Students Movement
In the United States, student unrest took on political overtones during the American Revolution. Toward the end of the 19th cent. many American students embraced the new theories of socialism and communism being advanced in Europe. The Intercollegiate Socialist Society was formed (1905) to advance the ideas of Marxism. Socialist activity and student protest, often in support of labor struggles and economic justice for the poor, blossomed during the Great Depression. Many students spoke out against McCarthyism in the 1950s and for freedom of speech on campus in the early 1960s. Spurred on by the civil-rights movement, the Vietnam War, and a growing counterculture, groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) rose to prominence. SDS advocated participatory democracy and economic justice, criticizing corporate-military interlocks and unresponsive government bureaucracy; their tactics included sit-ins, mass demonstrations, teach-ins and student strikes. The 1970 student strike for peace involved 200 campuses. Police response was often violent, as in the 1970 Jackson State and Kent State killings and at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.
STUDENTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY
Students for a Democratic Society sds, founded in 1960, was the institutional mainstay of the New Left. In June 1962, fifty-nine sds members and sympathizers met in Port Huron, Michigan, to draft a sixty-three-page political platform. A thoughtful critique of the cold war and the materialistic complacency of postwar American life, the Port Huron Statement proposed that universities should be the locus of a new movement for "participatory democracy." That goal, never precisely defined, animated sds and aimed generally toward transferring power from representative institutions to individuals and communities. In September 1963, sds formed the Economic Research and Action Project to put participatory democracy into practice. In the summer of 1964, 125 sds organizers in nine cities tried to mobilize poor people for "the new insurgency." In Newark and Chicago they acquired some influence. But their efforts never resolved the conflict between an increasingly revolutionary outlook and the fact that most concrete gains came from cooperation with the government.
The group then turned to antiwar activism. On April 17, 1965, sds held the first of several mass demonstrations against the Vietnam War, drawing fifteen thousand people to Washington, D.C. In November, it cosponsored a demonstration that drew thirty thousand.
In 1968, sds achieved a level of power and prominence unprecedented for a student organization. To protest Columbia University's participation in war-related research and its appropriation of a public park as the site for a new gymnasium, students occupied campus buildings in April. The university brought the occupation to an end by calling in the New York City police who injured over 200 students and arrested 712. Similar occupations spread to some forty other campuses across the country.
By that year, however, the rapid growth of sds had created chaos and divisions within the organization. When the Progressive Labor party, a tiny remnant of the Old Left, took it over in June 1969, sds collapsed. What remained became a small revolutionary sect known as the Weathermen.
Students for a Democratic Society II
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), in U.S. history, a radical student organization of the 1960s. In the influential Port Huron (Mich.) Statement (1962), the organization, founded in 1960, presented its vision for post-Vietnam War America and called for students to join in a movement to establish participatory democracy. It was not until later in the decade, however, with the growth of the anti-Vietnam War movement, that the organization became well known. SDS demonstrations against the war drew thousands of protesters. In 1968, SDS sponsored a protest at Columbia Univ. that was ended by the arrest of more than 700 protesters. In that same year, increasingly divided by factional disputes, the organization collapsed, leaving behind a small faction, known as the Weathermen, that advocated violent revolutionary action