Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a national student activist organization in the United States during the 1960s and was one of the principal representations of the New Left. Disdaining permanent leaders, hierarchical relationships and parliamentary procedure, the founders conceived of the organization as a broad exercise in "participatory democracy". From its launch in 1960, it grew rapidly in the course of the tumultuous decade, with over 300 campus chapters and 30,000 supporters recorded nationwide by its last national convention in 1969. The organization splintered at that convention amidst rivalry between factions seeking to impose national leadership and direction, and disputing "revolutionary" positions on, among other issues, the Vietnam War and Black Power.
A new national network for left-wing student organizing, also calling itself Students for a Democratic Society, was founded in 2006.
History
1960–1962: Port Huron Statement
SDS developed from the youth branch of a socialist educational organization known as the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). LID itself descended from an older student organization, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, founded in 1905 by Upton Sinclair, Walter Lippmann, Clarence Darrow, and Jack London. Early in 1960, to broaden the scope for recruitment beyond labor issues, the Student League for Industrial Democracy was reconstituted as SDS. They held their first meeting in 1960 on the University of Michigan campus at Ann Arbor, where Alan Haber was elected president. The SDS manifesto, known as the Port Huron Statement, was adopted at the organization's first convention in June 1962, based on an earlier draft by staff member Tom Hayden. Under Walter Reuther's leadership, the United Automobile Workers union (UAW) paid for a range of expenses for the 1962 convention, including use of the UAW summer retreat in Port Huron.
The Port Huron Statement decried what it described as "disturbing paradoxes": that the world's "wealthiest and strongest country" should "tolerate anarchy as a major principle of international conduct"; that it should allow "the declaration 'all men are created equal... to ring "hollow before the facts of Negro life"; that, even as technology creates "new forms of social organization", it should continue to impose "meaningless work and idleness"; and with two-thirds of mankind undernourished that its "upper classes" should "revel amidst superfluous abundance".
In searching for "the spark and engine of change" the authors disclaimed any "formulas" or "closed theories". Instead, "matured" by "the horrors of a century" in which "to be idealistic is to be considered apocalyptic", Students for a Democratic Society would seek a "new left ... committed to deliberativeness, honesty [and] reflection."
The Statement proposed the university, with its "accessibility to knowledge" and an "internal openness", as a "base" from which students would "look outwards to the less exotic but more lasting struggles for justice." "The bridge to political power" would be "built through genuine cooperation, locally, nationally, and internationally, between a new left of young people and an awakening community of allies." It was to "stimulating this kind of social movement, this kind of vision and program in campus and community across the country" that the SDS were committed.
For the sponsoring League for Industrial Democracy there was an immediate issue. The Statement omitted the LID's standard denunciation of communism: the regret it expressed at the "perversion of the older left by Stalinism" was too discriminating, and its references to Cold War tensions too even-handed. Hayden, who had succeeded Haber as SDS president, was called to a meeting where, refusing any further concession, he clashed with Michael Harrington (as he later would with Irving Howe).Todd Gitlin (1993). The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. Bantam. pp. 377–409. .
As security against "a united-front style takeover of its youth arm" the LID had inserted a communist-exclusion clause in the SDS constitution. When in 1965 those who considered this too obvious a concession to the Cold-War doctrines of the right succeeded in removing the language, there was a final parting of the ways. The students' tie to their parent organization was severed by mutual agreement.
In drafting the Port Huron Statement, Hayden acknowledged the influence of a Bowdoin College German exchange student, Michael Vester. He encouraged Hayden to be more explicit about the contradictions "between political democracy and economic concentration of power", and to take a more international perspective. Vester was to be the first of a number of close connections between the American SDS and the West German SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund), a student movement that was to follow a similar trajectory.
1962–1964: Organize your own In the academic year 1962–1963, the president was 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 a student group with a strong belief in decentralization and a distrust for most organizations, the SDS had not developed, and never would develop, a strong central directorate. National Office staffers worked long hours for little pay to service the local chapters, and to help establish new ones. Following the lead of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), most activity was oriented toward the civil rights struggle.
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. The convention chose a confederal structure. Policy and direction would be discussed in a quarterly conclave of chapter delegates, the National Council. National officer, in the spirit of "participatory democracy", would be selected annually by consensus. Lee Webb of Boston University was chosen as national secretary, and Todd Gitlin of Harvard University was made president.
In 1963, "racial equality" remained the cause célèbre. In November 1963, the Swarthmore College chapter of SDS partnered with Stanley Branche and local parents to create the Committee for Freedom Now which led the Chester school protests along with the NAACP in Chester, Pennsylvania. From November 1963 through April 1964, the demonstrations focused on ending the de facto segregation that resulted in the racial categorization of Chester public schools, even after the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka., p. 82 The racial unrest and civil rights protests made Chester one of the key battlegrounds of the Civil Rights Movement.
However, within the Congress of Racial Equality, and within the SNCC (particularly after the 1964 Freedom Summer), there was the suggestion that white activists might better advance the cause of civil rights by organising "their own".Clayborne Carson (1995). In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Harvard University Press At the same time, for many, 1963–64 was the academic year in which white poverty was discovered. Michael Harrington's The Other America "was the rage".Michael Harrington (1962). The Other America. Macmillan
Conceived in part as a response to the gathering danger of a "white backlash", and with $5,000 from United Automobile Workers union, Tom Hayden promoted an Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). SDS community organizers would help draw neighborhoods, both black and white, into an "interracial movement of the poor".Heather Frost (2001). An Interracial Movement of the Poor: Community Organizing and the New Left in the 1960s. New York: New York University press. . By the end of 1964, ERAP had ten inner-city projects engaging 125 student volunteers.
Ralph Helstein, president of the United Packinghouse Workers of America, arranged for Hayden and Gitlin to meet with Saul Alinsky who, with 25 years experience in Chicago and across the country, was the acknowledged father of community organizing. To Helstein's dismay, Alinsky dismissed the SDSers' venture into the field as naive and doomed to failure. Their view of the poor and of what could be achieved by consensus was absurdly romantic. Placing a premium on strong local leadership, structure and accountability, Alinsky's "citizen participation" was something "fundamentally different" from the "participatory democracy" envisaged by Hayden and Gitlin.Sanford Horwitt (1989) Let Them Call Me Rebel: The Life and Legacy of Saul Alinsky. New York. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 525
With the election of new leadership at the July 1964 national SDS convention there was already dissent. Noting that the "whole balance of the organization [had] shifted to ERAP headquarters in Ann Arbor", the new national secretary, C. Clark Kissinger cautioned against "the temptation to 'take one generation of campus leadership and run!' We must instead look toward building the campus base as the wellspring of our student movement." Gitlin's successor as president, Paul Potter, was blunter. The emphasis on "the problems of the dispossessed" had been misplaced: "It is through the experience of the middle class and the anesthetic of bureaucracy and mass society that the vision and program of participatory democracy will come—if it is to come."Miller, James (1994), Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago. Harvard University Press. p. 196
Hayden, who committed himself to community organizing in Newark (where he witnessed the "race riots" in 1967),Tom Hayden (1967), Rebellion in Newark: Official Violence and Ghetto Response, Vintages Books later suggested that if ERAP failed to build to greater success it was because of the escalating U.S. commitment in Vietnam: "Once again the government met an internal crisis by starting an external crisis." Yet there were ERAP volunteers more than ready to leave their storefront offices and heed the anti-war call to return to campus. Tending to the "less exotic struggles" of the urban poor had been a dispiriting experience.
Kirkpatrick Sale noted that however much the volunteers might talk at night about "transforming the system", "building alternative institutions," and "revolutionary potential", credibility on the doorstep rested on their ability to secure concessions from, and thus to develop relations with, the local power structures. Regardless of the agenda (welfare checks, rent, day-care, police harassment, garbage pick-up) the daytime reality was of delivery built "around all the shoddy instruments of the state." ERAP had seemed to trap the SDSers in "a politics of adjustment".
Lyndon B. Johnson's landslide in the November 1964 presidential election swamped considerations of Democratic-primary, or independent candidature, interventions—a path that had been tentatively explored in a Political Education Project. Local chapters expanded activity across a range of projects, including University reform, community-university relations, and were beginning to focus on the issue of the draft and Vietnam War. They did so within the confines of university bans on on-campus political organization and activity.