Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

The dominant student organization of the New Left. SDS was a loose federation with chapters on more than three hundred college campuses. Most members were students who believed they must take radical action against racial discrimination, poverty, militarism, and especially the war in Vietnam.

Origins and History

The American Left had all but vanished during the 1950’s, largely because of an anticommunist environment embodied in Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who launched assaults on suspected communists in various organizations. The Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), which traced its origins to the labor struggles of the 1930’s, tried to disassociate itself from the communists, whom they perceived as authoritarian, manipulative, secretive, and undemocratic. To emphasize its differences, the group called itself part of the New Left. Inspired by the Civil Rights movement emerging in the South, white SLID members attending the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor helped organize boycotts against chain stores that practiced racial segregation in the South and, in June, 1962, under a new name, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the group hosted a conference at a United Automobile Workers camp in Port Huron, Michigan.

The 1962 SDS convention issued a manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, proclaiming the group’s commitment to a form of democracy in which each citizen would directly participate in public affairs as much as possible. To prevent a core group of leaders from dictating policy, SDS was to have a loose structure. Each campus chapter would be relatively independent, most decisions would be made by group consensus, and leadership positions would rotate annually.

Activities

Perhaps the most important early activity of SDS was the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) in which SDS members lived in poor urban communities to assess the needs of the residents in those neighborhoods and help empower them to address those issues. ERAP organized rent strikes and won concessions from local welfare officers.

Initially identifying themselves as liberals who were carriers of core American values, SDS members were inspired by President John F. Kennedy’s call to action and then by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s support for civil rights and initiation of the War on Poverty. However, many became suspicious of Johnson’s pledge not to expand the Vietnam War during the 1964 presidential campaign. As the Vietnam War escalated, it increasingly became the focus of SDS activity and analysis. A consensus emerged that the war was not a mere mistake stemming from a fundamentally sound policy carried out too zealously but rather a manifestation of a society controlled by a small corporate elite who orchestrated foreign and domestic policy to ensure their continued wealth and power. Poverty, racial discrimination, militarism, and an aggressive foreign policy that SDS termed imperialism for its apparent aim of dominating other countries were all seen as symptoms of the same core cause.

By the mid-1960’s, most SDS members viewed themselves as radicals and saw liberals as members, or at least allies, of the corporate elite because of liberals’ attempts to contain protest so that it did not threaten the rich and powerful. In particular, they felt that liberals bore most of the responsibility for the Vietnam War. To rally opposition to the war and galvanize that opposition into a mass movement that would bring about a radical transformation of American society, SDS organized teach-ins on college campuses around the country, supported draft resistance, and sponsored nationwide gatherings that converged on Washington, D.C., and antiwar marches that attracted tens of thousands of participants in cities such as New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

A consensus emerged within SDS that universities did not produce objective, value-neutral knowledge but that they trained professionals and conducted research in service to the powerful corporate elite. Students demonstrated against the university itself, opposing the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), war-related research, and on-campus recruitment for the military and for weapon-producing corporations such as Dow Chemical. In April, 1968, the Columbia University chapter of SDS took over several buildings, effectively shutting the university down. When the university administration called the police, activity did not return to normal; instead, the protest erupted into a campus-wide student strike. The Columbia demonstration was followed by similar strikes and building takeovers on hundreds of campuses over the next several years.

By 1968, SDS had at least 350 chapters totaling at least forty thousand members, and the number of people who identified themselves as part of the New Left was much larger. Despite its success, SDS was becoming an organization plagued with internal problems. Its commitment to openness and tolerance and loose organizational structure made it possible for a small minority to speak indefinitely at meetings and seize control of the agenda. Supporters of progressive labor, whom most SDS members regarded as authoritarian, dogmatic, manipulative, and antidemocratic, took advantage of this opportunity and became so persistent, and some would say disruptive, that by 1969, it became almost impossible for SDS to function as a viable coalition. Soon SDS dissolved into small factions, including the Weathermen, and ceased to lead the New Left as a unified organization.

Impact

Whether or not they formally joined SDS, hundreds of thousands of young people students and nonstudents began to identify themselves with the radical New Left. Both students and nonstudents began to question the fundamental values of the society they were about to inherit. The antiwar movement eventually won sympathy even among soldiers and high-ranking representatives of the government, the corporations, the universities, and the media and may have influenced President Johnson not to seek a second term.

Subsequent Events

Although SDS essentially dissolved in 1969, the New Left continued to grow for several years. In 1970, a national student strike simultaneously shut down hundreds of campuses. Largely to appease student discontent, the voting age was lowered to eighteen, and many universities granted students more voice in governing campus affairs. Fear of provoking a radical movement may have motivated presidents Johnson and Richard M. Nixon to gradually withdraw from Vietnam.

Additional Information

Kirkpatrick Sale’s SDS (1973) is a comprehensive history of the organization. In 1989, R. David Myers edited Toward a History of the New Left, a collection of memoirs and reflections of former students who had been active in SDS. Steven Kelman’s Push Comes to Shove (1970) presents the reaction of one of the opponents of SDS.