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NY Times, Sept. 26, 2019
Training Teenagers for Guerrilla Warfare in the Wealthy Suburbs? Welcome
to 1969
By Rick Perlstein
In the last year of the 1960s, a political poster began showing up on
dorm room walls. It showed a hand holding up two fingers in a peace
symbol, captioned “1966.” Below that, in a second image captioned
“1967,” the index finger was lowered, middle finger up. “1968” was
symbolized with a raised fist. The final image depicted an index finger
extended horizontally, with the thumb pointed upward like the hammer of
a pistol. That was 1969 — a year when a taste for political violence had
even spread to high schools in high-income New York suburbs.
By then, formerly pacifist antiwar activists had begun drilling with M1
rifles — part of what the newly formed Weathermen called “bringing the
war home.” The cutting edge of the civil rights movement was
game-planning military sorties as much as marches. And even a review in
The New York Times praised a book titled “Look Out, Whitey! Black
Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama!” as an account that “arcs over the rotting
outposts of the Republic like a mortar shell shedding its sulphurous
glare, and lands plump in the heartland to detonate the conclusion that
‘it is clear that America as it now exists must be destroyed.’”
The spring of 1969 had brought a wave of student takeovers of university
buildings. The most dramatic ended when members of Cornell University’s
Afro-American Society exited the student union building armed with
rifles supplied to them by members of Students for a Democratic Society
— one with a bandoleer of shotgun shells across his chest. Then,
hundreds of students eagerly fell into line behind the militants as they
led a procession through the center of campus.
The coming 1969-70 school year was anticipated with fear and trembling.
It was one of the reasons Woodstock was greeted so rapturously that
August — and not just by the young people Abbie Hoffman immediately
christened “Woodstock Nation”: It hadn’t descended into “Lord of the
Flies,” as many people had fully expected. Instead, “Bethel produced a
feeling of friendship, camaraderie, and — an overused phrase — a sense
of love among those present,” as Time magazine put it.
A suggestion of how well-placed that paranoia was could be found in an
astonishing item of the front page of The Times, the morning of
Woodstock’s first day, Aug. 15. “Guerrilla War Tactics Taught at
Scarsdale High,” it was headlined. It described an elective course from
the elite suburban high school’s summer session, which awarded a half
credit toward graduation. It was accompanied by a photograph captioned,
“Stephen Kling, teacher, waves toy gun and holds ‘grenade.’ With him are
male students and girl portraying a peasant.”
Mr. Kling explained, “Revolution and guerrilla warfare are happening all
over the world, and I think students in Scarsdale should know about it.”
He had also taught the course the previous year — when field day took
place not in the woods along the Bronx River Parkway but in Scarsdale
itself, whose “takeover” the students strategized by studying the
vulnerabilities of its public buildings and infrastructure. (“We found
the village would be very easy to sabotage.”) One pupil received an A
for a paper in which she discussed adding LSD to the water supply.
The superintendent of schools was quoted as finding nothing to object to
in the class. Another administrator, a bit more defensive, said
Scarsdale High encouraged offerings that were “relevant to today’s
world.” He continued, “We have lots of unorthodox courses in our
curriculum. Why, we have courses in black-white relations, science
fiction and mythology.”
Mr. Kling, for his part, insisted his course had no ideological agenda,
adding, “I don’t believe that a public school should organize students
for action.”
It is reasonable to surmise, however, some of his pupils saw it as more
than just a social studies lesson. One underground high school newspaper
published in New York City that year was called The Street Fighter. An
essay in another, collected in a volume called “How Old Will You Be in
1984?: Expressions of Student Outrage from the High School Free Press,”
proposed a strategy for shutting down schools by destroying all paper
forms: “The success of a coup d’état is dependent upon the amount of
confusion that can be created in the establishment during the actual
takeover.” A student interviewed for another book, “The High School
Revolutionaries,” promised, “The pigs’ schools will be destroyed unless
they serve the people.”
That spring had seen an epidemic of student uprisings in New York City
high schools, heralded by a citywide high school underground newspaper:
“From April 21 to May 19 is our month! The streets, the schools, the
communities are all ours, we’re going to take them back.” (Demands
included sharing hiring and dismissal power with students and an end to
suspensions.) One day of action saw fires at Erasmus Hall High School in
Brooklyn and DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, and the smashing
of the windshield of a police cruiser in Queens.
And all signs suggested that the next school term would be uglier. At
Georgetown, a senior administrator reported, “The freshmen are much more
radical than the seniors, and I’m told the high school students coming
up are even more so.” Though the underground paper The Berkeley Barb put
it more colorfully: “Che Guevara is thirteen years old, and he is not
doing his homework.” And here they were, a concerned Times reader could
marvel, out in the woods practicing their tactics, with their teacher
leading the rebel contingent. So, the fact that a half-million young
people could come together in Yasgur’s field and the worst that came of
it were some bad acid trips was an enormous relief.
Perhaps, just perhaps, 1969 was a more innocent time after all. Along
the Bronx River Parkway, The Times reported: “The game was briefly
interrupted by two Scarsdale policemen. They said they had received a
call from an unidentified woman that teen-agers armed with guns were
running through the woods.
“The policemen left after Mr. Kling assured them that the guns were toys.”
Rick Perlstein is the author of “The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon
and the Rise of Reagan.”
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