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Actually, only a few hundred militant students, perhaps 1,000, have found jobs in parking lots, factories and warehouses, where they are trying to put across their message in talks with small groups and individuals. Their reception has been cool, if not hostile; most of the industrial workers have no patience with revolutionary jargon and little sympathy for comparatively privileged college students who spout it. The president of the Brewery Workers Union, Karl F. Feller, says: "A well-placed fist could be the welcome that awaits S.D.S. revolutionaries," and a Chicago United Automobile Workers' spokesman says, "Those kids couldn't organize their way out of a paper bag."
Activists not attracted by the call of the assembly line have focused on com munity organization projects, propagandizing and planning. In Boston, 200 radicals are attending a nine-week "Movement School," at which they are to develop a "critique of American society" and plan future tactics. Members of the Peace and Freedom Party are canvassing door to door in favor of rent control in Cambridge, where Harvard's expansion has contributed to a severe housing shortage. Other students are engaged in draft-resistance counseling, mobilizing high school youths and running newspaper and film projects.
A more dramatic move is in the making at Stanford, where student radicals are developing plans for a week-long series of demonstrations to be held during the International Industrial Conference at San Francisco in September. The conference will bring together 500 heads of major industrial, technological and financial firms like U.S. Steel, IBM, Royal/Dutch Petroleum and the Chase Manhattan Bank in a top level gathering that the students say "is designed to consolidate the dominion of the multinational corporations in the third world."
All across the country, radical groups are working intensively on plans for a massive descent on Chicago in mid-October. They claim that as many as 30,000 students will gather there to protest the war and demonstrate their support for the Black Panthers and for the "Conspiracy 8," who are charged with conspiring to incite riots at the Chicago Democratic convention last year. For sheer propaganda, however, nothing the activists are planning or doing is likely to equal the summer project of ex-S.D.S. Organizer Rennie Davis and Detroit's Linda Evans, an S.D.S. leader. They are presently in Hanoi as members of the U.S. delegation invited to escort homeward the three U.S. prisoners of war whose release was promised by the North Vietnamese early in July in observance of America's Independence Day.