At 10 minutes past noon on Tuesday,
April 23, 1968, an intense, lean six-foot junior in Columbia College, the historic all-male undergraduate school at Columbia University, began walking toward the Sundial, the unofficial University soapbox on College Walk, at the center of the campus. The student walked rather fast, with long strides, through the sunny spring air. His prominent jaw, the sandy waves of hair that spilled over the right side of his forehead, and his narrowed eyes gave him a look of determined belligerency. 'Wearing blue jeans, boots, and an unironed shirt open at the neck, he seemed rather like an angry farmer headed for a brawl at the local saloon. Several voices mUl"murad, "Here he comes now!" As he stepped up on the six-footround pink granite podium, with five of his fellow students, the gathered crowd of approximately 300 persons grew silent. There was a curious mixture of quiet good humor and dread foreboding among the listeners, as if they were about to witness a traditional spring panty raid in which the spirited students as a novelty had decided to carry knives. The undergraduate about to speak, Mark Rudd, was a bright. passionate young man who had suddenly emerged as a dramatic and fiercewilled leader of a small group of Columbia students who were totally fed up with the American "system" of life, with the "power structure" that was imposing that system on the masses and the young, with the leading universities that were acting in "complicity" with the system and its "imperialist wars," and with the University's president, Dr. Grayson Kirk. The student group also was disillusioned about "the careerist, hopelessly middle-class professors" who were acquiescing in the complicity instead of fighting actively to "liberate" the masses and the young from "the system." ~lost of these students belonged to a campus clique known as the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, though the true believers were not limited to membership in that organization. SDS, and Mark Rudd, had been talking and writing openly for several 4
months of a "spring offensive" at Columbia, the fifth oldest institution 0f higher learning in America. The Students for a Democratic Society was founded at Port Huron, Michigan in June 1962, the product chiefly of University of 'lichigan undergraduates like Albert Haber, Paul Potter, and Thomas Hayden, who was elected its first president. It was an offshoot of the League for Industrial Democracy, a tiny organization of socialists and quasi-socialists who were also passionate democrats-men like orman Thomas, Michael Harrington, Harold Taylor, and Bayard Rustin. (Albert Haber was president of the Student League for Industrial Democracy in 1961-62.) Like Columbia philosopher John Dewey, the SDS wanted to democratize American society more fully; that is, make every institution in the United States a participatory democratic cell in an almost Athenian way. 'iV'orkers should have a voice in running their factories, Negroes their ghetto schools and welfare programs, and students their universities, SDS contended. In September 1963 a Columbia chapter was formed. Initially, SDS spent most of its energy aiding the Negroes in civil rights actions. The SDS at first saw itself largely as a campus-based, middle class, northern counterpart to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, which was active on behalf of Jegro equality in the South. Civil rights activity led SDS quickly into community organization, or the stirring up of various underprivileged groups into collective action against the authorities in their area in order to gain better jobs, housing, schools, welfare programs, equal treatment, and the like. As the United States became more and more mired in the Vietnam war, however, SDS shifted its emphasis to anti-war publicity and activities in 1964. This shift was prompted by two other developments: the increasing desire of Negroes to have the civil rights movement largely a black-directed affair rather than a white-dominated one, and the failure of SDS to find allies among the working class, especially in the trade unions. (One labor leader told us in 1965 that he regarded the SDS radicals as "screwball, un-American, rich kids." The same
month one undergraduate activist ~t Columbia said to us that he found most of "the American proletariat" to be "surprisingly conservative, materialistic, home-loving, patriotic, and even racist.") By late 1966 SDS felt it necessary to move again, "from dissent to resistance." The Johnson administration seemed incredibly stiff and hawkish about the Vietnam situation, and the nation appeared to them reluctant to undertake a massive effort to help the egroes and America's poor. umerous SDS members began to question seriously the validity of America's whole economic and political system. SDS from its beginnings had had a vague anti-capitalist stance. As early as 1963, in their national policy document, America and the New Era, SDS leaders condemned the "corporatist" nature of the Kennedy administration and the "reactionary Congressional oligarchy." But in 1966 SDS members began to speak of capitalist warmongers, U.S. imperialism, rotten bureaucracies, the silliness and sameness of the twoparty system, the spinelessness and selfishness of the middle classes, and the slow, unresponsive, committee-infested procedures of liberal democracy. Talk became more frequent of "overthrowing the power structure" and smashing the entire U.S. "system" as it is presently constituted. In an interview with reporter Paul Hofmann, printed in the ew York Times on May 7, 1967, SDS national secretary Gregory Calvert said, "We are working to build a guerilla force in an urban environment. ... 'iV'e are actively organizing sedition." Calvert, who calls himself "a post-Communist revolutionary," said that students had to become more like the guerilla warriors of Vietnam and pro-Castro Cuba. Ernesto "Che" Guevara was the new hero. "Che sure lives in our hearts," said Calvert. As the SDS mood shifted from reform to revolution, the SDS members began to search for two things. One was a core of dedicated, serious radicals to spark things; the other was a mass base for the overthrow. To develop the former, they teamed up with the most radical students and professional agitators on the revolutionary leftthe Peking-oriented Progressive Labor Party; the Leninist-Trotskyite Young COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY