Word: tocsins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Tocsin's participation in 'Project Washington' last year was an extension of Goldmark's tactics, not a turn towards those of his early opponents. Prior to the march (which took place in February, 1962) Tocsin published a four-page brochure outlining its purposes; member had been instructed in these principles, and spent many evenings discussing them. For the whole point of the march lay in Tocsin's elaborately worked-out plans to meet and converse with legislators and members of the State Department. Whatever the intentions of other participants in the march, Tocsin meant to convince official Washington...
Unhappily, when Washington failed to take Tocsin seriously, its members lost much of their confidence in the organization too. When Goldmark graduated three months after Project Washington, Tocsin seemed to have foundered. Having discovered that crucial connections exist between an unimaginative disarmament policy and a generally unimaginative foreign policy, Tocsin lost its early purposefulness. At a discussion this winter between Harvard leaders of the peace and civil rights movements, Goldmark's successor, Todd Gitlin '63, wistfully expressed admiration for the concrete goals of the integration movement. Tocsin has neither thrown in its lot with the pacifist left nor succeeded...
Conceivably Tocsin could develop a third peace program, designed neither to appeal to the policy-making nor to help undergraduates to walk off their indignation. The arms race and the war economy could contain the seeds of a far-reaching radical critique of American society and politics. But since few of Tocsin's members were ever interested in an intellectually rigorous organization, it is not likely that they will undertake the job of constructing such a critique...
Discouragement and consequent loss of intellectual momentum also afflicted members of Tocsin who worked in H. Stuart Hughes's campaign for Senator last fall. he campaign, in fact, followed very much the same road that Tocsin travelled...
...early months of the campaign, Hughes's shrewdest advisors had urged him to do precisely what Tocsin had failed to do--to draw the connections between the arms race and other domestic and diplomatic issues; the campaign was to be distinguished by the intellectual cogency of Hughes's arguments, rather than by the glamour and vacuity which characterize American campaigns--not least of all Teddy's. Hughes had taken their advice and did not change his tack during the Cuban crisis; as he pointed out in an article in Commentary several months after the elections to do anything but criticize...