Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 12: Marge Piercy and the Anti-Rusk Demo, 1967

Chapter 12: Marge Piercy and the Anti-Rusk Demo, 1967 (ii)

On the Saturday before the anti-Rusk demo, Gottlieb, Sutheim and Marge came to the apartment with Dave, after having held an afternoon meeting and eaten dinner out together. They had been smoking a lot of grass and dancing to Rolling Stones’ music for awhile, when I went into the living room to join them in their little party. I smoked some grass myself and was content to sit on a couch and just listen to the music while Sutheim and Marge took turns dancing with Gottlieb and Dave—in-between continuing to talk SDS Regional Office shop.

Near the end of the party, Marge—who appeared to be in high spirits from the pot—insisted that I dance with her, in a friendly tone. We danced to a few long songs on the Rolling Stones album that contained the tune “Something Happened To Me Yesterday.”

It was during the two weeks before the anti-Rusk demo that Mark and I started to gossip with each other. In early November, Mark telephoned Dave at the apartment when Dave wasn’t home. Somehow Mark and I began to talk about Trude, Ted and Dave. Mark mentioned that he and Trude had once been close. We gossiped for awhile. And we each discovered that we could make each other laugh.

After gossiping about New Left politics and New Left people with him, I began to feel that Mark was getting more serious about being a New Left activist. When he said “Ciao” at the end of the phone conversation, I felt more warmth from him than I had previously felt. He seemed more fun to talk with now.

On the day of the anti-Rusk demo, about 100 hard-core Columbia SDS people met at the sundial in the late afternoon. Teddy gave a brief speech from the sundial in an easygoing tone and, halfheartedly, urged everybody to head downtown towards the Hilton Hotel. We all entered the 116th Street subway station through the kiosk and, when a Broadway downtown local arrived, we all got on the train simultaneously.

“Maybe we should take over the whole subway train like they used to do in France during the Algerian War,” Teddy joked, as the train moved towards 50th Street and Broadway. Most of the hard-core SDS radicals heading downtown weren’t too enthusiastic about spending the night in front of the Hilton, because our numbers from Columbia were sparse. And we didn’t expect many other people to be at the demonstration. But since the demo against Rusk had been planned, we all figured we might as well follow-through on it, the best way we could. I didn’t expect to get arrested outside the Hilton. I assumed that even if we were blocking traffic for awhile, we would be able to get back on the sidewalks if we saw any cops coming towards us.

Around the beginning of the midtown rush-hour, Columbia SDS people stepped out of the subway station at 50th Street and Broadway, feeling in more of a party-like than a warlike mood, as we noticed all the 9-to-5 people mechanically rushing home from the skyscrapers. The 9-to-5 people all seemed unaware that an anti-Rusk demo was about to take place.

The hundred of us, three-quarters of whom were Columbia men, walked towards the Hilton in a conspiratorial, smiling way. I noticed that the streets and sidewalks were crawling with NYC cops, and that police barricades were in front of the Hilton on 6th Ave. and W. 53rd St. When we got as close as we could to the Hilton, I noticed that Mark and Ted were each chanting through bullhorns and encouraging people to go “block the limousines” in the streets and “block the rush-hour” traffic. Some of us went into the street to confront the honking, disgruntled rush-hour drivers and any limousines we were able to pick out in traffic. Within a few minutes, however, police on horses and police on foot, with their clubs swinging, were rushing into our group of demonstrators. And within a few seconds, most of the Columbia SDS-led contingent of white demonstrators that escaped contact with the clubs—including me—was back on the sidewalk, trying to blend in with the now-curious rush-hour crowd of spectators. Prior to escaping to the sidewalk, I noticed that—about 25 yards away from me—Mark and his bullhorn were being grabbed by a group of burly cops. During the next hour or so, groups of demonstrators from both the Upper West Side and the Lower East Side periodically staged “guerrilla” traffic-blocking actions on the street. And, in an indiscriminate way, the cops “retaliated” with horse charges or foot charges on all the remaining demonstrators.

While this was going on, I was thinking that “boy, the cops really are brutal” and “boy, what a futile way to confront Rusk this proved to be.” I heard later that a few limousines did actually get blocked. But most ruling-class limousines were unaffected by the demo.

I bumped into Marge again, in the middle of a crowd of some anti-war demonstrators who were standing across the street from the Hilton Hotel, near the end of the demonstration. She still seemed friendly.

“What do you do when you’re not doing political work?” I asked her.

“I write poetry,” she answered.

“I used to write poetry. But now my poetry seems irrelevant compared to politics,” I replied.

“I have to write poetry in order to be able to be political,” Marge said. She then started to talk to somebody else.

During the demo, I had heard that Ted and his bullhorn were also seized by cops around the time Mark was grabbed. So after bumping into Marge and, subsequently, Teddy and Nancy and the Schneiders—and listening to a few boring speeches by the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade pacifists and moderates until Rusk finally left the Hilton—I headed downtown to 100 Centre Street. I wanted to find out what had happened to Ted and Mark. As I rode downtown on the subway, I thought to myself: “How sick America is. Now they’ve trapped Ted and Mark in their jail.”

When I arrived at 100 Centre Street for the first time, I took the elevator up to the floor where arrested people were being arraigned. I then went into the night arraignment courtroom. Except for the judge, some cops and court officers, and a few prosecuting or defense attorneys, it was nearly empty of people. But I then noticed Dave walking down the center aisle of the courtroom.

“Ted and Mark are being charged with `inciting to riot.’ But we should be able to get them released soon,” Dave said earnestly. He had spent the previous few hours calling Movement legal people from the courtroom building, and he seemed to have everything under control.

“Inciting to riot? Are they kidding?” I replied in a surprised tone.

Dave smiled. “The cops want to say that their police brutality was just a necessary response to an SDS-incited riot.”

“Is there anything that I can do?”

“Not really. The lawyers are pretty much taking care of everything now.”

Dave had to hang around the courthouse a while longer to make more phone calls and discuss details with lawyers. So I headed back uptown to the apartment, alone. When I got there, I turned on the radio and listened to some radio news descriptions of the events around the Hilton. As usual, I found the news reports bore little relationship to what had actually happened on the street during the demonstration.

Ted and Mark were released without much delay and were back around campus the following afternoon. Neither Ted nor Mark had been roughed up while in police custody. Everybody within Columbia SDS leadership circles treated the “incitement to riot” charges against Mark and Ted as some kind of Establishment and cop joke. The consensus around Columbia SDS was that the anti-Rusk demo had, indeed, been a fiasco. We explained its failure as being a result of the New York Regional SDS Office’s isolation from a grassroots campus base, which tended to lead its staff members to plan unrealistic, left-adventuristic actions.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 12: Marge Piercy and the Anti-Rusk Demo, 1967

Chapter 12: Marge Piercy and the Anti-Rusk Demo, 1967 (i)

On the Sunday evening after the march on the Pentagon, I had also talked with Dave about the demonstration. He hadn’t appeared surprised that the U.S. government had been able to control the demonstrators, despite the mass bravery and militancy. During the next few days, however, news of the government’s brutality in relation to the people who had sat-in, and its harsh treatment of those it had arrested, began to filter through the jails and to the outside world. And a new spirit of militancy and resistance, generated by the Pentagon confrontation, impacted heavily on the New York SDS Regional Office. So Dave volunteered our apartment for an SDS regional meeting to plan a militant street demonstration, patterned after the Pentagon demonstration, in front of New York City’s Hilton Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

The Pentagon confrontation had persuaded New York SDS Regional Office people like Jeff, Sutheim, Gottlieb, Halliwell and Marge Piercy that large numbers of people in New York City were ready for much more militant street activity in their street demonstrations against the Viet Nam War, comparable to the tactics used by European student groups such as German SDS. Mark and Ted also had been persuaded, by the apparent success of the Pentagon demonstration in radicalizing more people and “upping” the level of anti-war militancy, that Columbia SDS and the New York SDS Regional Office should try to organize an anti-war demo in Manhattan that embodied the new post-Pentagon confrontation spirit of resistance and militancy.

On November 14, 1967, LBJ’s Secretary of State—Dean Rusk—was scheduled to speak at the Hilton Hotel on W. 53rd St. and 6th Ave. at a meeting of the Foreign Policy Association, an elite group of ruling-class corporate-types. By November 1967, Rusk was seen by most anti-war people as a war criminal and a leading apologist for crimes against humanity in Viet Nam.

What the SDS Regional Office hoped to do was to mobilize thousands of anti-war people who had moved “from protest to resistance” in front of New York’s Hilton Hotel to confront Rusk and his Foreign Policy Association colleagues with militant opposition to their crimes and their right to rule over us.

Sutheim, Marge Piercy and some North American Congress on Latin America [NACLA] movement researchers had put together packets of revealing literature on Rusk and the Foreign Policy Association. A militant confrontation on November 14, 1967 would also provide a chance to spread this information to a wide audience and to raise anti-imperialist consciousness around New York City.

SDS chapters on all the New York City area college campuses were contacted by the NY SDS Regional Office and, on the last weekend in October 1967, one or two people from each chapter—plus about 9 people from Columbia SDS and New York SDS Regional Office circles—showed up at my W. 94th St. apartment to plan the November 1967 anti-Rusk demo. About 25 people attended this planning meeting.

Among the SDS activists attending this meeting was a 31-year-old woman who looked younger, although she was among the few women at the meeting who still used lipstick. Her name was Marge Piercy. Her novel, Vida, would later contain a fictionalized version of how Movement people planned this 1967 anti-Rusk demonstration.

Marge had attended the University of Michigan and a university in the Chicago metropolitan area in the 1950s; and she had also written Beat poetry during that decade. And during most of the 1960s she was married to her second husband: a white middle-class man.

At the anti-Rusk demo planning meeting, Marge sat on the chair in the apartment that was right next to the telephone. She appeared content to just sit and listen during the whole meeting, without making any strategic suggestions of her own. Other activists at the meeting included Gottlieb, Naomi, Joe and Dave, from the SDS Regional Office and—from Columbia SDS—Mark, Ted and me. Gottlieb, Ted, Mark and Dave pretty much determined the political direction of the meeting. Various suggestions were made as to what the most effective and non-violently militant way to confront Secretary of State Rusk would be.

The meeting consensus was that we would try to move into the street in front of the Hilton Hotel as ruling-class limousines drove up to the Foreign Policy Association gathering, and then retreat onto the sidewalk whenever the police attempted to clear us from the streets. A few people were assigned to examine whether it would be possible to non-violently confront Rusk with demonstrators inside the Hilton Hotel. SDS people with bullhorns would be in the street outside the Hilton Hotel, encouraging the anti-Rusk demonstrators to use “mobile tactics” to block traffic in the streets around the hotel.

Over the next few weeks, SDS/MDS Regional Office people worked hard to mobilize people for the November 14, 1967 anti-Rusk demo. But, as the memory of the Pentagon confrontation receded, fewer anti-war people around the City appeared eager to attempt to non-violently charge the Hilton Hotel to confront Rusk and the Foreign Policy Association Establishment-types about war crimes in Viet Nam. The pacifist Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee was only willing to hold its usual innocuous, non-confrontational, legalistic, non-militant anti-war demonstration between police barricades, in a street across from the Hilton.

A few people, including me, made separate visits to the Hilton Hotel to check out how easy it might be to sneak inside with anti-war protesters. But after examining the Hilton’s layout, nobody thought it possible to get inside the hotel for any length of time, without first being stopped by hotel security guards. There were too few street entrances to the Hilton Hotel for anti-war demonstrators to be able to sneak into the place.

As news of what was being planned for the anti-Rusk demo spread among Columbia SDS activists and grad school theoretical “heavies,” people at Columbia started to feel lukewarm about what was being planned, and little mobilizing effort was made on Columbia’s campus to recruit large numbers of students for this off-campus demo. Al, a heavily cerebral Columbia grad student from Boston, was becoming increasingly influential with praxis-axis people on the Columbia SDS steering committee because of his ability to mask his anti-action, right-opportunist political line in Marxist jargon. He was among the Columbia SDS “heavies” who ridiculed the New York SDS Regional Office’s strategy for the anti-Rusk demo.

Because Mark remained enthusiastic about the proposed “wild in the streets” tactics—even after others started to feel lukewarm about how effective the whole demo would be—Mark continued to develop an image within Columbia SDS leadership circles of being “irresponsible,” a “wild man” and a “hippie anarchist.” As November 14th approached, Ted, like Mark, planned to carry a bullhorn on the streets outside the Hilton. But, unlike Mark, Ted had come to feel that the New York Regional Office’s anti-Rusk demo strategy was too adventuristic in its conception. And Ted expected the demonstration to make little impact in New York City.