Columbia SDS Memories Revisited: Into Columbia SDS, 1967--Part 9

The final course I took during the second term of my sophomore year that was significant to me was entitled “American Foreign Policy II.” It was taught by Columbia University Professor of Government Schilling, a “balance of power man” who supported the U.S. military escalation in Viet Nam. He was anti-communist, anti-radical and anti-Soviet in his views. On an intellectual level, though, he found it entertaining to debate foreign policy issues in his class with leftist anti-war students like me.

The course met in a classroom at Columbia’s Law School, not inside Hamilton Hall like my other government courses did. After attending a few class sessions, participating in a few class discussions and learning how pro-Pentagon Professor Schilling was in his politics, I started to cut most of the remaining classes. But to pass Schilling’s course, I was expected to write a term paper on a foreign policy-related issue. In late February 1967, I chose the topic of my term paper: “The Military-Industrial Complex’s Role In Determining U.S. Foreign Policy.”

After the PL-led students stopped CIA recruiting in early February, political activity on campus remained at a high level. Tony and his PL followers came to the next Columbia SDS general assembly meeting with a proposal for Columbia SDS to begin an anti-ranking petition campaign at Columbia.

In early 1967, the Columbia Administration was mailing the class ranks of each of its 2S-deferred Columbia students to local draft boards in order to help the U.S. war machine determine, by means of class ranking, which students should be drafted first in case LBJ declared a “national emergency.” Students whose class ranking showed them to be less efficient than higher-ranking students would be more likely to be denied deferments by the U.S. Selective Service System [SSS], as a result of the Columbia Administration’s complicity with the SSS.

After PL proposed a spring term campaign to demand that the Columbia Administration stop sending class ranking information to U.S. draft boards, the New Left faction within Columbia SDS started to panic. PL—not Columbia and Barnard New Leftists—seemed to be the ones who were setting the spring agenda for Columbia SDS, and PL people were starting to dominate Columbia SDS general assembly meeting debates, in a way that made students feel that SDS wasn’t really a New Leftist political entity.

John, Harvey and Josh decided to hold a meeting at Teddy’s conveniently-located West 115th St. and Amsterdam Ave. apartment for non-PL people who were most active in Columbia SDS to attend. At the meeting, which Harvey and John dominated, we all attempted to define, more clearly, in what ways our approach to politics was different than PL’s approach to politics.

We concluded that, yes, PL’s idea for beginning a campaign to end class-ranking at Columbia was politically sound, but not just because ending class-ranking was morally justified or a good way to fight the U.S. war machine while on campus. An anti-class-ranking campaign was also seen by New Left activists within SDS as a vehicle for raising mass radical consciousness about the “true nature of the U.S. university” and their “real state of unfreedom” and “political powerlessness” and to turn people on to a New Left lifestyle and political orientation. At the meeting, Teddy also argued that PL’s conception of Revolution was “fundamentally Old Left, not New Left” and that our caucus represented people who were committed to a “life-style revolution,” unlike PL, which was only interested in obtaining political power for an authoritarian sect, by manipulation.

The New Left faction of Columbia SDS started to meet publicly every Friday afternoon in Earl Hall as a steering committee group which was open to all SDS members, including PL people. When necessary, though, informal meetings between SDS general assembly meetings would be held at Teddy’s apartment or someone else’s apartment. This was done in order to avoid the disruptive presence of PL fraction people. PL people at this time would often tie-up SDS general assembly meetings in long, irrelevant, non-productive, sectarian debates which tended to undercut SDS’s capacity to effectively engage in mass campus organizing.

Columbia SDS Memories Revisited: Into Columbia SDS, 1967--Part 8

Another reason why SDS people voted not to join the PL-led anti-CIA sit-in was that the Columbia Administration had vowed to discipline any student involved in stopping recruiting. It seemed foolish to risk being disciplined when our numbers were still so small.

The Columbia SDS dorm lobby meetings that evening and during the next few weeks went well. At the meeting in Furnald Hall’s lobby a good crowd of white liberal and white conservative dorm residents passed in and out of the lobby meeting, during the two hours it lasted, as did about 15 Columbia SDS people. When one liberal Columbia student argued that Viet Nam was an isolated case of U.S. foreign policy immorality, Harvey became angry and replied:

“What about Iran in 1953? What about Guatemala in 1954? It’s not just a question of Viet Nam. It’s a question of the U.S. government’s whole immoral foreign policy. And it’s not a question of free speech when it comes to the CIA being allowed to recruit on campus. The CIA is a criminal organization. Just like the KKK is a criminal organization. It not only has no right to recruit. It has no right to exist!”

Josh and Teddy were also there to argue effectively a New Left political line with much moral fervor and enthusiasm. Josh had been unanimously elected Columbia SDS vice-chairman because he was the only Columbia College senior interested in being Columbia SDS vice-chairman at that time and because he had no political enemies in Columbia leftist circles, as a result of his personable nature and non-rigid political style. John had been unanimously elected Columbia SDS chairman because he was the driving force behind the founding of the chapter, in addition to Dave, and because Dave had already graduated from Columbia College in 1966.

Classes for the second term of my sophomore year started. I ended my 1 ½ year involvement with the Columbia Citizenship Council’s P.A.C.T. because of my conclusion that it was politically ineffectual, too reformist, not radical enough and too white paternalistic. The afternoon and evening time I had devoted to P.A.C.T. work was now free for me to engage in more Columbia SDS organizing activity.

I kept writing new folk songs each month, but I no longer even considered writing plays and short fiction anymore. I was too busy interacting with real people within a large community of leftists, reaching out to new people with my revolutionary message and attempting to actualize my fantasies in real life to spend much time isolated in my room, pumping out a new play or novel. I began to see fictional writing, like reading, as a defense mechanism for really being involved with people and as a poor political substitute for really attempting to change the world by activism.

Three classes I took in Spring 1967 were significant to me because of the independent research they led me to engage in.

For my second term of “Europe 1870 To The Present” course, I wrote a long term paper on the European anti-war movement during World War I, which led me to read about the Second International’s failure to prevent World I and to read about how both pacifists and socialists continued to resist World War I after it began. I studied the Zimmerwald Conference of 1915 and both Rosa Luxemburg’s and Lenin’s writings of the World War I years.

The graduate student-teaching assistant assigned to mark the term paper trashed the paper on both political grounds and stylistic grounds. But my World War I resistance research seemed connected to my anti-war activism and seemed quite relevant to all the issues which were being discussed by 60s activists who wished to stop the Viet Nam war machine.

For my second term of Professor Kesselman’s “Reflections In Politics Since 1914” course, I wrote a long term paper on “The Role of German Universities in Nazi Germany,” in which I examined how German universities acted as “business-as-usual” instruments of Nazi totalitarianism during the Third Reich. I noted in what respects U.S. universities were fulfilling similar ideological and training functions during the Viet Nam War. By 1967, I felt the U.S. military machine’s operation in Viet Nam was comparable to the Nazi military machine’s activities during World War II. I also assumed the U.S. ruling class, like the German ruling class, would tend to drift towards more domestic fascism, in order to stifle mass resistance to its policies. Readings for this course included Behemoth by Franz Neumann, which was a sociological study of Nazi Germany, as well as some of Hitler’s speeches, Bullock’s biography of Hitler and Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism work.

What was also interesting about the Spring 1967 term of Kesselman’s class was that three Columbia SDS activists, in addition to me, had enrolled in the same course: Harvey, Teddy and a sophomore activist named Mark. After attending the first few class sessions, Harvey and Teddy mostly cut classes for the rest of the term. On the few occasions Teddy did appear, he usually walked in about one-half hour late at 11:30 a.m., with a big smile on his face. Mark attended class a few more times than Teddy, but also soon lost interest in the classroom sessions. After I saw that Harvey, Teddy and Mark were no longer coming to class to dominate the discussion in a collective way, challenging Kesselman’s social democratic political line and historical interpretations with arguments that Kesselman couldn’t answer, I also stopped going to class.

On the first day of class, after Kesselman had handed out the reading list, Harvey had raised his hand and asked: “Why isn’t Trotsky’s book on the rise of fascism included on the reading list?”
Kesselman looked uncomfortable and mumbled something about it not being an important work. Harvey then lectured Kesselman in his super-intellectual way, with arguments concisely and clearly laid out in order, for a few minutes. Teddy, Mark and I, and some of the other students, started to giggle, because Harvey appeared to already know more about the course’s subject than Professor Kesselman did. After hearing Harvey talk some more during the rest of the period, it became obvious that he was a more interesting, scholarly and knowledgeable lecturer on the subject than the Columbia professor.

It was in Kesselman’s class that I first noticed Mark as more than just somebody who looked vaguely familiar because he was some sort of a leftist. In early 1967, he had a brownish beard. He was around 6 feet tall and he dressed proletarian and bohemian. He wasn’t especially articulate in class compared to Harvey or Teddy. But Mark liked to talk in class when he showed up and he used his class talking time to bring current political issues into the discussion. In cold weather, Mark usually wore a green coat and a stocking cap.

Before or after Kesselman’s class sessions, Mark and I didn’t speak too much or too deeply. I found Teddy friendlier than Mark. Mark, unlike Teddy, never seemed to speak to people in a non-ambiguous way. He seemed harder to get to know than Teddy. Mark also wasn’t that interested in talking with me about New Left politics.

Columbia SDS Memories Revisited: Into Columbia SDS, 1967--Part 7

At the meeting in the CUSC office, John, Josh, Linda, Teddy, Ted, Tony, myself and others were in attendance. We talked about what kind of leaflet we would hand out and distribute around campus in the days prior to the anti-CIA demonstration. People agreed to leaflet and post leaflets around campus at specific times and places. PL leader Tony agreed to type the stencil and mimeograph the 1,000 leaflets we required, even though he still argued that the leaflet should announce that the CIA would be “kicked off campus by Columbia SDS,” not just picketed.

But the leaflets that Tony ran off reflected PL politics, not what everyone else in the Columbia SDS planning meeting had agreed the leaflet should say. So Ted had to end up typing up a new stencil and running off a bunch of new leaflets, so that the anti-CIA demonstration would accurately reflect New Left, not PL, politics.

Tony was a humorless, emotionally dead grad student at Columbia Teachers College, whose specialty was Chinese history and dogmatically applying the thoughts of Chairman Mao to U.S. 1960s political reality. But he was a hard worker and he was extremely dedicated, as were most of the other Progressive Labor Party people who operated as a fraction within Columbia SDS at that time and sought to gain control of the organization. Eliezer laughingly described how Tony had tried to recruit him into PL:

“He invited me to his apartment. After we arrived there, he started to play me a phonograph record of somebody reading the Communist Manifesto. Then, after the record was played, he asked me if I had any questions.”

In his dorm room, Eliezer and I gossiped about how the PL-types seemed less democratic and less emotionally open in their personalities and ways of relating than the New Left SDS types. We also joked about what Teddy used to call “the PL personality.”

After Ted had printed up the new anti-CIA leaflets and given them to Teddy, I was visited in my dorm room at Furnald Hall for the first time by Teddy. He had brought some leaflets for me to distribute around campus and in the dormitories. It was the first time I spoke with Teddy at length, on a one-to-one basis. Teddy immediately charmed me. I immediately felt even more love for him than for Ted. Teddy carried his leaflets and school books and notebooks around in a small knapsack/backpack, when everyone else at Columbia and Barnard was still using briefcases and attache’ cases. He wore a stocking-type cap in winter.

I can’t recall the specifics of my first lengthy conversation with Teddy. But he immediately seemed like the kind of guy with whom you could talk about more than New Left politics. Eliezer and I agreed that Teddy seemed Christ-like in many ways.

Teddy had a variety of intellectual interests. He was much more of an intellectual, trendy, faddist and hippie than a political activist. Politically, he saw himself as an anarchist, not a communist or Marxist-Leninist, in 1967.

Teddy was a very spiritual person. He argued that “Politics should be an instrument of morality, not an instrument of domination.” His personality and appearance were androgynous and gentle, not macho. He majored in religion and was so intellectually eclectic that he was almost as much into the Buddha as he was into Marxism. Teddy also liked to talk about sex and “chicks” a lot in a non-macho, realistic way, and considered himself a follower of Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse. He often tended to be more of a sexual determinist than an economic or sociological determinist when he explained the inter-personal and political behavior of people.

In talking at length with Teddy, you were able to receive capsule summaries of the many books in various fields that Teddy had read over the years. “As Reich says in The Function of Orgasm, etc.” or “As Marcuse says in Eros and Civilization, etc.” or “As Buddha says, etc.” or “As Che Guevara says, etc.” or “As Ho Chi Minh wrote, etc.” was the kind of talk Teddy was good at sprinkling his conversation with.

I put leaflets all around the dormitories and in school buildings and under dormitory doors. The night before the CIA recruiter was to come, I went with Eliezer to John’s West 108th St. apartment to help make anti-CIA picket signs for a few hours at a picket sign-making party. In the apartment, Dave, John, Teddy, Josh, Linda, Ted and other SDS people were drinking beer in-between using magic markers to write on the oak tag that was to be used for the picket signs. Rock music played in the background and, as people became more drunk, it really did begin to turn into a picket sign-making party. Being still new to most of the SDS people there, though, Eliezer and I found that nobody was too into talking with us. So we left the party early.

At 9 a.m. the next morning, I joined a picket line of about 20 people outside Dodge Hall. John led the chanting, as we marched around in the freezing February morning.

“CIA must go! CIA must go! CIA must go!”

To introduce some variety in the chanting, John suddenly started to chant, in a softer voice, “Lumumba lives! Lumumba lives! Lumumba lives!”

By late morning, the picket line had grown to about 75 people, a much smaller group than we had hoped for. Despite our January publicity, many Columbia and Barnard leftists had not heard about the scheduled anti-CIA demonstration because they hadn’t been around campus during January.

Shortly after Columbia SDS began picketing Dodge Hall, the PL fraction within SDS—plus a few other impatient SDS people—went inside Dodge Hall and sat down in front of the recruiting office. The CIA representative was effectively stopped from recruiting for the day. The New Left faction picketed outside for awhile. Then, we went to the basement floor of Dodge Hall and held a meeting to decide whether Columbia SDS, as a whole, should join the 18 PL-led students who were already sitting-in and stopping CIA recruitment.

Dave, John, Josh, Harvey, Lew, Ted and Teddy all argued against going upstairs to join the PL-led sit-in, as did most of the other students who spoke.

“If we all go upstairs and sit-in, the rest of the campus won’t understand why we’re stopping recruiting. The rest of the campus still thinks it’s a question of free speech. And that SDS is preventing free speech if we stop CIA recruitment today. PL doesn’t care about building a mass movement of students. They think all students are `bourgeois’ and that only workers matter. So they don’t worry about alienating the mass of students by their tactics.

“Yet there are plenty of Columbia students out there, who aren’t here now—but who will be here next time in a much larger demonstration—who can be organized. But only if we don’t alienate them now, by letting PL determine our campus strategy,” Dave argued.

Everybody supported this argument and we went back outside to picket some more, and then held a short rally.

Columbia SDS Memories Revisited: Into Columbia SDS, 1967--Part 6

In January 1967, Columbia SDS people learned that the CIA was returning to Columbia’s campus to once again recruit students during the first week of the Spring 1967 term. A meeting was held in Professor of History Kaplow’s high-rise apartment which his wife, Susan Kaplow (who was in both PL and SDS), John, Lew, Ted, Teddy, Harvey, Josh, myself, Tony of PL and a few others attended. In Professor Kaplow’s apartment, we discussed whether or not Columbia SDS should stop CIA recruitment. We also discussed possible tactics we could use to mobilize students to attend the anti-CIA protest demonstration.

Led by Tony, the PL faction at the meeting pushed for the political position that “The CIA should be kicked off the campus by students” and not just peacefully picketed by Columbia SDS. The non-PL New Leftists, however, collectively felt that our politically liberal mass base at Columbia and Barnard was still not radicalized enough to understand why the CIA should be driven off campus. Consequently, we decided to just call for a peaceful picket of CIA recruitment, in order not to turn-off the mass of potentially radical left-liberal students whom we wished to eventually recruit.

At the meeting we discussed possible ways of radicalizing more students at Columbia and Barnard.

“If we show students the gap between social potentiality and social actuality, they’ll get involved in Columbia SDS,” John asserted.

“I think the key thing to do to radicalize Columbia students is to show them that their liberal goals actually can be achieved only through political radicalism. And not through liberal politics,” I stated.

When we discussed possible ways to mobilize students to confront the CIA recruiter, I suggested we hold SDS dorm lobby meetings at which individual Columbia professors would be featured as guest speakers.

“Many more students might come to an SDS dorm lobby meeting if we have a Columbia professor there as a drawing card, than if it’s just SDS people speaking,” I said with a twinkle in my eye.

Lew immediately saw the virtue of this idea. It was agreed that I would spend part of January telephoning professors and setting up these SDS dormitory lobby meetings.

The first time I noticed Lew, when I was a freshman, he reminded me of Mario Savio in his physical appearance. Lew was probably the tallest white leftist intellectual around the Columbia campus in the 1960s. His 6’3”-plus height always made him quite noticeable at campus demonstrations. His hair was generally more longish than short. He was always clean-shaven, even when most other Columbia SDS men were growing mustaches and beards.

Lew’s mother was apparently an Old Leftist of some sort who became a literary editor of The Nation magazine and who lived in an Upper West Side apartment. She had remarried a published leftist novelist and then apparently given birth to Lew’s younger half-brother, who was to become a published novelist at a very young age.


After attending college for a time in Canada, Lew had moved back to the Upper West Side and enrolled at Columbia. He was a junior at Columbia College during the 1966-67 academic year. He was open about wanting to be a writer and he seemed to know more than anybody else, except Harvey, about the literary left and small intellectual magazine publishing scene. But he didn’t reveal to most other leftist students at Columbia either his mother’s Nation magazine connection or his stepfather’s prominence in U.S. left literary circles. In the academic year before Columbia SDS was re-organized as a mass-based group, Lew had coordinated a faculty read-in against the war in Viet Nam.

I reserved Furnald Hall dorm lobby space for the first meeting and “booked” a Columbia professor for this meeting and other professors for meetings in other dormitory lobbies. Most of the professors I telephoned were paranoid about SDS, but were flattered to hear that I felt dormitory residents would be interested in hearing them speak about U.S. foreign policy. Among the professors who were unwilling to speak against the war in the dormitory lobbies was Columbia Professor of Sociology Silver.

Professor Melman had an answering machine, which few other people possessed in the 1960s. He soon called me back and enthusiastically agreed to speak at an SDS dorm lobby meeting. Professor of Sociology Dibble also quickly agreed to speak out. Professor of Sociology Martin, who was a dogmatic social democrat, only reluctantly agreed to speak out against the war. Another social democrat, Professor Kesselman, was unwilling to speak out against the war in an SDS dorm lobby meeting, even though I was enrolled in one of his classes.

I also attempted to book an English professor named Hovde. Hovde initially refused to appear because “Lewis told me he was a communist” and “Lewis is a Columbia SDS leader.” But after I managed to reassure Hovde that speaking to Columbia students about the war in their dormitory didn’t mean he was supporting communism, he, too, agreed to be featured in a Columbia SDS dormitory lobby meeting.

In figuring out which professors to call and figuring out how to respond to professor questions about SDS’s goals, I consulted Harvey by phone a number of times. On the telephone, Harvey’s voice always sounded very earnest, intellectually confident, strong and seductive. With an affectionate giggle after he hung his dorm room phone up, following a conversation with Harvey, Ted once said the following to me: “He always sounds like he’s trying to seduce me.” The attraction of Harvey’s voice to me was based on the emotionally intense way he spoke about his politics. His personality had no effeminate qualities. The emotional intensity of Harvey’s voice was the quality that probably caused Ted to feel it was seductive.

A second meeting was held in the W. 115th St. office of the Columbia University Student Council [CUSC], a week before the CIA recruiter was to return to the campus. The head of the CUSC was some kind of a leftist, so John always had the key to the CUSC office. John was always able to use the student government’s stencils, reams of paper, phones and mimeograph machine for Columbia SDS purposes and as a meeting place whenever required.

Columbia SDS Memories Revisited: Into Columbia SDS, 1966--Part 5

December 1966 flowed into the Christmas break, which I spent back in Queens in my parents’ apartment doing assigned term papers, watching news shows, political interviews and football games on TV and practicing guitar in my room. By January 1967, I had read John Gerassi’s The Great Fear in Latin America, was getting more interested in Latin America and could argue against the immorality of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America as well as I could argue against U.S. war policy in Viet Nam. I also spent much time listening over and over again to Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home album, Dylan’s first album and his The Times They Are A-Changin’ album, as well as the Phil Ochs In Concert album.

I wrote two more love songs for Beth, “The Princess of the Park” and “My Name Is Ishmael” to go along with a love letter I wrote her. Having re-read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick for an American literature course, I identified with Ishmael-Melville quite strongly and, increasingly, was beginning to see myself as an “isolato” like Ishmael. I eventually met Beth in Barnard’s Brooks Hall one evening and dated her and wondered whether we’d be happy together as lovers.

Beth was an easygoing and undemanding beauty, but she wasn’t interested in New Left politics. Although I was wild about her, she refused to take my love for her seriously.
“You still hardly know me in more than a casual way. We can’t sustain a relationship with each other if your love for me is just based on a fantasized image of me. And not on how I really am,” she said to me one cold winter night, before we kissed each other goodnight.

As I walked back to my Furnald Hall dorm room, I wondered whether Beth was right. Insofar as I was an apparently upwardly-mobile Columbia student with artistic inclinations who found her beautiful, I could hold Beth’s interest. But insofar as I was a New Left activist who felt spiritually alienated from white upper-middle-class life, I was not on the same wavelength as her. So I didn’t continue to pursue Beth. But my heart still jumped whenever we bumped into each other during the next few years around the Upper West Side.

My songwriting around this time also reflected my involvement in opposing both the CIA and Columbia’s complicity with the U.S. military. I wrote a song entitled “The CIA,” which contained the following lyrics:

The CIA
It’s coming to bring you joy
The CIA
It wants little girls and boys.
Come work with me
In secrecy
The trench-coated spook he cries…."

I also wrote a folk song entitled “Columbia,” which included the following lyrics:

Secret research
Columbia
You’d best not snitch
Columbia
At Hudson Labs
Maybe some bombs?
For electronic war
Design lasers
And “humanize” and “civilize”
With “reason as your tool.”

Columbia SDS Memories Revisited: Into Columbia SDS, 1966--Part 4

I first met Josh and Linda at one of these Columbia SDS organizational meetings in Earl Hall. At the meeting, they both stated that they were Marxist-Leninists.

Josh had grown up in Queens. During his early years at Columbia, he had befriended a Columbia College classmate from Brooklyn named Harvey, who had been active in Brooklyn CORE before joining the Progressive Labor Party as a freshman. As underclassmen, both Harvey and Josh had apparently become acquainted with an Old Left ex-Communist Party member named Collins. Collins was a gay man who apparently influenced Josh and Harvey politically and intellectually more than any of their Columbia College professors. By the time Josh and Harvey were seniors, Harvey was no longer in PL and both Josh and Harvey were quite intellectually sophisticated Marxist-Leninists. Harvey, in particular, seemed to be the most widely-read and intellectually sophisticated guy in the whole school. He could concisely answer any intellectual question you might have about current and past social and political reality.

Linda had had a brief love affair with Teddy, and then fallen in love with Josh. Josh had been quite lonely before he and Linda found each other. Both Josh and Linda were much more intellectual and emotionally mature than most of the other students around Columbia and Barnard in Fall 1966. Josh was friendlier and more outgoing than Linda.

Linda seemed very devoted to Josh and lived with him. Josh and Linda walked around the Upper West Side as an inseparable couple most of the time. Linda rarely spoke politically at the male-dominated SDS chapter meetings and steering committee meetings. But when she did speak, she usually echoed Josh’s political views.

I also first met JJ in December 1966, when JJ was still in the Progressive Labor Party. JJ was from a wealthy Old Left family in Connecticut and had attended some exclusive private school before entering Columbia the same term I entered. Politically, JJ was a doctrinaire, dogmatic, left-sectarian Maoist, who was unable to convince left-liberal students of the correctness of his views through intellectual discussion and debate.

JJ’s voice was a monotonic caricature of a “proletarian” accent that lacked warmth when he spoke about radical politics. JJ also lacked warmth in relation to most men. He dressed like a hippie-bohemian, but in a Che Guevarist way, had longish hair and usually was bearded. He had a male macho personality, but Barnard women found JJ very attractive physically and sexually. Unlike most of his PL comrades, JJ was a sexually aggressive guy who enjoyed casual sex and sleeping around with many different women.

In the early 1960s, PL attracted many bohemian red diaper babies like JJ who found the Communist Party too politically conservative and socially straight and repressed. By 1966, however, grass, bohemianism and sexual promiscuity were no longer tolerated in PL. PL leaders claimed that grass, sexual promiscuity and a bohemian lifestyle alienated straight working-class people. By 1967, everyone in PL would be culturally and sexually straight, repressed and conventionally middle-class. In 1967, JJ would no longer be in PL.

Another reason for JJ’s exit from PL was that PL was too politically conservative for him. By 1967, JJ would be ready to begin the armed struggle in the U.S. immediately, in order to materially support the National Liberation Front [NLF] in Viet Nam by “bringing the war home” and opening a second front against U.S. imperialism within the United States. PL would still just favor sending student radicals into factories and into the U.S. military to just try to disrupt the System—without planting any bombs in the bathrooms of U.S. corporate office skyscrapers or at U.S. draft boards, military recruitment centers, ROTC campus buildings and U.S. military installations.

In December 1966, JJ spoke in a long-winded way at meetings and never listened to the arguments raised by people whose political positions were different than his. But he was unable to persuade anybody that his strategy of disrupting classes at Columbia University until the Viet Nam War ended was the best strategy for building a radical student movement.

When I first heard JJ go on and on with his version of PL’s current line in late 1966, I thought to myself: “Oh, God! If JJ is what radical change means, the new society is really going to be dictatorial and loveless, not democratic, liberating and loving.” But as I got to know JJ better over the next few years, I began to like him personally and become less paranoid about what his notion of revolution was all about.

Columbia SDS Memories Revisited: Into Columbia SDS, 1966--Part 3

The rest of November and December was filled with meetings with other newly-recruited Columbia SDS people. The meetings took place in Earl Hall or in lounges in John Jay Hall. At these Columbia SDS organizational meetings, I started to talk at length for the first time with many Columbia and Barnard leftists who I hadn’t met before.

The junior, senior and graduate student male white radicals tended to dominate the discussion at these informal SDS organizational meetings. At one meeting in the basement lounge of John Jay Hall, definite political differences appeared between a non-Marxist-Leninist named Peter Friedland and most of the other white radicals, who all called themselves Marxist-Leninists.

Initially, I felt that Friedland made some good points about the need for Columbia SDS to be “New Left” and not “Old Left” in style and politics. He felt it was useless to try to build a radical student movement at Columbia using “Marxist-Leninist jargon and Marxist-Leninist crap,” which would confuse people about the sincerity of the SDS desire to establish a participatory democracy in the U.S. I also felt that if Columbia SDS turned into just another Marxist-Leninist sect, like the Progressive Labor Party, it would go nowhere politically. So my personal position in December 1966 was “let’s just unite around specific issues and actions we all support, and not get bogged down in questions of exact ideology.”

As I got to know the Marxist-Leninists in Columbia SDS more, however, I tended to move politically into their faction. They seemed to be the most dedicated, most intellectual and most politically experienced and knowledgeable white people on Columbia’s campus. Ted, for instance, saw himself as a Marxist-Leninist and always seemed to make the most sense politically at Columbia during this period.

John had read about Guatemalan guerrillas. We followed their example in our initial Columbia SDS organizational meetings. According to John, when a Guatemalan guerrilla band is formed, each individual volunteer tells the other guerrillas about his or her life and the reasons why he or she decided to join the liberation movement. By the time every guerrilla volunteer has spoken, everyone realizes how similar their lives of oppression have been and how the source of their individual suffering is, therefore, sociological, not individual or psychological. Given this reality, the guerrilla band immediately realizes that since individual oppression is collectively shared by others, the collective oppression can be ended only by collective resistance and collective, not individual, action. Feminist consciousness-raising groups later also utilized the Guatemalan guerrilla group model to recruit women into the late 1960s women’s liberation movement.

New Columbia SDS recruits quickly learned that we all shared a sense of political powerlessness, anti-war and anti-draft rage and a militant anti-racist and anti-capitalist value-structure. We also all wanted to build a radically new world and new social order.