Appendix: The Roots 1905-1960

On September 12, 1905, Harry W. Laidler, a junior at Wesleyan College and a young man with an interest in the left, attended a quiet meeting in a third-floor walk-up loft at 140 Fulton Street in New York City. "I found," he wrote,

a group of some 100 men and women—writers, social workers, college students, members of organized labor and of various professions. They were intently listening to the message of the novelist and socialist, Upton Sinclair.

He had gone through five years of college life at CCNY and four years of university education at Columbia, he said, but had been made scarcely aware during his college days of the existence of the worldwide labor and socialist movements, and of proposals to eliminate poverty and social injustices from our midst. It was only when by accident, he met Leonard Abbott, then an editor of Current Literature, and receiving a copy of a socialist magazine from him, that he came to the realization of the existence and significance of these movements and of the cooperative philosophy of life.

"Why," he had asked himself, "was nothing like this taught me by my college professors?"

"I decided that, since the professors would not educate the students," he continued, "it was up to the students to educate the professors."?

That very night Sinclair asked those present to join him in forming an organization that would bring the message of socialism to American colleges, and everyone in the room agreed. And thus was born the Intercollegiate Socialist Society.

That began the history of what was to become, six decades later, the Students for a Democratic Society. Few people realized it in the sixties, when SDS seemed to have sprung full blown from the troubled brow of the decade, but in fact SDS was an integral part of a student movement dating back to the earliest years of the century and a direct descendant of the first successful student organization the country had ever known.

A measure of the importance of the new Intercollegiate Socialist Society was the stature of its sponsors, among them Clarence Darrow, prominent then as a legal champion of the criminal underdog; Jack London, whom audiences even then tended to admire for his immensely popular adventure books rather than his thoroughgoing socialism; William English Walling, a wealthy patron of the left, author of numerous books and tracts on social issues, and later a founder of the NAACP; Thomas W. Higginson, who had made a considerable reputation many years before as an abolitionist; James Graham Phelps Stokes, a Socialist Party activist and also a scion of one of the wealthiest families in America; and of course Sinclair himself, already well known for his journalism and then at work on The Jungle, the book that was to make him the most famous muckraker of the day.” Its first officers were London, president, Sinclair and Stokes, vice presidents, and on its executive board sat Harry Laidler, who was to continue his career with ISS and its successors right down to the sixties.

Now all of these men were quite dedicated social reformers, but they were from the upper end of the social and financial scale and in their schemes to redress national ills were rather more visionary than revolutionary; in common with much of the American left of the time, they saw the role of good socialists to be one of education. What they envisioned for the ISS, therefore, was quite modest: a loosely knit organization of campus "study clubs" which would promote, as they said in their prospectus, "an intelligent interest in socialism among college men and women, graduate and undergraduate." Or, as London was to put it later that fall: "We do not desire merely to make converts ... . If collegians cannot fight for us, we want them to fight against us—of course, sincerely fight against us .... Raise your voices one way or the other; be alive. That is the idea upon which we are working." And a modest enough up-from-apathy idea it is, too.

It is of some importance that the founders of the ISS saw it as a web of "study clubs" on different campuses, with a New York office in the center, for this organizational design remained with its successors into the sixties. It is also of some importance that they saw the target of this organization as being the universities, for never before had it been thought possible to spread a political message to people still in universities and draw a number of separate campuses together into a single political organization. That it seems so inevitable now only suggests a certain genius: for at universities are not only a corps of young, idealistic, and leisured people, but also dissatisfactions that mirror those of the society at large. Awaken these young people to the injustice and insensitivity of their universities, and you shortly have an army aware of the injustice and insensitivity of the society beyond, and probably prepared to act on them.

ISS president Jack London made this connection during the organization's first speaker's tour in the fall of 1905. First, the university:

I went to the university. I found the university, in the main, practically wholly so, clean and noble, but I did not find the university alive. I found that the American university had this ideal, as phrased by a professor in Chicago University, namely: "the passionless pursuit of passionless intelligence"clean and noble, I grant you, but not a/ive enough.

Then, the society:

And the reflection of this university ideal I find [in] the conservatism and unconcern of the American people toward those who are suffering, who are in want. And so I became interested in an attempt to arouse in the minds of the young men of our universities an interest in the study of socialism.

One reason that the connection was established at the start is that those who were guiding the organization were themselves of both worlds. Of all the early leaders of the ISS only one, Harry Laidler, was an undergraduate, and he seems to have been added more or less at the last minute. London was twenty-nine, Sinclair twenty-seven, Stokes thirty-three, Walling twenty-eight, and Darrow, the elder statesman, forty-eight, and none of them at the time had seen the inside of an ivy wall for half a decade. They were young enough to remember their own pallid university experiences, but it was natural for them to be equally aware of wider problems of the society in which they were now living. Whether the value of this perception is balanced by the disadvantages of having a leadership somewhat remote from the felt problems of those still in school is a real question and will continue to plague the organization into the future—but at the beginning, at least, it was no handicap. The ISS was the first student-oriented group to have a breadth beyond a single campus and a depth beyond a single issue, and it came upon the campuses in what was indeed an auspicious period. Its membership at the start was not large—by 1907 perhaps seventy-five members in a dozen chapters, all in the East (out of a student population of some two hundred thousand)—but within a decade it had grown to perhaps a thousand members at sixty-odd chapters from coast to coast. But membership was not really a criterion of its impact: enrollment was never made very much of, and campus chapters concentrated instead on holding study groups to talk about socialism and asking London, Laidler, or some other luminary to the campus every so often to stir it up. A better indication is the quality of those who joined: people like Morris Hillquit, Harry A. Overstreet, Laurence Seelye, Norman Thomas, and Alexander Trachtenberg in New York, Roger Baldwin, Heywood Broun, Walter Lippmann, and John Reed at Harvard, Babette Deutsch and Freda Kirchwey at Barnard, Edna St. Vincent Millay at Vassar, Paul Douglas and Joyce Kilmer at Columbia, Bruce Bliven at Stanford, William E. Bohn at Michigan, Ordway Tead at Amherst, Karl Llewellyn at Yale.

Still better, the results: as John Reed later said,?

The result of this movement upon the undergraduate world was potent. All over the place radicals sprang up .... The more serious college papers took a socialistic, or at least a progressive tinge .... It made me, and many others, realize that there was something going on in the dull outside world more thrilling than college activities.

But the ISS also had inherent weaknesses. For one thing, it confined itself to an educational role, trusting to the Socialist Party to take all the political action, and so in many places it degenerated rather drearily into just another campus seminar for people who wanted to hear their own voices. For another, it had no criteria for membership—nonsocialists in fact were as welcome as socialists, the only test apparently a vague allegiance to "human right and human gain"—and in the long run suffered that familiar organizational problem of a group whose arms are so wide open that entrance and egress are equally easy.

And so when the initial decade of receptivity to socialism (1905-1915) withered in the heat of the first World War, the ISS was not strong enough to last. National sentiment was harsh upon the socialists, originally because the American Socialist Party opposed the war (the only Socialist party in the West to do so) and later because the Russian Revolution inclined much of the nation to regard anyone to the left of Hoover as a flaming Bolshevik. On campuses, many students fell prey to that mindless chauvinism that seems an inevitable concomitant of war and participation in ISS meetings dwindled to a small hard core, while a number of prowar university administrations made things difficult for the ISS chapters. By 1920, little remained of the ISS beyond an office in New York and a few unshakable adherents.

After the war, the ISS began to pick up again, but now with a different face. In the early twenties, with the fears generated by the Russian Revolution and a mood of miniMcCarthyism gripping the country, repression both organized and spontaneous came down upon the Left, and a shift away from that political position seemed in order. (The Socialist Party itself made things easier by falling apart, first losing its left wing to the new Communist Party in 1919, and then losing its head to factionalism in 1925.) So in 1921 the ISS changed its name to the League for Industrial Democracy—because, as a later LID pamphlet was to maintain, "students wanted a more inclusive name than 'socialist,' because they believed there were several alternative approaches to a cooperative commonwealth," and because they wanted a name "that would not necessitate innumerable explanations to students and administrators of the non-connection of their society with the Socialist party." This was only the first of the organization's long series of moves away from the left and toward the position, later solidified into a dogma, of support for the reformist end of the capitalist spectrum. The new LID made no mention of socialism, and embraced "all believers in education for strengthening democratic principles and practices in every aspect of our common life."

In its new guise the LID managed to hold on, if never exactly to flourish. Robert Morse Lovett, Florence Kelley, John Dewey, and Roger Starr all served as presidents for brief times, Stuart Chase (in this period an influential reformist author) and Reinhold Niebuhr served as treasurers, and the executive directors and essential powers were Harry Laidler and Norman Thomas. Though most of the LID membership itself was now well beyond college age and the concerns of the group shifted during the twenties from campus to workshop, an Intercollegiate Council of the LID was formed to continue work among students. Campus members during these years included Sidney Hook, Darlington Hoopes, Max Lerner, Will Maslow, Talcott Parsons, Walter Reuther (president of the Wayne University chapter and a lifelong patron of the LID), Clarence Senior, William Shirer (at Coe College in Iowa), Irving Stone, and Frank Trager.

But the twenties were not propitious years for student action. A National Student Federation of America was formed in 1926 but soon faded, and a National Student Forum made only a brief appearance. The LID clung on with a New York headquarters (financed by well-to-do men of the left, but now increasingly finding labor support) and some twenty-odd campus chapters (it claimed twenty-three in 1927), but the membership was small, interest fluctuated greatly from year to year and campus to campus, and no coherent national policies or campaigns were ever successfully formulated. (An LID-led Student Committee to Aid Sacco and Vanzetti was established in 1927, but never gained a following, the fate of the shoemaker and the fish-peddler apparently proving beneath the interest of the college population of the Great Boom.) In the mid-twenties an antiwar pacifism had a certain collegiate vogue, and at the City College of New York a full-scale anti-ROTC movement grew, eventually leading the New York World to talk about a "student revolt." But far from producing anything like the antiwar movement of the sixties, this early activity was confined largely to New York City schools and even there in large measure to the sons and daughters of (often leftist) European immigrants.

It was not until the stock-market crash and the following depression that the LID began to evolve into a vital student organization. The LID was in a particularly advantageous position to gain campus support in those years when the concept of "the working class" began to be revived among students, both because of its ties to organized labor and because of its earlier work in the late twenties in trying to build student support for unionism. Then, too, perceiving through the rubble of the thirties that something did seem to be amiss with the capitalist system after all, the LID began to discard its reformism and sound like it was serious about social change; the student program of 1934 "expresses the urgency of a new social order that will root out unemployment, war, insecurity and injustice," which it sees as coming about through "those students who desire social change of a revolutionary character [throwing] in their lot with the working class." On individual campuses it moved out from the seminar room to the picket lines, for the first time infusing its educational role with the lifeblood of a little action. In 1931 it organized a group to work among West Virginia coal miners and picketed mineowners' homes in Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and New York. In 1932 the Columbia LID helped that campus hold the nation's first student strike, in support of a student-newspaper editor deposed by the administration, and the CCNY chapter renewed the fight against ROTC; that year also LID organized a United Youth Conference Against War, and led a march on Washington by the Association of Unemployed College Alumni.

Along about this time a fissure in the LID began to appear. The elders were middle-aged now—Laidler, still the guiding light, was forty-six in 1930—and more static, more New Dealish, more slice-of-the-pie-ish, while the collegians were more active, more radical, more uncompromising, and more Marxist. In the spring of 1931 several of the New York members, regarding the LID as hopelessly old fashioned and irredeemably moderate, called for "revolutionary student action" and broke away from the parent group to form a New York Student League. A year later this grew to become the National Student League, which in the next few years asserted itself as the most militant group on the student left. The NSL's view of the LID it left behind was put well that fall by its executive secretary, Donald Henderson, who had been on the LID Board of Directors:

Its theory of education is the typical academic one of learning through discussion alone rather than through struggle and action ... . Its conferences are usually held under circumstances which make it impossible for any but the higher income group students to attend even if they cared to; its dinners are graced with dress suits and evening gowns; and its policies are as shifting and opportunistic as are required by a disintegrating middle class.

Initially the LID response was to dismiss the NSL and all its works as Communist, the start of a tradition of redbaiting that was to become quite hoary by the mid-sixties. But then, hoping to fight fire with fire, the LID decided to establish its own rival campus division, turning one of its defunct projects, formed in 1928 as the Intercollegiate Student Council, into the autonomous Student League for Industrial Democracy.”

SLID turned out to be rather more of a problem child than its parents had anticipated. It did promote the virtues of socialism in contrast to the NSL's claims for Communism, but it soon came to believe that there was room enough on college campuses for both philosophies and both groups: "The Socialist and Communist movement[s]," it argued in 1934, "must have groups on the campus whose function it is to serve their respective programs there. At the moment, the Student L.I.D. and the N.S.L. represent those tendencies ... ." And it went on to urge fraternity for the moment—"on student matters joint action is clearly essential and possible"—and raise the possibility of a merger eventually—"It may be that an amalgamation of all radical groups on the campus may result." That year it did make a temporary alliance with the NSL, over the objections of the LID itself, to sponsor a Student Anti-War Week during which an estimated 25,000 students struck classes for an hour, the first widespread expression of student activism the country had ever seen. The following April the two groups joined again in leading a student strike, drawing between 150,000 and 185,000 (by their own estimates) out of classes to protest inadequate domestic policies and the threat of war abroad; Joseph Lash, a SLID leader, said the "feeling of solidarity" thus created "marked the crystallization of the student movement in America."

On its own, SLID soon showed that its socialism meant more than simple pot shots at the system. In 1934 it began a series of summer schools "to train Students for the Radical Movement" with a "thorough grounding in the theory and principles of Marxism" and in order to "solidify the alliance between students and workers by the interchange of experience and knowledge." Its "Declaration of Principles" that same year enunciated a class-war line ("In America ... the class struggle goes on constantly"), a rudimentary anticapitalist analysis ("We regard war as an aspect of capitalist expansion and rivalry ....

To abolish it, imperialist ambitions must be rooted out"), and a militant strategy for change ("Students who desire social change of a revolutionary character must throw in their lot with the working class [which] at times ... means defiance of power and authority"). SLID even published a bulletin called Revo/t for a time, but that one was too much for the LID elders and after a few issues its title was transmuted to Student Outlook. By 1935 SLID was able to claim chapters on 125 campuses, heavily based in the East but including also—no mean feat—groups at Utah, Colorado, and San Diego.?° It was that same year that the NSL avidly wooed SLID to join it in a united front of student leftists, and SLID finally succumbed. Though there was much anguish within SLID ranks, right-wing pacifists arguing with revolutionary socialists, proto-Trotskyists battling with liberals, the dominant opinion eventually held that the threat of war abroad and "fascism" at home was so great that a united student movement was essential, even if it meant that SLIDers had to give up their most valuable attributes, an annual budget from the LID and the prestige of affiliation with a respected adult group. At Christmas week of 1935, against the seasoned advice of practically all those in the LID, SLID agreed to cut its ties and join with the NSL in a new student organization to be known as the American Student Union.

The American Student Union was the most active student movement to date, and, with a claimed membership of 20,000 (12,000 paid, it said) in 1939, the most widespread. But it had a curious life. For its first two years it was quite militant. It enthusiastically supported the pledge of the Oxford Student Union not "to fight for King and country in any war" and turned that into its own battle cry, "We refuse to support any war which the United States government may undertake." It led demonstrations and marches at a number of universities, and in 1936 led what would now be called a "mill-in" at City College which was successful in reinstating a fired teacher. Its student slates won election to student governments at several Eastern colleges.” But the ASU's militance had no staying power. Although SLID and the NSL were supposedly equal partners, and though SLID leader Joseph Lash was Executive Secretary of the ASU, the organization moved increasingly closer to the Communist Party line and thus shared its same deflated fate. The ASU, like the Communist Party (and for that matter the LID), had no programmatic power and never was able to enlist its 20,000 students into anything resembling overt political action. Visions of mass strikes or worker-student coalitions remained just that; talk of the "power of the working class" and "smashing the ruling class" never got beyond words. Just as the Communist Party misunderstood American realities, so did the ASU, and after a few years of hard-line talking both began to flounder around in a miasma of bewilderment.

Nor did their attachment to Marxism prove to be of any help. In a world which seemed on the verge of collapse, with economic disintegration and political frenzy at home and chaos and war in Europe, it was natural for the student activists to turn to a doctrine that seemed both to explain that collapse and to separate them from the system that had created it; that doctrine, as it was to be in a later period of chaos, was Marxism. Marxism was the common coin of both SLIDers and NSLers, as it was of many of their elders, and, however imperfectly understood, it was spent in enormous quantities in one long meeting after another. Somehow, though, Marxism failed to explain American events satisfactorily, and all the attempts at redoing Marx to provide this explanation produced division rather than agreement, sects rather than a united vanguard. Marxism succeeded in producing a historically learned, backward-looking, rigid set of intellectuals. What was happening here was American studentry's first runaway into somebody else's theory, somebody else's explanations, and it didn't work.

The ASU, in other words, was absorbed into the bankruptcy of the Communist Party, a party whose underpinnings were so insecure that Roosevelt's blunt-edge liberalism could cut them right out from under. Having no truly revolutionary program to put forth, having not even a fundamental distaste for America and its ways, the ASU (like the Communist Party) found itself falling more and more in the orbit of the New Deal. By 1937 the ASU had become a pale front of a pale Communist Party, and its most vociferously held ideas differed little from FDR's: in fact, Roosevelt himself wrote a letter of "hearty greetings" to the 1937 ASU convention. That convention dropped the Oxford Pledge in favor of support for the Communist Party's "collective security" stand, preparing for war in Europe. The next year the ASU dropped its anti-ROTC plank and supported much of the New Deal. The New Deal had clearly won the day in America, and the ASU, thoughts of "revolution" and "socialism in one country" far behind, welcomed the victory. Student power, insofar as it existed at all, was exhausted. The Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939 was its last gasp—as it was for most of the Communist Party itself—and in 1941, when no one was looking, the ASU declared itself for the war and passed out of existence.

The LID, however, endured. Its voice was a thin reed indeed, barely distinguishable in the late thirties and into the war years from those of countless other groups, and with each passing year more muted and more moderate. But it endured. The organization was kept alive largely through the efforts of a few onetime LIDers now in the New York clothing unions—especially the International Ladies Garment Workers Union—many of whom were veterans of battles with Communists and others within their unions in the twenties and thirties. For these men the LID was seen as a helpful propaganda adjunct for the vigorously anti-Communist wing of the labor movement, a valuable political alternative between the Socialist Party and the Democrats, and a useful kind of old-age home for a number of dedicated social democrats (such as Harry Laidler) who spent their time as scholars manqués promoting social democracy in general and unionism in particular. Besides, it was a tax-exempt institution where a few thousand dollars could easily be sheltered, and it cost no more than $35,000 a year to keep it going anyway.

These years were instrumental in slowly squeezing the juice out of the Lid’s socialism until only a mealy kind of patriotic pulp remained, but to those in the LID the simple fact of its continued existence and continued identification with the triumphant United States government seemed only to confirm them in their course. And when they looked around after the war they congratulated themselves on having been against the SLID-NSL merger all along and decided that it was time for the LID, as Laidler told the fortieth anniversary dinner in 1945, "to develop again its college work with renewed vigor"—by which they really meant a new student division which would now be quieter, more apolitical, more "educational," and this time, by God, no joining up with the Communists.

The initial budget of the revivified SLID suggests the direction of the new group. Of the $6,000 total, $2,500 came from the People's Education Camp Society, otherwise known as Camp Tamiment, a Pocono vacation spot that attracted enough Manhattan secretaries during the summer to keep itself afloat during the rest of the year as a minor prolabor foundation. Another $1,750 came from unions: $100 from locals of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, $500 from ILG headquarters, and $250 from the Dressmakers, one of whose top officers, Nathaniel Minkoff, was also an LID leader. The remaining $1,750 of the budget came from individuals. This was not an enormous budget, and expenditures came to $5,785, by what must have been a neat bit of bookkeeping, so there wasn't a lot left over. But in 1946 an anonymous $5,000 legacy for student work dropped from the blue—possibly from the red-white-and-blue—and so LID was able to launch a new SLID that fall with what was, for them, a vengeance.

The first thing the LID did was to establish the position of "Student Secretary" (at different times called Field Secretary and National Secretary), who was to oversee SLID activities and travel to campuses to build up SLID support, but who would not himself be a student and who would be paid by and responsible to the LID rather than to the student group. Jesse Cavileer, then six years out of Syracuse and with a background in college religious organizations, was hired full time that fall as the first person in this post, beginning a succession that was to include, most notably, CORE founder (and later Nixon aide) James Farmer in the early fifties and, for a time, Gabriel Kolko, a SLID activist later to become one of the most important revisionist historians of the sixties.”

The next thing was for SLID to trim its ideology as close to the bone as possible. Its adopted program proclaimed that "the SLID seeks to promote studies of student housing, employment opportunities, responsible and honest participation in student government, the development of student cooperatives, and the extension of student rights to participate in making college policy," and its activities were to consist solely of "bringing to the college campuses able and well-known representatives of government, labor, cooperatives and other social movements, to lecture on their respective subjects." Even so, there were few takers. Columbia and CCNY became the first two chapters, in November 1946, but there is no indication that either had more than a handful of members. By Christmastime, when SLID held its first postwar conference, there were said to be chapters at seven other schools. ‘2 The LID proceeded cautiously with SLID this time around, protecting it from the dangers of backsliding with all the liberal anti-Communism at its command. Laidler, still LID Executive Secretary, was inordinately proud of the membership clause he established for SLID:

That membership in the LID be confined to those who believe in education for democracy in industry, in politics and in our cultural life; who believe in the democratic way of life as a means and as a Social goal.

By virtue of the democratic aims of the League, advocates of dictatorship and totalitarianism and of any political system that fails to provide for freedom of speech, of press, of religion, of assembly, and of political, economic and cultural organization; or of any system that would deny civil rights to any person because of race, color, creed or national origin, are not eligible for membership. Nor are those eligible whose political policies are wholly or largely determined by the policies laid down by the leadership of a foreign government.

This membership clause was formally adopted by the 1947 SLID convention, refined by the 1948 convention to add a provision against "all parties and/or factions based on Bolshevik principles" (the idea was to admit well-behaving Trotskyists), and, amazingly, remained a basic tenet of the organization's bylaws right up to 1962. The nervousness which permeates it seems rather quaint from this vantage point, but as in many things, SLID was to be slightly ahead of its time, and the time that was coming was McCarthy's.

SLID activities of the forties were negligible. Conventions were held in 1947 and 1948 at which national officers were elected, and grand resolutions opposing or approving this or that national policy were passed, to no apparent purpose. Conferences were held on prejudice (in Detroit, in December 1947) and the economy (in Cleveland, in April 1948) with a parade of liberal-labor speakers, but the audiences were small and the results unnoticeable. In 1947 SLIDers attended the founding conference of the National Student Association—a group that was later to prove important for SDS—where, for a change, they were considered to be on the liberal wing, but they did not seem to gain much in the way of followers. Membership, in fact, was never more than a few hundred at most, despite more than 150 visits by SLID student organizers at college campuses from 1946 to 1948, and despite the fact that until the end of 1948 nonstudents were as welcome as students. SLID claimed four hundred members in 1947 and seven hundred in 1948, but most of that by all accounts was only on paper,’ Chapters grew and collapsed with jerry-built rapidity, and never extended very widely despite a special provision that they could be as autonomous as they chose, even to the point of taking action contrary to official SLID policy. Things grew so bad, in fact, that the 1948 convention considered disbanding altogether, referring to the LID itself the question of whether it really was a necessary association since other student groupings did exist. The LID Board, pondering the issue, assured them that they must be important, and after some consideration determined that it was because, while other organizations were concerned with immediate actions, SLID had its sights set on long-range issues and broad policies.'?

The assurance, however, convinced few. In 1949 the new SLID reached its nadir: it had five breathing chapters at most, only one of which was outside New York City, it had no permanent Student Secretary, and there was not enough interest among the membership even to hold a convention.

The question is inevitable: Why did the LID want to keep its student branch alive, at a cost of maybe $5,000 to $6,000 a year and with no visible returns? The answer is nowhere to be found in official LID records, but in part it has to do with a feeling of the LID elders that if new blood was to come from anywhere—that is to say, if the shaky parent organization was to survive at all—it would have to come from the college campuses. Moreover, having a college-oriented division fit perfectly into the Lid’s image of itself as an educational group and allowed it to propagandize to hungry audiences in a way that would have been virtually impossible with adults. Finally, campus politics was an area which, surprisingly, was virtually untouched by other organizations—though there were religious groups (YMCA, YWCA, United Christian Movement) and a few political ones (Students for Democratic Action, the Student Federalists, the Young People's Socialist League), no single national organization dominated, and the LID therefore felt it could move into this area with relative ease.

The LID therefore worked to keep SLID alive, even through the particularly arid period of the fifties. Gabriel Gersch, SLID chairman in 1951, said at the time: "The average student nowadays is not only hostile to any form of socialism, but is indifferent to most political questions .... The hysteria that is spreading in America has reached the college campus." For survival, therefore, what more natural than to drop the idea of socialism on the one hand, and to join the hysteria, albeit decorously, on the other. That is the history of SLID in the fifties.

The 1951 convention began things by adopting a preamble to its constitution which is a triumph of the innocuous:

The Student League for Industrial Democracy is a non-partisan educational organization which seeks to promote greater active participation on the part of American students in the resolution of present-day problems. It is hoped that such participation will contribute to their awareness of the need for theestablishment in the United States of a cooperative commonwealth in which the principle regulating production, distribution, and exchange will be the supplying of human needs, and under which human rights will be protected and extended.

The 1953 convention managed to go this one better by adopting a constitution, the constitution that was to be the basic organizational document right up to Port Huron, which never once mentions the word "socialism," much less anything "radical," "left," or "revolutionary." By 1955 SLID is calling itself "a national liberal campus group, educating for increased democracy in every aspect of our life." In 1958 it holds a conference to ask, "Where are we, as young liberals, going?" And even in 1959, when it begins a new publication aimed at the now post-McCarthy generation, it is careful to include as its editorial statement: "The Student League for Industrial Democracy has served as a meeting point for students of liberal inclinations since 1905." What is happening here obviously is the immurement of the radical tradition in America.

Though many of the SLID members in these years were children of onetime socialists and former LIDers—else how would they have heard of this minute organization, much less think of joining it?—they had lived to see their parents' earlier ideology defamed and discredited, without much protest and often with mea culpa assistance. Socialism was for many of them something both outworn and out of step, communism was unquestionably a domestic and foreign danger, indeed radicalism of any kind was hopelessly out of date. If there was any reason to question that, they had only to look at the shamefaced radicals of the thirties for whom the most heroic act of the fifties was considered to be taking the Fifth Amendment before Congressional committees: had there been anything noble in the tradition of the past, surely they would have heard. Andre Schiffrin, a SLID leader of the fifties, reports the attitude of those days:

It seemed impossible to make common cause with the left that had been active in the thirties and had fallen into the rationalizations and evasions of

the forties and fifties ... . It was difficult then, it still is difficult now for me to think of anyone aged, let us say, 40 to 55, who represents something on the

American Left one would respect.

The result was that "only a few of us in SLID thought of ourselves as socialists of any kind. Most of our members were liberals."

One measure of the remove from socialism is the content of the series of summer institutes which SLID sponsored from 1953 to 1959 at Camp Three Arrows, near Peekskill, New York, the summer home of a number of ex-socialists with ties to the LID. The original meeting was designed, so its flyer said, "to stimulate thinking on the issues of the day, develop leadership, and provide an opportunity for us to meet fellow SLID-ers, exchange ideas, and have fun"—quite a change for the organization that in the thirties ran its summer camps "to train students for the radical movement," and to do it with Marxism, besides. The first year there were meetings on "the East-West conflict" and civil liberties, a few years later they were debating "How Should America React to the New Soviet Line?" and "Public Relations and Public Opinion," in 1957 the theme was "Bureaucracy, Corruption and Democracy," the next year "Work and Its Discontents." Hardly the stuff of which student activism is made.

As SLID's commitment to liberalism increased, so did its anti-Communism. In addition to the exclusionism of the constitution itself, SLID continued to purify its ranks and its line. The 1950 convention affirmed that the constitution should continue to exclude "Bolsheviks," but SLIDers that year were also forbidden to join a socialist coalition called the Student Federation Against War which included "Trotskyists" and "fellow travelers." The next year a bitter battle took place over the politics of a SLID chapter at CCNY led by Bogdan Denitch, a young Trotskyist whom the LID Board regarded, it said, as "a clear and present danger"; it urged the SLID convention to expel him, a move which the student group rejected, for reasons of obstreperousness rather than politics, but the pressure continued until Denitch took his whole chapter out the next year.

Four years later the SLID convention showed faint signs of uppitiness—it came out for the "eventual" abolition of the Attorney General's list of subversive organizations and after long debate rejected the idea then popular among LID elders that Communist Party membership was ipso facto proof of a teacher's professional incompetence—but it still passed a resolution forbidding any SLID member anywhere from "cooperation, nationally, locally or internationally ... with any whose actions or programs would bar them from admission in SLID," a roundabout way of saying Communists. In a SLID publication of 1955 SLID leader Andre Schiffrin attacked Communists as "unscrupulous Machiavellians," and three years later a SLID "International Bulletin" echoed: "LID members are very likely to be agreed on the following crucial governing position: ... that specifically Communist doctrine is antihumanistic, Communist techniques are vicious, and Communist societies are unjust, and Communism cannot be countenanced by morally sensitive people." And this vehemence two years after poor Joe McCarthy had been censured and forgotten.

SLID, in short, began to play what Michael Harrington, then head of the Young Socialist League, calls "a pro-American, Cold War, State Department kind of role." It was decidedly middle-of-the-road, even conservative. Looking back, Schiffrin in 1968 tried to rescue for SLID a role as "representing the far left in the universities" and "reasserting the existence of dissent," but neither is accurate. SLID was never as left as such "national" groups as the Young Socialist League (or its successor, the Young People's Socialist League), as various permutations of the Communist Youth League, nor, later on, as any of the local groups that began to surface in California, Wisconsin, and elsewhere in New York. Nor, if it was dissenting, did anyone become aware of this—what little campus dissent there was then and what grew in the late fifties was independent of SLID.

For the fact is that even after adopting its Eisennhoweresque positions of liberalism and anti-Communism, SLID was hard-pressed to get many followers. Membership crises were recurrent, and throughout the fifties the number of paid-up members probably never got beyond a hundred—with perhaps another hundred occasional hangers-on—at no more than a dozen campuses altogether. The New Republic in 1951 estimated a membership of 150 in six colleges (though the SLID student secretary that year claimed 600 in twenty). Two years later a young fieldworker from the Columbia School of Social Work named Bernard Comfeld—the same man who was in later years to find a somewhat more profitable career as an international financier—spent a summer investigating SLID for an M.S. thesis and noted that though the SLID lists showed five hundred members, most were neither paid-up nor active. The atmosphere, he concluded.

.. is one of discouragement .... The present function of the Student League for Industrial Democracy is not ... visibly productive .... While it is not a topic of general discussion, there is a feeling among the staff as well as the membership of some considerable misgivings about Student League for Industrial Democracy's present function.

The following year, according to Schiffrin, the "total active membership was in the dozens," and "the Yale chapter that we started that year was the first real SLID campus group at the time," the national organization being "a mere ephemeral business in many ways." In 1958 a grand total of thirteen students showed up for the annual convention.’®

Aryeh Neier, SLID president in 1957-58 and later an LID executive (before going on to become executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union), tried then to account for the obvious collapse of SLID: "The fears engendered by the McCarthy headline hunting may not have resulted in mass hysteria on the college campus but they did result in a degree of overcautiousness on the part of the college student who decided to play it safe and never sign or join anything." The LID, acknowledging that "the liberal tradition, in its old terms, has little to offer to the new generation," appointed study commissions to try to explain it all. But the simple fact was that SLID didn't do anything. A meeting there, a speaker hereeven, once, after the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956, a call for national action that seemed to be answered because its anti-Communism coincidentally matched the campus temperament of that moment. But nothing sustained, nothing with a vision, nothing to capture the idealistic fervor that lies within every student generation.

By the end of the fifties SLID seemed to be on its last legs: funds were drying up, interest was waning, membership was declining, and the purposes and directions were blurred and uncertain. The LID, its mentor, was similarly shriveled: Harry Laidler, the last link to the early days, retired in 1957, and debts were now running at about $6,000 a year, ona budget of less than $40,000. Somber days indeed seemed in the offing.

Little could anyone have imagined what the sixties were to hold.