Students for a Democratic Society

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a New Left youth movement, was arguably one of the most influential organizations for social justice and activism in the United States during the 1960s. Established in 1960 out of the Student League for Industrial Democracy, a social-democratic organization with close ties to American labor unions, SDS sought a new political order based on equality and democracy for all Americans. Drawing on radical sociologist C. Wright Mills's critique of American social order in The Power Elite, SDS activists called for participatory democracy, and aimed to take power out of the hands of corporate America, political elites, and the military-industrial complex, and return it to the people. The SDS manifesto, adopted in 1962 from an earlier draft written by University of Michigan student Tom Hayden, The Port Huron Statement critiqued postwar American society for failing to end racial discrimination, for the presence of poverty in the midst of plenty, and for the perpetuation of the Cold War. Throughout the decade, SDS activists worked for reforms in university systems, economic structures, civil rights, inner cities, and corporate America. The organization was perhaps best known for its anti-war demonstrations; the largest of these, a mass anti–Vietnam War demonstration in Washington, D.C., in 1965, made it a nationally recognized activist organization. Increasingly radicalized as American involvement in the Vietnam War escalated, the SDS led a protest and take-over at Columbia University in 1968 that ended with the arrest of some 700 students. Split by internal strife and [Page 1351]political factions by 1968, the SDS organized a final anti-war protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago before disintegrating. The Weather Underground (also known as the Weathermen Underground), an organization advocating violent revolution to force political change, was a spin-off of the SDS.

Deeply influenced by the civil rights movement, the SDS worked to politicize marginalized groups in order to achieve its vision of participatory democracy. SDS youth like Tom Hayden worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's voter registration drives in the South in the early 1960s. His accounts of these efforts, published throughout the country, politicized students and encouraged them to participate in and organize social and political reform activities. In 1963, SDS launched its Economic Research and Action Project. Organizing small teams of activists in urban ghettos throughout the Midwest and Northeast, SDS aimed to create an interracial movement for social and economic improvement in impoverished areas. Enthusiasm for the project began to wane by 1964, especially as American youth became more radical. The free speech movement at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, and President Johnson's escalation of American military involvement in Vietnam, spurred SDS organizers toward the planning and implementation of more radical, direct-action tactics to force social and political change.

By 1965, SDS remained a relatively unknown youth organization, with branches on college campuses throughout the nation. After organizing the largest of its kind anti–Vietnam War march in Washington on April 17, SDS membership rose dramatically and new chapters organized around the country. More than 15,000 people converged on the Washington Monument and marched, singing peace songs all the way to the steps of the capitol building, where SDS offered a petition to Congress to end the war. The message articulated in a speech by then SDS President Paul Potter resonated with youth across the nation. The war in Vietnam, Potter said, symbolized how America had gone terribly wrong. Democracy was failing, and Potter suggested that youth in the United States shared common problems with people in Vietnam; social movements in both countries sought to change the status quo. In the following years, SDS became the leading voice calling for an end to the war. As the protests grew in frequency and size, the SDS turned more and more frequently to radical action tactics to change the political status quo in America.

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