Theodore "Ted" Gold (December 13, 1947 – March 6, 1970)Jacobs, H. 275Berger, D. 127 was a leader of the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society who went on to join the Weather Underground.Jacobs, R. 26 He was one of the leaders of the 1968 Columbia University protests. Gold died in the 1970 Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, when a bomb that other Weather Underground members were building exploded prematurely.
Early years and education Gold's father was Hyman Gold, a prominent Jewish physician,House on 11th and his mother was a mathematics instructor at Columbia University. Both had been members of the Old Left. The family lived in a high-rise apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
Gold's parents had experienced economic hardship, but he considered them upper-middle-class. In 1958, before he reached the age of 11, Gold had attended his first Civil Rights demonstration in Washington, D.C. As a boy, he had gone to summer camp with other red-diaper babies at Camp Kinderland (Yiddish for "Children's Land") in upstate New York. From 1959 to 1961, Gold attended Joan of Arc Junior High School (JHS 118) on 93rd Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Columbus Avenue. Gold attended Stuyvesant High School, an elite public high school in Manhattan, where he was a member of the school's cross-country track team, the Stamp Club, and the History and Folklore Society.Jacobs H. 275
Arriving at Columbia University in Fall 1964, Gold immediately became involved in campus Civil Rights movement activity. He organized fund-raising activities for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Selma Project with Friends of SNCC at Columbia University. Gold identified more with SNCC activists than with any other Civil Rights group.
During his freshman year at Columbia College Gold lived at home with his parents. At the beginning of his sophomore year, he moved into an 8th-floor single dormitory room in Columbia University's Furnald Hall. Initially Gold had planned to major in mathematics at Columbia, but by his junior year in Fall 1966, he had decided that sociology was a more relevant field for him.
By late 1966, Gold had rejected many Old Left cultural and lifestyle values which he had come to regard as too "bourgeois", but he considered himself a Marxist and a communist who sought to establish "decentralized socialism" in the United States. If some other campus leftist would argue against a political position of his by stating that "Lenin wrote", or "Marx said", or "Mao says", Gold would generally reply that "Marxism is a method and a tool, not a dogma".Compare Stalin's quotation of Lenin paraphrasing Marx and Engels: "Lenin wrote: 'Our teaching is not a dogma, but a guide to action, Marx and Engels always used to say [...]' (Lenin, Collected Works, Russ. ed., Vol XX, pp. 100-101.)" Quoted in:
In November 1966, Gold became active in helping to build a mass-based chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at Columbia.
SDS activity By March 1967, Gold was the vice-chairman of Columbia SDS. Between late March 1967 and March 1968, he did most of the basic, menial work that was required to keep Columbia SDS functioning as a multi-issue radical student organizing group on campus. He became the most politically influential leader of Columbia SDS's New Left "Praxis Axis" faction, which emphasized education, rather than confrontational direct action, as its primary campus organizing strategy.Jacobs H. 276 They distributed materials, held rap sessions in the dorms, protested recruiters, and held referendums.Wilkerson C. 204
Spring and summer of 1967
On April 20, 1967, as Columbia SDS vice-chairman, Gold led 300 anti-war student protesters from a sundial rally into Columbia University's John Jay Hall to demand that the Columbia Administration ban the U.S. Marines from recruiting inside the John Jay Hall lobby.Sale K. 291 After a group of pro-war right-wing Columbia student athletes attacked the non-violent anti-war protesters inside the lobby, Gold quickly urged Columbia SDS people to retreat from John Jay Hall and return to the sundial rallying point in order to avoid further violence.
When the rally following the right-wing student attack on Columbia SDS people had ended, the Columbia SDS steering committee and Columbia Professor of Sociology Vernon Dibble, who was Columbia SDS's strongest faculty supporter, retreated to the back of the West End Bar on Broadway and 114th Street to plan what to do next.
"You let them push you out of John Jay Hall today. You have to go back there again tomorrow to keep your credibility as a radical student group," Professor Dibble insisted.
Gold and other Columbia SDS leaders all then got into a debate. Everyone agreed that Columbia SDS activists had to go back to confront the Marine recruiters the next day. The major point of debate was whether Columbia SDS would gain more politically and win more mass support by stopping campus Marine recruitment and possibly fighting it out with other students, the right-wing protectors of the U.S. Marines, or by having a more mass-based, non-violent anti-war demonstration directed at protesting the policies of its main political enemy, the Columbia Administration.
"The Administration likes nothing better than to have students fighting other students. Then it can portray itself as "above politics" and as "a neutral". We shouldn't fall into the Administration's trap and alienate all our new mass student support by leading students into a violent confrontation, which is what the Administration now wants us to do," Gold argued.
Gold's views were broadly supported by the rest of the Columbia SDS leadership. Its April 21, 1967 demonstration of the next day was going to be non-violent, disciplined, and focused more on protesting against the Columbia Administration's policies than on the jocks. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) aide, James Bevel, would be invited to address the campus rally. Gold wrote in an open letter from Columbia SDS to the school's faculty after this demonstration that the group was attacked by counterprotestors.Jacobs H. 277 Yesterday a group of 500 students, many of them members of Students for a Democratic Society, marched to John Jay Hall with the intention of questioning the recruiters about Marine atrocities in Vietnam and United States military policy throughout the world. However, a group of self-styled "leathernecks" sought to prevent any such peaceful confrontation. This violent group again and again attacked the anti-Marine demonstrators, who were trying to question the Marines and to keep an aisle open to their table. Several SDS members were injured by this group while trying to keep that aisle open. Since no University official sought to pacify those students whose violent intentions were openly apparent, a riotous situation ensued. One SDS member suffered a broken nose; many others sustained less severe injuries. Full-scale violence was averted only when Dean DeKoff agreed to eject the Marine recruiters.
Following this demonstration, most of the newly politicized and radicalized Columbia SDS supporters returned to their normal academic and hedonistic routines. But Gold and a few other Columbia SDS steering committee "heavies" spent the next few weeks putting together a Columbia SDS publication called New Left Notes: The Journal of Columbia SDS. This SDS newspaper contained articles and columns on the SDS-Marine confrontation, on the 'free speech/freedom to recruit' vs. responsibility to resist Columbia complicity with the war machine controversy, on draft resistance, on the latest Vietnam War escalation and on Columbia's connection to the Pentagon's Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA).
At the end of the Spring 1967 term, Gold decided he wanted to move out of his eighth floor Furnald Hall dormitory room and into an off-campus apartment during his senior year. Columbia SDS founder David Gilbert also needed new living space in September 1967. It was agreed that Gold and Gilbert and another Columbia SDS activist, Bob Feldman, would rent an off-campus apartment together during the 1967-1968 academic year.
After visiting Berkeley, California, and the West Coast in early June 1967, Gold returned to his Furnald Hall room by July 1967 and, for the second year in a row, worked as a summer group counselor of inner city high school students in Columbia University's "Double Discovery" tutoring program. Gold also organized with other Columbia SDS activists on the Upper West Side a "Vietnam Summer" anti-war off-campus summer organizing project.
Patterned after the Freedom Summer campaign of 1964, "Vietnam Summer" was a nationwide student anti-war campaign to raise off-campus consciousness about current events in Vietnam. SDS activists around Columbia set up tables on the sidewalks and canvassed Upper West Side apartment buildings.
In late July 1967, Gold and other Columbia SDS steering committee people started to meet in the high-rise apartment on LaSalle Street of the two Columbia SDS activists who were already married, Peter and Linda Schneider, a few blocks from Columbia's campus. Political strategy for the coming 67-68 school year was discussed. Nearly all the people attending these meetings were "Praxis Axis" people. Columbia SDS activist Bob Feldman brought to one of the meetings new research about IDA's involvement in "Project Agile" which directly related to weapons research for Vietnam War operational activity. There was also much theoretical discussion about New Left political strategy and Columbia SDS chapter internal organization and education. Peter Schneider, Columbia SDS Chairman Teddy Kaptchuk and Gold, especially, seemed to feel that too great a gap existed between the political consciousness level of Columbia SDS's leadership and that of its rank-and-file. Each felt that in the 67-68 academic year a special effort should be made to involve rank-and-file members in smaller groups to maximize their participation in Columbia SDS chapter activity.
In the summer of 1967, Monthly Review published an English translation of Régis Debray's Revolution In The Revolution?, which argued in support of Che Guevara's "foci theory of revolution". Near the end of the summer, a New York SDS regional organizer named Halliwell appeared at one meeting to make the case for applying Debray's theory of "mobile tactics" to Columbia University conditions, with Columbia SDS acting as the non-violent equivalent of Che's "guerrilla foci group". According to Halliwell's analogy, the mass of Columbia students, like the mass of Latin American peasants, could only be aroused if Columbia SDS developed the capacity to act off-campus as a mobile non-violent guerrilla foco at anti-war demonstrations. In Halliwell's view, Columbia SDS should continue to use its usual educational methods to persuade future members of the new working class (the mass of Columbia University student "peasants") to become off-campus demonstrators who pushed the U.S. anti-war movement "from protest to resistance" by their mobile tactics. In July 1967, however, Gold seemed only lukewarm about having Columbia SDS adopt some variant of Halliwell's "Debrayist" organizing strategy.
In late July 1967, Gold was still thinking of going to graduate school in London, following his scheduled June 1968 graduation from Columbia College, in order to please his mother. He thought that he would be able to get a good recommendation from Columbia Professor of Sociology Silver, who was still Gold's favorite professor at Columbia at this time. In July 1967, Gold had also become romantically involved with a recent Barnard College graduate named Trude Bennett, who was also working during the summer as a "Double Discovery" project counselor.