Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

STUDENTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY (SDS). The most visible and important political organization of the 1960s, SDS was the organized expression of the broad movement for social change that exploded in that decade. From its start in 1960 as a tiny offshoot of a long-standing socialist group to its demise amid factionalism and violence in 1970, it was the cutting edge of that decade’s progress from protest and reform to resistance and rebellion.

As a formal organization, SDS grew from a few young people sleeping around their mimeograph machines and surviving on a diet of peanut butter and rhetoric to a national organization in 1968 with a budget of $125,000, 350 official chapters, and the claimed allegiance of 100,000 adherents. But it was as an informal force, nurturing and giving voice to both the political revival known as the New Left and the social disaffection known as the counterculture, that SDS made its most important mark.

SDS was in effect the intellectual headwaters of the New Left, through which both students and the young intelligentsia in and around the academy put forth a variety of challenging new ideas. Its major political document was the Port Huron Statement, adopted at a meeting in Port Huron, Michigan, 11–15 June 1962, which first enunciated the alienation of the college generation and introduced the concept of participatory democracy (“that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life” and “decision-making of basic social consequence be carried on by public groups”). Other concepts, too, emerged under the SDS aegis, including that of the new working class (academics, intellectuals, and the “information society”), university complicity and the role of academics in support of the liberal state, and student power, concerning the rights and status of college students on their campuses.

SDS was the source of energy, as well, for many of the activities that marked the 1960s. SDS provided the core of white participants in the early civil rights protests; the original activists, formed as SDS’s Economic Research and Action Project or ERAP, that began the organization of the poor and made poverty a national issue; the women who were instrumental in the ideas and early actions of the women’s liberation movement; the shock troops, organizational finesse, protest techniques including the teach-in, and many of the leaders of the anti-war and anti-draft movement; and the bulk of the activists in the sweeping and tumultuous demonstrations and strikes directed against university administrations, some 2,000 in every state from coast to coast from 1965 to 1970, including the notable actions at Berkeley, Chicago, Harvard, Wisconsin, Cornell, San Francisco State, and Columbia.
SDS came to an end in an acrimonious split between a faction of national officers called Weatherman and a disciplined subgroup from the neo-Maoist Progressive Labor Party, which erupted at the June 1969 SDS National Convention. Thereafter it quickly lost adherents and influence, reducing itself to a small core devoted to violence and revolution and giving up aboveground politics in the spring of 1970, following the accidental explosion of its bombs in a townhouse in Greenwich Village (6 March 1970).

The impact of SDS during the decade was marked and included a role in the deposition of a president, the defection of the American public that ended the war in Vietnam, the sweeping reforms in campus life and governance at virtually every university, and the political awakening or “radicalization” of a substantial minority of that generation. Its legacy for later generations was the revival and expansion of the Left in America and the development of a homegrown American political perspective, many of whose adherents still play fundamental roles in US political, academic, journalistic, and intellectual circles.

A “New SDS,” formed by young people in 2006 with participation of a handful of SDS veterans, seemed to take life in a scattering of campuses, then stumble amidst ideological and organizational uncertainty, and disintegrate. YDSA, the youth movement of DSA, had already proved to be the logical successor to the original.

Evans, Sara. Personal Politics: The Origins of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left, 9th printing Edition. New York: Vintage, 1980.

Frost, Heather. An Interracial Movement of the Poor: Community Organizing and the New Left in the 1960s. New York: New York University press, 2001

Heath, G. Louis, ed. Vandals in the Bomb Factory: The History and Literature of the Students for a Democratic Society. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1976

Miller, James. Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Sale, Kirkpatrick. SDS. New York: Random House, 1973.

Students for a Democratic Society. The Port Huron Statement. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1990.

U.S. House Committee on Internal Security. Investigations of Students for a Democratic Society. Parts 1-A-7-B. 1969.

Students for a Democratic Society Records. Finding Guide. Special Collections and Archives. Kent State University Libraries. https://www.library.kent.edu/special-collections-and-archives/students-democratic-society-records