"Max B. Sawicky" wrote:
>
>
> "Power grab" doesn't strike me as quite right. PL had
> a majority at the fateful convention. The minority walked
> out. PL in its own cloddish way was amenable to
> holding the group together, which would have been better
> than the splintering that ensued.
Max puts it nicely without the elaborate scholarship I wrapped it in. PL, whatever its faults (and they were many and increasing), did win their majority fairly, and those of us who walked out were wrong. And he perhaps understates his point merely to remark that it would have been better to hold sds together. The reaction to Kent State could have been far more powerful had _any_ sort of national coordinating agency been in existence.
Shortly before the October demonstrations in '69 I ran into Linda Quint (I think I have her name correct) in Macomb, Illinois. I had driven to Western Illinois there to try to drum up recruits for the RYM 2 demos, and she was there for a speaking engagement I guess. We ran into each other in the student union. Her comment on the whole mess (RYM 2 vs Weather-jerks) was that they were a bunch of #$%^% sectarians. Linda had been an important pacifist organizer and had stayed at my house a couple times. The last I heard of her, she had flipped a bit too; she was among a group of people who broke into the Selective Service office in Chicago and drenched its files in blood, then went underground. I liked her very much. Does anyone on this list know what happened to her?
> The anarchists in SDS were invisible, except for those who
> were anarchist but didn't realize it, like the Weather-jerks.
Indeed.
Carrol