Jeremy Varon (6 page)

emerged. A striking number of Weathermen participated in the rebellion, whether as students or as agitators from the outside.

Columbia had a strong SDS chapter, which in 1966–67 protested the presence of CIA and military recruiters on campus. The SDSers initially pursued institutional channels for changing university policies but soon came under the leadership of an “action faction” that favored polarizing confrontations. In 1968, two issues dominated SDS’s attention: the proposed building of a university gym in Harlem and Columbia’s involvement with the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), which coordinated academic research used by the military in Vietnam. Critics charged that the proposed gym, which would encroach on neighboring Harlem but bring no benefit to its largely poor, black population, epitomized Columbia’s racism, and that the relationship with IDA revealed Columbia’s complicity with U.S. militarism. As the university ignored student demands and punished student leaders, “student power” became another potent issue.

After black students occupied a campus building in late April, whites seized four others. Together, they shut down the university, forming a makeshift government that “ruled” by means of participatory democracy. National activists, including Tom Hayden, a co-founder of SDS, rushed to the campus to join the rebels. Radicals, in a conscious play on Che Guevara’s call to “create two, three, many Vietnams,” proliferated the slogan “create two, three, many Columbias.” (The slogan seemed to have real agency when, in May, French students— conscious of events at 26

“Agents of Necessity”

Columbia—occupied universities and then other institutions, precipitating a crisis that almost toppled the French state.) As national and international media descended upon the campus, student protest in the United States achieved unprecedented visibility. The initial uprising ended after a week when university officials called in over 1,000 police to clear the students from the buildings. Police made over 700 arrests, injuring dozens of students in the process.11

The Columbia protest was significant for the links the students made among the issues of racism, militarism, economic injustice, and student power. One protester explained that “the uprising was begun . . . not to achieve student power alone, but to advance the struggle for liberation outside the university itself.”12 The protest was also important for its militancy, which enhanced the students’ sense of connection to that larger

“struggle.” Shutting down a major university in America’s premier city, the students felt a taste of power that encouraged them to think in the exalted language of revolution. They called the occupied buildings “liberated zones” and experienced the exhilaration of participating in what Jeff Jones described as a “culture of total resistance.”13 The use of police violence against the students was another hallmark of Columbia. It fed an uncompromising rhetoric of condemnation and compelled the protesters to see political conflict in overtly confrontational terms. In variously heartfelt and grandiose language, a flyer asserted that the students now “know personally the brutality and inhumanity of a System which kills its young men without remorse and allows the poor to starve. . . . We will free Columbia of the Company men and profiteers and cake-eaters who control its future and direct its participation in the death industries. Our weapon is our solidarity.”14 Another flyer encouraged new battles to be fought with more than the figurative arms of the spirit: “We must prepare ourselves to deal with the enemy. Our weapons: political education and tactical organization for students and workers: rocks, clubs, fire bombs, plastique, guns—but most of all—commitment and courage.”15

The New Left would soon cross another threshold in its evolving politics of confrontation. In response to a call from the Yippies—a flam-boyant, largely mythical group headed by New York’s Abbie Hoffman and Berkeley’s Jerry Rubin—five thousand young radicals massed in Chicago to protest the convention of the Democratic Party in August of 1968. The Democrats were set to nominate Lyndon Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who had pledged to continue Johnson’s Vietnam policy. With the assassination of the progressive Democrat Robert Kennedy and the certain defeat of the antiwar candidate Eugene Mc-

“Agents of Necessity”

27

Carthy, radicals lost any hope of working within the electoral system.

Partly as a show of force and partly as a playful provocation, the Yippies warned that Chicago would be a scene of fantastic disruptions.16

Rubin even seemed to welcome a violent police response, urging the group to “force a confrontation in which the establishment hits hard, thereby placing large numbers of people in a state of crisis and tension.”17 Though the Yippies rejected this suggestion, their sense of looming danger proved prophetic. When protesters failed to leave a park near the Convention Hall, police attacked them with brutal force. The bloody mêlée, shown live on national TV, provided spectacular images of a city, a political system, and a society out of control.

How and why young activists would turn so aggressively on “liberal”

institutions like Columbia University and the Democratic Party may now seem hard to fathom. Yet liberalism was the target of relentless attacks by the left from the mid 1960s on. Partly, enmity toward liberalism grew out of activists’ sense that so much of what was wrong with America had been perpetrated or was presided over by liberals. The Vietnam War, its critics repeatedly said, was a “liberal’s war,” insofar as it had been conceived and then expanded by the Democratic administrations of Kennedy and Johnson. More broadly, the Pax Americana of the postwar years—with its assertion of American military supremacy, vigorous anticommunism, and aggressive promotion of U.S. interests—was fully as much a part of the foreign policy agenda of liberals as it was of conservatives (though some liberals were outspoken in opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam).18 For leftists, President Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk—liberals all—became the arch-villains of the era.19

Liberals were less vulnerable on issues of race and poverty, but there, too, they attracted the suspicion and eventual condemnation of young rebels. The federal government had supported the effort to end legal segregation with legislation and even troops, and Johnson’s “Great Society” programs addressed poverty with an intensity not seen since the New Deal. Yet the extension of formal political rights addressed neither the connection between racial and economic oppression nor, as blacks argued with growing insistence, the institutional foundations of racism. Federal antipoverty programs went only so far in expanding the opportunities for the poorest Americans. As white activists became alert to the message of figures like Malcolm X and groups like the Black Panthers—

who harangued the liberal establishment for its alleged condescension and half-measures—their criticisms of liberal attitudes grew more probing. The 28

“Agents of Necessity”

essential charge was that white liberals supported the equality of people of color only up to a point; by the mid 1960s, “liberal” had become a dirty word among young activists, used to denounce a worldview that subscribed to tepid versions of all the right things, while recoiling from the kinds of change that would fundamentally challenge the supremacy of whites.

Disenchantment with liberalism was a virtual right of passage for those becoming Weathermen. In the Columbia experience, the process by which some became radicalized and peeled themselves away from the preor-dained script of their lives comes into focus. Robert Roth, the gifted and studious son of a middle-class family in Queens, entered Columbia in 1966

at the age of sixteen; by 1969 he had left and joined Weatherman. Roth credits his early interest in social justice to the “progressive Jewish tradition” of which his parents were a part. Growing up, he “compulsively”

followed the civil rights movement in the South, which offered images of the brutality of American racism but also of the “courage and spirit” of those resisting it. Participating in civil rights rallies in New York, he came to see racism as a northern problem as well. Columbia represented, in his words, “the chosen path” for someone of his background; its message, as he encountered it, was “there’s room for everyone here . . . this is the place where you can finally make your contribution . . . you’ve reached the pinnacle, so don’t blow it.” Yet Roth came to feel that the truth of

“success” at Columbia was better expressed in the SDS slogan “Work, Study, Get Ahead, Kill,” insofar as the endpoint was an elite position in a social system predicated on inequality and violence. Roth discerned in his fellow activists, beyond the competitiveness nurtured by an all-male institution, an admirable willingness to take a “risk in life and blow it”

by rejecting the rewards of Columbia. For Roth, the issues of the gym and IDA did not contradict but rather exemplified Columbia’s liberalism.20

David Gilbert, also a future Weatherman, had graduated from Columbia in 1966 but, still living in New York, joined the 1968 rebellion.

Raised like Roth in a liberal Jewish household, he recalls first being sen-sitized to injustice through education about the Holocaust. He locates the roots of his eventual radicalism in his sincere wish as a teenager that America “live up to the rhetoric of democracy.” The politically preco-cious Gilbert became active in his Boston-area high school in protests against racism and U.S. foreign policy, which often seemed to violate his country’s freedom-loving creed. Columbia, with its highly traditional cur-riculum and imposing neoclassical architecture, represented to him the

“pretense of humanism.” Despite its great wealth, the university paid its largely black and Hispanic workforce poorly. At orientation, the deans

“Agents of Necessity”

29

had warned the students not to stray into Harlem (and certainly not wearing Columbia sweatshirts); curious and defiant, Gilbert promptly toured Harlem, and he later tutored a child there. He described his experiences in Harlem and working with the campus chapter of CORE (the Congress on Racial Equality) as far “more educational” than what he felt was the

“mindless regurgitation” practiced at Columbia.21 When student protest heated up in the spring of 1968, Gilbert eagerly reimmersed himself in the activism on the campus.

Columbia was hardly unique among American universities for its involvement with the military-industrial complex, its questionable practices as a landlord and employer, or its exclusion of students from university governance. What was striking was the students’ response: not to see these qualities as mere taints that compromised an otherwise sound institution, but to declare them morally unacceptable expressions of Columbia’s true identity. As the inadequacy of the “official” channels for redressing their grievances was quickly exposed, the rebels adopted the uncompromising stance of “no business as usual.” Since the university also proved unyielding, a complex conflict became for some on each side an all-or-nothing struggle to be settled, at last, by force. A journalist who covered the events at Columbia and then the rise of Weatherman reflected:

“The more I witnessed, the more I felt that what was happening in the country had been prefigured at Columbia [where] SDS politics centered on collision. . . . When all the arguments about issues had been made, the only certain thing was violence.”22

Columbia stood out, finally, in how the protests pushed the protesters—

in ways both political and deeply personal—beyond the confines of the university. In the spring of 1968, Gilbert was called before the faculty to discuss a possible student strike. He recalls the faculty asking:

“Do you say you stand for democracy?” We said, “Yes, we do.” They said,

“Would you stand by a referendum, of the students and faculty, everybody at the University?” . . . And I was really torn between what I considered fundamental issues and the commitment to democracy, participatory democracy, and I sort of hesitated and said, “Well we would stand by a referendum, as long as the people in Harlem, and people in Vietnam, who are the ones most affected by this, can vote, because that’s really participatory democracy.”23

According to Roth, it was Columbia’s black students who, above all, honored this robust sense of democracy in choosing to “side with their community [in Harlem] on the issue of the gym” by initiating the building takeovers.

30

“Agents of Necessity”

Columbia soon became less and less relevant to its radical students. Roth, who was elected a leader of Columbia SDS for the new academic year, recalls that by 1969, “the powerful stuff was happening at other places,”

led largely by people of color fighting for basic access to life opportunities.

At the City University of New York, the battle over open admissions erupted into a major class and race conflict, in which Roth and other Columbia activists participated. Even so, Roth helped lead more building occupations at his own university, for which he was arrested and served a thirty-day prison sentence. The experience proved a “stepping stone to withdrawing . . . to see my life differently [and realize,] ‘No, I wasn’t going to finish Columbia.’”24 He was going to join the revolution instead.

This dynamic of a “local” protest escalating into a major confrontation was repeated in countless settings—if most often beyond the glare of instant celebrity shone on Columbia’s comparatively privileged radicals in America’s leading city. At San Francisco State College, the movement for black and ethnic studies programs was part of a larger struggle against racism. The combination of the university’s intransigence and the students’

militancy led to the continuous occupation of the campus in the fall and winter of 1968–69 by police and soldiers; by the year’s end, there had been more than 700 arrests, 80 injuries to students and 32 to police, and several attempted bombings.25 At Cornell University in the same year, students used the demand for a black studies program as a vehicle for advocating Black Power more generally; the photograph of black students brandishing rifles outside a campus building is an enduring symbol of the profound racial and social divisions of the era. In each case, radicals confronted a local injustice as an instance of a much broader system of oppression, which served as the ultimate target of their protest.