"Carl Oglesby, who led Students for a Democratic Society as it publicly opposed the Vietnam War but who was later expelled by a radical faction that became the Weather Underground, died on Tuesday at his home in Montclair, N.J. He was 76...
“He was the great orator of the white New Left,” Todd Gitlin, a Columbia University professor who was the president of S.D.S. from 1963 to 1964, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “His voice was a well-practiced instrument.”
...Mr. Oglesby’s speech “Let Us Shape the Future,” delivered at an antiwar rally in Washington on Nov. 27, 1965, is considered a landmark of American political rhetoric. In it, he condemned the “corporate liberalism” — American economic interests disguised as anti-Communist benevolence — that, he argued, underpinned the Vietnam War...
“For all our official feeling for the millions who are enslaved to what we so self-righteously call the yoke of Communist tyranny,” Mr. Oglesby said that day, “we make no real effort at all to crack through the much more vicious right-wing tyrannies that our businessmen traffic with and our nation profits from every day.”
He bet the ranch on the movement,” he said. “He transplanted his world, radically. I think part of his power as an orator was that you could sense that he was bringing his whole self into this. He was at stake. It wasn’t a role; it was a life.”
His book The Yankee and Cowboy War was a major influence on my conspiracy theory worldview.
Here is a link to Olgelsby's famous LET US SHAPE THE FUTURE speech as SDS President from 1965.
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