will it influence...
...Even when, in the endeavor to make the threat real, the hard-core whites became Weathermen, they were thought of by everyone (except evidently the Nixon White House which thought they were evil incarnate) as crazy-poor sick children...
...We would surge back...
...He was saying that one should not seek change because of that risk, that one’s political actions should be governed by that fear, a craven attitude which was to me the breath of death itself...
...They would charge with a flying wedge...
...They were the children of affluence and they said that there was something desperately wrong with their world...
...Juan Gonzalez defined the issue: “It was a confrontation which showed how much we believed in what we were fighting for...
...But that didn’t alter their urgency or the validity of the insight which prompted them...
...Today the old SDS views are the stock in trade of the stodgiest professor of political science...
...What I do remember is an open rebellion against SDS...
...It started in those moments of inaction between the time the policemen lined up and the charge into the building...
...But perhaps even more important is their reassessment of values which, even though many New Leftists ended up in the comer of nihilism-has triggered a groundswell of questioning...
...We would learn to part just as the wedge flew at us headlong...
...Bravo...
...The first vote was whether to stay or leave...
...It would be wrong, however, to paint a picture of the Hamilton group as a noble, reasonable body...
...The blacks needed no such evidence that their cause was just...
...They rejected the status ladder and the notion that if you sat behind a big desk and did tax law for large corporations all day you were automatically a valuable member of society...
...As a dogged preMcLuhanian (less in age than in conviction), I believe that the use of language reflects the clarity and quality of thought-is a measure, even, of truth...
...These values were extended right into the SDS operation...
...The isolated character of Sale’s account reflects the truth in one sense-even for purpose of strategy, the New Left had practically no sensitivity whatever to the working and middle classes...
...In the end 70 young radicals made their career decisions that night, to which the actual calling-in of the police and the ensuing brutality was secondary...
...I was moved by the black people who leaned out of windows and waved at the white middle class marching by, although the “good feeling” was mixed with a sense of foolishness, particularly as we solemnly sang over and over again with the patience of slaves in chains, “We shall overcome...
...The irony of that evening was that many of us ended up staying and getting arrested as much in defiance of SDS as of the administration...
...For most of SDS the answer was clear...
...Toughness and authenticity of commitment (how far are you willing to go...
...I was, at the time, a student at Columbia School of General Studies, an adult education school, whose student body was a motley crew of varying age, talent, and background...
...They were still hanging there, unanswered, several years later when the student population had returned to the fifties and copies of Charlie Reich were gathering dust on establishment bookshelves...
...The experience of having acquiesced to the suppression of free speech-of having felt that instinct moving in me-has left such a deep impression that if I am ever again in a situation in which someone is denied self-expression on political grounds, I think I will have an extreme reaction...
...We would mass...
...Fourth, an abhorrence of the mentality which perceives politics as the primary vehicle for human potential, as the sum value of any given group...
...were always the criteria of worth in the New Left...
...The group may have been moderate, but the SDS leadership controlled the microphone...
...They go to the heart of the country’s malaise, and once a sick body becomes aware of its sickness, the survival instinct is aroused and its corporate attention is not likely to wander...
...But I know that I owe most of the lines of inquiry I have pursued in the years since that time directly to that small band who are becoming a smaller and smaller chapter in the history books as the century flows forward...
...Even if they were aloof and uncooperative, the blacks in Hamilton represented both legitimacy and a challenge which the SDS leadership drew on heavily to keep the spirit of the troops from lagging...
...The explosion of the emotional powder keg...
...I was groping for my principles, and a coherent political stand was completely beyond me...
...Unable to attribute greed or self-preservation to their recoil from the risks of radical change (exactly what change was unclear, but that didn’t matter), I could see only a fear of growth, again the instinct of death-an abdication of hope in capitulation to fear, a shrinking away from luminous possibilities towards safe, blandly, mechanistically destructive mediocrity, and a projection of human beings as slaves of their own structures, incapable of transcending the dross in their nature to act on the gold...
...In actual fact, because a second arrest was a far graver threat than suspension-leading possibly to jailmost of the people who had been arrested the first time around left the hall when arrests became likely, thus leaving a clear majority of older, comparatively moderate people like myself who, for whatever reason, had not sat in the first time around...
...There is practically no reference to what was going on outside the organization-for example, the assassination of Robert Kennedy gets one line, a slight which may be “~orrect’in~ terms of radical philosophy (the system, not the personalities in it, makes the difference), but this hardly minimizes the personal impact which that event must have had on people deeply involved in politics...
...Tampering with the Evidence My impression that Sale has both desiccated and sugared his material was confirmed by his treatment of the one major event I experienced firsthand, the Columbia student uprising of 1968...
...For three years later large numbers of the hard-core New Left had followed his pathbreaking course to a blissful apolitical life in the hills of New England, reenacting that perennial pendulum sway of the left from Union Square to Vermont...
...Adults of good will who entered into those violent arguments between generations which marked the time, seemed to echo, in more muffled terms, the Argentinian’s position...
...That this questioning poked at the unprotected innards of the establishment was confirmed by its reactionclumsy, reflexive, defensive, and by the uncontrollable escalation of the relationship between questioners and the questioned to an impasse in which both sides reverted to force...
...We would climb back in...
...The Questions Remain These are hardly record-breaking conclusions...
...Secondly, suspension for a semester is hardly an insuperable obstacle to an academic career...
...We were right, as Tom Huston’s plan proved four years later...
...The definition of students as victims was ridiculous when cast in the overblown rhetoric of “oppression,” etc., but they were right when they saw that many of the careers for which their education prepared them, and which the society expected them to pursue, were traps in which their life energy would be wasted...
...Later we got our chance at our one phone call...
...I remember the New York dawn through the barred rear window...
...The threat of suspension merely stiffened our spines...
...The rule of the day was largely empty rhetoric, the rousing of emotions, the heralding of emotions as belief, and action...
...Kirkpatrick Sale alludes to far-reaching effects, but I find them hard to pin down...
...In order to be truly contemporary you have to be black,” said a friend of mine at the time...
...But there is another question: what will be the effect of the New Left on the evolution of the liberaltoradical community in general...
...the Stepsitters saw it all, going from building to building...
...The rights of the speakers, and the rights of the conservative students, who by this time had become a vocal minority, played no restraining role...
...The white radicals were inevitably caught in an image of child rebelling against parent...
...But I also saw there-we all did-in a flash the face of the establishment stung out of a complacent sleep, and, to everybody’s suprise, I think, before it could adjust, it revealed itself to be as inflexible, bankrupt, and uncomprehending of the language of values as the SDS rhetoricians had made it out to be...
...Were we students who were politically active, or activists who happened to be students...
...Third, a knee-jerk reaction against mob emotion, and a detestation of anything remotely resembling the manipulation of crowds...
...At the station we were searched by policewomen and as we emerged on the way to our cells, Ti-Grace Atkinson, wearing big dark glasses, asked us expectantly if we had been mistreated...
...Home from a Bust in a Cab Then Columbia blew up, and it was my political baptism, because for the first time I couldn’t just go home and comment cleverly to my friends...
...F e y would drive us off...
...Goaded by our ineffectuality, we resorted to vicious personal taunting of individual policemen (often drawing class lines-they were stupid, etc.-an irony lost on us at the time...
...he was going to go to a quiet little cabin in the mountains where the silence was broken only by the wind in the pines to think things over...
...A corollary of this is the danger of being sucked into the internal symbolism, standards, and psychodynamics which group activism creates, most notably the notion that the greater the risk, the more worthy the action, and the mistaking of feeling for belief...
...SDS then ordered to leave those who had voted to go-they wanted a hard core, people (I now understand) who would fulfill their fantasy of preparedness to make a critical career choice...
...We became set against the crude manipulations of SDS, but we generated our own heady mob rule and practiced the doctrine that thinking in itself is reprehensible...
...It strongly suggests that many ex-SDSers live in a nostalgic, self-serving dream about what it all was really like, dishing out gilded versions of their memories to an interviewer like old forgotten soldiers glad of a rare audience, incapable of honestly analyzing their moment of glory...
...The original questioners may have scattered and vanished since then or floundered into untenable self-destructive positions...
...This aspect of Sale’s material, I fear, tells us more than that the author was not ,as probing as he could have been: it ’ tells us something about his sources...
...The truth when it emerged was a much crueler rebuke, for instead of sharing their white colleagues’ romantic attraction to confrontation with the police, they rejected it...
...The term Middle America was born when a mass of people made their political presence known mainly in reaction to the New Left...
...I would like to recount here my version of the second sit-in at Hamilton Hall, and the events leading up to it, not only to set the record straight against Sale, but to open lines of inquiry into what the New Left meant to us all, politically, personally...
...Early that morning we filed into paddy wagons...
...In the outcome of that particular tale lies an apt symbol for the sad end of SDS: Moynihan’s plan was defeated in large part because of “radicals”-George Wiley and his welfare mothers, who stormed Capitol Hill and successfully duped the liberal flanks into joining them in their “non-negotiable demand” for $5,600 per annum rather than $2,000...
...What was it all about...
...Nobody left...
...blind, emotional anti-au thoritarianism, uninformed moralism, and an intuitive certainty on that one clearcut issue, the Vietnam war...
...Finally, not wanting to risk a second arrest themselves, most of the leadership left...
...The effect of this new way of looking at the system on the liberal community was so broad that by 1971 a man like Patrick Moynihan was lobbying from inside a Republican White House for a guaranteed income...
...But insights learned through experience have a special force with all of us...
...Keenly aware that I was exercising the inviolable right of the accused, I called a friend and had a pleasant, sophisticated little social chat...
...Not only did they feel most of these plush job slots were a waste of time, but they suggested that people should consider themselves responsible for the social effects of the institutions to which they lent their talents...
...It was an easy, blameless, though not particularly gratifying, position to take...
...SDS was not a civil libertarian organization-I can see that now-but at the time my reaction was hazy...
...I have no idea what was going through my mind . Red Armbands and Elite Weddings The period of the strike, which followed the bust and lasted until the end of the school year, was for me a period of utter confusion...
...I know the Civil Rights bill probably never would have been passed without the work which this one-sided sentimentality accomplished, and believe the good outweighs the violation, but still cannot bring myself to revel in the glory...
...For example, throughout the book he ignores the impact on SDS of the parallel black movement, but when dealing with Columbia he even overlooks the impact of blacks from within the protest...
...Then at last came the bust...
...SDS confronted American liberalism with the inadequacy of looking at the Cold War as the creature of the Soviet Union alone...
...Before this I had not gone South on the buses with my friends to advance the cause of desegregation, partly because I didn’t have any money, partly because I was uncomfortable with the idea of a lot of very young Northerners marching into what amounted to another land to force the wicked inhabitants to mend their ways...
...Even more counter-productive is Sale’s practice of transmitting the self-image of the organization rather than digging for the reality...
...The leadership ranted, insulted, berated...
...My civil rights activities consisted of a march in New York up to the Hotel Theresa in Harlem (I don’t remember the year), where Joan Baez appeared, a tiny figure on a balcony, and sang “Blowin’ in the Wind...
...It read, “Bravo...
...Then after the buildings had been cleared, a senseless circular battle played itself out...
...I can only explain my behavior that night by saying that I went out of my mind...
...I wore a red armband proudly about town with an almost military pride, which I look back on with a shudder because the badge of group identification somehow absolved me, in my own mind, of individual accountability...
...Their struggle was “real...
...However, having agreed to abide by a majority decision, nobody left...
...The danger of turning a political experience into a gilded mythology is not just that students of history are cheated, but that doing this freezes the period in time...
...His audience hooted at the ludicrous incongruity of his sentimental image, and as he hastily picked his way through the seated crowd to the door, he was booed...
...The next issue was whether or not to resist arrest...
...This impression carried over into a halfhearted attitude towards all the marches and rallies which followed, in which I invariably felt both seduced and antagonized by crowd emotions...
...Kirkpatrick Sale...
...Nobody seems to know as far as I can see...
...But what will be the influence of the New Left on thought...
...When the time for arrest drew near, they called friends, gave them all their money and valuables, and then, when the cops arrived, submitted without a flicker of resistance...
...This is one of the reasons the movement died on the vine...
...Like the more Byzantine memos which float around est a blishment bureaucracies, SDS communications on the whole are pretentious, clogged bunches of words which, if you make that extra effort to decipher them, yield flimsy, if not absurd ideas...
...The doublethink, when it comes to the bluecollar constituency, is particularly blatant...
...And there is almost equally little about what actually went on within the organization, very little about what members were feeling and thinking, little attempt to use the advantage of hindsight to extract the genuine from the detritus, to distinguish between self-image and the truth...
...Suzannah Lessard is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...the blacks didn’t...
...The left has to learn to ask questions such as: disregarding what we now know Nixon to be, for what reasons did the majority reelect him, and among those reasons, which ones are sound-which reasons must be made a part of left-wing consciousness and policy...
...Finally the action moved to the street (I think the police simply left the campus) where mounted cops would charge knots of people who would retreat like a wave in slow motion...
...For most of them (the radicals) this round of the battle would be decisive: the university announced that day that any student arrested when the police cleared the buildings would be suspended, and the question of whether to be full-time students or full-time radicals was posed irrevocably that night...
...The problem of the white radicals was making society notice them as a serious political force rather than as mere rebellious kids...
...But the destructive impact of the New Left’s last, hare-brained forays against the system hardly invalidates the brilliant seminal thought that emerged in the earlier years...
...The police treated them with kid gloves and then went on to the cavalier beating of uppity children which took place throughout the rest of the campus...
Vol. 6 • March 1974 • No. 1
