Between the first national student strike against war in April, 1934, and the second in April, 1935 the United States had seen mass strikes involving millions of workers in a general radicalization. That radicalization was evident on April 12, 1935 when over 100 campuses saw strikes involving 125,000 students, many of which were accompanied by violent assaults by police and fascists. Editor of the Columbia student newspaper and strike organizer James Weschler reports.

‘Strike Sweeps the Campus’ by James Wechsler from New Masses. Vol. 15 No. 4. April 23, 1935.

The author of the following article is a senior at Columbia University and the editor of The Spectator there. He took an active part in organizing the strike not only at Columbia but throughout the country.-THE EDITORS.

TWENTY-FOUR hours before the nation-wide student strike against war, Charles Walgreen, one of America’s renowned financial barons, withdrew his niece. from the University of Chicago. He did it with a bellowing which jarred even the front page of Mr. Hearst’s press. The self-styled rescue was well-timed, gallantly executed. As Mr. Walgreen later explained, he had saved the girl from “Communism” which, he assures us, is veritably rampant at the University. The act was reminiscent of a more glamorous era when solicitude for the fate of girl-like innocence was the rule, not the exception. Mr. Walgreen had seen the demon vice-wearing the horns of Communism—and snatched its victim away. But, like her ungrateful prototypes of an earlier day, the heroine is rumored to be indignant at her savior.

The episode could not have occurred at a more fortuitous moment. Had the offspring of one of our best families lingered another day, she might have been caught in the surging stream of anti-war action which swept the campus. For 2,500 Chicago students answered the strike call.

That day–April 12, 1935–is likely to be remembered. While diplomats were making pre-war gestures at Stresa, while Congress was allotting another unprecedented sum for militarizing the C.C.C., while the entire world was being propelled with alarming swiftness towards the second World War, the American Campus spoke out more decisively than ever before. Final estimates are still to be made; reports continue to drift in from outlying sections. But it is already safe to state that more than 125,000 students on nearly a hundred campuses were involved in the day’s momentous events. When a delegation representing the six organizations which sponsored the strike transmitted its declaration to President Roosevelt Friday afternoon, the echoes were still resounding through our ivory towers.

The picture is neither uniform nor unmarred. Friday’s drab skies reflected omens too threatening to be ignored; in the strike’s sweep across the country it encountered a grim prelude to that storm of reaction which America faces.

But there was an unmistakable, decisive advance. Five years ago an action of this kind, so broad in scope, so plain in purpose, so militant in tone, would have been hardly conceivable. Recall, for example, the situation only twelve months ago-the day of the first student anti-war strike. It would be unfair to minimize the significance of the first mass. action against war, but it must be acknowledged that the strike of 1934 was a minor one in comparison to that of 1935. Not more than 30,000 were enlisted in the walkout; the press, reflecting the attitude of the war-makers, treated it with indifference. In this light the momentous strides of the student movement can be most concisely estimated. A threatening world scene, more perilous with each passing hour, had exerted its influence. What was once an isolated fringe in the colleges was now a dynamic, compelling force.

Call the roll of the states and you will find that students within every territory rallied to the strike. In remote college towns and in industrial centers, from New York to California and from Maine to Georgia, the pro- test mobilized adherents.

The East was the main stronghold, as last year, but there were perceptible achievements in those sectors heretofore unpenetrated. While in New York, 3,500 students were challenging Dr. Butler’s bitter anti-strike pronouncement at Columbia, 1,500 students jamming the Great Hall at City College, 2,000 defying administrative reaction at Hunter, 1,500 crowding into an overflow meeting at N.Y.U., there were 3,000 assembled at Minnesota, 2,500 at Western Reserve, more than 1,000 in North Carolina and several thousand the figures have not yet been checked-on the West Coast where the most ruthless terror prevailed. In New England, Connecticut State College, Amherst, Smith, Wellesley and even Yale were among those to heed the strike summons. At Howard University several hundred responded; at Temple 2,000; at Brown, 1,300.

These are only random illustrations of the power, breadth and determination which marked this country-wide demonstration. Scores of other schools were involved, thousands of students on a roster too long to be detailed here.

This was one side-the side of promise, of struggle against the powers of war and fascism which confront the student body of the nation. It is a story replete with new successes, gains consolidated, awareness and sensitivity roused from the docile slumbers which so-called education has imposed. It is dramatic testimony to the genuine, unfaltering unity among six groups–the National Student League, the Student League for Industrial Democracy, the National Council of Methodist Youth, the Youth Section of the American League Against War and Fascism and the American Youth Congress.

So swift was word of the strike sped, so organized and firm was the pressure for it that, in some instances, college administrations capitulated. This was true at City College, Cornell, Virginia and a few other places where classes were either called off or traditional suppressive weapons abandoned. In some cases the administration virtually took part in discussion–but these were exceptions. In a number of places the fist of vested interest came down hard. The reason is eminently plain. So long as students confine their peace programs to quiet retreats or secluded forums, there is comparative harmony. But let them speak the language of struggle, of uncompromising mass action and the powers of reaction are unleashed.

At Michigan State, administrative officials openly endorsed violence directed against the strikers. In Los Angeles two girls were clubbed into unconsciousness by police. Eight were seized at Harvard for distributing leaflets. And again in Los Angeles crosses were burned and flaming fascist literature, urging “Protestants” to unite against the “Red menace” were circulated. At Harvard, rapidly gaining preeminence as the leading fascist array on the American campus–with California fighting hard for the lead-groups of students marched the Hitler goose-step, and in general aped the methods of Hitlerism.

These were characteristic incidents. Others are still being reported, and all are symptomatic of a decisive alignment of forces crystallizing on the campus. Arrayed against the strike were administrations–the mouthpieces of finance-capital’s rule over education— and administration agents within the student body. Why this division? Its origins rest in the class background of American students. They symbolize a middle class divided against itself, replete with illusions, hates, prejudices, victims of a crisis unparalleled in fury and eager to direct its wrath against a scapegoat. For a handful in the colleges, genuine self-interest places them on the side of reaction, they are the boys still comparatively secure, still destined for posts in their fathers’ banks and factories, the endowed sons of privilege who hope to make the most of it. But they are an ever-dwindling group. The others–the rank-and-file of vigilante bands are simply the prey of demagogy which plays an appealing tune on their emotional chords. Conscious of economic disaster, frightened out of their wits by the specter of hopelessness, they turn to any crusade of hate because they cannot break with those illusions which have been fostered in their class. They do the dirty work for the Board of Trustees; they prefer it to a recognition of their changed status in society, to their inevitable alignment with the working class in these life-and-death conflicts.

The Trustees crack down and their agents in the ranks mop up.

That is the motivation behind the roving vigilante bands which burst forth on April 12. In retrospect, several items stand out.

The word “strike” was not simply a slogan or battle-cry; it was symbolic of all those elements which made this venture distinct from the futile pacifism of 1916 or the detached aloofness of 1928. It was deliberately borrowed from an historic tradition; it is the language of social action, the technique of an organized working-class. It cemented the unity between students themselves only a fragment and the factory and farm workers, who are the decisive forces in the counter-attack against the plans of a privileged clique.

Another aspect was the influence exerted by the N.L.S. and the L.I.D. They were the compelling units in the spread of the strike. They gave initiative and direction to it. Around them gathered those thousands who recognize the immediate issues but who need leadership, organization, increased pressure. Where the N.S.L. and the L.I.D. are strong, the strike gained its greatest momentum and achieved a maximum clarity. If they had been more firmly rooted in the public schools of New York City, the frenzied devices of the authorities would not have proved so demolishing. If they had been a single, united organization, able to recruit more efficiently because they acted in complete harmony, administrations could not have tempered or diverted or subdued the strike. Where they possessed the widest following, fascist groups within the student body were most hesitant to emerge.

April 12 indicated that American students are ready, in ever-growing sections, to follow the paths laid down. Amalgamation of the N.S.L. and the L.I.D. could serve more than any other single step to insure that this be realized, to prevent the conversion of the student body in a storm troop reserve, to stem the tide of disaster which is rushing toward us. So long as they remain apart–while their programs and activities are so closely correlated–they will only enhance the difficulties of an already mountainous task.

In the dawn of April 12, two flags fluttered high above Morningside Heights. Run up under cover of darkness, one bore the inscription “STRIKE” in white letters on a blue background; the other was a black Nazi Swastika drawn on white bunting.

Later in the day we stood about, watching the flags fly in the cold, gray rain. A bevy of campus attendants were gathered around the flag-poles, seeking to haul down the emblems. Slowly the Swastika came rolling to the ground; a prolonged outburst of applause and cheering emerged from the throng. The “STRIKE” banner remained aloft, defying attempts to remove it; through some still obscure fortune, it maintained its supremacy until the day was almost done.

Perhaps the episode was in some manner symbolic. symbolic. Certainly, though every strategy was used against the strike, its adherents carried the day. The countless tales of courage and determination which occurred on April 12, of students braving every force exercised by a frightened ruling caste, are only the first of many to be written.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s to early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway, Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and more journalistic in its tone.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1935/v15n04-apr-23-1935-NM.pdf