Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 15: Steering Columbia SDS Into Action, 1968

Chapter 15: Steering Columbia SDS Into Action, 1968 (v)

There had been some pressure put on the University of Kentucky Administration by the local newspaper and local power structure not to let university facilities be used for an “anti-American” and “communist” meeting like the SDS National Council. But the University of Kentucky Administration hadn’t bowed to this pressure.

In the cafeteria of the student union building, I noticed Mark and other people from Columbia SDS. Mark laughed when he noticed me there and said: “Bob! When did you arrive here?”

“I just hitched down from Cincinnati,” I replied.

Jeff Gordon of PL was also there with his loyal band of PL followers and it appeared that the usual round of PL vs. New Left faction-fighting would take place. In the cafeteria, the PL people sat in the corner by themselves, while all the New Left people from the rest of the country socialized with each other.

There were about 400 white delegates walking in and out of the main mass meetings that weekend in Lexington. It seemed like SDS membership around the country was increasing. Chapters from as far south as Texas were represented and white radicalism in the United States, as a result of the prolonged war in Viet Nam and the draft, no longer just seemed a New York Jewish radical or a Berkeley bohemian phenomenon. There were literature tables with printed material from National SDS’s Radical Education Project [REP] and literature tables staffed by white Southern student radical organizations.

On the Friday evening before the Council meeting officially opened, New Left SDS people relaxed with each other in small groups on a hilly campus lawn of the University of Kentucky and conversed. I can recall noticing Carl and Karen Davidson walking arm-in-arm and Jeff and his woman friend, Phoebe, also touching each other in affectionate ways.

The Columbia SDS men who were unattached were driven by local anti-war religious activists from Lexington, along with other unattached SDS men from around the U.S., to some church on the outskirts of town, on the Friday night after the first session of the Council meeting. We all ended up sleeping cramped next to each other in sleeping bags on the floor of a fairly modern church, after spending a few hours in informal, interesting political discussion with each other. The SDS men and women who formed part of couples ended up crashing in friendly off-campus houses adjacent to the University of Kentucky campus.

I can only recall a few moments from the Council debate itself that seemed significant. Columbia SDS appeared to have the politically strongest and most active SDS chapter in the U.S. by this time. We had sent the most student activists to this meeting and our people usually made the most arguments during the various debates. JJ—although he had by now dropped out of Columbia, did no day-to-day organizing for Columbia SDS and only appeared on campus when demonstrations or SDS general assembly meetings were being held—loved these National Council debates. He would often speak for 10 minutes in a rambling, left-sectarian monotone, in support of some obscure ideological position, until people no longer understood what he was talking about—or even cared. His essential point still was that doing anything other than immediately kicking ROTC and recruiters off U.S. campuses everywhere and immediately trashing university military research labs, in support of the Vietnamese, was bull-shit. But he still didn’t know how to use political argument to persuade anybody that his super-militancy was politically correct—or that his call for SDS people to prepare for campus brawls with those few students he felt would actually fight us if we disrupted campus life, was a good strategy for radicalizing liberal students.

There were again debates over whether to support, at the expense of local campus organizing, national anti-war marches in Washington, D.C. that were being organized and controlled by Socialist Workers Party [SWP] people. Again, National SDS people argued that organizing for national anti-war marches was a waste of time, in terms of building an on-going multi-issue radical movement.

One of the most dramatic moments of the Council meeting occurred on Saturday afternoon when, after long months of study, solitude, thought and non-activism, a former National SDS president—Carl Oglesby—now clean-shaven, came down from the mountain to present his latest political analysis of the U.S. Oglesby was in his mid-30s at this time. He had worked as some kind of white-collar professional at Bendix in Ann Arbor in the early 1960s, before being radicalized by the war in Viet Nam and then discovering that U.S. foreign policy since World War II had been anti-democratic and hypocritical in its Cold War anti-communist hysteria.

“There’s a fight going on in the Establishment between what I call `The Yankees’ and `The Cowboys,’” said Oglesby. “The `Yankees’ are members of the old Eastern Establishment and they’re being represented by Bobby Kennedy. They had power until the Kennedy Assassination and now they want power again, in order to end the war in Viet Nam. `The Cowboys’ are the Southwestern and Western, newly-rich, military-industrial complex-linked members of the Establishment, with Texas and California-based wealth. They’re represented by Lyndon Johnson. They want to continue to escalate the war in Viet Nam until it is won. They’ve held power since the Kennedy Assassination and they want to keep holding power.”

Oglesby then continued his speech, while SDS people listened very attentively. “For the last few years we’ve been saying that the main issue in America is the war in Viet Nam. But the recent Democratic primary results in opposition to Johnson make it look like the `Yankees’ and Kennedy are going to regain the Presidency again and end the war in Viet Nam.

“Now being `radical’ means taking up issues that the liberals are afraid to take up. And no longer will the war in Viet Nam be the main issue in the United States. The main issue is now racism.

“Because of racism, more Black urban uprisings are inevitable. SDS must now prepare for these ghetto uprisings. We must prepare to donate arms to Black activists who need to defend their communities from racism and police brutality.”

At this point in Oglesby’s speech, Ben of the Motherfuckers suddenly stood up in the back of the hall, went into a tantrum and began to shout, as he approached Oglesby in a menacing way: “Donate arms! And let Black people do all the fighting and bleeding while SDS sits securely in the classrooms! White radicals have to fight too, you honky! They may be either Yankees or Cowboys, but we’re the Indians!”

Ben then started shouting incoherently about “white collar radicals” and preparing for guerrilla warfare for a few more seconds, while people laughed at his comment about us being the Indians. Then other SDS people cooled Ben down, finally.

Oglesby next resumed his speech by saying: “Before we can change anything, we have to be sure we’re psychologically together ourselves.” He then stated that the main issue SDS had to now decide was whether or not to support Kennedy in the 1968 election and how to prepare to donate arms to the Black community.

Oglesby’s speech did not go over well because most SDS people were not that certain the liberal “Yankees” were less dangerous than the right-wing “Cowboys” or that it was inevitable that the “Yankees” would end the war so quickly or really alter the foreign policy of U.S. imperialism. People also felt that to respond to Black ghetto uprisings by just donating arms, instead of initiating simultaneous struggle against the common oppressor for radical democratic goals, was too white liberal and passive an approach to responding to racism in 1968.

People were also turned off to the idea of even considering working for the “liberal opportunist” Robert Kennedy, instead of working to build a New Left Movement that radically changed more than who sat in the White House or which country abroad U.S. troops occupied. By this time in National SDS circles, Oglesby was seen as too “apolitical” in his political thinking and not Marxist or neo-Marxist enough in his way of analyzing events. Within SDS rank-and-file circles, the only presidential candidate who had any kind of credibility at this time was Eugene McCarthy because, unlike Bobby Kennedy, he had been willing to run as an anti-war candidate before it became apparent that LBJ could be defeated electorally in the Democratic primaries because of his war’s unpopularity.

In the evening following this Saturday debate a number of parties were held at various locations. I ended up at a party in which people like Ben and the other Motherfuckers and JJ smoked a lot of pot and mingled with local University of Kentucky anti-war movement women. I can recall getting stoned myself and walking around while high with other leftist students and leftist hippies, through car less Lexington streets around the campus. Inside the house, ten to fifteen of us, while stoned or tripping, spent a few hours pounding loudly on steel cooking pots, as if they were drums, at the same time rock music was blaring. Everyone stayed up stoned until mid-morning, turning on again and again, until we each dropped down somewhere and fell asleep either with a leftist or hippie woman in our arms or alone.

On Sunday afternoon, after enough SDS people had recovered from the Saturday night parties, the National Council passed resolutions and tried to raise money, by stirring up friendly chapter rivalry and ridiculing each of the most prominent National SDS “heavies”. Then it wrapped up its business. It was agreed that in late April 1968 SDS chapters would try to simultaneously carry out anti-war and anti-complicity actions on as many campuses as possible, as part of a “10 days against the empire” campaign which would “put SDS on the map.” Although Columbia SDS seemed to have the strongest chapter and Mark’s action-oriented, confrontational leadership appeared to be dynamic, nobody at the Council meeting foresaw how big the spring confrontation at Columbia actually would become.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 15: Steering Columbia SDS Into Action, 1968

Chapter 15: Steering Columbia SDS Into Action, 1968 (iv)

After the pie-throwing incident and the steering committee meeting in which he skillfully outdebated all his Praxis-Axis critics, Mark was clearly in control of the chapter’s direction and was able to lead in a freewheeling, charismatic way, with the enthusiastic support of the bulk of Columbia SDS’s hard core. The next evidence of Mark’s dynamic leadership and willingness to return Columbia SDS to its pre-Praxis-Axis confrontational style of politics was the March 27, 1967 demonstration inside Low Library. Two hundred of us playfully defied Columbia President Kirk’s ban on indoor anti-war demonstrations at Columbia at this time.

The initial goal of the March 27th march into Low Library was to deliver more petitions to Kirk which called for an end to Columbia’s institutional sponsorship of IDA. But—like in December, when Kirk was down in Virginia attending an IDA executive committee meeting—Kirk was not in his office when we entered the Columbia Administration building.

So chanting “IDA must go! IDA must go!,” we marched into the offices of other administrators, including the office of a guy named McGooey, who was your typical mid-50s, suit-and-tie-wearing administration bureaucrat. We asked him to justify Columbia’s ties to IDA and, naturally, McGooey didn’t know anything about them. But he seemed uncomfortable having to face a jeering Columbia SDS crowd led by Mark, Dave and Ted, each of whom shouted questions at him in a derisive, humorous way. Although Ted was hurt by the outcome of the post-pie-throwing meeting, after a few days he put his personal feelings aside and continued to be willing to do chapter agitational work at rallies under Mark’s leadership. After about a half-hour of confrontation and defiant marching inside Low Library, we left the building.

By March 27, 1968, most Columbia SDS people were so frustrated with the Columbia Administration’s failure to cut its ties to IDA that we were ready to sit-in immediately, once we had enough people. We no longer had any faith that the Columbia Administration would resign from IDA because of rational persuasion. We realized that only by showing Kirk that continued ties with IDA meant disruption of business as usual at Columbia would we be able to persuade Kirk to get Columbia’s trustees to pull out of IDA. Our hope was that by defying Kirk’s ban on indoor demonstrations in a confrontational way we would encourage the mass of apathetic anti-war students who had mobilized behind us in the April 1967 confrontation with the Marines to go into political action again. Everyone in Columbia SDS felt “up” after the March 27th demo inside Low Library.

A day or two after the March 27th indoor demonstration in Low Library, spring vacation began. During the spring break, most of Columbia SDS’s hard-core of 30 activists ended up traveling out to Lexington, Kentucky for what was to be a well-attended SDS National Council meeting. At first I wasn’t going to attend. It seemed like too much of a hassle to find a ride in a car going from the Upper West Side, when I only half-believed that National SDS meetings were of relevance to local SDS chapter activity. But after I spent a day back with my parents in Queens, I thought to myself: “What am I doing here? Why don’t I splurge a little and combine a trip to the SDS National Council meeting in Kentucky with a visit to my sister at Indiana University?”

I telephoned my sister (who was now finishing up her BA work at IU), looked at my collection of road maps, telephoned an airline company at LaGuardia Airport, took out some money from my bank account, packed a sleeping bag and some clothes in a knapsack, said goodbye to my mother and took a few local buses to LaGuardia. For the first time in 10 years, I got on a plane—a jet that was bound for Cincinnati. I could only afford a one-way ticket to Cincinnati. So my plan was to land in Cincinnati and hitch to the University of Kentucky campus in Lexington. After the National Council meeting ended, I then hoped to get a ride, or hitch, to Bloomington, Indiana, where I would crash with my sister for a week, before getting a ride back to New York City from Bloomington.

Although I had never hitched before on a highway, I had read through enough Woody Guthrie books and listened to enough Dylan to feel quite eager about starting to do a little hitching in the U.S. My 1968 hitch-hiking from Cincinnati to Lexington was my first time “on the road” hitching.

After the jet landed in Cincinnati in the early afternoon of a hot spring day, I soon found myself on a highway on the outskirts of the city. Within five minutes, a young guy who was a student at Xavier College picked me up and drove me from the airport to the southern outskirts of the city. Five minutes after he dropped me off, two poor whites from a mountain town in Tennessee, who were heading back home, picked me up. I sat in the backseat of their beaten-down jalopy during the hour or two that it took to reach the highway exit for Lexington. After being dropped off, I walked into the town and followed the signs that directed cars to the University of Kentucky campus.

The road from the highway through the town passed through the impoverished African-American section of Lexington, and I walked through this section towards Main Street and the center of town. In the center of town, I made a left and walked by many stores of the downtown shopping section, then up a hill to the University of Kentucky’s campus. As I walked up the hill and saw more of the university buildings, I felt more and more as if I was in a campus town. In the late afternoon, I found the building where the SDS National Council meeting was being held.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 15: Steering Columbia SDS Into Action, 1968

Chapter 15: Steering Columbia SDS Into Action, 1968 (iii)

The Columbia SDS steering committee meeting to discuss the pie-throwing incident took place in one of Earl Hall’s side rooms. I was picked to chair it because both the Praxis-Axis people and Mark felt I would chair the meeting in a neutral way. “What we’re going to discuss is whether Columbia SDS should repudiate the pie-throwing action,” I said right before we went around the room to debate the merits of Mark’s actions.

There were about 20 people in the small room and, initially, it looked like the vote was going to overwhelmingly repudiate the pie-throwing and a move might then possibly be made by the Praxis-Axis to call for new SDS chairman elections the following week.

“Throwing the pie in the middle of the Colonel’s speech was a terrorist action. What Columbia SDS has to still be about is building a mass movement by rational discussion and education—not infantile, small group terrorist actions. It was totally irresponsible for you to ignore the Draft Counseling Committee vote, Mark,” Peter Schneider argued, in an angry voice.

Then Ted followed: “We had a long debate in the committee, Mark. And you lost. You had no democratic right to go off and plan such a politically childish action on your own. It hurts us politically on campus because it alienates us from most of the liberals who still have hang-ups about free speech.”

Teddy and Al and a few other SDS hard-core activists followed with more angry Praxis-Axis condemnation of Mark. It looked like the whole debate was going against Mark, as each speaker poured on heavy criticism of him, and none of his previous sophomore caucus supporters appeared willing to defend either him or the pie-throwing action.

Jeff, from the SDS Regional Office, had dropped by to attend the steering committee meeting. He was one of the first speakers to talk about the pie-throwing action in a positive way. “I was at another campus yesterday and, when I mentioned the pie-throwing, they dug it and thought it was a great action,” Jeff said with a twinkle in his eye and a smile.

A Resist! organizer named Ron, who had been a civil rights worker in the South during the summer before he enrolled at Columbia, also supported Mark’s action.

I then stated my own position: “I think it was a good political action because it shows the campus that we’re about militantly resisting the war and not just having more polite academic discussions. But I don’t think Mark was right in violating the democratic forms of the chapter, in order to carry out the pie-throwing.”

Another speaker or two continued to pour criticism on Mark, as he sat impassively and carefully listened. Finally, it was Mark’s turn to speak. And there was an air of hushed tension as he began his reply:

“The issue isn’t really a question of democratic forms. Or whether the pie-throwing was a good tactic. The issue is whether the old leadership is going to really surrender control of the chapter to me and stop trying to block those of us who want to use more creative tactics to build the Movement.

“Many activists around Columbia have been made to feel like outsiders by the old leadership that still doesn’t want to relinquish control. Now that I’m trying to act more independently and provide a chance for people who have felt excluded from the chapter leadership to get involved in a creative way, they’re trying to undermine me.”

The Schneiders, Al, Ted, Teddy and Nancy began to frown, while the faces of SDS sophomores like Stu and Sokolow began to smile. Then Mark looked at each individual who had criticized him, in turn, and proceeded to answer, in a specific and convincing way, each of their specific individual criticisms, one-by-one. After demolishing each individual’s arguments and criticisms of him, he then made his own psychological and political counter-criticisms of their individual political practice, before turning his attention to the next individual whose criticism he responded to. By the time Mark had finished his 20-minute response, he had won over everyone in the room to his point of view, with the exception of Ted, Teddy, Nancy, the Schneiders and Al.

I called for a vote on whether or not Columbia SDS should repudiate the pie-throwing action. And everyone—except the hard-core Praxis-Axis of Ted, Teddy, Nancy, the Schneiders and Al—voted to support Mark’s position. Ted, Teddy, Nancy, Al and the Schneiders then hurried out of the room after the vote. Everyone else remained in the room to converse about what had just happened, in a gleeful way.

“Did you see Nancy’s face when the vote went against Teddy?” Stu asked somebody, while laughing.

Mark was smiling widely and talking with people in an enthusiastic and animated way.

“That was great! You really exposed their true motives in a clear way. I never saw anyone turn a political meeting around so dramatically like that,” I said to Mark right before I left Earl Hall to get some dinner.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 15: Steering Columbia SDS Into Action, 1968

Chapter 15: Steering Columbia SDS Into Action, 1968 (ii)

The pie-throwing incident of March 20, 1968 marked the start of Columbia SDS’s more confrontational approach, under Mark’s dynamic charismatic leadership.

Colonel Akst, the New York City Director of the Selective Service System, had been invited by some Earl Hall religious counselors of Columbia to speak about the draft options of students. A meeting had been held by Columbia SDS’s Draft Counseling Committee to decide the best way to greet Colonel Akst. At this meeting, Ted, Peter Schneider and Al had persuaded the bulk of Draft Counseling Committee members that the most effective way to respond to Colonel Akst’s presence was to “ask probing and embarrassing questions” after the Colonel spoke.

Mark, however, had argued that this response was not dramatic enough and that SDS people should use guerrilla theater in the middle of Akst’s speech to disrupt the speech of a war criminal. But Mark’s proposal had been voted down by 31 to 3 within the draft counseling committee because Ted, Schneider and Al had argued that it would “alienate” the non-SDS people who would be listening to Col. Akst. Hence, when Col. Akst began to speak in the Earl Hall auditorium all that was expected was that Columbia SDS people would “ask probing and embarrassing questions.”

A de-classified “Red Squad” document of March 22, 1968, however, described what happened when Colonel Akst began to speak:

“Approximately 150 students had assembled in the hall at 4:00 P.M. when Col. Akst began his talk. He had spoken about one-half hour, when a group of students, identified as Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.) members, entered through the rear of the audience and proceeded to cause a commotion. The invading students were equipped with an American flag; some were masked, and some carried toy pistols and fake rifles. They conducted what was purported to be a mock war. While everyone’s attention was drawn to the rear of the hall, one or two youths sneaked up on the stage and threw a lemon meringue pie at Col. Akst. The pie struck the Colonel on the left shoulder and left side of his face. The perpetrators escaped before they were apprehended.”

This same document also erroneously identified me as one of the pie-throwers:

“7. [deleted…] F.B.I., advised that a confidential source had been present at the above meeting, and was able to identify the following members of S.D.S. who had taken part in the `mock war’…The source also indicated that one BOB FELDMAN, a member of Columbia University S.D.S., not previously known to this command, was one of two persons who had perpetrated the above pie-throwing incident. The other person was not identified. Bob Feldman is described as follows: 20 years of age, 6’, very thin face, smooth complexion, brown curly hair, blue sun glasses, brown leather jacket…”

The description of me also overestimated my age and height and described the physical appearance of somebody else.

When I noticed Colonel Akst wiping the pie from his face—from a seat in the rear of the auditorium—I was as stunned as everybody else in the room. Nobody in the crowd was laughing and most of the audience perceived the pie on Col. Akst as an act of humiliation against a human symbol of the hated Selective Service System.

It was Mark who broke the silence a few seconds after everybody realized that a pie had been thrown. He stood up and yelled out: “He’s a war criminal. He has no right to speak on campus.”

The meeting soon broke up and the humiliated Col. Akst quickly left the campus, to the jeers of a few students. Ted, Teddy, Al, Peter Schneider and other Praxis-Axis people who had voted against Mark’s proposal to disrupt the speech at the Draft Counseling Committee meeting were furious that Mark had unilaterally decided to arrange for the pie to be thrown.

An emergency steering committee meeting was set up for a few days afterwards, and there was some talk among Praxis-Axis people that Mark would be ousted as Columbia SDS chairman. In the evening after the pie was thrown, Mark, himself, had self-doubts about the political wisdom of planning the pie-throwing and about his own ability to be Columbia SDS chairman. I can recall bumping into him near Harkness Theatre, in the basement of Butler Library, when he was walking around with an increasingly active Barnard SDS activist named Ann, on the evening of the day the pie was thrown.

“Everybody thinks it was a big mistake, Bob. They’re furious. I don’t know why I did it. Maybe I should resign as chairman. It reinforces Ted and Teddy’s notion that I’m too impulsive to be a good chairman,” said Mark.

I reassured Mark that arranging for the pie-throwing wasn’t necessarily a bad political move, although he probably shouldn’t have overruled the vote of the Draft Counseling Committee. “Regardless of what Ted, Teddy and Schneider think about the pie-throwing, you still should stay on as Columbia SDS chairman, because there’s still nobody else who can do a better job,” I said.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap.15: Steering Columbia SDS Into Action, 1968

Chapter 15: Steering Columbia SDS Into Action, 1968 (i)

A few days before Columbia SDS was to hold its March 1968 elections for its 1968-1969 officers and steering committee members, there was a knock on my dorm room door in Furnald Hall. It was Ted. Ted hadn’t visited me before in the dormitory that spring, so I asked him what was up.

“Some of us have been talking about next week’s chapter elections. And we feel that of the juniors in SDS, you’d make the best chairman.”

I laughed in disbelief and replied: “Are you kidding? Mark would make the best chairman. He’s a great speaker.”

Ted scowled. “Mark’s a good speaker. But he can’t be trusted politically. His political arguments in debate with liberals are often incoherent and unpersuasive. And he doesn’t seem able to work collectively or get along with chapter people as well as you do. We want you to run against Mark for chairman.”

I shook my head. “No. I have no desire to be Columbia SDS chairman. I’m not even sure we should have a chairman and a vice-chairman, since it reduces the collective power of the steering committee. And it creates a hierarchy of power in the chapter that may be unhealthy.”

Ted looked disappointed. “Well, if you feel you don’t want to run for chairman, how about running for vice-chairman?”

I shook my head again. “No. I have no desire to be vice-chairman. Why not ask Nancy to run for vice-chairman? She’s a junior, also.”

“We can’t have a woman speaking from the sundial. The campus isn’t ready to accept a woman as vice-chairman.”

Personally, I felt that Nancy deserved to be the new vice-chairman of Columbia SDS. But I didn’t argue with Ted over this subconscious capitulation to 1960s Ivy League male chauvinism.

We spoke for a few more minutes. And when I suggested that Brian might also make a good vice-chairman, Ted replied that Brian wasn’t charismatic enough to be effective, although he was a hard worker and a decent guy. Shortly afterwards, Ted left the dorm room. The Praxis-Axis faction he represented decided it would have to accept Mark as chairman but would back a sophomore named Nick as vice-chairman—because I didn’t want the post and Nancy couldn’t have the post because of her sex.

The next week, after Mark had returned from Cuba, Columbia SDS chapter elections were held one evening. Mark was elected chairman, Nick was elected vice-chairman and I received more chapter votes than either of them, after somebody renominated me for the steering committee. I seemed to be politically popular with the New Left members of Columbia SDS, whether praxis-axis or action faction, with PL cadre within Columbia SDS, and with Barnard women students in Columbia SDS.

The new Columbia SDS vice-chairman, Nick, was a tall guy with long hair and a mustache, who was from Long Island. In his freshman year, and the early part of his sophomore year, he had spent most of his time working as a Columbia Citizenship Council bureaucrat and a P.A.C.T. organizer. But in early 1968, he had started to spend less time with Citizenship Council and more time working on Columbia SDS’s IDA Committee. By the time of his election as Columbia SDS vice-chairman, Nick seemed to be defining himself as a Columbia SDS New Left radical activist, primarily, and not as a Citizenship Council bureaucrat.

On the night Mark and Nick were elected to head the chapter, the sophomores in Columbia SDS seemed much more enthusiastic than before. Robby, Stu and other sophomores—like Joel, Sokolow and Fitzgerald—were jumping with excitement, as if a dead weight had been lifted from their shoulders. There was a sense of expectation among them that Mark was, indeed, going to return Columbia SDS to a more confrontational style of campus political activism.

To try to channel student anti-draft sentiment away from involvement in Columbia SDS, the Columbia Administration met with a few of its student bureaucrat puppets and organized a “draft moratorium” around this time. For one day in March 1968, all classes were suspended by the Administration and students heard a variety of speakers in the McMillan Theatre talk about the immorality of the Viet Nam War draft.

In response, Columbia SDS’s IDA Committee adopted my proposal that we hold an “anti-complicity fast” to begin when the draft moratorium ended; in order to protest Columbia’s continued ties to IDA. My main argument in favor of holding this fast was that it was a good way to generate publicity for our anti-IDA campaign when people would be in a more receptive political mood because of the anti-draft moratorium.

At this IDA Committee meeting, Teddy and Nancy were not too enthusiastic about Columbia SDS sponsoring an “anti-complicity fast” because it seemed “too apolitical” and “too churchie.” And after the committee had finished planning the fast and the meeting was breaking up, Teddy said to me in a condescending way: “Are you trying to imitate our `fast for peace’ of last year?” Nancy laughed at Teddy’s remark in a condescending way.

“This fast is completely different. It’s just a publicity device to raise consciousness,” I answered.

About 20 Barnard and Columbia SDS people participated in the fast. And we were able to generate a news article in both Spectator and the Columbia School of General Studies’ student newspaper, The Owl. And some of the students involved in the 3-day fast became more deeply committed to radical politics as a result of hanging around the Columbia SDS table, while fasting on Low Plaza. Yet militant non-violent confrontational action, not more fasting, was what would be most effective in stirring up students that spring about the need to institutionally resist the war machine.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 14: Back In Furnald Hall, 1968

Chapter 14: Back In Furnald Hall, 1968 (v)

By early March 1968, I had reached my peak of personal loneliness and misery at Columbia. I was feeling so alienated and broken-down emotionally that I made an appointment at the student health service at St. Luke’s Hospital to see a shrink. By this time, also, Eliezer was so crazy from his acid trips and his metaphysical rebellion that Columbia had given him a leave of absence and committed him for a few weeks’ hospitalization at St. Luke’s, until he recovered from his hallucinations. When I visited him at St. Luke’s, he appeared to be in an emotionally helpless state and very illogical and paranoid.

My own emotional problem was the same as it had been in Summer 1967: I couldn’t seem to find any women to love in sustained ways and my New Left political activism, although it fulfilled me morally, failed to satisfy me emotionally. I had quit my job at the Journal of Philosophy, so I no longer saw Nancy and Teddy outside of political meetings. I had drifted apart from Ted, Dave and Mark and had not gotten close to Stu. I was not personally involved with anybody in any deep way, so my Friday and Saturday nights were now being spent alone pretty much, except on the few occasions when I would get invited to some hippie pot party--like one in which I stumbled into Mark, as he was sharing a joint.

I felt uncomfortable when I walked into the shrink’s office. He was a young guy in his late 20s who had short hair and no beard and didn’t wear glasses. As soon as he started talking, I regretted making the appointment. He seemed to lack the ability to empathize with my loneliness and my political commitment. I made a second appointment, but did not keep it.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 14: Back In Furnald Hall, 1968

Chapter 14: Back In Furnald Hall, 1968 (iv)

In March 1968, Howard University students occupied their Administration Building in support of their demands. Columbia’s African-American student activist leaders were influenced by the tactics used by activists at Howard. I read about the Howard University Administration Building occupation, but, insofar as I could envision a spring shut-down of Columbia, I could still only imagine a mass sit-in inside Low Library. The issue at Columbia that stirred the African-American students up was Columbia’s gym construction project in Harlem’s Morningside Park.

In early March, Columbia SDS’s “bread-and-butter” mass organizing issues were still the Viet Nam War-related issues of IDA-Columbia University complicity with the Pentagon and the draft issue. Despite numerous demonstrations—and even a December 1967 anti-war student march in and out of Low Library to drop off anti-IDA petitions signed by over a thousand students—the Columbia Administration still refused to resign its IDA institutional membership. And most Columbia SDS people involved themselves in some way in anti-IDA work.

But the PL cadre, which functioned as an external cadre within the SDS mass umbrella, had also organized a Columbia SDS “Labor Committee,” which was more oriented towards uniting students and transit workers than organizing the mass of students at Columbia to act collectively around their own oppression as students, and in support of anti-militarist and anti-racist demands. PL student activists pretty much controlled this committee, which was led by Tony and his PL disciples and a guy named Roger—who always argued in favor of an immediate sit-in, regardless of whether 300 people or 2 people could be mobilized by SDS to sit-in. In March, however, this committee was strengthened when a newly active, bombastic-talking, politician-type guy named Ed—who seemed somewhat phony in his radicalism—pushed himself rapidly into a prominent position in Columbia SDS by working with this PL-dominated SDS Labor Committee and loudly articulating a PL line.

Another committee within Columbia SDS was a small committee formed to work with community residents to resist Columbia’s further expansion into West Harlem/Morningside Heights. Columbia’s institutional expansion in the late 1950s and early 1960s had already caused the destruction of thousands of homes and the removal of thousands of African-American, Puerto Rican and white elderly tenants from the neighborhood, as a result of what is now called “gentrification.” Columbia SDS’s University Expansion Committee was carried by a tireless, dedicated tall guy with glasses, in his mid-to-late 20s, named Michael.

Michael was not part of Columbia SDS’s inner circle or steering committee leadership and he had been into liberal Democratic Party electoral politics when most of Columbia’s New Left leadership was already revolutionary communist or anarchist. Neither was Michael bohemian or hippie or a part of the aesthetic left or interested in getting involved in Columbia SDS’s theoretical or strategic discussions. But were it not for Michael, the Columbia gym issue would not have been raised by Columbia SDS in early 1968.

All of us who were busy trying to mobilize students around the IDA and draft issues were opposed to the gym construction project. But because neither the Student Afro-American Society nor African-American activist organizations in Harlem initially seemed outraged enough to mobilize many people against Columbia’s land-grab, we tended to feel that there wasn’t much point in white radicals, alone, trying to lead a confrontation on the gym issue at Columbia.

Michael, however, had spent a few years in local electoral politics and being involved with neighborhood tenant groups at meetings in which they had argued with elitist, arrogant representatives of Columbia’s real estate and housing office. As a result, he felt a strong passion to prioritize the fight against Columbia’s land-grabbing in West Harlem/Morningside Heights, whether or not the African-American community was in leadership. When the bulldozers moved into Morningside Park to rip up land for Columbia’s gym, Michael and his neighborhood allies—plus some politically liberal Columbia Citizenship Council people—got arrested in a symbolic way.

Among the people arrested when the gym construction began was Juan of the Columbia Citizenship Council’s Program to Activate Community Talent [P.A.C.T.]. Although Juan was still only a liberal, his work at P.A.C.T. and in Citizenship Council had made him feel—before most Columbia SDS and African-American student activists did—that it was worth getting arrested symbolically to stop Columbia’s gym project—even if most community residents were not mobilized yet on this issue. (Presently, Juan is the Democracy Now! radio show co-host who moonlights as a New York Daily News columnist).

In addition to Columbia’s proposed gym project being an institutionally racist attempt to steal Harlem’s parkland for white upper-middle-class students, there was a Jim Crow aspect to the project. African-American Harlem residents were to be allowed to only enter the token “community” portion of the gym through a back door, while most of the gym space would be utilized by the white Columbia students, who would enter through a separate, elite student front door. Hence, the chant: “Jim Crow Gym must go!”

From the time it was first proposed, there had been some community and liberal verbal opposition to Columbia’s proposed gym construction project. And Harlem CORE had warned Columbia in early 1968—as had SNCC chairperson H. Rap Brown [n/k/a Jamil Al-Amin and currently imprisoned in the South]—not to go ahead with the gym construction. But as late as March 1968, there was still little evidence that the mass of Harlem residents could be mobilized to prevent Columbia’s Morningside Park land seizure.