Word: tocsins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Todd Gitlin '63, former president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), professor of sociology at UC/Berkeley and author of The '60s: Days of Hope, Days of Rage (1987), launched into a nostalgic journey back to his days at Harvard, remembering his involvement with Tocsin, a student anti-nuclear group founded in the winter of 1962, and the way in which it affected the rest of his life...
...been political in high school, nor in my freshman year. In the fall of '60 I was initiated into Tocsin. There was a real tidal shift in that fall. I had a group of about seven or eight friends and none were interested in politics...
...next day in Quincy dining hall I was wearing a pin from the rally. It had a mushroom cloud on it, and Robert Weil ['61], a leading member of Tocsin, came up to me and asked me to come to a meeting. The group didn't sound too collectivistic, so I went...
Before long I was going up to Vermont to campaign for a pacifist congressman. The next thing I knew I was on the executive committee [of Tocsin]. It all happened in a month. Tocsin became the center of my life for the next two years...
Suddenly everything crystallized. What his speech told us was that Tocsin's politics of amiable persuasion were not enough. The effort of changing their minds by proving how well-read we were was valiant but fruitless. I resigned as chair of Tocsin soon thereafter. I knew that I had to do something else, though I didn't quite know what...