Selection from “The Defiant Voices of S.D.S.” by Roger Vaughn

Life magazine, 18 October 1968, pp. 8 ff.

    The loosely (almost chaotically) structured convention itself was in many ways an example of a participatory democracy in action. Carl Oglesby, a past national officer and continuing intellect of S.D.S., was in the midst of the most eloquent speech given at the convention. (“Oglesby is our only spellbinder,” a young man had whispered as the speech began. The assembled body of nearly 800 people were totally silent, hanging on Oglesby’s words. But in the middle of a sentence leading to a complicated point, Oglesby was interrupted by the moderator, who announced that the 30-minute time limit for speakers was up, and did the group wish to vote on a 10-minute extension for Oglesby? There was considerable laughter from the delegates at their own rigid adherence to the idea of equal protection of everyone’s rights, the vote was quickly taken (it was unanimous) and, unperturbed, Oglesby finished his remarks.
    To S.D.S., participatory democracy means essentially that power should evolve from the bottom up, not from the top down, which is why S.D.S. doesn’t particularly revere leaders—even its own—and why during the general sessions of the convention when resolutions were discussed, the lines at the floor microphones would often be 10 or 15 people deep. “If someone has something to say, let him say it!” became a kind of watchword. And it is also possibly why not one of the resolutions proposed at the convention was passed.
    There were two reactions to this feat of nonfeasance. One S.D.S.er, after carefully explaining the political nuances of the two main unpassed resolutions (the principle one would have restructured S.D.S), finally concluded a bit defensively, “Neither one of them was passed, but that doesn’t mean that nothing was accomplished.”
    Another delegate shrugged the whole thing off. “The convention comes and goes and there is all this talk,” he said. “Then most of us go back home and continue what we were doing as if the convention had never happened.”
    Back home is really where the action is in S.D.S. Back home in dozens of cities in the form of a wide variety of people and projects. In order to understand something of S.D.S. and its tactics, it is essential to look closely at some of its people, and find out what they do, what they believe, and what drives them.

    It was raining and the sun was out on an early summer afternoon in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Carl Oglesby, his wife and three children live in a frame house set in a thick grove of trees. The major industry in Yellow Springs is Antioch College. Oglesby’s term there as student-hired “radical in residence” had just expired, and he was teaching during the summer session because he needed the money. In the company of several cats and dogs—contentedly asleep—Oglesby was reading Che Guevara’s Reminiscences of a Revolutionary in his tree-darkened living room.
    He had on brown Curduroy pants and a yellow-striped orange T-shirt. His dark hair was combed straight back from his forehead, accentuating his Ichabodian face. He is tall and thin and wears round, steel-rimmed glasses. Carl Oglesby looks like an intellectual and he is.
    He is therefore an exception to most of the common preconceptions about members of the New Left. The New Left is often accused of not reading, of behaving emotionally, of being loud and argumentative and rude and of not listening to what it doesn’t want to hear. Oglesby is, first of all, a writer and scholar. (He was a playwright.) His delivery is quiet, his analytical material is well researched, and his thoughts are developed. Finally, he is as good a listener as he is a speaker. For these reasons alone, Oglesby is an immensely valuable unifying force in an organization as volatile and varied as S.D.S.
    There are, said Oglesby after putting Che Guevara aside, two ways to look at S.D.S. in relation to the U.S. One is that S.D.S. is therapeutic—it deals with the possibility of real change and problem-solving. The other is that S.D.S. is part of the malaise of the country and that its rapid and almost patternless growth is a reflection of an anxiety at the rate of change going on here and in the world. The change, Oglesby feels, will be momentous, far-reaching and basic in nature.
    “The results of advanced industrialization are surprising the hell out of people,” he says. “We need new ideas—and the historic task of working out this post-industrial way of life has fallen to the young on both sides of the Atlantic. The turbulence we’re now in is the result of the first awkward movements toward something new—a redefinition, a future.”
    Like many in S.D.S., Oglesby will admit to being a communist¾but only in his own definition of the term. “I reject the oldtime definitions, which were mostly used politically to scare people. I am not loyal to another man’s state. I am not a Stalinist. And I am not a member of the Communist party. The party is still there, but it is used mostly now by the weaker people in the movement who can’t handle the generally unstructured scene. It has nothing to do with what is going on.
    “What is going on,” Oglesby ways, “is that these leaders of ours are in bad shape.” The Kerner report, which said that two million more jobs will be needed in the next three years if the country is to avoid outright race war, particularly depresses him; but nothing much is being done about it, he feels, either by the Congress¾which won’t do anything—or by private industry—which strongly suspects that unemployment is headed up rather than down. “Everyone seems helpless¾our social institutions won’t respond to the problems they face. And the clock ticks like a countdown on Armageddon. But if we weren’t obliged, above all, to save the capitalist elite which is misruling the country, we could at least begin to solve these problems.”
    Oglesby does not have pat answers, or plans, for these or other problems he raises¾nor does he pretend to. “All I try to do,” he says, “is articulate the uncertainties and ambiguities of The Movement.”
    Carl Oglesby did not become a radical—a revolutionary—overnight. As he wrote in his book Containment and Change, “Everyone who is now a rebel became a rebel. The rebel is someone who has changed.”
    He was born in Akron, Ohio in 1934, the only child of Southern farming parents who had come north just before the Depression. “My father came looking for the big-paycheck factory job,” Carl says, “and my mother came looking for a man who had a big-paycheck factory job. She found my father.” Beyond that he has little to say about his childhood.
    He started college at Kent State and drop[ed out after three years to try New York, where he acted off-Broadway and wrote. After a near miss at having a play produced on Broadway, he returned to Kent State, got married, dropped out again to work in the publications division of the Goodyear Aerospace Company as a technical editor. “What my life was all about then,” he says, “was doing what I had to do to get money to write.”
    In 1958 Oglesby moved on to Ann Arbor, Mich. And enrolled in the university there, mainly because he had heard of a rich literature prize available to students. He won the prize and stayed on to graduate. By this time he had an editing job at Bendix Aviation. It wasn’t until three years after graduation that he got involved in politics.
    “Tom Hayden and Alan Haber [two founders of S.D.S.] were in Ann Arbor then,” Oglesby recalls, “but I didn’t know them. And frankly, I took a dim view of their commotiousness. My willingness to go along with the Establishment rationale of the cold war submerged my radical tendencies. I had standard liberal views about Castro—I couldn’t decide, the Russians—sane, China—crazy, and the U.N.—good.”
    In the summer or 1964 Oglesby encountered a book—D.F. Fleming’s The Cold War and Its Origins, which for its time was a very radical, left-wing analysis.
    “That book really hit me,” he says. “I mean, you have got to know where I came from: I was a member of the National Forensic League, and my senior year I won their national oratory prize. The subject of my speech was ‘Peace or Freedom,’ and the gist of it was that we must obey the summons of our Christian and democratic heritage and wipe out Soviet tyranny or die a horrible death! We have to do it now, before the Russia and take over by force! Wow! I was a liberal all right, a pro-cold war, pro-union liberal, and Fleming really got to me.”
    Oglesby scurried to other books on the subject, anxious to refute Fleming. “But he had the best of all the arguments,” Carl says. I became a radical about Vietnam without realizing it or wanting to admit it. To myself, I was just a reasonable man trying to find out the truth. To me, radicals were wooly heads with bombs.”
    Oglesby wrote a paper comparing the U.S. China policy with U.S. Policy in Vietnam and arguing that what really needed revising was our China policy. Some S.D.S. people read it in a campus magazine and, realizing they had an ally in Oglesby, sought him out.
    “They came out to Sunnyside Street—if you can believe the name—which is where we were living,” Oglesby says. “We had just moved into a house in the suburbs, complete with a brown refrigerator, two cars—the whole works. I had become head of my section at Bendix and was making about $1,000 a month.
    “We talked. I got to thinking about things. As a writer, I needed a mode of action…I couldn’t just grumble and go off to the creative spider hole and turn our plays. From what S.D.S. said about the Movement, it sounded like a direct way I could deal with things. I had to decide: was I going to be a writer just to be a professional writer or was I going to write in order to make change? I saw that people were already moving, so I joined up.”
    With some regrets, Oglesby quit his lucrative job at Bendix. “There were enjoyments about it,” he says. “First of all it was very easy. I think that most management-level jobs in corporations are ridiculously easy for anyone of average intelligence. I would say I was working at about 20% efficiency at Bendix and still doing a good job. Then there was golf. I got good at it, and I miss it.”
    Oglesby’s first Movement activity was his participation in the first teach-in on the war, held at the University of Michigan in 1965. The organizers hoped for 500. Instead, 3,000 showed up and stayed for most of the night. Oglesby was elated: “That night I remember thinking that these kids were definitely the wave of the future, and that I had to work with them”
    There followed a draft demonstration in New York, in which he was beaten up by local toughs—”A good thing. Actually, getting beaten up isn’t half as bad as thinking about it and fearing it”—and then the antiwar march on Washington of 25,000 people in April 1965. Afterwards came a meeting of the S.D.S. National Interim Council, an event Oglesby now remembers as “a fantastic experience. For three days there was debate on various subjects, and I was absolutely convinced by each speaker. One would get up and defend a point, and I would be convinced. Then another guy would get up and refute the point so well I thought he was right. One after the other they got better and smarter. It was the first time I had seen a debate when it wasn’t an ego game. They were beautiful people. Students! I really had no idea until then that young people—anyone!—could think so well.”
    In the spring of 1965, the first crop of S.D.S. people were facing commencement, and the worrisome question for the S.D.S. leadership was what these new graduates would do then. Being radical and living on peanut butter is easy for students. Could they continue that life after graduation? Carl Oglesby’s emergence just then was significant. Here he was: 30 years old, out of the middle class with a wife and (by then) three children, having worked in the defense industry and they dropped out to work in the Movement. “His being there,” says an S.D.S.er of the time, “meant that participation in the Movement was possible after student days were over.” At the convention that year, Oglesby was elected president of the organization he had just joined and really didn’t know much about.
    It was an evening in the small house in Yellow Springs. The phone rang—some Movement people were making their way east, typically, by contracting to deliver a new car, and asked if there was room for them to stay. There was, of course, because that is how the Movement works, and soon they arrived. Everyone embraced. Carl took out a gallon of cheap wine and picked at his guitar while the talk quietly flowed from Movement politics and people, to the national elections, to the New Left Reader that Oglesby is editing for a New York publisher.
    This fall Oglesby is in San Francisco. The idea of San Francisco’s Movement-oriented Mime Troupe interest him, and he would like to write for Ramparts magazine. But the idea that really tickles him is starting a rock group. All he has so far is the name. It would be called the National Liberation Front.

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