Student Activism in the 1930s
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ASU Memoirs

American Student Union Memoirs


50th and 25 National Reunion--ASU and SDS--1986

Victor Teich

1. It was the early spring of 1937. The forsythia bushes were blooming on a small-town college campus in the middle of The Bronx—the University Heights campus of New York University.

2. To this peaceful setting, we of the ASU wanted to bring the Spanish people's battle against the fascists. So Bert Witt, Paul Sigal and I got some furring strips and old bed sheets, and, in the basement of one of the buildings, we built a boat. It looked like a very large box-kite with a pointed bow, and it acted like a kite as we dragged it across the campus and tied it to one of the two handsome bronze lamps that flanked the broad steps of the nineteenth-century library with its domed roof. Then we hoisted a big square sail on which we painted in big black letters: "Give So That Spain May Live!" Into the boat we put a box for food, clothing or money for the cause.

3. From the broad window of his office in the Hall of Languages, next to the library, Dean Baer looked out on this scene. We could see him get up from his desk, put on his hat and coat and come out to take a closer look. He came out walked over and said, in effect, "What the hell is going on here?" We told him and reminded him that Archibald MacLeish had been on the campus just a few days earlier and had praised the Spanish loyalists. MacLeish had even read his own poems on the need to fight the fascists. Dean Baer looked at the dozen students who had gathered to watch, grunted a kind of acceptance—and let us be.

4. Our members took turns tending the boat, we collected money and food and clothing (I don't remember what we did with the food and clothing—how did we get it to Spain?) And a few months later, in June, Paul Sigal left for Spain, there to make a much greater sacrifice than we or Dean Baer had made.

5. It was 1939. There was a struggle for funds for high schools in New York City's budget. We, district officers of the ASU, decided to have a demonstration at City Hall. "We" were Bert Witt, Maia Turchin, Jack Kamaiko and I.

6. So we had a meeting of the district committee and of the district council, and agreed on the demonstration. We talked it up at chapter meetings, gave out leaflets—you remember how we used to do these things!

7. On the appointed day, before the appointed hour, we full-time officers went to City Hall. We were not too sanguine, especially when the appointed hour had come—and gone, and no troops! Just generals! But then, wonder of wonders. Out of the half-dozen subway exits in the City Hall area there started to pour—or explode—tens, then hundreds, and finally thousands of high school students, each school with lots of homemade signs, and lots of noise and lots of enthusiasm. We didn't know what to do, and the police didn't either. Our little speaker's stand had been swept away, so we hoisted Bert on our shoulders, and we moved through the crowds, and Bert exhorted the crowds. Then we set up a gigantic picket line, and we all felt great. Did the city provide the funds for education? I don't remember, but it was a lovely day.

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