SDS Veteran Offers Advice to Campus Radicals Today

Campus opposition to the Israeli military assault on Gaza, since the fall of 2023, has been quite triggering for veterans of student organizing against the Vietnam war in the 1960s. 

In progressive media outlets, now old “New Leftists” have mainly weighed in with welcome expressions of support, tempered with cautionary notes about political mistakes, excesses, and “bad choices” that might be better avoided this time around?

Early on, there were some Bronx cheers from “elders” who were much farther left six decades ago (and regretting it now?). Writing in The Nation, one such alumni of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a retired academic from upstate N.Y., quit Democratic Socialists of America over a downstate chapter’s  “willing[ness] to embrace the most extreme positions on the Palestinian question—up to and including denying Israel’s right to continued existence.”

In contrast, a well-known former SDS leader at Columbia University praised present-day protestors at his alma mater “for their moral clarity and courage.” He also warned them about “the mistake of answering police violence with anger, fighting them and calling them pigs,” which, in 1968, “blurred the line between nonviolence (the occupation of buildings) and violence (our slogans and rhetoric), thereby undercutting our moral position.”

Seventy-eight-year old Michael Ansara, a leading member of this generational cohort, has taken the bold step of offering 276-pages worth of advice to college students today. In The Hard Work of Hope (Cornell University Press, 2025), Ansara asks timely questions like “How does a movement build support when large parts of the country are opposed to its goals? How do you connect with people who disagree with you? How do you build organizations that unite across racial lines?”  

His discussion of these organizing challenges also draws on his formative experience as a Boston-area civil rights activist in high school and his post-college role in the formation of Massachusetts Fair Share, an innovative economic justice organization. Ansara argues, persuasively, that the lessons of student struggles against the Vietnam War are still relevant today, particularly the experience of building a New Left that migrated from campuses to blue-collar communities and workplaces. 

His book is less forthcoming about the challenges and contradictions of “successfully owning and operating two businesses” which served other employers, progressive non-profits, and political candidates. Ansara’s business decisions, at the helm of one of those firms, almost landed him in jail in the late 1990s and did major damage to several progressive organizing projects rooted in labor or the community. 

Green Pastures of Harvard

Ansara’s exemplary record of activism began at age 13 when he balked at participating in a Cold War-era civil defense drill at his public school in Brookline, Mass. This led to his involvement in advocacy for nuclear disarmament and then racial justice as a supporter of the southern civil rights movement. 

As a teen-ager, he worked on several independent political initiatives, including a race for the US Senate by peace candidate H. Stuart Hughes, a Harvard professor who did not fare well against a young Democrat (with White House connections) named Ted Kennedy. Ansara also supported a long shot campaign by civil rights advocate Noel Day, the first black candidate for Congress from Massachusetts who also ran as an independent against House Speaker John McCormack.

In 1964, the author crossed the Charles River and, as a scholarship student, started raising hell in what Bob Dylan called, at the time, “the green pastures of Harvard University,” The next few years were a blur of late-night debates, marches and rallies, student strikes, and street battles over the Vietnam War. Harvard and nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were the twin towers of war and imperialism in the Boston area.  

When you had Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Dow Chemical (which supplied his department with napalm for dropping on Vietnam), and the Shah of Iran all visiting your campus—and the Reserve Officer Training Program (ROTC) as a permanent presence– there was no shortage of targets of opportunity for SDS supporters, who were in turn arrested and brutalized by local cops and/or expelled by university administrators.

Not far from Harvard Square, MIT was also viewed, by angry students, as an integral part of “the war machine,” due to its “$100 million a year in Pentagon research and development funds, making it the tenth largest Defense Department R&D contractor in the country.”

Ansara helped create a coalition of students from 25 Boston area colleges and universities, plus local high schools, which faced court injunctions and police violence when it mobilized thousands of students for an attempt to shut down MIT’s military research facilities.

One revealing reflection by Ansara, as a key local leader of this “massive youth insurrection,” relates to his relationship with the rank-and-file:

“In SDS, the confusion over leadership inhibited our effectiveness, allowing young arrogant men like me to lead without being accountable…Leadership structures and a culture that promotes the intentional development of new leaders are important for any insurgent democratic movement. It is especially important for student groups where every four years, older leaders cycle out and every year new people cycle in.”

Post-Grad Turn to the Working Class

Hard Work also addresses the still relevant question: What do student radicals do after they graduate and need to find a job, in which they can remain politically active? (Spoiler alert: stick to workplace or community organizing, rather than becoming a call center owner.)

In the Boston area, some former SDS members went to work in big industrial shops like the unionized shipyard in Quincy, Mass, the General Motors plant in Framingham, the GE Works in Lynn, and even a Raytheon missile plant (that is still turning out union-label products for the Pentagon).  

In parallel fashion, Ansara and other New Left veterans created a dynamic, fast-growing network of Bay State groups that organized workers and their families around non-workplace issues in some of the same blue-collar cities and others like Chelsea, Revere, Lowell, Worcester, and Fall River. 

What kind of economic justice problems did Fair Share tackle? The author cites taxes, energy and insurance costs, toxic waste sites, plant closings, telephone company rates and policies, red-lining and other bank practices, youth jobs, and “an endless stream of neighborhood issues.” Among Fair Share victories, large and small, were “rate hikes stopped, rebates and tax abatements in the millions sent to working and low-income families…stop lights won. Parks cleaned up. Abandoned buildings fixed up.”

By 1979, the author reports, “brilliant campaigns and systematic work built a statewide organization with greater name recognition and support than any organization or politician at that time in Massachusetts” (which probably would have been news to my old Bay State Congressman, U.S. House Speaker Tip O’Neill and a soon-to-be presidential candidate named Ted Kennedy!).  Over 110,000 families—10% of the households in the state, including my own—were Fair Share members, paying dues of at least $15 per year and receiving its statewide newspaper. 

On any given day, in Fair Share’s heyday, there was, according to the author, a local membership meeting somewhere in Massachusetts with ten to 500 people in attendance.  Door-to-door canvassing was non-stop; Fair Share leaders, staff, and members were able to raise $3,000,000 a year to support their model community organizing work. 

Unfortunately, “Fair Share grew faster than my ability to manage it,” the author reports.  And it was “too dependent on staff.” Due to an absence of spending controls and the sudden loss of federally-funded Fair Share jobs, the group developed cash flow problems, a deficit of $1.2 million, mounting bank debt and IRS back taxes or penalties it struggled to pay. 

Ansara was forced to lay himself off, suddenly close Fair Share offices and furlough two-thirds of its staff.  The group continued for several more years and many of its former organizers later became progressive lawyers, academics, union reps, environmental campaigners, or elected public officials. But Fair Share’s “financial crash started a downward spiral that could not be reversed.”  

A Second Career

After Fair Share’s debt-driven collapse, Ansara “stumbled into” a second career as a political consultant, with a focus on voter registration. It was a choice seemingly driven by his post-60s regrets about failing to develop a strategy for change that “included both disruptive protest and effective electoral action.”

 Despite Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis’s past neo-liberal resistance to property tax reform sought by Fair Share, Ansara worked on his 1988 presidential campaign. He also continued to do organizer trainer and became a highly-paid specialist in non-profit fund-raising. One major client of the tele-marketing business he created was Working Assets Long Distance (WALD)—which later become CREDO Mobile— a re-seller of phone service actually provided by anti-union firms like Sprint and MCI.

Instead of looking for the union label, customers of AT&T, one of the largest unionized private sector employers in the country, were urged to sign up for the more “socially responsible” WALD instead– because it pledged to donate 1% of its gross revenues to an array of progressive non-profits. Thanks to call center support provided by the Ansara-owned Share Group, and a big direct mail campaign targeting readers of The Nation, Mother Jones, and the Utne Reader, WALD grew its customer base from 50,000 to 320,000 during the 1990s. And millions of dollars did indeed flow to worthy beneficiaries like Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and other “liberal social and political causes.”

Later in Hard Work, we learn that this savvy and successful business owner, employing hundreds of workers in multiple telemarketing centers, suddenly became a babe in the woods of union politics. In 1996, Ansara discloses, he “unknowingly, participate[d] in a conspiracy of money laundering, misuse of union dues, fraud, and extortion of union contractors” as “part of a headline-producing scandal around the campaign of the reform president of the Teamsters Union,” who he doesn’t even identify by name.

Ansara admits that he “was guilty of multiple felonies” and his “negligence was indefensible.” So he decided to take “full responsibility” and plead guilty to a single felony count (as did two other Democratic Party consultants involved in the costly and messy affair.) Their cooperation with federal prosecutors helped all avoid jail time, but Ansara paid more than $700,000 in fines and restitution (which another guilty party failed to do until a lien was placed on his ski condo in Aspen many years later).

Mid-Life Crisis?

A key figure in the plot was then-Teamster Political Director Bill Hamilton, a past business associate of Ansara’s. Hamilton contested the federal charges against him, was convicted of fraud, conspiracy, embezzlement, and perjury and sentenced to three years in jail.  After leading 185,000 workers to a major strike victory over United Parcel Service (UPS) in 1997, Teamster President Ron Carey was indicted on a single perjury count. But jurors believed his assertions, then and before, that he had no knowledge of any mis-use of union funds to aid his re-election.

Ansara describes this critical episode in his post-organizing career as a “mid-life crisis,” albeit a “profound” one. It was, in fact, much more than that, as Monthly Review author Ken Reiman documents in Ron Carey and The Teamsters, a well-researched account of Carey’s tragic rise and fall, published last year.  Despite his acquittal, Carey was forced to step down as Teamster president and banned from further union involvement, including participating in a re-run election in 1999.

The then two-decade old Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), which helped elect Carey twice, was unable to prevent an old guard candidate, James P. Hoffa, from becoming his successor–for the next 23 years. The reputation and moral authority of TDU and Carey as anti-corruption campaigners took a serious, short-term beating and Teamster reform, at the national level, was set back for an entire generation.

As In These Times and other progressive media outlets reported, the scandal known as “Teamster donor-gate” nearly derailed the career of recently-elected AFL-CIO Treasurer Rich Trumka. When questioned before a federal grand jury, Trumka invoked the Fifth Amendment (in violation of the federation’s own constitution), rather than explain how his office became improperly entangled in Carey’s re-election effort. 

In a sad echo of Fair Share’s sudden demise fifteen years earlier, Ansara’s misbehavior triggered the collapse of Citizen Action—as a national network of groups “working on the same issues,” that the author helped launch. Citizen Action was led by Ira Arlook, an old Tufts University SDS comrade, who ended up in personal legal jeopardy because of his ill-advised role in IBT election-related money laundering. Claiming 2 million members at the time, Citizen Action was forced to lay-off 20 staffers and close its doors in Washington, D.C. when its wealthy donors fled.

The author’s own multi-state call center operation took a major hit when a key client, the Democratic National Committee, severed ties with him.  He was then forced to sell Share Group to others, who continued to operate it (while hiring Jackson, Lewis, the notorious union-busting law firm to handle its labor negotiations).

Even Barbara Arnold, Ansara’s second wife, became deeply embroiled in the criminal investigation. She was recruited by him to make large prohibited donations to Carey’s 1996 re-election campaign (listing her occupation as “student”);  the Share Group billed the Teamsters for nearly $100,000 worth  of services it did not perform to pay back Arnold.

Third or Fourth Act?

Within a decade, the author had, nevertheless, bounced back in the same business.  Unlike Share–which, to its credit, dealt with my union, CWA, the ILWU, and the UAW—his new venture, called UpSource, operated on a non-union basis. According to the author, this firm never opposed unionization at its locations in Canada, Oklahoma, and Massachusetts. And, as reported by a New Bedford newspaper, Ansara did strive “to offer good wages and benefits rather than follow the trend toward call center ‘sweatshops.’”

Tele-marketing is clearly a tough business to be socially responsible in, even for a former Sixties radical.  (For further evidence of that, see ex-Teamster Boots Riley’s satirical 2018 film Sorry to Bother You about management co-optation of a call center union drive in Oakland). Since leaving the industry, the author of Hard Work of Hope has re-invented himself, again, as a published poet and now memoirist. 

On his new author website,  Ansara is getting rave reviews from old colleagues like Midwest Academy founder Heather Booth (whose late husband Paul, was an early SDS mentor of the author and, as a top AFSCME official, tried to help Carey get re-elected in similarly unhelpful fashion in 1996.) Former Dissent editor Michael Kazin, an historian of the American left (and outed in Ansara’s book as a former Weatherman) describes the author as “one of his generation’s most effective community organizers.”

Other Sixties radicals, whose decades of labor activism or community organizing suffered major blows due to the author’s misbehavior, tend to be less forgiving. As Ken Paff, a founder of TDU, told me, “Ansara’s role in taking down a great union leader set back my life’s work for many years.” A former Citizen Action national board member (and retired CWA leader in New Jersey) remains similarly incensed 30 years later.

Crimson Courage

Younger readers of Hard Work will, nevertheless, find much useful advice about what to do and not do during the current roller-coaster ride of anti-war campaigning on campus.  One thing to avoid, Ansara argues, is any modern-day version of the sectarian anti-imperialism of sects like the Progressive Labor Party, which developed a late ‘60s following at Harvard. This Maoist group proved to be more hindrance than help in building a massive 1969 strike by thousands of Harvard students of all political stripes. That campus shutdown resulted in the creation of an African-American studies program and abolition of military officer training for the next 42 years, 

Last year, Harvard students joined a Gaza protest movement that overlapped with a critical national election cycle. As Ansara notes, there was, in 1968, similar political tension between anti-war demonstrators and a Democratic contender for the presidency who (like Kamala Harris last year) failed to support peace initiatives—for fear of alienating a lame-duck White House boss. But since January 20 of this year, Harvard Square–the scene of so many past student battles against university complicity with the military—has become ground zero for Trump’s carpet-bombing of the Ivies (including his own alma mater, University of Pennsylvania).   

So suddenly, as one observer notes, “everyone loves Harvard” because “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”  According to an undergraduate student leader “school pride is at an all-time high.” Past graduates, like journalist Matthew Yglesias—who previously opposed giving any money to this “rich and famous university”—are now “fighting fascism” by donating to a Harvard-created defense fund.  

On graduation day last month, Harvard President Alan Garber received thunderous applause from a crowd of 30,000, despite “silencing dissent, prosecuting protest, and abandoning academic freedom,” according to one Harvard Crimson critic who argues that Garber has “already actualized many Trump Administration wishes for the University.”

Last year, Garber was booed by graduating seniors for denying diplomas to 13 Gaza war protestors facing disciplinary action. At this year’s commencement, among the supportive alumni handing out “Crimson Courage” stickers was Mark Dyen,  Class of ’70, who helped co-found Mass Fair Share after quitting the Weatherman faction of SDS and “coming back to political sanity,” as Ansara puts it. 

Dyen, who later founded a renewable energy company, told The New York Times that he was coming to the aid of his embattled alma mater because “Harvard stood up for itself, for us, for higher education, and democracy…” That was not a message that would have resonated with Dyen’s earlier self or Ansara’s, in the same venue 55 years ago when political friends and enemies seemed easier to sort out.

The post SDS Veteran Offers Advice to Campus Radicals Today appeared first on CounterPunch.org.