Students for a Democratic Society (1960 organization)

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The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a student activist movement in the United States founded in 1959. As part of the New Left movement in the United States, the organization developed rapidly in the mid-1960s, before dissolving in 1969.

The SDS was the organizational high point for student radicalism in the United States during the 1960s, and thus 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 national student activist groups.

Though various organizations have been formed in the years prior 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.

Most recently, a movement to revive the SDS took shape, beginning in 2003. A small group of SDS veterans (Robert Alan Haber, Tom Good, Paul Buhle) have joined with a Connecticut high school student, Pat Korte, to call for a new formation of SDS in response to the lacking anti-war movement against US involvement in Iraq. Several chapters at various colleges were subsequently formed. Since the group issued a press release in January of 2006 stating their intentions, over 30 chapters of SDS have appeared across the United States and more than 400 members have joined. The new group hosted its first northeast regional confrence at Brown Univeristy on April 23, 2006.

Origins

The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) developed from the youth branch of a socialist educational organization known as the League for Industrial Democracy (LID) which descended from the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, started in 1905. SDS held its first meeting in 1960 at Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Robert 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. This manifesto criticized the political system of the United States for failing to achieve international peace and for failing to address social ills in contemporary society. It also advocated non-violent civil disobedience as the means by which student youth could bring forth a "participatory democracy."

At Port Huron, Tom Hayden clashed with Irving Howe and Michael Harrington, over the perceived potential for totalitarianism. Hayden said, "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...."

Early years: 1962-1965

In the academic year 1962-1963 the President was Tom Hayden, 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 student group with a strong belief in decentralization and a distrust for most organization, the SDS did not have a strong central bureaucracy. The three stalwarts at the office, Don McKelvey, Steve Max, and National Secretary, Jim Monsonis worked long hours for little pay to service the local chapters, and to help establish new ones. Procedures and methods were experimental. Even during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, little could be accomplished. Most activity was oriented toward civil rights issues.

By the end of the school 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 failed miserably at first. But at least it was doing something, and many young idealists were drawn to SDS because of it.

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). 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) 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.

Then, on October 1, the University of California at 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 36 hours. The demonstrations, meetings and strikes that resulted all but shut the university down. Hundreds of students were arrested, the pundits analyzed, and the establishment foundered with incomprehension. Future SDS members all over the country watched and learned.

From protest to resistance: 1965-1968

In February of 1965, United States President Lyndon Johnson dramatically escalated the war in Vietnam by bombing North Vietnam and increasing the number of ground troops directly involved in fighting the Viet Cong in the South. The draft became a very real factor in the lives of students in America. 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 during the preceding year brought with it a new breed with a new style:

"For the first time at an SDS meeting people smoked marijuana; Pancho Villa mustaches, those droopy Western‑movie addenda that eventually became a New Left cliché, made their first appearance in quantity; blue workshirts, denim jackets, and boots were worn by both men and women. These were people generally raised outside of the East, many from the Midwest and Southwest, and their ruralistic dress reflected a different tradition, one more aligned to the frontier, more violent, more individualistic, more bare‑knuckled and callus‑handed, than that of the early SDSers. They were non‑Jewish, nonintellectual, nonurban, from a nonprofessional class, and often without any family tradition of political involvement, much less radicalism. They tended to be not only ignorant of the history of the left and its current half‑life in New York City, but downright uninterested: ..."^[1]

The convention elected an Akron, Ohio student, Carl Oglesby, President and Jeff Shero, Vice President. The convention voted to remove the anti-communist exclusionist clauses out of the constitution, declined to provide for any national program, and increased the reliance on local initiatives at the chapters. As a result, the NO fell into ineffectual chaos.

In the Fall of 1965, SDS began to organize against the draft, encouraging students to opt for Conscientious Objector draft status. Most chapters participated in the protests of October 15-16 against the war, which turned out about 100,000 people all over the country. Oglesby gave perhaps the most effective speech in the history of SDS at the SANE sponsored March on Washington on November 27. At this point, the establishment really began to take the movement seriously, and accusations and charges of treason began to be bandied about. LID severed relations with SDS and Members of Congress began to attack the organization and their demonstrations. Nevertheless, membership soared to new levels, although SDS was still not a household word within the United States.

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 Universty, was chosen as National Secretary. It was at this convention that members of Progressive Labor Party (PL) began to make their presence known for the first time. PL was a Maoist group that had turned to SDS as fertile ground for recruiting new members. 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 the Worker Student Alliance.

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.

By the Fall of 1966, there were approximately 175 active chapters, and about 6000 members. New Left Notes was coming out with some degree of regularity, and there was a feeling that the SDS was at a threshold of a new level of activism. The draft was a potent force, "We Won't Go" groups within and even outside of SDS began to form, and the first public burnings of draft-cards occurred. In December, the NC took the fateful step of passing from "protest to resistance" by advocating organized resistance to the draft. This represented a clear move away from the liberal concern with the civil rights of another group, and towards radical action for one's own liberation.

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. FBI 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 NO became distinctly more effective in this period, and the three officers actually visited most of the chapters. As well, New Left Notes became a potent vehicle for promoting some coherence and solidarity among the chapers. The hippie movement really began to take hold.

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A Volunteer takes on New Members

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 Viet Nam. Furthermore, a women's liberation resolution on the issue of male chauvinismwas 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.

Climax and disintegration: 1968-1969

In the Spring of 1968, SDS 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 ever in the history of the United States. It was largely ignored by the media, which was intensely focused on the shutdown of Columbia University in NYC, which was unconnected to the Ten Days of Resistance campaign.

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 actually present, and set up their literature tables all around the edges of the cavernous hall. The Young Socialist Alliance, Wobblies, Sparticists, Marxists and Maoists of various sorts, all together with various law enforcement spies and informers contributed to the air of impending expectations.

Each of the delegates were given the convention issue of New Left Notes, which contained a manifesto, "You don't need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows." This had been written by eleven 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 subsequently turned into the Weather Underground Organization. The New Left Notes issue distributed at the convention was full of the language of the Old Left of the thirties; thus it was impenetrable to the majority of SDSers.

The convention quickly fell into disarray as the PL Worker Student Alliance faction, which was about evenly divided with the Revolutionary Youth Movement forces at the convention, moved to exert its power over SDS as a whole. When the Black Panther representatives attacked PL but 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, voted by about 500 to 100 to expel the PL, and then walked out of the conference hall with that 500. By the next day there were two SDS's, neither of them recognizable to an older SDSer, nor to the bulk of the members back on the campuses. In the Fall of 1969 many of the SDS chapters also split up. Many of them disintegrated. The Weatherman faction evolved into a small underground organization that first took to street confrontations and then to blowing things up. There were no more national conventions. SDS was fully defunct by 1972.

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 United States Senator.

External links

File:Sds dare.jpg

SDS Logo from a current Florida chapter

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 Movement 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.

"New SDS"

Students for a Democratic Society (1960 organization)

Origins

Early years: 1962-1965

From protest to resistance: 1965-1968

Climax and disintegration: 1968-1969

See also

Further reading

Archives

Articles

Books and references

SDS Publications

U.S. Government Publications

External links

"New SDS"