ABSTRACT
The period from the late 1950s to the early 1970s in America, typically labeled the 1960s, witnessed the rise of numerous vociferous countercultural groups, ranging from the Beats, FreedomRiders, civil rights marchers, advocates of a new left, free speech student activists, and antiwar protestors to black nationalists, pacifists, feminists, hippies, homegrown Third World radicals, gay rights advocates, fellow-travelers of farm workers’ unions, yippies, and commune organizers. Taken together, such groups formed the “Movement,” which seemed singularly dedicated, despite its many fronts, to undermining the stability of settled social conventions and to fostering a multifaceted campaign for liberation. Newmodes of dress, speech, music, literature, criticism, political participation, sexual morality, and living proliferated, bearing witness to an emergent sensibility rooted in political irreverence and an antinomian spirit. In retrospect, these tumultuous and gaudy times, which were followed by an enduring conservative backlash, seemed nothing if not unstable, shifting, and ephemeral. Perhaps no phenomenon of this period has been judged more heterogeneous
and radical than the new left, which was a loose, protean set of temporary coalitions formed between 1960 and 1972 mainly by white university students. At the heart of the new left was the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)—an organization named in 1960 and supported by the League for Industrial Democracy, a group of older leftist intellectuals and trade unionists originally founded by Upton Sinclair and Jack London in 1905. In 1960 Robert Alan Haber, a student at the University of Michigan, became president of SDS. Soon he and a fellow student, Tom Hayden, were changing this modest campus association of liberals, socialists, and unaffiliated radicals into a more ambitious and left-leaning organization. The considerable importance of SDS was perhaps first signaled at the landmark annual convention in June 1962 at Port Huron, Michigan, the site of the United Auto Workers summer camp. Among the five dozen people at the meeting were representatives from the National Student Association, the Student Christian Movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Young
Democrats, and the Young People’s Socialist League. Drafted by Hayden and refined by diverse hands, the widely disseminated, lengthy Port Huron Statement soon became a founding document of the emerging new left. Showing the influence of early Karl Marx, Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman, C. Wright Mills, and William Appleman Williams, the SDS manifesto made clear the young radicals’ loss of faith in American institutions and bureaucracies, their devotion to participatory democracy and nonviolence, their distrust of vanguard parties and left-authoritarianism, and their self-conscious disregard of the old left and the Cold War liberals. It criticized America’s foreign policy, rabid anticommunism, the two-party political system, the military-industrial complex, racism, poverty, and academic apathy. It called on activist students to form coalitions with allies in labor, civil rights, and other liberal causes. At the peak of its strength in 1968, SDS reportedly had 100,000 members in 500 chapters.1
