The Roots of the Left

UT's Rebels With a Cause

"My name was read into the Congressional Record as one of five people responsible for all the student unrest in Texas." If that had been remotely true, Robert Pardun would have much to be proud of.

Instead, he records that moment -- a passing detail from the 1969 congressional investigation of the Students for a Democratic Society -- partly to document the very real political repression that was law enforcement's reflexive response to student activism and partly to illustrate how absurd the word "intelligence" can become when coupled with the word "government." It is only one of many such cautionary tales in Prairie Radical, Pardun's 2001 autobiographical Journey Through the Sixties, and like most of them, it hasn't lost its currency.

Pardun's name is no longer common coin in Austin, but from roughly 1964 to 1969 probably every UT administrator and a fair number of local (and not so local) cops had him on their blacklists as one of the founding organizers of the local chapter of SDS. He had arrived from Colorado in 1963 as a graduate student in mathematics and was soon caught up in the political and cultural transformations of the decade. His rough-hewed but abundant narrative recounts his own remarkable transition -- along with that of a generation of classmates, friends, co-workers -- from civil rights volunteerism to anti-war activism to revolutionary student organizing, in Austin and across the country. He records as well the collapse of SDS (locally a microcosm of the national implosion) but looks back across the years with pride: "I have never regretted my involvement in the movement. I spoke out against injustice and tyranny then and I continue to do so now."

Pardun's personal Austin history is also a remarkable catalog of many other too readily forgotten local heroes: Judy Binder, George and Mariann Vizard, Alice Embree, Charlie Smith, Jeff Shero Nightbyrd, Judy Schiffer, names that surface among the millions who joined "the Movement" for one day's demonstration or for a lifetime. It is an honorable though not uncomplicated history -- and Pardun is thorough and frank about the internal sectarian dissension that also contributed to the movement's long retreat after the Vietnam years.

There is enough material here for a few more books and certainly for a film: specifically, the documentary history Rebels With a Cause by Pardun's wife, Helen Garvy.

From their home in Los Gatos, Calif., Pardun told the Chronicle he wrote the book initially as "something my kids would understand" and that the research and interviews for the film formed its core, supplemented by historical documents (including his several-hundred-page FBI file). "It's both a personal and a social history," he said, and he considers it a story still unfinished, especially in light of the U.S. war on Iraq. "We just returned from Italy, and we began taking pictures of the pace [peace] signs -- but then we realized there were thousands, and we'd never have enough film.

"We had thousands of people marching in Santa Cruz, and there were eventually so many millions demonstrating around the world that the media finally had to cover them," he said. "And like Johnson and Nixon before him, George Bush was wondering, 'Who are those people?'"

For more information on the book Prairie Radical and the film Rebels With a Cause, see the Web site at www.sdsrebels.com.