America's First Mass Student Movement

On April 22, 1936, half a million college students nationwide walked out of class for the Third Annual Student Strike Against War.
As impressive as that sounds, it is even more impressive when you consider that in the mid-30's there was less than 1.5 million college students.

This was the culmination of five years of student organizing and political agitation.
WWII would soon cut short this student movement, and it wouldn't rise again until the New Left of the 1960's.
However, this first mass student movement would lay the foundations for the next generation of student activists.

Until the economic and political crisis of the early 30's, student groups normally stayed clear of politics, and the few participate politically that did were concentrated in large eastern cities.

   The origins of radical student politics in the United States can be traced to City College of New York.
   The student body of CCNY in 1931 was one of the poorest in the nation. 80% of students there in 1938 were Jewish, most of them were from eastern European refugee families. Their concern about rising fascism in the world made this the perfect location for the creation of the National Student League, a coalition of communist and socialist students.
  During this period of time it was common for 50-80% of college graduates to be unemployed. By 1933 it was normal for students (and the public in general) to question the viability of the capitalism.
   While students were generally leftist, college administrations remained solidly conservative.

Start of a movement

 The initial February 1931 issue of Frontiers magazine, published by the Social Problems Club, questioned the legitimacy of the ROTC on campus. Back then it was common for colleges to require compulsory service in the ROTC.
  College president Frederick C. Robinson was beyond conservative. He was a fascist sympathizer. He confiscated the magazine and suspended the charter of the Social Problems Club. When the members of the club protested, Robinson suspended them from school.

 A broad alliance of left-leaning student groups organized and put pressure on the NYC Board of Higher Education, through protests and letter writing. Eventually Robinson's edicts were rescinded, but the student alliances remained.

  The NSL's next action was to send a student delegation to Harlan County, Kentucky in support of the striking miners who were being "legally murdered" by company thugs. About 80 student left New York by bus on March 23, 1932. Their arrival was met by angry crowds, somewhat similar to the reception to the Freedom Riders 30 years later.

The following year saw the Reed Harris case.

 Harris, the crusading liberal editor of the Columbia Spectator, ran stories exposing the bad conditions in the campus dining hall with regard to the preparation of food and treatment of student waiters. He was clumsily expelled, in the course of a series of events which highlighted the high-handedness and hypocrisy of the Columbia administration...
   Harris’ expulsion precipitated a sort of small-scale free speech movement, with thousands of students coming out in the first collegiate student strike of the decade on April 6, 1932, to manifest their indignant protest. The result was mainly a victory; Harris was reinstated, although he had first to make some concessions.

 After the Reed case campus life, at least on the East Coast changed. Free speech fights, protests against fee hikes became common.
  The faculty, OTOH, was increasingly put in a difficult situation. They often had sympathies with the students, but college administrations cracked down harder and harder. Some colleges started demanding loyalty oaths from the teachers. Public displays of radical politics often ended with faculty members being fired.

  But it was compulsory ROTC that pushed things over the edge.
Ohio State and Cornell faculty and students petitioned the trustees to abolish compulsory ROTC. University of Minnesota students sponsored a "Jingo Day" protest and 1,500 attended.

 Not to be outdone, the students at CCNY held their own “Jingo Day” anti-war demonstration on May 29, 1933, to protest an ROTC review.

 On “Jingo Day,” President Robinson calls the police to disperse demonstrators. Students accuse President Robinson of attacking them with his umbrella; the administration accuses the students of “preventing the normal functioning of the school.” The Social Problems Club, the Student Forum, and the Liberal Club, as well as The Campus, the student newspaper, are suspended for supporting the demonstration. Twenty-one student leaders are expelled.

 

 One uniting factor in all the student group was pacifism.

 In 1934 the two radical student organizations launched what seemed to many at first a rather wild idea, but which turned out to be the most successful single action of the movement: a “Student Strike Against War.”

 The date was set for the anniversary of the United State's entry into WWI, April 13, 1934. Students were told not to skip classes, but to actually walk out of their classrooms.
  This first student strike, coordinated by the SLID was a surprising success with 25,000 participating, almost all of them in New York, despite administration threats.

“They are making fools of themselves.... What war are they worrying about anyway?”
  - Fordham dean, 1935

CCNY President Robinson didn't get it.

  President Frederick B. Robinson invites an official delegation of students representing Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy to be honored on October 9, 1934 at a special assembly in CCNY’s Great Hall. A fight breaks out at this event when campus authorities seek to halt the anti-fascist remarks of the CCNY student body president.
   The Robinson administration expels twenty-one anti-fascist student leaders for disrupting this college event and dissolves the Student Council. Over one hundred students are called before a college disciplinary committee.

 Robinson was heard to call the anti-fascist protestors "guttersnipes". This became a rallying call for the students.

 The following April the Student Strike Against War protest was much larger and more widespread. Around 175,000 students participated nationwide. 130 campuses participated, including 20 in the south.
 At Kansas University speakers urged students to work toward eliminating war profiteering and to remind people that war is "not inevitable".

  However, it was not without a conservative reaction. At Michigan State a mob attacked the peaceful anti-war rally by throwing rotten fruit and eggs, and then grabbing five students and threw them in the river. The night before about 200 students had threatened the Jewish fraternity with violence.

  The success of the second Strike Against War was followed up by the Third in 1936. This time the nationwide turnout was so enormous that the major media began questioning if the young people of the United States would even fight to defend the country in the event of war.
  The turnout in the south was nothing short of amazing.

 according to one enthusiastic observer, "For the first time the majority of students in the Negro colleges participated: Hampton Institute, Morehouse College, Virginia Union as well as the veteran Howard..."

 Unlike the 1935 protest, this year's protest at KU was not without its problems, when someone lobbed a teargas bomb into the demonstration.

 The 1936 strike had begun with a march by the “Veterans of Future Wars,” who satirized a military unit by wearing paper military hats and carrying signs saying “Unfair to Organized Hypocrisy.”

 Only eight days after this huge peace demonstration, 1,000 students at CCNY staged the first large sit-in in American college history. They were protesting the firing of  faculty activist Morris Schappes. Student agitation continued throughout May. Finally in June the NYC Board of Higher Education reinstated Schappes and twelve other dismissed faculty activists. Robinson was defeated again.

“Will the Communists Get Our Girls in College?”
   - 1936 article title in Liberty magazine

  At this point it appeared that students at American colleges had become totally radicalized.
  So what happened?

   Administrators began offering college facilities, such as auditoriums, for student meetings. They no longer threatened draconian punishment for demonstrations. “Peace Assemblies“ replaced the anti-war strikes.
   In 1937 the Civil War in Spain began to look like just the first step towards world war. Pacifism began to lose its appeal. Comintern was pushing for a popular front against fascism, and that was incompatible with pacifism.
  When the socialists were kicked out of the student movement in 1938, the Roosevelt Administration gave its approval of the American Students Union, in a letter of greetings to the convention from the President.
   Finally when Hitler and Stalin signed their nonaggression pact in 1939, the entire left-wing split down the middle.

Afterward

  On December 19, 1938, President Robinson submitted his letter of resignation. Ongoing student opposition had now bled into the CCNY Alumni Association.
   Schappes is arrested on March 18, 1941, and sentenced to up to two years in prison for refusing to identify other communists within the CCNY faculty.

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Mark from Queens's picture

Revolution was in the air, everywhere. It wasn't hyperbole either.

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"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"

- Kurt Vonnegut

Socialist Party movement begins in the US circa 1875. The Haymarket Massacre occurs in 1875, amid demonstrations for safer workplaces, including an eight-hour work day. Reconstruction is barely over before the SCOTUS upholds"separate, but (allegedly) equal in 1896. World War I occurs, which results in many, many casualties and helps spread an influenza pandemic. The US Socialist movement is decimated because many of its adherents opposed the war and government cracks down on them. Meanwhile, Russian Revolutions begin in 1905 and finally succeed in 1917.In 1918, Lenin invites the Socialists to join the Communist movement

The Communist Party of the U.S., forms in 1919, touting equal rights for African Americans and elevating labor. Yadda, yadda, the Roaring Twenties.

A U.S recession begins in the summer of 1929; panic selling on Wall Street reaches its peak, October 29, 1929/ and the Great Depression begins. Over 650 banks fail before 1929 ends. A series of bank panics ensues, as does a period of drought, which turns into the Dust Bowl, resulting in many farm foreclosures and affecting food production.

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http://www.sfmuseum.org/loc/prepday.html

By mid-1916, after viewing the carnage in Europe, the United States saw itself poised with great reluctance on the edge of participation in World War I. Isolationism and anti-preparedness feeling remained strong in San Francisco, not only among radicals such as the International Workers of the Worlds ("the wobblies"), but also among responsible labor leaders.

At the same time, with the rise of Bolshevism and labor unrest, San Francisco's business community was nervous. The Chamber of Commerce organized a Law and Order Committee, despite the diminishing influence and political clout of local labor organizations. Radical labor was a small but vociferous minority which few took seriously. Violence, however, was imminent.

The huge Preparedness Day parade of Saturday, July 22, 1916, was the target date. A radical pamphlet of mid-July read in part, "We are going to use a little direct action on the 22nd to show that militarism can't be forced on us and our children without a violent protest." At 2:06pm, about half an hour into the parade, a bomb exploded on the west side of Steuart Street, just south of Market Street, near the Ferry Building. The bomb was concealed in a suitcase; ten bystanders were killed and forty wounded in the worst terrorist act in San Francisco history. San Francisco screamed with anger and outrage.

Two known radical labor leaders -- Thomas Mooney (ca. 1882-1942) and his assistant, Warren K. Billings (1893-1972) -- were arrested. In a hasty and bungled trial carried out in a lynch-mob atmosphere that included several false witnesses, the two were convicted. Mooney was sentenced to be executed, but a Mediation Commission set up by President Wilson found no clear evidence of his guilt.

It was at the time, The Worst Act of Terrorism in San Francisco History. My maternal grandpa was the judge, Franklin A. Griffin. He fucked up convicting Tom Mooney on false evidence, could never undo it. Mooney rotted in prison for 23 years until a Democrat was elected Governor to pardon him, then he died at St. Lukes hospital for the poors, which is where I got born seventeen years after. I guess it was the worst thing ever done in my family, no one ever spoke of it, I only learned through inherited crap and research of my own.

So when I bitch about California, there is half my license right there I think Wink The other half, the paternal grandpa was a Bohemian of the Monte Rio kind, vacation home not far from Bohemian Grove. My ancestors wrote the book on how NOT to proceed, but no one listens, no one cares except for the money. Solitude, nothing left but greed all around. Mmph.

bye felicia

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Thank you so much for sharing that.

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Mark from Queens's picture

What's hardly known by its citizens is the degree to which the American government has used its power to crush Left Wing dissent.

The "law" has been flouted in some of the most heinous misuses, such as the Espionage Act and so many other infringements on basic freedom and liberty, the hallmarks of everything the Right whines and companies about, but never lift a finger to stand with and protect the very citizens it targets most, who are the economically oppressed, minorities hunted by police and those movement folks calling attention to the various crimes of monopoly and oligarchy.

The still continuing use of the FBI specifically to employ gangs of thugs to destroy any movement that challenges the capitalist construct, from the Red Scare to McCarthyism to killing leaders of the Black Panthers, harassing, intimidating and surveilling everyone from Billie Holiday to MLK to the songwriter of "Louie, Louie" to Occupy Wall St to #BlackLivesMatter and environmental and anti-war activists. The list is head-spinningly long and should alarm every proponent of free speech and civil rights/liberties. Yet, so few have a handle on how deep this malignant force goes.

Whenever telling people of this stuff I remind them how if the FBI was really doing their job, instead of harassing and keeping files on gentle hippies who just want a fair shake for all the tax money that's being wasted on imperialistic misadventures and protecting the Economic Terrorists of Wall St, maybe they should be investigating the high crimes of the plundering bankers who were responsible for throwing millions out of their homes, or the defense contractors who bribe congressmen, or the lobbyists paying acting as money middleman to muddy the waters of legislating the sectors of business we all rely upon, or the trillions of dollars unaccounted for by the Army in Iraq.

I'm so tired of the cheap "law and order" "tough on crime" ploy that gets ratcheted up every election season. The law in America, as radical advocate lawyers William Kunstler said, "is a lie." It's there to protect rich people and their property from the poor.

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"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"

- Kurt Vonnegut

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sojourns's picture

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"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
John Cage

Have there been any student strikes since?

Selective Service announces the end of the draft January, 1973.

S.I. Hayakawa, President of San Fransisco State College during the student strike of 1969 (over ethnic studies program), elected U.S. Senator from California, November, 1976.

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Raggedy Ann's picture

or be consumed by war. The American bully is rearing its ugly head. We all need to rise up unless we are all okay with war.

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"The “jumpers” reminded us that one day we will all face only one choice and that is how we will die, not how we will live." Chris Hedges on 9/11

Lookout's picture

seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Caught a good clip on the 60's peace movement "the power of protest" from Tom Hyden (15 min)
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HpUG-5moIs]

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

and tragically timely! The most crucial part of your essay for me is the presentation of the bonding between pacifism and anti-fascism. We are confronted with that reality right now.

How, one would ask from the perspective of the powers that be, could one be anti-fascist and anti-war at the same time? If fascism is looming and threatening the survival of life and liberty, why would one not be pro-war in order to fight fascism?

I think the reality is that college students were in a better position than most Americans to know that New York bankers and industrialists were arming Hitler and creating the fascist threat. My personal belief is that these industrialists, who were strongly represented in the State Department, assumed the United States would enter the war on the side of Germany and that their clear, overt purpose was to replace the Soviet system with fascism and to destroy democracy in Europe. I'm currently reading Churchill's history of the war, and his position backs up my belief very strongly.

The three most important works to read on this subject, I think, are:

Charles Higham's, Trading With the Enemy, documenting U.S. corporate financing, fueling, and maintaining of the German war effort for the duration of WWII;

Antony Sutton's works documenting U.S. corporate development of Soviet military and industrial development; and

David Talbot's, The Devil's Chessboard, documenting the lifetime work of Allen Dulles to carry out the interests of fascism worldwide from within the U.S. government.

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sensetolisten's picture

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“I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.”
― Harry Truman
EdMass's picture

Well that changed

"While students were generally leftist, college administrations remained solidly conservative."

As you know, we are somehow silenced as to the status of politics in the US in the 1930's. Events at Madison Square Gardens. Strange crap in CA. Even FDR's admin were into facism, re: Joe Kennedy, Henry Ford, and on and on. Let's agree not to talk about Byrd or Thurmond or Helms or Fulbright or.. or.. or...Phillip Dru anyone?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Dru:_Administrator

“His book's hero leads the democratic western United States in a civil war against the plutocratic East, and becomes the acclaimed leader of the country until he steps down, having restored justice and democracy.

Historian Paul Johnson wrote: "Oddly enough, in 1911 he [House] had published a political novel, Philip Dru: Administrator, in which a benevolent dictator imposed a corporate income tax, abolished the protective tariff, and broke up the 'credit trust'—a remarkable adumbration of [Woodrow] Wilson and his first term.”[1]”

Aside from Pearl Harbor, it was only Churchill that eventually shamed us to do something. Even after the entry we went first to Europe. There y'a go.

Jeepers gjohnsit, can we ever escape the history and current "leadership"?

I am going to write you in for Potus.

It's the only sane thing to do.

Crap.

Sheesh.

F.

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Prof: Nancy! I’m going to Greece!
Nancy: And swim the English Channel?
Prof: No. No. To ancient Greece where burning Sapho stood beside the wine dark sea. Wa de do da! Nancy, I’ve invented a time machine!

Firesign Theater

Stop the War!