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Subject file · TLI-O-0017

Students for a Democratic Society

AKA: SDS · the SDS

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The Record

SDS began as the Student League for Industrial Democracy, the student arm of an old social-democratic body, and renamed itself in 1960. The Port Huron Statement of June 1962 gave it a programme. The Vietnam buildup gave it a mass membership it had done nothing special to earn.

Its trajectory tracks this section of the Record. It moved from grassroots democracy and community organising, through the 1963 convention document America and the New Era, to an openly revolutionary stance by 1968. Then it broke apart.

The break came at the Chicago convention in June 1969. On one side stood the Progressive Labor Party's Worker-Student Alliance, which held that students should subordinate themselves to an industrial working class. On the other stood the Revolutionary Youth Movement, which held that youth were themselves part of that class. RYM then split again: one faction went underground as Weatherman, the other became RYM II and went into the factories and the schools. After 1969 there was no single SDS.

The archive holds SDS's own paper, New Left Notes, through the six issues that carry the split. You can read the argument in the organisation's own words rather than in a historian's summary of them.

Relationship Ledger

had participant
SDS adopts the Port Huron Statement
Date not recorded
reported

The Port Huron Statement, principally drafted by Tom Hayden, was adopted by Students for a Democratic Society at Port Huron, Michigan, in June 1962. Source: A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times

had participant
Klonsky publishes "Toward a Revolutionary Youth Movement"
Date not recorded
reported

As SDS national secretary, Mike Klonsky published 'Toward a Revolutionary Youth Movement' on 23 December 1968, rejecting campus-bound activism. Source: The Movements of the New Left, 1950-1975: A Brief History with Documents

had participant
SDS splits at its own convention
Date not recorded
documented

The June 1969 convention split over the Revolutionary Youth Movement. Source: New Left Notes, 1969: Six Issues Through the Split, {"offset": 368990}

had participant
SDS adopts America and the New Era
Date not recorded
reported

SDS adopted America and the New Era at its June 1963 convention, a year after Port Huron, carrying the corporate-liberalism analysis developed at Studies on the Left into the organisation’s own programme. Source: A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times

Referenced in

Records whose text names Students for a Democratic Society. The list is rebuilt from the published prose and checked for drift.

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