These 3-4 paragraphs were extensively footnoted. This has to be one of the most extensively footnoted books I've ever read -- and it's not for the purpose of impressing anyone with names as you see in lit reviews in academic journals.
Also, I stopped writing about the convention. This was what Berger describes as an initial break, where the RYM factions realized they'd decisively split on the issue of anti-racism. From there, there was more contention at the convention and further breakdowns in the months that followed.
In this case, the sections I wrote about and quoted by Dan Berger drew on the following sources, sentence by sentence -- meaning there were 3-6 sources footnoted per paragraph:
Jack Smith, "SDS ousts PLP," in Guardian, June 28, 1969, pp 3, 11 Lyndon Comstock, personal e-mail to author Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS, 1974 pp 557, 564, 566, 569 Andrew Kopkind, _The Thirdy Years' Wars: Dispatches and Diversions of a RAdical Journalist, p. 167
>First of all, it is seriously misrepresenting the factional struggles to
>link _only_ PLP to "mao." RYM was if anything _more_ "maoist" than PLP,
>or at laeast claimed to be.
This is interesting. From the Weatherman's perspectives -- the folks he interviewed for this book, as well as his reading of original sources, biographies, memoirs, etc., this doesn't get brought up as an issue of competing Maoists, at least not in this section. He writes later that the Weatherman were "ok" with the NLF negotiating with the US, whereas the PL thought they were sell outs. Hence, the Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win chant. If I've got that right.
Berger says, "WRiting in the Guardian a month later, Carl Davison of RYM II said that the SDS convention was significant in being the first time since Reconstruction that a predominantly white organization had splkit over questions of racism and white supremacy." (p 85)
He then goes on to talk about an impromptue caucus of RYM 1/Weatherman and RYM II folks: they were caucusing about what to do next: go back and fith it out with PL -- or declare themselves the 'real' SDS and expel PL?
June 21 was the night of Dohrn's speech. She recounted the history of SDS in relation to the Black movement and thir world struggles.
"With this legacy, she argued, SDS could not permit itself to become an organization that denounced the Vietnamese lib. movement for negotiating with the U.S. at the Paris peach talks and attacked the Black Panther Party and other radial Black Nationalist forces for "narrow nationalism" while they were under murderous attacks.... SDS was not simply an opposition force, she said; not the Left wing of the Democratic Party or a union auxilliary. It was becoming a revolutionary movement; and as such, it could not allow a group such as PL in its ranks...because PL opposed what was best about the movement.
At the end, Dohrn proclaimed, "We are *not* a caucus. *We are SDS." As kopkind reported, "suddenly it all beame true to the croseds in the bleachers, and they knew that there was no going back." (signage of a satement of principles...) Dohrn then led the RYM bloc back into the main convention room, where she officially expelled the Progressive Labor Party from Students for a Democratic Society." (pp. 85-6)
The coolest thing about reading this book, though, is that it confirms a lot of what you say about how people just -- snap! -- do it when it comes down to brass tacks. More on all that later.
shag
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