Word: caucuses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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PERHAPS what Harvard needs is a good non-fiction novel about a pot-smoking radical from St. Paul's who has an affair with an assistant professor from the liberal caucus whom he meets secretly in the Widener archives and who gets arrested in a demonstration but dies of meningitis in jail before his rich, conservative magazine-writer father can sell the movie rights. Or perhaps a good book-burning...
...part, this weakness stemmed from divisions within the radical movement. Even during 1968-69. Harvard SDS experienced bitter infighting between its two principal factions: the Worker-Student Alliance (WSA) caucus, and the New Left caucus. WSA, led by the well-organized and elite Progressive Labor Party (PL), viewed the New Left caucus's rather diffuse ideology- which centered on support for most all wars of national liberation- with scorn. For its part, the New Left caucus generally felt that WSA's rigid Marxism-organizing for a workers revolution- was inapplicable to present condition. Even during the height...
DESPITE such verbal battles, the two caucuses held together in one Harvard SDS during 1968-69, and the combination was potent. WSA-PL provided good organizers- "I don't like PL's ideas but their tactics are usually the best" was a refrain commonly muttered by SDS members at mass meetings. The New Left caucus, on the other hand, possessed more charismatic leaders like Michael Ansara '68, and a looser ideology more attractive to non-SDS students...
...than I got feeling to pick up a gun and fight. The tensions between these two life styles could not easily be accommodated within one organization; the national SDS split in June 1969. Harvard SDS followed suit: it became the property of the WSA faction, while the New Left caucus regrouped as the November Action Coalition...
...trouble was not that there were students involved, Arthur Maass, Frank G. Thompson Professor of Government and later head of the Faculty's conservative caucus, explained. Professors were upset because SFAC was not properly integrated into the structure...