Students for a Democratic Society

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the most influential and best‐known political organization of the white New Left during the 1960s. In 1960, SDS emerged from its forerunner, the Student League for Industrial Democracy, a social democratic organization. Inspired by and affiliated with both the civil rights movement and organized labor, SDS sought to design a political strategy to achieve progressive social change in postwar America. In June 1962, fifty‐nine members meeting at a labor‐union resort in Michigan drafted The Port Huron Statement, a political manifesto critiquing American race relations, the persistence of poverty, and America's Cold War role. The principal author was Tom Hayden (1939–), a University of Michigan student. Arguing that these problems reflected the impoverishment of politics, the manifesto called for “participatory democracy,” whereby Americans would involve themselves directly in the decisions affecting their lives and communities. The commitment to participatory democracy guided SDS's organizational structure and future political action.

Over the ensuing decade, SDS members participated in civil rights activism, began community organizing in the urban North with the Economic Research and Action Project in 1963–1964, and played a prominent role in the anti–Vietnam War and student movements. Bringing direct action tactics to these movements, SDS sponsored mass antiwar demonstrations in 1965 in Washington, D.C., and at the Democratic party's 1968 national convention in Chicago, as well as student strikes on college campuses, including a heavily publicized one in 1968 at Columbia University. As protests and media attention intensified, SDS grew to an estimated membership ranging from 30,000 to 100,000. Rapid growth and ideological divisions contributed to conflicts within the organization about strategy and goals. When the fractious 1969 SDS national convention split between the revolutionary Weathermen (a term drawn from a protest song by Bob Dylan) and the neo‐Maoist Progressive Labor party, the organization collapsed. Many former members remained committed to progressive politics, however, through their career choices and participation in later social and community movements.
See also Antiwar Movements; Other America, The; Radicalism; Sixties, The; Socialism; Socialist Party of America.

Bibliography

James Miller , “Democracy Is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago, 1987.
Alice Echols , We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Notes toward a Remapping of the Sixties, Socialist Review 22 (April–June 1992): 9–33.

Jennifer Frost