AFTER FOUR years of steadily increasing activism, protest groups began looking for a multi-issue approach to American ills. It was clear to many activists that peace, discrimination, and poverty were not autonomous events. In the fall of 1964, Tocsin, by then operating at a bare subsistence level, officially became SDS. CRCC and the Harvard Socialist Club joined up to create a single organization including all elements of the Harvard radical community.
This amalgamation reflected the amazing expansion of SDS. The 1962 Port Huron Statement, still the group's basic document of purpose, established SDS as the student spear-head of the New Left. It articulated a unique philosophy of white activism based not on economic exploitation but on "participatory democracy."
One old SDS member describes the beginning. "In those days we were not big, not popular. SDS had to sell its own ideas, without the help of the War. And we did come up with distinctive ideas all our own." The philosophy stressed quality of life, poor-white organizing, and community power within a critique of corporate liberalism. There was militant anti-anti-communism, i.e., the true enemies in this country are the closed-minded red baiters.
By the end of 1962, SDS had grown to a real national organization with about 500 members. A year and a half later, summer 1964, the strength of community organizing as a tactic had gained general acceptance among the nation's activists. That summer SDS started the Economic Resistance into Action Project (ERAB) in Boston, Newark, Cleveland, Baltimore and Chicago. About 150 radicals worked full time to organize ghettos on unemployment, rent, and welfare considerations.
That was also the summer when the great wave of Northern students went South to work for civil rights. There they viewed community organizing first hand. Many came back itching to create a SNCC in the North. When they found SDS was doing just that, they joined up.
The 1964 presidential election was a dividing point in the evolution of post-war radicalism. Radicals still trusted the traditional electoral process. Martin Luther King called off the marches during the campaign. Radicals worked for Johnson. After the election there was a lessening of desire to work through the conventional system because radicals felt no basis for trust. Civil Rights was a radical cause which gained through national popularity. It appeared that radical demands were being satisfied with traditional politics: the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It appeared that the United States had a president deeply committed to a radical cause. After the election, when emphasis shifted to obstructing the war, radical policy found no sympathy with the administration.
But in 1964 there was overwhelming cooperation. Radicals joined with Kennedy liberals to support LBJ, believing that underneath his assertion to "support all the people," there was a resolve to start a liberal revolution. While Harvard SDS worked for Johnson, they also supported independent Noel Day in his campaign to unseat House Speaker John McCormack. Their campaign slogan expressed the radical mood: "Part of the Way with LBJ; the Rest of the Way with Noel Day."
While Johnson was gaining the biggest consensus of all time, the ground-work was being laid for a mass movement which would seriously challenge his tenure in office. In August, Congress adopted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, enabling the tremendous involvement of the United States in Vietnam. Late November saw the birth of University Reform at Berkeley. Students served warning about what they could do when they found a cause.
In February of 1965 something happened which brought students a cause and brought to the country the beginnings of a mass protest movement. It involved people to the political left and right of the civil rights movement. It changed dissent from an intelligent association to a moral cause. The United States began daily bombings of North Vietnam.
Harvard's first peace march occurred in February of that year when 100 students marched from the Cambridge Common to the post office. "We were chanting 'Bring the boys home now!' and man, did we ever feel radical," says one marcher.
With the bombings, dissent at Harvard and around the country became more and more radical. The most effective anti-war propaganda came from a Progressive Labor front organization, the May 2nd Movement. The