"I don't know any of them. They're not my friends," remarked one clean-cut Harvard student as a Vietnam protest march passed through the Square last October. But the academic year went on, many former antagonists became sympathizers, if not members, of the New Left. The October march to the Boston Common attracted only 750 people; by March, 2,000 made the pilgrimage.

The New Left at Harvard, best typified by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), represents one fact of a new generation of students which began to arrive at the College after 1960. For them, the election of president Kennedy, with his image youth and energy, served as a catalyst. Simultaneously, the damper which the McCarthy investigations had placed on radical politics in the university began to lift, and soon the New Left generation made its presence known at Harvard.

Kenneth Kenniston, a former Harvard Junior Fellow, has called them the "uncommitted fringe" of the professional generation;" others have labeled them the "service generation," but the young radicals themselves are still unsure of their common identity. They made headlines when they pressed for a revolution in sexual mores in 1963, substituting ethical standards based on individual situations for the old blanket moral standards. At the same time they began to call for nuclear disarmament, although the Geneva Test-Ban Treaty alone was sufficient disperse the movement.

Although these various protests were confined to a minority of the student population, the generation of the 60's has created a style of its own which permeates the entire college. Today's students insist on creating their own music. The conventional dance bands who once stood assured Harvard bookings on important weekends have disappeared entirely. The initial swing to folk music at turn of the decade has given way student twist groups such as "Oedipus and his Three Mothers" who pound out their pulsing rhythm almost every weekend.

In short, the student generation of 60's wants to decide things for themselves on issues which effect them, whether those issues concern dance music or politics. This need for involvement in the decision-making process underlies every program of the New Left, especially their protest against the Selective Service System. As Barry McGuire phrased it in his protest song, "The Eve of Destruction," "You're old enough to kill, but not for voting." Paul Booth, the national secretary of SDS, complained to a Harvard audience last October that "the decision to take up 45,000 people a month is not a decision that any of the draft-age people participated in."

These students view themselves as an underprivileged class, defined as any class of society which has its decisions legislated for them. The New Leftist can thus sympathize with other underprivileged groups, such as Negroes or unemployed workers, who, in the SDS view, have not taken full advantage of their political rights. The students see a common bond with such groups which the groups themselves often do not share. An SDS expedition to organize the meatpackers in Haymarket Square against the Vietnam war found themselves harassed and jeered by the workers. "So that's the proletariat," one student commented on his way back to Cambridge.

The Vietnam war has drawn many liberals into the New Left camp this year. As one tutor in Government sympathetic to SDS explains, "As soon as you start to talk about Vietnam, you begin to have doubts about your government." Michael S. Ansara, an executive of the national chapter of SDS at Harvard, however, attributed the growth of SDS to the new image of the Left at Harvard. "The view of the mindless radical has gone out. We think before we act," he says.

Harvard SDS began the year with less than one hundred members and has since doubled its membership, not including 200 other students who think of themselves as "close to SDS."

According to Ansara, the group does not actively solicit its membership, but instead concentrates on building a "solid base of educated members." As he explains, "students usually start out on one issue. They think the war is bad, or poverty is bad. But once in SDS, there occurs this broadening of their perceptions and their commitments." Consistent with their emphasis on decision-making, they begin to ask "who runs things," while at the same time developing a commitment to "direct action" to solve specific problems.

To provide their members with "a consciousness of what's wrong with society," Harvard SDS conducts seminars taught by both students and faculty members. The SDS seminar on "Theories of Social Change" attracted about thirty-five people this year, while several ten-man groups investigated the problems of labor and Vietnam. Next year, SDS plans to create a Free University in Boston, similar to the one in New York, where participants in this year's program can teach an even larger group.

An SDS education does not mean indoctrination in a party line. At best the group would claim a "somewhat coherent overview" of what must be done to change American society. This step-down from dogma again sets off the generation of the 60's. The radicals of the 50's, similar to their predecessors of the 30's, held an almost Stalinist conception of leadership whereby a few key leaders would give the group its doctrine. These earlier radicals view the lack of ideology as the main weakness of the New Left. To them, SDS is "hung up on problems of participatory democracy."

The structure of SDS at Harvard, although based upon theories of democratic decision-making, also indicates a reaction against the Stalinists of the 30's. The Harvard Chapter has no less than four co-chairmen. Separate committees study and act on Vietnam, Labor, Civil Rights, South Africa, and University Reform. The executive committee theoretically consists of only the chairmen of the various committees, but in practice, anyone may attend executive committee meetings.

Consensus Democracy

The SDS theory of participatory democracy has its roots in the American Constitutional Convention of 1789, as the founders of SDS observed during the Port Huron Conference of 1962. Madison, citing Montesquieu, wrote in The Federalist Papers that only small nations could remain truly democratic. In a large country, one big faction might blot out the rights of a slightly smaller faction by means of a simple majority. The New Leftists, accordingly, believe that the United States has grown too large to rely on the simple majority alone and that consensus politics must return if justice is to be maintained.

In theory, an SDS education supplies the common viewpoint which makes such a consensus possible, but the theory clearly breaks down in practice. At a two day regional meeting of SDS last December, the large assembly failed to take a position on a proposal to carry the war protest to groups off campus. The program did take place during the spring semester, but not in the organized fashion the leaders had envisioned.