Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967

Chapter 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967 (xiii)

Sunday afternoon was spent at a brief National SDS Council closing session and, since Ted wanted to stay an extra day in Madison while I had to get back to class and my Journal of Philosophy job the following day, I decided to take a spot in a car going east that was leaving late Sunday afternoon, which was being driven by John. Also in the car were JJ, Ben, Ben’s woman friend—who had been driven to Madison in a different car than Ben a few days before—and the Japanese student who had come to demonstrate the snake dancing techniques to SDS people. Ben’s woman friend was in her mid-to-late 20s, was dressed in blue jeans, had long brown hair, and didn’t seem as intellectual as most of the other SDS women who had attended the National Council meeting.

John was a good driver, but less cautious than either Ted or Brian had been while driving on the turnpike. He tended to overtake and pass more cars while driving on the highway, in a much more impatient way than Ted or Brian had.

John spent much of the time talking radical politics with JJ and me and recounting earlier Movement history and early 1960s Movement gossip. John, like Harvey and Josh, had found graduate school study at the University of Wisconsin to be worthless and less relevant than his work on organizing a Madison Draft Resistance Union. Unlike JJ, John felt SDS was making real progress organizing students around draft resistance in accordance with New Working-Class ideology, in opposition to the use of student deferments as an Establishment instrument of “channeling” and around the slogan “not with my life, you don’t,” which spoke to students’ sense of powerlessness. Around this time, John was considering giving up his 2-S deferment because he felt it undercut attempts to organize non-students in campus-based draft resistance organizations. John also was beginning to question whether SDS chapters should continue to try to prevent on-campus recruitment by the U.S. military or Dow Chemical—from a left position.

“You know, Dow Chemical actually does belong on the corporate university’s campus. The corporate university trains manpower for the corporations, and Dow Chemical being on the campus to recruit emphasizes the real nature and the real function of the corporate university. Why should we try to purify the corporate university, by acting as if recruitment by Dow Chemical on campus is some kind of an aberration and something extraordinarily different than what `business is usual’ at the corporate university is all about?” said John.

JJ pointed out the political limitations of this position: i.e., even though Dow Chemical or the military on campus represented the logical extension of the corporate university’s politics, students still should stop such recruitment, in order to resist the war on any terrain where students could materially hurt the U.S. military or U.S. war machine, concretely.

As John drove past the oil refineries around Cleveland’s outskirts, Ben, the Japanese student and Ben’s woman friend were fast asleep. John, JJ and I were still awake and discussing what North American society would look like after it radically changed. We all assumed this change would happen by the end of the 1970s.

“I think those oil refineries represent ugliness,” I commented.

“They’re only ugly because the workers don’t control them, Bob,” John replied. “We shouldn’t be like the Luddites, even though we want to de-emphasize mindless industrial production and reduce the time people have to spend at factory work.”

“To me, those refineries symbolize exploitation and immoral materialism,” I said.

“There’s another side. They also symbolize what workers have been able to build. To me, those refineries have a certain beauty,” John said.

Then we got into a discussion about what place technology should play in the ideal society and to what degree technology had led to the anti-humanistic monstrosity that U.S. society in the 1960s had become. JJ joined the discussion, but nothing was resolved before we began to talk about another topic.

In Western Pennsylvania, in the early morning hours, John became sleepy and JJ took over the wheel. John took my seat in the backseat in order to try to get more sleeping room for his legs. I sat in the front seat next to JJ and had to fight against falling asleep myself, while JJ drove next to me.

JJ was a good driver. He did not drive as fast or as impatiently as John. But in the hours before dawn JJ started to get sleepier, as he drove through central Pennsylvania. I recall having to shove the steering wheel back to the left once, after JJ started to fall asleep at the wheel, and the car started to swerve to the right and onto the shoulder of the Turnpike. JJ opened his eyes again and decided that we should pull over, wake up John, and let John take over the driving again.

We shifted people in the car again and, somehow, John ended up at the wheel, JJ ended up sprawled in the back seat asleep, next to the sleeping Japanese student and Ben; and Ben’s awakened woman friend ended up in the middle of the front seat leaning against me, as she tried to fall asleep again. By this time, even those of us who were awake were too tired to talk anymore. So John just turned on the car radio, and he started to drive as quickly as he could towards New York City.

By the time we reached the outskirts of Harrisburg, the sun was up. We drove off the Turnpike and stopped at a gas station, where John purchased a pack of cigarettes and some coffee from a local highway restaurant. Then he headed toward Route 22, which was a toll-free alternative route to New York City. About ten minutes later, as John drove at 80 mph, we heard a siren behind us.

“Shit!” John said as he looked in his rearview mirror and started to slow down.

A Pennsylvania state trooper then pulled up in his car, alongside John’s car, and told him to pull over to the side of the highway.

“Let me see your license and registration,” the trooper said, as he stood next to the car.

John fumbled around his wallet—and in the glove compartment for awhile—and then handed over his license and registration form to the state trooper. The state trooper looked over the documents and then wrote out a speeding ticket for John.

“Don’t let me find you speeding again like that further down the road. Our radar picked you up at 78 miles per hour,” the state trooper warned John, as he handed him the ticket.

“I’m sorry, sir,” John replied in a quiet, respectful, earnest tone of voice. Then the state trooper got back in his car and drove in front of us--at 80 mph for a few miles—before turning around to the other side of the highway.

As he continued driving, John laughed and said: “Shit. I was afraid the cop was going to look for dope in the trunk and notice all my bundles of SDS literature and draft resistance pamphlets. We were lucky.”

JJ had awakened during the stop and he and John joked about what might have happened if John’s SDS literature had been discovered. Then JJ went back to sleep again, as John continued to drive at a slower speed to New York City.

We finally arrived in midtown Manhattan in the late morning. Ben, Ben’s woman friend, the Japanese student, JJ and I all went our separate ways home on the subway, while John drove to the SDS Regional Office to drop off some of his SDS literature there.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967

Chapter 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967 (xii)

Male chauvinism was still not treated as a really serious issue within National SDS. And National SDS leaders appeared to feel uneasy when National SDS women brought up the issue of male chauvinism. At this particular Madison meeting, a physically beautiful woman in her mid-twenties dressed herself up in baggy pants, a flannel shirt and a working-class cap before reading a collectively-written position paper which stressed the need to end male chauvinism within SDS at all levels. In-between reading paragraphs of her position paper, this SDS female “heavy” inhaled on a cigar.

Her speech reflected a hard-hitting radical feminist critique of SDS policy and practice in relationship to Movement women and was interrupted quite a few times by jeers from some of the SDS men at the meeting. After the speech was read, there was little debate or discussion of the issues raised, and the meeting soon adjourned for dinner, and for the Saturday night partying.

Despite the unenthusiastic reception National SDS men seemed to give to the speech on male chauvinism and sexism—because the speech argued that the New Left reflected the sexism of straight bourgeois society—I felt that SDS was still going to be an effective organizational vehicle in the future for establishing sexual equality and female liberation in the United States. Within white, anti-war circles on campus there was not yet much visible evidence of Movement women discontent with the New Left’s political practice in relation to women. Most women student radicals still seemed content to let male radicals play the dominant political roles, although there was growing pressure on white male radicals to start sharing the political shitwork roles with women activists. And many of the most vocal 1970s white middle-class feminist critics of the “Patriarchal New Left” were too deeply involved in their academic studies, middle-class careers or marriages to liberal Democratic Party-affiliated husbands, to be involved in New Left activism in 1967.

Gottlieb and Sutheim also spoke at this National Council meeting. And people like Dave, John, Harvey, Josh and JJ also were in attendance. Another guy named Machtinger was there, too. Ted, Brian and I ate dinner out with Machtinger at a local student hangout near the campus on Saturday night.

Machtinger had grown up on the East Coast, prior to attending Columbia. At Columbia, he had become quite friendly with Ted, before going out to the University of Chicago in Fall 1966 to attend graduate school. At the University of Chicago, Machtinger was a “heavy” in the SDS chapter and played a leadership role in a sit-in at the University of Chicago administration building which demanded an end to the university’s mailing of student class-ranking information to local draft boards.

In the student hang-out restaurant, Machtinger seemed like a pleasant, good-natured, jovial guy, who was more of a grad student and academic radical than an activist. He laughed a lot and was very friendly. After we had eaten dinner and had a few drinks with Machtinger, all of us got into the car of Ted’s father and Ted drove to where Harvey and Josh now lived.

My memories of the next few hours are somewhat hazy, because we all started to smoke a lot of potent pot together at the house in which Harvey and Josh lived, and where Linda was now staying with Josh again. But certain images remain vivid, and I do recall some of what we talked about.

Harvey was now involved with a different woman than the one with whom he had been involved with at Barnard. She listened in a stoned state along with Linda, as Ted informed Harvey and Josh about the state of the Columbia SDS chapter. She seemed both good-natured and quite devoted to Harvey. Linda looked much happier than she had looked in New York earlier in the fall, now that she was together again with Josh.

“Nancy has isolated Teddy from the rest of the chapter. And the chapter is suffering because I have to do most of the day-to-day political work and strategic thinking myself,” Ted complained to Harvey and Josh. “Nancy is more interested in her relationship with Teddy, than in building SDS. She discourages Teddy from doing any more than a minimal amount of political organizing work.”

Harvey, Josh and Linda all seemed to agree with Ted’s negative assessment of Nancy’s influence on Teddy and all felt that Nancy was too self-centered.

“Teddy has always had serious political weaknesses, Ted. That’s why I wasn’t sure he’d make a good chairman. And Nancy isolating him probably accentuates his political weaknesses,” Harvey added.

Personally, I didn’t share Ted, Harvey, Josh and Linda’s negative assessment of Nancy’s political influence on Teddy. But since they all had known Teddy far longer than I had, I didn’t feel qualified enough to openly challenge their negative assessment of Nancy’s influence on Teddy.

The rest of the night remains a blur, as the grass started to take effect and the rock music began to drown out our attempts to have a political discussion. Eventually, Ted, Brian, Machtinger and I staggered into the car of Ted’s father, Ted dropped off Machtinger at the house in which Machtinger was staying and then drove back to his childhood friend’s apartment. Ted, Brian and I then crashed down on the mattresses on the floor, and we all slept soundly until late Sunday morning.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967

Chapter 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967 (xi)

I can’t recall much of what was debated at this particular National Council meeting, although the ideology of New Working-Class theory and student syndicalism/student power still dominated the politics of the SDS national leadership around this time. Like at all National SDS meetings, white male Movement “heavies” tended to dominate the heavily intellectual debate of strategy and theory. Personally, I found the debate interesting for the first hour or so. But after a few hours, the debate turned into a repetitive parliamentary wrangle between Progressive Labor Party heavies and New Left heavies, and people started to leave the meeting room and talk outside in the halls with each other, until the agenda called for discussion of some new topic.

This was the usual pattern of most SDS regional and national meetings between Fall 1967 and June 1969: interesting debates usually deteriorating into dull Marxist verbal battles between the personally straight, puritanical, sexually repressed PL bureaucratic heavies and their more bohemian, hedonistic, pot-smoking, sexually liberated New Left counterparts.

At this particular National Council meeting, a University of Wisconsin SDS heavy named Evan Stark—who was neither PL nor New Left bohemian, but more just a graduate student, academic, independent, traditional Marxist-type—was somewhat influential. The next week he apparently would courageously lead the anti-Dow Chemical Company recruitment demo that was busted up by the Madison police, at which Harvey was brutalized. Another influential person at this meeting was Carl Davidson, who was a national officer of SDS at this time.

Davidson was in his mid-twenties, but he seemed older. He wore the kind of Huck Finn cap that Bob Dylan wore around the time of his first album. Davidson was a quiet guy with a big mustache who was usually accompanied by a future editor of the now-defunct Guardian radical U.S. newsweekly named Karen Gellen. Gellen seemed content to let Davidson do most of the talking at political gatherings, and she seemed content to remain in Davidson’s shadow at this time. She was very sweet and less elitist than Davidson and had a tender-sounding voice. She called herself Karen Davidson at this time.

Davidson was one of National SDS’s leading theoreticians. He had dropped out of grad school after attending Penn State and the University of Nebraska in order to do full-time Movement work. Influenced by IWW theory, the Wobblies’ Little Red Songbook and events at Berkeley, he had written a paper on student syndicalism that, in turn, influenced local SDS chapter activists around the nation. Davidson was one of the first activists who characterized student governments at U.S. universities as “Mickey Mouse” forms of student politics.

Although Davidson wasn’t as loquacious as most Columbia SDS leaders, he struck me from the start as being a decent, committed and great guy. National SDS seemed lucky to have him as a Movement leader. I felt confident that Davidson could help lead the New Left to victory and create a radical democracy within the United States. Both Davidson and Gellen seemed to care nothing for material wealth. Both seemed to have developed an alternative post-college New Left lifestyle, outside the elite bourgeois university—that combined love, dropping out, activism and social commitment—which appealed to me.

Local campus organizing against the war and “institutional resistance”—not national mobilizations in Washington, D.C.—were being stressed by Davidson and the other National SDS heavies around this time. “The war in Viet Nam cannot be ended because it is a logical result of the existing social system. What we have to do is focus on building a movement that changes the System that produces this war. And maybe prevent a `seventh Viet Nam War’ in the future. And the only way to do this is to organize locally, not build another national march,” was the way National SDS leaders argued around this time.

Thus, National SDS leadership, like Columbia SDS leadership, was lukewarm in relation to the scheduled October 21, 1967 “March On The Pentagon” to “confront the warmakers,” which proved to be a successful means of stimulating a mood of increased militancy and resistance among anti-war youths. At this National Council meeting in Madison, PL pushed SDS to sponsor its own competing mass anti-war national mobilization to focus, not on the Pentagon, but on the White House. Much time was wasted at the meeting arguing about this PL proposal, until it was finally voted down.

I can’t recall much else of what was talked about at this National Council meeting, except for images of Crazy Ben standing in the back of the hall ridiculing the “white collar radical” and “bourgeois student” tone of the debate, funny horseplay and verbal exchange during the national office’s appeal for SDS chapters to pledge donations to fund National SDS staff activity, speakers from SDS’s Radical Education Project [REP] and its off-campus organizing projects and a meeting session in which the question of women’s liberation and male chauvinism was discussed.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967

Chapter 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967 (x)

Ted drove his father’s car south down the New Jersey Turnpike, and then west towards the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Like nearly all the New Left men whose cars I rode in, Ted was a good, safe driver who did not take macho risks on the highway, but who could drive for long hours and at night without having to rest his legs, at highway speeds of about 70 mph. In western Pennsylvania, Ted stopped the car for some gas and some dinner at a Pennsylvania Turnpike rest area restaurant. At Ben’s urging, we just walked out of the restaurant without paying the bill after we had eaten our meal, and we giggled as we hit the turnpike again. It seemed easy to outfox the Howard Johnson restaurant chain, if you just ignored their capitalist money-game rules and took what was rightfully yours from the corporate monopolies.

From Pennsylvania, we crossed into Ohio just as Ted and Ben were getting into a discussion about how U.S. society was going to look in the 1970s and 1980s—after we had successfully overthrown the U.S. government and made a Revolution in the United States.

Sitting in the backseat, as Ted kept turning his head towards the backseat to reply to Ben’s arguments while he drove, I half-noticed a sign which seemed to indicate that the divided Ohio Turnpike, because of construction, was going to turn into a two-lane, no-passing, undivided road a few miles ahead, with one lane going west and one lane going east.

Ted, apparently, didn’t notice the sign because, as I half-noticed that on-coming traffic was beginning to come towards us on the lane to the left of us, Ted suddenly accelerated and started to pass the slow-moving trailer-truck ahead of us. Before I could say anything, Ted had driven the car into the left lane and was alongside the slow-moving truck to his right. Then, suddenly, Ted realized that about 400 yards directly ahead of us a big truck was rolling head-on towards us in the same left lane.

Instinctively, Ted took his foot off the gas, slammed on the brakes, swerved the car back and forth, skidded in a way that stopped the acceleration, and somehow managed to reposition the car back in the right lane behind the slow-moving truck, only a few seconds before the oncoming truck from the west passed us by at full speed.

For about a minute, Ted, Ben, Brian, the Japanese student and I all sat in hushed silence. Then Ted said with a laugh: “Since when did the turnpike become a two-way street?”

And Ben replied: “I thought for a few seconds there that we all weren’t going to live to see the Revolution.”

We all laughed. And then Ted decided to pull over to the side of the highway and let Brian take over the driving, after the turnpike had once again become a divided, 4-lane highway. Once Brian started to drive, Ted and Ben resumed their lively political discussion.

Neither Ted nor Brian were yet used to driving on highways stoned in Fall 1967. So even though Ben had brought a supply of grass with him, we all decided we wouldn’t turn on together during the drive out to Wisconsin.

Brian was also a good, safe driver who didn’t drive in a macho way and he was more satisfied than Ted to just drive at the 65 mph limit. Because both Ted and Brian could relieve each other at the wheel, there was no need to stop at any motel before arriving in Madison, early Saturday morning. We then checked in at the Student Union building to register as SDS National Council participants and dropped Ben and his Japanese student friend off on the campus, before driving to the off-campus house in which a childhood friend of Ted lived with a woman friend. Ted’s childhood friend was also a red diaper baby.

Madison reminded me somewhat of Bloomington or West Lafayette, Indiana, and I was curious about what it would be like to attend school so close to a lake. But I didn’t get a chance to do much independent exploring at Madison during this weekend because the debates were too lengthy, and by late Sunday afternoon it was already time to return to the highway back to New York.

Ted’s childhood friend rented the first floor of a run-down house in Madison’s student ghetto. He and his woman friend were both pleasant and anti-Establishment, but they seemed more interested in just living together and being alone with each other, than in getting involved in SDS politics. Ted’s friend showed us the big room in which there were extra mattresses on the floor on which we could crash later that night, and he gave Ted an extra set of keys for the house and first floor apartment. Then Ted, Brian and I said goodbye, left the house, got into the car of Ted’s father, and drove back to the student building to attend the National Council meeting.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967

Chapter 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967 (ix)

A National Council of SDS meeting was going to be held in Madison, Wisconsin during a weekend in October 1967. When Ted suggested that I ride out there with him and Brian, I agreed to attend. I had never been to any kind of National SDS meeting before and had never been to Madison, Wisconsin, so the prospect of attending the meeting appeared interesting. Ted borrowed his father’s car and on Friday afternoon we left the W. 94th St. apartment, picked up Brian at his apartment near the campus and then drove downtown to pick up two other people who needed a ride to Wisconsin.

One of the people we picked up downtown was a Japanese student in a white shirt and tie who appeared to be in his mid-twenties and who spoke little English. The other person we picked up was a short, thin man who had a heavy beard and black long hair, and who appeared to be in his late 20s or early 30s. In the car, he described himself as a revolutionary artist from the Lower East Side. His name was Ben. And he was one of the leaders of SDS’s “Up Against The Wall, Motherfuckers” chapter of hippie anarchists that Tom Neumann had also helped to build.

The trip began with Ted in the driver’s seat, Brian in the front passenger seat and the Japanese student, Ben and I in the back seat. After Ted had driven the car through the Lincoln Tunnel into New Jersey, we all started to talk politics with each other. Most of the talking was done by Ben and Ted. And Ted would often turn his head for a second to the back seat while driving, to reply to a point made by Ben, during the times Ted became passionately involved in the discussion.

After I asked Ben why his Japanese student friend had decided to attend the SDS National Council meeting, Ben replied:

“He’s an expert in teaching the street demonstration tactics of snake dancing that they use in Japan. He thinks SDS should organize students to snake dance at anti-war demonstrations in Washington. If SDS learns how to snake dance at anti-war demonstrations, there’s no way the cops will be able to control demonstrations in Washington. And we’ll really be able to start an anti-war riot and get more of a revolution going.”

Ted started to laugh and I asked Ben: “What do you mean by `snake dancing’?”

Ben smiled and started to talk on and on about the need of the anti-war movement and SDS to start preparing for urban guerrilla warfare in the United States. Ted, Brian and I all seemed to feel that Ben was well-intentioned, but somewhat crazy and fanatical. However, his verbal style of getting out his revolutionary anarchist, “crazy” politics was quite entertaining; and the good-natured debate between Ted and Ben, as we drove out to the Midwest, made time pass by rapidly, as afternoon turned into night.

In the backseat at one point, Ben showed me a copy of the underground magazine he put out, which was called Black Mask. The issue contained some great revolutionary poetry and great revolutionary visual artwork, as well as instructions on how to make Molotov cocktails. In Fall 1967, Ben and the other members of his “Up Against The Wall, Motherfuckers” group—which was usually called “The Motherfuckers” by everyone in the City—openly argued that the time was ripe for New York City white radicals to just drop out of schools or quit their white-collar jobs and start heaving Molotov cocktails at cops, U.S. corporate offices, university buildings and U.S. military targets, whenever possible. Ben and the other Motherfuckers considered most student leftists as nothing more than bourgeois “white collar radicals,” and felt, like JJ, that 95 percent of all SDS national meeting debate was irrelevant, verbal bull-shit.

Although Ben struck me as both loveless and somewhat flipped-out politically (after I had heard him talk in the car for a few hours), I did share his contempt for what he called “bourgeois white honky culture.” But I also thought to myself that “if Ben were the revolution in the U.S., the revolution won’t be too humanistic or liberating;” because Ben seemed too macho, too hard, too authoritarian, too intolerant and too domineering in his personality structure. He didn’t seem to give off enough gentle vibes.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967

Chapter 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967 (viii)

Columbia SDS continued to spend its weekly general assembly meetings in long discussions of political strategy. Mark started to participate more actively in these debates with great enthusiasm. But most of his strategic ideas seemed impractical and somewhat confused to me. At one meeting, Mark enthusiastically suggested that we build a wire fence around Low Library, to symbolize Columbia’s sponsorship of the IDA project which proposed the building of an electronic barrier between North and South Viet Nam to help crush the Vietnamese insurgency, by “preventing `infiltration’” from the north of Viet Nam. At another SDS general assembly meeting, Mark argued in favor of working to build a student strike at Columbia, around university complicity with the Pentagon issues, six months later—in April 1968. And he circulated mimeographed copies of a position paper which argued in favor of Columbia SDS adopting this strategy.

What was good about Mark’s October 1967 position paper was that (unlike the dominant figures in the Praxis-Axis) Mark recognized that unless Columbia SDS was seen by the mass of student radicals as concretely working for some kind of spring strike (and not just simply working to educate students without mobilizing them to act concretely), campus radicals would drift away from active participation in “local organizing” work, as the academic year progressed. What was bad about Mark’s October 1967 position paper was that it failed to show how locking Columbia SDS into a plan to call for a student strike six months later would lead to the mass politicization and radicalization of Columbia and Barnard students any faster than the intensified dorm canvassing, more dorm meetings, more educational activities, more petition-circulating approach being carried out under the Praxis-Axis leadership. Mark’s October 1967 plan appeared to overestimate the degree to which Columbia and Barnard students had already been radicalized and were ready to express their new radicalism in militant non-violent action.

Influenced by Ted, Teddy, Peter Schneider and Al, the mass of Columbia SDS members voted down most of Mark’s October proposals because they seemed overambitious and unrealistic. The “heavy” Columbia SDS theoreticians were still much glibber when it came to discussing political strategy with SDS members than was Mark. Ted, Peter Schneider, Al, Evansohn and the other praxis-axis Marxist intellectuals—like a philosophy graduate student named Andrew—smugly dismissed Mark as being, at best, a “vulgar Marxist” and, at worst, “an anarchist hippie” with “no politics.” Any Columbia SDS person who dared question the chapter’s emphasis on non-alienating, pedantic leftism and consciousness-raising—instead of moralistic, militant non-violent direct actionism—as a means of developing a mass campus base was accused by Columbia SDS’s theoreticians of having “no politics.”

My own strategic position was that Columbia SDS should continue to do dorm canvassing and other kinds of radical education work, in the context of continuing to demand an end to Columbia’s membership in IDA; and not alienate the mass of anti-war left-liberal students by small, premature left-sectarian actions which demanded an end to the Columbia-IDA connection. But when we had won enough people to have a sit-in of 500 in Low Library through this kind of educational work, I felt it would then be most practical to non-violently disrupt business as usual at Columbia, until Columbia’s IDA ties were severed.

Although—like the other Praxis-Axis people on Columbia SDS’s steering committee—I felt that tactics like having a “dirtiest man on campus” contest (in which students voted at the Columbia SDS table on Low Plaza for the Columbia trustee or professor who they felt had the “dirtiest” corporate or personal connections) were clever, I also realized that they weren’t enough. It wasn’t enough, I felt, for Columbia SDS to just be a cute guerrilla theater, radical education, draft counseling, petition-signature-gathering, purely agitational organization. But the intellectualism and intellectual certitude of others within the Praxis-Axis leadership made me assume that they knew what they were doing. If I wasn’t content with Columbia SDS just being a “local organizing” group, that avoided what Teddy called “infantile, masturbatory, left-sectarian action,” in favor of patient campus organizing and patient radical consciousness-raising among future members of “The New Working-Class,” then, perhaps I was being “politically immature.”

I realized that militant confrontational and disruptive non-violent action which exposed and provoked right-wing or Columbia Administration violence was a quicker way to develop mass radical consciousness than just holding teach-ins and forums, and just handing out verbose, pedantic leaflets. But I still felt that not enough students were yet ready to non-violently disrupt campus business as usual. So, unlike Mark, I didn’t think it was that important to agree in October 1967 to call a strike for April 1968—as long as anti-IDA sentiment was going to spread enough on campus by our educational and agitational work to make a mass sit-in or mass non-violent disruption of Columbia in the spring of 1968 possible.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967

Chapter 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967 (vii)

During October and November 1967, a number of Movement people stopped by the apartment to spend some time with Dave. From the SDS Regional Office in Washington, D.C. came Cathy Wilkerson, who was visiting New York SDS Regional Office people on Movement business and needed a place to crash for the night. Cathy was in her 20s, dressed in jeans and a work shirt, and used neither make-up nor lipstick. She sounded much more politically conscious and earnestly committed to making radical social change than the Barnard women students I knew, and she seemed very intelligent.

I first met Jeff when he nodded at me on an October 1967 stopover to meet Dave at the apartment. Jeff had dropped out of Antioch and was also working at the New York Regional SDS Office in Fall 1967. He was a tall, blond-haired guy and was from a Quaker background. But Jeff struck me as more of a rebel and radical Guevarist-type activist in spirit, than a religiously-motivated “pacifist-Quaker”-type activist. I was impressed by his cheerfulness, his good nature, his apparent psychological strength and the energetic way he approached people and moved about. He seemed to be more into being an activist and organizer than an academic radical or a theoretician. I was also impressed by the fact that Jeff had apparently been willing to drop out of school and give up his 2-S deferment, in order to be a full-time Movement organizer before completing college.

A tall Movement guy in his early 20s from Madison, who wore glasses, spent three nights in our apartment, before moving into his own New York City apartment. I can’t recall the guy’s name, but I do recall that he talked about the police riot which squashed the anti-Dow Chemical protest in Madison. Dow Chemical was the company which made the napalm that was being used by the U.S. war machine in Viet Nam to burn civilians.

Madison radicals in Fall 1967 had stopped Dow Chemical Company recruitment at the University of Wisconsin and the University Administration there had called in the police. Many student radicals were then beaten, and Ted and other Columbia SDS people received calls from Madison indicating that Harvey had been brutalized. Given how we all worshipped Harvey, because of his leftist intellectual brilliance, we were, naturally, quite anxious, until we heard that Harvey had not been seriously injured.

Around this same time, Brooklyn College SDS—under the leadership of PL “SDS’ers”, like a guy named Jeff Gordon—had also stopped Dow Chemical recruitment and forced the Brooklyn College Administration to also call cops onto the campus. As a result of the brutal way the NYC cops came onto Brooklyn College’s campus, Brooklyn College SDS, temporarily, acquired a mass student base around anti-repression politics for about a week—until the mass of sympathetic left-liberal students discovered that the Brooklyn College SDS chapter was actually an authoritarian, dogmatic left-sectarian PL chapter, operating under the New Left “SDS” label.

Another Movement visitor who stopped by the apartment one evening was an enthusiastic young activist from Berkeley who had played a leadership role in the mass street actions a few weeks before, in which mobile radical anti-war protesters had succeeded in shutting down the Oakland military induction center for awhile, while bravely confronting Oakland police. For a few hours, the activist—a guy named Kleiman—vividly filled me and the activist from Madison in on details of the anti-draft protest. I was excited by his talk, and felt some envy that more radical and more militant action was happening out near Berkeley than was happening at Columbia. As I listened to his description of the street demonstrations, I once again regretted that I hadn’t been able to afford a transfer to Berkeley.

“We had the cops completely outflanked. So many more people than we ever expected turned out for the protests early in the morning, that the cops were too outnumbered to control us. This was the most militant anti-war protest that’s been held anywhere in the U.S. That’s why they’re trying to pin a `conspiracy’ charge on some of the leaders,” Kleiman explained.

Kleiman’s personal report from Berkeley reinforced my feeling that the pace of mass radicalization and the growth of mass militancy was definitely accelerating. After speaking with Kleiman, I read the West Coast-based newspaper, The Movement, and liked the way it analyzed Oakland’s “Stop The Draft Week.”