We're Happening All Over, Baby!

During the weekend of October 15 to 17, 1965, nearly 100,000 Americans--more than half of them students--demonstrated against their Government's involvement in the war in Vietnam. Close to 30,000 marched down New York's Fifth Avenue, while 14,000 paraded in the San Francisco Bay Area. Many of the latter tried to advance on the Oakland Army Terminal to hold a "teach-in" aimed at the military personnel there, but they were twice turned back by police. Protesters were in the streets in Pittsburgh, New Haven, Cleveland, Detroit, Seattle and Los Angeles. In Ann Arbor, 38 were arrested, including students and professors from the University of Michigan, as they staged a sit-in at Selective Service headquarters. Fifty students from the University of Wisconsin marched on Truax Air Force Base in an unsuccessful attempt to make a citizen's arrest of the commandant for acting as "an accessory to mass murder and genocide."

In the following weeks, demonstrations continued, punctuated by the public burning of draft cards in several cities, and highlighted in late November by a massive anti-Vietnam march on Washington--coordinated by the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy--that attracted more than 25,000 protesters. Meanwhile, Students for a Democratic Society, the largest of the student groups on the left, insisted that wide-ranging opportunities for nonmilitary service must be provided those youngsters who will not kill. "Work in Watts [the Negro section of Los Angeles which erupted in violence during the summer of 1965] with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in the Peace Corps," proclaimed Paul Booth, national secretary of SDS, "should be seen as being as high a duty as burning a village."

These protesting students are admittedly a minority on the nation's campuses, but they are a larger minority of dissent than has ever existed before in this country. And their numbers are growing. For the past three years they have seemed to be everywhere--as nonviolent guerrilla fighters against the "power structure" throughout the South; as organizers of the poor for power in Northern black ghettos: as marchers against American foreign policy; as agitators on more and more campuses for freer speech and against the machinelike impersonality of the multiversity. They are the New Left--the most action-oriented, radically searching generation of the young in American history.

Their placards and buttons proclaim their restless independence and their fervent identification with the voiceless, the dispossessed: Let the People Decide! You can't Trust anybody over 30! Register for Power! Stand Back and Don't bug Us! Make Love, Not War! And one banner, at the University of California, heralds what they hope is a rising wave of (continued on page 98)We're Happening All Over(continued from page 83) dissent: We're Happening All Over, Baby!

Adults try to understand the roots of the new radicals' anger; they try to at least categorize the commotion. A middle-aged liberal Republican stockbroker asks a youngster picketing New York's Chase Manhattan Bank because of its participation in the economy of apartheid South Africa: "Do you think your actions can change the world?" "Maybe not," the picket answers. "But I want to make sure the world does not change me."

Harry Reasoner, an analyst for CBS News, looks for a connective thread in the tumult: "What is new is that a sexual revolution is sweeping across campuses today as young people seek greater freedom. And this has somehow become all involved with politics. As though some fateful equation existed between sexual freedom, free speech and a rejection of the values of an adult generation."

That equation does exist. The young radicals insist they have declared war against all the interconnecting, life-smothering forces in the society--from anachronistic parental prohibitions of premarital sex to the constant imminence of a finger on the button that sets off Armageddon. They further insist that they can only find themselves, realize their full capacities, in direct action to change the society.

Kate Coleman, a lissome, 22-year-old member of the Free Speech Movement (now the Free Student Union) at the University of California, tells of what spurred her to confront that multiversity, in which some classes have as many as 1200 students: "I feel I am being swallowed up by a faceless crowd. I don't know whether I am dead and they are alive or they are dead and I am alive. I feel lost in a machine. It is lonely. It is impersonal. It is cold."

In Washington, on April 17, 1965, 25,000 march--the largest American peace demonstration until the march in New York on October 16--in a student-organized protest against the war in Vietnam. In front of the Washington Monument, 26-year-old Paul Potter, then president of Students for a Democratic Society, lashes them to answer a question: "What kind of system is it that leaves millions upon millions throughout the country impoverished and excluded from the mainstream and the promise of American society, that creates faceless and terrible bureaucracies in which people spend their lives and do their work, that consistently puts material values before human values--and still persists in calling itself free and still persists in finding itself fit to police the world?"

His voice rises, and the young seem to ignite in assent: "What place is there for ordinary men in that system and how are they to control it, make it bend itself to their wills rather than bending them to its? We must name that system. We must name it, describe it, analyze it, understand it and change it." At the end, he tries to span the world for himself and his listeners: "In a strange way the people of Vietnam and the people on this demonstration are united in much more than a common concern that the war be ended. In both countries there are people struggling to build a movement that has the power to change their condition. The system that frustrates these movements is the same. All our lives, our destinies, our very hopes to live, depend on our ability to overcome that system."

Their elders listen, and some ask why more of the new radicals do not also attack other systems--the Russian, the Chinese. J. Edgar Hoover claims to have the answer. Before the House Appropriations subcommittee in March 1965, he says of the student revolt at the University of California the previous fall: "A few hundred students contain within their ranks a handful of Communists that mislead, confuse and bewilder a great many students to their detriment. Communist Party leaders feel that based on what happened on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, they can exploit similar student demonstrations to their own benefit in the future."

Adding to the chorus of alarmed concern is Dr. Stefan Possony, Director of International Studies at the Hoover Institute, Stanford University. In May 1965, appearing before the Senate Internal Security subcommittee, he warns that "the radicalization of American youth is proceeding beyond the wildest expectations of the Communists."

There are, indeed, Communists in the bristlingly diversified New Left: but they are a small minority. And while they have tried, they have not been able to manipulate such of the major cadres of the new radicals as SDS, SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), NSM (Northern Student Movement), SSOC (Southern Student Organizing Committee) and the newly politicalized CORE (Congress of Racial Equality).

The influence on the militant young of the limp, shuffling American Communist Party is practically nonexistent. At 54, Gus Hall, the Party's general secretary, presides over a barren domain of 8000 to 10,000 aging members.

More vivid, more voluble and much younger are the new Communists--the pro-Mao adherents of the Progressive Labor Party. That center of apocalyptic rhetoric was organized in 1961 by 38-year-old Milton Rosen and 40-year-old Mortimer Scheer--who had been expelled by the vintage Communist Party. The membership of PLP, centered mainly in New York and San Francisco, is 1400 and its average age is 25. The stance of PLP is violent. It aches for the red glare of cities exploding into battlefields between the virtuous, invincible poor and the helmeted minions of capitalist oppression. Its literature persistently--and laboriously--calls for revolution rather than "collaboration."

Ominous rumors proliferate concerning PLP--stories of stacks of hidden arms; subterranean funds from Red China; classes in the techniques of karate, disguises and forgery as preparations for going underground. None of these rumored attempts to tool up for actual revolution has yet been proved, though not for want of trying. All phones in PLP offices are tapped; its leaders are under surveillance; and undoubtedly there is more than one FBI member in the guise of a PLP foot soldier.

The visible activities of the Progressive Labor Party have so far been attempts to sink roots in the slums of Harlem, the Lower East Side and San Francisco. PLP organizes rent strikes, remedial-reading clinics, child-care services and demonstrations against police brutality. In the process, they try to sell their Marxist-Leninism and their roaring newspapers--Challenge in New York and Spark in San Francisco. There is no evidence that they have converted more than a few of the black and Puerto Rican poor to their credo of cosmic cataclysm. "They get some support," says a CORE worker in Harlem, "on the immediate, gut issues like slumlords and the cops. But the people here just don't give a damn about foreign affairs and Marxism. They want jobs. And PLP ain't about to be able to get them any jobs."

Charges of pro-Soviet Communism have been made against another group of dissidents--the DuBois Clubs, named after the patrician Negro intellectual, William DuBois, one of the founders of the NAACP. Late in his long, energetic life, DuBois joined the Communist Party. He died, mordantly anti-American, an expatriate in Ghana. The DuBois Clubs are strongest in San Francisco, where they were formed in June 1964. They have grown to 44 chapters with more than 2000 members on campuses and in cities.

Judging from their literature and from talks with their leaders, the DuBois Clubs are vaguely socialist, unreservedly critical of the United States, and committed to the achievement of a "socialist America" through democratic political processes rather than revolution. The leaders maintain, as one of them puts it, that "the Soviet Union and the whole socialist bloc--including the new nations in Africa and Asia--have broken loose from some of the basic problems that are at the heart of this country's social system."

A smaller core of rebels--with 500 to (continued on page 144)We're Happening All over(continued from page 98) 600 active members on several campuses--is the May 2nd Movement, an outgrowth of the May 2nd Committee formed at a socialist conference at Yale in March 1964. Its name comes from the fact that on May 2nd of that year, the Movement organized a march on the United Nations, protesting the war in Vietnam.

Like the DuBois Clubs, the May 2nd activists consider what they term "American imperialism" their primary target. Admitting frequent, informal ties with the Progressive Labor Party, May 2nd leaders deny they have been taken over by the PLP. They call their nascent organization "a radical student peace organization," but they are not pacifists. "We cannot," says one of their leaders, "ask the Vietcong or the black people in Northern ghettos to be nonviolent. Oh, I used to be a pacifist, but I never had to try it out. However, a Vietnamese peasant confronted by a Marine or a black man being hit by a cop cannot be asked to be nonviolent. Pacifism is irrelevant for them."

Old-line, anti-Communist leftists such as Socialist Norman Thomas and Bayard Rustin, chief strategist for Martin Luther King, condemn the overt communism of the PLP; and they consider the DuBois Clubs and the May 2nd Movement as at best politically naïve and at worst easy prey to manipulation by Communists. SDS, SNCC and the Northern Student Movement resent the implication that they can be successfully infiltrated. They will cooperate with the DuBois Clubs and the May 2nd Movement--though not with the rigid, raucous PLP--on specific projects, maintaining their own stubborn independence. Since they practice total inner democracy and have no patience with pat ideologies, whether Soviet or Chinese, they are confident they can protect themselves.

On one occasion, a PLP member infiltrated a SNCC unit in the South, becoming editor of that group's local newspaper. When the paper began to look as if it had been programed by a computer in Peking, the journalistic James Bond of the PLP was dismissed.

"Look," says C. Clark Kissinger, a short, wiry, 24-year-old graduate of the University of Chicago (where he majored in mathematics) and now a full-time strategist for SDS, "we began by rejecting the old sectarian Left and its ancient quarrels. We are interested in direct action and specific issues. We do not spend endless hours debating the nature of Soviet Russia."

In agreement with Kissinger is 28-year-old Bill Strickland, a tall, slim, pervasively hip Negro who directs the Northern Student Movement from an office in Harlem. A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard who wrote his master's thesis on Malcolm X, Strickland speaks for the majority of today's radical American young when he insists: "Whatever 'revolution' does occur will be an American revolution, coming out of the American experience. We'll have to evolve our own ideology. You can't impose an alien ideology in the United States. We're not interested in a guy's memorizing Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution or in some Stalinist with a line. We're interested in creating new forms and new institutions."

"Man," adds a member of SNCC, "the Communists, they're empty, man, empty. They've got the same stale ideas, the same bureaucracy they've always had. When he gets mixed up with us, a Commie dies and a person develops."

The Northern Student Movement--the SNCC of the North--was formed in 1961. Manned largely by college students, some of whom dropped out of school for a time to work in the field, the NSM at first concentrated on tutorial programs for children in Negro slums. In the last year, its focus has changed to helping the poor--the black poor--organize themselves into power blocs.

With some 2000 student members on 73 campuses, the Northern Student Movement has 32 field secretaries and 40 full-time volunteer workers. Now nearly all in the field are Negro. Engaged in community organizing in Boston. Hartford, Detroit, Philadelphia and Harlem, they are acting as catalysts for rent strikes, political action, pressure on War-on-Poverty officials to enlist the poor in decision making, and otherwise as stimuli for the previously voiceless to join forces. "We go way beyond voter registration," says Strickland. "What's the point of getting people registered so that they're swallowed by the same old mechanistic political machines? We're engaged in creating new political structures for a really new society."

A switch to politics is also a major part of the new direction being taken by CORE. Formerly, CORE concentrated its energies on civil rights breakthroughs--from public accommodations to jobs--but now, CORE's former national director, James Farmer, emphasizes, "our goal is power, political power" (see When Will the Demonstrations End?, Playboy, January 1966, and Mood Ebony, Playboy, February 1966). One route to that power is the opening of store-front community centers, North and South, to mobilize the Negro ghettos into "a force for political and community action." Depending on the circumstances, CORE will either encourage "freedom democratic movements" within the Democratic Party or it will start parallel parties, as it already has in the Brooklyn Freedom Democratic Party.

The concept of parallel institutions--new groupings when traditional institutions are failing the poor--is central to many of the new student movements. SNCC has its Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; members of SDS and other organizations are planning a parallel Congress in Washington as a means of dramatizing their protest against the war in Vietnam; and both CORE and SNCC see no reason why there cannot be parallel labor unions when regular unions persist in discriminating against Negroes.

The most advanced of the new radical movements in the South, and one from which Northern activists draw many of their ideas, is SNCC. Started five years ago as an outgrowth of the first sit-ins and Freedom Rides, SNCC has primarily worked in rural areas, but is now expanding into such Southern cities as Atlanta, Montgomery and Birmingham. SNCC is not a membership organization, although "Friends of SNCC" exist on many campuses. To be in SNCC itself, however, requires a total commitment of time and energy. Making that commitment are 200 paid workers in the field (paid at the barest subsistence level) and 250 full-time volunteers.

After organizing voter registration campaigns--often under extremely hazardous conditions--SNCC, too, has moved into politics. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party has been able to force its challenge of the five Mississippi seats in the House of Representatives onto the floor of the House itself. It did not win the challenge, but it brought abrasive national attention to the fact that the present Congressmen from Mississippi hardly represent all of its citizenry.

SNCC pioneered in another kind of parallel institution--the Freedom School. In protest against the inferiority of Mississippi education for Negroes as well as against the absence of Negro and African history in Negro schools, SNCC set up its own classes. The idea has been taken over throughout the North by such groups as CORE and the NSM. The newest SNCC parallel institution is the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union. In the Mississippi delta, where laborers are paid 30 cents an hour, the MFLU's basic demand of plantation owners is that they comply with the Federal minimum wage law of $1.25 an hour. Despite reprisals by exacerbated employers, strikes continue and membership is spreading.

In all of its activities, the heart of SNCC's philosophy is "participatory democracy" and the right of the poor to decide for and by themselves what the policies of SNCC and its affiliates should be. Participatory democracy means that every member should share in the decisions of any organization or government to which he belongs. As a result, SNCC's own meetings tend to be lengthily contentious until a "consensus" is reached with which everyone can agree. The word "leader" is suspect in SNCC, and although the tough, sharp-edged Jim Forman and the impregnably fearless John Lewis usually act as SNCC spokesmen, their authority comes from below.

SNCC's ultimate goal is to have leaders come directly from the poor--a process that has already worked in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, one of whose directors is the blunt, charismatic Fannie Lou Hamer, a former sharecropper. SNCC distrusts--and is sometimes distrusted by--other organizations, such as the NAACP and Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which are not operated with the egalitarianism of SNCC.

An intriguing and little-publicized offshoot of SNCC is the Southern Student Organizing Committee, formed in April 1964 by white Southern college students to spread the word for "a new politics for a new South." Now, with affiliates on 50 campuses, recently including several Negro colleges. SSOC has more than 2000 supporters.

For Negro student radicals in the North, a first meeting with the blonde girls and the reedy boys of SSOC, their accent redolent of the South, takes some adjusting. "I hear what they say," says a CORE militant, "but I hear how they say it, and it's hard to associate that accent with those ideas. Yet they're for real. I don't know how they got that way, but they are."

"Participatory democracy" is as endemic to SSOC as it is to SNCC. Also obsessed with that concept and with the conviction that the poor can and should be their own leaders is the nationwide SDS, which has the widest representation on campuses of all student groups and is engaged in community organization in more ghettos than any of its contemporaries.

In three years, SDS has attracted more than 3300 members in 100 chapters in 41 states. By the end of 1965, its membership was growing swiftly as a result of its intensified focus on activities against the war in Vietnam. In the field are 70 full-time staff members--300 during the summer--engaged in creating an "interracial movement of the poor." The beginnings of this movement have been planted by SDS in ten Northern and Midwestern cities. In Newark, for instance, the Newark Community Union Project--despite persistent opposition from the mayor, the police and even some liberals who felt they were being displaced--has succeeded in defeating an urban renewal plan that would have destroyed a viable Negro neighborhood. It has also put effective pressure on absentee landlords in the ghetto to repair their buildings, and it has propelled some of its local members into decision-making positions in the council distributing War-on-Poverty funds.

As its ghetto components grow, SDS is working on ways to link them as the first stage in a national alliance of the poor. Two conventions of "community unions" from around the country have already been held, and more are planned. Bill Strickland of the Northern Student Movement also envisages the growth first of local centers of power and then a network of the militant poor that could bring regional and eventually national changes in the way the poor live. "To get rid of the ghetto," says Strickland, who veers easily from Harvard speech to the argot of the street, "you have to get to the nitty-gritty. And that means candidates from the ghetto who are responsible to the ghetto."

It is groups such as SDS, SNCC and the Northern Student Movement that have the most powerful appeal to those on the nation's campuses who have not yet committed themselves to full-time careers as changers of "the system" but who do support these organizations with money and with their bodies at demonstrations.

A basic attraction of these groups is that they are not extensions of the adult Left. They were formed by students and are led by students. Accordingly, they satisfy the fundamental need of today's dissident young--to make their own decisions. "This generation," says 23-year-old Jeffrey Shero at the University of Texas, "has witnessed hypocrisy as has no other generation. The churches aren't doing what they should be doing. There is lie after lie on television. The whole society is run and compounded on lies. We are the first generation that grew up with the idea of annihilation. In a situation like this, you have to go out and form your own religion."

A reason, on the other hand, why the Progressive Labor Party has not been successful on campuses is that it parrots an old, tired, adult line--in its case, that of the Chinese Communists and those who polemicize with similar furious oversimplification.

This decision by more and more of the young to create their own ideology, often by existential experience in action for social change, is relatively new. During most of the 1950s, the young were the "silent generation," intimidated by McCarthyism, traumatized by The Bomb and anxious only for materialistic security. Then came the "Beats," who expressed their disdain for the values of the majority society by cutting themselves off from it.

For the dissatisfied young of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the passive, self-protective alienation of the Beats began to lose its charm. The reasons were several, and intersecting. The first major thrust for re-evaluation of themselves by the young was the accelerating civil rights movement in the South. Seized by the courage of the initial sit-inners and Freedom Riders, Northern students began to hold parallel demonstrations, picketing local stores of chains that discriminated in the South. They gave money, and gradually began to give themselves. Significantly, many of the students who emerged in the fall of 1964 as leaders of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California had spent the preceding summer in Mississippi teaching Negroes how to pass voter registration tests.

Ironically, another impetus for the rise of the new radicals was the House Un-American Activities Committee. After student protests against HUAC's hearings in San Francisco in 1960, the Committee made easily available throughout the country a film of that confrontation, Operation Abolition. "We are indebted to HUAC for that film," says Clark Kissinger of SDS with wry satisfaction. "It showed these big cops clubbing students. Civil rights and anti-HUAC groups sprang up all over the place."

Robert Hutchins, former chancellor of the University of Chicago, provides another reason why the young were ready for action: "There has been a shift in the composition of the student body. Years ago, those who went to college were members of the establishment when they entered. Their purpose in coming was to confirm and improve their positions in it. In recent years, however, as the number of students has tripled, the social spectrum they represent has widened. More students are in college because they are bright and interested in learning something."

Because more of them are bright, they have been drawn to the viscerally relevant social movements outside the class room, particularly since they regard so much of their curriculum as dully irrelevant. The Free Speech Movement--and some of its counterparts on other campuses--began in reaction to administration attempts to restrict on-campus activity in civil rights and politics. But it soon expanded into a pungent, penetrating criticism of the very quality of the computerlike education being offered the protesters.

Mario Savio, the bushy-haired, 22-year-old former chief spokesman for the Free Speech Movement, escalated his contempt for the dehumanization of education to a jeremiad against the dehumanization of society at large: "There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machines will be prevented from working at all."

At Berkeley, the urge to be heard above the whirring of the machine led some students to extend the Free Speech Movement into what university administrators and the press called "the filthy speech movement." In March 1965, a group in their early 20s demonstrated on campus with placards on which were written the most common four-letter Anglo-Saxon word in American speech. They also sang and chanted the word. Adults were shocked. Even the American Civil Liberties Union considered their case "indefensible."

Why did they do it? One of them, 22-year-old John Thompson, told the San Francisco Open City Press: "I made that sign as a protest against the hypocritical climate, the lack of love I've found on this campus ... I could walk around this campus for weeks with a sign that said Murder or Shoot or Kill and no one would pay the least attention. I write this one little word and, bam, into jail I go. Isn't it absurd that people here only get involved with this one word when they should get involved with war, with murder--the kind of murder that's going on every day in Vietnam."

It has been in the past year especially that American foreign policy--as practiced in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic--has acted as a further source of student unrest. At Columbia University, in June 1965, 100 student demonstrators blocked the doors of Low Memorial Library and forced the postponement of a military review and awards ceremony of the university's officer training unit. In the same month, 75 Cornell students disrupted a Reserve Officers' Training Corps ritual by a sit-in. At Harvard, when McGeorge Bundy, a principal Presidential advisor on foreign policy, was selected as orator for the June literary exercises of the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa chapter, more than 100 members of that honor society, in an unprecedented move, made a public statement of protest. And when Bundy came, he was picketed.

Meanwhile, college faculty members were also becoming restive. During the tumult at the University of California, many professors came out forcefully on the side of the students, and some spoke of their own shame that it was the students rather than the professors who had dramatized the need for more individualized and more humanized education. The faculty revolt reached its apogee so far in the unprecedented wildfire of teach-ins--campus conclaves in lengthy opposition to American policy in Vietnam. Started in March 1965 by a group of University of Michigan professors, the teach-ins proved contagious, and soon hardly a university or college of prominence was without its home-grown variant. The initial climax of the teach-ins was a debate in Washington in May, which was televised to 100,000 on more than 100 campuses and to many more in those cities with television and radio stations that made the proceedings generally available. Moreover, two of the antagonists at the Washington teach-in were guests on NBC's Meet the Press with its audience of 10,000.000.

In May, the most Gargantuan of all teach-ins--a nonstop, 30-hour protest meeting--took place before 27,500 students at the University of California in Berkeley. In defense against the spreading campus opposition, the State Department felt itself compelled to send out teams to explain the Government's position. They failed to convert the dissidents. In one skirmish, at Adelphi University on Long Island, the State Department spokesmen were drowned out in a geyser of wild cheers and applause from 400 faculty members and students when a teenager in the audience shouted, "Isn't the United States getting ready for World War Three? Is this what we want?"

In the months during and since the proliferation of the teach-ins, a particularly significant development in the New Left has been the increasing fusion of protests directed against both America's internal and its external policies. No longer is the "peace movement" virtually alone, as it was more than five years ago. It has found swiftly multiplying allies among those of the young who began their apprenticeship as revolutionaries preoccupied with civil rights.

In May 1965, hundreds of University of California students marched on the Berkeley draft-board headquarters and presented the stunned coordinator of the board with a black coffin. Forty of them burned their draft cards. Steve Weissman, a leader of the Free Speech Movement, toured Southern campuses for the Southern Student Organizing Committee, telling his audiences: "Our movement started on a narrow issue--free speech on campus. But soon we found ourselves face to face with a more basic question: Who makes the decisions that govern our lives? And the further question is: How can we have a part in making the decisions?"

In June 1965, Bill Strickland insisted: "Events in Vietnam and Santo Domingo, Harlem and Mississippi are all related. They all raise the question as to what is the true face of America." John Lewis, the former divinity student who is currently national chairman of SNCC, agreed: "Black people must start protesting all injustices. We should broaden our perspectives to cross national and international boundaries, fighting injustices whether they be in America, South Africa or Vietnam." Clearly, the civil rights movement had broadened its scope enormously in the five years since students first conducted sit-ins for a cup of coffee at lily-white dime stores and cafeterias in the South.

When Students for a Democratic Society organized its mammoth April 17, 1965, March on Washington to End the War in Vietnam, it had no difficulty obtaining SNCC as one of its co-sponsors. And letters came from students in Mississippi Freedom schools saying they wanted to attend. Many did. That same month, at an SDS rally in Cleveland to protest the bombing of North Vietnam, two of the three speakers were poor whites in one of SDS's projects in that city. And in a bulletin issued intermittently by the Newark Community Union Project, one of the Negro poor who had gone to a later Washington conference on peace, wrote: "We say poor people should get together and unite. Poor in Vietnam or Newark, we are all alike."

While the students and some of the poor with whom they work are increasingly concerned with such issues as Vietnam, it remains true that to most of those who live in the slums, as Bill Strickland says, "Vietnam is hardly a consuming passion." Therefore, the major efforts of those in the New Left working in the ghettos concern basic changes in domestic institutions. The specter they see is that of an increasingly automated society that will further divide the elitist decision makers and the highly trained technicians from the undereducated and the underskilled. And among the latter, among those whom Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal calls "the underclass," they see a disproportionate percentage of Negroes.

The new radicals are not impressed by the steadily rising gross national product. Instead they underline, for instance, that while in 1947 the nonwhite unemployment rate was 64 percent higher than the white rate, in 1962 it was 124 percent higher. They see a persistently rising unemployment rate among Negro teenagers. Many of these black youngsters, moreover, have been made "unemployable," in an automated era, by the poor schools they had to attend.

The new radicals know that nearly 1,000,000 youngsters of all colors drop out of school every year. Where are they to find jobs? They know that ten years ago there were 2,200,000 Aid to Dependent Children cases receiving welfare funds. Today the figure is almost double. They know that the pressure of the population explosion will require that 9,000,000 new jobs be found during the next five years. Yet between 1947 and 1964, jobs increased at less than half that rate. They see, as Herbert Hill, Labor Secretary of the NAACP, puts it, the antipoverty program becoming "an extension of white welfare paternalism." with politicians rather than the poor in control in most of the cities receiving War-on-Poverty funds.

The new radicals see--and are bitter about--a country with astonishing resources but with so many poor. They would agree with Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania who, in the summer of 1965, criticized the newly passed, vastly inadequate LBJ housing bill, emphasizing: "We are the richest nation in the history of mankind. When we fail to provide a decent home for every American, it is not because we can't, but because we won't."

"It was essential," says a member of CORE in Philadelphia, "that we went beyond civil rights into programs for major social, economic and political changes. By itself, the civil rights movement had a built-in dead end, because when the basic civil rights issues are settled, there still won't be enough jobs for everyone."

What do the new radicals propose? There is as yet no coherent, cohesive program for change with which all sections of "the movement" agree. They do agree, however, on the urgent necessity for the poor to organize themselves and acquire political power. And they agree that political power should be used to attain massive housing rehabilitation and massive construction of new housing as well as to create new jobs.

The more traditionally socialist members of the New Left stick to New Deal--like solutions for unemployment--extensive public works and similar Government-financed expansions of activities in the public sector. But the radicals point out that, as job qualifications become more complex, to limit the poor largely to construction work is to ensure their being frozen in the underclass. They demand, therefore, a redefinition of work along with fundamentally improved public education. For some, a corollary of redefining work is a basic annual income, an idea first popularized by economist Robert Theobald, who is convinced that every American citizen by right should receive an annual sum from the Government. Advocates of the plan differ as to the amount. Martin Luther King, a convert to the idea, thinks the minimum per family should be $3000 a year. Others consider King's proposal to be at the level of poverty, and would raise the annual guarantee.

With an annual income, its proponents claim, families would be freed from the indignities and the dependency spawned by the existing welfare agencies. If, simultaneously, public education were so improved as to stimulate rather than stifle spontaneity and curiosity, the poor could become interested in all manner of jobs that are concerned with social services rather than with the production of goods--which will increasingly be taken care of by machines in any case.

Tom Hayden, an SDS worker and one of the organizers of the Newark Community Union Project, foresees the possibility of "thousands of new vocations in the areas of education, health care, recreation, conservation. Imagine a society which subsidized community-level art and journalism, health clinics, recreational facilities, libraries and museums; it would establish the basis for common culture for the first time in America."

Hayden and others of the new radicals, furthermore, would agree with U Thant, Secretary General of the United Nations, that the day should come when "the average youngster--and parent or employer--will consider that one or two years of work for the cause of development, either in a faraway country or in a depressed area of his own community, is a normal part of one's education."

But they would ask, "Why one or two years? Why not a lifetime of work as political and community organizers, as members of an international SNCC, as explorers of new ways to reach and rehabilitate the socially discarded, as creators of new forms of art to be enjoyed and participated in by large numbers of people?"

While these designs for a new society are being debated, the hard present task of moving the underclass to get the power to demand such a society continues. The goals of the new radicals for the immediate future are to step up block-by-block organization of black ghettos, to increase the still minute amount of similar work among poor whites, South and North, and to arrange closer and more frequent contacts between the various elements in the New Left.

When Major Owens, a CORE organizer in Brooklyn, established the Brooklyn Freedom Democratic Party in the spring of 1965 to contest a local election against a candidate from the regular Democratic machine, he had Fannie Lou Hamer of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party come North for his opening rally. Owens has since proposed a formal unification of the two groups. The Northern Student Movement and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party have been discussing a possible exchange of staffs from time to time so that the experience of each organization can be broadened.

There is an even more basic, more immediate problem. How many of those students who are now full-time sowers of the new radicalism will stay as they go deeper and deeper into their 20s and are increasingly tempted by affluent positions inside the majority society as well as increasingly threatened by Government action against burners of draft cards and others who try to impede the war effort in Vietnam? And how many of the thousands of supporters of the New Left still in school will choose to spend five or ten or more years as community organizers? It is too soon to tell. The only evidence up to now is that volunteers for field work in SNCC, SDS and the Northern Student Movement have increased every year.

Nor are the new radicals easily intimidated. Many have been jailed for demonstrating, and they keep coming back. Mario Savio, for instance, was offered a choice in July 1965 between 120 days in jail or a two-year period of probation during which he could not take part in political demonstrations. The sentencing was for Savio's role in an all-night sit-in at the University of California in December 1964, which resulted in the arrest of nearly 800 students. Savio chose jail. "I welcome the chance to reject probation," he told the judge, "because probation imposes orders on how men should act. Revolution is a positive duty when power is in the hands of the morally and intellectually bankrupt." Many of the other students who were offered the same choice made the same decision as Savio. Among them was his wife, Suzanne, who had also been a leader of the Free Speech Movement.

Even among the most committed, however, there are inevitably moments of acute doubt. Some months before he, too, was sentenced to jail for his part in the December sit-in at the University of California, Mike Rossman, a 25-year-old graduate student, said: "It's hard. It's incredibly hard to make changes in this society. It's hard in particular for young people to make changes, because we're so alone. There is all this incredible inertia around us. But if you try hard enough, something gives way and now something's beginning to tremble."

Brightening, Rossman went on: "We may get not only defeated, but broken. But the curve of our actions has been rising. It will keep rising. We are going to be more and more active."

At the best times for the new radicals, there is that sense of being part of what could become an irresistible tide--although the odds are against it. Staughton Lynd, a 36-year-old professor of history at Yale and one of the very few adults who can accurately say he speaks for many of the radical young, was remembering during the summer of 1965 how it had been in Washington the previous April 17 during the SDS March to End the War in Vietnam: "It was unbearably moving to watch the sea of banners and signs move out from the Sylvan Theater toward the Capitol as Joan Baez, Judy Collins and others sang We Shall Overcome. Still more poignant was the perception--and I checked my reaction with many, many others who felt as I did--that as the crowd moved down the mall toward the seat of Government, its path delimited on each side by rows of chartered buses so that there was nowhere to go but forward, toward the waiting policemen, it seemed that the great mass of people would simply flow on through and over the marble buildings, that our forward movement was irresistibly strong, that even had someone been shot or arrested, nothing could have stopped that crowd from taking possession of its Government.

"Perhaps," Staughton Lynd continued, "next time we should keep going, occupying for a time the rooms from which orders issue and sending to the people of Vietnam and the Dominican Republic the profound apologies which are due; or quietly waiting on the Capitol steps until those who make policy for us, and who like ourselves are trapped by fear and pride, consent to enter into dialog with us and with mankind."

Another characteristic of the new radicals at their most hopeful times is a conviction that the individual can still make his presence felt in even the most complicated power confrontations. At the end of the year, the same Staughton Lynd, pursuing this conviction, was one of three Americans who flew to North Vietnam in an attempt to find out for himself the avenues to peace, with the hope that on returning he might be able to help change the national consensus.