Revolution

In the crowded coffee shop of the Cedar Rapids airport, Thomas Emmett Hayden, 29, founder of SDS and, according to one Iowa state senator, "a known Communist," was waiting for the winter weather to clear, so that his plane could leave for Chicago.

At O'Hare field, he would meet briefly with one of the lawyers defending him against indictments then being prepared for the allegedly criminal mischiefs he had committed during the great Chicago confrontations of the summer of 1968. Then he would get on another jet and return to his home base in Oakland to do his part in the San Francisco State College student-faculty strike.

On the runway, a United Boeing 727 sat hunched in a dense fog that covered most of the nation. It was a dark, dull, unclean miasma lacquering another layer of frost on snowdrifts evidently left over from the last ice age. At ten yards, the world disappeared into a white blur.

By contrast, Hayden's face was sharp and vivid, impatient, itching to be gone, Where the skin was not hidden by a dark goatee and mustache, it was a hot pink, flushing almost to red. The gray eyes radiated pain, sorrow and shame, as if their owner had just returned from a fact-finding mission on skid row.

"Look at the man sitting behind me," he said. A bald fat-neck, wearing thick rimless glasses, was reading a newspaper. He was wearing a dark-blue suit that could have been made by a prison tailor. He might have been a traveling enforcer on his way to collect souls whose contacts had run out. He did not look like a nice person.

"Sights like that make me a little paranoid sometimes," Hayden said, a grim edge of whimsy in his voice. A little paranoid? Tom Hayden was Mr. Paranoia. In his case, it was a sign of mental health. He had every reason to be afraid. He was going around the country crying out for immediate and radical change. All the enemies of (continued on page 140)Revolution(continued from page 135) change were waiting for him to slip and fall, so they could eat him alive.

Tom Hayden was The Revolutionary. He was The Anarchist. He was The Hunted Man. His phone was tapped. His mail was read. He was watched. Only the night before, he had drunk, whiskey with a man from the University of South Dakota who confessed under the influence of the alcohol that he was keeping a dossier on him for the CIA.

Hayden had gone to Iowa to participate in a symposium on student power at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. For this, he was paid $500 plus expenses. He would rather have stayed in San Francisco, where he could be at the center of the action.

"I don't know exactly what student power means," Hayden told the 2000 young people attending the first session of a two-day conference. "It sounds kind of quaint to people in the Bay Area, where every day San Francisco State and, in the past five or six days, Berkeley begin to resemble Tokyo University, with people on their way up to the campus not to go to class but carrying helmets, their faces greased, meeting with the offcampus allies of the administration--the combined police forces of the Bay Area--for two or three hours and then going home.

"Yesterday, there was a five-hour battle. Six pigs were beaten. Five students. I think there were 12 arrests. So I feel a little out of my mind being here. I find it hard to speak in a calm and quiet way about student power, but, since President Nixon has advised us not to shout but to speak quietly, I want to try.

"There are other people here who may want to speak in different ways and they should. I welcome disruptions of speeches, especially from podiums like this."

During the next two days, Hayden got the disruptions he had invited. Speakers were interrupted. Local radicals made long, complicated and unauthorized speeches. Foul language was used. State legislators professed shock.

Governor Robert D. Ray, according to an A. P. dispatch, told the legislators that they reacted properly, but he added, "I think at a time like this, instead of doing something rash, people should keep cool heads." He said he would not like to see legislators give students a rallying point by overreacting to the incidents. Although people do not like filthy language, he explained, it exists anyway. He said students need the freedom to hear "firsthand how bad these people are." Ray called actions by extreme radicals "goofy." He expressed confidence that the majority of the students at the University of Iowa are good people who would rather get an education than listen to dirty talk.

"I'm really disappointed at the condition of the left here," Hayden complained privately. It was not active enough, he said.

At the end of the conference, as the final question-and-answer period was beginning, a tear-gas grenade was set off in the hall by person or persons unknown. Otherwise, it was a tame affair, compared with what was going on in California and what soon would be spreading to campuses all across the country.

"The United States is going through a period of revolutionary collapse, revolutionary crisis," Hayden said. "Some new basis for organizing this society and other societies has to be found. The values of puritan individualism, of racism and white supremacy, of militarism are outmoded in the new age of which we are the children. They are not just outmoded in the abstract sense, but literally outmoded, because if they are pursued, it means destruction.

"It seems to me that, as complicated and muddy as they are, the new protest movements in this country are the only movements that embody the possibility of a future, because they have abandoned these values and are searching for new ones."

The most talented students reject America, said De Vere Pentony, a former deputy president of San Francisco State and no great champion of protest. "The question today is not whether society can accept them but whether they can accept society. The student cry for power expresses a basic disgust with things as they are and a growing disbelief in American institutions."

"I am here to tell you the truth," said Harry Edwards, who organized the black athletes' boycott of the 1968 Summer Olympics. "The system is rotten. The system is what must be changed." The first three rows were filled with black people, some of them wearing Black Panther berets. When Edwards had first taken his place at the lectern, they stood in a block and raised the clenched-fist salute of the militant.

"America is a hypocritical country," Edwards said. "We have bought this hypocrisy for over 350 years. We have bought it through slavery, blood, sweat, tears and hope. We are no longer asking or begging for anything from white America. We are demanding it."

We are demanding it. On this intransigent note, America was notified early in 1969 that a new decade of conflict was about to begin. The Sixties were rough. The Seventies could be rougher yet. As the nation approached the 200th anniversary of its independence, tough, young black and white radicals appeared to be calling for history to repeat itself. What was once the movement began to be called the revolution.

"American Revolution 1969" was the title of a special issue of Rolling Stone, a San Francisco tabloid more usually concerned with rock-'n'-roll music. In the same week, Time called its essay "The Dangers of Playing at Revolution." In Chicago, columnist Murray Kempton, on trial with other delegates to the Democratic Convention who had refused to obey police orders to call off a march, was asked to explain why he had used the word revolt in a column he had written about the incident.

Anyone in the media could have explained it to the prosecutor. The word has a nice ring to it, urgently symbolic of change. Revolution in the usage of contemporary American communication is "terrific." It has no real content. There seems to be some feeling among the young that it is time to put meaning back into the cliché.

"During pleasant nights in communes in San Francisco and Colorado," Michael Rossman wrote in Rolling Stone, "I watch friends oiling guns and learning how to load magazines. ... People are swiping dynamite, industrial sabotage mounts unreported in the press."

In another Rolling Stone article, Black Panther minister of education George Mason Murray wrote, "The only brother we have today is the brother who will help us make the revolution. Having black skin has nothing to do with being a freedom fighter. The standards are universal; what man will use the gun as Huey did?"

Huey is Huey P. Newton, minister of defense of the Black Panther Party. He was convicted last year of manslaughter in connection with a shoot-out between Panthers and police in which an Oakland officer was killed.

Interviewed by The Movement, a San Francisco--based radical newspaper, he said, "We refuse to remain slaves. We'd rather be dead. We realize that we are going up against a highly technical country and we realize that they are not only paper tigers, as Mao says, but real tigers, too, because they have the ability to slaughter many people. We know that the enemy is very powerful and that our manhood is at stake, but we feel it necessary to be victorious in regaining ourselves, regaining our manhood. Either we will do this or we won't have any freedom. Either we will win or we will die trying to win."

Georgia state representative Julian Bond told Mademoiselle editor Joanna Romer, "The good thing the Panthers have done is that they organized a group of young men who've never been organized before, people on the street.

"If they succeed in controlling the police, as they seem to have done in Oakland to some degree--by following them; by in effect policing the police--if (continued on page 185)Revolution(continued from page 140) they do nothing but that, that's a benefit. But what they have to do, what all militants have to do is translate some of the rhetoric of militancy into some kind of reality; translate the slogans into a meaningful program that people can attach themselves to."

• • •

To a generation that has seen Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh stand off the massed power of what was advertised as the greatest military machine the world has ever known, the fantasy of a guerrilla war that would bring down the American system must not seem especially more unreal titan any other youthful fantasy.

Boys who were brought up on the myths of the great American Revolution of 1776 now take their dates to see If ..., an English film that ends with kids spraying machine-gun bullets across the schoolyard. The movie, like the fantasy, goes no further. The adult, who knows that when sexual dreams become real babies are conceived (barring contraception), wonders what fruit this revolution would bear if it should ripen suddenly into success.

Unfortunately, no Declaration of Independence has yet emerged. There is a Times Square of flashing slogans fighting for attention, but no one has organized the riot of demands into a single, eloquent document stating the nature of the complaint. Even further away is anything resembling a draft of a constitution. As a result, it is easy for those who wish to do so to dismiss the whole business as chaotic anarchy, the delusional ravings of adolescent lunatics.

"I have a certain emotional sympathy for them," said the late Max Eastman, a Socialist and an authority on the Bolshevik rebellion, "but they are rather pathetic, because they have no plan. They just seek a revolution for its own sake."

In a widely publicized speech given at Swarthmore College in 1967, George F. Kennan, former ambassador to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, stated the establishment position. His address, later reprinted in The New York Times Magazine and in Reader's Digest, as well as in his book Democracy and the Student Left, read, in part:

I submit that if you find a system inadequate, it is not enough simply to demonstrate indignation and anger by mass defiance of established authority. You have the obligation, it seems to me, of saying in what way this political system should be modified, or what should be established in place of it to assure that its workings would bear a better relationship to people's needs and people's feelings.

If the student left had proposals for the constructive adaptation of this political system to the needs of our age, and if its agitation took the form of reasoned argument and discussion, then many of us could view its protests with respect. But when we are offered, as the only argument for change, the fact that a number of people are angry and excited, then we of my generation can only recognize that such behavior bears a disconcerting resemblance to the origins of totalitarianism. We have no choice but to rally to the defense of a public authority with which we cannot conceivably dispense.

To this kind of argument, former SDS president Carl Oglesby countered in Containment and Change, "The fundamental revolutionary motive is not to construct a Paradise but to destroy an Inferno."

When Tom Hayden was interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, special counsel Frank Conley asked, "Is it your present aim to seek the destruction of the present American democratic system?"

"That is a joke," Hayden replied.

"I am asking you, sir," Conley said.

"Well, I don't believe the present American democratic system exists," Hayden explained. "That is why we can't get together, to straighten things out. ... I believe that you have destroyed the American democratic system--by the existence of a committee of this kind."

"When I was growing up, our country was the best in the world, as far as I was concerned," Tommy Smothers has said. "I mean, there was nobody that was going to do anything better than us. Then came Sputnik. It was the biggest shock I'd ever had. I thought, 'What the hell is that? That's not supposed to happen. We have more telephones, more cars, the best scientists.'

"A crack began to appear in the national ego. Since then, the whole fabric has begun to fray. All these lies--the U-2, the Gulf of Tonkin, the whole war--have destroyed our willingness to believe in anything. For the ones who are younger than us, the college kids, may be there was no willingness to believe in the first place."

In the Lion's Head, a saloon near the offices of The Village Voice in Greenwich Village, Paul Gorman, who wrote speeches for McCarthy, talked about the funeral of Robert F. Kennedy:

"Tom Hayden and I and Joe Krangle, this big boss from Erie County, stood by Kennedy's casket for a half hour. Tom Hayden cried and people put him down for crying. I didn't cry.

"It occurred to me then that what you got in the last eight or nine years is the first generation of people who realized that it wasn't getting better all the time in America. All of a sudden, between 1958 and 1968, a whole bunch of people realized that it's getting worse."

In a letter from Mexico City in July 1963, novelist Thomas Pynchon wrote:

From the time we were little kids, they brainwashed us with all kinds of jive about how lucky America was, is and will continue to be, world without end, amen, and how lucky we were to be living in it. They taught us Dr. Johnson's line ass backward, that there is much to be enjoyed, little to be endured, and we, saps and too young to know any better, believed it.

So, sure, when we run into things like hate, and ICBMs and cancer, it seems like too much to endure. And if enough evil and misfortune succeeds in. piling around us like a heap of shit till it's up to our necks, and then some cat walks up, unzips his fly and prepares to piss on us, and it becomes a choice of whether to take it or duck, or to get out of the game completely, we not infrequently choose out.

Older people, like the Negroes we've put down for 300 years, have not forgotten that might makes right and talk is cheap. It is interesting that Negroes in America have survived indignity, pain, hunger, sickness and poverty of a sort and depth that would have driven most whites to suicide. I think it's because they never got a chance to start conning themselves, because it's root hog or die from the minute the cord is cut. It is something we can learn from, them, maybe, if we're hip enough.

"I curse this country every day of my life, because it made me hate it and I never wanted to," SNCC veteran Mendy Samstein told Jack Newfield in 1965. The flag covered too many corpses, he felt, not only Schwerner, Chaney, Goodman, Medgar Evers and John F. Kennedy but also the anonymous ones who never got to be famous even in death, the Emmett Tills no one ever heard of.

According to novelist John Speicher, after the death of John F. Kennedy, "Young Americans began looking for new heroes who could stake out new attitudes, attitudes that would not be subject to total ruin by the caprice of fortune." They began to demand a new conception of truth.

"Truth," said Dave McReynolds of the War Resisters League, "is never abstract. It is always concrete." Reality is expressed not by ideas but by people. The calendar is the list of celebrations of the birthdays of heroes. Each day has its own saint. Some of them, like Jesus Christ, are strong enough to make their influence felt throughout the entire society. The radical and New Left young demand that the calendar be changed. They feel it is time for their heroes to be on television. They want their saints--Ché, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Jack Kennedy, Malcolm X--to be the names on the calendar.

"It is important for people to have a tradition," said Harry Edwards. "Integration has meant, 'Nigger, you get like me, because what you are is nothing.' For a long time, blacks bought this. They'd go to the movies and pull for Tarzan against the natives. They felt that the whites were right in turning down the 12 black women offered in exchange for one blonde-haired white woman by the tribal chief in King Kong.

"I remember sitting in the movies in California in 1963 and blacks actually laughed, 'He going to trade them 12 things for that woman?' They were pulling for the white folks.

"Every black church that you go into, with few exceptions, is white oriented. Jesus is white. Mary is white. The angels are white. The first thing the Negro preacher wants to do is tell you as a black person that as soon as you die and go on the other side of Jordan, God is going to wash you whiter than snow.

"No one can love and respect anything until he loves and respects himself. Let's recognize that we are not just dealing with Americans of a different color when we are dealing with Afro-Americans. We are dealing with an entirely different heritage, art entirely different American experience, entirely different problems.

"Let's develop education aimed not at teaching people how to make a living but at teaching people how to live."

Edwards' message is understood very well by those young white students who, like the blacks, somehow will not or cannot fit neatly into the American ideal. For a variety of reasons, they feel like strangers in their own land, either because they do not think right or because they do not look right.

"I see things other people don't see," Bob Dylan once said. "I feel things other people don't feel. It's terrible. They laugh. I felt like that my whole life.

"My friends have been the same as me--people who couldn't make it as the high school football halfback junior chamber of commerce leader fraternity boy truck driver working his way through college. ... I couldn't do any of those things, either. All I did was write and sing, paint little pictures on paper, dissolve myself into situations where I was invisible.

"I just didn't care what anyone looked like, just as long as they didn't think I was strange."

It is a condition observed not only in the United States but also throughout the Western world. "A child born in the United Kingdom today stands a ten-times-greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university," British psychiatrist R. D. Laing wrote in Ikon, "and about one fifth of mental-hospital admissions are diagnosed schizophrenic. This can be taken as an indication that we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them. Perhaps it is our very way of educating them that is driving them mad."

The radical prescription for curing the madness is to change the rules, redefine how a person is taught to judge himself. Instead of teaching our children to hate themselves, they propose that we teach them to love themselves. Instead of a rigid, central and authoritarian ideal, let us have one that is flexible, individual and permissive. Instead of forcing them to produce objects, let us allow them to produce joy.

"You start with the view that man is basically productive and creative," Abbie Hoffman said. "If he's given more and more freedom, this productivity and creativity will come to the surface. It should never be defined as work.

"Work is something that's necessary for a capitalist system. That kind of separation--this is your work, this is your religious life, this is your play area, this is your love life, this is your family--is necessary in a capitalist society, because then you can have consumers out there and you can cater directly to them. This product is for the women; this is for the black people; this is for the young; this is for the workers.

"Under capitalism, you have clean work and dirty work. You ask, 'Who's going to want to pick up the garbage?' You never ask, 'Who's going to want to be a doctor?' That's clean work. You know there would be people who would dig that.

"When I was a psychologist, there was a salesman in group therapy who came in complaining, 'I hate this. I hate my work. I hate my boss. I hate everything about my job.' But after a couple of months, when we had plowed through all that shit, it turned out he really dug what he was doing. He liked the whole game of trying different pairs of shoes on ladies, looking up their dresses and everything, but he was programed in such a way that he couldn't like his work. People in a healthy state, in a healthy society, dig what they're doing.

"In Cuba, on the Isle of Youth, formerly the Isle of Pines, 20,000 youths live in a totally moneyless, free society. I don't say they don't play very hard. I hesitate to use the other four-letter word--work.

"They live very hard and they live with a very strong commitment, but cutting cane is not separate from dancing in the streets."

As the rebels see it, government has grown so enormous and the weight of laws so heavy that individual happiness--which is what the system was originally designed to nourish--is being crushed. The adults are convinced that we cannot survive without all this structure. Their children are willing to try.

In effect, all the young are told is, "Do what we say and you will be happy." This works as long as a child's definition of happiness is the same as his parents'. As soon as a sense of self begins to appear, there is conflict. At that point, the adult can begin to let the child do as he likes or say, "Do what we say or we will hit you." The dispute between the superpowers and their client nations is the same as the struggle between parent and child. The revolt of the black man in the United States is also. And, obviously, so is the rebellion on campus.

This does not necessarily mean, as sociologist Lewis Feuer has suggested, that radical students are striking at stand-ins for their own parents. Dr. Misha S. Zaks of the Northwestern University Medical School told the American Orthopsychiatric Association Convention in New York that a majority of the Yippies who demonstrated in Chicago expressed favorable attitudes toward their parents, who were described as nonauthoritarian.

It is possible that what they are doing is attempting to force the society--the national parent, the collective superego--to treat its children in the same way that their parents treated them. Significantly, Dr. Zaks reported, the parents of Yippies were in the higher educational and economic levels. Forty percent had annual incomes of $15,000 or more.

Hayden, writing with Norm Fruchter and Alan Cheuse in the spring 1965 issue of Studies on the Left, outlined the goal:

"What we seek ... is a thoroughly democratic revolution, in which the most oppressed aspire to govern and decide, begin to practice their aspiration and, finally, carry it to fulfillment by transforming decision making everywhere. ... Power in America is abdicated by individuals to top-down organizational units, and it is in the recovery of this power that ... a new kind of man emerges.

"This kind of man cannot be purchased, because his needs cannot be translated into cash; he cannot be manipulated, because it is precisely against manipulation that he has defined his rebellion."

In the Port Huron Statement, written mostly by Tom Hayden for the 1962 SDS convention in Port Huron, Michigan, there was faith that radicals could work through the established liberal institutions in bringing about the creation of participatory democracy, a social system that would have two central aims: "That the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation."

At the bottom, this is what all the fuss is about. Many people would undoubtedly assume that America long ago achieved at least this. Theoretically, we have. There are few radicals who would not agree that the Constitution of the United States, faithfully and literally observed, would provide as much freedom as anyone could handle. Those radicals, however, maintain that, in fact, there is little freedom for much of the population. The debacle of Chicago, 1968, they say, illustrated the reality faced daily by the powerless who attempt to make themselves heard.

To the people of the ghetto, the spectacle of the Chicago police beating up convention demonstrators was no surprise. It was unusual only because it was happening on television and it was happening to whites. For the most part, the protesters were voluntary niggers. By allowing their hair to grow long, they had discovered what it was like to live outside the established order. The film Easy Rider, in which two long-hairs are killed merely for being different, expressed the paranoia of the young, a paranoia epidemic among those who see the forces of law and order as agents of a system that encourages racism, disease, poverty, destruction of the environment and the suicide of the American national ethic in a war whose essential character, they feel, was revealed at Song My.

The young reformer, attempting to eradicate these evils and others, sometimes finds that they exist not by accident or by inertia but because they serve someone's interest. It has been estimated, for example, that American industry saves 22 billion dollars a year by paying black workers less than whites for equivalent jobs.

Even hunger is sometimes directly maintained by the profit motive. When George McGovern's special committee investigating hunger visited migrant labor camps in Immokalee, Florida, the Senators were shocked by the squalor of the housing and the starvation diets of the workers. Fat back, corn bread and string beans were the typical scant contents of refrigerators in the dilapidated shacks. According to The New York Times, Collier County officials have for years kept Federally aided food programs out of the area because the aid might be too costly, because migrant farm workers might be tempted to settle down instead of moving on and because the poor might refuse to pick the crops if they received free food.

After a few experiences such as this, the concerned young are inclined to conclude that the institutions of our society serve not the people who do the work but the people who collect the profits. The next conclusion is that the institutions themselves stand in the way of freedom and ought to be destroyed. This is where the radical and the revolutionary part company. Not all radicals are convinced that the entire structure of society has to be torn down and totally rebuilt, but even those who continue to operate within the political process have a limited view of what can be done.

"I think you have to begin with the premise that politics can't cure the ailments of the human condition," said political writer Jack Newfield. "You have to begin with the understanding that people are going to commit suicide and take drugs and be sad under any social system--capitalism, socialism, corporate liberalism, welfare state, Cuba, China, anywhere. What politics can do is redistribute economic power.

"I think we have to make a revolution so that sharecroppers in Mississippi can join the rest of the society sitting in front of their TV sets drinking beer and belching, and feeling threatened by their children. They are entitled to that agony.

"I'm willing to build a democratic movement primarily through confrontation in the streets and only secondarily in candidates and politicians who are schooled in democratic and activist values. I'm willing to concede that this movement will not come to fruition in my lifetime. I think that the problem with the New Left is the desire for instantaneous results. I'm willing to have revolutionary patience."

Change is not always brought about by patient people, however. "The greatest advances in human consciousness," editorialized The Avatar, an underground paper published in Boston for several months in 1967, "are made by people who demand too much." The student rebels have been demanding too much for quite some time now, but their accomplishments have pointed the direction in which the country could go, once it realized that these were not loony visions but actual possibilities.

The Freedom Riders demonstrated to the black people of the South that they could sit anyplace they wanted on public transportation. They also made it possible for white Southern ladies to see that they weren't going to break out in sores if they sat next to a black person. The same was true for the lunch-counter sit-ins. The anti-war protesters proved that citizens could directly influence foreign policy. In each situation, the demonstrators were criticized for their bad manners and their defiance of law and order and threatened with a backlash.

Yet no meaningful backlash developed. The vote for George Wallace was not evidence that the country had moved to the right, but. rather, that a historically mute sector of the electorate had finally found a voice. The American Independent Party campaign was made possible not by any new outpourings of public fury but by a technological advance--television. For the first time in our history, it was economically possible to mount a national campaign that could successfully reach all of the scattered disaffiliated souls who have abandoned the Republican and Democratic parties. It would have happened had there been no protesters.

If anything, the country appears to be moving consistently toward acceptance of political equality. A nationwide survey by the Gallup Poll in 1969 revealed that 67 percent of the American people say they would vote for a Negro for President, a jump of 13 points from the previous measurement in June 1967. When Gallup first began polling on the subject in 1958, only 38 percent answered yes.

It may be quite some time before we see a black candidate of a major party running for President, but the prospect is inevitable. The Democratic primary-election victory of Thomas Bradley, a black man, over Sam yorty, the white incumbent mayor of Los Angeles, was accomplished with white votes less than four years after the Watts riots. Although he lost the general election after the primary, Bradley drew 47 percent of the votes cast, even though only 15 percent of L. A.'s voters are black. This hardly seems proof of any backlash.

Now the student left is attending to its most immediate concern--bringing about change on the college campuses. Once again, even though there is almost general agreement among educators that the changes have been long overdue, radical students are being warned that a right-wing backlash is developing.

In fact, there probably ought not to be disruptions on campus and there almost certainly would be none--if the administrative machinery were capable of dealing with what appears to be justifiable discontent about the kind of education being offered, a discontent shared not only by students but by faculty as well.

Militant students, Margaret Mead wrote in the April 1969 Redbook, are rebelling against being "treated like package goods--so many to be processed, pushed through the educational maze, examined and granted degrees at the end of a standard course."

"Who can be surprised," she asked, "that one of the principal demands students are making is for 'participatory democracy'--for the right to have a real voice in the decisions that affect their lives?"

Even the Reverend Theodore M. Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame University, known as an enemy of campus dissent, told the 66th annual convention of the National Catholic Educational Association that "the strong tradition of paternalism" in Roman Catholic higher education was on its way out.

"God bless these difficult, demanding revolutionary students who are the reason and often the despair of our educational existence," he said. "We must take some chances and have more faith in this younger generation and have more understanding of their concerns."

As if to punctuate and underscore this fellowship with the rebel young professed by administrators, there was the voice of Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Robert Finch, who told a Congressional investigating committee that the academic world had created its own mess by allowing itself to be compromised by business, government and military research funds.

"It is at least in part against this corruption that the students of every continent are now in revolt," wrote Stringfellow Barr in The Center Magazine, published by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.

"Although the general public does not know it," he said, "the university professor has turned go-getter. His booty includes a fat salary from a business firm or a Federal grant big enough to support him and a couple of assistants. In this atmosphere of increasing affluence, of classified information and of pleasant expense accounts, the professor too often teaches as little as possible or not at all.

"Faced with this massive corruption of what once was the purpose of a profession, the student joins the revolt against the establishment," Barr explained. "Can he really be blamed? He was used to the lying television commercial, but he had thought of the university as a community concerned not with power, not with force, not with fraud but with discovering the truth and proclaiming it.

"In the long run, calling the police cannot save the universities."

All of this academic self-criticism does not reveal the reality at issue. The confrontation is not so much over particular demands such as black-studies programs or the admission of minority students who do not meet usual standards or giving grades or not giving grades. The fight is really about whose needs the university is intended to serve the administration's or the students'.

According to radical students, school administrations are obsessed with the business of measuring success--by the grades students achieve and by the dropout rate, and, more importantly, by the size of the university and the amount of money it controls.

Because there is no way in which the administrative measuring devices register unhappiness--if, in fact, there is any interest in doing so--rebellious students and sympathetic faculty believe they are forced to use unmistakably dramatic signals, such as kicking the president of the university out of his office to express what they feel. Those who criticize the rudeness of such forms of address seem to forget that it is possible that the lack of attention to more polite communications has been literally killing people. The suicide rate of college students--a scandal for many years now--may very well be the best evidence anyone needs to demonstrate how miserably the schools have failed.

The attempt to reduce human beings to numbers has been recognized as one of the most vicious and dangerous trends in modern life. It is much easier to kill a number than a person. It is not insignificant that Hitler's concentration-camp victims were tattooed with numbers instead of names; nor is it insignificant that the war in Vietnam is the first one whose progress we have measured by body counts.

A similar process of "deindividuation"--a word coined by Stanford University research psychologist Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo--has taken place on campus. Dr. Zimbardo described the dynamics of deindividuation in the society as a whole at the symposium on motivation at the University of Nebraska.

He suggested that the size of American cities, the enormous power of big institutions and the mobility of the citizen have made it more and more difficult for the individual to locate himself in any real way in the structure of society the way he once could in the family. The result, he theorized, is a feeling of anonymity and futility, as well as a weakening of restraints based on self-evaluation, and a growing rage at the inability to express personal needs in any way that will not only be acceptable to society but also produce a response.

Increased technology has not increased responsiveness, although there is no reason why it couldn't. Instead, it has often decreased the contact between the individual and the power structure. Anyone who has attempted to communicate with a telephone company or a power company or a credit agency will understand the feeling of frustration.

A threat, however, brings prompt--if unpleasant--results. "Conditions which foster deindividuation," said Dr. Zimbardo, "make each of us a potential assassin." He suggested that the increase in murder of the past few years, the beating and torture of 40,000 American youngsters each year by their parents or brothers and sisters, the 230 violent urban outbreaks of the past five years and the assassinations may be symptoms.

It is possible that these effects might also be explained by the unusually large percentage of youths in the population mix, since youth is statistically a time of violence; but Dr. Zimbardo's argument is still perceptive and persuasive. A protest demonstration, certainly, is an attempt to prove that people exist as people. Sometimes there is an easily understandable tendency to forget that they exist. Until they start fighting back, they are consumers or workers or students or teachers or units. It is the nature of government officials to think this way, but the radicals have decided that the bureaucrats may not be allowed to fall into the convenient fantasy of smoothly functioning power.

Even revolutionaries themselves should not be immune from rude confrontations with reality. Although there is plenty to be indignant about, the indignation of the rebel often masks desires that are less noble than his cause. It is bad enough to have cops, without having also to put up with self-appointed anti-cops whose activities are sometimes almost as annoying.

"Eternal life to free pay toilets--that's our program," Abbie Hoffman said. "In the new society, there shall be only one law: It is forbidden to forbid."

In his book Woodstock Nation, Hoffman suggests that the mass communion of the great rock festival at Bethel, N. Y., where hundreds of thousands met in joyous anarchy without a single fistfight, is the kind of experience that grows out of the elimination of inhibition. He ignores the darker possibilities of desire without restraint. As 1969 ended, the Woodstock Nation was to have its own Chicago.

At the Rolling Stones's rock festival in Altamont, California, hundreds of thousands were present at a satanic spectacle in which four persons died and an uncounted number were injured. The Hell's Angels, hired to provide security, killed one man and beat many others. Among those hurt were Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, punched in the mouth, and Marty Balin of the Jefferson Airplane, knocked unconscious.

At one point, an enormously fat young man took off his clothes and approached the stage. At Woodstock, this would have almost certainly been greeted with cheers. The fat man was displaying himself in an act of freedom. At Altamont, the Angels beat him bloody with sawed-off cue sticks. "To the Angel," read the caption under a photograph in Rolling Stone, "the naked man was so repulsive he had to get hit. And he did."

"To all complaints that they had been overzealous, too rough, in keeping the stage clear, the Angels simply replied that they was just doing their thing, which is violence," the rock newspaper commented.

There are some people who believe that the Altamont disaster was simply a clerical error: Someone made a mistake in hiring the Angels. Others say that the festival was a moneygrubbing shuck to begin with, a publicity stunt for the Stones, who would make a fortune from the movie rights. Altamont, in their view, was a perversion of Woodstock, an exploitation doomed by greed.

These would seem to be excuses and apologies very much like those that followed Chicago--reasonable and sophisticated, but irrelevant. The real lesson is less glib. Those who insist on total freedom must accept the inevitable release of evil as well as good.

Ten years ago, in Naked Lunch, William Burroughs wrote:

Rock-'n'-roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa's face. They open zoos, insane asylums, prisons, burst water mains with air hammers, chop the floor out of passenger plane lavatories, shoot out lighthouses ... in nautical costumes ram the Queen Mary full speed into New York Harbor, play chicken with passenger planes and buses, rush into hospitals in white coats carrying saws and axes and scalpels three feet long; throw paralytics out of iron lungs (mimic their suffocations flopping about on the floor and rolling their eyes up), administer injections with bicycle pumps, disconnect artificial kidneys, saw a woman in half with a two-man surgical saw, they drive herds of squealing pigs into the curb, they shit on the floor of the United Nations and wipe their ass with treaties, pacts, alliances.

By plane, car, horse, camel, elephant, tractor, bicycle and steam roller, on foot, skis, sled, crutch and pogo stick the tourists storm the frontiers, demanding with inflexible authority asylum from the "unspeakable conditions obtaining in Freeland," the Chamber of Commerce striving in vain to stem the debacle: "Please to be restful. It is only a few crazies who have from the crazy place outbroken."

In July 1969, the Black Panther Party organized a National Conference for a United Front Against Fascism, held in the Oakland, California, municipal auditorium. The purpose of the conference was to enlist white student support for the Panthers. Among the 3500 delegates representing themselves and 300 organizations was a man with long gray hair who was selling buttons with the word Crazies forming a stylized automatic rifle.

The pin was an appropriate symbol for those revolutionaries who believe that it is possible to fight for peace by brandishing imaginary weapons. The fantasy, like the button, is not backed up by any great armory. White students do not like guns, nor do they own them, but they like to talk about them, perhaps in the same way that they like to talk about sex. There is a close relation between the psychology of violence and the psychology of sex. Those who use the pornography of sex do so to relieve the frustration that comes from being unable to manage the real thing. The same holds true for the pornography of violence.

Dave McReynolds had this analysis:

"Tom Hayden told a very small group of intellectuals one night in Chicago that the reason for using defensive violence is that the public has an image of us as being Jews, queers and Commies and that we've got to change this, because the country won't respect people they're viewing as Jews, queers and Commies.

"Of course, he was dead wrong. Tom was just dead wrong in his thought and function. The problem is that obviously, Tom's own conception of the movement is that it is composed of queers and Communists and Jews. The point is, that is precisely what it is and always has been. That's what is nice about the movement. It is the weak making it in their own way, the fragile, the neurotic. I don't want to prove otherwise. I don't have to prove otherwise. I am worried about this idea of proving things. It's as if the kids were not clear about their own definitions.

"But that's only one section. They want to prove they're very courageous. Another section doesn't give a damn about proving anything, but they are determined to do their own thing. The important point here is that there is a significant segment that has dropped out of a prosperous society or challenged it. Whether they challenge it stupidly or provocatively is not as important as the fact that they made that challenge. They're saying this is not the kind of society that we want."

A letter signed "Doug Lummix" in the San Francisco Express Times, a radical underground newspaper, offered another perspective:

Birth is a kind of violence. ... Anyone who can't stand the sight of blood had better not try to be a midwife. But anyone who decides that blood is the key to the process is a butcher abortionist, not a midwife.

The difference is rather important: It is the difference between life and death. In birth and revolution, the point is to make new life and keep it alive. Imagining you can cause a revolution by violence is like imagining you can make a woman give birth by kicking her until she bleeds.

Lenin was right that you have to break eggs, but you have to break them from inside.

At the Oakland conference Black Panther chairman Bobby Seale outlined a plan to promote referendums throughout the country to set up decentralized neighborhood police forces that would be appointed and controlled by locally elected commissioners. During the question-and-answer period, a young white girl in hippie uniform asked if this meant that the Panthers were giving up armed struggle and embracing the existing political system. Her tone suggested that she thought this was a form of treason to the ideals of the revolution.

"We are working at the level of the consciousness of the people," he answered, "giving the people something that they would want to vote for, for a change. We're working at a level where they can begin to relate to it. We are trying not to get too far ahead of them.

"As long as those fascists are out there, baby, we are going to defend ourselves. We are talking about basic democratic rights being used as a means to combat the system, but we are not going to anarchistically place the right of self-defense out of context. We are saying that we have a right to have shotguns and rifles in our homes and we are going to have them.

"The street revolutionary who doesn't want to go forward and educate the masses with a practical, functional program is not a street revolutionary--he's a jive anarchist. All revolutionist organizations respect the anarchist's demands, but it is criminal to desire to lead the masses to emotional, anarchistic demands beyond what the masses can see and understand at their own level of consciousness."

Another girl, from New York, wanted to know what would happen if the community-control plan were voted into law and the police refused to disarm. It was nearly midnight, the end of the final day of the three-day conference. Seale was obviously exhausted, but he grabbed the question with ferocious enthusiasm.

"If they are not going to give up their jobs," he said, "that means the fascists are not going to give up control of the state and that means, baby, we got open, righteous revolution. The people that voted are going to move to what the revolutionaries told them. They're going to move to getting guns and keeping guns in their homes and defending themselves from those fascists."

Bobby Seale felt he had isolated the point at which revolution becomes legitimate and necessary. When all of the conventional means of translating the will of the people into government action fail to produce results, the government in power must be replaced. The United States of America, a constitutional democracy created by a revolutionary war, has survived by constantly renewing the authenticity of its authority in an orderly transfer of power from one generation to the next. In schools at every level, in every community, children are taught and retaught the central concept of our political system: The government official is a steward of the nation's wealth, an employee of the people, a hired hand who is supposed to take his orders from the voters. Like any worker, he ought to be dismissed if he will not obey the owners of the enterprise. As the decade of the Sixties ended, an increasing number of people were beginning to believe that the American Government no longer represented the American people and would have to be overthrown.

Yet the likelihood of a successful uprising does not seem to be very great, even to the most militant revolutionaries. In an interview held in the Berkeley, California, headquarters of the Black Panther Party, a Panther field marshal, who called himself D. C., said:

"We're out to change this system, smash it, destroy it--this bourgeois capitalism, dictatorship of the minority--and replace it with a government of the people, by the people and for the people. We know it can't be done through parliamentary procedures, through the election box. It has to be smashed, overthrown, and it's going to take violence to do that."

Despite this, D. C. was not looking forward to immediate battle. "Our job is hot to start the war," he said. "We'd do a little bit of damage, but we'd be wiped out. Our job is to educate the people."

Unlike most white revolutionaries, the Panthers have seen police firepower close up. Since the beginning of 1968, D. C. said, 27 Panthers have been gunned down by police officers. During the same period, only three lawmen have been killed in shoot-outs with Black Panthers. In December 1969, Fred Hampton, head of the Panthers' Illinois chapter, was killed in a controversial predawn police raid. Also killed was another member of the Panthers, Mark Clark. The Panther--police war, often ignored until then by the media, was front-page news.

When Bobby Seale arrived that day at the Berkeley headquarters, he was asked what the Black Panthers would do about the unemployed policemen who became unemployed as a result of the success of the community-control plan.

"What are we going to do with the unemployed cops?" he repeated in a tone of disbelief. "What have they done for the black people who have been unemployed all their lives?" Then, after a long pause, he said, "If we had a socialistic state and real socialistic education, maybe we could pay them to go to school to learn how to be human beings."

• • •

"Every revolution ends in the creation of a new privileged class," the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes once wrote. It is possible that the young revolutionaries are only a new cadre of cops. Should their revolution succeed, it may be that they will become the new privileged class.

To those who have experienced the lessons of history in which Stalin, the policeman, inherits the structure created by Lenin, the revolutionary, and brings back the permanent terror of authoritarian rule, it may seem pointless to encourage the victory of one side or the other in the eternal war between cop and anti-cop.

To many of the young, who live in the seemingly endless present of first awakening, history is just another boring textbook. They feel the pain where the harness rubs and all they can think about is freedom, not knowing or caring that there is always another harness, that the struggle for freedom is endless. Some of their leaders seem more interested in struggle than in victory.

Abbie Hoffman, in an interview, was unable to imagine anything he would rather do than make revolution. This was the problem that Ché Guevara faced. It drove him from Cuba to Bolivia and death. In this sense, the continued existence of the Government and repression in general serves to give meaning to the revolutionary's life. Hoffman defined his struggle as "life against death." He said that the only alternatives he could see were to work in an office at a job that he would hate or to be a revolutionary. In a sense, he is kept going by the police, who gratify for him what appears to be an obsessive love of martyrdom.

Hoffman has been arrested some 40 times. One of his latest arrests was for refusing to fasten his seat belt on a plane. He has been beaten many times by the police. In Chicago, he arranged for a girl to wave a bloody shirt and scream that he had been murdered. This was supposed to be a decoy. The girl chickened out and he was cheated of Tom Sawyer's thrill of seeing his own funeral.

Today's masochist can be tomorrow's sadist. In a letter to The Village Voice, he called Sirhan Sirhan a "freedom fighter." In an interview, he refused to deny that he thought there might be circumstances in which political assassination might be justified. As he talked, he played with a Crossman air pistol. In his book Revolution for the Hell of It, he had told how a friend had given him a .22 pistol that he eventually got rid of. Three times, he told the story of his latest arrest, snapping the air-pistol trigger again and again.

At the airport in Cedar Rapids, a student denounced Tom Hayden, citing a speech that had been delivered at Harvard. "Some people in this society," Hayden was reported to have said, "will have to be wiped out politically or exterminated."

"What is it that you object to?" he asked. The word exterminate, he was told. Who did he think would make the decisions of who would live and who would die?

"Individuals will make those decisions," he answered. Would he be one of the individuals who would make those decisions?

"How do you know I haven't already?"

About an hour later, the weather cleared just enough for Hayden's plane to take off; but for the next two days, the fog closed in and there were no more flights in or out of Cedar Rapids or Iowa City. Each night, however, the network television news showed scenes of rebellion in San Francisco. The Iowa kids thought that it was fun to watch. It may not be much longer.