I Computer People for Peace. i
Recently The Outline published a piece on Computer People for Peace, a 1960s-1970s activist group originating in New York but with numerous chapters nationally. Some folks from the Tech Workers’ Coalition were looking for someone near one of the libraries which hold copies of the CPP’s newsletter Interrupt to scan them, and as the Tamiment at NYU is one of those libraries, I spent last Friday afternoon there.
While I haven’t had a chance to read through all of them yet, I did learn that the group originated as “Computer Professionals for Peace”; in October 1970 “Professionals” was replaced with “People” because members “felt that the ‘Professional’ label limited the potential scope of the group and smacked of elitism.” It eventually had chapters (or at least local organizing contacts) in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Poughkeepsie,1 San Francisco, Washington, DC, northern New Jersey, and Southern Florida. And its editors seemed to enjoy printing letters from subscribers complaining that it was too radical.
(N.B.: Tamiment doesn’t have the whole run, only numbers 5-10 and
12-20, and I ran out of time before I could scan number 20 (which
was unique in being published by the Chicago rather than the New York
branch) Jen Kagan was kind enough to scan number 20, which is now
included below. I apologize for the poor-to-very-poor quality of these
images; Tamiment doesn’t provide a copier or scanner which patrons can
use, so I took pictures with my phone. Some came out better than
others. Hopefully they’re mostly legible.)
- Interrupt #5 (March 1969)
- Interrupt #6 (April 1969)
- Interrupt #7 (May 1969)
- Interrupt #8 (November 1969)
- Interrupt #9 (February 1970)
- Interrupt #10 (April 1970)
- Interrupt #12 (October 1970)
- Interrupt #13 (December 1970)
- Interrupt #14 (February 1971)
- Interrupt #15 (May 1971)
- Interrupt #16 (November 1971)
- Interrupt #17 (March 1972)
- Interrupt #18 (May 1972)
- Interrupt #19 (January 1973)
- Interrupt #20 (March 1973)
-
In fact the Poughkeepsie contact gave an address in Beacon, NY, just across the river from my former home in Newburgh. While I would like to attribute this to some secret quality of the mid-Hudson-Valley as a nexus of hidden leftist currents (did you know that “Banks of Marble” was written by an apple farmer living just outside of Newburgh?), this was the heyday of IBM, which had opened a plant in Poughkeepsie in 1948 and employed many computer workers throughout the region. ↩