Another Eight in Search of Jeff

Max Watts – James Bond of the left

Max Watts in the Negev, Israel '52

           A high government official described Max, on the eve of his expulsion from France, as part Lenin, part James Bond. Max Watts was his political pseudonym – his real name was Tomi Schwaetzer.

Born in Vienna during the interwar period, Max and family fled Austria one step ahead of the Holocaust. They took refuge in Paris, but as war closed in, Max and his father went to London while his mother and sister made it to Lisbon and a ship bound for America.

          But Max’s father, failing to find work, committed suicide in England, so as a boy of 10 he was stranded for several years as the war raged on the Continent and in the Pacific. As a youngster on his own, he became politically involved on the left, his lifetime commitment. 

Eventually making it to New York to join his mother, Max earned a BA at New York University where he joined the Young Communist League, moving later to the American Communist Party. Eventually Max would eschew parties and the dogmatics of ideology and adopt a kind of ecumenical spirit toward the diverse factions of the left writ large.

Against war, he left the US to avoid the Korean War draft and lived for a time in Israel. From Israel Max went to Paris where he studied for a PhD in Geophysics and participated on the left, namely for the Algerians in their war of liberation against the French. In the early ‘60s his work as a geophysicist took him to revolutionary Cuba where he met the Castro brothers.

Returning to France as American involvement in Vietnam heated up, Max became a founding member of ‘Resistance inside the Army’ or RITA, a group that helped and hid American deserters sought by the French police and the US Army. Among other notables, he worked with Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave on behalf of the beleaguered GIs.

          His work with his partner June van Ingen was so effective that the government determined his presence in France was not in the country’s best interests. Max was to be deported, but his homeland, Austria, refused to take him, so the French police banished him to the island of Corsica.

However, resourceful Max met Danish activists making a port call who sailed him back to mainland France. Slipping into Paris, now a fugitive himself, he nonetheless continued his antiwar work, including helping to publish Act,  RITA’s newsletter.

          Eventually caught again, Max was deported to West Germany, settling in Heidelberg, headquarters of US forces in Europe. There he continued his opposition to the Vietnam War. Now working as a journalist in several languages, Max collaborated with a GI whistleblower to score a media coup against US military surveillance of anyone in Germany thought to oppose the war.

          In the early ‘80s Max was on the move again, this time to Australia, where he spent the rest of his life working as a local activist and international left freelance journalist. He took up many progressive causes. A skilled sailor, he once maneuvered his sailboat to block a US nuclear missile cruiser from entering Sydney Harbor.

It was in Australia that I ‘met’ Max by phone and email. Back in Europe of the ‘60s he had known of brother Jeff Sharlet and his underground paper Vietnam GI, and admired him from afar. Although the two of them never met, they moved on parallel tracks in the global struggle against the American war in Vietnam.

          Max, an extravagant personality, was prodigiously effective on four continents – his death in 2010 was echoed throughout the world in left circles.

         

Michaela ‘Miki’ Lang – Long lost, but found

Miki Lang, Sausalito CA '10

          By an extraordinary stroke of luck we finally found Miki after a long search. During their senior year at Indiana University (IU), Jeff and Miki had been an item. I was hoping to talk with her about that time. We had photos of the two of them together, but Miki was nowhere to be found on the Internet.

          However, my research assistant Karen Grote Ferb, was determinedly persistent and eventually found Miki’s long cold trail by an unusual route. Although we assumed she had probably married and taken her husband’s name, Karen tried a wild card approach of searching under Miki’s surname.

Her search for ‘Lang’ brought up a German web site about paintball, an unusual sport. Featured was an American, Oliver ‘Ollie’ Lang, rated the best player in international competition. To round out the homage to Oliver, there was an interview with his mother, none other than Miki Lang of Sausalito, CA.

Miki had finished up at IU with an MA in ’70 and a few years later joined the Peace Corps. Thus began her long career abroad, later working for C.A.R.E. and the US Agency for International Development. Miki began her service in Sierra Leone, but then worked in Chad, Mali, and Cameroon, as well as India.

After 16 years in Africa and South Asia, she finally returned to the States in ’88.

          She remembered Jeff well as one of the first voices at IU to bring back from Vietnam dire warnings about US involvement in the war. Miki had been especially struck by “the intensity with which he talked about Vietnam and how relentlessly he pursued the subject.” Looking back over time, she recognized that opposing the war was Jeff’s singular purpose in life. So true.

Jim Wallihan, California radical

Jim Wallihan addressing Governor Brown, Sacramento CA '64

          A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM), Jim arrived in Bloomington in the fall of ’65. He had come to Indiana University (IU) for grad school from the University of California (UC). When the mass arrests of student protesters occurred at Sproul Plaza on the Berkeley campus, Jim, having eluded the sweep, became spokesman for FSM before the governor in Sacramento.

Unbeknownst to Jim, the Davis CA police had sent ahead to the Bloomington authorities an unsolicited warning that a California radical was on his way. Outlandishly a couple of years later, while on trial for a raucous anti-Dow Chemical demo at IU, the local District Attorney asked Jim, “Isn’t it true that you organized the California riots?”

Jim had been a so-called faculty brat at UC-Davis, not far from San Francisco. When his father, a noted agricultural biologist, was invited to spend a year in the Philippines, Jim took a leave of absence and joined his parents. Later he did a summer stint as a smoke jumper fighting fires in the Alaskan wilderness.

Arriving at IU, Jim naturally sought out the small coterie of New Left students who were stirring the pot on that conservative campus. He met Jeff, who had returned from the Vietnam War the previous year. Jeff hung out with the activist group, but had not joined their efforts to launch a chapter of Students for Democratic Society (SDS) at IU.

Jeff was skeptical of the efficacy of student protest against the war. At that point in the antiwar movement, SDS was not well focused or effectively organized. Jim persuaded him to join the new SDS group and lend his authority as an ex-Vietnam GI opposed to the war. Jim and Jeff soon reorganized the chapter and became part of the leadership of campus SDS. Later, under Jeff’s aegis as SDS president, the frequency, focus, and effectiveness of antiwar actions greatly increased.

Jeff moved on to grad school at University of Chicago, but his heart wasn’t in the academic game. After just a semester he withdrew and used his fellowship funds to launch a GI antiwar paper, Vietnam GI. Jim joined him several months later, lending a hand on the paper as its circulation grew rapidly.

Together they travelled the country visiting military bases looking for returning combat GIs with stories about what was really going on in Vietnam. During the summer of ’68 Jeff and Jim took off for the West Coast. Chicago was hosting the Democratic Presidential Convention, sure to be a magnet for unrest, and the Chicago police, with help from the Army, was gearing up to block the massive, planned antiwar protest.

Work was underway on the August issue of VGI, and Jeff and Jim felt the better part of valor would be to temporarily move the editorial process out of town. Around that time the two of them sat for a long interview with a major underground paper – their topic: How civilian antiwar protest could benefit from working with the numerous disaffected GIs. The GI antiwar movement was gathering steam.

Jeff died before the war he fought in and against, came to an end, but Jim retained his memories of their joint struggle, which when we met early in the new century he shared with me.

Showdown in Kyoto

Japanese riot police at the ready

Late summer ’68 – Jeff was supposed to go to Prague. A group of US antiwar leaders was to parley with a delegation from the National Liberation Front (NLF), the shadowy political arm of the Communist insurgency in South Vietnam. The NLF was particularly interested in emerging GI protest against the war and hoped to meet Jeff.

Jeff was interested, but didn’t want to go. He had worked in intelligence in Vietnam, and was under interdiction not to travel behind the Iron Curtain for five years after finishing his tour in ’64. Penalties for violating the restriction were stiff, and Jeff had more important work editing Vietnam GI than doing time in federal prison.

Just about the same time, Jeff’s deputy editor, Dave Komatsu, was invited to Japan as a representative of the GI antiwar movement. As a Japanese-American Dave felt he was chosen for his language ability, and he wasn’t  enthusiastic about going. However, Dave came up with a solution – he would replace Jeff in Europe, and Jeff would head for Japan – to the city of Kyoto.

The Japanese peace organization, the host group, was harboring nearly 20 US deserters from the Vietnam War, but they were proving hard to keep safely hidden from the Japanese authorities and US military police. The peace activists needed counsel from someone of authority on the rising GI antiwar protest.

Jeff was their man, but to cover his real purpose in Japan, they folded him into an international peace gathering in Kyoto. There Jeff did his thing – spoke publicly at the conference by day, and in the evenings privately counseled on the deserter problem.

At the end of the conference, an antiwar march on Kyoto town hall was planned. Jeff had seen such confrontations with the Japanese police on television and wanted no part of it. He said he had business elsewhere, but his hosts wouldn’t hear of it. As an honored guest as well as an ex-Vietnam GI, they insisted Jeff join them – and in the front rank no less.

He could see the massed police in riot gear dead ahead and was filled with trepidation. Arms locked, the protesters set off. A melee ensued, but happily Jeff got through it unhurt. Another day on the Vietnam antiwar front.

Bernard ‘Bernie’ Morris – Mentor to the New Left

Bernie & Betty Morris, summer on Cape Cod, '60s

Bernie was no stranger to bucking the system. As a young man he went to Yale for a graduate degree, but was thought too far to the left and pushed out. America was then on the cusp of WWII so Bernie went to Washington and landed a job in the Justice Department.

At Justice, his office mate and friend was a young woman named Judith Coplon. ‘Judy’ was later convicted as a Soviet spy which subsequently created problems for Bernie when he moved to the State Department. When the anti-communist Red Scare got underway in the late ‘40s, simple ‘guilt by association’ could be a source of trouble.

Bernie survived that, but then at the end of the ‘50s as the USSR and Communist China began to fall out, he offered a novel explanation. As an intelligence analyst, he was among the first to spot the coming split between the two Communist giants. However at State, the prevailing consensus was of a unified Communist Bloc, and Bernie was told to cease advocating a contrary interpretation.

A few years later in the early ‘60s Secretary of State Dean Rusk became a key point man for President Kennedy’s growing involvement in the civil war in Vietnam. At that point, Bernie had had enough of government and left for academe.

He accepted a position as Professor of International Relations at Indiana University (IU), offering courses on Soviet Foreign Policy, International Communism, and the like. Within his courses Bernie basically taught critical thinking on the great issues of the day. No longer subject to Washington rules, he became an outspoken public intellectual.

As Bernie gained a student following, he added a course on Marxism, the first time the subject was offered at IU. Neither an advocate nor a critic, he taught Marxism as a course in political theory.

Many students were drawn to the course and reached their own conclusions. Campus New Left activists were especially attracted to the course, including Robin Hunter, Paulann Groninger, and my brother Jeff Sharlet among others.

As a chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) got up and running at the university, Professor Bernie Morris became the group’s unofficial adviser. Though not an activist himself, he did attend SDS’s Friday afternoon rallies and some of their major antiwar demos.

President Nixon’s 1970 invasion of Cambodia transformed antiwar protest at IU and other schools from essentially a minority voice into a huge expression of dissent. More than 8,000 IU students turned out to register their protest and hear speakers condemn Nixon’s policy.

For Bernie, that afternoon was perhaps his finest hour as mentor to the critically minded. Of all the speakers, he received the greatest ovation. Professor Morris scorned Nixon’s plan for terminating the war by widening it as

                             strategically unsound,

                             politically self-defeating,

                             and morally indefensible.

Ralph Levitt, A life on the left

The Bloomington 3, Ralph Levitt (l), Indiana University '63

When I first met Ralph, he was intent on pursuing an academic career. We were both newly minted graduate students in Russian and East European Studies at Indiana University (IU).

Brother Jeff was also on campus as a freshman. He too crossed paths with Ralph, but ‘politically’, as Ralph took a very different path, eventually spending his life on the left.

The first intimations of protest against the emerging Vietnam War were starting to stir on campus when Ralph joined a nascent Trotskyist group, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA). YSA’s political writ was broad. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of fall ’62, the group organized a protest march against the American naval blockade of Cuba.

That action, which took great courage, was not well received either on campus or in town as the rally around the flag spirit swept the country. Several months later, the YSA chapter brought a speaker to campus. His remarks were in no way inflammatory, yet the county prosecutor chose to indict Ralph and fellow leaders for inciting the overthrow of the government of the United States, an absurd contention. Clearly it was payback for the earlier provocative pro-Cuba march.

The charges were without merit, but defending against them took up the next three years of the lives of the ‘Bloomington 3’ (B-3), Ralph and his co-defendants. They tirelessly traveled the country, speaking wherever a sympathetic audience could be found – trying to raise public consciousness about their case and raise funds to fight it.

By ’65 the indictment hanging over the B-3 had been withdrawn, but by then Ralph Levitt never looked back to academe. He moved up and became a major activist in the Socialist Worker’s Party (SWP), the YSA’s parent organization. As a party heavy he went wherever needed – to a political demo or a labor action. His home base was the San Francisco Bay Area.

Intent on showing solidarity with the proletariat, Ralph became a motorman in the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART). His organizational talents recognized, he eventually moved up in the ranks.

Upon retirement, Ralph moved back to his home town of Indianapolis where his elderly parents still lived. Highly intelligent and well informed, he continued his involvement in SWP, serving as the party candidate in both statewide and federal elections in Indiana.

With few illusions about winning office, Ralph nevertheless skillfully used the campaign platforms to reach a broader audience with the party line.

A lifetime on the left.

Susie ‘Creamcheese’, Antiwar groupie

The real Suzy Creamcheese '67

          I spoke to Susie Creamcheese just once; that was over 40 years ago. I had no idea who she was, and she didn’t identify herself. In a highly agitated voice, she said I must come immediately, my brother was dying.

          My brother Jeff was indeed very ill, but my father assured me his condition was stable. I had planned to fly to Florida two days hence to talk with his doctors, but to my profound shock he died the next day. The caller was right, and I arrived too late.

          I only learned the identity of the young woman who called me decades later. She was nicknamed Susie Creamcheese. Having driven from Chicago to Miami to visit my brother during his last days, Susie was so stunned by his condition she called me to sound the alarm.

          Susie’s real name was Susan Rosenberg. From an affluent Chicago family, she neither had to earn a living, nor was she going to college. Susie Creamcheese was said to have been on ‘the wild side of hippyism’, styling herself in the manner of Janis Joplin, one of the zaniest musical icons of the day.

          She had hung out with Jeff and the circle of people around his underground paper Vietnam GI – as a kind of antiwar groupie. Susie got her moniker from a Frank Zappa song about a young music groupie he called Suzy Creamcheese who followed the band on the road. Her real name was Susan Zeiger.

          By great coincidence, the original Suzy Creamcheese is the sister of film maker David Zeiger, who in 2005 premiered his award-winning documentary on the Vietnam GI antiwar movement, Sir! No Sir!, dedicated to Jeff Sharlet.

Lincoln Bergman, Revolutionary poet

Lincoln Bergman in recent times, California redwoods

My brother Jeff died young – he was only 27.  In the final years of the ‘60s, he had become an admired leading figure of the growing GI protest against the war in Vietnam. He knew the war well; he had served in Nam ’63-’64.

Decades on, Jeff is still remembered for his leadership of the antiwar paper, Vietnam GI, an almost instant success in the world of underground journalism of that day. His untimely death was widely noted in the Movement press, in both civilian and GI publications alike.

Among the many obits and death notes, one particularly stood out, a eulogy framed as a long narrative poem by Lincoln Bergman, a revolutionary poet. His poem was published in The Movement in July ’69 not long after Jeff’s death.

A man of the left, Linc Bergman’s political activism went beyond the issue of the day, the Vietnam War. During the ‘60s he had taught English as a second language in Communist China. And as the war in Southeast Asia was winding down in the early ‘70s, Bergman had spent a year in revolutionary Cuba broadcasting for Radio Havana.

In his poetic tribute to Jeff, Seeds of Revolution, he began, “Brothers and Sisters, Part of us is dead. … He did time in Vietnam … And when he came home, He gave [the GIs] something to believe in.”

Linc continued:

          Not long ago he said:

          ‘We felt a newspaper Was the best way to begin

          To talk to the enlisted men

          The guys on the bottom. …’

          He was a quiet, vital guy         

          Who thought before he spoke.

          Looked straight in peoples’ eyes

          And those who listened learned. …

          Talking to the men in uniform

          Feeling the pulse of the people

          Working long hours to help

          The paper serve their needs.

Concluding his paean to Jeff, the poet wrote:

          He told us to plant the seeds

          People had to change

          Change through their experience

          He spoke the truth. …

          A good man.

          So many things

          Embodied in those three words

          Death leaves so much unsaid.

          Courage from his courage

          Example of his deeds.

          For Jeff is dead…

          Like Johnny Appleseed.

In a note to the poem in a volume of his collected poetry, which appeared several years ago, the poet added a fitting valediction to Jeff.  Within the antiwar movement,

          Jeff Sharlet was an authentic leader,

          modest and sincere, calm, a good

          listener, with iron determination

          and large vision.

         

Long March from Bloomington – Lives of the New Left V

Most of us went to college, followed our youthful enthusiasms, and later moved on to grad school and career tracks, but not the New Left activists of Indiana University (IU) during the ‘60s. Many of them had arrived on campus politically aware, while the others were soon politicized and radicalized by the inescapable crisis of those years, the Vietnam War.

For the New Left, the war seemed emblematic of the ills of American society – thus, opposing the war while supporting the Civil Rights Movement and other ‘freedom’ movements and causes became the order of the day.

         

The New Leftists at IU were never numerous – essentially a small minority of students on a large campus – but they were a tightly knit band of brothers and sisters determined to stop a war and change society. I’d been aware of the IU New Left for some time in the course of researching a memoir on my brother Jeff Sharlet, IU ’67. He was part of the group, one of the few ex-Vietnam GIs on the campus left at that time. He became a campus leader of the SDS chapter, the Students for a Democratic Society.

Jeff’s activism didn’t end with graduation. Winner of a prestigious Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship, he went on to the University of Chicago, but soon withdrew to continue the struggle against the Vietnam War. Until his early death in ’69, he was a founding leader of the emerging GI opposition to the war. †

During summer of 2013 I had the opportunity to get better acquainted with my brother’s old IU comrades. They had gathered for a grand reunion of the New Left back in Bloomington where it all began for them. One of the kick-off events was an informal assembly called a ‘Town Hall’ at which a couple of dozen rose to speak about their activist days as students and their lives beyond Indiana University.

Sure, they graduated, left town, and moved on, although the activists took away not only parchment diplomas, but the political commitment that had marked their university experience as well.  In effect, Bloomington for them was the point of departure for a ‘long march’ down through the years. And although the war in Vietnam is long over, new as well as extant old domestic issues still preoccupy most of the IU New Left who are carrying on the struggle to this day.

The profiles at hand are of two of those ‘long marchers’, Marilyn Vogt-Downey and Sandi Sherman. Their early experiences at Indiana with the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) and other left groups have informed and shaped their life choices. For both, their initial political commitments have guided their respective paths from Bloomington through many years ‘on the road’, so to speak, as they continued the pursuit of social justice.

As committed Trotskyists and, for a long period of time, members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), their journeys have taken them far and wide, Sandi throughout the States while Marilyn has also traveled extensively abroad. Each is a paragon of the activist life on the left.

Marilyn Vogt-Downey arrived at Indiana University as a grad student. Since leaving Bloomington, she has had a notable career as a long-time revolutionary, a scholar, translator, union activist, and secondary school teacher. Her work has taken her to New York, Paris, Moscow, the former Leningrad, and Tallinn, capital of Estonia.

Along the way, she has made many valuable translations from Russian, contributed to a number of books, and, during the ‘90s, published two books of her own – The USSR 1987-1991: Marxist Perspectives (1993) of which a reviewer wrote that “serious historians of the Soviet Union would ignore at their peril;” and Notebooks for the Grandchildren: Recollections of a Trotskyist Who Survived the Stalin Terror (1995) with Mikhail Baitalsky.

Marilyn also made presentations at a number of conferences on Trotsky’s legacy,  both here and abroad, and has championed numerous causes, including the posthumous rehabilitation of victims of Stalin’s purge trials of the ‘30s, opposition to NATO’s Balkan bombing campaign, a statement against the war in Afghanistan, petitions on behalf of various individuals prosecuted by the US government, and most recently, support for the post-9/11 Muslim hunger strikers at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in the Caribbean.

 Marilyn Vogt-Downey at the ‘Town Hall’, Bloomington IN, 2013

With verve, she described her life and times at the New Left reunion of August ’13:

I am Marilyn Vogt, actually Marilyn Vogt-Downey, and I came here from Bloomington, Illinois [with a BA degree]. We had had a committee … and when I got here we set up the Committee to End the War in Vietnam [CEWV]. Was anybody here in that?

So, yeah, and then pretty soon the [national office of the] YSA figured out we were here, and Russell Block* and I, Randy Green and Dennis and one other woman reconstituted the [IU] YSA. How many of you knew Russell Block? I think almost everybody knew Russell Block. Yeah, so we reconstituted the YSA [chapter] that had been disbanded earlier on. Then we were involved in all the things everybody here has been talking about, all the antiwar work and everything that was going on here in the ‘60s.

Professor Russell Block, Munich, Germany

Then I left here, I was married, and we went to Albany [NY]. The women’s movement kind of really hit in the ‘70s, and I left my husband, went to New York City and joined the Socialist Workers Party [SWP]. They hired me to work at Pathfinder Press [SWP’s publication arm] so I got to work on translating Trotsky’s [books] for the writing series. That was exciting until they had no more money in ’75 and laid us off.

I worked [at Pathfinder] with George Saunders, rather George Shriver [his actual name], and we put out the samizdat stuff. We started translating all this stuff that was coming out of the Soviet Union, all the underground literature. We started translating it and getting it into ‘Intercontinental Press’ [a Trotskyist international weekly] and to the International Socialists and others.

SWP made the ‘turn to industry’, and I ended up becoming a pipe fitter. [However,] unfortunately I got caught with a sailor smoking pot and got expelled [from the party] (laughter). I didn’t actually smoke, but it was a time when the party was having trouble with COINTELPRO,** and they were going to trial. Suddenly it occurred to us that Larry the sailor might have been a cop, so we thought it was a good idea to get me out of there. So SWP expelled me, they were very hostile.

Then I went to Paris and worked with Gerry Foley *** [an IU alumnus] who was an international editor on ‘International Viewpoint’. I was a typesetter for that. When I came back, I remarried. I married a Welshman, a lovely Welshman named Nicholas Downey. Unfortunately, he died just about a year and three months ago.

Anyway [on return from Paris] I had decided to become a high school teacher. I taught Trotskyism. Yes! I taught socialism and the workers and the US rogue state. I taught that for about 12 years and then I retired.

I was in the UFT [United Federation of Teachers] and fought the horrible leadership, the so-called leadership – the Unity Caucus of UFT, horrible people … those bastards, those sell-out creeps. I had also been in other groups that worked on the [US] Labor Party.

In defense of Marxism, I got out a couple of books that you can’t afford to buy because they’re too expensive. Lastly, I want to say that lately I’ve been working on Lynne Stewart’s case and on behalf of Bradley Manning.**** I’m going to his court-martial in Washington [where] I’m going to support the Gitmo [Guantanamo] hunger strikers as well.

All these causes are very important, but I’m not in a party so I’m running around like a chicken with its head cut off, trying to make things work. You can’t do it that way, it doesn’t work that way. Lynne Stewart should be released from prison, she’s dying from cancer. How many of you have heard about her case? All right, how many of you have done something about it? Okay, this is really serious, so if you want more details we’ll talk about it later.

For the other speaker, Sandi Sherman, opposition to the Vietnam War while at Indiana became seminal for a lifetime on the left. As a student it took her awhile to find her political direction, but soon she was active on the emerging issues of the late ‘60s/early ‘70s – abortion rights and women’s liberation. She received her BA degree in ’73, left Bloomington, and joined the Socialist Workers Party, spending nearly the next two decades as a party activist in various parts of the country.

During the past several years, Sandi has focused primarily on labor issues at the University of Minnesota (MN) where she is a ‘program/project specialist’ at the university’s cancer research center. As a member the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), she was a major activist, playing a significant role in two strikes against the university system over wage issues.

         

Most recently, in June 2013, Sandi testified on behalf of her union local before the Board of Regents, speaking in opposition to the university’s plan to shift more health insurance costs to the clerical staff, the lowest paid stratum of the MN community. Like the deeply committed person of the left she has long been, for Sandi the issue was not just a local matter. As she wrote, “Our fight is a fight for all working people.”

 Sandi Sherman testifying, University of Minnesota, 2013

From the IU Town Hall assembly, here’s Sandi Sherman telling of her long march in her own words:

I’m Sandi Sherman. I was here from ’69 to ’73. I grew up in Indianapolis and was born in Maryland. My parents were Democrats, my father a liberal Democrat. I came to college with a kind of – well, I wasn’t a Republican, but I was very naïve.

I remember going to the ’69 moratorium event [to hear a speaker] and I was completely turned off. I thought he was a jerk so I went right back to my dorm room and said, “This is not for me.”

So it took me a little while to get active. But through Ike [Nahem]†† and David and Barbara Webster, I became active in the Abortion Rights Movement. I was also very active in the Gay Liberation Front. I had a lot of gay friends, so I was very active in that.

[Those issues] helped radicalize me and then of course, the war in Vietnam, I would say much more than Bloomington was the seminal influence on my life. It changed my life, it made me see that we live under imperialism, and I was opposed to that.

I wanted to fight to change the world and joined the Young Socialist Alliance. After graduation I left Bloomington with Barbara Webster in my little VW packed to the gills. We drove out to San Francisco and broke down in the Wasatch Mountains (laughter) ….

From there I joined the Socialist Workers Party and was very active for the next 19 years. I lived in San Francisco, San Jose, Kansas City, New York – where I met my husband Bill – Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and now we’re in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota. I’m a clerical worker at the University of Minnesota and an activist in the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. We were on strike twice in 2003 and 2007. I was an organizer – I was a picket – I organized all the picket squads in 2007.

♫ Now if you want higher wages let me tell you what to do

You got to build you a union, got to make it strong,

...

It ain't quite this simple, so I better explain

Just why you got to ride on the union train.

'Cause if you wait for the boss to raise your pay,

We'll all be a-waitin' 'til Judgment Day.†††

Right now, I have to go back tomorrow because on Monday we’re having a big rally at the President’s office in opposition to some really big take-backs in our healthcare coverage that they’re planning to blame on Obamacare. I’m still a supporter of SWP; I organized volunteers to get ‘The Militant’ [SWP’s newspaper] online weekly, but I’m not as active as I was.

I don’t have the energy, but still have the heart. I still believe in this fight.

So for Marilyn Vogt-Downey and Sandi Sherman, veterans of the left, the long march from Bloomington continues – the fight goes on.

___________________________

† Jeff Sharlet created 'Vietnam GI' in 1968 as the first GI-edited underground antiwar paper addressed to Vietnam GIs, see http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/06/vietnam-gis-mission.html

†† On Ike Nahem as activist, see http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2013/09/lives-of-new-left.htm

†††  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C13JFv4JfH8

*Russell Block, a friend of Jeff Sharlet’s at IU, arrived at the university in 1965 where he earned an MA in Linguistics in ’67. He subsequently studied at the University of Washington, Heidelberg University, and the University of Hamburg where he took his PhD in English and German. He currently teaches at Hochschule München (Munich University of Applied Sciences). While at IU, Russell was affiliated with the New Left as a member of YSA and a leader of CEWV. He was nominated by the IU Revolutionary Student Party to run for student body president. At the University of Washington, he continued his involvement with YSA.

**COINTELPRO or ‘Counter Intelligence Program’ was created by the FBI during the ‘50s to sow disinformation,  carry out illegal break-ins, and perpetrate other ‘dirty tricks’ against dissidents of various persuasions, especially those on the left. The program’s secret existence was exposed in the early ‘70s when a group of anti-Vietnam War activists broke into a regional FBI office and hauled off thousands of classified documents which they sent to the media. For the story of the break-in, see Betty Medsger, The Burglary: The Discovery of J Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI (2014).

***The late Gerry Foley, American socialist, prolific journalist, and master linguist – he reportedly read 60 languages and spoke 12 fluently – was a full-time revolutionary who supported the causes of oppressed and persecuted people at home and abroad. Gerry attended grad school at IU where he met George and Ellen Shriver, founders of the campus YSA, and became part of the group during his time at the university. After he left IU, Gerry participated in the national defense of the ‘Bloomington Three’ while attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he was active in the campus YSA and Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

****Progressive defense attorney Lynne Stewart represented defendants in the terrorism case following the 1993 bombing of the New York World Trade Center. She in turn was charged with and convicted of aiding and abetting terrorism and other charges as a result of her work as defense counsel in the case. Disbarred and dying of cancer in prison, she applied for compassionate release under federal law which provides for sentence reduction under extraordinary circumstances, foremost of which being life-threatening illness. She was granted a release on December 31, 2013. Bradley Manning, now known as Chelsea Manning, was diagnosed with gender identity disorder while serving as a US Army intelligence analyst. In 2013 he was convicted of espionage, among other offenses, for leaking thousands of classified documents into the public domain. Dishonorably discharged and sentenced to 35 years in prison, there have been mixed reactions to his punishment. Many felt his actions were traitorous, but some saw the leaked material as a positive catalyst for the ‘Arab Spring’, while others simply believed the sentence was overly harsh.

           

For a Better World – Lives of the New Left IV

Indiana University (IU) of the 1960s was a typical conservative Midwestern state university with its sprawling campus, many students, and location in a small town, Bloomington. Like the other schools of the Big Ten Football Conference, IU mainly served residents of the state.

The vast majority of students came to Bloomington to get a good, relatively inexpensive higher education. Tuition was only about $200 a semester for Indiana residents. The general ambition was to earn an undergraduate degree in four years, then find a job and take one’s place in society.

However, the ‘60s was no ordinary decade. It was a time of considerable social tumult as a distant war on the other side of the world roiled and divided American society. Students at a great number of colleges and universities started protesting the Vietnam War and demanding radical change of the prevailing ‘system’, as they referred to the existing socio-economic structure.

They called themselves the New Left. While such critically-minded students were by no means numerous on most campuses and though activism at IU was not as extensive as elsewhere, the IU New Left acquitted itself well in the annals of the time.*

Unlike most of their fellow students in Bloomington who were intent on ultimately fitting into the world beyond the campus gates, the IU New Left’s aim was to end the war in Vietnam and, in the process, transform American society rather than join it – and they preferred radical change. My younger brother, Jeff Sharlet, IU ’67, an ex-Vietnam GI who died young, was part of the IU New Left contingent.

Jeff Sharlet leading a protest rally at IU, spring 1967

This past summer over a half century later, quite a number of the IU New Left turned up in Bloomington for a grand reunion. Not a large group to begin with, some 60 or more reassembled at their old stomping grounds, swapping stories of past campaigns, inevitable setbacks, and eventual victories – large and small, personal and public. They kicked off their gathering with what was dubbed a ‘Town Hall’ at which many of the returnees made short presentations about their activism during and beyond their time at Indiana University.

Their diverse interests and various causes, then as students (long gone were the idealistic dreams of ‘revolution’) and since as graduates, made for a rich mosaic of their continuous striving for meaningful, albeit incremental, social change in America.

The profiles in this post cover the gamut of the ‘60s at IU. The first is of Paulann Hosler Sheets, who arrived at the university in ’59 from a city in eastern Indiana near the Ohio border and subsequently played key roles in two major events of the early decade – the pro-Cuba march during the Missile Crisis of ’62 and the related case of the ‘Bloomington Three’ (B-3), students indicted under the Indiana Anti-Communism Act.

The other profile is of Dan Kaplan, a major campus leader, who helped successfully rally thousands of IU students against President Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia in 1970.

Many of the future New Leftists who enrolled at IU came from liberal family backgrounds while some had early exposure to radical political ideas. Most, looking back in time in 2013, called their activist experience at IU seminal. A few students of the left came from conservative Indiana families, and their time of political engagement at the university was both initially transformative as well as ultimately seminal.

Such was the experience of Paulann Sheets, who took  her BA degree at IU and subsequently won a fellowship to the grad school. She came to campus a Goldwater Republican and joined a sorority – in the stratified world of student housing, the upper stratum of the campus social universe. In a very short time, however, Paulann hooked up with the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) and became a Trotskyist as well as a premier campus activist.

Her first major action was the Fair Play for Cuba March of October ’62 – in opposition to President Kennedy’s naval blockade of the island during the tense Missile Crisis.  Paulann was part of a very small band of brothers and two sisters who planned to march across campus displaying their opposition on signs held aloft – so-called ‘speech on a stick’ –  with slogans like ‘Hands Off Cuba’ and ‘Stop the Blockade’. However, when the group assembled, they found themselves confronted by several thousand jeering, jingoistic fellow students.

The protest group, mostly YSA members, had previously agreed that Jim Bingham would make the final decision whether it was a ‘go’ or ‘no go’. Seeing the veritable sea of hostile counter-protestors before them, he called off the action, but Paulann and Polly Smith boldly announced they were going to march, mob or no mob. The guys, certainly more conscious of the potential dangers ahead, joined them.

In the midst of the Cold War with the USSR, the great bugbear, the marchers were predictably mobbed, signs shredded, punches thrown – all while campus security and the city police stood by impassively. Bravely, the tiny group marched on, fortunately essentially unscathed, before wisely abandoning the remainder of the route for safe refuge from the hostiles. Nevertheless, their statement had been made.

During the following spring of ’63, three of the YSA leaders – Jim Bingham, Ralph Levitt, and Tom Morgan – were indicted on trumped-up charges of conspiring to overthrow the government of the state under Indiana’s dubious McCarthy-style statute, so-called after the notorious political witch hunter of the ‘50s, the late Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. Their persecutor was the young, politically ambitious county district attorney, or DA, Thomas Hoadley.

Encouraged by YSA’s parent organization, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Paulann organized the ‘Committee to Aid the Bloomington Students’, or CABS, serving as its secretary on behalf of her three comrades whose education and lives were disrupted for the next two years by the DA’s willful political crusade.

Valedictorian from a very good high school and a first class student in IU’s Government Department, Paulann interrupted her own education, withdrawing from school for a time to travel the country on behalf of the B-3. The FBI’s Indianapolis Field Office considered her so effective that they recommended Paulann as a candidate for the ‘Index’, the secret list of citizens who, in event of national emergency were to be closely monitored, and in some cases interned.

Paulann Sheets at the IU reunion, August 2013

In her presentation at the reunion Town Hall, Paulann provided the backdrop for her vigorous activism:

I’m from Fort Wayne, Indiana. My name’s Paulann. Well, that’s a story in itself – Paulann Hosler Groninger Caplovitz Sheets. And I think it all goes back to about the 4^th grade when I had a teacher, and she taught everything, and her name was Sadie Baker Hatcher Hawkins Simon, and I must have been trying to live up to that.

And something that really stuck was what she said to us probably once a month which is, “History is the struggle of the ‘haves’ against the ‘have-nots.’” And it really stuck with me even though as a member of my family I identified as a Republican – a Goldwater Republican by the time I came here in ‘59. That’s where I was.

But at the heart of Goldwaterism in my parents’ creed was standing up for your principles. ‘Be true to thyself’. Well, I was a top student at Northside High School, but I knew nothing about the world. Nothing. And I didn’t know anything about myself. I didn’t know what was beautiful, what was true. I had just tried to meet all the expectations that were placed upon me, and did so, and then I came to Bloomington.

Well, first semester [of my Sophomore year] as a Government student there was a campaign for president going on, and [the Hollywood actress] Angie Dickinson and others arrived [in town to campaign for the Democratic ticket]. Jack Kennedy was running, and Richard Nixon was running. I was for Nixon. And I remember a sign that we put up that said something like, “If you trick our Dick, we’ll flush your John.”

I thought it was so clever, but I just shocked and shamed my Department of Government. You have to remember back then it was the Department of Government, not Political Science, that was pretentious and foolish.

And Bernie Morris – and I bet you remember Bernie [a professor of Government]. When I was still in the throes of my passion for Trotskyism in the sense that this is how I see the world – I can’t call myself a revolutionary socialist because if you’re not making a revolution 24/7, you really don’t deserve to call yourself that. But anyway, Bernie scoffed at this Political Science; he said, “Political Séance.” That says it all.

Anyway, in a nutshell, I began to learn about the world and of course discovered racism, sexism, poverty, all the things everybody else knew about, but I had been protected from. I was deeply shocked. But what’s ironic is that my real activism started with the march against the Cuban blockade in ’62.

That Republican family of mine – my father was quite a salesman for York Air Conditioning equipment. He would win big prizes in his company [including trips]. He went to Cuba in 1958 with my mother. And he was horrified at what he’d seen. This is before Castro came down from the hills [in late ‘58].

My father came back terribly impressed with Castro; it was the greatest thing that could have happened because he had seen child prostitution in the streets of Havana. And so I was predisposed to be a Cuban revolutionary supporter and have stayed one ever since. And unfortunately the struggle has gone on.

[Moderator: Didn’t you work with the Bloomington Three?]

Yes, I was the organizer of the ‘Committee to Aid the Bloomington Students’, thanks to the Socialist Workers Party. It was a great experience. I quit school for a year and a half and gave speeches here and there, trying to provide moral support to our great Ralph [Levitt], Tom [Morgan], and Jim [Bingham] who went through the ordeal imposed on them by DA Hoadley very bravely and with grace under fire.

The ‘Bloomington Three’ at IU – Levitt, Morgan, and Bingham

Floor time at the Town Hall was necessarily limited, and at this point Paulann broke off, unable to elaborate further about the ‘Committee’. Later she told me more of her work on behalf of the B-3, which I’ll summarize.

Ralph Levitt and Jim Bingham, both IU grad students, and Tom Morgan, an undergrad, were officers of the campus YSA as well as the ‘Fair Play for Cuba Committee’. They and others had been instrumental in the march (described above) and during the following spring they had invited a national YSA officer to speak on campus in what Paulann described as “a sedate affair before an academic audience.”

DA Hoadley, claiming that the speaker’s remarks were a call for revolution against the State of Indiana, quickly moved to indict the three YSA leaders. Paulann said they well understood that the grand jury’s decision was “also a reaction to the October ’62 anti-blockade march” – an attempt to intimidate students from speaking out on controversial issues as well as an unprecedented assault on freedom of speech at a university.

Almost simultaneously, YSA called a meeting with Paulann (then Paulann Hosler Groninger) in the chair, posing Lenin’s question ‘What is to be done?’ The national YSA and the SWP in New York recommended the creation of a local defense committee for the B-3. Paulann led the formation of CABS, or the Committee to Aid the Bloomington Students, to serve as a springboard for mobilizing national support for Ralph, Jim, and Tom.

Following the recommended modus operandi, she recruited concerned IU faculty, the better known the better, to lend their names to the committee’s letterhead. She successfully “rounded up about 15-17 worthies,” among whom were some of Indiana’s most prominent professors. The local CABS letterhead in turn provided leverage for acquiring the support of distinguished scholars at nationally-known universities, ensuring high visibility for the beleaguered B-3. Hence, Paulann regarded her recruitment efforts in Bloomington as her most important contribution to the defense of her friends and comrades.

The story of the B-3 continues, but that’s for another time. For now, suffice it to say that after having their lives turned upside down for a couple of years, the case finally ended well for the Bloomington Three.

Paulann later withdrew from the PhD program in Government and went on to Columbia University for a law degree at the urging of David Caplovitz, a sociologist whose work on the voiceless poor, The Poor Pay More, she admired. Eventually appointed an Assistant Attorney General of New York State, she subsequently did a stint as an adjunct law professor and is currently a member of a law firm specializing in assisting homeowners facing foreclosure. 

Paulann later went on to Columbia University for a law degree, was appointed an Assistant Attorney General of New York State, subsequently did a stint as an adjunct law professor, and is currently a member of a law firm specializing in assisting homeowners facing foreclosure.

Unlike Paulann Sheets, Dan Kaplan, IU ’70, appeared in Bloomington politically shaped, if not yet fully formed. He was born and raised in Gary, a steel town in northwestern Indiana. As a youngster there, Dan became acquainted with the Balanoff family.†  

The father of his Balanoff contemporaries was a steelworker’s union leader and a longtime member of the Old Left. Already at a young age, Dan would sit in their living room arguing the relative merits of Trotsky versus Stalin. Balanoff senior got Dan a summer job at a steel plant where he joined the union, the first of several in his long career in labor.

Dan’s activism got underway before his arrival at IU. He had been involved with the ‘Friends of SNCC’ (pronounced ‘snick’, supporters of the Black civil rights group, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) in the Chicago area. Dan had also attended SDS’s June National Council meeting in Ann Arbor MI before entering IU fall term ’66. He was soon drawn to the campus SDS chapter and quickly became a stalwart of the New Left.

Brother Jeff Sharlet was chapter president during Dan’s freshman year, and they became good friends. When Jeff graduated in ’67, Dan was elected SDS president and led the group during the Dow Chemical sit-in, the campus protest against Secretary of State Rusk, and other actions during 1968-69.

Let’s have Dan pick it up from here from his IU Town Hall remarks:

[In high school] I got involved a little bit with SNCC in the Chicago area and somehow ended up going to the SDS National Council meeting in Ann Arbor with someone in this room. Jim Balanoff and I spent a weekend there, so I was very focused on SDS when I came here to IU.

Long story short, or a little shorter, I became president of the SDS chapter here in Bloomington from 1967 into 1969. I later joined the campus YSA just a few weeks before the [national] upsurge against [Nixon’s] invasion of Cambodia [which began April 30, 1970].

Dan Kaplan, 2012

I left Bloomington in ’70; I went to New York for a year where I spent a lot of time at the National Office of the Socialist Workers Party, observing close up the functioning of the party’s central leadership. After a year in New York, I moved to the [San Francisco] Bay Area, where I became a staff member for the Northern California Peace Action Coalition. I organized against the war in Vietnam until the war ended when I lost my job.

I then became a social worker in the Department of Social Services in San Francisco. That gave me an opportunity to join the labor movement. I became a member of the Executive Board of the San Francisco local of the Social Workers Union and was involved in the city’s labor movement for a long time.

Then I went back to school and ended up becoming a community college instructor teaching American politics, international relations, and political philosophy. I always, I must admit – although I wouldn’t have necessarily said this to my students – I always taught from a Marxian perspective. I never had a problem delivering a radical analysis.

Eventually I ended up at the City College of San Francisco, working half-time for the faculty union while teaching Political Science courses half-time at the college. From there, I was hired to be the Executive Secretary of the San Mateo Community College Federation of Teachers, American Federation of Teachers [AFT] Local 1493. And I’m still holding that position today as well as teaching political philosophy classes from time to time.

I must say, as many people have said here at the Town Hall this morning, Bloomington really had a seminal influence on my mind and I think my values. They were already roughly [shaped] values, but they were solidified by my activism here in Bloomington, which has helped me stay really focused on my ideas of how to create a better world and a fundamentally successful movement for social change.

We haven’t been winning that battle obviously, but I’m still committed to engaging in the struggle.

A lifelong activist, Dan continues to serve as Executive Secretary of AFT 1493, which celebrated its 50^th anniversary this fall. In addition, he sits on the editorial board of the local’s newsletter, The Advocate, for which he occasionally writes. Dan was a co-organizer of the IU New Left reunion of 2013.

I don’t think it can be put much better than in Dan’s words – in their activist years at IU and during the decades since, Paulann and Dan, each in their different ways, have steadfastly striven ‘to create a better world’.

_____________________________________

*See M A Wynkoop, Dissent in the Heartland: The Sixties at Indiana University (2002).

†  On the Balanoffs, see http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2013/11/activist-legacies-in-hoosierland-lives.html