Student Peace Union

STUDENT PEACE UNION. For a short period in 1960 and 1961, the Student Peace Union (SPU) was the largest campus organization on the Left in the United States. With more than three thousand members in over a hundred campus chapters concentrated in the Midwest but with outposts throughout the country, the SPU focused attention on nuclear testing, disarmament, and foreign policy questions. Established at a time when American students were beginning to take an interest in political issues and while many of its leaders were involved in such groups as the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL) and in the pacifist movement, the SPU was a broad-based “issue” organization. Its earliest concern was with nuclear testing. Later, the organization was involved with foreign policy questions, and was one of the first groups to focus on the growing conflict in Vietnam. SPU membership peaked in 1962 at thirty-five hundred national members, but its influence was much larger, since many nonmembers identified with the SPU. Among the SPU’s major activities were several marches on Washington, D.C., including one in 1962 that was the largest political demonstration in Washington since the 1930s. The SPU emphasized its campus chapters and focused attention on campus-based discussions and activities as well as national activities.

The SPU leadership was a combination of peace-oriented students including many pacifists associated with the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the American Friends Service Committee (both of which lent support to the SPU) and socialists associated with the YPSL. The SPU took a strong “Third Camp” position, criticizing the foreign policies of both the United States and the Soviet Union. This unique combination permitted the SPU to gain strength at many colleges that were not traditionally involved in campus politics in the Midwest and South such as Grinnell, North Central, Lake Forest, and many others as well as the more traditionally active schools.

By 1964, the SPU dissolved itself, feeling that campus activism had gone in other directions and that its leadership was inadequate to the task. The growing Students for a Democratic Society, with its multi-issue orientation, and the civil rights movement were both more potent forces on campus at the time. Nonetheless, the SPU can be seen as an important transition between the apathy of the 1950s and the New Left. Its leadership, to some extent tied to some of the ideas of the Old Left, nonetheless proved that an independent campus-based organization could be successful in mobilizing large numbers of students and in focusing attention on key national issues.

Altbach, Philip G. Student Politics in America: A Historical Analysis. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974.

Isserman, Maurice. If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left. New York: Basic Books, 1987.

Metzenberg, Howard. “Student Peace Union, Five Years before the New Left.” Senior Honors Thesis, Oberlin College, 1978.

Vickers, George. The Formation of the New Left: The Early Years. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1975.

https://www.swarthmore.edu/library/peace/DG051-099/dg065spu.html
Student Peace Union Records, 1959-1967
Collection: DG 065 Swarthmore College Peace Collection