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One youth cold-shaved his chin in a Concord street to "Get Clean for Gene," while another hirsute can vasser, barred entry because of his beard by an irate housewife, borrowed a razor and tried to con vert her while depilating. Though a sign in one McCarthy headquarters proclaimed that "Strange Politics Makes Bedfellows," housing was strictly segregated by sexes (boys in a gymnasium, girls in McCarthy supporters' homes). In keeping with McCarthy's own austerity, the kids largely eschewed beer drinking, though one group of New Yorkers nearly came to grief in a Rochester bar: a local tough announced that "McCarthy is a mongoloid idiot," but was soon buying beer for the earnest young proselytizers on the simple strength of their arguments and jovially warning them to "drink it or wear it."
"New Stevensonians"
The students, of course, had slogans of their own. Some McCarthy workers sported buttons reading "We Try Harder"—in Hebrew. Posters announced: "God Isn't Dead—He's Just Lonely—But He Might Commit Suicide March 12th. It's Up to You." That same sense of last stand desperation was echoed in a primary-eve plaint: "Over 40%, we go on to Wisconsin; 30%, back to school; 20%, we burn our draft cards; 10%, we leave the country." When the results came in, it was on to Wisconsin, where last week a hard-core cadre of 300 New Hampshire veterans, many of them AWOL from classes, deplaned to begin organizing up to 25,000 fresh Midwestern volunteers pouring in from Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota and Iowa—not to mention a goodly number of the Badger State's 70,000-odd resident students. As in New Hampshire, few of the volunteers had any political experience, and one veteran said: "Some of their instruction will have to be given on the buses." Other cadres were at work in Nebraska, Indiana, South Dakota and Oregon. Chief among the organizers: Samuel Winfred Brown Jr., 24, a baby-faced Harvard Divinity graduate student who was board chairman of the National Student Association when its CIA link was exposed last year; blue-eyed Ann Hart, 20, a diminutive (5 ft., 102 Ibs.), self-described "dropout and cop-out," who is the daughter of Michigan Senator Philip Hart, a Johnson Democrat; and freckled-faced Mary McCarthy, 18, who was a Radcliffe sophomore until she took an authorized student sabbatical last month to work for her father's nomination.
Most of McCarthy's staffers consider themselves "New Stevensonians" and are outraged by Bobby Kennedy's candidacy. "We'll fight him the same way we fought Johnson," growls Joel Feigenbaum, 25, a Cornell theoretical physicist. Ann Hart and a few plucky pals argue that McCarthy's issue-oriented idealism is the only answer to the nation's malaise. "We wouldn't do this cruddy work for anybody but Gene McCarthy," says Ann, who lost 18 Ibs. during her New Hampshire duty, and slept a straight 16 hours on returning to her Washington home. "We've sworn ourselves to him."