Nation: STRIKE AGAINST THE WAR

MORATORIUM" was scarcely a household word a couple of months ago. The dictionary definition is "a period of permissive or obligatory delay," and to most people it meant a pause in paying one's debts or in talking. Now, suddenly, "moratorium" has become the focus of national attention in its special 1969 sense: M-day, Oct. 15, a movement intended by its organizers and supporters to show the Nixon Administration that large and growing numbers of Americans want out of the Viet Nam war as fast as possible.

Across the nation, M-day observances are aimed at suspending business-as-usual in order to allow protest, debate and thought about the war. The Moratorium demonstrates a diversity and spread unknown in the earlier landmark protests against the war: the march on the Pentagon in October 1967, which inspired Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night, and the bloody riots the following summer in Mayor Daley's Chicago. Each of those involved directly only a minority of the young and the radical intelligentsia, not anything resembling a cross-section of U.S. society.

M-day is different. In Brunswick, Me., 1,000 candles were to be left burning atop the Senior Center, the tallest building in northern New England. In Washington, 16 Representatives announced that they would keep the House in all-night session in order to speak against the war. In North Newton, Kans., an antique bell long disused was to be tolled some 40,000 times for the U.S. dead in Viet Nam. In the conservative city of Los Alamos, N. Mex., housewives agreed to block a bridge leading to local defense plants while carrying signs: HELP STOP THE WAR. Students from Gonzaga University and Whitworth College organized a march to the federal building in Spokane, Wash., where they would wear white armbands speckled with blood.

Letting Nixon Know

Small-town housewives and Wall Street lawyers, college presidents and politicians, veteran demonstrators and people who have never made the "V" sign of the peace movement—thousands of Americans who have never thought to grow a beard, don a hippie headband or burn a draft card—planned to turn out on M-day to register their dismay and frustration over Viet Nam. Yes terday's Vietniks are determined to grow into tomorrow's majority.

The core of M-day activism is on the campuses, as it was in the campaign for Eugene McCarthy in 1968; hundreds of colleges and universities are closing for the day or radically altering schedules to allow for Moratorium demonstrations. The idea has spread from the campuses to the community at large—though not without arousing resistance. In the affluent suburb of Westport, Conn., the representative town meeting bitterly debated for nearly three hours last week and then only narrowly passed, 17 to 15, a resolution asking immediate action to get the U.S. out of Viet Nam. In California's San Joaquin Valley, the Porterville police chief denied local residents permission to march down the customary Main Street route on their peace parade this week; the city council backed him up, and the protesters had to settle for a route around the edge of town.

No Allegiance to Mao