John H. Ehrenreich ’63, who served as Tocsin’s secretary, recalled an early Tocsin event during which organization leaders asked students to show their support for nuclear disarmament by donning blue armbands.
“On the one hand we got things like ‘go back to Russia,’ and on the other hand we got about 1,000 students wearing blue armbands,” he said.
Former Vice-Chairman of Tocsin Christopher A. Sims ’63, who won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Economics, said that government professors Stanley H. Hoffmann and Henry A. Kissinger ’50 regularly met Tocsin members for lunch to talk about politics.
“They thought we were a little naive or radical. In particular, Kissinger enjoyed provoking us,” Sims said, highlighting the intellectual discourse that Tocsin emphasized.
PUSHING THE AGENDA
February 1962 saw Tocsin’s largest protest effort. According to The Crimson, Tocsin helped plan and joined “Project Washington,” which brought hundreds of Harvard and Radcliffe students and many more from universities across the country to the capital to protest and meet with political leaders, including National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy.
Promoting an agenda for nuclear disarmament, Tocsin’s leaders drafted an eight-page policy paper to present to congressmen.
The protesters received little support from officials in Washington—one representative called them, “full of baloney” while another criticized the students’ “emotional outbursts,” The Crimson reported. But Sims said Tocsin’s efforts were successful in bringing attention to the need for policy change.
“We thought there was a significant risk of nuclear war and people weren’t doing enough about it,” he said. “It seemed like an important issue where pushing an out-of-the-box agenda seemed to make a difference.”
‘AHEAD OF THE CURVE’
At the time of Tocsin’s founding, few student-run activist organizations existed. Through its affiliation with the Student Peace Union, a national coalition of organizations like Tocsin, its members helped pioneer an era of activism on college campuses.
“I think we were very ahead of the curve,” said Du Bois. “This was an elite university in the country and we were right there in the front.”
According to the Tocsin leaders, their role as a pioneer of student protest necessitated less extreme demands and methods.
But Gitlin said that the path that Tocsin blazed empowered later student movements. After serving as Tocsin’s chairman, Gitlin became president of the growing national organization Students for a Democratic Society.
“Tocsin was a very modest and well behaved organization,” he said. “It was much more careful and cautious than the Occupy movement,” about which he recently published a book.
Sims said similarities still exist between student movements in 1962 and those that are happening today, 50 years later.
“It’s students thinking about issues that matter for their future and getting angry,” he said.
—Staff writer Fatima Mirza can be reached at fmirza@college.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer Eliza M. Nguyen can be reached at enguyen@college.harvard.edu.