Biography/History

The origins of SDS go back to the 1905 founding of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, renamed the League for Industrial Democracy (LID) in 1920. LID stressed the introduction of socialist thought on college campuses through tours by speakers like Jack London, Harry Laidler, and Norman Thomas; and through the publication and distribution of socialist literature. From its beginnings, LID also organized affiliated student groups which carried on educational programs. In the 1920s and early 1930s, students participated in LID through the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), which had partial autonomy from LID. During the period 1936-1939, SLID ignored the admonitions of LID and joined with the Communist youth group, the National Student League, to form the American Student Union. Throughout much of its history, SLID also maintained close ties with the Young Peoples' Socialist League (YPSL), the youth arm of the Socialist Party.

The SLID which emerged after World War II had closer supervision from LID; Communists and other radical-socialists were excluded. During the 1950s, SLID suffered a decline in numbers common to many liberal and radical student groups; by the middle of the decade, it had a few hundred, mostly inactive, members. It would have surely collapsed completely if not for money from LID and the efforts of a few stalwart supporters like James Farmer, later a leader of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), who as LID's student secretary in the early 1950s aided SLID.

During the 1950s, LID and SLID turned away from explicitly socialist politics. LID became dependent on American labor unions for funding, much of which was earmarked for campus educational programs that were designed to gain student support for unions and for progressive measures advocated by labor leaders and liberal politicians. This program, however, had little impact on the campuses.

At its annual national meeting in 1960, SLID changed its name to the Students for a Democratic Society, and began to organize a movement whose purpose was to meaningfully involve people in the political, social, and economic issues that affected their lives. The main impetus for change came that year when Robert (Al) Haber became SDS's president. Haber in the spring of 1960 organized a conference at the University of Michigan which was attended by representatives of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), James Farmer of CORE, and the Catholic-socialist Michael Harrington. This conference began SDS's long association with SNCC and at it were recruited some of the persons who came to lead SDS in the period 1961-1966. Yet SDS remained practically non-existent during the 1960-1961 school year.

In the fall of 1961, Paul Potter and Tom Hayden, both future presidents of SDS, went South to participate in the burgeoning civil rights movement. Both were beaten by white mobs and returned to the North determined to organize further assaults upon racism. In June of 1962 at SDS's National Convention in Port Huron, Michigan, Hayden presented a draft of a statement of the values, beliefs, and conclusions of the New Left. This classic, The Port Huron Statement, criticized the hollowness of the American dream and enunciated many of the fundamental beliefs held by SDS during the 1960s.

Throughout the 1960-1962 period, there existed continuous tension between SDS and LID. The League paid staff salaries and provided office facilities for SDS, but became increasingly disenchanted with the leftist direction of its junior organization. The members of both organizations increasingly realized that their ways were parting.

The school year of 1962-1963 found SDS involved in supporting civil rights activities in the South, pushing for a halt to nuclear testing, and organizing student chapters. Richard Flacks directed a Peace Research and Education Project (PREP), organized during the fall of 1962, which served as a clearinghouse and publishing center for research about peace, disarmament, and foreign policy. PREP remained basically a one-man affair from the fall of 1962 through the fall of 1964, when Flacks resigned as director and Todd Gitlin and Paul Booth assumed charge. Funded by a $7500 grant by a wealthy Texas liberal, Joe Weingarten, Gitlin and Booth pursued an aggressive program of campus speaking trips which stimulated the founding of SDS chapters. PREP also continued its research activities, concentrating on the conversion of the economy to peace-oriented production, American imperialism, and the military draft. Actual work on converting the economy to peace-time uses was only effective in the Boston area, where PREP assumed a role similar to the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) and assimilated the latter's local group.

During the summer of 1963, SDS obtained a grant of $5000 from the United Auto Workers. With part of this money, they established ERAP. From engaging in research into poverty, ERAP sought during 1964-1965 to build a radical political movement of the impoverished. People from neighborhoods would be organized on issues like better schools or garbage removal, and through their struggle learn how power operates in our society. This program, led by Rennie Davis, broadened the insights of ERAP workers but failed to either alter the condition of the poor or to organize them.

During the 1963-1964 academic year, there was considerable debate over the direction of SDS; to organize the disenfranchised and exploited, or to organize students. This division could be seen in the diverse programs of SDS which ranged from ERAP's work in the slums to the Political Education Project's (PEP) distribution of buttons with the slogan “Part of the way with LBJ.” The establishment of PEP had been mandated by the delegates at the June 1964 National Convention. Lead by Steve Max and Jim Williams, it sought to push national electoral politics to the left. Towards this end, PEP distributed anti-Goldwater literature for the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO, which had given it $1300. The Johnson landslide victory and subsequent escalation in Vietnam proved to be PEP's undoing. The December 1964 National Council scrapped most of PEP's tentative programs and left it to fade into oblivion during 1965.

In the academic year of 1964-1965, SDS had twenty-seven chapters in the U.S. and about two thousand dues-paying members. It published a monthly Discussion Bulletin for the membership and sent out a weekly worklist to about two hundred activists and chapter contacts. Having directed its major efforts towards community organizing, SDS was surprised at the development of two new issues which came to overshadow the poverty question: the Vietnamese War and the issue of student power as exemplified in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Though unprepared, SDS lent support to the latter struggle but was less willing to become actively involved in the anti-war movement. This was due to a fear of becoming a “one issue organization” and a belief by its members that the internal structure of America had to be radically altered in order to prevent imperialism. At the December 1964 National Council meeting, a proposal to organize an anti-war demonstration the following spring passed only after heated debate. This National Council also started an action-education program directed -by PREP against American economic imperialism in South Africa; this produced a torrent of literature and sparked the March 1965 Chase Manhattan Bank protest, at which SDS members were arrested for the first time.

The April 17, 1965 March on Washington also proved to be a great success and made SDS recognized as one of the primary organizations of the New Left. That spring the National Office moved from New York to Chicago, symbolizing both the parting of ways between SDS and LID, and a shift of the organization from being basically East Coast-oriented to one which included the entire U.S.

The June 1965 National Convention, held at Kewadin, Michigan, proved to be a transition for SDS. The convention re-affirmed SDS's commitment to the organization of local power bases and to a multi-issue style of radicalism. It consciously rejected leadership of the anti-war movement at a time when many expected SDS to sponsor more massive anti-war demonstrations as well as militant draft resistance, and following the Kewadin convention, SDS had neither the organizational structure nor the commitment to lead the swelling anti-war movement. Leadership passed from Eastern radicals with longer experience in leftist movements to Midwesterners with neither radical nor organizational experience. These new leaders concerned themselves more with action than with theory and had only a vague idea of the complex divisions in the American Left. In the National Office this encouraged a general breakdown, which was only partially alleviated by bringing in Clark Kissinger and Paul Booth to serve as temporary National Secretaries. Throughout this chaotic period, New Left Notes played an important unifying role by printing many of SDS's position statements, local news, and numerous letters to the editor by leftists of every stripe.

In spite of or perhaps because of its disorganization, SDS continued to exert an immense leftward influence on the anti-war and student movements. It started to attract members from the Maoist-orientated May 2nd Movement, a youth organization of the Progressive Labor Party. SDS's Radical Education Project (REP) produced a series of documents exposing the complicity of academia with the military-industrial complex. The April 1965 National Council Meeting commissioned REP to undertake analytical research similar to that of the defunct PREP as well as to strengthen internal education and communication. This group enlisted many of the “old guard” like Al Haber, Paul Booth, and Steve Weissman. In 1966, REP was incorporated separately; by the following year it had broken with SDS over the issue of whether it should train organizers or, as REP preferred, continue its research efforts.

SDS's influence could also be gauged by the students' shift frs' shift from protest to resistance during 1967 and the crescendo of violence connected with student protests. Although SDS had a relatively mild national anti-war policy and had opposed the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, local SDS chapters and members came to lead militant student protests. These confrontations, in turn, convinced some SDS members that the accepted methods of protest were ineffective and that an insurgent, student-based movement had to be developed. Drawing upon the flourishing youth culture as well as the militancy of black radicals, SDS leaders like Mark Rudd and Bernardine Dohrn became convinced of the absolute necessity of active resistance to establishment repression by any means possible. This attitude became a harbinger of the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM I).

During 1968, SDS experienced increasing factionalism caused by Progressive Labor (PL) members who were Maoist-doctrinaires and stressed an alliance with the working class; and the RYM I group who advocated a more student-oriented, militant, counter-cultural program. SDS remained, however, in the center of student protests like the Columbia University strike of spring 1968 and the violence at the Democratic National Convention that summer in Chicago. The June 1968 SDS National Convention saw acrimonious shouting matches, ideological bickering, and bitter personality clashes. PL supporters gained policy victories that stressed attempts to gain working-class support, but RYM I and other non-committed delegates continued to dominate the organization's leadership positions.

SDS found itself harrassed from without and fragmented from within during the 1968-1969 school year. These pressures surfaced with a vengeance at the June 1969 National Convention at which SDS split into approximately three factions: PL, Weathermen, and RYM II. This latter group, composed of diverse, moderate SDSers, collapsed within a year due to its inability to develop a coherent, activist program. The Weathermen, who included many of the national leaders and staff members, sought to initiate an immediate revolution; within six months, the organization had gone underground and its leaders were wanted in connection with mob violence and bombing. SDS-PL continues today as an off-shoot of the Progressive Labor Party; dominated by a doctrinaire ideology, which, for example, condemned Ho Chi Minh for receiving aid from the USSR, this organization has had little appeal on campus. And so SDS, after being at the forefront of the New Left during the 1960s, dissolved into factions of bickering ideologues and violence-oriented cadres.

Much of this information came from a history of SDS prepared by Clark Kissinger, circa 1965; from Kirkpatrick Sale's book, SDS (New York: Random House, 1973); and from an interview with Patrick M. Quinn, formerly of the State Historical Society staff, May 16, 1974.

Officers and Membership Statistics

1960-1962:	(There was no convention in 1961 and no election of new officers.)
President:	Al Haber
Vice President:	Jonathan Weiss
Field Secretary:	Al Haber (1960-2)
	Tom Hayden (1961-2)
Members:	250 (December 1960)
	575 (November 1961)
	800 (May 1962)
Chapters:	8 (December 1960)
	20 (November 1961)
	10 (May 1962)
1962-63:
President:	Tom Hayden
Vice President:	Paul Booth
National Secretary:	Jim Monsonis
Field Secretary:	Steve Max
Members:	900 (January 1963) (447 pd.)
	1100 (June 1963) (600 pd.)
Chapters:	9 (January 1963)
1963-64:
President:	Todd Gitlin
Vice President:	Paul Booth
National Secretary:	Lee Webb/Clark Kissinger
Field Secretary:	Steve Max
Members:	1500 (October 1963) (610 pd.)
	1000 pd. (June 1964)
Chapters:	19 (October 1963)
	29 (June 1964)
1964-65:
President:	Paul Potter
Vice President:	Vernon Grizzard
National Secretary:	Clark Kissinger
Members:	2500 (December 1964) (1365 pd.)
	3000 (June 1965) (2000 pd.)
Chapters:	41 (December 1964)
	80 (June 1965)
1965-66:
President:	Carl Oglesby
Vice President:	Jeff Shero
National Secretary:	Jeff Segal/Clark Kissinger/Paul Booth/Jane Adams
Members:	10,000 (October 1965) (4000 pd.)
	15,000 (June 1966) (6000 pd.)
Chapters:	89 (October 1965)
	172 (June 1966)
1966-67:
President:	Nick Egleson
Vice President:	Carl Davidson
National Secretary:	Greg Calvert
Members:	25,000 (October 1966)
	30,000 (June 1967)
Chapters:	265 (October 1966)
	247 (June 1967)
1967-68:
National Secretary:	Mike Spiegel
Education Secretary:	Bob Pardun
Inter-organizational Secretary:	Carl Davidson
Members:	35,000 (April 1968)
Chapters:	265 (December 1967)
	280 (April 1968)
	350 (June 1968)
1968-69:
National Secretary:	Mike Klonsky
Education Secretary:	Fred Gordon
Inter-organizational Secretary:	Bernardine Dohrn
Members:	80,000[?]-100,000 (November 1968)
	30,000[?]-100,000 (June 1969)
Chapters:	350-400 (November 1968)
	300[?] (June 1969)
1969-70:
National Secretary:	Mark Rudd
Education Secretary:	Bill Ayers
Inter-organizational Secretary:	Jeff Jones
PL (Boston)
National Secretary:	John Pennington
Education Secretary:	Alan Spector
Inter-organizational Secretary:	Patricia Forman

The above information is taken from Sale's SDS, pp. 663-664.