Word: tocsins
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Harvard, which exposes its undergraduates to ceaseless complexities, also provides them with unlimited freedom of retreat. Within this large community, anyone can associate himself with a group of like-minded friends, and comfortably ignore experiences which might radically challenge him. If the CRIMSON editor, a clubbie, or a Tocsin member does not grow very much in wisdom by remaining inside his chosen organization, he at least avoids the risk of altogether losing himself...
...organizers of Tocsin, who saw the dangers lurking in this vague discontent, offered specific suggestions for what they called "unilateral initiatives" towards nuclear disarmament, which they modestly hoped would stimulate intelligent discussion of alternatives to the present arms policy. The group's early leaders, especially Peter Goldmark '62, were careful to delimit the Tocsin's objectives: educate the Harvard and Cambridge communities on the dangers of the arms race, in an effort to fill the information gap the Kennedy Administration had created (or, at least, widened). In addition to its meetings and forums, Tocsin published an occasional News-Letter, featuring...
Goldmark was careful to dissociate Tocsin from the more emotional Boston University and Brandeis factions of the 'Peace Movement' (you could recognize the latter by their use of the 'mutation' and milk-related arguments). He rejected the techniques of picketing and demonstrating which they had taken over from England's Aldermaston Marchers, since college students could perform a different and probably more valuable_ role in the fight by using their minds rather than their feet. But this approach was decided upon only after profound disagreements among the members, many of whom had helped form Tocsin because they thought the Harvard...
...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...