a special feature the sundiay daily by taminmy jacobs to Number 52 Night Editor: Geri Sprung Sunday, November 14, 1971 f Trying to move the anti-war masses: Mission. impossible? WASHINGTON (Oct. 25, 1971)-Four barefoot people grabbed hands in the cold rain and started dancing, mud splattering their blue-jeans. Others huddled under umbrellas, shi- vering. Behind them loomed the Washing- ton Monument, and in front, a stage. Of the 300 that had gathered ear- lier for an anti-war rally and march to the White House, only 50 remained. Rennie Davis, one of the rally lea- ders, stood dripping wet on the stage, but he spoke to the crowd as if it were 5,000 instead of 50. He urged those who wanted to leave to do so, at least for a few hours. "But the Vietnamese people have been fighting their struggle through many monsoon seasons," he said. "Ev- en if there were a monsoon at the Washington Monument today, I'd stay." He didn't. Instead he postponed a scheduled phone call from North Viet- namese and Vietcong delegates in Paris, then withdrew to an uptown church to discuss plans for civil dis- obedience the next day. "What are we doing here, anyway?" asked one college-age youth as he left the muddy monument grounds. "I'm bezinning to wonder," his companion replied. So were most, of the neoole. Osten- sibly. the week of Washington actions was billed as Phase One of a cam- paign to evict President Nixon. It was sponsored by the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice, but even PCPJ leaders seemed unclear of what they expected. * * * ANN ARBOR (March 25, 1965)- Students and faculty gathered through the night and into the morning to hear lectures, see films and discuss the Vietnam war. The 12-hour program, sponsored by University professors, has been heralded as the first anti-war ian terminology--Phases One, Two, and Three. Phase One was composed of the Oc- tober actions in Washington. Three days of a teach-in thinly disguised as a grand jury inquest. Then two days of abortive demonstrations, climaxed by the arrest of Davis and 297 others. Phase Two is projected as an "edu- cational campaign" designed to reach Americans throughout the country this winter and spring. Other panels will be formed, PCPJ leaders will speak, and the movement will enter system politics with forays into state and national primaries. being killed - Asian men (and wom- en and babies) are dying from Amer- ican bombs. And as the American death count in Indochina has de- creased, so has anti-war activism. The time for excitement, for in- spiration, for gut reaction has come and gone. But PCPJ is trying to revive it, to revitalize the flagging spirits (and numbers) of the movement. For this they will need new tactics, new rea- sons to fight the American system. Their Evict Nixon campaign is not so much a new series of tactics, as the old methods couched in new lang- "Harvard, Buffalo, A.nn Arbor - places the leadership has traditionally come from-are the last places to look right now. The despair, the bitterness there is too deep. It's the Podunk places that are going to give the leadership noW." TO BUILD A national movement, culminating in some sort of apoca- lypse at San Diego, PCPJ is going to have to do better than that. They are going to have to find more people - many more people -- and mobilize them. The excuse this time was that Phase One was for "getting our own heads together," but now, with presumably together heads, PCPJ has to go about finding the masses. "We want to go to San Diego with not just a half-million freaks," Davis exhorts his youthful followers . "I mean, everyone should bring t h e i r parents, ferchrissakes." But first, PCPJ must get parents interested. "The American people are not bad, just confused," Chicago seven defend- ant John Froines said during Phase One. "They're fragmented and iso- lated. We have to prove to them that we have the same goals - we have to bring them together." "We've developed a rhetorical style that ,speaks to just ourselves," he ad- mits. "We've got to get out of that." PART OF THE WAY for the move- ment to 'get out of" its isolation from the rest of the world, PCPJ believes, is to broaden the scope of its protests. The People's Panel in Washington was one example of this. Once con- tent to tell about the horrors of the Indochina war, the anti-war leaders branched out, discussing such topics as prisons in America, imperialism, poverty, racism, sexism and repres- sion. The slightly melodramatic, words of PCPJ leader Paul Mayer, indicted in the conspiracy to kidnap Henry Kiss- inger, introduced the new, improved teach-in. "This panel is being con- vened by the cries of the victims all over the world," he said. "We are here to respond to the cries from Indochina and Attica, of the welfare mothers, the unemployed, women and gays." But hand-in-hand with the new, -Rennie Davis -Courtesy of Jeremy Jacobs Evicting the Nixon evicters, October, 1971 -A 3,000 demonstrators and National Guardsmen and police reached riot proportions. * ~* * NEXT YEAR it will be San Diego's turn, PCPJ vows. PCPJ leaders -- especially those veterans of the Chicago riots and sub- sequent conspiracy trial - are quick to promise it won't be like the 1968 Democratic Convention "unless San Diego has a mayor like (Chicago May- or Richard) Daley." However, PCPJ clearly hopes t h e rally in San Diego will have the samo strong effect on the 1972 national elections as the 1968 disruptions in Chicago had - in linking Humphrey with the protesters, thereby hurting his credibility. It is not quite clear how this cam- paign will "drive Nixon from political power." PCPJ expects to support no .alternative presidential candidates, and San Diego is not expected to be the kind of revolution that will leave Nixon literally hanging from con- vention hall rafters. PCPJ, in fact, is not quite sure what it expects to happen in San Diego. A major riot would not have the same shock to the American system t h a t Chicago did, for the system has be- come numbed to that kind of protest since 1968. Certainly, too, PCPJ has no illus- ions about its chances of raising enough voter support to oust Nixon, PCPJ's jump into electoral politics is to end in Phase Three-a cataclys- mic rally at the Republican National Convention in San Diego. But to hold the rally, PCPJ will need people. * * * WASHINGTON (Oct. 22, 1967) - Police and army troops arrested 300 of 30,000 protesters in front of the, Pentagon yesterday; shortly after 100,000 persons rallied against the war on the grounds of the Lincoln memorial. WASHINGTON (Nov. 16, 1969)- Close to 500,000 anti-war protesters marched from the Capitol to t h e Washington Monument grounds in uage. And, at least during Phase One, the people didn't go for it. LAST MONTH PCPJ LEADERS pre- dicted that 3,000 to 10,000 people would march and get arrested in Washington - the figure turned out to be closer to 1,000 marching, with only 300 willing to add yet another symbolic protest arrest to their re- cords.t PCPJ leaders then promised t h e masses would come during the rallies held last week in 16 U.S. cities, co- sponsored by PCPJ and the National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC). But the largest turn out was San Francisco's, with 10,000 marchers, and Detroit was second with only 5,000. "Harvard, Buffalo, Ann Arbor -- places the leadership has traditionally come from - are the last places tc look right now," he admits. "The des- pair, the bitterness there is too deep.' "It's the Podunk places - Texas Oklahoma, Florida - that are going to give the leadership now," he says The "Podunk, places," where people missed the '60s wave of emotional anti-war protests, are where PCPJ is searching for leadership now. In the "Podunk places", PCPJ fig- ures, people still have ideals, have not been numbed from trying. Bui in those places, there is not the stim- ulation or level of consciousness that the mainstream of political life had when the great protests began. And it is this ignorance, this apathy, that PCPJ is struggling with, rather thar again face the cynicism, the bitter- ness of Ann Arbor, or Cambridge o New York. * * * WASHINGTON (May 5, 1971) - Over 12,000 demonstrators h a v e been arrested during the last two days of civil disobedience here. The arrests came as protesters at- tempted, to "stop the government" by holding a series of traffic tie- ups at key intersections in down- town Washington. The arrests made in massive sweeps by police, National Guards- men and army forces, have been challenged as not having followed legal procedures. * * * ACCORDING TO AT least one of the movement's faithful, D a v i s doesn't need his two million organiz- ers, or his massive education c a m- paign. A 16-year-old f r o m Ohio, who claims to have thrown a dozen tear- gas cannisters back at police during the Mayday actions, says the October arrests "were even better." "Only 300 got arrested, and it ac- complished the same thing as all those people did in May," he said. The accomplishment, he feels, is to "get people to know we mean business." A student from Oswego, New York, disagrees with such tactics, saying he was "disappointed by Mayday. It didn't seem to accomplish anything," he said. "Businessmen would have gotten paid if they had stayed home, but they went to work just to spite us. All I learned in May was about the police." The New York student, sitting in the church PCPJ used for temporary housing, is much more enthusiastic about the education prong of PCPJ's new campaign. "This is meaningful, this panel. If we can get some of this information out, it'll tell people a lot more than sitting in the streets does." But, while the first of PCPJ's prob- lems is to get the information out, and the second is to convince people that the information is meaningful a n d worth fighting for; the most import- ant question is still how the fighting is to be done. PCPJ seems to be trying everything at once: teach-in, electoral politics, and confrontation actions. And even they do not know which action or combination thereof will work. LAST MONTH IN WASHINGTON, one 18 year-old black drop-out looked at the coterie of middle class whites &' -J -iy-Jay uassiay -Daily-Tom Gottlieb Chicago-August, 1968 'teach-in' on Vietnam. Plans for similar actions have been announ- ced around the country. About 3,000 students attended the controversial program, which was marred by three bomb threats against the war protestors. * * * THE FIRST part of PCPJ's campaign, in Washington, was a new sort of teach-in. Titled "The People's Pan- el: A Grand Jury Investigation into American Life," the action consisted of "testimony" about life under the Nixon Administration and an indict- ment of Nixon for "crimes against the Washington-November, 1969 Mayday-May, 1971 near-freezing weather yesterday, in the largest single demonstration ever held here. WASHINGTON (April 25, 1971) - A week-long series of sit-ins and arrests at government buildings culminated yesterday in a march to the Capitol by some 500,000 people. ** * WHERE HAVE the marchers gone? According to one national poll, 73 per cent of the American people are against the war, but it appears that the once substantial base of marchers is no longer there. It's not hard to put a finger on Obviously, the marchers of yesteryear are not ready to march again soon. So, last month, it was only the PCPJ faithful, the hard core, w h o trooped to Washington from as far away as Minneapolis. A few of the curious also came to the final rally and the march, but that was it. "I'd be hypocritical if I said I was here for PCPJ," admitted one high school woman. "I'm here because it's interesting, and because Bobby Seale is supposed to speak." (He didn't, but made a videotape recording instead.) Besides the core of 300 who got ar- rested, and the 700 curious people fll'fll 7 7 Xl tnhnfl f l nnfi a 7On r1 f 11 broadened base of attack towards the new, broader base of people, go the traditional tactics of confrontation. "Just because you start a new direc- tion doesn't mean you give up every- thing you've done in the past," Fro- ines says. A two-pronged attack is planned for the primaries. First, PCPJ plans to work through the electoral system, supporting local candidates, and per- haps running some of their own un- der an Evict Nixon party. And se- cond, the group plans confrontations. "There will be actions built around every primary," Davis promises. "And -Courtesy of Jeremy Jacobs Phase One-October, 1971 with no alternative in sight. But what happens in San Diego will be crucially important, not only to PCPJ, but to the entire anti-war movement, because, PCPJ, for all its failings, is about all the organization the anti-war movement has at this point. So, somewhere in between the sys- tem politics and the traditional move- ment confrontations lies the solution PCPJ must find. DAVIS, WHO THINKS at least part of the solution lies in organizing a broad-based mass of people, is wor-