Introduction to Troublemaker, part I
David Sullivan
Memorial board for David Sullivan, Chicago, 2009.
Editor’s Note:
The world has a way of occasionally turning itself upside down – just as narrative may, at times, reliably spin backwards. Which goes to say that having published the first chapter of David “Irish” Sullivan’s memoir Troublemaker in the Fall 2022 Cable Street, we are now presenting his Introduction to that book in two successive issues, Spring and Summer 2025.
Troublemaker chronicles Sullivan’s evolution into a political radical in New York City in the early 1960s. In the latter years of the decade, David and I were comrades in the Seward Park High School anti-war organization and worked together on an “underground” student paper, but afterward lost touch for many years. When we reconnected, circa 2005, our correspondence centered around our writing practices, and particularly David’s efforts toward finishing his memoir while running a construction firm that specialized in high-quality, low cost housing in Chicago.
A few weeks before he died unexpectedly in September 2009, David sent me several chapters of Troublemaker –those which he considered final, or nearly final drafts. After his death, I tried, without success, to locate the rest of his manuscript. Then in 2022, a mutual friend found a hard copy in his attic. This included the Introduction, which I had not yet read.
My sense is that David wrote the Introduction after he had completed at least in rough form the majority of the book, and outlined those chapters yet to come. Despite what I know to be his reticence about sharing any work he deemed “not perfect,” I am confident that given our present crisis, he would forgive my presenting it here in a very lightly edited form. No one I have met before or since believed more keenly than David in the capacity of writing to weave our individual experiences into the greater, commonly held fabric of history. Nor do I know of a writer who calls across the chasm between the Zeitgeist of a remembered moment, and the one in which he or she is writing, with greater integrity.
— Eric Darton
Part I
The gap between experience and its verbal description is immense. The writer willingly takes up the struggle to reduce the gap by bringing the descriptions nearer to the richness of experience.
— Ernst Schachtel, circa 1955 (attributed)
The historical record is arbitrary. Over a period of several days beginning Tuesday, April 23, 1968, about 750 students occupied several buildings on the Columbia University campus and the school closed down. On Friday of that same week between 130,000 and 150,000 high school students in New York City went on strike against the war in Vietnam. The occupation and strike at Columbia figures in almost every account of the 1960s while there is virtually no historical memory of the much larger high school anti-war strike.
Although the late 1960s are often remembered for the student protest movement on college and university campuses, high school students across the country also engaged in an unprecedented level of political activity. They organized in their schools for student and civil rights as well as against the war in Vietnam on a scale and with an intensity never seen before or since. A protracted period of protest and confrontation between students and school authorities assumed the form of petitions, protest meetings, “underground” newspapers, picket lines, marches, walkouts, sit-ins, strikes, school occupations, and even pitched battles with the police. At some high schools, the student movement that developed in 1968 and 1969 took on the character of a rebellion against school systems as a whole and the social and political order in general, producing in the process a large group of teenagers trained in political organizing and committed to radical social change.
What follows is, for the most part, an account of my experience in that movement, particularly at my own high school, Seward Park, on New York City’s Lower East Side. In New York City, but also in many other places, our movement was broadly based. Our unprecedented anti-war strike in the spring of 1968 effectively shut down New York City high schools. The protracted occupation of many high schools during a teachers’ strike the next fall led to the birth of many alternative schools. A sickout of 300,000 students in December of that year shut down the school system again. As another major wave of protest spread through New York City high schools in April and May, 1969, a research group of Columbia University faculty estimated conservatively that in the previous six months there had been 2,000 high school rebellions in the U.S. That spring, three out of five high school principals responding to a national survey conducted by the National Association of Secondary School Principals reported “some form of active protest” in their schools. The high school student movement reflected in hundreds of thousands of teenage students the larger social and political movements of the day and, in turn, influenced those movements to a significant degree.
Although often regarded as an appendage of the college level student movement, political activity in the high schools had its own distinctive character. Composed of teenagers, it was, of course, less sophisticated than the movement of college age students, but was frequently more militant. High school activists made no theoretical contributions to the movement as a whole, but their organizations were more rooted in local communities and were often able to cut across class, racial, and ethnic lines in a way that college level political activity usually could not. Many youth who turned to radical politics during their teenage years went on to participate in politics in college and/or as adults. The defenders of the status quo had reason to be troubled by growing political activity in the high schools, because it was clear evidence that the rebellion of the 1960s was spreading in American society, gaining influence in a particularly volatile section of the population.
The high school student movement deserves a proper history, but I am not the one to write it. I offer an autobiographical account of the period, sticking closely to what I know to be true, because I have neither the time nor the means to research such a project. Hopefully, some enterprising academic or one of the former high school activists who had more of an overview of the movement than I did will take on this task. If so, they have their work cut out for them. Despite the breadth and depth of political activism among teenagers in the 1960s, this phenomenon was not well documented at the time and has not been the subject of much investigation since then.
I hope that my account of our battles at Seward Park at least conveys a sense of the period and the politics and can serve as an example of what happened in one form or another at many other schools in New York and around the country. Because the high school student movement was part of the broader protest movement and the personal and political aspects of the period were closely related, perhaps my story has the virtue that it depicts our youthful political activity as it was actually experienced. Although only a comprehensive history of our movement would reveal the full scope of the rebellion that we took for granted at the time, a personal account may render a complex period more vivid and meaningful to the modern reader.
My narrative may also have value because, in the broadest sense, my experiences are representative of the period. While the events described in this book probably seem unusual by today’s standards, at least in New York City they were not unusual for the late 1960s. Although New York City was the bastion of the high school student movement nationally, Seward Park was not particularly known as a center of unrest. Of the significant political events described in this book, in every case much more dramatic examples can be found at other local high schools of the time. Where a little more than half of the students walked out of my school after Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, a number of other high schools emptied almost completely that day. Because our anti-war strike of late April 1968 conflicted with midterm exams at Seward Park, it was much less successful there than at virtually every other school in the city. We began publishing our “underground” student newspaper only after several other such local school papers had been in existence for some time. The eight week long student/teacher occupation of my school during the New York City teachers’ strike in the fall of 1968 was notable, but it was only one of many such occupations. On the Lower East Side of Manhattan, we were remote from the political battle that was the focus of the strike and the source of a major crisis for New York City. Our “riot” after the teacher’s strike lasted less than ten minutes and resulted in 16 arrests and 13 serious injuries. As such, Seward Park rated just a paragraph or no mention at all in front page newspaper stories about walkouts and rioting at a number of other high schools that day. At our school, political actions were sporadic, but many other schools were in almost constant turmoil. The NYC High School Student Union “Spring Offensive” of April and May 1969 passed us by at Seward Park, but shook a number of other local high schools to their foundations. My personal altercations with school authorities and the police were common for young radicals in the late 1960s. Of the political activists at my high school, I was no more prominent than three dozen other students. My role was that of a foot soldier in a large and pervasive movement. Only a comparative study of the student movement at a number of high schools and a survey of individual activists would clarify exactly how typical my experience was, but it surely was not exceptional.
The reader is advised to keep this perspective in mind, since autobiographical writing has an inherent tendency to place the author at the center of events, subtlety implying that those events were also central to the period. All personal experience is limited and partial in the extreme, the smallest fraction of a broader social experience. I write with a sense of apprehension, because it is neither my intention to inflate my own role in the movement nor the importance of events at my school. Subsequently influenced by a political tradition that stressed collective achievement rather than the individual’s role in politics, I cannot quite overcome a sense of immodesty when writing about myself. Moreover, it has never been clear to me to what extent the experiences that meant so much to me personally are of interest to others. I am convinced, however, that the high school movement of which I was a participant was an important phenomenon. Hopefully, a personal and partial account of that movement will go some distance to illustrating the movement as a whole.
Either because of some presence of mind or because of my packrat tendencies, I saved copies of most of the memos, leaflets, posters, pamphlets, and newspapers referred to in the text and cited in the end notes, beginning in high school a collection of “New Left” documents and publications which grew over the years into what is probably one of the largest private archives of such material. I also kept diaries and notes at various times, squirreled away personal letters that I received, saved my report cards, program cards, and other school paperwork, and preserved a collection of photographs that I took in the late 1960s. In later years, I obtained heavily censored copies of my police and FBI files, a portion of which relates to my time in high school. I realized the truth of the old proverb that “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” after my parents died and I came into possession of our family papers. My mother and father had saved practically every letter that they had ever received and carbon copies of many that they had sent, including those concerning my troubles at school. To check names, dates, and details, as well as to verify the sequence of events, I consulted newspaper archives, other institutional archives and several historical and journalistic accounts of the period. A number of my friends read drafts of all or part of this manuscript and kindly offered valuable suggestions, criticisms, and some additional documentation.
My narrative is constructed around this material, but still relies heavily on memory, both my own and that of former classmates and teachers. I am aware that memory can be an unreliable source for writing a personal memoir. It is sometimes faulty, proverbially “hazy,” and has a tendency to be conveniently selective. I found it revealing to piece together my early life from the vantage point of late middle age. More than once in the course of my research, I was surprised to discover from reliable sources that I had “remembered” events in the wrong order, synchronous with other events that they could not have been associated with, or separated from other events by significant time and space when they had, in fact, followed each other in rapid succession and in close proximity. For reasons that are not clear to me, there are some periods that I could not remember well, hence there are gaps in my narrative, periods of time for which, more than forty years later, I felt that I could not accurately reconstruct what happened. While I believe that I remember many events from my youth vividly, others participating in the same actions may recall them differently, and perhaps more accurately. Not surprisingly, I remember best my own personal triumphs and humiliations, our collective moments of victory and defeat, as well as the excitement and romance of the period, and have all but forgotten most of the hard work in between. With only a couple of exceptions discussed in the end notes, I have deferred to the documentary record rather than to my memory when the two conflicted. In those cases where no documentary material was available and my memory has failed me, hopefully it is in matters of detail, not substance. Whether I was working primarily from documents or memory, I have tried to offer an accurate and honest account of my experiences, including those which were not pleasant or flattering to me. At the same time, I make no pretense that this book is anything other than my story, told from my point of view.
More problematic than weighing documentary evidence or sorting out my memories is the difficulty of separating what I think now about many things from what I thought about them as a teenager more than four decades ago. Most insight on the past comes only with reflection and is filtered through a summation of experience subsequent to the events under consideration. The personal stresses and strains of adolescence, in particular, were difficult to put in context at the time. While recognizing the fundamentally political character of our rebellion, I have tried not to graft a more sophisticated political viewpoint onto our actions after the fact than was present at the time. Although the perspective from which this book is written can only be the present, I have attempted to capture the spirit of the times even if some of what that meant is now regarded as politically incorrect. My narrative is laced with commentary based on my thinking about the period since high school. In the text, I try to indicate from which vantage point I am writing, but, inevitably, my narrative is some combination of perspectives. Of course, even with the benefit of hindsight, real life is not like a novel in which everything comes together at the end, all of the players’ motives are revealed, and justice is done.
In an unabashedly partisan book written from the point of view of students about serious conflict between them and their school system, the teaching and school administration professions inevitably receive short shrift. The 1960s were a period of general crisis for American society and the New York City school system was experiencing its own particular crisis. Willingly or unwillingly, school administrators and teachers often placed themselves in a position of defending the status quo. As such, they were often the instruments of school disciplinary action and, therefore, the objects of our protest. One consequence of writing so long after the fact is that almost all of the teachers and administrators dealt with uncharitably in my narrative must be retired by now and many have probably passed away. In the latter case they are beyond criticism or embarrassment. In the former case it is my pleasure to rake a few of them over the coals even in their old age.
Although there are no kind words for school administrators to be found in this book, lest I give the wrong impression (and this general disclaimer will only be issued once), I had many good teachers in my youth and some who were outstanding. I benefited from the extraordinary kindness and understanding of more than a few great teachers, who also inspired me about the subjects that they taught. Several profoundly influenced my life and contributed to developing in me a humanity and a sense of right and wrong that led me, like so many others, to challenge the school system that employed them. Many of my teachers, though not most, tried to come to terms with our rebellion and a few even joined it, often at the risk of their careers. Their politics aside, from the vantage point of late middle age, I marvel that so many of my teachers were able to withstand the meat grinder of the New York City public school system, remaining so idealistic and committed to their profession under the most difficult conditions. I should also say that, all considered, I received a decent education, which was certainly more of a credit to the individual effort of my teachers than to the bureaucrats who ran the New York City schools at the time.
Several of my professors in college and graduate school stressed that one did not study history to “learn lessons.” This prohibition is well taken in the sense that history never repeats itself in exactly the same way and any specific lessons would apply only to a particular time, place, and set of conditions. There is a certain nostalgia among many of my contemporaries for at least aspects of the 1960s and a yearning among many of today’s disaffected youth for what they imagine the period was like. But, the 1960s are now history, practically ancient history for today’s youth, and will not return or be repeated. The next large scale rebellion against the established order will be the product of new and different circumstances. As a social and political phenomenon, it will have features that cannot yet be determined. It would be prudent for today’s political activists studying the 1960s to be very careful what specific lessons from the period they transport directly to the present or, like thoughtless generals, they will end up “fighting the last war” instead of the war that they actually have to win.
In a larger sense, however, “learning lessons” is the only reason to study the past. It was not possible in the 1960s to understand one’s parents or their generation as a whole without at least some knowledge of the prevailing trends and central events that shaped and defined them, namely a pervasive racism and sexism, the Great Depression, the rise and fall of fascism and its consequences, World War II, and the Cold War. In the same vein, today’s youth must find it difficult to comprehend their parents’ generation without some grasp of the Vietnam war, the civil rights and anti-war movements, the growth of the modern feminist movement, the rise of youth culture and alternative lifestyles, the ghetto riots, and the further development of nationalist consciousness among minorities.
Interestingly enough, progressive political activists today confront a circumstance similar to one that my generation faced. A characteristic of the rebellion of the 1960s was its discontinuity with the major period of rebellion that preceded it. The Cold War political atmosphere of the 1950s, and particularly the McCarthy period, had all but eliminated the left wing as an organized force from the American political scene by the time that the civil rights movement was in full swing and the U.S. became deeply involved in the war in Vietnam. In retrospect, this break in continuity on the left had both advantages and disadvantages for the student movement of the 1960s. On the one hand, we were not automatically obliged to take on the political baggage of the “Old” Left, nor were we always tarred with the communist brush. On the other hand, we did not situate ourselves within an established political tradition and often could not benefit from the valuable accumulated experience of political activists who came before us. At the time, my friends and I were ambivalent about the role of the Old Left. We did not want to accept their leadership in the movement, but we also regarded the lack of connection with our history embodied in them as a disadvantage. Personally, I wanted desperately to learn everything that I could about the great labor organizing campaigns of the 1930s and 40s, the communist and socialist movements, and the post war civil rights movement. But, while my radical high school classmates and I may have looked for inspiration to previous periods of rebellion, from day to day we usually took our lead from other high school activists or college and graduate school age student leaders who were only four to ten years older than we were. We had few immediate mentors from the older generation to teach us about politics.
Although not for the same reasons, the gap in time and knowledge between today’s student activists and the 1960s is now even greater than it was between activists of the 1960s and those of the 1930s and 40s. Like every generation before them, young people today are absorbed in the present, but, platitude that it may be, they would do well to know their history, especially that of the recent past. To change the world, you have to understand it. To understand it, you have to know how it became that way. With more than a little gumption we used to say, “Either you can make history or history will make you.”
The details of our struggle with the school administration at Seward Park in 1968 and 1969 may be of little practical consequence for today’s generation of activists, but perhaps students at the beginning of the 21st century can learn something, both in positive and negative terms, from qualities of our student movement that transcend the last 40 years. On the one hand, the passion and strong sense of commitment that characterized our movement, the spirit of daring to challenge arbitrary and unreasonable authority, and our willingness to fight, and to fight hard, for causes that mattered are the prerequisites of any serious challenge to the status quo. Our ability to see through the slick veneer of modern American capitalism and our exposure of fundamental inequalities in our social system, while dated in some of their particulars, are still worthy objects of study. In contrast to the present day preoccupation with single issues or interest group concerns, our attention to larger social and political issues and our focus on the question of political power seems so refreshing. Our emphasis on the class nature of our society, so well obscured by popular myth and culture, official propaganda, and advertising, rings as true today as it did then.
On the other hand, a certain self-destructive impulse of the left, as well as pronounced sectarian and dogmatic attitudes, are also apparently transcendental qualities of radical politics. The fondness that some of my contemporaries and I had for political orthodoxies and a certain nihilism that we promoted seem to plague the left of every generation. In a general sense, most of the important problems that we faced and the difficult questions that we had to answer repeat themselves over and over again in one form or another in radical politics. If some of the particulars of these problems and how we coped with them are now out of date, the general questions of worldview, political orientation, methods of leadership, forms of organization, and ethics are not.
In the 1980s, after I was long out of school, a group of student organizers summed up the idealism of many students by saying that what they wanted was “a life with a purpose.” I do not recall that my friends or I ever expressed this sentiment in those words while we were in high school, but, fundamentally, it was that general notion which motivated us at the time. We rebelled against the regimentation of school; we did not aspire to join American corporate culture; we rejected Cold War ideology; and we refused to accept the lifestyles of our parents’ generation without question. We did not trust our government’s motives, either at home or abroad, and we strived to correct glaring social injustices. Although harshly critical of American society, we were also forward looking and hopeful. We were confident that we could change things for the better. We wanted our lives to have a meaning beyond just going to school, going to work, earning a living, or having a career. In another time and in another place we might have sought that meaning in religion, social work, or some patriotic calling, but in the 1960s the core of the student movement located it in a concerted rebellion against the establishment. Many came to reject “the good life” in favor of one dedicated to political opposition to the system. While it is true that we responded mostly to cultural, social, and political problems, not more fundamental economic concerns, they were real problems nonetheless. The search for purpose and meaning in one’s life is as pressing now as it was in the late 1960s. Although the immediate issues are different, I would suggest that many of today’s students might find that purpose and meaning in roughly the same place that some of my classmates and I found it over 40 years ago.
By late 1968, the turmoil that surrounded our political activity at Seward Park pushed our school administrators close to the breaking point. Apparently, they judged that stationing an entire detachment of the police riot squad in our school for the balance of the school year was the only way to maintain order and control. Similarly, the general rebellion of the 1960s challenged our social and political system as a whole, ultimately revealing it to be more fragile than the authorities would have had the public believe at the time. It only became clear in the 1970s and 80s just how seriously government at all levels had regarded this challenge to their authority, how desperate their response to the perceived threat had been, and, in the process, how unstable the political system had become.
Having said this, while the reaction of the authorities to the student movement at Seward Park was similar to that at many other high schools, at least in New York City, our school was not necessarily a microcosm of how American society responded to the upsurge of the 1960s. While our administrators in high school resorted only to threats, disciplinary action, and calling the police to maintain order, making no attempt to co-opt our movement, the social and political system as a whole proved to be more flexible. Although disenchanted youth in the 1960s felt a certain sense of common identity, our rebellion was not a homogenous or highly organized movement and it had no central leadership. What we called “The Movement” had many components, diverse points of view, and dozens of only nominally related political, social, and cultural agendas. At different times, everything from long hair to terrorist aspirations placed one in the movement. Despite our protestations to the contrary, the cultural aspect of our rebellion was eventually absorbed in sanitized form into the dominant culture, with much money made in the process. Of the political component, part could be redirected into electoral politics, as happened with Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign; part could be diverted into academic pursuits or activities such as the Peace Corps, for example; part could simply be deflected or stonewalled; and part, for instance the Black Panther Party, was repressed by force. American society demonstrated once again in the 1960s an amazing ability to adapt to rapid technological development, to mediate cultural differences, and to isolate advocates of radical change while resisting fundamental change to the established social and political order.
Although American society polarized in the 1960s and many actively opposed the civil rights and anti-war movements, at Seward Park we had no organized opposition among the students and no competition on the left for their attention. This is not to say that most students agreed with us, but they did not actively disagree with us either, or, at least, their disagreement never took organizational form. Ours was always a minority movement that survived because it sometimes enjoyed a broader sympathy among the students. It only occasionally attracted true mass support, but, in all cases, we had the political playing field to ourselves. For most of my time in high school, our only opponents were the school administration, the police, and a minority of teachers who felt obliged to take up the cause of our school authorities. Only in my senior year was our movement thrown into conflict with the majority of teachers, the subject of the last several chapters of this book.
To be continued in our next issue
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