Word: draft
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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WHEN, two months ago, 150 Harvard students held a long, fiery meeting to form the Harvard Draft Union, there were tangible signs that a broad based. campus anti-draft campaign had begun. The Draft Union would offer Harvard students a positive way of responding to the prevailing national mood of crisis. A CRIMSON poll had shown that as many as 22 per cent of the senior class were ready to flee the country or go to iail rather than serve in the armed forces. In other words, the potential for resistance was there...
...Draft Union promised to work in two ways. It would work first on an individual basis, canvassing and counseling seniors and training draft counselors who could organize similar projects in their own communities over the summer. Second, it would unite students who opposed the war into an effective political force, rallying them around the issue which threatened them with most immediacy...
...first weeks of existence, the Draft Union organized more than 200 volunteers into decentralized units in the Houses, the Yard, and 13 Graduate departments. These workers canvassed the entire senior class and held several small sessions in draft counseling. And, as a show of strength, the Union collected more than 1150 signatures on a petition in support of Rolf Kolden, a teaching fellow in Government, who was planning to refuse induction...
...even in February, when the national mood seemed glummest, the Draft Union was having trouble getting through to people. "Most seniors still don't believe that they will be drafted after graduation," sophomore Barry A. Margolin, undergraduate coordinator of the Union, said recently. "Seniors think their draft boards are different-but 70 per cent of them are going to end up in Vietnam." The psychological impact of recent events has been to confirm these seniors' hopes of legally avoiding the draft. The immediate threat now seems less dangerous...
Leaders of the Draft Union dismiss these hopes as foolish. They cite the recent callup of 60,000 reservists, the continued bombing 225 miles north of the Demilitarized Zone, and the President's refusal to accept Hanoi's proposed sites for peace talks. But whether or not the chance for peace is real, it has drawn people away from the Draft Union. Recent meetings have been badly attended, and most of those coming are the familiar SDS faces...