Kirkpatrick Sale’s SDS is an indispensable and exhaustive history of not just Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) but also the American New Left (Verso needs to acquire the rights and re-release this book). Appearing only a few years after SDS’s demise (members of Weatherman were still underground), Sale’s book is insightful and critical while avoiding the condescension of so much other historiography of the 1960s, which presumes to be able to judge between the good sixties and the bad sixties. Sale divides the history of SDS into four periods: “[T]he first, the period of Reorganization from 1960 to 1962 when SDS takes a new name and lays the basis for the shape it was to become; the second, the period of Reform from 1962 to 1965 when SDS tries to make American institutions live up to American ideals; the third, the period of Resistance from 1965 to 1968 when SDS spreads out from coast to coast with open confrontations against these institutions; and the last, the period of Revolution from 1968 to 1970 when SDS sets itself consciously for a thorough – and, for some, violent – overthrow of the American system.” SDS began as the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID). Around 1960, members of SLID decided to change the organization’s name because “industrial democracy” seemed too labor oriented, made recruiting difficult, and held too strong of an association with the dusty politics of the League for Industrial Democracy, SLID’s parent organization. So in January 1960, the name was changed to Students for a Democratic Society. Sale argues this change, noticed by few, “was symbolic of a new attitude within the organization, a new awareness that the American studentry was getting ready to shed its apathy for a resurgent life of activism and that a student organization like SDS could help on its way.” A number of factors influenced this changing position of students: transformations in the social fabric (loosening sexual morals, straining of the nuclear family, etc.); cracks in the economic structure (the “discovery” of poverty, high unemployment for certain parts of the population, inflation, etc.); political apathy turning into hostility toward political corruption and bureaucracy; America’s increasing tendency to take a visibly active and aggressive role on the international scene; a new hostility toward institutions based on the “’delegitimization’ of authority and the ‘deauthorization’ of the entire system”; the growing recognition of the power held by youth, resulting in the creation of a distinct and large “youth market”; and the spectacular rise in the number of college students, so that “In the sixties, for the first time in the history of any nation, there were more students than there were farmers.” SDS initially committed itself to the cause of the civil right movement. A grant from Detroit’s United Automobile Workers Union allowed SDS to hire a “full-time national officer,” Robert Haber, who devoted himself to making SDS an organization that could coordinate local civil rights protests at a national level. Haber’s plans for SDS immediately collided with the reformist, liberal anti-communism of the League for Industrial Democracy, but Haber pushed forward anyway and the conflict between the two organizations was put off, though it regularly resurfaced until there was a final split in 1965. During the 1961-62 school year, SDS largely consisted of Haber working in the National Office producing newsletters, copying pamphlets, and making speeches and Tom Hayden operating out in the field of the civil rights movement. But by “mid-fall SDS claimed a membership of 575 and twenty campus chapters.” At the national conference held in Ann Arbor, it was decided that what the organization needed was not “a single national program” but rather “a shared view of the world,” a manifesto that eventually took the form of The Port Huron Statement. The document was named for the camp “belonging to the United Automobile Workers at Port Huron, Michigan” where a meeting of delegates helped draft the text, though the final statement was not actually completed until a month later. Sale critically points out that much of The Port Huron Statement was unoriginal, drawing heavily from C. Wright Mills or repeating the ideas of liberal reformism, “but what gave it a particular strength was its radical sense that all of these problems were interconnected, that there was a total system of America within which its multiple parts functioned, and that social ills in one area were intimately linked to those in another, so that solutions, too, had to be connected.” The document articulated an “ideology,” a “vision of the future” based on the values of “humanism,” “individualism,” “community,” and “participatory democracy,” and offered a strategy centered on using “the universities as the ‘potential base and agency in a movement of social change.’” Over the next few years, tens of thousands of copies of the document were sent out, so “The Port Huron Statement may have been the most widely distributed document of the American left in the sixties.” Although The Port Huron Statement treated the university as an exceptional space for basing struggle, by 1962 the emphasis on university reform was already being contested. SDS faced two different conceptions of higher education: “Are the universities bases from which assaults can effectively be made on the social system, or are they bastions of that system producing instead its minions? The former impulse leads to the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, to student power, to the explosive rebellions of the campuses; the latter leads to SDS’s ghetto-organizing projects, to the ‘free universities,’ to the ‘dropout’ culture of the youth ghettos, and more.” The question, of course, has never been definitively answered, and would dramatically flare up in different ways throughout SDS’s history, pushing the organization either towards or away from the university. By the 1962-63 school year, SDS also began to face another contradiction that would trouble the organization over the rest of the decade. The paradox: “A student group that wants the growth of decentralized communities where participatory democracy can operate has at its center a single, centralized office.” “SDS almost without even thinking of it became an organization of officers at the top and bureaucratic administrators below, constitutions and bylaws, parliamentary meetings and points of order, conventions and committees, mimeograph machines and official documents, letters in triplicate and bills paid monthly, lists of members and calculations of dues, accounts receivable and payable, mailing lists, files, phones, a central office.” When, as happened many times during the decade, the national office had problems managing time and resources, handling the media (not an issue until 1965), and formulating policies and strategies, the local and regional chapters became increasingly isolated from and even antagonistic to the national organization and leadership. One inadequate solution enacted was to require the national leadership to regularly rotate, so Haber was replaced by Todd Gitlin as president. By 1963, “SDS had succeeded in establishing for itself a solid reputation as the most intellectual student group around, the place where the leaders and ideologues of other organizations went from time to time to forge their separate swords in the fires of debate and intellectuality.” “But it was not known for doing anything on its own, either as a national group or (with few exceptions) in its chapters. That, combined with the organizational limitations of the National Office, chafed increasingly on a number of the SDS in-group, and they began searching for new drives and programs that would energize the membership and circumvent the NO.” The call for a “new insurgency” led to the creation of The Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP), a program for SDS members to move into the ghetto and live amongst and organize poor, unemployed youth. Though it persisted for a few years, ERAP was a notorious failure, with ghetto youths taking little interest in being “organized” by intellectual outsiders. It also caused significant conflict within SDS, as many ERAPers argued that members should forget about school and dedicate themselves “entirely to community organizing.” The “tension between those who wanted to go into the real world and build a Movement and those who wanted to stay and organize in the universities would continue to be felt in the organization in the years to come.” But ERAP radicalized many SDS members, gave SDS a reputation for actually doing things, and taught members valuable practical lessons as they attempted to put their ideas into action. In 1964, Paul Potter was elected president and SDS began to seek out new projects and to experiment with the form of the organization. But that same year also saw the emergence of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the Battle of Berkeley, which opened many students’ eyes to the truth of American society. “During the course of the fight it was discovered that the university did not live up to its claims, but, more than that, neither did the police, the press, and the public, the very personifications of the society: the university proved not to be the home of fair and dispassionate reasoning, the regents showed themselves not to be wise statesmen above pettiness and vindictiveness, the press turned out not to be an unbiased and objective seeker after truth, the police proved not to be efficient agents of justice and servants of the people, and the public at large turned out not to be open to reason, to be willing to listen to another side of a story, to harbor sympathy.” Though still relatively limited in size and capabilities, SDS became viewed as the organization for student groups across the nation to turn to as they extended the fight of Berkeley. But it was the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965 that truly fueled the radicalization of the student movement and quickly prompted demonstrations on numerous campuses as well as a spike in SDS’s membership. SDS’s national office went into full gear in preparation for the large anti-war march planned in Washington D.C., but the organization’s frontism, its willingness to work with a variety of different groups, led to trouble with the League for Industrial Democracy, which ineffectively demanded that SDS sever all contact with communist organizations. By the fall of 1965, the two organizations would divorce over the increasing number of communist members in SDS and other reformist/radical disagreements. Shortly before the Washington march, SDS engaged in its “first official act of civil disobedience”: a “sit-in” in front of a Chase bank in Manhattan, during which protestors were arrested for refusing to disperse. A week later, the first “teach-in” was held at the University of Michigan, and the tactic soon spread across the nation. But “SDS as an organization never promoted [teach-ins] as a part of its over-all strategy. This was not only because the teach-ins were in the main faculty-led and faculty-directed, but because SDSers felt that these were essentially apolitical exercises whose best effect could be only to educate but not to radicalize.” “Without ever even enunciating it or having to make an official decision, SDS indicated by its passive response that it had gone beyond the moderation of the teach-in phase of antiwar politics. It had by now learned bitter lessons about reformism, and it was coming to feel that only with the kind of confrontation and militancy a march represented could America be changed.” At the Washington march, Paul Potter gave his famous “name the system” speech, adding to the strong passions aroused at the event. But mass civil disobedience was contained at the end of the march (SDS itself played a strong role in keeping marchers “in line”), leading to a feeling of disappointment for many. Despite SDS’s bursting into the public’s eyes with the Washington march, the national office decided not to commit SDS to being simply an anti-war organization. Money and organizational problems impaired the effectiveness of the national office, which struggled to develop anti-war policies and strategies and began to alienate many of SDS’s newer members and local chapters. Some members pushed for a new Port Huron to reestablish the organization, but conferences and meetings devoted to that purpose failed to accomplish much. When the government decided to start drafting students using a ranking system, local SDS members organized a sit-in at the University of Chicago that occupied the administration building for five days. The campus administration avoided conflict and waited for the sit-in to slowly die out, but in a faculty meeting shortly after, “the faculty voted to threaten harsh disciplinary action against future sit-ins or campus disruptions, and to put itself unshirkingly behind the administration policy with regard to ranking. The blow was severe, the students hardly believing that two months of work and negotiations and demonstrations and petitions and letters and arguments had produced not one single concession. But since the end of the school year was at hand, and regroupment was now impossible, there was little recourse.” But the sit-in at Chicago revealed that university administrations were “complicit” with the interests of business and government and demonstrated a new willingness by students to directly resist. “The realization of complicity on the part of the university, combined with a realization of how readily it could be confronted, was a crucial element in helping to turn attention back to the campus during the rest of the year.” But as was often the case, the turn towards the university was accompanied by a turn away from it. Around the same time, SDS assisted in the creation of a number of “free universities,” where alternative education could take place outside of traditional institutions. But doubts about free universities soon appeared in the following few years because they may have actually helped traditional universities by moving troublemakers outside and by creating innovative programs that could be co-opted by universities. But, Sale notes, the free universities were important as a significant attempt by the New Left to create a truly autonomous form of education and organization. As SDS continued to grow, the local ranks became increasingly powerful and independent of the national office, though the latter attempted to maintain some control through New Left Notes, a weekly newspaper which started appearing in 1966. Around this time, SDS’s constituency visible changed. The older members, and especially the national leadership, were confronted with “Prairie Power,” a younger generation, often from the Midwest rather than the East coast, that dressed less formally (more facial hair and hippie fashion) and was less versed in the history of the left, more anarchistic and hostile to the national leadership, and impatient for change. Partially in response to the demands of Prairie Power, SDS began organizing at the university level for “student power,” but with an ultimate aim of creating a general radical student movement. So though demands might be immediate at times, it was believed that “Student power in short, was not educational but political.” SDS played a key role in organizing campus protests against military recruiters and visits by government officials. The draft was a key issue that led to what Greg Calvert in 1966 called the move “From protest to resistance” (a phrase Ulrike Meinhof would import into the German New Left). Draft resistance actions spread, and there was a mass draft-card burning in New York City in 1967 as well as more protests about university complicity with the war. But there was still a growing feeling that mobilization in marches and other activities were accomplishing nothing in regards to stopping the war, and that something like “revolution” was on the table at that point. “The problem, as those of the SDS leadership saw it, was how to move more people from personal action to political commitment, how to raise the level of those who were so obviously potential recruits – the draft resister, the campus demonstrator, the antiwar marcher – to that of ‘revolutionary consciousness.’ [Carl] Davidson put it simply: ‘We need to move from protest to resistance; to dig in for the long haul; to become full-time, radical, sustained, relevant. In short, we need to make a revolution. But again, how do we go about it?” SDS came up with two solutions. First, “T-O institutes . . . a queer mixture of the familiar graduate-school seminar, the ERAP communal-living projects, and the political ‘cadre schools’ that Old Left groups like the Communist Party used to run during the summers.” Second, proposals for a new ideology to replace The Port Huron Statement. Theoretical analyses were already being produced in abundance and the journal Radical America was a valuable source for theoretical inquiry. “But the most successful ideological contestant was a concept called ‘the new working class,’” which consisted of people with “technical, clerical, and professional jobs that require educational backgrounds.” The new working class was essential for the functioning and reproduction of modern American capitalism, and, if made aware of its function, could come to play the role of a political vanguard. The theory returned emphasis to the campus as the site of resistance by arguing that students need to start with their own situation. As Sale states its impact: “Liberals operate out of other people’s oppression; the radical operates out of his own.” The summer of 1967 of course saw the beginning of the wave of dramatic political activity that would extend until at least 1970. Sale stops to evaluate the state of SDS at this point. Carl Davidson assessed the group at the time, stating, “We have within our ranks Communists of both varieties, socialists of all sorts, 3 or 4 different kinds of anarchists, anarchosyndicalists, syndicalists, social democrats, humanist liberals, a growing number of ex-YAF libertarian laissez-faire capitalists, and, of course, the articulate vanguard of the psychedelic liberation front.” Davidson also surveyed the composition of a typical SDS campus chapter. He argued 85-90% of the membership were “shock troops,” usually younger undergraduates with anti-intellectual tendencies but strong moral outrage at the American system. 5-10% were the “superintellectuals,” mostly graduate students in Social Sciences or Humanities: “They spell out grand strategies for the chapter’s activities, but will rarely sit behind the literature tables. . . . They join most of the demonstrations, but rarely help make the picket signs . . . Without a doubt some of the most brilliant young people in America today.” Finally, 5% were the “organizers,” those who “do the bureaucratic shitwork (reserving rooms, setting up tables, ordering literature, etc.) or see that it gets done.” In 1967, women began to visibly protest the elitist, male chauvinist leadership of the group, and SDS’s indifference to women’s issues would lead to many women leaving the organization over the next few years. During 1967, repression of the left became even more violent and leftists exhibited an increased tendency to directly resist and even fight back in order to make sure that disruption was successful. As Davidson puts it, “No one goes limp anymore, or meekly to jail. Police violence does not go unanswered. Sit-ins are no longer symbolic, but strategic: to protect people or hold positions, rather than to allow oneself to be passively stepped over or carted off.” This boldness was most clear in the 1967 Pentagon protest, which saw protestors (including SDSers) rushing through barriers and up the steps of the building as well as sneaky mass arrests in the middle of the night (for a firsthand account, see Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night). Despite the formulation of the new working class theory, SDSers, especially the more intellectual ones, were increasingly led to Marxism, which the early generation of SDSers had scorned for its association with the Old Left. Sale admits this shift toward Marx may have had good reasons, but he is skeptical of the tendency to accept Marxism as a readymade ideology. “[T]he SDS leadership began to see itself more and more (in the Marxist phraseology) as a ‘vanguard’ in the impending revolution, or at least as the core of that potential vanguard. The people around the [national office] itself became an increasingly close-knit group: a number of the staff lived and slept together in nearby apartments in a quasi-communal style; they shared drug experiences (marijuana mostly, but also LSD), out of which came, initially at least, a sense of closeness and unity; and they developed their political ideas together both through formal and informal meetings which they held to ‘advance their political education.’” But many SDS members resented and resisted the leadership’s turn toward revolution and Marx, and a split grew between the national organization focusing on revolution and the local chapters dedicated to base-building. Needless to say, 1968 saw protest and resistance appear in almost every possible location and form. Particularly new and newsworthy were the outbursts of political violence aimed at property, including bombings of campus buildings linked to the war. SDS did not immediately embrace such violence, labeling those responsible “adventurists.” “And yet it fascinated, the idea of violence, and as frustration grew, repression grew, the monumentality of the task grew, and its necessity, so did the possibilities of violence.” And then “Columbia” happened. The local Columbia SDS chapter played a large role in articulating an argument about the school’s links to the war and the racism of the university’s plans to expand into neighboring Harlem. SDSer Mark Rudd became a leader of the “action faction” heading the occupations movement. The first occupation received an ambivalent response, and when it seemed like it might fail SDS voted down Rudd’s proposal to take more buildings. But when other organizations successfully took over other buildings, SDS turned around and joined in supporting the wave of occupations. After the occupations were violently ended by the police, the liberal wing of the student body took back power from the more radical side, aided by the fact that groups like SDS lacked a coherent counter-proposal. “But three momentous experiences which underlay the Columbia rebellion did linger and did much to shape the revolutionary politics that SDS was edging toward. The first was the experience of those who encountered the communal life – thrown together with like-minded men and women, sharing, meeting, loving, eating, defecating, sleeping, talking, and deciding together, with no authority, no rules, no force to limit them, and making the decisions that affected their own lives.” “The second experience grew out of the alliance with black students . . . and the strength this gave to the white students’ cause. The blacks were slow in joining the issues at Columbia (it was SDS, for example, which instigated the gym and Martin Luther King protests) and insisted on going their own way once they had . . . but their mere presence gave the rebellion legitimacy, confidence, and power.” The third experience “had to do with the students’ taking a political view of themselves, and their university, and the society beyond, confronting the true implications of the old SDS slogan, ‘A free university in a free society.’” As the complicity of the administration and the faculty, as well as the liberal student body, was made clear, it became obvious that something more than reform was needed. As one SDSer stated, “’a free university’ will only exist after we have won a ‘free society.’” In order to undermine the SDS call for “two, three, many Columbias,” college administrations across the nation tried to offer friendly “restructuring” plans that would win over the support of faculty and students by offering more shared governance. But such efforts did little to stop the wave of campus demonstrations that immediately followed Columbia and the further radicalization of the student movement. By the 1968 SDS convention, “revolutionary” was a preferred adjective and statement of identity. “By the middle of 1968 there were many thousands of people who could, with no sense of hyperbole, agree with the SDS convention paper which argued ‘our movement is an element of the revolutionary vanguard painfully forming from the innards of America.” But at this time, Progressive Labor, a Maoist group with strict political lines emphasizing the organization of the working class, made its first strong bid for control of SDS. Despite its small numbers, Progressive Labor was able to acquire a great deal of power through its ability to order its members to vote in a bloc. An attempt was made to kick Progressive Labor out of SDS at the East Lansing convention, but it failed, and the final conflict between the two was put off for another year. Many groups on the left were planning protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and a number of first-generation SDSers were leading such efforts, but SDS’s national leadership at first did not support protesting the convention because it considered electoral politics a lost cause. However, as momentum for the protests grew, SDS reluctantly sent out some lines of communication and support. It was important that SDS didn’t neglect the event because police brutality at the convention, as seen on the streets and in the news, did much to further radicalize the left. “For SDS, the lessons of Chicago were profound, and each of them seemed to confirm the rightness of the move into revolution. Chicago proved once and for all, for those still needing proof, that the country could not be educated or reformed out of its pernicious system, even by establishmentarian reformers like McCarthy. It showed that even resistance, open and defiant resistance, was not enough to wrest changes, for the institutions of American society, grounded in violence, would use violence in their own defense when the threat was regarded as serious enough.” But Sale underscores that SDS in many ways failed to effectively to take advantage of the growing strength of the radical movement. The organization was partially crippled by bitter internal divisions at every level over issues such as dope or no dope, action or education, revolution or base-building. Sale is particularly critical of how the focus on revolution may have alienated SDS from its constituency. Although Sale admits the intelligence and reasons for the SDS’s leadership turn to revolution, he is critical of its failure to connect with potential supporters: “At a time when many young people wanted some explanations for the failure of electoral politics, SDS was led by people who had long since given up caring about elections and were trying to organize for revolution. To students just beginning to be aware of their own radicalization and their potential role as the intelligentsia of an American left, SDS offered the wisdom that the only really important agents for social change were the industrial workers, or the ghetto blacks, or the Third World revolutionaries. For college students who swarmed into chapter meetings ready to take on their administrations for any number of grievances, SDS provided an analysis which emphasized ‘de-studentizing,’ dropping out, and destroying universities. And for youth in search of an integrative ideology to supplant the tattered theories of corporate liberalism, SDS had only the imperfectly fashioned tenets of a borrowed Marxism and an untransmittable attachment to the theories of other revolutionaries.” By the fall of the 1968, repression had also began to take its toll on SDS and the New Left, with government spying and infiltration, police arrests, college administration sanctions, and a variety of forms of liberal cooptation sapping some of the strength of the left. For better or worse, “After years of demanding to be taken seriously, activists found that they were.” Political protest, resistance, and violence continued in 1969, the extent of the last showing just how thoroughly “violence had become a real part of the lexicon of American left-wing politics.” SDS officially remained ambivalent about the wave of political bombings and property destruction, but the organization’s revolutionary fervor made the group sympathetic most of the time. Around this time, SDS committed itself to building a “revolutionary youth movement” and also began to make contacts with other groups, particularly the Black Panthers. But the leadership was leading the organization into a corner. “How ironic it all was: at precisely the time of the greatest explosion of the American left in all of the decade, SDS, its leading organization by every index – size, fame, geographical scope, energy – was gradually but unmistakably isolating and diminishing itself, losing its student constituency, its women, its alumni, failing to connect with the high schools, the soldiers, the workers. The SDS revolutionaries were on the barricades, but they had forgotten to look behind: their troops were no longer following.” Everything fell apart at the 1969 summer convention. During the convention, issues of New Left Notes passed out included an article with the title, taken from a Bob Dylan song, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” The Weatherman statement was directly aimed at the growing power of Progressive Labor, and called for a centralized revolutionary party while it positioned white American radicals as comrades of the struggles of Third World guerillas and supporters of “black liberation struggles.” Sexist statements made by Black Panthers about “pussy power” at the convention gave Progressive Labor an opportunity to take the moral high ground and criticize the Panthers as well SDS’s growing support for black nationalism. A written statement by the Panthers later read at the convention attacked Progressive Labor, and a group of SDS leaders spontaneously split the convention by leading non-Progressive Labor members out of the hall, resulting in two SDSs, and in reality the death of SDS. The concluding chapter of SDS’s history focuses on Weatherman, which would soon attempt to lead a violent direct attack on the system during the October “Days of Rage” and after. Of course protest and resistance continued without the SDS, and perhaps in even greater number in the next few months. Yet Sale argues, “It was impossible, of course, to stop the activism of college campuses . . . but now there was no easy way for that activism to be infused with politics, with the kinds of understanding that from the beginning SDS had worked so hard to project and transmit. A campus might explode with anger over a tuition increase, but there would be no common appreciation of how that connected with the role of the university in a corporate society; a lengthy campaign against ROTC or university investments might excite a college, but there would be little understanding of the links with imperialism; students across the land could get outraged at the perilous conditions of the ecology without ever seeing the nature of the capitalist system and how it works to produce and prolong that peril. Without something like an SDS, there would be no ready political mooring; without a political mooring, activism goes adrift.”
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Kirkpatrick Sale: SDS (1973)
Kirkpatrick Sale’s SDS is an indispensable and exhaustive history of not just Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) but also the American New Left (Verso needs to acquire the rights and re-release this book). Appearing only a few years after SDS’s demise (members of Weatherman were still underground), Sale’s book is insightful and critical while avoiding the condescension of so much other historiography of the 1960s, which presumes to be able to judge between the good sixties and the bad sixties. Sale divides the history of SDS into four periods: “[T]he first, the period of Reorganization from 1960 to 1962 when SDS takes a new name and lays the basis for the shape it was to become; the second, the period of Reform from 1962 to 1965 when SDS tries to make American institutions live up to American ideals; the third, the period of Resistance from 1965 to 1968 when SDS spreads out from coast to coast with open confrontations against these institutions; and the last, the period of Revolution from 1968 to 1970 when SDS sets itself consciously for a thorough – and, for some, violent – overthrow of the American system.” SDS began as the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID). Around 1960, members of SLID decided to change the organization’s name because “industrial democracy” seemed too labor oriented, made recruiting difficult, and held too strong of an association with the dusty politics of the League for Industrial Democracy, SLID’s parent organization. So in January 1960, the name was changed to Students for a Democratic Society. Sale argues this change, noticed by few, “was symbolic of a new attitude within the organization, a new awareness that the American studentry was getting ready to shed its apathy for a resurgent life of activism and that a student organization like SDS could help on its way.” A number of factors influenced this changing position of students: transformations in the social fabric (loosening sexual morals, straining of the nuclear family, etc.); cracks in the economic structure (the “discovery” of poverty, high unemployment for certain parts of the population, inflation, etc.); political apathy turning into hostility toward political corruption and bureaucracy; America’s increasing tendency to take a visibly active and aggressive role on the international scene; a new hostility toward institutions based on the “’delegitimization’ of authority and the ‘deauthorization’ of the entire system”; the growing recognition of the power held by youth, resulting in the creation of a distinct and large “youth market”; and the spectacular rise in the number of college students, so that “In the sixties, for the first time in the history of any nation, there were more students than there were farmers.” SDS initially committed itself to the cause of the civil right movement. A grant from Detroit’s United Automobile Workers Union allowed SDS to hire a “full-time national officer,” Robert Haber, who devoted himself to making SDS an organization that could coordinate local civil rights protests at a national level. Haber’s plans for SDS immediately collided with the reformist, liberal anti-communism of the League for Industrial Democracy, but Haber pushed forward anyway and the conflict between the two organizations was put off, though it regularly resurfaced until there was a final split in 1965. During the 1961-62 school year, SDS largely consisted of Haber working in the National Office producing newsletters, copying pamphlets, and making speeches and Tom Hayden operating out in the field of the civil rights movement. But by “mid-fall SDS claimed a membership of 575 and twenty campus chapters.” At the national conference held in Ann Arbor, it was decided that what the organization needed was not “a single national program” but rather “a shared view of the world,” a manifesto that eventually took the form of The Port Huron Statement. The document was named for the camp “belonging to the United Automobile Workers at Port Huron, Michigan” where a meeting of delegates helped draft the text, though the final statement was not actually completed until a month later. Sale critically points out that much of The Port Huron Statement was unoriginal, drawing heavily from C. Wright Mills or repeating the ideas of liberal reformism, “but what gave it a particular strength was its radical sense that all of these problems were interconnected, that there was a total system of America within which its multiple parts functioned, and that social ills in one area were intimately linked to those in another, so that solutions, too, had to be connected.” The document articulated an “ideology,” a “vision of the future” based on the values of “humanism,” “individualism,” “community,” and “participatory democracy,” and offered a strategy centered on using “the universities as the ‘potential base and agency in a movement of social change.’” Over the next few years, tens of thousands of copies of the document were sent out, so “The Port Huron Statement may have been the most widely distributed document of the American left in the sixties.” Although The Port Huron Statement treated the university as an exceptional space for basing struggle, by 1962 the emphasis on university reform was already being contested. SDS faced two different conceptions of higher education: “Are the universities bases from which assaults can effectively be made on the social system, or are they bastions of that system producing instead its minions? The former impulse leads to the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, to student power, to the explosive rebellions of the campuses; the latter leads to SDS’s ghetto-organizing projects, to the ‘free universities,’ to the ‘dropout’ culture of the youth ghettos, and more.” The question, of course, has never been definitively answered, and would dramatically flare up in different ways throughout SDS’s history, pushing the organization either towards or away from the university. By the 1962-63 school year, SDS also began to face another contradiction that would trouble the organization over the rest of the decade. The paradox: “A student group that wants the growth of decentralized communities where participatory democracy can operate has at its center a single, centralized office.” “SDS almost without even thinking of it became an organization of officers at the top and bureaucratic administrators below, constitutions and bylaws, parliamentary meetings and points of order, conventions and committees, mimeograph machines and official documents, letters in triplicate and bills paid monthly, lists of members and calculations of dues, accounts receivable and payable, mailing lists, files, phones, a central office.” When, as happened many times during the decade, the national office had problems managing time and resources, handling the media (not an issue until 1965), and formulating policies and strategies, the local and regional chapters became increasingly isolated from and even antagonistic to the national organization and leadership. One inadequate solution enacted was to require the national leadership to regularly rotate, so Haber was replaced by Todd Gitlin as president. By 1963, “SDS had succeeded in establishing for itself a solid reputation as the most intellectual student group around, the place where the leaders and ideologues of other organizations went from time to time to forge their separate swords in the fires of debate and intellectuality.” “But it was not known for doing anything on its own, either as a national group or (with few exceptions) in its chapters. That, combined with the organizational limitations of the National Office, chafed increasingly on a number of the SDS in-group, and they began searching for new drives and programs that would energize the membership and circumvent the NO.” The call for a “new insurgency” led to the creation of The Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP), a program for SDS members to move into the ghetto and live amongst and organize poor, unemployed youth. Though it persisted for a few years, ERAP was a notorious failure, with ghetto youths taking little interest in being “organized” by intellectual outsiders. It also caused significant conflict within SDS, as many ERAPers argued that members should forget about school and dedicate themselves “entirely to community organizing.” The “tension between those who wanted to go into the real world and build a Movement and those who wanted to stay and organize in the universities would continue to be felt in the organization in the years to come.” But ERAP radicalized many SDS members, gave SDS a reputation for actually doing things, and taught members valuable practical lessons as they attempted to put their ideas into action. In 1964, Paul Potter was elected president and SDS began to seek out new projects and to experiment with the form of the organization. But that same year also saw the emergence of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the Battle of Berkeley, which opened many students’ eyes to the truth of American society. “During the course of the fight it was discovered that the university did not live up to its claims, but, more than that, neither did the police, the press, and the public, the very personifications of the society: the university proved not to be the home of fair and dispassionate reasoning, the regents showed themselves not to be wise statesmen above pettiness and vindictiveness, the press turned out not to be an unbiased and objective seeker after truth, the police proved not to be efficient agents of justice and servants of the people, and the public at large turned out not to be open to reason, to be willing to listen to another side of a story, to harbor sympathy.” Though still relatively limited in size and capabilities, SDS became viewed as the organization for student groups across the nation to turn to as they extended the fight of Berkeley. But it was the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965 that truly fueled the radicalization of the student movement and quickly prompted demonstrations on numerous campuses as well as a spike in SDS’s membership. SDS’s national office went into full gear in preparation for the large anti-war march planned in Washington D.C., but the organization’s frontism, its willingness to work with a variety of different groups, led to trouble with the League for Industrial Democracy, which ineffectively demanded that SDS sever all contact with communist organizations. By the fall of 1965, the two organizations would divorce over the increasing number of communist members in SDS and other reformist/radical disagreements. Shortly before the Washington march, SDS engaged in its “first official act of civil disobedience”: a “sit-in” in front of a Chase bank in Manhattan, during which protestors were arrested for refusing to disperse. A week later, the first “teach-in” was held at the University of Michigan, and the tactic soon spread across the nation. But “SDS as an organization never promoted [teach-ins] as a part of its over-all strategy. This was not only because the teach-ins were in the main faculty-led and faculty-directed, but because SDSers felt that these were essentially apolitical exercises whose best effect could be only to educate but not to radicalize.” “Without ever even enunciating it or having to make an official decision, SDS indicated by its passive response that it had gone beyond the moderation of the teach-in phase of antiwar politics. It had by now learned bitter lessons about reformism, and it was coming to feel that only with the kind of confrontation and militancy a march represented could America be changed.” At the Washington march, Paul Potter gave his famous “name the system” speech, adding to the strong passions aroused at the event. But mass civil disobedience was contained at the end of the march (SDS itself played a strong role in keeping marchers “in line”), leading to a feeling of disappointment for many. Despite SDS’s bursting into the public’s eyes with the Washington march, the national office decided not to commit SDS to being simply an anti-war organization. Money and organizational problems impaired the effectiveness of the national office, which struggled to develop anti-war policies and strategies and began to alienate many of SDS’s newer members and local chapters. Some members pushed for a new Port Huron to reestablish the organization, but conferences and meetings devoted to that purpose failed to accomplish much. When the government decided to start drafting students using a ranking system, local SDS members organized a sit-in at the University of Chicago that occupied the administration building for five days. The campus administration avoided conflict and waited for the sit-in to slowly die out, but in a faculty meeting shortly after, “the faculty voted to threaten harsh disciplinary action against future sit-ins or campus disruptions, and to put itself unshirkingly behind the administration policy with regard to ranking. The blow was severe, the students hardly believing that two months of work and negotiations and demonstrations and petitions and letters and arguments had produced not one single concession. But since the end of the school year was at hand, and regroupment was now impossible, there was little recourse.” But the sit-in at Chicago revealed that university administrations were “complicit” with the interests of business and government and demonstrated a new willingness by students to directly resist. “The realization of complicity on the part of the university, combined with a realization of how readily it could be confronted, was a crucial element in helping to turn attention back to the campus during the rest of the year.” But as was often the case, the turn towards the university was accompanied by a turn away from it. Around the same time, SDS assisted in the creation of a number of “free universities,” where alternative education could take place outside of traditional institutions. But doubts about free universities soon appeared in the following few years because they may have actually helped traditional universities by moving troublemakers outside and by creating innovative programs that could be co-opted by universities. But, Sale notes, the free universities were important as a significant attempt by the New Left to create a truly autonomous form of education and organization. As SDS continued to grow, the local ranks became increasingly powerful and independent of the national office, though the latter attempted to maintain some control through New Left Notes, a weekly newspaper which started appearing in 1966. Around this time, SDS’s constituency visible changed. The older members, and especially the national leadership, were confronted with “Prairie Power,” a younger generation, often from the Midwest rather than the East coast, that dressed less formally (more facial hair and hippie fashion) and was less versed in the history of the left, more anarchistic and hostile to the national leadership, and impatient for change. Partially in response to the demands of Prairie Power, SDS began organizing at the university level for “student power,” but with an ultimate aim of creating a general radical student movement. So though demands might be immediate at times, it was believed that “Student power in short, was not educational but political.” SDS played a key role in organizing campus protests against military recruiters and visits by government officials. The draft was a key issue that led to what Greg Calvert in 1966 called the move “From protest to resistance” (a phrase Ulrike Meinhof would import into the German New Left). Draft resistance actions spread, and there was a mass draft-card burning in New York City in 1967 as well as more protests about university complicity with the war. But there was still a growing feeling that mobilization in marches and other activities were accomplishing nothing in regards to stopping the war, and that something like “revolution” was on the table at that point. “The problem, as those of the SDS leadership saw it, was how to move more people from personal action to political commitment, how to raise the level of those who were so obviously potential recruits – the draft resister, the campus demonstrator, the antiwar marcher – to that of ‘revolutionary consciousness.’ [Carl] Davidson put it simply: ‘We need to move from protest to resistance; to dig in for the long haul; to become full-time, radical, sustained, relevant. In short, we need to make a revolution. But again, how do we go about it?” SDS came up with two solutions. First, “T-O institutes . . . a queer mixture of the familiar graduate-school seminar, the ERAP communal-living projects, and the political ‘cadre schools’ that Old Left groups like the Communist Party used to run during the summers.” Second, proposals for a new ideology to replace The Port Huron Statement. Theoretical analyses were already being produced in abundance and the journal Radical America was a valuable source for theoretical inquiry. “But the most successful ideological contestant was a concept called ‘the new working class,’” which consisted of people with “technical, clerical, and professional jobs that require educational backgrounds.” The new working class was essential for the functioning and reproduction of modern American capitalism, and, if made aware of its function, could come to play the role of a political vanguard. The theory returned emphasis to the campus as the site of resistance by arguing that students need to start with their own situation. As Sale states its impact: “Liberals operate out of other people’s oppression; the radical operates out of his own.” The summer of 1967 of course saw the beginning of the wave of dramatic political activity that would extend until at least 1970. Sale stops to evaluate the state of SDS at this point. Carl Davidson assessed the group at the time, stating, “We have within our ranks Communists of both varieties, socialists of all sorts, 3 or 4 different kinds of anarchists, anarchosyndicalists, syndicalists, social democrats, humanist liberals, a growing number of ex-YAF libertarian laissez-faire capitalists, and, of course, the articulate vanguard of the psychedelic liberation front.” Davidson also surveyed the composition of a typical SDS campus chapter. He argued 85-90% of the membership were “shock troops,” usually younger undergraduates with anti-intellectual tendencies but strong moral outrage at the American system. 5-10% were the “superintellectuals,” mostly graduate students in Social Sciences or Humanities: “They spell out grand strategies for the chapter’s activities, but will rarely sit behind the literature tables. . . . They join most of the demonstrations, but rarely help make the picket signs . . . Without a doubt some of the most brilliant young people in America today.” Finally, 5% were the “organizers,” those who “do the bureaucratic shitwork (reserving rooms, setting up tables, ordering literature, etc.) or see that it gets done.” In 1967, women began to visibly protest the elitist, male chauvinist leadership of the group, and SDS’s indifference to women’s issues would lead to many women leaving the organization over the next few years. During 1967, repression of the left became even more violent and leftists exhibited an increased tendency to directly resist and even fight back in order to make sure that disruption was successful. As Davidson puts it, “No one goes limp anymore, or meekly to jail. Police violence does not go unanswered. Sit-ins are no longer symbolic, but strategic: to protect people or hold positions, rather than to allow oneself to be passively stepped over or carted off.” This boldness was most clear in the 1967 Pentagon protest, which saw protestors (including SDSers) rushing through barriers and up the steps of the building as well as sneaky mass arrests in the middle of the night (for a firsthand account, see Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night). Despite the formulation of the new working class theory, SDSers, especially the more intellectual ones, were increasingly led to Marxism, which the early generation of SDSers had scorned for its association with the Old Left. Sale admits this shift toward Marx may have had good reasons, but he is skeptical of the tendency to accept Marxism as a readymade ideology. “[T]he SDS leadership began to see itself more and more (in the Marxist phraseology) as a ‘vanguard’ in the impending revolution, or at least as the core of that potential vanguard. The people around the [national office] itself became an increasingly close-knit group: a number of the staff lived and slept together in nearby apartments in a quasi-communal style; they shared drug experiences (marijuana mostly, but also LSD), out of which came, initially at least, a sense of closeness and unity; and they developed their political ideas together both through formal and informal meetings which they held to ‘advance their political education.’” But many SDS members resented and resisted the leadership’s turn toward revolution and Marx, and a split grew between the national organization focusing on revolution and the local chapters dedicated to base-building. Needless to say, 1968 saw protest and resistance appear in almost every possible location and form. Particularly new and newsworthy were the outbursts of political violence aimed at property, including bombings of campus buildings linked to the war. SDS did not immediately embrace such violence, labeling those responsible “adventurists.” “And yet it fascinated, the idea of violence, and as frustration grew, repression grew, the monumentality of the task grew, and its necessity, so did the possibilities of violence.” And then “Columbia” happened. The local Columbia SDS chapter played a large role in articulating an argument about the school’s links to the war and the racism of the university’s plans to expand into neighboring Harlem. SDSer Mark Rudd became a leader of the “action faction” heading the occupations movement. The first occupation received an ambivalent response, and when it seemed like it might fail SDS voted down Rudd’s proposal to take more buildings. But when other organizations successfully took over other buildings, SDS turned around and joined in supporting the wave of occupations. After the occupations were violently ended by the police, the liberal wing of the student body took back power from the more radical side, aided by the fact that groups like SDS lacked a coherent counter-proposal. “But three momentous experiences which underlay the Columbia rebellion did linger and did much to shape the revolutionary politics that SDS was edging toward. The first was the experience of those who encountered the communal life – thrown together with like-minded men and women, sharing, meeting, loving, eating, defecating, sleeping, talking, and deciding together, with no authority, no rules, no force to limit them, and making the decisions that affected their own lives.” “The second experience grew out of the alliance with black students . . . and the strength this gave to the white students’ cause. The blacks were slow in joining the issues at Columbia (it was SDS, for example, which instigated the gym and Martin Luther King protests) and insisted on going their own way once they had . . . but their mere presence gave the rebellion legitimacy, confidence, and power.” The third experience “had to do with the students’ taking a political view of themselves, and their university, and the society beyond, confronting the true implications of the old SDS slogan, ‘A free university in a free society.’” As the complicity of the administration and the faculty, as well as the liberal student body, was made clear, it became obvious that something more than reform was needed. As one SDSer stated, “’a free university’ will only exist after we have won a ‘free society.’” In order to undermine the SDS call for “two, three, many Columbias,” college administrations across the nation tried to offer friendly “restructuring” plans that would win over the support of faculty and students by offering more shared governance. But such efforts did little to stop the wave of campus demonstrations that immediately followed Columbia and the further radicalization of the student movement. By the 1968 SDS convention, “revolutionary” was a preferred adjective and statement of identity. “By the middle of 1968 there were many thousands of people who could, with no sense of hyperbole, agree with the SDS convention paper which argued ‘our movement is an element of the revolutionary vanguard painfully forming from the innards of America.” But at this time, Progressive Labor, a Maoist group with strict political lines emphasizing the organization of the working class, made its first strong bid for control of SDS. Despite its small numbers, Progressive Labor was able to acquire a great deal of power through its ability to order its members to vote in a bloc. An attempt was made to kick Progressive Labor out of SDS at the East Lansing convention, but it failed, and the final conflict between the two was put off for another year. Many groups on the left were planning protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and a number of first-generation SDSers were leading such efforts, but SDS’s national leadership at first did not support protesting the convention because it considered electoral politics a lost cause. However, as momentum for the protests grew, SDS reluctantly sent out some lines of communication and support. It was important that SDS didn’t neglect the event because police brutality at the convention, as seen on the streets and in the news, did much to further radicalize the left. “For SDS, the lessons of Chicago were profound, and each of them seemed to confirm the rightness of the move into revolution. Chicago proved once and for all, for those still needing proof, that the country could not be educated or reformed out of its pernicious system, even by establishmentarian reformers like McCarthy. It showed that even resistance, open and defiant resistance, was not enough to wrest changes, for the institutions of American society, grounded in violence, would use violence in their own defense when the threat was regarded as serious enough.” But Sale underscores that SDS in many ways failed to effectively to take advantage of the growing strength of the radical movement. The organization was partially crippled by bitter internal divisions at every level over issues such as dope or no dope, action or education, revolution or base-building. Sale is particularly critical of how the focus on revolution may have alienated SDS from its constituency. Although Sale admits the intelligence and reasons for the SDS’s leadership turn to revolution, he is critical of its failure to connect with potential supporters: “At a time when many young people wanted some explanations for the failure of electoral politics, SDS was led by people who had long since given up caring about elections and were trying to organize for revolution. To students just beginning to be aware of their own radicalization and their potential role as the intelligentsia of an American left, SDS offered the wisdom that the only really important agents for social change were the industrial workers, or the ghetto blacks, or the Third World revolutionaries. For college students who swarmed into chapter meetings ready to take on their administrations for any number of grievances, SDS provided an analysis which emphasized ‘de-studentizing,’ dropping out, and destroying universities. And for youth in search of an integrative ideology to supplant the tattered theories of corporate liberalism, SDS had only the imperfectly fashioned tenets of a borrowed Marxism and an untransmittable attachment to the theories of other revolutionaries.” By the fall of the 1968, repression had also began to take its toll on SDS and the New Left, with government spying and infiltration, police arrests, college administration sanctions, and a variety of forms of liberal cooptation sapping some of the strength of the left. For better or worse, “After years of demanding to be taken seriously, activists found that they were.” Political protest, resistance, and violence continued in 1969, the extent of the last showing just how thoroughly “violence had become a real part of the lexicon of American left-wing politics.” SDS officially remained ambivalent about the wave of political bombings and property destruction, but the organization’s revolutionary fervor made the group sympathetic most of the time. Around this time, SDS committed itself to building a “revolutionary youth movement” and also began to make contacts with other groups, particularly the Black Panthers. But the leadership was leading the organization into a corner. “How ironic it all was: at precisely the time of the greatest explosion of the American left in all of the decade, SDS, its leading organization by every index – size, fame, geographical scope, energy – was gradually but unmistakably isolating and diminishing itself, losing its student constituency, its women, its alumni, failing to connect with the high schools, the soldiers, the workers. The SDS revolutionaries were on the barricades, but they had forgotten to look behind: their troops were no longer following.” Everything fell apart at the 1969 summer convention. During the convention, issues of New Left Notes passed out included an article with the title, taken from a Bob Dylan song, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” The Weatherman statement was directly aimed at the growing power of Progressive Labor, and called for a centralized revolutionary party while it positioned white American radicals as comrades of the struggles of Third World guerillas and supporters of “black liberation struggles.” Sexist statements made by Black Panthers about “pussy power” at the convention gave Progressive Labor an opportunity to take the moral high ground and criticize the Panthers as well SDS’s growing support for black nationalism. A written statement by the Panthers later read at the convention attacked Progressive Labor, and a group of SDS leaders spontaneously split the convention by leading non-Progressive Labor members out of the hall, resulting in two SDSs, and in reality the death of SDS. The concluding chapter of SDS’s history focuses on Weatherman, which would soon attempt to lead a violent direct attack on the system during the October “Days of Rage” and after. Of course protest and resistance continued without the SDS, and perhaps in even greater number in the next few months. Yet Sale argues, “It was impossible, of course, to stop the activism of college campuses . . . but now there was no easy way for that activism to be infused with politics, with the kinds of understanding that from the beginning SDS had worked so hard to project and transmit. A campus might explode with anger over a tuition increase, but there would be no common appreciation of how that connected with the role of the university in a corporate society; a lengthy campaign against ROTC or university investments might excite a college, but there would be little understanding of the links with imperialism; students across the land could get outraged at the perilous conditions of the ecology without ever seeing the nature of the capitalist system and how it works to produce and prolong that peril. Without something like an SDS, there would be no ready political mooring; without a political mooring, activism goes adrift.”
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Have you ever considered reviewing U.S. political prisoner David Gilbert's book, "No Surrender," which contains some long essays about both SDS and The Weather Underground?
Post a Comment