Students: How Radicals Spend Their Summer

Having alienated themselves from most of society’s cherished institutions, radical students dedicated to their cause are now abandoning another: the summer vacation. In cities across the country they are working overtime during the hot summer months, while campuses are cool, to revolutionize society and plan future assaults on the established order. One of the top national leaders of the Students for a Democratic Society says: “For S.D.S. people, there is no summer vacation. We see ourselves working 18 hours a day forever. We’re in this for a lifetime.”

One of the highest-priority aims of the radicals, to win over the “working class” to their beliefs, may well take that long — if it is ever achieved. Months ago, before the S.D.S. split into two fac tions over ideological disagreements at its June convention in Chicago, the S.D.S. determined that it would renew and intensify its efforts to infiltrate labor and create a revolutionary worker-student alliance. Similar “work-in” programs had been attempted before on a smaller scale, but this time the campaign was planned in detail. A lengthy Work-in Organizers Manual was circulated among S.D.S. chapters. At the convention, both factions endorsed the alliance concept, although in somewhat differing forms.

Class Perspective. The manual told students how to get jobs: “You’re not afraid to work is the idea to get across”; “Don’t dress like a slob.” It also explained how to act: “Don’t talk to workers like you know everything and they know nothing.” It summed up the program’s purpose: To get across “the identity of interests of students and workers” and spell out “the relationship of the Viet Nam and the other imperialist wars to their immediate demands, to the fact that they and their sons die in the war, that it is a war for the rich—the class perspective.” During the workin, students were to challenge racism among white workers, to explain their campus goals, and to “break down bourgeois, elitist ideas in ourselves” about workers.

The student drive brought an alarmed response from business associations and Chambers of Commerce. They held briefings and sent out thousands of letters informing executives about the program and recommending screening procedures to keep activists off payrolls. J. Edgar Hoover warned that union members would face “fanatic, anarchist revolutionaries” who have left behind them “a bitter wake of arson, vandalism, bombings and destruction across the nation” and who believe that “unions should be destroyed, along with the Government, the military, private industry and law enforcement.” New York’s Commerce and Industry Association held a meeting, closed to outsiders, at which 250 executives were given lengthy, detailed counsel on methods of blocking the infiltrators.

Actually, only a few hundred militant students, perhaps 1,000, have found jobs in parking lots, factories and warehouses, where they are trying to put across their message in talks with small groups and individuals. Their reception has been cool, if not hostile; most of the industrial workers have no patience with revolutionary jargon and little sympathy for comparatively privileged college students who spout it. The president of the Brewery Workers Union, Karl F. Feller, says: “A well-placed fist could be the welcome that awaits S.D.S. revolutionaries,” and a Chicago United Automobile Workers’ spokesman says, “Those kids couldn’t organize their way out of a paper bag.”

Activists not attracted by the call of the assembly line have focused on com munity organization projects, propagandizing and planning. In Boston, 200 radicals are attending a nine-week “Movement School,” at which they are to develop a “critique of American society” and plan future tactics. Members of the Peace and Freedom Party are canvassing door to door in favor of rent control in Cambridge, where Harvard’s expansion has contributed to a severe housing shortage. Other students are engaged in draft-resistance counseling, mobilizing high school youths and running newspaper and film projects.

A more dramatic move is in the making at Stanford, where student radicals are developing plans for a week-long series of demonstrations to be held during the International Industrial Conference at San Francisco in September. The conference will bring together 500 heads of major industrial, technological and financial firms like U.S. Steel, IBM, Royal/Dutch Petroleum and the Chase Manhattan Bank in a top level gathering that the students say “is designed to consolidate the dominion of the multinational corporations in the third world.”

All across the country, radical groups are working intensively on plans for a massive descent on Chicago in mid-October. They claim that as many as 30,000 students will gather there to protest the war and demonstrate their support for the Black Panthers and for the “Conspiracy 8,” who are charged with conspiring to incite riots at the Chicago Democratic convention last year. For sheer propaganda, however, nothing the activists are planning or doing is likely to equal the summer project of ex-S.D.S. Organizer Rennie Davis and Detroit’s Linda Evans, an S.D.S. leader. They are presently in Hanoi as members of the U.S. delegation invited to escort homeward the three U.S. prisoners of war whose release was promised by the North Vietnamese early in July in observance of America’s Independence Day.