The American Spectator

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1968 : /p>

The Henry piece is excellent revisionist history. I believe it was the late Phillip Abbott Luce who told the story of SDS this way: the original 2,500 members (people like Clark Kissinger who I used to talk politics with at the laundromat in Hyde Park) were essentially "pure" as far as Stalinist or Maoist connections were concerned -- very nice, innocent democratic socialist utopians for the most part.

But the CPUSA, following a prolonged barrage of pro-SDS publicity from a liberal establishment press alarmed at the rise of YAF and the Young Republicans (YAF with membership exceeding 50,000 or so at times), ordered its youth wing, the W.E.B Dubois Clubs (about 7,000 Stalinist diaper babies) to join SDS. The Progressive Labor Party (with about 13,000 Maoist youth) then did the same thing and suddenly SDS was another thing altogether -- a somewhat disciplined (lots of internal fighting) leftist army which was the fighting force we all saw in Chicago and later in the McGovern campaign. And is now the professoriat on many campuses.

p>If this has appeared in a book-length history of SDS (Kirkpatrick Sale's? It has been too long since I read that, and my copy is not at hand), I must have missed it. br> -- Jameson Campaigne /p> p> What's all this nonsense about Southern racists voting for "Tricky Dick" in 1968. George Wallace (an unreconstructed segregationist, maybe the last of his breed to say so publicly) ran and took the angry white racist vote that year. Humphrey and TD got about 45% each. In 1972 the Democrats ran McGovern on a downright socialist platform (remember the negative income tax proposal). The Republicans didn't have to kowtow to the racists to get their vote. They had nowhere else to go. As for all the goody two shoes liberals that year, well TD took the vast majority of states including NY and CA. Racist strategy, my foot. br> -- Ed Callahan br> La Habra, CA /p> p>

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