Students: The Emergence of S.D.S
uncredited writer, Time, 17 May 1968
The Students for a Democratic Society, declared Columbia Provost David B. Truman last week, were deliberately “seeking a confrontation with the university.” Thus Truman seemed to support the widespread notion that the wave of recent demonstrations and strikes at Columbia were all part of a conscious conspiracy. That is unlikely. S.D.S., which has played an active role in most of the U.S. campus uprisings, certainly believes in all sorts of radical confrontation, but conspiracy is not really its game. If anything, it is an organization whose members shy away from organization.
A loosely formed amalgam of some 35,000 young people—barely 6,000 of whom pay national dues—the far-left S.D.S. boasts chapters on at least 250 campuses. Opposed to “imperialism” (whatever that means these days), racism and oppression, S.D.S. finds the American university guilty of all three. The organization got its start at the University of Michigan as a student offshoot of the League for Industrial Democracy, a socialist trade-unionist group. In 1962, following S.D.S.’s first national convention at Port Huron, Mich., Tom Hayden, a former editor of the Michigan Daily, drafted the 30,000-word “Port Huron statement” that was to become a basic manifesto of the New Left. Concluding that it was possible to “change circumstances in the school, the work places, the bureaucracies, the government,” Hayden advocated a participatory democracy in which the individual could “share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life.”
Against the Framework. S.D.S. concentrated at first on civil rights issues. It organized Northern ghetto dwellers in such projects as Chicago’s Jobs Or Income—Now (JOIN) and fought to get Mississippi’s “Freedom delegation” seated at the 1964 Democratic Convention. The Viet Nam war, however, led to a change of tactics. By 1966, S.D.S. had broken with the L.I.D. and decided against working within the existing political framework. Since then, the group has been trying to be what National Secretary Michael Spiegel, 21, a onetime Harvard student, calls “an independent radical force.”
That independence extends to individual S.D.S. chapters, which plan their own programs, ranging from attacks on residence rules at Princeton to a campaign to haul down a Confederate flag at the University of Texas. There is remarkably little guidance from the
S.D.S. national office, run by a triumvirate consisting of Spiegel and two other national secretaries, Penn State Graduate Carl Davidson, 24, and University of Texas Graduate Robert Pardun, 26. Headquarters is a pair of drab rooms above the Chicken House restaurant on Chicago’s sleazy West Madison Street. No two chapters are alike. At Harvard, the 200-member S.D.S. is a thriving, cohesive force. At Ohio’s Oberlin College, where no national officer has paid a visit in more than two years, the local chapter is a dispirited band of 35 students. The group has all but melded into the Oberlin Resistance, a broader-based organization whose protests recently prevented Navy recruiters from interviewing on campus.
Surprisingly, S.D.S. at the University of Iowa is stronger than at Berkeley, where the local chapter is lost in a welter of radical campus groups. To raise funds, says Graduate Student Leonard Goldberg, 22, Berkeley’s S.D.S. is often reduced to “throwing a party, charging a dollar a head and serving cheap beer.” Money is a problem almost everywhere. The national S.D.S. owes the Federal Government $10,000 in back taxes. Receiving little money from headquarters, Columbia Graduate John Fuerst, 23, hitchhikes around the country as one of S.D.S.’s eight at-large national officers. Fuerst is not even a dues-paying member, explains simply that “I can’t afford $5.” Nor are all S.D.S.-ers students. In New York City, an East Village branch is made up largely of Mao-minded hippies.
What draws young people into S.D.S., says Berkeley Sophomore Peter Stone, 20, is a desire to translate their sense of alienation from society into “a political thing.” Products of comfortable, middle-class homes, S.D.S. members typically are disenchanted young liberals. Most feel that anti-Communism is an irrelevant stance. Probably no more than 2% of all S.D.S.-ers belong to the Communist Party. Princeton Sophomore James Tarlau, 20, who was president of his high school student council in Manhattan, once worked for Democratic Representative William Fitts Ryan, eventually turned to S.D.S. after becoming appalled by congressional support for the Viet Nam war. Lawyer Ron Yank, 26, was a fraternity man at Berkeley, saw what direct action could do when a sit-in won more jobs for Negroes at a San Francisco hotel. Yank joined S.D.S. while attending Harvard Law School, became co-chairman of the local chapter.
Rhetoric à la Che. S.D.S. is animated not by any master plan for revolution but by a sense of moral outrage—to say nothing of a fascination with rhetoric à la Che. Says Columbia S.D.S. Chairman Mark Rudd: “It has energy, and that’s why I’m in it.” The certainty that they are morally right nonetheless pushes S.D.S.-ers toward intellectual arrogance and a facile conviction that ends justify means, including violence. For all their talk about “participatory democracy,” few members seem prepared to accept, or readily tolerate, anybody else’s ideas on how society’s ills can best be cured.
Nor do all S.D.S. radicals seem willing to pay the price of their convictions. Unlike Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr., a 43-year-old rebel who is willing to go to jail to dramatize his opposition to the draft and the Viet Nam war, Columbia’s student strike leaders are demanding, among other things, total amnesty for violating the law. There is the irony that neither Mark Rudd nor most of the other Columbia S.D.S. leaders were even in occupied buildings during the battle with police three weeks ago. Thus they were not among those arrested on criminal-trespass charges. But last week, Columbia’s rebellious students got themselves involved in a new fracas over the seizure of a Columbia-owned apartment building in Morningside Heights. And this time, Rudd was among 117 persons arrested when police were called in to disperse the demonstrators.
