Tocsin will not fulfill its initial promise until the leaders impose on the membership the realization that Tocsin's job is to remain a voice of intelligent radicalism even when no one is listening. If the membership continues to waver between exaltation and despair, Tocsin will move dispiritedly into the demonstrators' camp--where it would be on a small, second-rate picketing organization.

Tocsin's Red Challenge

But Tocsin's leaders face a nearly impossible job in toughening its intellectual fibre. For underlying the decision of many people to join the organization is anger not at vapidity and ineptitude in Washington, but at the fact that the government has the power to decide the fate of the human race. The peace movement really challenge institutions rather than policies. A past officer of the group has suggested that its goal is to "return" control of foreign policy to the people--although he was not clear as to when in the past such a system had existed. Hence the movement's energy almost necessarily flows into protest activity--which in a vague way symbolizes the "return" of a voice to the people in foreign affairs--rather than into thinking up persuasive alternative policies. It would seem that if Tocsin "went intellectual," it would lose its appeal to potential members. But if it goes in any other direction, it won't matter at all.

The Civil Rights Movement

But if Tocsin began conscious of the dangers of vagueness, Harvard's civil rights radicals seem actually to have based their movement on vagueness. And as their strength and influence have grown--especially during this past year--their attachment to a very dubious set of semi-ideas has hardened.

The "Civil rights radicals" are a difficult group to define; though many are members of such organizations as the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee, (SNCC, dit "snick"), the Boston Action Group (BAG),