Next Left Notes Is A News Magazine Devoted To Direct Action
A New Song for SDS
A Song of Ourselves
By Paul Buhle
We know perfectly well our own egotism,
And know our omnivorous words, and cannot say any less,
And would fetch you whoever you are, flush with ourselves?
Missing us one place, search another
We stop somewhere waiting for you.
(Apologies to WW)
1968. Blessed year of uprisings and downfallings
Such a short span from 1960
Span less to 1970
Our own uprise--and downfall.
We weren't the first rebels downcast
Not by a long shot
Generations came and went
Hopes launched like rockets
Crashed, crushed or both.
Look back, back to the beginning
Before SDS, to the Student League for Industrial Democracy
Campus walkouts against war, 1934, first time ever in the US
And the Intercollegiate Socialists of the 1910s,
Jack London, Upton Sinclair, orators to the
hot-blooded bluebloods of the Ivy League.
Back further to the Wobblies (we'll see them again),
Who, if anyone, ever, had the DNA of SDS
Still further back to Eugene Victor Debs, railroad man
Named after Eugene Sue and Victor Hugo
And the glorious campaign (his first)
New Century, new socialist dream: 1900
"An' there's 'Gene Debs
a man at' stans'
An' jist holds out
In his two hands
The kindest heart that ever beat
Betwixt here an' the Jedgment Seat."
That was the Hoosier Poet, James Whitcomb Riley
Jim and Gene boozed together through the Red Light District
Of Terra Haute, that railroad town in Indiana (Hoosier talk: Injiany)
More than one night.
Gene said they were the realest women he ever met.
A thousand years ahead of his time,
The townsfolk said about Gene.
Imprisoned (for being against War and Empire,
Unforgivably: An American War, an American Empire)
Almost a million votes for Prisoner Number 9653, in1920.
Broken, a dead man released six years later.
Working people cried in the streets
(Not the ones with Fords, bought on time)
That was three years before the Crash
(Then they lost their Fords).
Then Depression, Fascists in Europe
And the KKK in the USA
All too soon, World War
The dark mood broken by sit-downs,
Citywide strikes, new unions
Blind faith in Red Russia,
And in FDR's Democratic Party.
Nazi Terror, Holocaust, Hiroshima
But Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
Stalingrad, the Partisans
And then: Bring the Boys Home!
Good Times (for a little while)
Boom Times, more strikes, wild hipsters
Dizzy G and Bebop
But suddenly: Redscare, FBI, Loyalty Oaths
Happy to pronounce them: Loyal Intellectuals,
Fat with self-satisfaction, "paytriots"
Operators Irving Kristol, Junior Arthur Schlesinger
Critic Leslie Fleacure (Nelson Algren named him)
All on the make and on the take.
New Leader, Partisan Review, Encounter
Self-righteous liberals
With CIA money hidden in their designer clothes.
The Jet Set Liberals SDSers would rebel against.
Saint Allen Ginsberg, we remember
And his friend Jack, tho drunk and confused
Looking for Satori on Hank Williams' Lost Highways
Listening (sometimes) to philosopher Gary Snyder
Berated, scandalized by Lady LT
Herself without a talent in sight
So like the smarmy Podhorrible
Craving revenge against the inspirers of the young rebels
And craving the spotlight for themselves.
1959! The literary vampires went after the Beats
As they would go after SDSers, a few years later
We wanted to be the vindication of those rebels,
And we were. For a while. Until the new century.
When our own generation of changelings
(D. Horowitz the dumbest and least of them
and War Democrats worse than hack Republicans)
Lobbied, listed for photo-ops,
And awaited appointments
And praised dead Empire-protectors, Empire expanders
Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman
Hated in the end by ordinary folks.
As beacons of wisdom
Martyrs for Global Might.
Not for them, C. Wright Mills, early martyred
Random radicals, their books not quite banned
Their work not quite halted, just condemned.
W.E.B. DuBois, in his 'nineties, eyes on Mother Africa
C.L.R. James, exiled, unbroken
Television writers, movie writers
Scribbling under phony names
Shows about Robin Hood, and about crime understood
As Sin, not as Evil, and social sin at that.
Films of happy whores, inflamed black men (not monsters)
Antifascists, strikers, thieves
Strong women, weak men
All the unacceptable.
And Mad Comics!
Diane DiPrima, anarchist's granddaughter,
With her own Beat rhythm in the Village.
Lenny Bruce shooting up on the toilet seat,
None to be forgotten.
That handsome brown man known as Martin
J. Edgar conspired, the ADL sent spies into his office
To get something to use against him.
Meanwhile a guy named Zinn, WWII bombardier, young and earnest
From Jewish parents poorer than MLK's
Willed immigrants, not descendents of captured Africans
Teaching at Tuskeegee, Atlanta black girl's school
Alice Walker, his student
Ground troops for the sit-ins.
Building up to something
Calling us into existence.
Verse 2
And Clark Kerr said:
"The university has become a prime instrument of public purpose."
Kerr, a former SLIDer (back in the 30s)!
Now Kommandant of the multiversity
Readying the young for the warfare state.
He also said (1959) "The employers will love this generation.
There aren't going to be any riots."
The joke was on Kerr and Packer and Kirk and all the others
Gutless liberals who wanted the War to go away,
But would never endanger their own careers,
And who always bowed to power,
While saving their heavy foot for our necks.
A better philosopher (30 and already bearded)
Alan Haber, University of Michigan, Soc Grad Student
"The groundwork for a radical student movement"
would be found by looking where...
Clark Kerr would never look (but neither would an Old Red):
In the heart of a student, any student.
"We have spoken at last, with vigor, idealism and urgency,
supporting our words with picket lines, demonstration,
money and even our own bodies.
We have taken the initiative away from the adult spokesmen...
As our actions evolve their own dynamic.
Pessimism and cynicism have given way to:
Direct Action."
And it was only June, 1960!
There was an office (in New York)
Small and paint peeling
Haber slept under the mimeo machine
That was otherwise kept busy.
Tom Hayden, pockmarked Irishman
Red-faced, full of bluff
But bigger than his weakness,
For women
And his body hunger
For personal glory.
The others a small army
An anti-army!
Fighting together, over ideas, principles
To live by
And organize by.
But not quite what Mom and Dad LID wanted
SDS leaders called on the carpet
Hearing date, July 6, 1963, New York
Young Michael Harrington for the Prosecution
Old Norman Thomas sheepishly for the Defense.
Locked out of the office, next day
(Al Haber, remembering highschool Industrial Arts, picked the lock.)
Peace restored. For the moment. and
Walter Reuther wrote a check.
In Port Huron, Michigan
A union camp with furniture built
By union wives of UAW regulars.
Fifty-nine met, in June, 1962
The mighty Lake was too cold for skinny dipping.
Mosquitoes too thick for lovers camping out.
The professors (one S. Kauffman) rambling and dull.
The social democrats (wives and mortgages back home)
Worried that Something Dangerous might be going on.
"All this was settled ten or twenty years ago" (M. Harrington)
America was innocent, if not yet perfect.
Russians were guilty. JFK a savior come to earth.
Tho he needed Better Advisors.
Undaunted, Hayden wrote what all on hand rewrote
Together during the day, during the night
Mountains of paper
Mounds of cigarette butts
The Something Dangerous
(I got my copy in September, 1965)
The Port Huron Statement!
About Americans afraid of shadows
"They fear change itself, since change might smash
whatever invisible framework seems to hold back chaos."
"Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe
the vast distance" between humans in the
richest nations the world had ever known.
Something to be overcome "only when a love of man
Overcomes the idolatrous worship of things."
Heresy!
And on campus, Yesterday's "fraternity president
Is seen at the junior management levels;
The prom queen has gone to Gross Pointe.
The once-serious and never-serious poets works
At the advertising agencies."
"The world is in transformation,
but America is not."
"America must abolish its political stalemate.
Corporations must be made publicly responsible.
The allocations of resources must be based on social needs.
America should concentrate on its genuine social priorities:
Abolish squalor
Terminate neglect
Establish an environment for people to live in
With dignity and creativeness."
Heresy!!
"We seek the establishment of a
democracy of individual participation."
That is, Participatory Democracy.
A new phrase
A new phase.
But no easy trek.
Verse 3
ERAPers and rappers
Pine Ridge, Catskills, 1963
Todd Gitlin, Harvard boy from Bronx Science with a big puffing pipe
Looking to a future in high places
Thrown off course by a decade of better dreams
Gave forth, Alfred North Whitehead!
Jim Williams, listening, said quietly to himself: I never heard that name.
Felt ashamed, spoke no more.
Jim Williams, the other SDS
Son of a socialist bricklayer, nephew of a coopers' union president
Louisville, Kaintuck
Received a letter from Al Haber, 1961.
Inside Carl Braden's place, bookshelves document
In the trial for sedition.
(Carl and Anne: sold their house to a black WWII
vet: not quite a crime, but guilty on one count of communism.)
One day The Port Huron Statement appeared in the mail.
Jim Williams knew: this was what he wanted.
Verse 4
Snapshot: Washington Mall
Warm April afternoon, 1965
Looking every bit the Quaker, Staughton Lynd sez
"We are here today on behalf of John-Paul Sartre..."
and a thousand Empire liberals ground their teeth.
They wanted Sartre dead
And some farting Harvard don in his place.
Glorious and humble Bob Moses, back from the South and
next on the platform:
"Listen and think. Don't clap please. Don't
use Mississippi as a moral lighting rod.
Use it as a looking glass.
Look into it and we what it tell you
About all of America."
Paul Potter, farmboy-philosopher:
"I mean more than petitions and letters of protest.
I mean people who are willing to change
Their lives
Willing to challenge the system.
Our problems are not
In Vietnam, or China, or Brazil
Or outer space
But here in the United States
What we must do is build
A democratic and humane society
In which Vietnams are unthinkable."
Twenty thousand shouted and applauded
(I was one of them.)
When Potter said, "We must name the system,"
A few young Maoists grumbled, "Capitalism!"
I remember thinking: no, that's not it.
There's something more.
We need to listen.
Then it was Fall, 1965
80,000 out against the war,
across the country (not the South)
Bespeckled Paul Booth on David Suskind's show
Well dressed.
Well coiffed.
Playing cards close to his sleeve.
Offering SDSers for VISTA
BUILD, NOT BURN!
(It was a great slogan.)
But the war went wild,
And the liberals said what they always said,
Bomb them, bomb them, bomb them,
Bomb them a little softer.
BUILD NOT...BURN!
(It was never a slogan. But we thought it.)
Verse 4
Greg (ory) Nevlin Calvert:
Larger and smaller than life itself
Half-Finn, farm boy, Southwest Washington
Grandad an old Wobbly
Hardly spoke English
And talked only politics (the family complained).
Left behind as Greg was moved away.
At 17, Greg in love with another boy
All the sex stopped years earlier,
"What are you, queer?"
Jump down decades, to Chicago and the National Office
It's '66 and Calvert is Nat'l Sect'y
Socialist Shitworkers Local 666 formed spontaneously
Of youngsters printing and stuffing envelopes
*Some of them on the run from draft boards)
This demand issued to officers:
"That we get more love and affection
from the older members,
of the staff."
What were they, queer?
No, maybe yes and no,
Looking for more love.
Gregory Calvert, age 13
Mother in the state nut house
Dad brutal, fist-fights
"What kind of son are you?"
Off to college, gay life behind
Then college graduate abroad: 1962
On the streets in Paris
Hustling for lovers
who could pay.
And back to Iowa to teach
Until Chicago called
Another National Office accident!
This one a happy mistake.
I heard him in Princeton, 1966,
Don't make a revolution for someone else,
Make it for yourself!
In other words (and Carl D. put it more succinctly)
Student Syndicalism!
And a dozen past SDS leaders ground their teeth:
It all seemed vague.
But at least it was something new.
Not a rewrite of the 1930s (class struggle!)
Or the 1920s (save the workers' republic!)
Or the 1950s (we stand for civil rights?
And wait for something else).
[To be continued]
[Brothers, Sisters, I need your stories. Just like the SDS comic.]
Next Left Notes
(c) 2004,2006 Thomas Good
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