Talk:Columbia University Chapter of SDS

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This article was nominated for deletion on July 16, 2007. The result of the discussion was keep/withdrawn by nominator.

[edit] Copyvio

I don't understand the copyvio posting. The material that I posted when I originated the article is all gone--it had been posted in its entirety near the end of the SDS political article. The copy vio refers to http://www.bladedesigner.com/articles/Students_for_a_Democratic_Society which is entirely different. That material was largely written by me for the Wikipedia article on SDS. Thus bladedesigner.com is the copier, not the other way around. I believe the page should be returned to the state in which I left it.DonSiano 19:59, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

1. the correct word is FACTION (as in PLP faction) not "fraction." 2. there is inconsistency in identification-why are some radical activists named and others not? for example,who is the Barnard activist mentionned at the end of the article? 3. Barnard women were not as meekly accepting of SDS male chauvinism as indicated here. Liberation classes in feminism took place on campus in April and May 1968. During the Strike, women in Fayerweather Hall met and refused to be assigned all the cooking responsibilites by the men. These initial acts of feminist awareness marked the beginnings of a powerful movement in which Barnard women played an important role.

[edit] Original writeup from the article

The most politically effective campus chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was founded at Columbia University in the spring of 1966 by John Fuerst and Dave Gilbert.

In May 1965, Fuerst had been involved in the anti-war student disruption of the Columbia Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC) awards ceremony. As a result of this protest, which was busted up by the Columbia Administration with the aid of New York City police, Fuerst had received a disciplinary warning letter from Columbia College Dean Truman. On the kitchen wall of his West 108th Street apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side, Fuerst had taped up this letter from the Dean, in the same way that doctors tape up their medical school diplomas on their office walls.

Prior to founding the Columbia SDS chapter with Gilbert, Fuerst had been involved in Columbia student government politics and had also attempted to radicalize National Student Association (NSA) members all around the United States. Fuerst had also worked with National SDS people and been involved in some of the New Left student activists' arguments with Michael Harrington and the League for Industrial Democracy (LID) people over the Social Democrats' desire to impose a red-baiting, anti-communist tradition of political organizing on the younger New Leftists.

In early November 1966, Fuerst took the initiative on campus when it was learned that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was coming to recruit students in Dodge Hall. Columbia SDS sponsored a sundial rally to protest the CIA's presence on campus and demanded that the Columbia Administration not allow the CIA to use university facilities to recruit.

Speakers at the sundial during a lunch hour rally explained what the CIA had already done around the world prior to 1966: overthrown the democratically-elected government of Iran in 1953,overthrown the democratically-elected government of Guatemala in 1954, planned the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 and helped set up the Diem dictatorship in Viet Nam in the 1950s, which led to the 1960s U.S. military escalation in Viet Nam. Then around 100 Columbia and Barnard anti-war students marched into the lobby outside of Dodge Hall's recruitment office and stayed there until CIA recruiting was cancelled by the Columbia Administration.

The following day, a letter was sent to Columbia University President Grayson Kirk, asking for a meeting to discuss university policy on CIA recruitment and university relations to the U.S. government. Later in the month, another rally was held at the sundial, prior to confronting Columbia University President Kirk in the Low Library administration building. Kirk appeared to feel he had to meet with the 300 Columbia and Barnard anti-war students who were rallying, in order to avert a possible Low Library sit-in.

At the rally, Fuerst spoke and emphasized that what students at Columbia now wanted was more student power over University policy decisions and genuine student involvement in Columbia University decision-making. Mike Klare of Columbia University's Independent Committee on Vietnam anti-war group, although still not interested in building a Columbia SDS chapter, also spoke at the rally. He criticized Columbia for accepting research contracts from the Department of Defense and drew the distinction between the Movement approach to politics and social change and the Columbia Administration's approach:

"We can attend yet another committee meeting. And speak to yet another bureaucrat. And wait for yet another dean. And attend yet another bureaucratic meeting. And we still won't get any results. That's the Administration's approach. That's the kind of politics they want us to be involved with.

"But what about the Movement? We do things differently in the Movement. In the Movement, we avoid all the bureaucratic run-around. That's why the Movement is going into Low Library today."

The Columbia and Barnard anti-war students then marched into Low Library and gathered in the Low Library rotunda. Kirk uneasily read a statement in which he argued that Columbia University should make no value judgements and take no political positions regarding U.S. government policy. Therefore, organizations like the CIA would continue to have the right to recruit on campus.

After he read his statement, Gilbert, Fuerst, Mike Klare, Lew Cole and some of the other Movement "heavies" at Columbia started to throw questions at Kirk. Students hissed in response to Kirk's initial answers. Kirk quickly retreated to his Low Library office for another appointment, before students felt the discussion should be terminated.

During the 1950s, Columbia President Kirk had fired a few Columbia professors who were accused of being Communist Party members. He had also written that Columbia University would not knowingly hire a communist intellectual to teach on its faculty. In 1954, Kirk had worked with the CIA's "cultural freedom congress" campaign which linked the celebration of Columbia's 200th anniversary to the CIA's 1950s anti-communist Cold War propaganda campaign. In 1954 or 1955, Kirk had given an honorary degree to his friend Allen Dulles, the CIA Director in the 1950s. Personally acquainted with former Columbia University President and U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and those U.S. ruling-class officials who sat on the Columbia board of trustees, like New York Times publisher Sulzberger and CBS board chairman William Paley, Kirk identified himself totally with the U.S. Establishment.

After Kirk left the rotunda, some of the anti-war students began to laugh. Fuerst had a big smile on his face. Gilbert was the first activist to speak to the anti-war students:

"Those are his values. But we have different values. And if we want Columbia University policy to reflect our values, we're going to have to build a Movement here that fights for student power and for participatory democracy at Columbia. And that's why we have to build a Columbia SDS chapter."

There was more discussion, and the anti-war students were enthusiastic about attempting to build a Columbia SDS chapter which would fight the Columbia Administration on a multi-issue basis, attempt to win student power at Columbia and work to build a mass-based radical student movement in the United States. A time for follow-up meetings was agreed upon and the group of anti-war students broke up for the day. There was a big headlined article on the student left's confrontation with Kirk in the Columbia student newspaper, Spectator, the next day.

The rest of November and December 1966 was filled with meetings of newly-recruited Columbia SDS people. The meetings took place in Earl Hall or in lounges in John Jay Hall. The junior, senior and graduate student male white radicals tended to dominate the discussion at these informal SDS organizational meetings. At one meeting in the basement lounge of John Jay Hall, definite political differences appeared between a non-Marxist-Leninist named Peter Friedland and most of the other white radicals, who all called themselves Marxist-Leninists.

Friedland argued that there was a need for Columbia SDS to be "New Left" and not "Old Left" in style and politics. He felt it was useless to try to build a radical student movement at Columbia using "Marxist-Leninist jargon and Marxist-Leninist crap," which would confuse people about the sincerity of the SDS desire to establish a participatory democracy in the U.S..

The Marxist-Leninists in Columbia SDS, however, seemed to be the most dedicated, most intellectual and most politically experienced and knowledgeable white people on Columbia's campus. Ted Gold, for instance, saw himself as a Marxist-Leninist and always seemed to make the most sense politically at Columbia during this period.

Fuerst had read about Guatemalan guerrillas. Their example was followed in the initial Columbia SDS organizational meetings. According to Fuerst, when a Guatemalan guerrilla band is formed, each individual volunteer tells the other guerrillas about his or her life and the reasons why he or she decided to join the liberation movement. By the time every guerrilla volunteer has spoken, everyone realizes how similar their lives of oppression have been and how the source of their individual suffering is, therefore, sociological, not individual or psychological. Given this reality, the guerrilla band immediately realizes that since individual oppression is collectively shared by others, the collective oppression can be ended only by collective resistance and collective, not individual, action. Feminist consciousness-raising groups later also utilized the Guatemalan guerrilla group model to recruit women into the late 1960s women's liberation movement.

New Columbia SDS recruits quickly learned that they all shared a sense of political powerlessness, anti-war and anti-draft rage and a militant anti-racist and anti-capitalist value-structure. They also all wanted to build a radically new world and new social order.

In December 1966, a new Columbia SDS member, former Progressive Labor Party member John Jacobs spoke in a long-winded way at meetings and never listened to the arguments raised by people whose political positions weredifferent than his. Jacobs, who was known to everybody within the Columbia and Barnard anti-war left subculture as "JJ," was unable at this time to persuade anybody that his proposed strategy of disrupting classes at Columbia University until the Viet Nam War ended was the best strategy for building a radical student movement.

In January 1967, Columbia SDS people learned that the CIA was returning to Columbia's campus to once again recruit students during the first week of the Spring 1967 term. A meeting was held in Professor of History Kaplow's high-rise apartment. In the Upper West Side high-rise apartment, the most active Columbia SDS activists discussed whether or not Columbia SDS should stop CIA recruitment. The Columbia SDS activists also discussed possible tactics the chapter could use to mobilize students to attend the anti-CIA protest demonstration.

The leader of the small Progressive Labor (PL) Party fraction within Columbia SDS pushed at this meeting for the political position that "The CIA should be kicked off the campus by students" and not just peacefully picketed by Columbia SDS. The non-PL New Leftists, however, collectively felt that the Columbia SDS chapter's politically liberal potential mass base at Columbia and Barnard was still not radicalized enough to understand why the CIA should be driven off campus. Consequently, it was decided to just call for a peaceful picket of CIA recruitment, in order not to turn-off the mass of potentially radical left-liberal students whom Columbia SDS wished to eventually recruit.

At the meeting, the Columbia SDS activists discussed possible ways of radicalizing more students at Columbia and Barnard.

"If we show students the gap between social potentiality and social actuality, they'll get involved in Columbia SDS," Fuerst asserted.

"I think the key thing to do to radicalize Columbia students is to show them that their liberal goals actually can be achieved only through political radicalism. And not through liberal politics," a newly-recruited anti-war activist named Bob Feldman stated.

When the meeting then discussed possible ways to mobilize students to confront the CIA recruiter, Feldman suggested that SDS hold dorm lobby meetings at which individual Columbia professors would be featured as guest speakers.

"Many more students might come to an SDS dorm lobby meeting if we have a Columbia professor there as a drawing card, than if it's just SDS people speaking," Feldman pointed out. It was agreed that Feldman would spend part of January telephoning professors and setting up these SDS dormitory lobby meetings.

Feldman reserved Furnald Hall dorm lobby space for the first meeting and "booked" a Columbia professor for this meeting and other professors for meetings in other dormitory lobbies. Most of the professors he telephoned were paranoid about SDS, but were flattered to hear that he felt dormitory residents would be interested in hearing them speak about U.S. foreign policy.

A Columbia Professor of Engineering, Seymour Melman had an answering machine, which few other people in the 1960s then possessed. He soon called Feldman back and enthusiastically agreed to speak at an SDS dorm lobby meeting. Columbia Professor of Sociology Vernon Dibble also quickly agreed to speak out. Columbia Professor of Sociology Martin only reluctantly agreed to speak out against the war. Columbia Professor of English Carl Hovde also reluctantly agreed to be featured in a Columbia SDS dormitory lobby meeting. In figuring out which professors to call and figuring out how to respond to professor questions about SDS's goals, Feldman consulted one of the most intellectual Columbia SDS activists at this time, a Columbia College senior named Harvey Blume.

A follow-up meeting was held in the West 115th Street office of the Columbia University Student Council [CUSC], a week before the CIA recruiter was to return to the campus. The head of the CUSC was some kind of a leftist, so Fuerst always had the key to the CUSC office. Fuerst was always able to use the Columbia College student government's stencils, reams of paper, phones and mimeograph machine for Columbia SDS purposes and as a meeting place whenever required.

At the meeting in the CUSC office, the most active Columbia SDS activists talked about what kind of leaflet SDS people would hand out and distribute around campus in the days prior to the anti-CIA demonstration. People agreed to leaflet and post leaflets around campus at specific times and places. The leader of the PL fraction agreed to type the stencil and mimeograph the 1,000 leaflets SDS required, even though he still argued that the leaflet should announce that the CIA would be "kicked off campus by Columbia SDS," not just picketed.

But the leaflets that the PL fraction leader ran off, however, reflected PL politics, not what everyone else in the Columbia SDS planning meeting had agreed the leaflet should say. Ted Gold had to then type up a new stencil and run off a bunch of new leaflets, so that the anti-CIA demonstration would accurately reflect New Left, not PL, politics.

At 9 a.m. on the day in early February 1967 that the CIA recruiters arrived on Columbia's campus again there was a picket line of only about 20 people outside Dodge Hall. Fuerst led the chanting, as the small group of anti-war students marched around in the freezing February morning.

"CIA must go! CIA must go! CIA must go!"

To introduce some variety in the chanting, Fuerst suddenly started to chant, in a softer voice, "Lumumba lives! Lumumba lives! Lumumba lives!"

By late morning, the picket line had grown to about 75 people, a much smaller group than SDS activists had hoped for. Despite Columbia SDS's January publicity, many Columbia and Barnard leftists had not heard about the scheduled anti-CIA demonstration because they hadn't been around campus during January.

Shortly after Columbia SDS began picketing Dodge Hall, the PL fraction within SDS--plus a few other impatient SDS people--went inside Dodge Hall and sat down in front of the recruiting office. The CIA representatives were effectively stopped from recruiting for the day. The New Left activist members, meanwhile, continued picketing outside for awhile. Then they went to the basement floor of Dodge Hall and held a meeting to decide whether Columbia SDS, as a whole, should join the 18 PL fraction-led students who were already sitting-in and stopping CIA recruitment.

Gilbert, Fuerst and others all argued against going upstairs to join the PL fraction-led sit-in.

"If we all go upstairs and sit-in, the rest of the campus won't understand why we're stopping recruiting. The rest of the campus still thinks it's a question of free speech. And that SDS is preventing free speech if we stop CIA recruitment today. PL doesn't care about building a mass movement of students. They think all students are `bourgeois' and that only workers matter. So they don't worry about alienating the mass of students by their tactics.

"Yet there are plenty of Columbia students out there, who aren't here now--but who will be here next time in a much larger demonstration--who can be organized. But only if we don't alienate them now, by letting PL determine our campus strategy," Gilbert argued.

Everybody supported this argument and the group of SDS people went back outside to picket some more, and then held a short rally.

Another reason why SDS people voted not to join the PL fraction-led anti-CIA sit-in was that the Columbia Administration had vowed to discipline any student involved in stopping recruiting. It seemed foolish to risk being disciplined when the number of Columbia SDS supporters on campus was still so small.

The Columbia SDS dorm lobby meetings that evening and during the next few weeks went well. At the meeting in Furnald Hall's lobby a good crowd of white liberal and white conservative dorm residents passed in and out of the lobby meeting, during the two hours it lasted, as did about 15 Columbia SDS people. When one liberal Columbia student argued that Viet Nam was an isolated case of U.S. foreign policy immorality, Harvey Blume became angry and replied:

"What about Iran in 1953? What about Guatemala in 1954? It's not just a question of Viet Nam. It's a question of the U.S.government's whole immoral foreign policy. And it's not a question of free speech when itcomes to the CIA being allowed to recruit on campus. The CIA is a criminal organization. Just like the KKK is a criminal organization. It not only has no right to recruit. It has no right to exist!"

A good-natured Columbia College senior named Michael Josefowitz, who everybody within the Columbia campus anti-war subculture called "Josh," was also there to argue effectively a New Left political line with much moral fervor and enthusiasm. Josh had been unanimously elected Columbia SDS vice-chairman because he was the only Columbia College senior interested in being Columbia SDS vice-chairman at that time and becaue he had no political enemies in Columbia leftist circles, as a result of his personable nature and non-rigid political style. Fuerst had been unanimously elected Columbia SDS chairman because he was the driving force behind the founding of the chapter, in addition to Gilbert, and because Gilbert had already graduated from Columbia College.

After the PL fraction-led students stopped CIA recruiting in early February, political activity on campus remained at a high level. PL fraction members came to the next Columbia SDS general assembly meeting with a proposal for Columbia SDS to begin an anti-ranking petition campaign at Columbia.

In early 1967, the Columbia Administration was mailing the class rank of each of its 2-S-deferred Columbia students to local draft boards in order to help the U.S. war machine determine, by means of class ranking, which students should be drafted first in case LBJ declared a "national emergency." Students whose class ranking showed them to be less efficient than higher-ranking students would be more likely to be denied deferments by the U.S. Selective Service System, as a result of the Columbia Administration's complicity with the SSS.

After PL proposed a spring term campaign to demand that the Columbia Administration stop sending class ranking information to U.S. draft boards, the New Left activists within Columbia SDS started to panic. PL--not Columbia and Barnard New Leftists--seemed to be the ones who were setting the spring agenda for Columbia SDS, and PL fraction people were starting to dominate Columbia SDS general assembly meeting debates, in a way that made students feel that SDS wasn't really a New Leftist political entity.

Fuerst, Blume and Josh decided to hold a meeting at Columbia SDS activist Teddy Kaptchuk's conveniently-located West 115th Street and Amsterdam Avenue apartment for the non-PL people who were most active in Columbia SDS to attend. At the meeting, which Blume and Fuerst dominated, the group all attempted to define, more clearly, in what ways the New Left activists' approach to politics was different than PL's approach to politics.

New Left activists concluded that, yes, PL's idea for beginning a campaign to end class-ranking at Columbia was politically sound, but not just because ending class-ranking was morally justified or a good way to fight the U.S. war machine while on campus. An anti-class-ranking campaign was also seen by New Left activists within SDS as a vehicle for raising mass radical consciousness about the "true nature of the U.S. university" and their"real state of unfreedom" and "political powerlessness" and to turn people on to a New Left lifestyle and political orientation. At the meeting, Kaptchuk also argued that PL's conception of Revolution was "fundamentally Old Left, not New Left" and that the New Left caucus represented people who were committed to a "life-style revolution," unlike PL, which was only interested in obtaining political power for an authoritarian sect, by manipulation.

The New Left activists of Columbia SDS started to meet every Friday afternoon in Earl Hall as a steering committee group which was open to all SDS members, including PL people. When necessary, though, informal meetings between SDS general assembly meetings would be held at Kaptchuk's apartment or someone else's apartment. This was done in order to avoid the disruptive presence of PL fraction people. PL people at this time would often tie-up SDS general assembly meetings in long, irrelevant, non-productive, sectarian debates which tended to undercut SDS's capacity to effectively engage in mass campus organizing.

Around this time, other leftist students became involved with Columbia SDS who formed the hard-core of its New Left "praxis-axis" faction. "Praxis" was a political term used by National SDS people to describe political theorizing and strategizing which related to daily radical activism.

John Evansohn was a graduate student in sociology who attended Columbia SDS steering committee meetings fairly regularly during Spring 1967. He saw himself as more of an academic, Marxist theoretician than as an organizer-activist. Evansohn's basic political argument was that Columbia, like the University of California at Berkeley, was nor more than a vocational training school and research instrument for the corporations and U.S. corporate capitalism. And that the education its students were all receiving inside Columbia's classrooms was "bourgeois" mis-education and little more than the transferring of "bourgeois ideology and culture" to a new generation of captive students.

"Students have to be shown that the corporate interests served by the Columbia Administration are antagonistic to their own student interests. And that to insure that Columbia serves their own interests, they must struggle to take power over the institution from the Administration," Evansohn argued at one meeting.

Columbia SDS's New Left faction accepted the truth of Evansohn's theoretical argument at this time. His basic notion about the Columbia Administration's true relationship to U.S. capitalism and U.S. corporate interests, and the bourgeois ideological bias of its class course content, seemed to reflect the reality of the late 1960s situation at Columbia.

Peter Schneider was another key praxis-axis theoretical leader who became active around this time. Like Evansohn, Schneider was very intellectual and academic and non-bohemian. He was a philosophy major and was already married to an equally politically involved Barnard student named Linda Schneider. The Schneiders lived in a high-rise, middle-class apartment building on LaSalle Street, a few blocks north of Columbia's campus. Like Evansohn, Peter Schneider thought that Columbia and Barnard students could be radicalized purely by "education alone." Linda Schneider pretty much followed her husband's political approach to radical politics.

Then there was Halliwell, a Russian History graduate student at Columbia. Halliwell dressed in a bohemian-proletarian way and worked with National SDS organizers and New York Regional SDS Office people. He liked to attend National SDS conferences and international student radical conferences. But he was too elitist to do any Columbia SDS organizing at his own school, except to chair an SDS general assembly meeting once or twice.

Evansohn, the Schneiders and Halliwell were all pleasant people, personally. They also all seemed to have far more integrity and more of a commitment to the politics of liberation than either the non-Columbia SDS people around campus or the faculty members of Columbia.

Around this time, a regional SDS conference was held in Princeton, New Jersey one weekend. SDS people from other New York City area chapters were also there.

At this Princeton conference, Dave Gilbert read "The Port Authority Statement," which he had written with Bob Gottlieb and Gerry Tenny. The Port Authority Statement was intended to be an updated equivalent of the Port Huron Statement of early National SDS. Its basic argument was that "the new working-class" of technocrats, technicians and middle-class professionals was going to be the agent of Revolution in the United States, instead of the traditional industrial working-class--which was declining in numbers and social power because of technological change.

After Gilbert read his Port Authority Statement, an elderly editor or former editor of some Old Left publication looked perturbed and unimpressed. In a dogmatic, Old Left-chauvinist, intellectually elitist way, he argued that the New Left of the 1960s was "wrong to write off the industrial working-class under capitalism" and that "the new working-class theory" was "non-Marxist" and "made no sense."

Yet in 1967, given the general political passivity of U.S. industrial workers in relationship to the U.S. war machine, and given the growing enthusiasm of white middle-class, pre-professional college students for radical politics, Gilbert's "New Working-Class Theory" seemed to explain reality. New Leftists around Columbia were guided by New Working-Class theory political conceptions when they organized during the next year.

The Old Left editor's argument against the New Working-Class theory was snickered at by most of the younger generation SDS people. Not just because of their ageism in relationship to Old Leftists of the older generation, but also because his description of the U.S. industrial working-class in the 1960s seemed inaccurate. The Old Left editor's picture of the industrial working-class seemed like a result of wishful thinking and not a picture that was based on concrete investigation, observation and interaction with 60s industrial workers on the factory shop floor.

February 1967 remained hectic, with SDS activity on two fronts at Columbia. The Columbia Administration went ahead with its disciplinary action against the PL-led students who had sat-in against the CIA's campus recruitment. A closed hearing was held around the time that Ramparts Magazine was disclosing how the CIA had secretly used many "non-profit" U.S. educational foundations as conduits to finance non-leftist political organizations like the National Student Association [NSA], and activities in which people like Gloria Steinem and Allard Lowenstein participated in, during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The anti-class ranking campaign was also beginning to reach out to both liberal student leaders of the Columbia Citizenship Council and the Undergraduate Dormitory Council [UDC] and to the broad mass of liberal Columbia College students. A characteristic tendency of Columbia SDS in 1967 was to ignore mass organizing at Barnard and neglect to make any real attempts to mobilize Barnard women against the institutionalized male-supremacist nature of Columbia. Bob Feldman did set up a Brooks Hall lounge dormitory meeting at Barnard in which the editor of the anti-war campus underground newsletterGadfly, Paul Rockwell and Columbia Professor of English Geoerge Stade spoke out against the U.S. war machine before a small group of Barnard students, who floated in and out. But Columbia SDS activists all generally assumed that only anti-war men at Columbia were qualified to be featured at SDS public meetings. Only on rare occasions was the "exceptional" leftist woman allowed to speak at SDS-sponsored educational events. Yet New Left women at Barnard and Columbia did not vocally protest against SDS's male chauvinist political practice in 1967.

The disciplinary hearing of the anti-CIA students was closed to most leftist students. According to de-classified New York Police Department "Red Squad" documents, however, a New York City undercover cop attended these hearings and made notes that listed the names of those students and professors who also attended the hearing, for "Red Squad" files.

The campus sundial oratory of Gadfly editor Rockwell also began to make an impression on anti-war students at Columbia and Barnard at this time.

"The CIA is a criminal organization. It respects no rules of international law. It abides by no morality--except for the morality of Goring, Goebbels and Hitler. Columbia University President Kirk directs the Asia Foundation. The Asia Foundation acted as a conduit for CIA funds. Columbia University awarded an honorary degree to Allen Dulles in the 1950s, in order to legitimize CIA Director Dulles' role in ordering CIA coups in Iran and Guatemala."

Rockwell spoke in a fiery way. His face reddend with outrage when he described from the sundail how current U.S. foreign policies violated Jeffersonian principles of democracy.

But in his dorm room one night, Ted Gold cited one reservation he had about Rockwell's 1967 politics:

"He doesn't argue against the war from either a New Leftist or a Marxist ideological perspective. But just from a militant liberal democratic, constitutionalist perspective. He ends up perpetuating illusions that the U.S. Constitution and Jefferson'[s political thought genuiinely reflect a commitment to a truly democratic society. We want to rid people of these illusions."

In February 1967, Gold was the Columbia SDS agitator who initiated the anti-class-ranking campaign by standing up on a wall in front of Hamilton Hall, between 9 o'clock and 10 o'clock classes, and addressing three other Columbia SDS guys. While he attempted to harangue them, large numbers of students apathetically walked by him. Many of these Columbia students glanced at Gold with a condescending smirk as they passed by him.

Gold's oratorical style was more verbose and pedantic, as well as less emotional and concise, than Rockwell's style. But his political summations were more traditionally Marxist. Rockwell was much better at using hecklers to stir up leftist mass moral passion, because he could quickly think up an emotionally and verbally good response to a right-wing heckler. Gold was less quick and witty than Rockwell at retorting to hecklers. Although Gold explained SDS positions very logically, he was sometimes too long-winded and not verbally flashy enough to stir up student mass emotions. He usually sounded more like a super-logical leftist intellectual than a charismatic orator.

Despite Gold's oratorical weaknesses and the presence of a PL fraction within Columbia SDS, however, by April 1968 the Columbia University chapter of SDS had radicalized enough anti-war Columbia and Barnard students to shut down Columbia University. The Columbia Student Revolt in 1968, occurring only 100 blocks north of Manhattan's television network studios, ended up receiving even more mass media publicity than the Berkeley Student Revolt of 1964 had received; and it put SDS "on the map" politically within the United States, on a nationwide basis.

On the East Coast, the most active Columbia SDS militants tended to follow former Columbia SDS vice-chairman Ted Gold and 1968 Columbia Student Revolt spokesperson Mark Rudd into the Weatherman faction of National SDS's Revolutionary Youth Movement faction. In July 1969, some of the former Columbia SDS activists held a post-National SDS convention meeting in the Bayside apartment of former Columbia College Citizenship Council head Frank Ward. Among the SDS people in attendance besides Ward, was Ted Gold.

Before the meeting in the Bayside apartment began, Gold joked about how he and another former Columbia SDS activist had had to pretend that they were a married couple while searching for a collective house for Weatherman activists in Queens. One of the other former Columbia SDS activists then began this meeting by slowly reading and interpreting the Weatherman Statement, for those at the meeting who hadn't been out at the National SDS Convention. The main thrust of the Weatherman Statement, according to this former Columbia SDS activist, was that, within the domestic colony of Afro-America, revolutionary armed struggle, led by the Black Panther Party, was likely to break out in the early 1970s; at the same time that more wars of national liberation, like the inevitably victorious Vietnamese national liberation struggle, against U.S. imperialism would occur. Within the "mother country" oppressor nation of "white honky Amerika," the task of revolutionary communists like former Columbia SDS activists was now to build a United Front Against Imperialism that was mass-based among white working-class youth, which opposed all forms of racism, sexism, national oppression and capitalism, and which militantly fought for the cause of revolutionary world communism.

After the former Columbia SDS activist finished reading the Weatherman Statement, everyone in the room agreed that it accurately described U.S. political reality at that time. All agreed that they would play their part to build an off-campus revolutionary white working-class youth movement which would fight for communist revolution in "the white mother-country" at the same time Black Panther-led masses of Third World revolutionaries in the U.S. domestic colonies, and Third World revolutionary masses in Asia, Africa and Latin America continued to fight, by any means necessary, for national liberation.

The woman activist who had been unsuccessfully searching for a collective house with Ted Gold then talked some about the need to free political prisoners like Ahmed Evans, who had been unjustly jailed for an act of armed self-defense in Cleveland. In addition there was a discussion of possible methods of recruiting masses of white working-class youth out in Queens to the U.S. revolution and possible ways to stimulate more mass anti-racist consciousness among white youth.

Later in the summer, a Weather-led demo was held at JFK Airport to greet Nelson Rockefeller, at the end of Rockefeller's tour of Latin America. Rockefeller's tour had been greeted by militant anti-imperialist mass demos in every Latin American city that Rockefeller had visited. Around 100 U.S. anti-imperialist protesters, led by Mark Rudd and other former New York Regional SDS people who were now into Weather, showed up at the airport. But since the airport was so large and the number of protesters were so small, the demo felt like an ineffectual one.

A minor controversy developed at Queens College around the same time, over the Queens College Administration's failure to allow a summer program for African-American youth to be run in a way that respected African-American self-determination rights. Some of the Weatherman activists attempted to make links with Queens African-American activists who were working with Rev. Mitchell, by attending a Queens College campus demo that Rev. Mitchell had organized. But nothing further developed in the way of an inter-racial alliance in Queens County. But by September 1969, all the energy of the former Columbia SDS people who had joined the Weatherman group appeared to be going into attempting to recruit people to "bring the war home" at a planned October 1969 "Days of Rage" anti-war demonstration in Chicago in support of the Chicago 8 Conspiracy Trial defendants.

[edit] redirect to main article

It looks like there isn't enough material here that can be properly sourced to merit Columbia's chapter of SDS its own article. Therefore, I have redirected it to the main Students for a Democratic Society (1960 organization) article.--RedShiftPA (talk) 18:32, 2 March 2008 (UTC)