The Beginning of the Revolution
Calvert’s call [for a "truly revolutionary movement"] struck a chord, as did the slogan he coined that swept the Movement that winter of 1966−67: “From protest to resistance.” At least initially, no one was entirely sure what “resistance” meant. But out on college campuses, students quickly provided the answers. All through the first half of 1967, protesters who once silently carried signs began confronting authority. When a district attorney tried to confiscate copies of a student literary magazine at Cornell, a crowd of angry students sold it in brazen defiance; when six were arrested, others surrounded the police car and freed them. At Penn State student protesters occupied the president’s office until he provided information about the university’s practice of releasing student-organization lists to Congress.
But it was SDS itself that propelled by far the largest resistance movement: to the military draft. The first draft-resistance groups began springing up in early 1967 and were soon widespread, many students openly burning their draft cards or wearing a popular SDS button: NOT WITH MY LIFE YOU DON’T. This kind of open defiance to government authority, along with disclosures of U.S. bombing of North Vietnamese civilians, drew tens of thousands of young people into the Movement even as its intellectual leaders, especially in SDS, began musing about ever more militant ways to confront the government. Protests alone, they could see, were no longer enough. ...
One of the most striking characteristics of radical thought during the late 1960s was the flash-fire speed with which it evolved: An idea could be introduced, accepted, popularized, and taken to the “next level” in a matter of months, sometimes weeks. And so it was with the path of “resistance.” No sooner had the broader Movement plunged into the realities of draft and other resistance than the keenest thinkers began pondering what came next. Defying the government was giving way to confronting the government. And there was only one place to go, intellectually, once the government was confronted.
It was Greg Calvert once more who first put it into words, at least publicly, in a front-page article in the New York Times in May 1967. The article, which attempted to take stock of student-resistance activities, suggested that violence was the Movement’s logical next step, a contention it supported with a quote that Calvert quickly recanted: “We are working to build a guerrilla force in an urban environment.” No other student leader seconded it, and because it suggested a tactic few in SDS had even considered, much less approved, it was broadly renounced. But not by everyone. The intellectual cat was now out of the bag...
