The '60s Are Gone, But One of Its Most Controversial Organizations Is Back

By Astra Taylor, AlterNet. Posted March 22, 2007.

In April of 1965 a young man named Paul Potter took the stage at the first march on Washington against the war in Vietnam. "What kind of system is it that justifies the U.S. or any other country seizing the destinies of the Vietnamese people and using them callously for its own purpose?" he asked the crowd, before enjoining them to "name that system, describe it, analyze it, understand it, and change it."

Potter was president of Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, the group behind the demonstration. The largest and most influential activist youth organization of the 1960s, SDS united around the ideal of "participatory democracy" and encouraged radical analysis, emphasizing the connections between issues like poverty, racism and the Vietnam War. A media success, the march thrust SDS into the national spotlight. Over the next four years membership swelled to include upwards of 100,000 young people, but by 1970 the group had self-destructed.

Today Students for a Democratic Society occupies an almost mythical place in the history of the '60s, embodying both the promise and disappointment of Vietnam era youth activism. Since its fiery demise in 1969, there have been various attempts to revive SDS.

All such efforts failed, until recently.

Pat Korte of Stonington, Conn., and Jessica Rapchik of Chapel Hill, N.C., were high school seniors last year when they met on a conference call for participants in the World Can't Wait: Drive Out the Bush Regime campaign, one of the only nationwide protest games in town.

"After a while we felt very disillusioned. We felt powerless," Rapchik told me. Turned off by the lack of spontaneity and authoritarian undertones in discussions among the organizers, Korte and Rapchik realized the Revolutionary Communist Party -- a group that "definitely promotes violent overthrow of the government and revolution," as Rapchik put it -- was running the show.

It wasn't exactly the vibrant, spontaneous and inclusive peace movement they were looking to become part of. And so, after a couple of private phone conversations, the high school seniors went to their respective libraries and did some reading about past efforts to produce social change. Inspired by SDS's guiding ideal of "participatory democracy," they decided to revive the group.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to them, Alan Haber, who played an instrumental role in the 1959 founding of SDS was having similar inklings up in Michigan, the original birthplace of the organization. Back in Ann Arbor after a long interlude in the Bay Area, Haber felt the time had come for the group's resurrection.

With a sense that the time was again ripe for New Left sentiments, Haber went to work doing what he does best: getting folks involved in the quest for peace. He put some fliers on telephone poles around town. "The last meeting was 35 years ago," they read. Approximately 30 people of varying ages showed up; soon enough, an SDS chapter formed on the university campus.

Unaware of these developments, Korte, an articulate and determined young idealist with a mop of unruly brown hair, got in touch with Haber to share his and Rapchik's vision. With that -- an 18-year-old reaching out to a man approaching 70 -- the nascent SDS signaled its first significant break with its previous incarnation, once famous for shunning the input of elders (defined, most dramatically, as "anyone over 30").

Since then, the organization's membership has mushroomed, exceeding Korte and Rapchik's wildest expectations. Boosters of the new SDS claim it is the fastest-growing multi-issue student group in history, already dwarfing comparable organizations like the International Socialist Organization. Official membership has passed the 2,000 mark, and there are approximately 140 university-based chapters across the country and 46 more at high schools.

According to Brian Kelley, a Pace University sophomore who is partly responsible for maintaining the website, new chapters are forming every week. Frustrated by the prevalence of single-issue groups on campus and the authoritarian politics or infighting between anti-war groups off campus, college students are gravitating towards the new SDS, which offers a youth-led, radically democratic program and a broad political focus.

Return to Chicago

But is it possible -- or, perhaps more importantly, desirable -- to revive a political organization that has been defunct for almost four decades? And not just any organization, but one with an incredibly vexed history -- and one whose previous members are still alive?

In 1969, SDS held its last national convention in Chicago, an event that has gone down in historical infamy. The proceedings devolved into sectarian madness, with Maoist militants facing off against the Marxist-Leninists, and what would become the Weather Underground Organization emerging as the most powerful faction.

Most of SDS's 100,000 members simply walked away, demoralized and disgusted. Thirty-seven years later SDS was back in Chicago, and I stood late last August chatting with Haber amidst the bustle of the first national convention of the revitalized SDS.

See more stories tagged with: students for a democratic, sds, weather underground

Astra Taylor is a writer and documentary filmmaker. Her first book, "Shadow Of the Sixties," is forthcoming from the New Press in 2007.

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