The New Student Crusade: Working in the System

IN some ways, it looked like the spring of 1968, when Eugene McCarthy piped his youthful armies across the nation. At Dartmouth College last week, Senior Peter Fogg had his long hair shorn and then set off to gather signatures for an antiwar petition in the New Hampshire countryside. At Princeton, students who had been selling McCarthy buttons two years ago pored over computer analyses of key congressional primaries and elections. The student union at UCLA became a chaos of committees, milling students, peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, mimeographed broadsides and memos. Said the University of Southern California's President Norman Topping: "It's extraordinary. The feelings run deeper and cover a larger number of students than anything I've seen in my 18 years of experience here."

In startling numbers, the nation's students were returning to political action for the first time since they dispersed in bitterness after the bloody Chicago convention. While some young extremists were still sporadically fire-bombing ROTC offices, many thousands more coalesced in the new activist movement. It was in effect a rapidly formed, massive new lobby to coax or coerce change from the system. Some of the more vociferous radicals had at least temporarily muted their voices, but more important, the changed context of the Indochinese war and the Kent and Jackson State killings suddenly brought a new legion of moderate, previously uncommitted Americans, most of them students, into the antiwar movement. It was sometimes incongruous that in a baffled outrage over what they saw as expanded war abroad and increased repression at home, some of the young found a new conviction that the system can be peacefully changed.

While the McCarthy crusade was aimed at the presidency, the new activists are concentrating on Congress. Strategies vary. Some groups, such as the Movement for a New Congress, are working to elect peace candidates in primaries and in the November elections. Started at Princeton two weeks ago at the suggestion of a young politics professor. New Congress already has twelve regional centers across the nation and affiliates at 280 campuses. Last week students were using a Princeton computer to analyze congressional-election results of the past ten years to choose district races where student help might swing an election. Among the first candidates chosen were four antiwar Democrats--Joseph Duffey for Senator in Connecticut, Norval Reece for Senator in Pennsylvania, Lewis Kaden for Congressman in New Jersey's 15th District and Nicholas Lamont in Pennsylvania's Third District. In the New Jersey race, more than 200 students are already canvassing for Kaden, a 28-year-old lawyer who is trying to unseat incumbent Edward Patten, a Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.

Turning Off Mao. In New York's 14th Congressional District, about 150 high school and college students are at work canvassing through Brooklyn for Peter Eikenberry, an antiwar candidate fighting incumbent John J. Rooney, known to some of the students as "Superhawk." Says one volunteer who was arrested during Columbia's 1968 spring riots: "Students aren't interested in the S.D.S. rhetoric any more. We don't identify with their worker-student alliances or their Maoism. There's a very real difference between rhetoric and action on the campus--kids talk radical and act liberal. Cambodia and Kent State have pushed the talkers into action, but it's not a conversion from left to right."

However, Stu Finer, a first-year student at Brooklyn Law School, underwent some kind of conversion in going to work for Eikenberry. "I considered myself really conservative," he says. "I probably would have voted for Nixon in '68, but I didn't register. Now, there is so much dissent, and Nixon doesn't seem to respond. I'm tired of just sitting back."

Some groups, such as the National Petition Committee, based at the University of Rochester, are designed to pressure Congress to exert itself against the war. The committee last week had gathered 140,000 signatures against the war; its goal is 20 million. Continuing Presence in Washington (C.P.W.), organized at Dartmouth, has set up a research and information headquarters in the capital. The group is installing a Teletype link to Dartmouth's central computer to keep track of congressional voting records and campaigns.

Fairly typical of some newly active students is Dartmouth Sophomore David Hazelett. Although he comes from a resolutely Republican family and favored Richard Nixon in 1968, Hazelett now describes himself as "a radical who is turned off by violence. By 'radical,' I mean we need radical solutions." Last week, as C.P.W. was getting organized, Hazelett was on Capitol Hill lobbying with Vermont Representative-at-Large Robert Stafford, a family friend. "A lot of Congressmen would take a different stand if they thought they'd have popular backing," says Hazelett. "We're trying to show them they would."

Some of the students took quick cram courses in foreign affairs, even in how to make presentations. In a gesture reminiscent of the "Clean for Gene" McCarthy campaign, almost all of the lobbying students--including 1,000 from Yale and 2,000 law school students from across the nation--came neatly barbered, wearing coats and ties, to the Hill. Most students concentrated their attention on Representatives from their own districts, as with a group of North Carolinians who called on Congressman James T. Broyhill. The lobbyists generally received polite audiences with their Representatives, and even some assurances of support for antiwar measures. Only occasionally did they confront a member like Georgia's Benjamin Blackburn, who argued briefly with a University of Minnesota law student and then snapped: "Get out of my damn office." The primary aim of the lobbyists was to help along the Hatfield-McGovern amendment (see page 16), which would require withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Viet Nam by June 30, 1971.

Faculty-Student Unity. Across the nation, the new movement is improvising other, quasi-political methods of pressure. Some organized a drive to cash in U.S. savings bonds. Others are promoting a boycott of Coca-Cola--simply because the young are among its best customers. The new movement has largely united students and faculty on most of the nation's campuses, bringing an unprecedented communication between them. The Universities National Anti-War Fund, formed by a group of Harvard and M.I.T. professors, is asking faculty members throughout the U.S. to pledge at least one day's salary for the antiwar election drive.

The largest question about the new coalition is whether it can sustain such momentum. In one way, many of the nation's campuses have already been so transformed that students find it difficult to imagine a return to an earlier status quo. Reports Bill Alford, TIME'S campus correspondent at Amherst: "With the exception of a few sheer crazies, the whole Amherst campus has moved so far to the left that the radicals have been swallowed up. Now the average guy here is saying things that would have got him beaten up on this very campus three years ago. A strong majority--about 80%--are opposed to the Indochinese war, and doubt that the U.S. Government has any intention of doing anything but staying in Asia and pumping it for all it is worth."

In a tactic guaranteed to promote activism, Princeton University has decided to recess classes for two weeks before the November elections so that students can work in congressional campaigns, and dozens of other colleges are devising similar arrangements. In the shorter range, however, the nation's schools will close soon--many are already shut down--and the dispersal of students will make organization much more difficult. If the President's Cambodian foray follows his scenario, U.S. troops will all be back in South Viet Nam by the time schools reopen, probably diminishing the movement's impetus. In addition, the drudgery of campaign work may soon discourage many volunteers. Last week a student working for Eikenberry complained: "I had no idea what total b-- politics is. First I checked petition names; then I put the phone number to contact on the student housing sheet to be mimeographed. The phone number didn't show up, so I had to write the thing out about 1,000 times. I was really turned off by all of it."

Last Chance. In public, most politicians welcome the students. Last week Democratic National Chairman Lawrence O'Brien set up a campaign clearinghouse to send volunteers' names to candidates with whom their views are compatible. But beneath their surface enthusiasm, many party professionals are skeptical. Some point out that Nixon defused the war as an issue once and might do so again, making many voters less receptive to the young activists. In most states, filing deadlines have passed, so that it is often too late to field a peace candidate where none exists. Candidates and campaign directors also fear that a backlash against protest will set in. Collegians pouring into a congressional district may cause resentment of "outsiders."

Still, the student movement could win some victories. It may be vital that it does, for the new spirit of moderation is drawn from a diminishing fund of patience. "If this working through the system doesn't work," says Brandeis University Student David Guc, "then who knows what the next step will be? This is sort of a last chance."

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