VLVL PR3 and "the Movement"

[jbor]

from _SDS_ by Kirkpatrick Sale, Random House, New York, 1973:

SPRING 1969

  On the campuses, protests were more frequent, more diverse, and more
violent than even the previous year. [...]
  All told, there were major protest demonstrations at nearly three hundred
colleges and universities in every part of the country, at a rate of nearly
two a day, involving a third of the nation's students, roughly 20 percent of
them accompanied by bombs, fires or destruction of property, a quarter by
strikes or building takeovers, and a quarter more by disruption of classes
and institutional functions. (511-2)

  SDS--SDS as catalyst, as progenitor--had clearly done its job well:
protest was percolating into every part of the porous republic. But SDS--SDS
the ongoing organization, the national presence--was no longer under any
illusions that this meant its message was sweeping the country. [...] The
fall's multiplicity of troubles--in-fighting, PL factionalism, distance,
repression--had produced a bitter realism about what it is like to wage a
serious war in the grown-up world of power. The people at the top levels of
the organization no longer had the sense that the revolution was going to
happen by itself just because it was right--if it was going to come it would
take a new and even more sustained effort, a new seriousness.
  For the national leadership, the new seriousness meant a new way of
operating, of confronting power, and it took the form of a search for a new
discipline, new ideology, and new allies. (513)

  [...] the one weapon SDS needed on its side above all others, the one
without which political action of any kind was impossible, was the support
of the students themselves, at least the important minds and talents among
them, at least enough to make a visible and sustained campaign of protest.
This, however, was a weapon slipping slowly form the SDS grasp. SDS was
losing its campus base.
  Part of the problem was a growing change in SDS's style. The paranoid
temperament that had emerged in many chapters in the fall developed still
further in the spring--not without cause, it should be added--often leading
to a confusion of priorities and a paralysis of action: "Always looking over
our shoulders," Todd Gitlin wrote in February, "we risk stumbling over our
feet." Moreover, a sense of hardness and self-importance descended upon many
who felt themselves to be revolutionary, all too often growing into a
dogmatism, an impatient righteousness that scorned the winning of converts,
even at the cost of making enemies. Seriousness hung like cigarette smoke
over every gathering, and more revolutionary-than-thou poses were struck as
often as matches. (519-20)

  And still with all of this the screws of repression tightened--a stark
display of power aroused.
  The Nixon Administration which took office in January came on like--well,
like gangbusters. It did not hesitate to carry out its law-and-order
campaign promises--including those about unruly students--and to use the
Department of Justice as a political arm of the White House to that end.
[...] Various branches of the Department of Justice were instructed to step
up their investigation and infiltration of militant and left-wing
groups--most notably the FBI, but also the Law Enforcement Assistance
Administration, the Community Relations Service and a special thirty man
"campus rebellion" task force which [Attorney General John] Mitchell began
to organise to carry out the vigorous prosecution of students who interfere
with federally guaranteed civil rights or federally funded programs (that
is, just about every university). (541-2)

cont.