After the radical Students for a Democratic Society split into angry
factions at the organization's convention last June, the question was
whether any of them could mount an effective “fall offensive.” The
answer is no. By last week, S.D.S. had fallen on extremely hard times.
Items:> At Fordham University, 400 students turned out for a mass rally
called by the Committee to Abolish S.D.S. Angered by the violent
tactics that S.D.S. had used to protest ROTC at Fordham, the students
called on the university's president, Father Michael Walsh, to bar the
organization from the campus. > At Harvard, militant black students
briefly cooperated with S.D.S. raiders in occupying the office of Dean
Ernest May to protest the university's allegedly racist employment
practices. The black-white alliance broke down when the white radicals
insisted on holding May captive. Arguing that such a move would serve
no useful purpose, the black students ushered the dean through the
S.D.S. ranks and out of the building. > Also in Cambridge, police
arrested 15 young men and nine women said to be members of the
supermilitant Weatherman faction of S.D.S. Raids on three apartments
netted a small arsenal: one shotgun, three rifles and nearly 1,000
rounds of ammunition. All 24 were charged with conspiracy to commit
murder by firing two shots through the front window of the Cambridge
police station earlier this month.> In Washington, a Moratorium leader
Stephen Cohen, accused Weatherman leaders of trying to “shake down” his
committee by demanding $20,000 in return for pledging nonviolence
during the peace demonstrations. “We politely told them to get lost,”
said Cohen. The Weathermen say that they asked for help in paying the
massive legal fees that have piled up in Chicago, where more than 200
of their members are coming to trial for rioting last month. But they
deny that it was a shakedown, claiming that Moratorium leaders issued
the story to discredit them. When the violence did come in Washington,
the Weathermen were in the thick of it .Ways and Means. S.D.S. is broken into so many factions on most campuses
that its energies are being dissipated by internal haggling. Although
distinctions between the S.D.S. factions are blurry, there are three
principal wings: the Worker-Student Alliance, the Revolutionary Youth
Movement 1 and the Revolutionary Youth Movement 2. All are
committed to the notion of a more or less violent revolution in
America, but they differ over ways and means.Taking a Marxist-Leninist line borrowed from the Progressive Labor
Party, the Worker-Student Alliance insists that students subordinate
themselves to workers as the vanguard of the revolution. Though W.S.A.
thinks that Negro laborers will ultimately lead the movement, it hedges
on the primacy of black workers at the start. As a result, the other
factions label W.S.A. racist. In turn, W.S.A. criticizes the rest of
S.D.S. for looking down on workers and existing labor organizations.
