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How Students for a Democratic Society revived the American left for a new decade
“We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.”
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) declared itself to the world on this day in 1962 with the Port Huron Statement.
Written by American college students at a getaway in Michigan, the Statement imagined a new type of radical politics centred on the university:
“Any new left in America must be, in large measure, a left with real intellectual skills, committed to deliberativeness, honesty, reflection as working tools. The university permits the political life to be an adjunct to the academic one, and action to be informed by reason.”
The SDS activists had a point, too.
It was in the sixties that university students began to play a major role in US political life, from the Civil Rights Movement to the antiwar movement.
Students from groups like the SDS and the SNCC played a significant role in the civil rights movement of the 1960s
The foundation of the SDS was also a move away from the American ‘Old Left’ to a new one.
The Old Left of the New Deal era was associated, at best, with top-down decision-making and cultural conservatism; at worst, with the Stalinism of the Communist Party.
Also, the Old Left was beat.
McCarthyism had decimated progressive politics in America during the late 1940s and 1950s.
So the student generation of the early Sixties thought it was high time to build something new.
The New Left would be open to cultural change, and it would be radically decentralised, led from the grassroots.
But the new generation, rallied by student activists like Alan Haber and Casey Hayden, didn’t make – and didn’t want – a total break with the past.
The SDS was itself an offshoot of the League for Industrial Democracy, a socialist organisation reaching back to the start of the twentieth century and reformers like Upton Sinclair and Clarence Darrow.
And the Port Huron summit was supported and funded by Walter Reuther’s United Automobile Workers (UAW), a major labour union.
In the 1950s, leftists like Arthur Miller were pursued by the US government and blacklisted for their supposed Communist ties
The SDS instead wanted to revive old left-wing idealism in a new and improved form. In fact, Port Huron denounced the turn against progressive politics in the postwar era:
“The decline of utopia and hope is in fact one of the defining features of social life today… To be idealistic is to be considered apocalyptic, deluded. To have no serious aspirations, on the contrary, is to be ‘tough-minded.’”
Led by local students across the country, with only a shoestring national office, SDS chapters jumped headfirst into the African-American Civil Rights Movement.
SDS activists were involved in the Freedom Rides and campaigns to end segregation in public schools, fighting alongside Black organisations like the NAACP and SNCC.
The SDS also sent activists to do community organising among the white working class through projects like the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP), helped by the UAW.
And the SDS demanded progressive reform of university life in the U.S. They were students after all…
Students have always been at the forefront of radical politics, from the US in the 1960s to Germany in the 1940s
Some chapters went so far as to set up ‘Free Universities’ of their own in places like Gainesville and Berkeley, teaching modules on topics from Marxism and Freud to the new social movements in America – all of which were absent from the crusty old syllabi of the traditional academy.
Then, in 1965, the SDS kicked up another gear by opposing the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, and the conscription of young Americans to fight there.
SDS chapters challenged the complicity of American universities in the war through partnerships with the arms industry.
The SDS also helped organise mass actions against the draft, including a 100,000-strong march to the Pentagon in October 1967, and a 1 million-strong student strike in 1968.
But just like the Student Non-Violence Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and other New Left organisations, the SDS splintered at the end of the decade.
Politically, the Sixties ended with the assassinations of MLK and Robert Kennedy, the rise of Richard Nixon and the ongoing war on Vietnam.
But Students for a Democratic Society had been a key player in the revival of the American left after its doldrum years.
American progressives entered the 1970s wary and weary, but clear in the knowledge they had the power to change things for the better.
Who were our radical ancestors? What's the legacy we're following? To understand the present, we have to look back at our past, and that's exactly what Pete's radical history emails and blog posts do.
With so many remarkable individuals, It's impossible for Pete to choose his favourite figure from radical history, but if he had to, he'd say Sylvia Pankhurst: "She always appreciated that the struggles for feminist, economic, and racial emancipation are linked together, and she did all of her politics with that truth in mind. Also, like me, she's a Mancunian!"
