How Goes the Second Children's Crusade?

JULIAN FIFER is a gentle, soft-spoken 19-year-old cellist who is a Columbia College sophomore. Before the Cambodian invasion and the student deaths at Kent State University, he says, "I hadn't reached the state within myself to be involved in anything political. I had my music. The disruption of everything this spring forced me into a commitment." It is a strong commitment. Recently he and four other students walked onto a building site in lower Manhattan where they spent more than four hours discussing their differences with the construction men. "I saw one guy in the group just plastered with American flags," Fifer said. "I introduced myself, and he warmed up. We talked, and when I left he told me that what we're doing is really great."

Heady Days. Fifer is typical of the residue of tough-minded collegians left after a powerful but formless wave of students came rushing onto the scene in May to establish a beachhead in conventional politics. Summer started, school ended, and predictably most of the student volunteers have forsaken figurative for littoral beaches. But those who remain are hard at work registering voters, gathering petitions, computerizing, analyzing their mistakes in the spring primaries, interested in winning on the issues rather than losing with elan. Their principal goal in November is to elect a Congress that will end the Viet Nam War and turn the nation's attention and efforts to the achievement of racial reconciliation, a better environment, the restoration of the cities and similar social issues.

Many of the students and some of their faculty are brought together under an organization called the National Coalition for a Responsible Congress, located in New York, which is coordinating the activities of other groups. Perhaps the most visible component of it so far is the Movement for a New Congress, which is devoting itself to organizing student power in a limited number of congressional races where the young believe that they can make the difference between victory and defeat. The M.N.C. is setting up regional centers throughout the country. Some are embryonic and may never really come to life; others are already operative. Headquartered in Princeton, M.N.C. has a computer that sorts and slots the names of more than 10,000 students who in the heady, rebellious days of spring said they would work for the cause.

Among the other organizations working within the coalition at a national level:

> The National Petition Committee at the University of Rochester is preparing sophisticated TV and radio spots to further an antiwar petition addressed to Congress.

> The Universities National Antiwar Fund of Harvard and M.I.T. is asking faculty members to donate a day's salary for the support of approved congressional candidates.

> The Bipartisan Congressional Clearing House in Washington is providing political analyses on which other groups can base their actions.

> The Continuing Presence in Washington is a permanently based group designed to serve as a clearinghouse for lobbying operations in the capital.

Beer and Pizia. Beneath these broad groups, much purely local activity is under way. At Smith College, 1,500 young women pledged to spend time this summer trying to sway Rotary Clubs and other community organizations in their home towns. A workshop in realistic political organizing will be held next month at Northwestern University; 71 students concluded a similar session last week at the College of Wooster, Ohio. Other students have turned to other forms of political activity. At Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., movement members tried to reach their elders through beer-and-pizza parties and even staged a Moms' Night.

In Riverside, Calif., a total-involvement project is under way: 1,500 University of California students distributed 600,000 pieces of literature, talked to thousands of people in the community, and got 13,000 names on an antiwar petition. They then computerized the names of the petition signers for development into a neighborhood cadre to work in the community in common cause with the students on a variety of issues. Says Political Science Student Thomas Findley, 24, an ex-Navyman: "We have time and tremendous resources on campus. With the mass power base, we hope to produce effective political action."

The students have their problems. In Illinois an imaginative plan was designed to run a train loaded with electioneering students cross-country. Lack of funds has so far stymied the plan. The train would cost $15,000 a day to run; the students raised only $2,000. The National Petition Committee, after collecting 130,000 signatures early in its campaign, had planned to send six teams around the country to expand its petition drive during the summer; not all of the teams got started. "We had unrealistic expectations of the level of activity," said Committee Member Ron Formisano. In New York, 1,800 students made springtime promises for primary work, but fewer than half kept them. Said Stephen Golden of the New York regional office of M.N.C.: "There weren't concentrated groups of people who carried through with the whole process. Students came in for a day, two days. There were probably 600 to 700 of those. Students have a great lazy streak."

The Wrong Man. So far, the box score has not been encouraging either. In a highly publicized Brooklyn primary election, a young lawyer named Peter Eikenberry, backed by M.N.C. student power, lost by 1,623 votes in his attempt to take a congressional nomination from John Rooney, a Democratic machine incumbent. Why did the clubhouse defeat the schoolhouse? Two basic tactical errors turned up in the students' postmortem. Willing, white middle-class students were not familiar with the issues troubling the Irish, Italian, black and Hasidic Jewish voters in the district. Moreover, the student canvassers neglected an area known to favor Eikenberry heavily.

In New Jersey, the students fell into an opposite snare. They got thousands of voters to the polls--only to find them voting for the wrong man. Dovish Challenger Lewis Kaden failed by a wide margin in an effort to unseat Democratic Representative Edward Patten in the 15th District, right in the Princeton backyard of the M.N.C. No one can fault the students' energy; they got 3,000 more voters to take part in the congressional primary than voted in a U.S. Senate primary in the same district. But an analysis showed that blanket canvassing in pro-Kaden areas brought Patten voters out as well.

Many students drop out when they find the work they confront is neither research nor policymaking. Sometimes those who remain waste their efforts. On Long Island, students helped Harvey Sherman, a peace candidate, win a Democratic congressional nomination, but they face certain disappointment in November in the habitually Republican district. In a Cambridge, Mass., convention on June 28, more than 700 young people turned out to hear congressional candidates and make endorsements, eschewing a fine summer day and a free performance by the cast of Hair less than a mile away. Yet they were clearly bored by a peace candidate who--not illogically from his point of view--discussed the problems of the fishing industry in a district that includes Cape Cod.

The students are discovering other traditional difficulties that go along with traditional political activity. At Columbia University, M.I.T. and at Brandeis University, student groups have agreed to administration requests that they evacuate on-campus offices. Columbia, though publicly citing a need for the office space, told the regional staff of the M.N.C. that the university wanted to conform to federal guidelines that raise doubt about tax exemptions because of political activity by groups like M.N.C. At Brandeis, it was local tax officials who raised a similar problem. However, the Internal Revenue Service has given its blessings to a plan, originated at Princeton, under which students will get up to two weeks off before the November election for campaigning without raising tax problems for the schools. The time will be made up through rescheduling the rest of the academic calendar. At least 18 schools are going ahead with the election recess.

In the June primaries, the students' scorecard showed only one clear victory, that of Ron Dellums, a radical black congressional candidate from Berkeley. However, more than 300 students helped in the Westchester County, N.Y., campaign of Ogden Reid, an antiwar Republican, and his staff called their aid "crucial" in the narrow victory he won for renomination.

S.D.S. Out. For the most part, the student approach has been realistic and determined. The new activists differ from the first young crusaders who carried Eugene McCarthy to sudden prominence in 1968. Golden says: "There was more idealism in the McCarthy thing. There was a once-and-for-all feeling of making a major change. I don't think many of the young people working here feel we're going to bring about an overwhelming immediate change. We just feel that this is the best way of going about starting it."

The S.D.S. is sitting this one out. The activist students are for the most part, like Julian Fifer, former members of the uncommitted, politically uninvolved section of the collegiate spectrum. As one student put it: "The philosophy this year is to pick up on an older form of 'radicalism.' We are trying an older approach into politics."

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