Henry Lesnick: Lessons of War

   The generation of protest that I grew up in emerged from the repressive 1950’s, the era of McCarthyite, anti-communist witch-hunts and school kids hiding under our desks to protect ourselves from nuclear attack. By 1965 we had all seen the Selma to Montgomery Marchers fire-hosed and beaten by police and attacked by police dogs. And we saw that Viola Liuzo was murdered in Alabama for her participation in that March.  Civil Rights workers, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman were murdered by the KKK and the Philadelphia, Mississipi Sherrif for registering black voters. Malcom X was assassinated. We watched the Democratic Party Convention as the disenfranchised blacks of Mississippi, the Mississippi, Freedom Democratic Party, were excluded again from the so called democratic process by the President  and his party. During this period we watched succeeding presidents of both political parties escalate their imperial war in Southeast Asia. Yet paradoxically, this historical experience produced a generation of anti-racist, anti-war protest informed by the belief that we were on the verge of creating a truly humane, new social order. 

   Before I came to QC in 1968, I was a draft resister in Chicago, working with an anti-war street theater group. Our belief then was that acts of moral witness, burning our draft cards, and educating the public to the imperial appetites of the war makers in street skits would help lead the way to a new society based on non-cooperation with the old. As a strategy for social change, this may sound pretty naïve now, but when you consider that Timothy Leary, the Harvard University professor and guru of psychedelic drug use, toured college campuses throughout the country speaking to Standing Room Only audiences, urging us to “Turn-on, Tune-in and Drop out,” you can understand that the draft resisters’ vision of revolutionary social change was not far removed from the popular, white, middle class, do your-own-thing culture of the period.  

   One of the more popular slogans of the period was “fill the jails.” This was also popular with the American ruling class. The Mccarran Walters Act of 1952 provided for construction of huge detention facilities to accommodate extra-judicial prisoners— mass-detention facilities similar to those for which Haliburton has recently received a $385 million contract. By 1968 I had met with several of my young comrades from the Chicago Area Draft Resisters who had spent up to 18 months in jails where they had been raped, beaten and politically demoralized. Although the draft resistance movement gained a good deal of attention and generated publicity for the anti-war movement, and attracted some of the most deeply moral young people from divinity schools around the country, it never had much of a base of support among the working class populations that actually were called to war. When I arrived at QC in September 1968, a young colleague in the English Dept. asked if I would help organize a draft resistance chapter on campus. I declined, explaining that I no longer thought that public non-cooperation could serve as a model for the kind of movement that was needed. 

   On-campus recruitment during the Vietnam War was, as it is today, a prime target for anti-war protest. Major targets then were Dow Chemical, which produced napalm; branches of the military, of course; and General Electric, the largest military contractor at the time. When I was at Northwestern in the spring of 1967, we tried to pass a resolution in the faculty senate to bar military recruiters. It was defeated by faculty who argued that the first amendment rights of the recruiters had to be respected, so we set up an anti recruitment table next to the military recruiters and the local Evanston radio station covered our discussions with potential recruitees and recruiters and the military packed up and left.. When we learned that GE would be recruiting at QC in the spring of 1969, the QC Students for a Democratic Society chapter decided to hold a protest sit-in and wanted the small street theater group I worked with on campus to call attention to the sit-in. We prepared a brief skit that was presented repeatedly, along with an SDS leaflet calling for the sit-in, to the lunchtime gatherings on campus. As our troupe reached the recruiting center there were about 250 students and faculty in our procession that joined the several SDS students already in the building.

   The protesters drew up a list of several demands that included an end to military recruitment; the end to the use of the McCarthyite Max-Kahn guidelines for faculty personnel decisions (still in effect today), which ensure that personnel proceedings are cloaked in secrecy, kept even from the faculty under review; and the rehiring of an outspoken critic of the war who was not rehired ostensibly because of her “abrasive personality.” Thus began the seven-week protest, sit-in, and strike that included the early morning arrest of 38 students and me, selected as the lone faculty member to demonstrate student-faculty solidarity. As we were being led into the police wagons, the Dean of Faculty informed me that I was no longer working for QC and informally assured me that my college teaching days were over. Within the next day or two I was notified that I would be arrested again if I appeared on campus. Shortly thereafter the AAUP intervened (largely as a result of  our faculty union’s efforts, as I recall) to declare the college had been overzealous in its on-the-spot firing of me, and I was allowed to finish out my contract year. My FBI file obtained several years after I was fired from QC shows that a Spring 1969 meeting between the CUNY Board of Higher Education (an earlier incarnation of the Board of Trustees) and the Federal Government’s Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Robert Finch, came up with a list of 10 anti-war professors that the Federal Government wanted fired and the BHE promised to act on.   After the arrests, our group decided that we wanted to plead not guilty and wage a political defense. We met several times with Lawyers Guild attorneys who agreed to assist us. But when our July hearing date rolled around the Lawyers Guild found an ACLU lawyer who they recommended we work with and who supposedly knew the Queens courts. When we arrived in court the new attorney approached me and instructed me to get everyone to plead guilty in order to avoid jail time and a permanent jail record. He told me that I wd be responsible for ruining these students’ futures if we did not plead guilty. Because we were under the impression that this would be a preliminary hearing, this was a turn of events we had hardly expected. With only minutes before being called to enter a plea, I tried unsuccessfully to contact our Lawyers Guild attorney. Intimidated into making a hasty decision, we reluctantly agreed to accept this attorney’s recommendation. The Judge immediately sentenced us to 15 days in Rikers Island, without even allowing us the chance to speak or the time to collect a toothbrush.

   During this period many of us were still somewhat unclear about the loyalties of the university and its relationship to the government. While I was at Northwestern in 1967, the FBI requested of the Administration that I be fired for my anti-war activities, and in particular, for using college mails to distribute an anti-war newsletter. But my department chairman objected, and I kept my job. Our view of the university then was that it was an enclave somewhat more civil than the rest of society. The protests at Columbia several months before and the vicious police reprisals should have served as forewarning. Certainly the murders of Kent State and Jackson State Students in 1970 should have removed any ambiguity about the relationship of the university and the government. However, I suspect even today university people still tend to think that we live in a cloistered community and are somewhat immune to the less restrained, more brutal force that the government exerts in time of war.

    Maintaining the military force needed to maintain US military dominance is critical to the preservation of U.S. capitalism’s survival, probably more so today than in 1969. In 1969, U.S. capitalism still produced goods and was developing technologies that were competitive in global markets. The major economic weapon the US has today is its military might. Were it not for the terrible power of the U.S. military, U.S. capitalism, with it uncompetitive educational infrastructure and muti-trillion dollar debt, would collapse.  Protest against the on-campus military recruitment will in the future be much more problematic. The Supreme Court’s recent unanimous decision upholding the Solomon Amendment’s denial of federal funds to any college that bars military recruiters will surely inform university and police response to future protests against on-campus military recruitment. The day after the recent court decision, the Hostos administration, not usually in the forefront of legal scholarship, posted an article on the decision on the Hostos list. CUNY today will be more cooperative with the Federal Government and military planners than they were in 1969.  The predominantly black and Hispanic and poor white populations that are called on to fight contemporary wars as they did the Vietnam war, will make CUNY and other public universities and public high schools essential recruiting grounds for the military manpower required for the government to perform its major task, protecting and advancing the geopolitical and economic interests of the U.S. ruling class.

   Arguably the most important lesson to be drawn from the experience of the anti-war movement of this period was put forward by the Worker Student Alliance that emerged from the final SDS convention of July 1969.  The Worker Student Alliance, as its name implied, was informed by the Marxist recognition that the working class was the essential component of any movement that looked to bring about revolutionary social change. An underlying realization was that the alliance could not be organized within the twin parties of capitalism. Democrats were as deeply implicated in waging war and nurturing racism as Republicans. These two propositions were confirmed by the experiences of the student movement as well as the history of modern class struggle. The French general strike of 1968 sparked by the French students and joined by French workers threatened the continued existence of the French capitalist Republic. Workers throughout Europe were shaking the foundations of established, undemocratic regimes. Negative examples of the consequences befalling protest movements isolated from the working class were all too abundant in the U.S. Hundreds of thousands of young people entered the anti-war movement, most often to be channeled into activities led by the Democratic Party. Large numbers of those not yet burned out joined the Get Clean for Gene McCarthy nominating campaign, which ended with the nomination of Hubert Humphrey in 1968 at the very undemocratic Democratic Convention in Chicago. The following year in Chicago, the bastion of the Democratic Party machine, the Chicago police, in close collaboration with the FBI, assassinated Black Panthers, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in their beds. Just two of the 38 Panthers murdered by the FBI in conjunction with local police, made possible by the Panthers disregard for the working class and the historical racism of much of the white working class.

    Wars are ever more essential to the fading U.S. capitalist economy, which is rapidly being eclipsed by emerging economic powers such as China and India. The U.S. ruling class will not go quietly. Today they wage war for control of the oil fields of Iraq, as they look greedily toward the gas and oil of Iran. Can we imagine that the U.S. ruling class would not use every weapon at its disposal to prevent the ascent of China to world economic dominance? The vast majority of people in this country are working people whose children fight the wars for the further enrichment of the rich while the rest continue to scramble for scraps. Only by coming together in a multiracial workers party can we end this ever-growing devastation endemic to capitalism and achieve a new, truly humane society. The choice between socialism or barbarism has never been more sharply posed.