Students for a Democratic Society
Encyclopedia
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a student activist
movement in the United States
that was one of the main iconic representations of the country's New Left
. The organization developed and expanded rapidly in the mid-1960s before dissolving at its last convention in 1969. A faction of SDS formed the Weather Underground, identified by the FBI as a "domestic terrorist group."
SDS has been an important influence on student organizing in the decades since its collapse. Participatory democracy
, direct action
, radicalism, student power, shoestring budgets, and its organizational structure are all present in varying degrees in current American student activist groups. Though various organizations have been formed in subsequent years as proposed national networks for left-wing student organizing, none has approached the scale of SDS, and most have lasted a few years at best.
A new incarnation of SDS
was founded in 2006.
(SLID), the youth branch of a socialist educational organization known as the League for Industrial Democracy
(LID). LID descended from the Intercollegiate Socialist Society
, started in 1905. Early in 1960, SLID decided to change its name into SDS. The phrase “industrial democracy” sounded too narrow and too labor oriented, making it more difficult to recruit students. Moreover, because the LID's leadership did not correspond to the expectations and the mood on the campuses, the SLID felt the need to dissociate itself from its parent organization. SDS held its first meeting in 1960 on the University of Michigan
campus at Ann Arbor, Michigan
, where Alan Haber was elected president. Its political manifesto, known as the Port Huron Statement
, was adopted at the organization's first convention in 1962, based on an earlier draft by staff member Tom Hayden
.
The Port Huron
Statement criticized the political system of the United States
for failing to achieve international peace and critiqued Cold War
foreign policy
, the threat of nuclear war, and the arms race
. In domestic matters, it criticized racial discrimination, economic inequality, big businesses, trade union
s and political parties
. In addition to its critique and analysis of the American system, the manifesto also suggested a series of reforms: it proclaimed a need to reshape into two genuine political parties to attain greater democracy, for stronger power for individuals through citizen's lobbies, for more substantial involvement by workers in business management, and for an enlarged public sector with increased government welfare
, including a "program against poverty
." The manifesto provided ideas of what and how to work for and to improve, and also advocated nonviolent
civil disobedience
as the means by which student youth could bring forth a "participatory democracy
." Kirkpatrick Sale described the manifesto as "nothing less than an ideology, however raw and imperfect and however much would have resisted this word."
The manifesto also presented SDS's break with the left-wing policies of the postwar years. Firstly, it was written with the same overall vision all along the document and reflected their view that all problems in every area were linked to each other and their willingness not to lead single-issue struggles but a broad struggle on all fronts at the same time. Then, it expressed SDS's willingness to work with groups whatever may be their political inclination and announced their rejection of anti-communism
, a definitely new radical view contrasting with much of the American Left
which had always developed a policy of anti-communism. Without being Marxist or pro-communism, they denounced anti-communism as being a social problem and an obstruction to democracy. They also criticized the United States for their exaggerated paranoia and exclusive condemnation of the Soviet Union and blamed this for being a reason of failing to achieve disarmament and to assure peace.
The Port Huron
Convention opened with a symbol of this break with the policy of the past years: the delegate of the Communist Progressive Youth Organizing Committee asked to attend the conference as an observer. The people from the Young People's Socialist League objected while most of the SDSers insisted on letting him sit. He eventually sat. Later in the meeting, Michael Harrington
, an LID member, became agitated over the manifesto because he found the stand they took toward the Soviet Union
and authoritarian regimes in general was insufficiently critical, and because, according to him, they deliberately wrote sections to have pique the liberals. Surprisingly, Roger Hagan, a liberal, defended the SDS and its policy. After lively debates between the two, the draft finally remained more or less unchanged.
Some two weeks later, a meeting between the LID and SDS was held where the LID expressed its discontent about the manifesto. As a result, Haber and Hayden, at this time respectively the National secretary and the new President of the organization, were summoned to a hearing on the 6 July 1962. There, Hayden clashed with Michael Harrington (as he later would with Irving Howe
) over the perceived potential for totalitarianism among other things. Harrington denounced the seating of the PYOC member, SDS’s tolerance for communism and their lack of clarity in their condemnation of communist totalitarianism and authoritarianism, and he reproached SDS for providing only a mild critique of the Soviet Union and for blaming the cold war mostly on the United States. Hayden then asked him to read the manifesto more carefully, especially the section on values. Hayden later wrote:
"While the draft Port Huron Statement included a strong denunciation of the Soviet Union, it wasn't enough for LID leaders like Michael Harrington. They wanted absolute clarity, for example, that the United States was blameless for the nuclear arms race...In truth, they seemed threatened by the independence of the new wave of student activism..."
The tension between SDS and the LID was greatly increased when SDS called for a national demonstration to take place during the spring of 1965. The LID was very concerned about "Communist" participation but SDS refused to restrict who could attend and what signs they could use. The rift opened even further when, at the 1965 SDS National Convention,the clause excluding communists from membership was deleted from the SDS constitution. During the summer of 1965 delegates from SDS and the LID met in Chicago and New York. The League for Industrial Democracy, SDS's sponsoring organization, objected to the removal of the exclusion clause in the SDS constitution, as SDS was with LID's non-profit status which excluded political activity. By mutual agreement the relationship was severed October 4, 1965.
, the Vice President was Paul Booth and the National Secretary was Jim Monsonis. There were nine chapters with, at most, about 1000 members. The national office (NO) in New York City
consisted of a few desks, some broken chairs, a couple of file cabinets and a few typewriters. As a student group with a strong belief in decentralization and a distrust for most organizations, the SDS did not have a strong central bureaucracy. The three stalwarts at the office, Don McKelvey, Steve Max, and the National Secretary, Jim Monsonis, worked long hours for little pay to service the local chapters, and to help establish new ones. Even during the Cuban Missile Crisis
in October, little could be accomplished. Most activity was oriented toward civil rights
issues and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) played a key role in inspiring SDS.
By the end of the academic year, there were over 200 delegates at the annual convention at Pine Hill, New York
, from 32 different colleges and universities. It was then decided to give more power to the chapters, who would then send delegates to the National Council (NC), which would meet quarterly to handle the on-going activities. Also, in the spirit of participatory democracy, a consensus was reached to elect new officers each year. Lee Webb of Boston University
was chosen as National Secretary, and Todd Gitlin
of Harvard University
was made president. Some continuity was preserved by retaining Paul Booth as Vice President. The search began for something to challenge the idealistic, budding activists.
It was at this time that the Black Power Movement was first gaining some momentum (although Stokely Carmichael
would make the movement more mainstream in 1966). The movement made it impolitic for white activists, such as those in SDS, to presume to lead protests for black civil rights. Instead, SDS would try to organize white unemployed youths through a newly established program they called the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). This "into the ghetto" move was a practical failure, but the fact that it existed at all drew many young idealists to SDS.
At the summer convention in 1964 there was a split between those who were campus-oriented, and the ERAP supporters. Most of the old guard were ERAP supporters, but the campus activists were growing. Paul Potter was elected president, and by the end of summer there were ten ERAP programs in place, with about 125 student volunteers. C. Clark Kissinger
of Shimer College
in Illinois
was elected as National Secretary, and he put the NO on a much more business-like basis. He and his assistant, Helen Garvey mailed out the literature list, the newsletters and the news of chapter's activities to a growing membership list. Kissinger also worked to smooth the relationship with the LID.
A small faction of SDS that was interested in change through conventional electoral politics established a program called the Political Education Project (PEP). Its Director was Jim Williams of the University of Louisville, and Steve Max served as its Associate Director. This was never very large, and it was opposed by the mainstream SDSers, who were mostly opposed to such traditional, old-fashioned activity, and were looking for something new that "worked". The Johnson
landslide victory in November played its part, as well, and PEP soon withered away. A Peace Research and Education Project (PREP) headed by Paul Booth, Swarthmore, met a similar fate. Meanwhile, the local chapters got into all sorts of projects, from University reform, community-university relations, and now, in a small way, the issue of the draft
and Vietnam War
.
Then, on October 1, the University of California, Berkeley
exploded into the dramatic and prolonged agony that was the free speech movement
. Led by a charismatic Friends of SNCC
student activist named Mario Savio
, upwards of three thousand students surrounded a police car in which a student, arrested for setting up a card table in defiance of a ban by the University, was being taken away. The sit-down prevented the police car from moving for 32 hours. The demonstrations, meetings and strikes that resulted all but shut the university down. Hundreds of students were arrested.
and introducing ground troops directly involved in fighting the Viet Cong in the South. Campus chapters of SDS all over the country started to lead small, localized demonstrations against the war and the NO became the focal group that organized the march against the war in Washington on April 17. Endorsements came from nearly all of the other peace groups and leading personalities, there was significant increase in income and by the end of March there were 52 chapters. The media began to cover the organization and the New Left
. However, the call for the march and the openness of the organization in allowing other groups, even communist
front groups, or communists themselves, to join in caused great strains with the LID and some other old left organizations.
The first teach-in
against the war was held in the University of Michigan
. Soon hundreds more, all over the country, were held. The demonstration in Washington, DC attracted about 25,000 anti-war protesters and SDS became the leading student group against the war on most U.S. campuses.
Representing its move into the heartland, the 1965 summer convention was held at Kewadin, a small camp in Northern Michigan
. Moreover, its National Office, which was previously located in Manhattan
, was moved to Chicago
at about the same time. The rapid growth of the membership rate during the preceding year brought with it a new breed with a new style:
The convention elected an Akron, Ohio
student, Carl Oglesby
, President and Jeff Shero, Vice President in preference to "old guard" candidates. The convention voted to remove the anti-communist
exclusion clauses from the SDS constitution, failed to provide for any national program, and increased the reliance on local initiatives at the chapters. As a result, the National Office's leadership fell into ineffectual chaos. The League for Industrial Democracy, SDS's nominal sponsoring organization, was disappointed with removal of the exclusion clause from the SDS constitution, as SDS was covered under LID's non-profit status which excluded political activity. By mutual agreement the relationship was severed October 4, 1965.
On November 27, 1965 there was a major anti-war demonstration in Washington, D.C. at which Carl Ogelsby, the new SDS president, made a very successful speech, addressed to the liberal crowd, and in circuitous terms alleged that the United States government was imperialist in nature. The speech received a standing ovation, substantial press coverage, and resulted in greatly increased national prominence for SDS.
The unexpected influx of substantial numbers of new members and chapters combined with the ousting of the previous leadership, the "old guard", resulted in a crisis which dogged SDS until its final breakup; despite repeated attempts to do so, consensus was never reached on what form the organization should take or what role it should play. A final attempt by the old guard at a "rethinking conference" to establish a coherent new direction for the organization failed. The conference, held on the University of Illinois campus at Champaign-Urbana over Christmas vacation, 1965, was attended by about 360 people from 66 chapters, many of whom where new to SDS. Despite a great deal of discussion, no substantial decisions were made.
Nationally, the SDS continued to use the draft as an important issue for students, and over the rest of the academic year began to attack university complicity in it, as the universities had begun to supply student's class rankings, used to determine who was to be drafted. The University of Chicago's administration building was taken over in a three day sit-in in May. Rank protests and sit-ins spread to many other universities.
The summer convention of 1966 was moved even farther west, this time to Clear Lake
, Iowa
. The "prairie people" continued to increase their influence. Nick Egleson was chosen as President, and Carl Davidson
was elected Vice President. Greg Calvert, recently a History Instructor at Iowa State University, was chosen as National Secretary. It was at this convention that members of Progressive Labor Party (PL) first participated. PL was a Maoist group that had turned to SDS as fertile ground for recruiting new members sympathetic to its long-term strategy of organizing the industrial working class. SDSers of that time were nearly all anti-communist, but they also refused to be drawn into actions that smacked of red-baiting
, which they viewed as mostly irrelevant and old hat. PL soon began to organize a Worker Student Alliance
. By 1968 and 1969 they would profoundly affect SDS, particularly at national gatherings of the membership, forming a well-groomed, disciplined faction which followed the Progressive Labor Party line.
The 1966 convention also marked an even greater turn towards organization around campus issues by local chapters, with the NO cast in a strictly supporting role. Campus issues ranged from bad food, powerless student "governments," various in loco parentis
manifestations, on-campus recruiting for the military and, again, ranking for the draft. Campuses around the country were in a state of unprecedented ferment and activism. Despite the absence of a politically effective campus SDS chapter, Berkeley again became a center of particularly dramatic radical upheaval over the university's repressive anti-free-speech actions, and an effective student strike with very wide support occurred. Even Harvard endured an upheaval engendered by a visit there of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara
.
The Winter and Spring of 1967 saw an escalation of the militancy of the protests at many campuses. SDSers and self-styled radicals were even elected into the student government at a few places. Demonstrations against Dow Chemical Company
and other campus recruiters were widespread, and ranking and the draft issues grew in scale. The FBI
(mainly through its secret COINTELPRO
) and other law enforcement agencies were often exposed as having spies and informers in the chapters. Harassment by the authorities was also on the rise. The National Office became distinctly more effective in this period, and the three officers actually visited most of the chapters. New Left Notes, as well, became a potent vehicle for promoting some coherence and solidarity among the chapters. The Anti-War movement began to take hold among university students.
The 1967 convention took an egalitarian
turn by eliminating the Presidential and Vice-Presidential offices and replacing them with a National Secretary (20 year old Mike Spiegel), an Education Secretary (Texan Bob Pardun), and an Inter‑organizational Secretary (former VP Carl Davidson). A clear direction for a national program was not set but they did manage to pass strong resolutions on the draft, resistance within the Army itself, and they made a call for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam. A women's liberation resolution on the issue of male chauvinism was passed by conference attendees, for the first time.
That fall saw a great escalation of the anti-war actions of the New Left
. The school year started with a large demonstration against university complicity in the war in allowing Dow recruiters on campus at the University of Wisconsin in Madison on October 17. Peaceful at first, the demonstrations turned to a sit-in that was violently dispersed by the Madison police and riot squad, resulting in many injuries and arrests. A mass rally and a student strike then closed the university for several days. A coordinated series of demonstrations against the draft led by members of the Resistance, the War Resisters League
, and SDS added fuel to the fire of resistance. After conventional civil rights tactics of peaceful pickets seemed to have failed, the Oakland, California Stop the Draft Week ended in mass hit and run skirmishes with the police. The huge (100,000 people) October 21 March on the Pentagon saw hundreds arrested and injured. Night-time raids on draft offices began to spread.
in the history of the United States. It was largely ignored by the New York City-based national media, which focused on the student shutdown of Columbia University
in New York, led by an inter-racial alliance of Columbia SDS chapter activists and Student Afro Society activists. As a result of the mass media publicity given to Columbia SDS activists such as Columbia SDS chairperson Mark Rudd
during the Columbia Student Revolt
, the organization was put on the map politically and "SDS" became a household name in the United States for a few years. Membership in SDS chapters around the United States increased dramatically during the 1968-69 academic year.
Led by the Worker-Student Alliance and rival Joe Hill caucuses, SDS in San Francisco played a major role in the Third World Student Strike at San Francisco State College. This strike, the longest student strike in U. S. history, led to the creation of Black and other ethnic studies programs on campuses across the country.
SDS members from Austin
, Texas
participated in a mass demonstration in San Antonio, Texas in April 1969 at the "Kings River Parade". San Antonio SNCC members called the demonstration to protest the killing of Bobby Joe Phillips by San Antonio Police Officers.
In the summer of 1969, the ninth SDS national convention was held at the Chicago Coliseum
with some 2000 people attending. Many factions of the movement were present, and set up their literature tables all around the edges of the cavernous hall. The Young Socialist Alliance
, Wobblies
, Spartacists
, Marxists
and Maoists
of various sorts, all together with various law-enforcement spies and informers contributed to the air of impending expectations.
Each delegate was given the convention issue of the newspaper New Left Notes, which contained a manifesto, "You don't need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows", a line taken from Bob Dylan
's Subterranean Homesick Blues
. This manifesto had been first presented at the Spring, 1969, SDS National Council Meeting in Austin, Texas
. The document had been written by an 11-member committee that included Mark Rudd, Bernardine Dohrn
and John Jacobs
, and represented the position of the Revolutionary Youth Movement
(RYM) wing of SDS, most of which later turned into the Weather Underground Organization
. The New Left Notes issue was full of the language of the Old Left of the 1930s; and was thus impenetrable and irrelevant to the majority of SDSers.
Once it became clear that the Worker Student Alliance
(WSA) faction was the largest contingent with a majority of the delegates, the convention quickly fell into disarray, as the RYM and allied groups moved to expel Progressive Labor (PL) members and the WSA faction of SDS. The Black Panther
representatives attacked PL and at the same time proved itself inclined towards sexism
by advocating "pussy power." The entire convention fell into something approaching chaos, or worse, farce.
The RYM and the National Office faction, led by Bernardine Dohrn
, led a breakaway meeting from which PL and WSA members were barred. This group then voted by about 500 to 100 to expel PL from SDS, and then walked out of the conference hall with that 500. By the next day, there were two SDS organizations, which RYM termed "SDS-RYM" and "SDS-WSA."
In the fall of 1969, many of the SDS-RYM chapters also split up or disintegrated. The Weatherman faction evolved into a small underground organization that first took to street confrontations and then to a bombing campaign. The Weathermen held one final national convention in Flint, Michigan, from December 27–31, 1969. It was at this convention, more popularly known as the "Flint War Council
," that the decision was made to disband what remained of SDS-RYM. SDS-RYM was fully defunct by 1970, while SDS-WSA continued its activity.
administration a lot. This is the entry from H.R. Haldeman’s diary:
Now calling itself simply SDS, SDS-WSA continued to publish the newspaper New Left Notes. It held a convention in Boston in 1971, at which a striking General Motors
worker was a featured speaker.
In 1972, SDS-WSA demonstrated at the Democratic National Convention
in Miami against Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern
's retreating from his original stronger campaign positions against the Vietnam War
. Several hundred SDS members staged a sit-in at the Doral Hotel as McGovern and his staff met upstairs with protesting members of Grassroots McGovern Volunteers and sympathizers angry over the same issues.
In Newark, New Jersey
, SDS-WSA demonstrated against Anthony Imperiale
and his North Ward Citizens' Council which was opposing the construction of Kawaida Towers, a building complex sponsored by a community organization led by Black nationalist and poet Amiri Baraka (formerly Leroy Jones) (New York Times January 3, 1973, p. 84)
SDS joined with PLP and others to protest the writings of Arthur Jensen
, William Shockley
, and Richard Herrnstein
, all of whom promoted the notion that there might be a genetic component to the observed below-average performance of black people on IQ tests. In October 1973, SDS-WSA, PLP, and others organized a convention at the Loeb Student Center of New York University dedicated to opposing academic racism. SDS circulated a petition entitled "A Resolution Against Racism" that was published in the New York Times on October 28, 1973 (p. 211). Out of this convention the Committee Against Racism (CAR) was formed to continue the fight against racism. CAR later changed its name to International Committee Against Racism (InCAR), when some chapters were formed in Canada
.
In 1974, National SDS(-WSA) voted to dissolve as a separate organization and reform as chapters of InCAR. However, individual chapters of SDS continued to exist for some time. A chapter at Purdue University
was active as late as 1976.
All references to contemporary activities of SDS in sources such as the New York Times after early 1970 are to SDS-WSA. For example, SDS confronted Indiana
Senator Vance Hartke
at an antiwar rally in New York City
in 1971 (New York Times July 3, 1971, p. 3 and July 4, 1971, p. 3). SDS denounced liberal Democrats as having been the authors of the Vietnam War in the first place. SDS demonstrated against the Republican National Convention
in Miami Beach, Florida
in August 1972 (New York Times August 21, 1972, p. 20; August 22, 1972, pp. 1,36; August 23, 1972, pp. 1, 28).
Unlike SDS-RYM and the Weathermen, SDS-WSA strongly opposed bombing and terrorism
. In 1971, SDS-WSA published a pamphlet titled Who Are The Bombers?. It warned readers against police agents sent into the anti-Vietnam War movement to foment violence to justify police attacks. It also sharply criticized the Weathermen, which had begun its campaign of bombings.
On June 26, 1972, the US Supreme Court gave a unanimous opinion, in the case Healy v. James
, stating that members of the SDS had been unconstitutionally deprived of their First Amendment
right to freedom of assembly when a group was denied permission to form on the campus of Central Connecticut State College in New Britain
, Connecticut
.
A few early SDS leaders went on to careers as Democratic Party
politicians, including Tom Hayden
, who is still active in politics and writing. Hayden is a former member of the legislature of the state of California
and is well-known as the former husband of actress Jane Fonda
, a prolific author, and a former candidate for offices such as Governor of California
, Mayor of Los Angeles, and US Senator.
Student activism
Student activism is work done by students to effect political, environmental, economic, or social change. It has often focused on making changes in schools, such as increasing student influence over curriculum or improving educational funding...
movement in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
that was one of the main iconic representations of the country's New Left
New Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
. The organization developed and expanded rapidly in the mid-1960s before dissolving at its last convention in 1969. A faction of SDS formed the Weather Underground, identified by the FBI as a "domestic terrorist group."
SDS has been an important influence on student organizing in the decades since its collapse. Participatory democracy
Participatory democracy
Participatory Democracy, also known as Deliberative Democracy, Direct Democracy and Real Democracy , is a process where political decisions are made directly by regular people...
, direct action
Direct action
Direct action is activity undertaken by individuals, groups, or governments to achieve political, economic, or social goals outside of normal social/political channels. This can include nonviolent and violent activities which target persons, groups, or property deemed offensive to the direct action...
, radicalism, student power, shoestring budgets, and its organizational structure are all present in varying degrees in current American student activist groups. Though various organizations have been formed in subsequent years as proposed national networks for left-wing student organizing, none has approached the scale of SDS, and most have lasted a few years at best.
A new incarnation of SDS
Students for a Democratic Society (2006 organization)
Students for a Democratic Society is a United States student organization representing left wing beliefs. It takes its name and inspiration from the original SDS of 1960-1969, then the largest radical student organization in US history...
was founded in 2006.
Origins
SDS developed from the Student League for Industrial DemocracyStudent League for Industrial Democracy (1946-1959)
The Student League for Industrial Democracy of 1946 to 1959 was the second incarnation of the League for Industrial Democracy's student group. It changed its name to the Students for a Democratic Society on January 1, 1960, and severed its connection to the LID in 1965.- Origins :After the...
(SLID), the youth branch of a socialist educational organization known as the League for Industrial Democracy
League for Industrial Democracy
The League for Industrial Democracy , from 1960-1965 known as the Students for a Democratic Society , was founded in 1905 by a group of notable socialists including Harry W. Laidler, Jack London, Norman Thomas, Upton Sinclair, and J.G. Phelps Stokes...
(LID). LID descended from the Intercollegiate Socialist Society
Intercollegiate Socialist Society
The Intercollegiate Socialist Society was the a Socialist student organization from 1905-1921. It attracted many prominent intellectuals and writers and acted as the unofficial Socialist Party of America student wing...
, started in 1905. Early in 1960, SLID decided to change its name into SDS. The phrase “industrial democracy” sounded too narrow and too labor oriented, making it more difficult to recruit students. Moreover, because the LID's leadership did not correspond to the expectations and the mood on the campuses, the SLID felt the need to dissociate itself from its parent organization. SDS held its first meeting in 1960 on the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
campus at Ann Arbor, Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Ann Arbor is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the county seat of Washtenaw County. The 2010 census places the population at 113,934, making it the sixth largest city in Michigan. The Ann Arbor Metropolitan Statistical Area had a population of 344,791 as of 2010...
, where Alan Haber was elected president. Its political manifesto, known as the Port Huron Statement
Port Huron Statement
The Port Huron Statement is the manifesto of the American student activist movement Students for a Democratic Society , written primarily by Tom Hayden, then the Field Secretary of SDS, and completed on June 15, 1962 at an SDS convention at what is now a state park in Lakeport, Michigan, a...
, was adopted at the organization's first convention in 1962, based on an earlier draft by staff member Tom Hayden
Tom Hayden
Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden is an American social and political activist and politician, known for his involvement in the animal rights, and the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s. He is the former husband of actress Jane Fonda and the father of actor Troy Garity.-Life and...
.
The Port Huron
Port Huron, Michigan
Port Huron is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the county seat of St. Clair County. The population was 30,184 at the 2010 census. The city is adjacent to Port Huron Township but is administratively autonomous. It is joined by the Blue Water Bridge over the St. Clair River to Sarnia,...
Statement criticized the political system of the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
for failing to achieve international peace and critiqued Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
foreign policy
Foreign policy
A country's foreign policy, also called the foreign relations policy, consists of self-interest strategies chosen by the state to safeguard its national interests and to achieve its goals within international relations milieu. The approaches are strategically employed to interact with other countries...
, the threat of nuclear war, and the arms race
Arms race
The term arms race, in its original usage, describes a competition between two or more parties for the best armed forces. Each party competes to produce larger numbers of weapons, greater armies, or superior military technology in a technological escalation...
. In domestic matters, it criticized racial discrimination, economic inequality, big businesses, trade union
Trade union
A trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...
s and political parties
Political party
A political party is a political organization that typically seeks to influence government policy, usually by nominating their own candidates and trying to seat them in political office. Parties participate in electoral campaigns, educational outreach or protest actions...
. In addition to its critique and analysis of the American system, the manifesto also suggested a series of reforms: it proclaimed a need to reshape into two genuine political parties to attain greater democracy, for stronger power for individuals through citizen's lobbies, for more substantial involvement by workers in business management, and for an enlarged public sector with increased government welfare
Welfare
Welfare refers to a broad discourse which may hold certain implications regarding the provision of a minimal level of wellbeing and social support for all citizens without the stigma of charity. This is termed "social solidarity"...
, including a "program against poverty
Poverty
Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...
." The manifesto provided ideas of what and how to work for and to improve, and also advocated nonviolent
Nonviolence
Nonviolence has two meanings. It can refer, first, to a general philosophy of abstention from violence because of moral or religious principle It can refer to the behaviour of people using nonviolent action Nonviolence has two (closely related) meanings. (1) It can refer, first, to a general...
civil disobedience
Civil disobedience
Civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal to obey certain laws, demands, and commands of a government, or of an occupying international power. Civil disobedience is commonly, though not always, defined as being nonviolent resistance. It is one form of civil resistance...
as the means by which student youth could bring forth a "participatory democracy
Participatory democracy
Participatory Democracy, also known as Deliberative Democracy, Direct Democracy and Real Democracy , is a process where political decisions are made directly by regular people...
." Kirkpatrick Sale described the manifesto as "nothing less than an ideology, however raw and imperfect and however much would have resisted this word."
The manifesto also presented SDS's break with the left-wing policies of the postwar years. Firstly, it was written with the same overall vision all along the document and reflected their view that all problems in every area were linked to each other and their willingness not to lead single-issue struggles but a broad struggle on all fronts at the same time. Then, it expressed SDS's willingness to work with groups whatever may be their political inclination and announced their rejection of anti-communism
Anti-communism
Anti-communism is opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed in reaction to the rise of communism, especially after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the beginning of the Cold War in 1947.-Objections to communist theory:...
, a definitely new radical view contrasting with much of the American Left
American Left
The American Left consists of individuals and groups, including socialists, communists and anarchists, that have sought fundamental change in the economic, political and cultural institutions of the United States. Although left-wing ideologies came to the United States in the 19th century, there...
which had always developed a policy of anti-communism. Without being Marxist or pro-communism, they denounced anti-communism as being a social problem and an obstruction to democracy. They also criticized the United States for their exaggerated paranoia and exclusive condemnation of the Soviet Union and blamed this for being a reason of failing to achieve disarmament and to assure peace.
The Port Huron
Port Huron Statement
The Port Huron Statement is the manifesto of the American student activist movement Students for a Democratic Society , written primarily by Tom Hayden, then the Field Secretary of SDS, and completed on June 15, 1962 at an SDS convention at what is now a state park in Lakeport, Michigan, a...
Convention opened with a symbol of this break with the policy of the past years: the delegate of the Communist Progressive Youth Organizing Committee asked to attend the conference as an observer. The people from the Young People's Socialist League objected while most of the SDSers insisted on letting him sit. He eventually sat. Later in the meeting, Michael Harrington
Michael Harrington
Edward Michael "Mike" Harrington was an American democratic socialist, writer, political activist, professor of political science, radio commentator and founder of the Democratic Socialists of America.-Personal life:...
, an LID member, became agitated over the manifesto because he found the stand they took toward the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
and authoritarian regimes in general was insufficiently critical, and because, according to him, they deliberately wrote sections to have pique the liberals. Surprisingly, Roger Hagan, a liberal, defended the SDS and its policy. After lively debates between the two, the draft finally remained more or less unchanged.
Some two weeks later, a meeting between the LID and SDS was held where the LID expressed its discontent about the manifesto. As a result, Haber and Hayden, at this time respectively the National secretary and the new President of the organization, were summoned to a hearing on the 6 July 1962. There, Hayden clashed with Michael Harrington (as he later would with Irving Howe
Irving Howe
Irving Howe was an American literary and social critic and a prominent figure of the Democratic Socialists of America.-Life and career:...
) over the perceived potential for totalitarianism among other things. Harrington denounced the seating of the PYOC member, SDS’s tolerance for communism and their lack of clarity in their condemnation of communist totalitarianism and authoritarianism, and he reproached SDS for providing only a mild critique of the Soviet Union and for blaming the cold war mostly on the United States. Hayden then asked him to read the manifesto more carefully, especially the section on values. Hayden later wrote:
"While the draft Port Huron Statement included a strong denunciation of the Soviet Union, it wasn't enough for LID leaders like Michael Harrington. They wanted absolute clarity, for example, that the United States was blameless for the nuclear arms race...In truth, they seemed threatened by the independence of the new wave of student activism..."
The tension between SDS and the LID was greatly increased when SDS called for a national demonstration to take place during the spring of 1965. The LID was very concerned about "Communist" participation but SDS refused to restrict who could attend and what signs they could use. The rift opened even further when, at the 1965 SDS National Convention,the clause excluding communists from membership was deleted from the SDS constitution. During the summer of 1965 delegates from SDS and the LID met in Chicago and New York. The League for Industrial Democracy, SDS's sponsoring organization, objected to the removal of the exclusion clause in the SDS constitution, as SDS was with LID's non-profit status which excluded political activity. By mutual agreement the relationship was severed October 4, 1965.
Early years: 1962–1965
In the academic year 1962–1963, the President was Tom HaydenTom Hayden
Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden is an American social and political activist and politician, known for his involvement in the animal rights, and the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s. He is the former husband of actress Jane Fonda and the father of actor Troy Garity.-Life and...
, the Vice President was Paul Booth and the National Secretary was Jim Monsonis. There were nine chapters with, at most, about 1000 members. The national office (NO) in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
consisted of a few desks, some broken chairs, a couple of file cabinets and a few typewriters. As a student group with a strong belief in decentralization and a distrust for most organizations, the SDS did not have a strong central bureaucracy. The three stalwarts at the office, Don McKelvey, Steve Max, and the National Secretary, Jim Monsonis, worked long hours for little pay to service the local chapters, and to help establish new ones. Even during the Cuban Missile Crisis
Cuban Missile Crisis
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a confrontation among the Soviet Union, Cuba and the United States in October 1962, during the Cold War...
in October, little could be accomplished. Most activity was oriented toward civil rights
Civil rights
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...
issues and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ' was one of the principal organizations of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. It emerged from a series of student meetings led by Ella Baker held at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina in April 1960...
(SNCC) played a key role in inspiring SDS.
By the end of the academic year, there were over 200 delegates at the annual convention at Pine Hill, New York
Pine Hill, New York
Pine Hill is a hamlet in the western part of the town of Shandaken in Ulster County, New York, United States. As of the 2000 census, the CDP had a total population of 308.- History :...
, from 32 different colleges and universities. It was then decided to give more power to the chapters, who would then send delegates to the National Council (NC), which would meet quarterly to handle the on-going activities. Also, in the spirit of participatory democracy, a consensus was reached to elect new officers each year. Lee Webb of Boston University
Boston University
Boston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...
was chosen as National Secretary, and Todd Gitlin
Todd Gitlin
Todd Gitlin is an American sociologist, political writer, novelist, and cultural commentator. He has written widely on the mass media, politics, intellectual life and the arts, for both popular and scholarly publications.-New Left activist:...
of Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
was made president. Some continuity was preserved by retaining Paul Booth as Vice President. The search began for something to challenge the idealistic, budding activists.
It was at this time that the Black Power Movement was first gaining some momentum (although Stokely Carmichael
Stokely Carmichael
Kwame Ture , also known as Stokely Carmichael, was a Trinidadian-American black activist active in the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement. He rose to prominence first as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and later as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party...
would make the movement more mainstream in 1966). The movement made it impolitic for white activists, such as those in SDS, to presume to lead protests for black civil rights. Instead, SDS would try to organize white unemployed youths through a newly established program they called the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). This "into the ghetto" move was a practical failure, but the fact that it existed at all drew many young idealists to SDS.
At the summer convention in 1964 there was a split between those who were campus-oriented, and the ERAP supporters. Most of the old guard were ERAP supporters, but the campus activists were growing. Paul Potter was elected president, and by the end of summer there were ten ERAP programs in place, with about 125 student volunteers. C. Clark Kissinger
C. Clark Kissinger
C. Clark Kissinger was the National Secretary of Students for a Democratic Society in 1964-65. He visited the People's Republic of China twice during the Cultural Revolution, and is a devoted Maoist. His writings frequently appear in Revolution, journal of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA...
of Shimer College
Shimer College
Shimer College is a very small, private, undergraduate liberal arts college in Chicago, Illinois, in the United States. Founded by Frances Wood Shimer in 1853 in the frontier town of Mt. Carroll, Illinois, it was a women's school for most of its first century. It joined with the University of...
in Illinois
Illinois
Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...
was elected as National Secretary, and he put the NO on a much more business-like basis. He and his assistant, Helen Garvey mailed out the literature list, the newsletters and the news of chapter's activities to a growing membership list. Kissinger also worked to smooth the relationship with the LID.
A small faction of SDS that was interested in change through conventional electoral politics established a program called the Political Education Project (PEP). Its Director was Jim Williams of the University of Louisville, and Steve Max served as its Associate Director. This was never very large, and it was opposed by the mainstream SDSers, who were mostly opposed to such traditional, old-fashioned activity, and were looking for something new that "worked". The Johnson
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon Baines Johnson , often referred to as LBJ, was the 36th President of the United States after his service as the 37th Vice President of the United States...
landslide victory in November played its part, as well, and PEP soon withered away. A Peace Research and Education Project (PREP) headed by Paul Booth, Swarthmore, met a similar fate. Meanwhile, the local chapters got into all sorts of projects, from University reform, community-university relations, and now, in a small way, the issue of the draft
Conscription
Conscription is the compulsory enlistment of people in some sort of national service, most often military service. Conscription dates back to antiquity and continues in some countries to the present day under various names...
and Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
.
Then, on October 1, the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
exploded into the dramatic and prolonged agony that was the free speech movement
Free Speech Movement
The Free Speech Movement was a student protest which took place during the 1964–1965 academic year on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley under the informal leadership of students Mario Savio, Brian Turner, Bettina Aptheker, Steve Weissman, Art Goldberg, Jackie Goldberg, and...
. Led by a charismatic Friends of SNCC
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ' was one of the principal organizations of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. It emerged from a series of student meetings led by Ella Baker held at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina in April 1960...
student activist named Mario Savio
Mario Savio
""...But we're a bunch of raw materials that don't mean to be - have any process upon us. Don't mean to be made into any product! Don't mean - Don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone!...
, upwards of three thousand students surrounded a police car in which a student, arrested for setting up a card table in defiance of a ban by the University, was being taken away. The sit-down prevented the police car from moving for 32 hours. The demonstrations, meetings and strikes that resulted all but shut the university down. Hundreds of students were arrested.
From protest to resistance: 1965–1968
In February 1965, United States President Lyndon Johnson dramatically escalated the war in Vietnam by bombing North Vietnam in Operation Flaming DartOperation Flaming Dart
Operation Flaming Dart was a U.S. and Vietnam Air Force military operation, conducted in two parts, during the Vietnam War. During the bombing raid Premier Alexei Kosygin headed a Soviet delegation to North Vietnam....
and introducing ground troops directly involved in fighting the Viet Cong in the South. Campus chapters of SDS all over the country started to lead small, localized demonstrations against the war and the NO became the focal group that organized the march against the war in Washington on April 17. Endorsements came from nearly all of the other peace groups and leading personalities, there was significant increase in income and by the end of March there were 52 chapters. The media began to cover the organization and the New Left
New Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
. However, the call for the march and the openness of the organization in allowing other groups, even communist
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
front groups, or communists themselves, to join in caused great strains with the LID and some other old left organizations.
The first teach-in
Teach-in
A teach-in is similar to a general educational forum on any complicated issue, usually an issue involving current political affairs. The main difference between a teach-in and a seminar is the refusal to limit the discussion to a specific frame of time or an academic scope of the topic. Teach-ins...
against the war was held in the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
. Soon hundreds more, all over the country, were held. The demonstration in Washington, DC attracted about 25,000 anti-war protesters and SDS became the leading student group against the war on most U.S. campuses.
Representing its move into the heartland, the 1965 summer convention was held at Kewadin, a small camp in Northern Michigan
Northern Michigan
Northern Michigan, also known as Northern Lower Michigan , is a region of the U.S. state of Michigan...
. Moreover, its National Office, which was previously located in Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
, was moved to Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
at about the same time. The rapid growth of the membership rate during the preceding year brought with it a new breed with a new style:
The convention elected an Akron, Ohio
Akron, Ohio
Akron , is the fifth largest city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Summit County. It is located in the Great Lakes region approximately south of Lake Erie along the Little Cuyahoga River. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 199,110. The Akron Metropolitan...
student, Carl Oglesby
Carl Oglesby
Carl Oglesby was an American writer, academic, and political activist. He was the President of the leftist student organization Students for a Democratic Society from 1965 to 1966.-Early years:...
, President and Jeff Shero, Vice President in preference to "old guard" candidates. The convention voted to remove the anti-communist
Anti-communism
Anti-communism is opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed in reaction to the rise of communism, especially after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the beginning of the Cold War in 1947.-Objections to communist theory:...
exclusion clauses from the SDS constitution, failed to provide for any national program, and increased the reliance on local initiatives at the chapters. As a result, the National Office's leadership fell into ineffectual chaos. The League for Industrial Democracy, SDS's nominal sponsoring organization, was disappointed with removal of the exclusion clause from the SDS constitution, as SDS was covered under LID's non-profit status which excluded political activity. By mutual agreement the relationship was severed October 4, 1965.
On November 27, 1965 there was a major anti-war demonstration in Washington, D.C. at which Carl Ogelsby, the new SDS president, made a very successful speech, addressed to the liberal crowd, and in circuitous terms alleged that the United States government was imperialist in nature. The speech received a standing ovation, substantial press coverage, and resulted in greatly increased national prominence for SDS.
The unexpected influx of substantial numbers of new members and chapters combined with the ousting of the previous leadership, the "old guard", resulted in a crisis which dogged SDS until its final breakup; despite repeated attempts to do so, consensus was never reached on what form the organization should take or what role it should play. A final attempt by the old guard at a "rethinking conference" to establish a coherent new direction for the organization failed. The conference, held on the University of Illinois campus at Champaign-Urbana over Christmas vacation, 1965, was attended by about 360 people from 66 chapters, many of whom where new to SDS. Despite a great deal of discussion, no substantial decisions were made.
Nationally, the SDS continued to use the draft as an important issue for students, and over the rest of the academic year began to attack university complicity in it, as the universities had begun to supply student's class rankings, used to determine who was to be drafted. The University of Chicago's administration building was taken over in a three day sit-in in May. Rank protests and sit-ins spread to many other universities.
The summer convention of 1966 was moved even farther west, this time to Clear Lake
Clear Lake, Iowa
Clear Lake is a city in Cerro Gordo County, Iowa, United States. The population was 8,161 at the 2000 census. The city is named for the large lake on which it is located. It is the home of a number of marinas, state parks and tourism-related businesses. Clear Lake is also a major stop on Interstate...
, Iowa
Iowa
Iowa is a state located in the Midwestern United States, an area often referred to as the "American Heartland". It derives its name from the Ioway people, one of the many American Indian tribes that occupied the state at the time of European exploration. Iowa was a part of the French colony of New...
. The "prairie people" continued to increase their influence. Nick Egleson was chosen as President, and Carl Davidson
Carl Davidson
Carl Davidson is a former student leader of the new left of the 1960s, serving as a Vice President and National Secretary of Students for a Democratic Society. From 1968 to 1976, he worked on the Guardian newsweekly as a writer and news editor. Born in 1943, he graduated with a B.A...
was elected Vice President. Greg Calvert, recently a History Instructor at Iowa State University, was chosen as National Secretary. It was at this convention that members of Progressive Labor Party (PL) first participated. PL was a Maoist group that had turned to SDS as fertile ground for recruiting new members sympathetic to its long-term strategy of organizing the industrial working class. SDSers of that time were nearly all anti-communist, but they also refused to be drawn into actions that smacked of red-baiting
Red-baiting
Red-baiting is the act of accusing, denouncing, attacking or persecuting an individual or group as communist, socialist, or anarchist, or sympathetic toward communism, socialism, or anarchism. The word "red" in "red-baiting" is derived from the red flag signifying radical left-wing politics. In the...
, which they viewed as mostly irrelevant and old hat. PL soon began to organize a Worker Student Alliance
Worker Student Alliance
The Worker Student Alliance in the United States was the section of Students for a Democratic Society led by the Progressive Labor Party. The WSA argued that the best way to build a movement in the working class, like SDS wanted, was for students to become involved in workers' struggles both on...
. By 1968 and 1969 they would profoundly affect SDS, particularly at national gatherings of the membership, forming a well-groomed, disciplined faction which followed the Progressive Labor Party line.
The 1966 convention also marked an even greater turn towards organization around campus issues by local chapters, with the NO cast in a strictly supporting role. Campus issues ranged from bad food, powerless student "governments," various in loco parentis
In loco parentis
The term in loco parentis, Latin for "in the place of a parent"" refers to the legal responsibility of a person or organization to take on some of the functions and responsibilities of a parent...
manifestations, on-campus recruiting for the military and, again, ranking for the draft. Campuses around the country were in a state of unprecedented ferment and activism. Despite the absence of a politically effective campus SDS chapter, Berkeley again became a center of particularly dramatic radical upheaval over the university's repressive anti-free-speech actions, and an effective student strike with very wide support occurred. Even Harvard endured an upheaval engendered by a visit there of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara
Robert McNamara
Robert Strange McNamara was an American business executive and the eighth Secretary of Defense, serving under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to 1968, during which time he played a large role in escalating the United States involvement in the Vietnam War...
.
The Winter and Spring of 1967 saw an escalation of the militancy of the protests at many campuses. SDSers and self-styled radicals were even elected into the student government at a few places. Demonstrations against Dow Chemical Company
Dow Chemical Company
The Dow Chemical Company is a multinational corporation headquartered in Midland, Michigan, United States. As of 2007, it is the second largest chemical manufacturer in the world by revenue and as of February 2009, the third-largest chemical company in the world by market capitalization .Dow...
and other campus recruiters were widespread, and ranking and the draft issues grew in scale. The FBI
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...
(mainly through its secret COINTELPRO
COINTELPRO
COINTELPRO was a series of covert, and often illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations.COINTELPRO tactics included discrediting targets through psychological...
) and other law enforcement agencies were often exposed as having spies and informers in the chapters. Harassment by the authorities was also on the rise. The National Office became distinctly more effective in this period, and the three officers actually visited most of the chapters. New Left Notes, as well, became a potent vehicle for promoting some coherence and solidarity among the chapters. The Anti-War movement began to take hold among university students.
The 1967 convention took an egalitarian
Egalitarianism
Egalitarianism is a trend of thought that favors equality of some sort among moral agents, whether persons or animals. Emphasis is placed upon the fact that equality contains the idea of equity of quality...
turn by eliminating the Presidential and Vice-Presidential offices and replacing them with a National Secretary (20 year old Mike Spiegel), an Education Secretary (Texan Bob Pardun), and an Inter‑organizational Secretary (former VP Carl Davidson). A clear direction for a national program was not set but they did manage to pass strong resolutions on the draft, resistance within the Army itself, and they made a call for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam. A women's liberation resolution on the issue of male chauvinism was passed by conference attendees, for the first time.
That fall saw a great escalation of the anti-war actions of the New Left
New Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
. The school year started with a large demonstration against university complicity in the war in allowing Dow recruiters on campus at the University of Wisconsin in Madison on October 17. Peaceful at first, the demonstrations turned to a sit-in that was violently dispersed by the Madison police and riot squad, resulting in many injuries and arrests. A mass rally and a student strike then closed the university for several days. A coordinated series of demonstrations against the draft led by members of the Resistance, the War Resisters League
War Resisters League
The War Resisters League was formed in 1923 by men and women who had opposed World War I. It is a section of the London-based War Resisters' International.Many of the founders had been jailed during World War I for refusing military service...
, and SDS added fuel to the fire of resistance. After conventional civil rights tactics of peaceful pickets seemed to have failed, the Oakland, California Stop the Draft Week ended in mass hit and run skirmishes with the police. The huge (100,000 people) October 21 March on the Pentagon saw hundreds arrested and injured. Night-time raids on draft offices began to spread.
Climax and split: 1968–1969
In the spring of 1968, National SDS activists led an effort on the campuses called "Ten Days of Resistance" and local chapters cooperated with the Student Mobilization Committee in rallies, marches, sit-ins and teach-ins, which culminated in a one-day strike on April 26. About a million students stayed away from classes that day, the largest student strikeStudent strike
A student strike occurs when students enrolled at a teaching institution such as a school, college or university refuse to go to class. This form of strike action is often used as a negotiating tactic in order to put pressure on the governing body of the university, particularly in countries where...
in the history of the United States. It was largely ignored by the New York City-based national media, which focused on the student shutdown of Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
in New York, led by an inter-racial alliance of Columbia SDS chapter activists and Student Afro Society activists. As a result of the mass media publicity given to Columbia SDS activists such as Columbia SDS chairperson Mark Rudd
Mark Rudd
Mark William Rudd is a political organizer, mathematics instructor, and anti-war activist, most well known for his involvement with the Weather Underground. Rudd became a member of the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society in 1963. By 1968, he had emerged as a leader...
during the Columbia Student Revolt
Columbia University protests of 1968
The Columbia University protests of 1968 were among the many student demonstrations that occurred around the world in that year. The Columbia protests erupted over the spring of that year after students discovered links between the university and the institutional apparatus supporting the United...
, the organization was put on the map politically and "SDS" became a household name in the United States for a few years. Membership in SDS chapters around the United States increased dramatically during the 1968-69 academic year.
Led by the Worker-Student Alliance and rival Joe Hill caucuses, SDS in San Francisco played a major role in the Third World Student Strike at San Francisco State College. This strike, the longest student strike in U. S. history, led to the creation of Black and other ethnic studies programs on campuses across the country.
SDS members from Austin
Austin, Texas
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of :Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 14th most populous city in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in...
, Texas
Texas
Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...
participated in a mass demonstration in San Antonio, Texas in April 1969 at the "Kings River Parade". San Antonio SNCC members called the demonstration to protest the killing of Bobby Joe Phillips by San Antonio Police Officers.
In the summer of 1969, the ninth SDS national convention was held at the Chicago Coliseum
Chicago Coliseum
The Chicago Coliseum was the name of a succession of three large indoor arenas in Chicago, Illinois from the 1860s to 1982 that each served as a sports venue, convention center, and exhibition hall over the course of their respective histories. The first Coliseum briefly made an appearance in the...
with some 2000 people attending. Many factions of the movement were present, and set up their literature tables all around the edges of the cavernous hall. The Young Socialist Alliance
Young Socialist Alliance
The Young Socialist Alliance was a Trotskyist youth group of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States of America. It was founded in 1960, although it had roots going back several years earlier. It was dissolved in 1992...
, Wobblies
Industrial Workers of the World
The Industrial Workers of the World is an international union. At its peak in 1923, the organization claimed some 100,000 members in good standing, and could marshal the support of perhaps 300,000 workers. Its membership declined dramatically after a 1924 split brought on by internal conflict...
, Spartacists
International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)
The International Communist League , earlier known as the international Spartacist tendency is a Trotskyist international. Its largest constituent party is the Spartacist League...
, Marxists
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
and Maoists
Maoism
Maoism, also known as the Mao Zedong Thought , is claimed by Maoists as an anti-Revisionist form of Marxist communist theory, derived from the teachings of the Chinese political leader Mao Zedong . Developed during the 1950s and 1960s, it was widely applied as the political and military guiding...
of various sorts, all together with various law-enforcement spies and informers contributed to the air of impending expectations.
Each delegate was given the convention issue of the newspaper New Left Notes, which contained a manifesto, "You don't need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows", a line taken from Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
's Subterranean Homesick Blues
Subterranean Homesick Blues
"Subterranean Homesick Blues" is a song by Bob Dylan, originally released in 1965 as a single on Columbia Records, catalogue 43242. It appeared 19 days later as the lead track to the album Bringing It All Back Home. It was Dylan's first Top 40 hit, peaking at #39 on the Billboard Hot 100. It also...
. This manifesto had been first presented at the Spring, 1969, SDS National Council Meeting in Austin, Texas
Austin, Texas
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of :Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 14th most populous city in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in...
. The document had been written by an 11-member committee that included Mark Rudd, Bernardine Dohrn
Bernardine Dohrn
Bernardine Rae Dohrn is a former leader of the American anti-Vietnam War radical organization, Weather Underground. She is an Associate Professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law and the immediate past Director of Northwestern's Children and Family Justice Center...
and John Jacobs
John Jacobs (student leader)
John Gregory Jacobs was an American student and anti-war activist in the 1960s and early 1970s. He was a leader in both Students for a Democratic Society and the Weatherman group, and an advocate of the use of violent force to overthrow the government of the United States...
, and represented the position of the Revolutionary Youth Movement
Revolutionary Youth Movement
The Revolutionary Youth Movement was the section of Students for a Democratic Society that opposed the Worker Student Alliance of the Progressive Labor Party...
(RYM) wing of SDS, most of which later turned into the Weather Underground Organization
Weatherman (organization)
Weatherman, known colloquially as the Weathermen and later the Weather Underground Organization , was an American radical left organization. It originated in 1969 as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society composed for the most part of the national office leadership of SDS and their...
. The New Left Notes issue was full of the language of the Old Left of the 1930s; and was thus impenetrable and irrelevant to the majority of SDSers.
Once it became clear that the Worker Student Alliance
Worker Student Alliance
The Worker Student Alliance in the United States was the section of Students for a Democratic Society led by the Progressive Labor Party. The WSA argued that the best way to build a movement in the working class, like SDS wanted, was for students to become involved in workers' struggles both on...
(WSA) faction was the largest contingent with a majority of the delegates, the convention quickly fell into disarray, as the RYM and allied groups moved to expel Progressive Labor (PL) members and the WSA faction of SDS. The Black Panther
Black Panther Party
The Black Panther Party wasan African-American revolutionary leftist organization. It was active in the United States from 1966 until 1982....
representatives attacked PL and at the same time proved itself inclined towards sexism
Sexism
Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is the application of the belief or attitude that there are characteristics implicit to one's gender that indirectly affect one's abilities in unrelated areas...
by advocating "pussy power." The entire convention fell into something approaching chaos, or worse, farce.
The RYM and the National Office faction, led by Bernardine Dohrn
Bernardine Dohrn
Bernardine Rae Dohrn is a former leader of the American anti-Vietnam War radical organization, Weather Underground. She is an Associate Professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law and the immediate past Director of Northwestern's Children and Family Justice Center...
, led a breakaway meeting from which PL and WSA members were barred. This group then voted by about 500 to 100 to expel PL from SDS, and then walked out of the conference hall with that 500. By the next day, there were two SDS organizations, which RYM termed "SDS-RYM" and "SDS-WSA."
In the fall of 1969, many of the SDS-RYM chapters also split up or disintegrated. The Weatherman faction evolved into a small underground organization that first took to street confrontations and then to a bombing campaign. The Weathermen held one final national convention in Flint, Michigan, from December 27–31, 1969. It was at this convention, more popularly known as the "Flint War Council
Flint War Council
The Flint War Council was a series of meetings of the Weather Underground Organization and associates in Flint, Michigan, that took place from 27–31 December 1969 . During these meetings, the decisions were made for the WUO to go underground, to "engage in guerilla warfare against the U.S...
," that the decision was made to disband what remained of SDS-RYM. SDS-RYM was fully defunct by 1970, while SDS-WSA continued its activity.
SDS-WSA: 1969–1974 and beyond
SDS-Worker-Student Alliance (SDS-WSA) continued to function nationwide, with a focus on (a) fighting racism; and (b) supporting workers' struggles and strikes, including the 1969 General Electric strike and 1970 Postal Workers' strikes. The WSA organized a support demonstration for the post office strikers, which worried the NixonRichard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 under...
administration a lot. This is the entry from H.R. Haldeman’s diary:
Now calling itself simply SDS, SDS-WSA continued to publish the newspaper New Left Notes. It held a convention in Boston in 1971, at which a striking General Motors
General Motors
General Motors Company , commonly known as GM, formerly incorporated as General Motors Corporation, is an American multinational automotive corporation headquartered in Detroit, Michigan and the world's second-largest automaker in 2010...
worker was a featured speaker.
In 1972, SDS-WSA demonstrated at the Democratic National Convention
Democratic National Convention
The Democratic National Convention is a series of presidential nominating conventions held every four years since 1832 by the United States Democratic Party. They have been administered by the Democratic National Committee since the 1852 national convention...
in Miami against Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern
George McGovern
George Stanley McGovern is an historian, author, and former U.S. Representative, U.S. Senator, and the Democratic Party nominee in the 1972 presidential election....
's retreating from his original stronger campaign positions against the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
. Several hundred SDS members staged a sit-in at the Doral Hotel as McGovern and his staff met upstairs with protesting members of Grassroots McGovern Volunteers and sympathizers angry over the same issues.
In Newark, New Jersey
Newark, New Jersey
Newark is the largest city in the American state of New Jersey, and the seat of Essex County. As of the 2010 United States Census, Newark had a population of 277,140, maintaining its status as the largest municipality in New Jersey. It is the 68th largest city in the U.S...
, SDS-WSA demonstrated against Anthony Imperiale
Anthony Imperiale
Anthony M. Imperiale, Sr. was a member of the New Jersey State Senate from Newark, New Jersey.-Biography:He was born on July 10, 1931 in Newark, New Jersey. He later served in the United States Marine Corps who during the Korean War.In the 1960's he opposed desegregation busing in the United States...
and his North Ward Citizens' Council which was opposing the construction of Kawaida Towers, a building complex sponsored by a community organization led by Black nationalist and poet Amiri Baraka (formerly Leroy Jones) (New York Times January 3, 1973, p. 84)
SDS joined with PLP and others to protest the writings of Arthur Jensen
Arthur Jensen
Arthur Robert Jensen is a Professor Emeritus of educational psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Jensen is known for his work in psychometrics and differential psychology, which is concerned with how and why individuals differ behaviorally from one another.He is a major proponent...
, William Shockley
William Shockley
William Bradford Shockley Jr. was an American physicist and inventor. Along with John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain, Shockley co-invented the transistor, for which all three were awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.Shockley's attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the 1950s...
, and Richard Herrnstein
Richard Herrnstein
Richard J. Herrnstein was an American researcher in animal learning in the Skinnerian tradition. He was one of the founders of quantitative analysis of behavior....
, all of whom promoted the notion that there might be a genetic component to the observed below-average performance of black people on IQ tests. In October 1973, SDS-WSA, PLP, and others organized a convention at the Loeb Student Center of New York University dedicated to opposing academic racism. SDS circulated a petition entitled "A Resolution Against Racism" that was published in the New York Times on October 28, 1973 (p. 211). Out of this convention the Committee Against Racism (CAR) was formed to continue the fight against racism. CAR later changed its name to International Committee Against Racism (InCAR), when some chapters were formed in Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
.
In 1974, National SDS(-WSA) voted to dissolve as a separate organization and reform as chapters of InCAR. However, individual chapters of SDS continued to exist for some time. A chapter at Purdue University
Purdue University
Purdue University, located in West Lafayette, Indiana, U.S., is the flagship university of the six-campus Purdue University system. Purdue was founded on May 6, 1869, as a land-grant university when the Indiana General Assembly, taking advantage of the Morrill Act, accepted a donation of land and...
was active as late as 1976.
All references to contemporary activities of SDS in sources such as the New York Times after early 1970 are to SDS-WSA. For example, SDS confronted Indiana
Indiana
Indiana is a US state, admitted to the United States as the 19th on December 11, 1816. It is located in the Midwestern United States and Great Lakes Region. With 6,483,802 residents, the state is ranked 15th in population and 16th in population density. Indiana is ranked 38th in land area and is...
Senator Vance Hartke
Vance Hartke
Rupert Vance Hartke was a Democratic United States Senator from Indiana from 1959 until 1977.-Early life, education, military service:...
at an antiwar rally in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
in 1971 (New York Times July 3, 1971, p. 3 and July 4, 1971, p. 3). SDS denounced liberal Democrats as having been the authors of the Vietnam War in the first place. SDS demonstrated against the Republican National Convention
Republican National Convention
The Republican National Convention is the presidential nominating convention of the Republican Party of the United States. Convened by the Republican National Committee, the stated purpose of the convocation is to nominate an official candidate in an upcoming U.S...
in Miami Beach, Florida
Miami Beach, Florida
Miami Beach is a coastal resort city in Miami-Dade County, Florida, United States, incorporated on March 26, 1915. The municipality is located on a barrier island between the Atlantic Ocean and Biscayne Bay, the latter which separates the Beach from Miami city proper...
in August 1972 (New York Times August 21, 1972, p. 20; August 22, 1972, pp. 1,36; August 23, 1972, pp. 1, 28).
Unlike SDS-RYM and the Weathermen, SDS-WSA strongly opposed bombing and terrorism
Terrorism
Terrorism is the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion. In the international community, however, terrorism has no universally agreed, legally binding, criminal law definition...
. In 1971, SDS-WSA published a pamphlet titled Who Are The Bombers?. It warned readers against police agents sent into the anti-Vietnam War movement to foment violence to justify police attacks. It also sharply criticized the Weathermen, which had begun its campaign of bombings.
On June 26, 1972, the US Supreme Court gave a unanimous opinion, in the case Healy v. James
Healy v. James
In Healy v. James, the Supreme Court held that Central Connecticut State College's refusal to recognize a campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society was unconstitutional. The denial of official recognition was found to violate the First Amendment....
, stating that members of the SDS had been unconstitutionally deprived of their First Amendment
First Amendment to the United States Constitution
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering...
right to freedom of assembly when a group was denied permission to form on the campus of Central Connecticut State College in New Britain
New Britain
New Britain, or Niu Briten, is the largest island in the Bismarck Archipelago of Papua New Guinea. It is separated from the island of New Guinea by the Dampier and Vitiaz Straits and from New Ireland by St. George's Channel...
, Connecticut
Connecticut
Connecticut is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, and the state of New York to the west and the south .Connecticut is named for the Connecticut River, the major U.S. river that approximately...
.
A few early SDS leaders went on to careers as Democratic Party
Democratic Party (United States)
The Democratic Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. The party's socially liberal and progressive platform is largely considered center-left in the U.S. political spectrum. The party has the lengthiest record of continuous...
politicians, including Tom Hayden
Tom Hayden
Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden is an American social and political activist and politician, known for his involvement in the animal rights, and the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s. He is the former husband of actress Jane Fonda and the father of actor Troy Garity.-Life and...
, who is still active in politics and writing. Hayden is a former member of the legislature of the state of California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
and is well-known as the former husband of actress Jane Fonda
Jane Fonda
Jane Fonda is an American actress, writer, political activist, former fashion model, and fitness guru. She rose to fame in the 1960s with films such as Barbarella and Cat Ballou. She has won two Academy Awards and received several other movie awards and nominations during more than 50 years as an...
, a prolific author, and a former candidate for offices such as Governor of California
Governor of California
The Governor of California is the chief executive of the California state government, whose responsibilities include making annual State of the State addresses to the California State Legislature, submitting the budget, and ensuring that state laws are enforced...
, Mayor of Los Angeles, and US Senator.
The New SDS: 2006 and later
A new incarnation of SDS was founded on January 16, 2006, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and by 2010 had grown to over 150 chapters around the United States. It has held five national conventions to date, including the fifth in 2010 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.Books
- Adelson, Alan. SDS. New York, Charles Scribener's Sons, 1972 ISBN 0-684-12393-2.
- Davidson, Carl, editor. Revolutionary Youth and the New Working Class: The Praxis Papers, the Port Authority Statement, the RYM Documents and othe Lost Writings of SDS . Pittsburgh: Changemaker, 2011 ISBN 978-1-257-99947-7
- Elbaum, Max. Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. London and New York: Verso, 2002 ISBN 978-1859846179.
- Frost, Heather. "An Interracial Movement of the Poor: Community Organizing and the New Left in the 1960s." New York: New York University press, 2001 ISBN 0814726976.
- Heath, G. Louis, ed. Vandals in the Bomb Factory: The History and Literature of the Students for a Democratic Society. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1976 ISBN 0-810-80890-0.
- Halstead, Fred. Out Now!: A Participant's Account of the Movement in the United States Against the Vietnam War Hardcover edition. Anchor Foundation; Reprint edition 1978 ISBN 0-913460-47-8.
- Isserman, Maurice. If I Had a Hammer: the death of the old left and the birth of the new left. New York: Basic Books, 1987. ISBN 0-465-03197-8.
- Klatch, Rebecca E. A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1999 ISBN 0-520-21714-4.
- Miller, James. Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994 ISBN 978-0674197251.
- Pardun, Robert. "Prairie Radical: A Journey Through the Sixties" Shire Press, 2001 ISBN 0-918-82820-1.
- Sale, Kirkpatrick SDS. New York: Random House, 1973 ISBN 0-394-47889-4.
Articles
- Alper, Mark. The Legacy of S.D.S. and Its Relevance to Today's Activists. Electronic Worker. Direct Action Tendency, Socialist Party USASocialist Party USAThe Socialist Party USA is a multi-tendency democratic-socialist party in the United States. The party states that it is the rightful continuation and successor to the tradition of the Socialist Party of America, which had lasted from 1901 to 1972.The party is officially committed to left-wing...
. Retrieved April 12, 2005. - Bailey, Geoff. "The Rise and Fall of SDS." International Socialist Review, issue 31, September–October, 1983.
- Bookchin, MurrayMurray BookchinMurray Bookchin was an American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher. A pioneer in the ecology movement, Bookchin was the founder of the social ecology movement within anarchist, libertarian socialist and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books on politics,...
. Anarchy and Organization: A Letter To The Left. Reprinted from New Left Notes. January 15, 1969. Retrieved April 12, 2005. "The essay originally was written in reply to an attack by Huey Newton on anarchist forms of organization." - Maines, Billy. Second Coming : The Infamous SDS is Back, and Now It's Local. Orlando Weekly. November 23, 2006
- SDS in the 1960s: From A Student Movement to National Resistance, The Indypendent
- SDS: The signature organization of the 1960s student left has been reborn, The Indypendent
- Tom Hayden, "The Future of 1968's 'Restless Youth'" in: Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth, 1968 in Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 325-331.
- Who Are The Bombers? SDS-WSA pamphlet, 1972, attacking terrorism, including Weatherman terrorism.
- Setting The Record Straight: Progressive Labor & SDS
- "A Short History of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and Its Activities in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)" Series of 12 articles originally published in Challenge-Desafio, biweekly newspaper of The Progressive Labor Party January - July 2007.
- "The Death of SDS", essay by Mark RuddMark RuddMark William Rudd is a political organizer, mathematics instructor, and anti-war activist, most well known for his involvement with the Weather Underground. Rudd became a member of the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society in 1963. By 1968, he had emerged as a leader...
.
SDS publications
- Davidson, Carl. Toward a Student Syndicalist Movement or University Reform Revisited. Chicago: Students for a Democratic Society. ca. 1967. Mimeographed. 7 p.
- Gilbert, David and David Loud. U. S. Imperialism. Chicago: Students for a Democratic Society, 1968. Wraps. 33 p.
- Haber, Al and Dick Flacks. Peace, Power and the University: Prepared for Students for a Democratic Society and the Peace Research and Education Project.Ann Arbor: Peace Research and Education Project, 1963. Mimeographed. 12 p..
- Hayden, TomTom HaydenThomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden is an American social and political activist and politician, known for his involvement in the animal rights, and the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s. He is the former husband of actress Jane Fonda and the father of actor Troy Garity.-Life and...
, and Carl Wittman. "An Interracial Movement of the Poor?," SDS Economic Research and Action Project, 1963. 27 p. - James, Mike. Getting Ready for the Firing Line: Join Community Union. Chicago: Students for a Democratic Society, March 1968. Stapled softcover. 8p. Photos by Nancy Hollander, Tom Malear of the Chicago Film Coop, Todd Gitlin & Les Jordan, SCEF. Reprinted from "The Activist," Spring 1967. Introduction for this pamphlet by Mike James.
- Lemisch, Jessie. Towards a Democratic History. Ann Arbor & Chicago: Radical Education Project/Students for a Democratic Society, (1967). Radical Education Project Occasional Paper. 8 p.
- Lynd, StaughtonStaughton LyndStaughton Craig Lynd is an American conscientious objector, Quaker, peace activist and civil rights activist, tax resister, historian, professor, author and lawyer. His involvement in social justice causes has brought him into contact with some of the nation's most influential activists, including...
. The New Radicals and "Participatory Democracy". Chicago: Students for a Democratic Society, 1965. 10 p. - Oglesby, CarlCarl OglesbyCarl Oglesby was an American writer, academic, and political activist. He was the President of the leftist student organization Students for a Democratic Society from 1965 to 1966.-Early years:...
. The Speech given by Carl Oglesby, President, Students for a Democratic Society, at the Nov. 27, 1965 March on Washington to End the War in Vietnam. Chicago: Students for a Democratic Society, ca. 1965. 8 × 11 in. Mimeographed. 8 p. - Olinick, Michael. The Campus Press. Distributed by Students for a Democratic Society for the Liberal Study Group, National Student AssociationNational Student AssociationThe United States National Student Association, a confederation of American college and university student governments, was founded in 1947 at a conference at the University of Wisconsin. It established its first headquarters in Madison, not far from the U. of Wisconsin campus...
, 1962. 13 p. - Oppenheimer, Martin. Alienation or Participation: The Sociology of Participatory Democracy. n.p.: Students of a Democratic Society (S.D.S.), 1966. 7 pages. 1st edition. Stapled booklet.
- Students for a Democratic Society. The Port Huron Statement. Based on Draft by Tom HaydenTom HaydenThomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden is an American social and political activist and politician, known for his involvement in the animal rights, and the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s. He is the former husband of actress Jane Fonda and the father of actor Troy Garity.-Life and...
, revised by SDS National Convention, Port Huron, Michigan, June 11–15, 1962. (Posted by The Sixties Project, sponsored by Viet Nam Generation Inc. and the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.) - Students for a Democratic Society. SDS: An Introduction. 1968.
- Students For A Democratic Society [S.D.S.]. Fight Racism! Boston: Students for a Democratic Society, n.d. [1969]. 28pp. 1st edition. Stapled softcover.
- Students for a Democratic Society. New Left Notes. Chicago. [?] Vol. 1 # 1 1965 [?] - Vol. 4 # 31 October 2, 1969.
- Students for a Democratic Society [Progressive Labor]. SDS New Left Notes, Vol. 5, No. 15, July 6, 1970 - [?]. Boston, 1970.
Archives
- Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.), Records, 1965-74. May 4 Collection—Box 107. Kent State UniversityKent State UniversityKent State University is a public research university located in Kent, Ohio, United States. The university has eight campuses around the northeast Ohio region with the main campus in Kent being the largest...
Libraries and Media Services. Department of Special Collections and Archives. Online guide retrieved April 12, 2005. - Students for a Democratic Society Period : 1962–1970. Period : 1962–1970. Total Size : 0.5 m. International Institute of Social History. Online guide retrieved April 12, 2005.
United States Government publications
- U.S. House of Representatives. Investigation of Students for a Democratic Society, Part 2 (Kent State University): Hearings Before the Committee on Internal Security, House of Representatives; 91st Congress, 2nd Session, June 24 and 25, 1969. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969.
- U.S. House of Representatives. Investigation of Students for a Democratic Society, Part 3-A (George Washington University); Hearings Before the Committee on Internal Security, House of Representatives; 91st Congress, 2nd Session, July 22, 1969. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969.
- U.S. House of Representatives. Student Views Toward U.S. Policy in Southeast Asia; Hearings Before an Ad Hoc Committee of Members of the House of Representatives; 91st Congress, 2nd Session, July 22, 1969. Washington: U.S. Government Printng Office, 1969.
- U.S. President. Commission on Campus Unrest. Report. This publication is often referred to as the Scranton Report, issued in 1970.
External links
- New Left Archive at NLN SDS and Weather Underground Documents compiled by Next Left Notes, a journal edited by several former and current SDS members
- SDS Historical Documents and other links
- "Shut It Down!" Includes Port Huron Statement, "SDS: The Last Hurrah" (an account of Chicago 1969 written by an undercover federal agent), and the Revolutionary Youth MovementRevolutionary Youth MovementThe Revolutionary Youth Movement was the section of Students for a Democratic Society that opposed the Worker Student Alliance of the Progressive Labor Party...
mission statement. - University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections – Vietnam Era Ephemera This collection contains leaflets and newspapers that were distributed on the University of Washington campus during the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. They reflect the social environment and political activities of the youth movement in Seattle during that period.
- Links to resources from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and related groups and activities Books & Memoirs
- SDS and Young Lords march in Chicago,October 1969