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Surprisingly, S.D.S. at the University of Iowa is stronger than at Berkeley, where the local chapter is lost in a welter of radical campus groups. To raise funds, says Graduate Student Leonard Goldberg, 22, Berkeley's S.D.S. is often reduced to "throwing a party, charging a dollar a head and serving cheap beer." Money is a problem almost everywhere. The national S.D.S. owes the Federal Government $10,000 in back taxes. Receiving little money from headquarters, Columbia Graduate John Fuerst, 23, hitchhikes around the country as one of S.D.S.'s eight at-large national officers. Fuerst is not even a dues-paying member, explains simply that "I can't afford $5." Nor are all S.D.S.-ers students. In New York City, an East Village branch is made up largely of Mao-minded hippies.
What draws young people into S.D.S., says Berkeley Sophomore Peter Stone, 20, is a desire to translate their sense of alienation from society into "a political thing." Products of comfortable, middle-class homes, S.D.S. members typically are disenchanted young liberals. Most feel that anti-Communism is an irrelevant stance. Probably no more than 2% of all S.D.S.-ers belong to the Communist Party. Princeton Sophomore James Tarlau, 20, who was president of his high school student council in Manhattan, once worked for Democratic Representative William Fitts Ryan, eventually turned to S.D.S. after becoming appalled by congressional support for the Viet Nam war. Lawyer Ron Yank, 26, was a fraternity man at Berkeley, saw what direct action could do when a sit-in won more jobs for Negroes at a San Francisco hotel. Yank joined S.D.S. while attending Harvard Law School, became co-chairman of the local chapter.
Rhetoric à la Che. S.D.S. is animated not by any master plan for revolution but by a sense of moral outrage—to say nothing of a fascination with rhetoric à la Che. Says Columbia S.D.S. Chairman Mark Rudd: "It has energy, and that's why I'm in it." The certainty that they are morally right nonetheless pushes S.D.S.-ers toward intellectual arrogance and a facile conviction that ends justify means, including violence. For all their talk about "participatory democracy," few members seem prepared to accept, or readily tolerate, anybody else's ideas on how society's ills can best be cured.
Nor do all S.D.S. radicals seem willing to pay the price of their convictions. Unlike Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr., a 43-year-old rebel who is willing to go to jail to dramatize his opposition to the draft and the Viet Nam war, Columbia's student strike leaders are demanding, among other things, total amnesty for violating the law. There is the irony that neither Mark Rudd nor most of the other Columbia S.D.S. leaders were even in occupied buildings during the battle with police three weeks ago. Thus they were not among those arrested on criminal-trespass charges. But last week, Columbia's rebellious students got themselves involved in a new fracas over the seizure of a Columbia-owned apartment building in Morningside Heights. And this time, Rudd was among 117 persons arrested when police were called in to disperse the demonstrators.