MAY, 1970 was not a happy month for radicals at Harvard. While ROTC buildings went up in flames across the nation. 350 Harvard students successfully interposed themselves between Shannon Hall and a group of 200-odd SDS'ers bent on burning it down. This spring's student strike tooke up the 1969 symbols- like red fists and "Fight ROTC" chants- but these appeared to have lost whatever power they once had to set masses of Harvard students into motion. The radical leadership of the strike splintered and political leadership passed to a group of "moderate" students and Faculty planning little more dramatic than support of anti-war candidates this fall. Even the Old Mole. the local radical newspaper which had spewed out daily "Strike Specials" for weeks in April, 1969, gave up after two or three specials this spring.

Nor were the radicals comparatively weak only during May. Throughout the year, they proved able only to fight battles, not campaigns. University Hall. Holyoke Center, and the Center for International Affairs were briefly occupied. picketed, or otherwise besieged upwards of 20 times this year, but none of the actions provoked a replay of the crisis of 1969. Radical campaigns started, flared, then halted; disciplinary hearings before the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities were their principal monuments. For the most part, the rest of the University noted the expulsions or suspensions which resulted from these hearings with a nod, and then went back to its business.

In part, this weakness stemmed from divisions within the radical movement. Even during 1968-69. Harvard SDS experienced bitter infighting between its two principal factions: the Worker-Student Alliance (WSA) caucus, and the New Left caucus. WSA, led by the well-organized and elite Progressive Labor Party (PL), viewed the New Left caucus's rather diffuse ideology- which centered on support for most all wars of national liberation- with scorn. For its part, the New Left caucus generally felt that WSA's rigid Marxism-organizing for a workers revolution- was inapplicable to present condition. Even during the height of the 1969 strike, salvoes worthy of the worst moments of the old Left flew back and forth between the caucuses. Analyzing April, 1969, for example, the PL newspaper Challenge concluded Harvard radicals had been led astray by New Left caucus members who were, in effect, no more than tools of the Harvard Corporation.

DESPITE such verbal battles, the two caucuses held together in one Harvard SDS during 1968-69, and the combination was potent. WSA-PL provided good organizers- "I don't like PL's ideas but their tactics are usually the best" was a refrain commonly muttered by SDS members at mass meetings. The New Left caucus, on the other hand, possessed more charismatic leaders like Michael Ansara '68, and a looser ideology more attractive to non-SDS students.

Though the two SDS factions complemented one another in one sense, in the long run they were incompatible. At stake were not only specific ideological points but two drastically different approaches to politics. As revolutionaries, the short-haired PL'ers always resembled Lenin: intense, hardworking, and following on ideology which- no matter how far removed from reality- had at least a rigorous internal consistency. By contrast, New Left members resembled Che Gucvara: they sported long hair, waxed as romantic revolutionaries, and stressed ideology less than I got feeling to pick up a gun and fight. The tensions between these two life styles could not easily be accommodated within one organization; the national SDS split in June 1969. Harvard SDS followed suit: it became the property of the WSA faction, while the New Left caucus regrouped as the November Action Coalition (NAC).

The open split made the left's internal warfare public property, and the spectacle was one not calculated to draw new recruits to the radical cause. In October, 1969, Boston PL members even called press conferences to attack their political rivals and flabbergasted establishment reporters by charging that Mark Rudd (former leader of Columbia SDS and now a member of the street-fighting Weathermen) was a real live police agent.

MOREOVER, as a result of the split, each faction moved to strengthen its position vis a vis the other and, in the process, moved further away from the mainstream of Harvard life. Trying to begin organizing workers, WSA members began getting jobs, often full-time ones, as workers at Harvard or in Cambridge and treated the University to the amusing spectacle of seeing its recent graduates sling hash in the dining halls. Members of NAC also tried to find a revolutionary constituency: they searched among Greater Boston blacks, tenant unions, street people and working class teenagers.

The result of this jockeying for position was that Harvard radicals moved themselves into position where they were unlikely to attract continuing support even from those on their immediate right. As spring opened, PL was still preaching the ultimate proletarian revolution, while NAC, going them one better spurred Boston street people to begin the revolution now by breaking windows in Harvard Square.

A teaching fellow on the non-radical left summed up his view of the situation like this: "The sensible people on the left, even a lot who were SDS members a year ago, have nowhere to go. PL has its head wedged as usual, and now the rest of them have gone crazy."

II

WHILE radicals feuded, "moderate students"- a term encompassing virtually everyone outside SDS and NAC- began to reassert themselves as a political force. The academic year 1968-69 had been one of shell-shock for most moderates, As moderates watched the McCarthy campaign's bloody denouement in Chicago and the dismal spectacle of Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey competing for the hearts and minds of Middle America. political activity on the right of SDS virtually stopped. Some were radicalized: probably a greater number simply withdrew from politics. This absence of a continuing counterweight to SDS in 1968-69 meant that, when the April crisis erupted, the mass of moderate students became, for the most part, a shuttlecock to be hit back and fourth between radical activists, liberal faculty, and conservative faculty and administrators. "Moderates" flocked to the stadium meetings, stenciled strike fists on their tee shirts, and finally brought the strike to an end by returning to their prior state of political inertia and exhaustion.

The rebirth of moderate political activity came in the fall of 1969 with the Moratorium. The memory of Chicago had dimmed, and if the McCarthy campaign hadn't ended the war, the April upheaval at Harvard hadn't seemed to do too well at that task either. So in October and November, Harvard students flocked to demonstrations in Boston and Washington and flowed over the Greater Boston area canvassing against the war. Though the Moratorium organization- led by veterans of the McCarthy campaign-carried the fall political season, it atrophied during the winter and formally dissolved itself in April, 1970.

INSOFAR as it had any strategy, the Moratorium had aimed to show widespread opposition to the war through large-scale rallies and demonstrations. October and November had fulfilled that goal; continuing the demonstrations in the spring seemed to raise the embarrassing possibilities of declining attendance combined with sporadic post-demonstration violence such as the April 15 Harvard Square riot. In addition, the Moratorium faced the recurring problems of any organization trying to rouse "moderate" students: politics did not rank high on the priorities of the average student, and a crisis was generally needed to rouse him. President Nixon seemed to have taken away the crisis: the war, while it continued, did so in a page five not a page one fashion: casualties declined and withdrawals of troops were announced. At least for the time being. Nixon had taken away the main tool for organizing moderates. In May, he was to restore that crisis: the successor to the Moratorium would spring up, and moderate political activity would reach its highest point since the McCarthy campaign.

The Cambodian invasion- and the speech with which President Nixon announced it- struck raw nerves among Harvard students. "If I feel like kicking in the television tube." said a conservative Lowell House economist, "you can imagine what those guys in NAC are feeling like doing." Four days later, a mass meeting of 2700 Harvard students, Faculty, employees and assorted Greater Boston radicals was in the process of voting for a strike at the University. As the meeting- held in Sanders Theatre. Memorial Hall, and Lowell Lec, and linked by a halting PA system- wound on its way, couriers scurried back to the Harvard Administration's command post in Grays Hall with reports, dismal ones. SDS (or NAC) was planning (had already begun) a march to burn down Shannon Hall (or the Center for International Affairs.) The command post, and most of the university braced itself for a return to April, 1969.

THE mass meeting itself was sharply divided. A large but unorganized group of moderates had come to the meeting: they were willing to accept a strike, but wanted political action during the strike directed outward- toward ending the war-rather than inward against the University. The moderates noisily applauded Dean May when he gave a brief announcement, and remained conspicuously seated when the rest of the crowd gave Panther leader Doug Miranda a standing ovation. In the end, however, they lost the crucial vote of the evening, as the meeting approved, 1770-900 a demand calling on the University to immediately end "defense research. ROTC counter insurgency research, and all other such programs": the passage of this resolution implied that political action during the strike would be directed against the University.