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Chapter 2 The Quaker Schools The campuses of Swarthmore, Haverford, and Bryn Mawr Colleges are about as far away from the gritty neighborhoods of Philadelphia as one can possibly get. Two of these liberal arts colleges-Haverford and Bryn Mawr-tended to coordinate their student activism; one of them-Swarthmore-was more within the urban orbit of the city of Chester in Delaware County. All three played critical roles in the emergence and development of the white New Left Movement in greater Philadelphia. Swarthmore, for example, was in the vanguard of what became the New Left's early community organizing strategy, the SDS Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). Swarthmore activists were in the forefront of the efforts of radical students to find a way to break out of what they felt was the ivory tower insularity oftheir campus to connect with "real people." As such, they pioneered the construction of a cross-class, cross-racial alliance with elements of the black community in Chester. Haverford's activists, less communal and more idiosyncratic, were leaders in the earliest criticisms of U.S. intervention in Indochina. Most striking were the precocious and extraordinary efforts of Russell Stetler, the Philadelphia area's best known and most controversial student antiwar leader through the middle 1960s. Finally, Bryn Mawr, the only women's college considered in this study, provides an avenue to follow the processes by which civil rights and antiwar activists became pioneers in the creation ofsecond wave feminism. Swarthmore College In a 1956 mock election, Swarthmore College students voted for Adlai Stevenson over Dwight David Eisenhower, 375 (53.5%) to 318 (45.2%); that same year the senior class president was future scientist Jeremy Stone, while its most celebrated undergraduate was future P. D. Q. Bach Peter Schickele. This idyllic, leafy campus was "terribly ingrown and self-centered," according to editors of the campus paper, The Quaker Schools 35 the Phoenix. There was a consistent flow of dissident speakers invited to campus-A. J. Muste, Norman Thomas, I. F. Stone, Dorothy Daybut complaints of student apathy ruled, with one editor lamenting, "Even Sputnik is discussed merely as a sort of scientific curiosity." At mid-century, the campus, with a surprisingly strong fraternity presence , seemed dormant, with more energy involved in pushing a very reluctant faculty and administration to establish a Sociology Department than in disarmament and civil rights issues.I In the face of the first sit-ins of February 1960, over one-third of Swarthmore students signed a petition sent to Woolworth's and Kress's to desegregate their southern lunch counters. But when some students joined a solidarity picket in Philadelphia, Phoenix editors called their efforts "highly questionable" and concluded that "impulsive reaction motivated by moral indignation . . . may lead to more harm than good" by entrenching resistance and alienating Southern moderates. Indeed the Student Council refused to support the picketers.2 Over the next months, as SNCC formed and the sit-in movement spread across the South, Swarthmore began to pay more attention. Swarthmore students participated in some of these events, reporting through the Phoenix their sense of excitement and their developing identification with the young civil rights activists. Over the next several years, the Swarthmore experience was comparable to that at most other elite, liberal institutions: idealistic undergraduates would be energized and motivated by the heroism of the civil rights activists, especially those of SNCC and CORE. A small but influential segment would join such efforts by going south to participate in integration struggles, by visiting southern sites to report back to campus about the stirring events, or by examining how such idealism could be invested in more local venues, such as Philadelphia and nearby Chester.3 The class of 1964, totaling 259 students, slightly more males than females and 80 percent from public high schools, were selected from an application pool of more than 2,000. That year, 1960, the students overwhelmingly supported Kennedy over Nixon, 69.3 to 28.1 percent ; the faculty support for JFK was even stronger, 83.6 percent. Fraternity rush was the lowest in six years-only 59 pledges-and a small group of students, many of them red-diaper babies, including Ollie Fein, Mimi Feingold, and Jerry Gelles, organized a trip to revolutionary Cuba during winter break. Clearly a critical mass was beginning to form-a post-McCarthy cluster of student activists, children of Old Leftists, liberals, and pacifists, who responded to a variety of issues including Cuba, civil rights, and the...

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