were such traditional SDS concerns as help for the poor, for egroes, and for student power in running the universities. Rudd recently told a New York Times reporter, "I was never really attracted to civil rights. There was too much idealization of Negroes and they didn't seem too effective. I've always felt a tremendous barrier between me and blacks." Mark Rudd, and those few others who supported him were not able to muster much enthusiastic support for the position paper. One of the things that his plan required was much tighter organization and, as he put it," "commitment to the work necessary to win." But the SDS has from its beginnings prided itself on its egalitarian and ÂŁIoating structure, its absence of strong internal discipline. In 1966 SDS even voted to abolish its own offices of President and Executive Secretary on the grounds that such positions allowed too much authority and replaced them with three National Secretaries and an 11man National Council. To some, Rudd's ideas seemed like an alien Leninist imposition of party control. Also, many SDS followers are fine young scholars, and they balked at the suggestion of curtailing their studies to work night and day for a university takeover. Then too, Rudd's proposals had a methodical quality, a smell of probable violence in them, that scared off students who preferred to stay loose and non-violent. Lastly, the SDS group had as its chairman College senior Ted Kaptchuk '68, an effective speaker and authoritybaiter but a personally amiable and not entirely dedicated radical. He and SDS's chief Sundial orator, Ted Gold, a former classmate of Kaptchuk's at ew York's Stuyvesant High School, both came out of a background of intellectual radicalism of a Trotskyite bent. It is a background that is rather ideological in its anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, one unaccustomed to the new trend toward swift action and brawling, guerilla-like street fighting. Though Rudd's approach remained a minority one within SDS, he and his colleagues decided to put portions of their action-oriented program in operation anyway. He lashed out at everything at Columbia even remotely connected with military and government activities, and he fought off-campus,
too. He was arrested for a virulent attack against Secretary of State Dean Rusk outside a midtown hotel in New York on November 15, 1967. On February 24 he helped stage an illegal sitin inside Dodge Hall, blocking the door of the campus job interviewer from Dow Chemical Corporation, a leading manufacturer of napalm. Earlier President Kirk had stated that picketing inside University buildings was improper because such action makes noise and hampers the movement of persons in a way that directly interferes with classroom instruction and work in the buildings, and is hard to keep non-violent. (Peaceful outdoor picketing, rallies, and demonstrations have long been an accepted practice at Columbia.) The February 24 sit-in was done despite an undergraduate student referendum on Jovember 1 in which 67.3 per cent of the students voted to continue open recruiting, despite a College Faculty vote on November 14 also backing free campus visits by corporations, and despite the objections of some SDS members. But Mark Rudd had become a revolutionary and had risen above majority rule. Five weeks before the illegal February 24 sit-in (which the College's Associate Dean for Students Alexander Platt decided, to many people's surprise, not to punish as an illegal act), Rudd had requested permission to leave the College brieÂŁly to visit Cuba in January. He came back with enthusiastic reports of how marvelous everything was in that state. (His reports, printed in Spectator, the College's caustically liberal daily newspaper, drew the fury of others at the University who had other knowledge of life in Fidel Castro's territory. One of the respondents, a Mr. Perez, wrote in a letter to the Spectator editor, "As a Cuban citizen born in that beautiful country, I am disgusted and outraged at the pack of lies, distortions, and absurdities that a Ml'. Mark Rudd has been trying to pass as facts . . .") Additionally, fired with the guerilla spirit of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Rudd was more than ever convinced of the necessity, the morality, even the beauty of a liberating upheaval. Only two weeks before the illegal February 24 sit-in, after Rudd had returned from Cuba, several Columbia students attended a weekend regional
SDS conference at New York University's Weinstein Residence Hall en February 10-11. The purpose of the meeting was to figure out ways of locally implementing a decision reached by the SDS's National Council during the Christmas holiday of 1967-68 at the University of Indiana. Basically, the decision was that SDS members had to enter a new third stage of political theory and practice. Begun in dissent and reform, SDS had moved into resistance and sabotage; now it was time to move into revolution and head-on clashes. As stated in Firebomb, the SDS newsletter, in early February, SDS was taking a "major step forward" in their struggle, one that was a matter of Ijfeand-death for SDS. Said the editorial: "A serious organization consciously seeking to develop a revolutionary practice creates a life-or-death dynamic within the society it is trying to destroy and recreate." What the SDS ational Council decided in Bloomington was to adopt the so-called "Ten Days in April" plan, whereby SDS members and their allies would spark 10 days of disruption and violent confrontations at leading American colleges and universities between Sunday, April 21 and Tuesday, April 30. As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 15, 1968, by an on-the-scene observer, Greg Calvert, one of the SDS national leaders, declared the last 10 days in April "a time to shake the empire." Another one of the 200 students in attendance called the period, "a time for aggression."
The SDS plan, in keeping with the organization's looseness and centrifugal tendencies, urged that each campus chapter select its own methods and targets. The SDS national leaders cautioned, however, against getting too hung up on specific issues or particular reforms. The report said, "SDS does not attack university complicity with the war, but the university as an integral part of the corporate structure which necessitates and wages imperialist wars." The SDS newsletter Firebomh pointed to the need for greater discipline within its ranks and told readers of the plan "for pulling our organization together as a real political force in America." One SDS writer from New York