Word: tocsins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Students for a Democratic Society--SDS has an interesting background at Harvard. Its predecessor, TOCSIN, was vital in the early 1960's at Harvard; it was intellectually oriented and lasted as long as ban-the-bomb was an issue, but the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty wiped out TOCSIN's importance. In 1964, the old TOCSIN remnants and several new groups combined to fill the vacuum for civil rights and peace activities. The TOCSIN tradition was one of sophisticated analysis and objectivity, but in the past year there have been trends both towards more emotionally satisfying tactics of confrontation and towards...
This idea had been tested four years earlier at Harvard by members of a radical political organization called "Tocsin." Some Tocsin members were very concerned about Congressional inactivity on the Berlin Crisis and contacted Alperovitz, then a legislative assistant for Rep. Robert W. Kastenmeier (D.-Wisc.), for advice...
Taking his advice, Tocsin members addressed various church and fraternal organizations about the issues involved in Berlin. Lacking a word for what they were doing, the group's members coined the term "Alperovitzing." Soon Tocsin people were walking down Cambridge streets talking about how they "Alperovitzed" the Methodist Church the day before...
What they were doing, Alperovitz now calls "teaching out," a concept that was to be the father of Vietnam Summer. But Tocsin's teach outs met with little success. Something was missing, and only six years later did Alperovitz find out what...
That was the answer: canvassing, talking to people in their homes. Ten thousand people ringing millions of doorbells across the country could accomplish more than 10,000 public speeches. He had found what was missing from his ideas for utilizing college manpower -- from Tocsin's "Alperovitzing...