Splintered S.D.S.

Students for a Democratic Society is an agglomeration of 70,000 radical reformers and sometime revolutionaries that sounds fearsomely monolithic but is actually as disorganized and ragtail as Coxey's Army. At the S.D.S. national convention in Chicago last week, the internal dissension was so severe that the five-day meeting promised to be the most chaotic in S.D.S.'s seven-year history--and possibly the last.

Despite its wildfire success at campus disruption, S.D.S. has lost any firm sense of direction, if it ever had one. The Paris peace talks have clouded one of its central issues, the Viet Nam war. Blacks have pre-empted the fight against racism, and now often reject any association with white militant students. Universities are struggling to reform their structures and procedures--partly, of course, in response to S.D.S. demands and disruptive activities.

Infiltration and Suspension. The fact that S.D.S. lacks a clearly defined purpose is the chief cause of its confusion, but in the eyes of its members, who have lately begun to feel martyred and somewhat paranoic, the worst of it all is the heavy pressure now being applied against the organization. Police and FBI informants have infiltrated many campus chapters. S.D.S. militants at Columbia and Dartmouth have been jailed; narcotics and bomb-plot charges have been brought against members in New York, Colorado and Pennsylvania. In recent months, six of S.D.S.'s twelve regional offices have been vandalized and files burned or stolen. Four different congressional committees have announced plans to investigate the group. The growing official hostility partly explains why S.D.S. was refused meeting facilities at 60 colleges, camps and halls before deciding, surprisingly, to hold the delayed convention in Mayor Daley's Chicago.

As the 2,000 delegates gathered at the grimy Chicago Coliseum on South Wabash Avenue, straggling in past police taking their pictures, schism dominated the proceedings from the first hour. Members of the two main opposing groups even looked different. Most of those with beards, jeans, sandals and other casual clothes supported the relatively moderate program of the S.D.S. regulars to extend their efforts to high schools as well as to organize community-action projects in poor neighborhoods. Their Marxist challengers, the highly disciplined Progressive Labor Party radicals, were generally neatly barbered and shod, some even wearing suits and ties. Known as the "shorthair caucus," they want S.D.S. to form a militant union of students and workers, and toil for an old-fashioned "class struggle" revolution--a misreading of U.S. reality if there ever was one. The only agreement between the two major factions was that S.D.S. must now look beyond the campus if it hopes to survive.

Out with Capitalists. The first squabble inside the gloomy hall, often used as a wrestling arena, quickly showed the weakness of the S.D.S. regulars and the strength of the P.L.P., which had packed the convention with 700 well-drilled supporters. A motion backed by the central headquarters group, the national office, to admit reporters (after payment of $25 and signing of a security pledge) was massively defeated by 90% of the delegates. The defeat was the first of a series of humiliations for National Secretary Michael Klonsky, 26, and Interorganizational Secretary Bernardine Dohrn, 27. The decision after an hour's debate was to UPI bar the "capitalist press" and prohibit any news conferences during the convention.

Then, secure from prying eyes, except for the undetermined number of police and press infiltrators dotted throughout the hall, the delegates were free to tear S.D.S. apart--mostly in barely endurable rhetoric larded with phrases like "the right of self-determination for internal colonies." The real issue was which faction will determine the future course of S.D.S.

Against the outmaneuvered and splintered regulars, who at one point quit the hall in disgust, the tightly organized P.L.P. was confident of victory. It may hardly be worth it. As Yippie Jerry Rubin lamented: "Whoever wins, loses."

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