Word: tocsins
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...little need even for constructive alternatives to American foreign policy. The Young Democrats and the Young Republicans had both cabled support on Cuba to President John F. Kennedy '40, and the Lowell Lec meeting had been called by the most activist, most pacifist organization on campus, a group called Tocsin that never had more than about 80 members. Tocsin had grown out of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy in the summer of 1960--the same year that saw a minor flurry of small student demonstrations outside the Cambridge Woolworth's, in solidarity with sit-ins to integrate...
That was when the group's faculty adviser, H. Stuart Hughes, Gurney Professor of History and Political Science, decided to run for the Senate as an Independent peace candidate--the first of the 1960s. Tocsin members and other Harvard students formed much of Hughes's campaign staff. At first, things went surprisingly well. Hughes got more than twice the 73,000 signatures he needed to make the ballot, and he and his supporters forced his two opponents--Edward M. Kennedy '54, whom the liberals who backed Hughes regarded as an administration stooge with few principles or abilities, and George Cabot...
...that about finished Tocsin--at least, as Tocsin. Increasingly, students interested in disarmament were also becoming interested in other issues--the civil rights movement, most notably. In a few years, these other interests would lead many of them to accept Barrington Moore's analysis, and to act on it in ways that he, in company with Hughes and the majority of Harvard's other faculty members, would consider misguided or reprehensible. But for the moment, interests in civil rights and community organizing just led many Tocsin people to drift into the other leftist groups that were starting to surface...
There were other intimations, too. A thousand demonstrators, mostly Tocsin people demanding American disengagement from Vietnam, greeted Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu when she came to Ringe Tech in October 1963. "At Columbia they threw eggs at me like I was a peasant," Nhu complained, "but Harvard was incredible." And in May 1964, Harvard saw its first semi-political riot in years: police used dogs and clubs to break up 1500 demonstrators trying to save 70 sycamore trees, slated for replacement by a Mem Drive underpass at Boylston Street (the plans were later revised). Of course, it was only semi-political...
...Crimson era, and spelled the same numb disbelief and uncomprehending shock at Harvard which it caused all over the country. Although the paper remained liberal and Democratic, the war policies of the Johnson Administration caused increasing alienation among the editors. At Harvard, a small, left wing group called Tocsin gave way to a newer group called SDS, which became more militant as the war escalated and the Executive Branch increased the level of warfire without consent of Congress, or the people. In 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara was surrounded and detained by a group of students; punishments were handed...