The year was 1947. With the end of the Second World War and the return to civilian life, Swarthmore's student body grew to unprecedented numbers. Half of the men in the student body were veterans of the armed forces. The cost of a year's room and board had risen to $600. And at the beginning of that September, 50 years ago, Paula Adler (Golden) '48, Bobbie Darrow (Hays) '48, and Larry Weis-krantz '49 attended the first Congress of the U.S. National Student Association (NSA), in Madison, Wis.
"We went to the meeting with unqualified skepticism," Weiskrantz said later in the Phoenix. "We re-turned, however, with overflowing enthusiasm and a deep conviction that an organization had been formed that could play a significant role in the progress of American education."
The goals of the convention were twofold: Students wrote a constitution for the association and also attempted to map out its goals for the coming year. Convention delegates discussed the formation of an information service to educate student councils about each other's actions, drew up a Student Bill of Rights, and argued about how strongly the NSA should encourage actions to ease racial segregation and discrimination.
Even before the convention began, controversy raged over an important question: Should the NSA affiliate with the communist-dominated International Union of Students, which had been formed in Prague in 1946? It was agreed to send an American delegation to Prague the following year to enter membership negotiations with the IUS, but in March a communist coup in Czechoslovakia and the subsequent crackdown on the Czechoslovakian Student Union&emdash;an action applauded by the IUS&emdash;had settled the question. The 30 Swarthmore students who had applied to be members of the negotiating team for the NSA were doubtless disappointed to miss a chance for a trip to Prague, but Swarthmore had found other ways to become involved with the NSA.
The student body had voted to affiliate with the NSA in November 1947, and at the organizational meeting of the Pennsylvania Region of the NSA that December, Swarthmore's delegation agreed to host the region's race relations clinic "to investigate, compile, and disseminate information concerning racial and religious discrimination in the colleges of the Pennsylvania Region and to recommend programs of action which can alleviate such discriminatory practices." A Swarthmore freshman, Ralph Lee Smith '51 was elected regional publicity director, and Newt Garver '51 was chosen to head the committee to investigate fund drives for international relief by colleges in the region.
The regional race relations clinic was conducted by members of Swarthmore's own Race Relations Club, which had been lobbying the College for increased minority enrollment. Its members surveyed every college and junior college in the state about discriminatory practices and recommended increased educational efforts among their fellow students.
Swarthmore continued its active role in the Pennsylvania Region of the NSA over the next several years. The race relations clinic remained at the College, and Ken Kurtz '51 succeeded Smith as regional publicity chair after Smith became regional president, a position Kurtz held the following year. Both moved on to run for positions at the national level&emdash;Smith was national publicity chair in 1949&endash;50, and Kurtz ran unsuccessfully for national president the following year. But by the fall of 1948, the Phoenix noted, "Despite the fact that the NSA represents the entire Swarthmore student body, the actual participation in its programs came from only a very few students.... At the Albright (College) regional meeting just held, it was quite apparent that Swarthmore had lost the high place she once held in the Pennsylvania region."
Smith attributes this decline to a more general loss of enthusiasm for national and international action across the country as the "veterans' generation" neared graduation. "There was a tremendous feeling that a great war had been fought, and now came the peace, and we wanted to be involved.... I regard the veterans' generation at Swarthmore and nationally as the last of the Victorians," he says. "We had a tremendous faith in progress, faith in rationality in the long run, faith that you could accomplish something by working within the system. The weakness of the NSA was that it could never develop a domestic program that was interesting. Student governments just didn't know what to do with it between meetings."
Indeed coverage of the NSA in the Phoenix shows some of this tension between national and local actions. At the national level, the organization issued resolutions on such things as loyalty oaths, student rights, discrimination in American colleges, and the Korean War. It investigated college athletics and organized a nationwide system of student discount cards. The national organization also negotiated with the International Union of Students to arrange student exchanges and organized summer tours of Europe.
By contrast the regional NSA organized student music and arts festivals, sponsored workshops on how to make student councils run more smoothly, lobbied against Pennsylvania laws requiring loyalty oaths from professors, and worked to make absentee voting legal in Pennsylvania.
"Most of Swarthmore's participation in the NSA was attending meetings and conventions, and, on one or two occasions, hosting those conventions. The appeal was that it had a strong international aspect," said Frank Sieverts '55.
Sieverts believes that Swarthmore's participation in the NSA brought something unique to the Pennsylvania region. "There was an undercurrent of civic courage involved," he says. Sieverts was elected regional president in his junior year, and he brought the regional conference to Swarthmore in December 1953. "This was the era of Joe McCarthy," he explains. "Swarthmore had a reputation as a liberal campus, upholding the cause of liberty in the face of all this. We had professors who were refugees from Berkeley and the (California) loyalty oaths and professors who were refugees from Germany. Swarthmore was an oasis of free thought, and there was a sense that we had a responsibility to bring that spirit to the NSA."
After the mid-'50s Swarthmore's leadership in the NSA dissipated. While students continued to attend regional and national conferences, they generally turned their attentions to other things. When the NSA experienced financial difficulties in the early 1950s, small groups within the national leadership knowingly accepted financial support from foundations that were fronts for the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA and the State Department were taking a keen interest in student political movements during the Cold War, and, according to a history of the NSA by Angus Johnston, the NSA leaders who were "in the know" (apparently not all were, especially those on the domestic side) were asked to provide information on foreign student activists.
The CIA relationship was exposed in the February 1967 issue of Ramparts magazine. At Swarthmore the student council resolved to withhold its annual dues "pending a complete investigation of NSA's effectiveness on our campus and its involvement with the Central Intelligence Agency." In the Phoenix Barry Wohl '69, sponsor of the resolution, explained what he had learned about the NSA&endash;CIA connection and suggested a course of action. The CIA had been strongly influencing which students were selected to lead the national organization for the previous 15 years, he wrote, suggesting that "the next step is to encourage other small, liberal schools to follow our lead, withdraw from NSA, attend the Congress with us, and rejoin only when the NSA makes itself more democratic."
Swarthmore sent Bruce Campbell '70 to the summer 1967 NSA convention. Upon his return he reported in the Phoenix: "I did gradually become convinced of one thing: that the question of Swarthmore's membership in NSA is not very important. Swarthmore's dropping out of or remaining in NSA will obviously not strongly affect either institution." A vote by the student body in November was representative of Campbell's ambivilence: 211 students voted to withdraw from the NSA, and 153 voted to remain.
In December the student council voted to end Swarthmore's membership in the National Student Association. Twenty years had passed, almost to the day, between the idealistic vote by Swarthmore students to affiliate with the national student movement and their disillusioned decision to terminate this affiliation. n
Elizabeth Weber '98 is an economics major. Her articles about College history have appeared frequently in the Phoenix.