One of many student protest organizations established in the early 1960s, SDS for a time became the most influential of these activist groups.
Founded by activist Al Haber in 1960 at the University of Michigan, SDS remained largely unknown until June 1962, when 40 students from major universities assembled in Port Huron, Michigan. There, they rekindled the organization and delineated their beliefs, intentions, and objectives in the Port Huron Statement. This SDS manifesto, written by University of Michigan student Tom Hayden and others assembled at the meeting, spoke to a young generation of Americans who were critical of the jarring contradictions they perceived between the ideals and the realities of American life, and the rampant indifference to these disturbing paradoxes on the part of most Americans. The manifesto, a document proposing wide-ranging social reforms, began with the words, “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” It declared that the world the student generation would inherit needed to be changed.
SDS members were troubled by America’s pervasive racism and its high level of poverty, both of which exemplified the alarming gap between America’s political rhetoric of equality and a reality that belied such proclamations. Moreover, they condemned the cold war ideology that drove the nation’s foreign affairs, the growing political exclusiveness that was blocking citizens’ access to government, and the increasing domination of bureaucracies in universities, big business, government, the military, and political parties that was rendering the average American powerless.
In its manifesto, SDS called for “truly democratic alternatives to the present.” What its members proposed was a resurrection of participatory politics, but one in which the efforts of individuals would prompt crucially needed reforms. Students would serve at the forefront of this attempt to bring about a positive shift in the status quo, or, in the words of SDS’s manifesto, to “establish an environment for people to live in with dignity and creativeness.” While SDS advanced many of the same reforms previously advocated by liberals, such as an end to violence, poverty, racism, and social injustice, its members sought to differentiate their politics and methods from the “Old Left” (traditional LIBERALISM together with the socialism and COMMUNISM of past decades). In contrast, SDS referred to its ideology as “New Left.” It further distinguished itself from left-wing predecessors by placing emphasis on individual rather than bureaucratic efforts, grassroots organizing on college campuses and in cities, and “participatory democracy.”
An early initiative was the Economic Research and Action Project, which sought to create an alliance between workers and students in urban areas. Despite concerted efforts, the project proved unsuccessful.
The first major student protests erupted in the fall of 1964 at the University of California at Berkeley. Angered by the university’s efforts to deny them their traditional venue for political activities on campus, several hundred students staged SIT-INS and occupied administration buildings. Major student organizations, including SDS, took part in the demonstration and formed the Free Speech MovE-
University of Texas Students for a Democratic Society members protesting the war in Vietnam while other students jeer, 1965 (Library of Congress)
MENT. After a tense standoff, the university relented. What initially began as a protest for students’ rights at Berkeley, however, quickly intensified into general criticisms of universities around the country. These included the poor quality of campuses, the lack of open and free discussions, the bureaucratic nature of college administrations, and the universities’ suspiciously close ties with the government. As student protests spread, activists employed many of the tactics of nonviolent resistance they had learned from the Civil Rights movement. The growth of SDS accompanied the growth of campus unrest.
America’s increasing involvement in the Vietnam War changed the focus of the protests. With the nation’s military escalation in Vietnam and the 1965 expansion of the military draft, student groups redirected their impassioned rage into an antiwar movement. Students began to burn draft cards and American flags and stage campus strikes and antiwar rallies. Opposition to the war, with SDS in the forefront, came to consume the energies of the student movement. By the end of 1967, SDS claimed more than 100,000 supporters and took responsibility for hundreds of protests on campuses nationwide.
By this time, however, some SDS members began complaining of the organization’s increasingly authoritarian bent. Additionally, women involved in SDS criticized the group’s prevailing misogynist attitudes. They accused male members of denying them egalitarian treatment, of relegating them to little more than sex objects and glorified secretaries, and of purposefully ignoring the larger issue of gender discrimination in American society. Furthermore, some SDS leaders, including Tom Hayden, began abandoning their previously espoused strategies of nonviolent protest and, instead, urged the use of more militant tactics. The year 1968 degenerated into dramatic clashes between students and police on major college campuses and violent confrontations between police and protesters at the DEMOCRATIC Party’s national convention in Chicago. At the same time, SDS began to break up into factions. The most extreme of these splinter groups was the Weathermen, which proposed a strategy of revolutionary terrorism. By 1971, disunity and divisiveness had come to characterize SDS and led to its complete demise. The organization’s New Left ideology, with its rhetoric of hope, reform, and social justice, likewise collapsed. Both were victims of SDS’s rejection of its founding principles—“participatory democracy,” equal opportunity, passive CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE, and moral legitimacy.
Further reading: Wini Breines, Communi-fy and Organization in the New Left, 1962-1968 (New York: Praeger, 1982); Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS: Ten Years toward a Revolution (New York: Random House, 1973).
—Irene Guenther
World History
