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auskultu · 7 years

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THE NEW LEFT TURNS TO MOOD OF VIOLENCE IN PLACE OF PROTEST

Paul Hofman, The New York Times, 7 May 1967

“We are working to build a guerrilla force in an urban environment,” said the national secretary of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society, Gregory Calvert, one day recently.

“We are actively organizing sedition,” he said.

Mr. Calvert, a 29-year-old former history teacher, spoke pleasantly about revolution in his dingy office on Chicago's Skid Row. The threat of violence in his words characterizes the current radicalization of the New Left.

A maze of factions with a penchant for verbosity and a hankering for actions, the New Left wants emphatically to be distinct from the old left—the socialist and Communist movements whose history goes back over generations.

Ebullience and Frustration Just how distinct it has become was made clear during a three-week series of interviews with some 75 New Left activists and sympathizers from coast to coast. Most of them were younger than 30, and some sounded much more truculent than members of the Moscow-oriented Communist party, U. S. A.

The spirit of resistance and direct action constitutes perhaps the major attitude in the New Left today. Other findings in this assessment of the New Left's mood are as follows:

An ebullience over the impact of opposition to the war in Vietnam, which emotionally involves some members of the middle class and leads them to New Left positions also on domestic issues.

A frustration resulting from the lack of New Left political power and the failures of “peace” candidates in national and local elections.

A virulent factionalism similar to the doctrinaire old left feuds, a factionalism that is being exploited by extremists. up with leftist and “anti-imperialist” movements in Latin America, Europe and emerging nations.

The growth of a broadening “hippie” segment, mainly on the East and West Coasts, occasionally Joining the New Left in demonstrations but also worrying it because drug users and beatniks tend to withdraw from society instead of attempting to reform or revolutionize it.

The drifting apart of young whites and Negroes, close allies in the civil rights battles in the South a few years ago, as black power extremism spreads in Northern ghettos.

‘Che Lives in Our Hearts' If there is one dominant hero of the New Left mood, perhaps he is Ernesto Che Guevara.

Mr. Calvert, the beardless, ruddy-faced national secretary of Students for a Democratic Society, said:

“Che’s message is applicable to urban America as far as the psychology of guerrilla action goes. . . . Che sure lives in our hearts.”

Che Guevara, the Argentine-born revolutionary who was an associate of Premier Fidel Castro of Cuba, disappeared more than two years ago and is rumored to be leading insurgents somewhere in the Andean fastnesses.

A long way from the South American sierras, a surprising number of young left-wing intellectuals were found to revere the Argentinian adventurer. Rebellious students who spoke with equal disdain about “Establishment liberals” and “Communist squares” professed the cult of the “pure” man of revolutionary action.

Posters of Che Guevara and of Malcolm X, the black nationalist slain here two years ago, are advertised for sale “at special bulk rates” in a San Francisco monthly, The Movement. The radical publication disaffiliated recently from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the militant, Southern-oriented movement that used to be one of the pillars of the New Left but has lately veered toward black power goals and away from Students for a Democratic Society.

‘I'm No Pacifist' Che Guevara’s bearded likeness was encountered on the walls of the littered offices of radical newspapers and left-wing groups. His name cropped up in talks in college cafeterias whenever the New Left’s current infatuation with direct action was mentioned.

“I recognize that violence may be necessary, I'm no pacifist,” said a vibrant young woman who has done much work for the New Left, Leni Zeiger. “I’m a white, middle-class girl, but I understand why Negroes, Puerto Ricans or Okies riot. I feel the same frustrations in myself, the same urge to violence.”

Ann Arbor is important on the New Left map because Students for a Democratic Society was born there some six year ago. The movement’s first national convention in Port Huron Mich., in June, 1962, produce a basic New Left manifesto.

This rejected “paranoiac anti-Communism” while blaming the Soviet Union for suppressing opposition. It strongly attacked American capitalism, denounce the “hypocrisy of America ideals” and advocated a vaguely defined . “participatory democracy.”

Several S.D.S. member asked for practical examples of “participatory democracy” in action, pointed to the Yugoslav system of workers’ council running nationalized business enterprises.

Amendments to the “Port Huron Statement” have made the S.D.S. program completely agnostic on Communism, opening the door to membership of Communists.

Since then, Students for Democratic Society has gone through various phases, aided the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee in the South, it went into the Northern ghettos to organize their inhabitants, and lately it has swung back onto the campus.

Some of the ghetto efforts a still alive. Among them are the Newark Community Unity Project—directed by Tom Hayden, a cofounder of S.D.S. a main author of the Port Huron manifesto— and Chicago’s Jobs or Income Now (J.O.I.N.).

In the short but lively history of S.D.S., 1967 is the year of the “prairie guys,” the national leaders who were elect at a convention in a Methodist camp at Clear Lake, Iowa, in September. Nick Egleson, president, Carl Davidson, vice president, Mr. Calvert and their friends are leading S.D.S., in Davidson’s words, “from protest to resistance."

Action Above Ideology Mr. Calvert described himself as a “post-Communist revolutionary," putting action above ideology. Dee Jacobsen, assistant national secretary a headquarters manager, said t North Vietnamese whom S.D.S representatives had got in touch with “cannot understand we don't take any direct action."

The three-room, $125-a-month national headquarters of Students for a Democratic Society is at 1608 West Madison Street Chicago's Skid Row. It is close to the area of last summer’s Negro rioting.

Despite the squalid settling, the headquarters looks more affluent than it did at its torn location near the University Chicago campus on the city’s South Side.

Last year there was picturesque clutter: now there is disorderliness. There are boxes outgoing and incoming mail, staffers who answer telephones and an ancient safe with a combination lock.

"We are getting ready the revolution." Mr. Jacobsen joked with a thin smile while visitor remarked on the new look.

Mr. Jacobsen said he abandoned psychiatric hospital work to become a full-time S.D.S. organizer because he thought “my life was getting unbelievable.”

Mr. Calvert and Mr. Jacob said S.D.S. had some 200 chapters, with 8,000 dues-pay members and at least 25.1 other supporters who participated in chapter activities.

These activities, the S.D.S. leaders said, are centered on enlisting young men to evade military duty by “insubordinate, legal and illegal emigration Canada, going underground America—everything.’’

Students for a Democratic Society is organizing “draft resistance unions" and has “national draft resistance ordinator."

A Change of Plan The resistance-fomenting leadership has only contempt for electoral campaigns “peace" candidates and is hostile toward more protest demonstrations. The leadership first decided not to participate in Spring Mobilization anti-war demonstrations of last April deeming them a futile exert but was overruled at a meeting of the movement’s national council in Cambridge early in April.

The national leaders still not seem to think much of mobilization, and they have hinted at possibly even sterner action than resistance to the draft.

"Some of our members undoubtedly will help” in ghetto riots this summer, Mr. Jacobsen said.

A former S.D.S. organizer, who asked that he not be named, ridiculed the present leadership’s talk of urban guerrillas.

"Greg Calvert has read something about leftist terrorist commandos in Caracas,” he said, "and he and his friends think they are Venezuelans. They are becoming a sect. Romantic and out of touch with reality.”

He said infiltrators from the pro-Peking Progressive Labor party had gained control of a least one S.D.S. chapter in Chicago. He did not name it.

Other New Left moderates suggested that the verbal militancy in S.D.S. headquarter might mask an inferiority complex vis-i-vis Negro racists who had already made up their minds that violence was necessary to attain black power.

“Black nationalists are stacking Molotov cock tails and studying how they can hold a few city blocks in an uprising, how to keep off the fire brigade and the police so that the National Guard must be called out,” a white Ohio student said. "And they're right. We ought to help them where we can, but we oughtn’t be hung up with leading or liberating the Negroes."

In Praise of Black Power Mr. Calvert conceded that S.D.S. had few Negro member He said:

“Black power is absolutely necessary. When we have organized the white radicals we can link up with the Negro radicals."

This seemed to imply a lack of such a link at present.

In the view of Jack Newfield, assistant editor of The Village Voice, the Greenwich Village newspaper, and a former S.D.S member, the radicalization of New Left movements results from a feeling of hopelessness “The situation is getting more oppressive," he said. “Look at Alabama, look at Georgia, look at the war in Vietnam."

At the Internal Security Division of the Department of Justice, an official said “it is obvious that these [New Left] groups are becoming more and more vociferous and threatening“ in protesting against the war in Vietnam and calling for sedition.” However, he said was unable to comment on he serious a threat to law and order these groups were.

He said that “we are following closely the activities some of these groups,” keeping in mind that the First Amendment to the Constitution protects freedom of speech. He said violations of the Universal Military Training and Service Act and the Sedition Act were being investigated but declined to indicate whether prosecutions were on the increase.

Talks with police officers a community leaders in various cities found most in agreement that only a small hard core leftist activists is determined to defy the law—maybe no more than a few hundred across the nation. The number of young New Left militants who advocate violence is grown, it was found, but whether the increasingly radical talk can be translated into unlawful action is controversial.

A potential threat to law and order from New Left radicals was seen in areas where racial disorders this summer are feared, including Cleveland, Chicago and, possibly New York.

Numerically, the New Left remains weak. The figure 200,000 adherents nationwide that is often mentioned by sympathizers seems exaggerated.

Staughton Lynd’s View In the New Left itself, campus talk about direct act Is only rarely frightening, does not frighten Staughton Lynd, who at the age of 38 often called an "elder statesman" of the New Left.

The guerrilla concept is "is descriptive" of the new radical trend, he said in an interview. He appeared to distinguish tween active violence and civil disobedience, which he himself practiced at the end of 1966 when he defied the United States Government and visited Hanoi with Mr. Hayden, S.D.S. cofounder, and Dr. Hebert Aptheker, the leading theoretician of the Communist Party, U.S.A.

Mr. Lynd, an associate professor of history at Yale University, who has been influenced by Quaker pacifism, said he expected to receive a leave of absence from Yale and move to Chicago teach at an S.D.S.-backed course for community organizers. Graduates of the school may assist draft resistors or defend the interests of the poor in housing and welfare, he said.

Mr. Lynd stressed that “solid base of local organization" was more important the New Left than going quickly into national politics.

“I believe in local polital candidates” of the New Left said.

A more sanguine assessment of the New Left's political sensibilities was given by Booth, who was S.D.S. national secretary before Mr. Calvert. Mr. Booth said in Chicago that the defeats of New Left “peace” candidates in year’s primaries and Congressional elections “have given people a better sense of how much work is to be done” to win political power.

Third-Party Idea Mr. Booth said the idea setting up a third party or antiwar and New Loft platform deserved consideration.

He expressed hope that “in three months” a vast audience would rally behind Rev. Dr. Marlin' Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Dr. Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician and antiwar leader, as candidates for President and Vice President. Dr. King has said he does not intend to run.

Mr. Booth, a 23-year-old Swarthmore College graduate, is a board member of the National Conference for New Politics. ("Those left liberals!" Mr. Calvert sneered when the group was mentioned to him.)

The conference was established last year to help New Left and antiwar forces win political Influence. Cochairmen are Julian Bond of the Georgia Legislature and Simon Casidy, a California Democrat. Dr. Spock was among the founders.

Another backer of Dr. King is Robert Scheer, the 31-year-old managing editor of Ramparts magazine. During a visit to New York he predicted broad popular support for the clergyman.

"I cannot think of any Negro minister attacking him,” Mr. Scheer said. “Stokely Carmichael [chairman of the S.N.C.C.] embraced him publicly. The extremists will have to go along.”

Mr. Scheer knows how to sound pretty extremist himself. In the Spring Mobilization rally In San Francisco he called President Johnson a “murderer” who was aiming at a “final solution” in Vietnam. The term “final solution” was used in official Nazi documents to describe the destruction of Jews ordered by Hitler.

The executive director of the Conference for New Politics, William F. Pepper, said in an interview at the group’s New York headquarters, at 250 West 57th Street, that "we aren’t a bunch of liberal do-gooders, we are revolutionary.” (“Liberal” is a dirty word in the New Left.)

He said the conference aimed at affiliating with the hundreds of antiwar committees and left-oriented “single-issue and multi-issue” groups that had sprung up throughout the country.

Mr. Pepper said he once was a campaign coordinator for Senator Robert F. Kennedy in Westchester County but that in his present activity he was not “fronting for Senator Kennedy.”

A Meeting With Kennedy Senator Kennedy has shown interest in the New Left and some time ago had a long talk with Mr. Lynd and Mr. Hayden at his home here. The meeting was arranged by Mr. Newfield. who is working on a biography of the Senator.

It was an aide of Dr. King, the Rev. James Bevel, who served as national director of the Spring Mobilization. The protest Idea was originally conceived by pacifists around the Rev. A. J. Muste, who died last Feb. 11.

While Dr. King jolted the civil rights movement by saying that it was vitally connected with the campaign against the war in Vietnam, leftists became prominent in the mobilization campaign. Some moderates withdrew.

The antiwar rally on April 15 In San Francisco's 62,000-seat Kezar Stadium, which was almost filled, was directed by a 21-year-old Trotskyite, Kipp Dawson. Outside the stadium, members of a Los Angeles-based pro-Peking group, wearing homemade uniforms with red-star insignia, sold copies of the “little red book" anthology of Chairman Mao Tse-tung's thoughts. The Maoists had denounced the April 15 demonstrations as a "revisionist Trotskyite betrayal." but did not pass up its possibilities for propaganda.

The W. E. B. Dubois Clubs, widely regarded as an unofficial youth arm of the Communist Party, U. S. A., played a subdued role In the antiwar drive or were missing altogether. Leftists of various shades wondered why.

An attempt to obtain an explanation at the Chicago national headquarters of the clubs was unsuccessful. The two-room office In the Great Lakes Building, 180 North Wacker Drive, was closed, and the telephone was disconnected.

A Theory About the Club Some DuBois Clubs have ceased their advertising of activities in local student publications. A Negro undergraduate had his own theory of why the clubs, which are named after a dead Negro Marxist scholar, seem dormant:

“The Communist Party desperately wants to look liberal and respectable. These DuBois cats, square as they are, are too swingin’ for the party bureaucrats.”

A former DuBois leader, Michael Myerson, is director of a newly formed Tri-Continental Information Center here that, according to a recent announcement. “has established contacts with anti-imperialist organizations and movements throughout the world.” Among the sponsors are Communist party members such as Dr. Aptheker, S.D.S. backers and Dr. Spock.

Mr. Myerson, a 26-year-old University of California graduate, said the members of the center were offering their services and support as Individuals and not as representatives of any organizations. The group has an office at 1133 Broadway and a two-man staff. It said It would issue a monthly bulletin and a series of pamphlets and would send fact-finding missions "to areas suffering from United States domination."

Students for a Democratic Society, too, is branching out internationally. A new Radical Education Project calls for creation of a network of "scholars, journalists, leftist youth leaders. government officials, guerrilla leaders, etc.," to gather international intelligence on insurgent movements and foreign policy developments.

The Young Socialist Alliance, an appendage of the Trotskyite Socialist Workers party, thoroughly committed its small but disciplined membership to the Spring Mobilization demonstration.

The Trotskyites’ advocacy of all-embracing. “nonexclusive” antiwar alliances is met with deep distrust by many New Left adherents.

‘Liars’ a Student Says "The Trotskyites are liars and just want to take over the entire left,” a Harvard University student said.

A visitor to the Spring Mobilization headquarters in San Francisco, a few days after the April 15 demonstrations, found the organizing committee's director there, the petite Miss Dawson, counting money contributions and arranging for the payment of bills.

It quickly developed during an interview that Miss Dawson's revolutionary idol is Che Guevara.

"The Cuban revolution is the most exciting thing that has happened In our time,” said the Young Socialist Alliance activist, who was not yet born when Leon Trotsky was murdered in Mexico in 1940.

Trotsky, one of the chief organizers of the Russian October Revolution of 1917, advocated world revolution and establishment of uncompromising “pure", Communism. He was forced into I exile by Stalin. Followers of Trotsky's doctrine of “permanent revolution” are influential in some Latin-American countries.

While the heirs of the old left thus identify with Che Guevara. his book "Guerrilla Warfare”—and not Mao’s little red book—is becoming part of the young radicals’ field kit.

[Due to a bad scan, article is incomplete for last few paragraphs.]

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berkeleyfreeclinicthesis-blog · 7 years

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02.11.2017 - visiting the haight ashbury free clinic

I work at UCSF on the weekends, so I decided to leave Berkeley early and check out the “first” free clinic of the free clinic movement.

haight ashbury free clinic is now part of a california-wide conglomerate of federally qualified health centers called healthright 360.I had seen a bunch of people wearing healthRIGHT360 shirts at a Jan 15,2017 rally in San Francisco with Nancy Pelosi to defend the Affordable Care Act, but I was too scared to go up to them and ask a bunch of questions.

I came at it quite skeptically after my experience with lifelong care, which had all of the frustrating alienating qualities of the typical private care facility. bored staff, drab, empty waiting room, didn’t seem like anyone cared. Turns out Haight Ashbury still has a distinctly “free clinic” vibe, something warm and welcoming, a staff that appeared bright, responsive and concerned.

The CEO of healthright360 gets my stamp of approval. Here’s an excerpt from an npr article.

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/01/22/510622207/haight-ashburys-free-health-clinic-middle-aged-and-still-groovy

“In the 1980s, a young woman named Vitka Eisen came to the Haight Ashbury clinic struggling with heroin addiction, and learned firsthand the value of the personal attention the clinic offered.

"I went there for detox at least nine times," she says. "I never felt shamed or judged. They always acted like they were glad to see me."

Her trust in the staff, she says, led her to kick her heroin habit and return to school. She eventually earned a doctorate in education from Harvard University.

Today Eisen is CEO of HealthRIGHT360.

By 2011, like many recession-era nonprofits, the organization Smith helped start in the 1960s was deeply in debt. So it merged with Walden House, a respected San Francisco-based addiction and mental health treatment program, which wanted to offer comprehensive medical care to its patients. The merged nonprofit adopted the name HealthRIGHT360.

By joining forces, Eisen says, Walden House and the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics were able to weather the extraordinary financial expense of shifting their organizations to electronic health records, a requirement of the Affordable Care Act.

With the network in place, she says, it's been easier to train and add new providers as HealthRight360 has expanded. The merger also allowed the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics to erase its debt in a year.”

To prep I looked back through the 1971 book written by David Smith, founder of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. I found a few passages I felt were worthy to highlight.

From “The Free Clinics: Approach to Alienated Youth” by Ricardo Galbis - discusses the implications of increasingly strict penalties for marijuana usage. 2-6 years in jail with probation only for first time offenders. This means that people within the hippie communities, who are often students and in some way trying to pursue mainstream life, often no longer feel comfortable dealing drugs. This leaves the dealing to be done by professional crime syndicates which also traffic heroine. Heroine is a more lucrative drug than marijuana, so it is in the economic interest of these crime syndicates to get the flower children hooked on heroine.... many free clinics are designed almost exclusively engage with the fallout of this massive heroine abuse among flower children. which is an indirect result of overly strict government drug policy. In the light of recent comments from nixon’s aide John Ehrlichman, this degradation of the counterculture was the intended result of their war on drugs. “ “ We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

From “Washington Free Clinic: Community, Programs and Problems” by George H. Lawrence and Burton Schonfeld. People using the WFC: “high schools and college students, lower, middle and upper class youth, suburban kids, drop outs, runaways, hippies, drug users, laborers, and a few ghetto blacks. The location of the WFC is in Georgetown, in an area of avant garde boutiques and other shops surrounded by high income single family housing. The commercial blocks are common meeting grounds for the hundreds of young, predominantly white young street people, day and night.”

From “The Isla Vista Almost Free Clinic” by David Bearman and Mimi Sheridan. “In recent years Isla Vista has developed many of the characteristics of the urban ghetto- transient (UC Santa Barbara and SBCC students) population, absentee property ownership” The open door clinic is established with the support of the University of California.

Anyhow I got off the N-line and walked down to Haight st., then down to the cross with clayton. There at clayton and haight i snapped the following pictures.

the waiting room and exam rooms are located up a steep set of stairs, above a tibetan gift shop. those second story bay windows in the photograph above look into the exam rooms i assume. Reminded me of what i had read earlier, “The location of the WFC is in Georgetown, in an area of avant garde boutiques and other shops surrounded by high income single family housing.” Free clinics have a habit of popping up near avant garde boutiques in rich white neighborhoods.

I walked up the steps, where the current door is pasted with life-size photograph of the old door which had been painted with dolphins and dragons telling people not to bring drugs inside, and with the note “i love you” painted on the bottom panel.

I walked inside and it immediately felt different than the Life Long health center-- the waiting room seemed well used, i made eye-contact with a group of women doctors through a wide open door. the younger women seemed peppy, on a mission and I imagined that the older woman they were all listening to had been working here for decades. Maybe i just imagined that she held herself that way.

nonetheless the waiting room was also empty.

One thing I noticed though was that it was really hot inside. Maybe it was just that I had been walking a lot, but i noticed that I was sweating profusely. In that sweaty state I went up to the front desk, introduced that i was writing a thesis and asked if they had any informational packets or books about the history of the place. They told me they didn’t but i would have all my questions answered if I went to the second location on mission.

they handed me this slip

So i started schlepping on to the mission location.

This is the “corporate headquarters” of healthright 360. I took the bus. The building is a big red box under the free way. it looks like an appropriately humble location for a free clinic. I ran up to the glass door and waved to the people gathered around the inside lobby, i didn’t consider what it meant that a bunch of nurses were just hovering around the door. I tugged on the door and found it locked. I looked up to the people in the lobby and they stared back. Checked my watch, 5pm. I held up my hand and spread my fingers apart and mouthed FIVE? They nodded and I turned away, i guess they close at five.

Of course I was not done. I waited on the side of the door out of view until a doctor walked out, before the door could slide shut I grabbed it put my foot in and stared into the lobby at the workers who were gathering to leave. I think i scared them a little.

There was an old man, with the key rings of someone involved in maintenance or janitorial work and two young nurses.

I introduced myself by tugging on the breast of my berkeley free clinic hoodie. I told them about my project and asked if there was anyone I could talk to about haight ashbury free clinic or healthright 360. They said there were two people, their bosses, that might know something and that i should write a note for them.

I scribbled a note, including my berkeley email and phone number and the nature of my project. altogether the whole haight ashbury thiing is completely tangential, i mainly just want to use it to highlight how unique the independent financial situation of the BFC truly is, and how remarkable that it has maintained a true collective structure through all these years.

While I was writing the two nurses went home, it was friday evening afterall... most people have fun plans... I, on the otherhand, was on my way to an all-night shift at the lab. The older man remained and he asked me to come in after the others had left. this whole time i had been standing awkwardly with the door propped up against my back.

The older man told me that he had worked for the haight Ashbury free clinic back in its hey day... “back when it was an actual free clinic.” he said. Today it receives federal funds and is therefore required to charge every client based on a sliding scale. I asked him about Healthright360.. he said that it was very corporate and the structure was distinct from what he remembers the clinic being, but he stressed that he couldn’t make any comments on the structure of health right 360 and that only his bosses could. Of course that fact along stands in contrast to the principles of unity that defined most of the free clinic movement clinics-- the collective ownership stuff.

Anyhow, i didn’t feel like pressing him, plus i was running a little late, so i handed him the note, thanked him and left. walked down mission to 24th. turned down 24th, and followed it to portrero where san francisco (now zuckerberg) general hospital is located, trudged up the stairs to my lab and worked until 8AM.

I wondered in retrospect what kind of information i could have mined from the old janitor guy if I had been persistent, but whatever, I resigned to wait for a call from his boss.

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