Fall 1960 - Fall 1961

But before Haber could get the new SDS untracked and pointed in the direction he felt it had to go, he had to confront the immutability of SDS's parent organization, the League for Industrial Democracy.

The LID had been through a great deal in its forty years as a vaguely social-democratic clearinghouse for liberal and left-liberal (and even a few protosocialist) ideas and causes, and it had emerged from its battles with Communists in the thirties and forties and from its alliances with trade unions in the forties and fifties with certain fundamental beliefs: a strong attachment to anti-Communism, a commitment to the American labor movement, a faith in Cold War liberalism, and a dedication to the apparently successful meliorism of the American welfare state.

Concomitantly, through years of experience with its various student departments—one of which had even broken away to form an alliance with a Communist-influenced youth group in the thirties—the LID had settled upon a form for its student group assuring that it would keep its chapters free from Communist taint, confine its campus activities to seminars and speakers, hold its politics to a kind of Fabian do-gooderism, and devote its energies to educating younger generations through pamphlets, newsletters, and an occasional conference.

Moreover, the present leadership of the LID, men who had stayed with the organization through all these not very enlightened years, were growing old and increasingly rigid: Nathaniel M. Minkoff, a power within the International Ladies Garment Workers Union—an intractable foe of leftism and the chief source of LID's financial support—was Chairman of the Board; Frank Trager, a conservative professor of sociology at New York University, was head of the Executive Committee and its major link with the student department; on the Board of Directors sat, among others, such familiar Cold Warriors as Daniel Bell, George S. Counts, Louis Fischer, Victor Reuther, John Roche, and Clarence Senior; on the National Council, a kind of advisory group, were men like Arnold Beichman, James B. Carey, the Reverend Donald Harrington, Sidney Hook, Alfred Baker Lewis, and Harry A. Overstreet.

It is little wonder, then, that the LID elders, not terribly disposed to welcoming the awakening student mood in the first place, became positively alarmed as Haber elaborated more and more of his particular vision for SDS's future. They were especially worried about the student organization's overstepping what they regarded as its basic educational role and going into overt political action that was at odds with the LID's super-respectable image, and which might endanger its all-important tax exemption besides.”

They were genuinely troubled by Haber's interest in linking up with any of the newly active campus groups and working alongside any of the responsive national organizations—outfits like SNCC, for example, or, worse, YPSL—for fear that this might embroil the LID in relations with Communist or quasi-Communist organizations, a fate worse than promiscuity. And, finally, they were faced with a serious drought in contributions—funds on hand in the fall did not exceed $2,000, and even the usual trade union sources in New York were not coming forth with the $40,000 or so a year that the LID demanded—so they were little inclined to pour a lot of money into an ambitious student organization with all the conferences, picket lines, protests, staff, and subsidies that Haber seemed to want.

“ As a (distinctly) nonprofit organization, the LID was entitled to certain tax-exempt benefits—the kind that were essential to attract any sizable donations from wealthy patrons—so long as it did not engage, nor allow its various departments to engage, in direct political action in favor of any political party or legislative cause. declaring his intention to stay and fight. He acknowledged that he had little support in the New York office, but, with thinly disguised blackmail, he pointed out that most of the members elsewhere were on his side:

The conflict came to a head in early 1961, after months of what Haber, in a lengthy and bitter letter to Trager, called the "backbiting, the hostility and the vicious pettyness."

After several meetings the Executive Committee finally voted on March 23 to fire Haber; three days later, in an uncharacteristic fit of submissiveness, Haber sent in a letter of resignation saying he was off to join the National Student Association; and two days later Nathaniel Minkoff accepted the resignation and tossed in $100 as a severance gift, adding with unknowing prescience that he hoped Haber would "continue your warm interest in the student movement."

But then an extraordinary thing happened. Haber did not budge. He stayed on in New York, avoiding the office but carrying on correspondence from his apartment, weighing his weariness and his anger against his vision and his hopes, debating past and future, work accomplished and work undone.

Finally he decided he was unwilling to give t all up, after all, and he wrote a six-page single-spaced letter to Trager declaring his intention to stay and fight. He acknowledged that he had little support in the New York office, but, thinly disguised blackmail, he pointed out that most of the members elsewhere were on his side:

I am president of the organization and will preside at the next student

convention and can there present my case. I have the votes, as the saying

goes ... the membership of SDS would almost certainly support me.

He also knew that it might be possible to take this membership into something new:

I would be free to initiate discussion in student and adult circles regarding the possibility of ... the kind of radical democratic organization I have projected .. . Many friends of the LID might well see a more aggressively dynamic youth organization closer to their interest.*

The LID came to have second thoughts. Trager, especially, urged reconsideration of the case. Some of the less rigid LIDers were enlisted in the battle for the first time, and sided with Haber. Haber's father, who had dropped his LID contacts some time before but was still friendly with the elders, wrote long, warm letters to both Trager and Minkoff. To Minkoff he pointed out the virtues of the current young:

I happen to be living on a college campus, an exciting and vital group of 25,000. They are students coming out of their shells; they are talking about ideas and ideals ... are thinking beyond the vocational purposes which brought them to a college or university campus.

To Trager he said of his son:

I am sure he has a deep sense of responsibility and he has a deep sense of

mission. In all fairness, you and I had it at his age and we cannot be too hard

on young people who exhibit it at their age.

By May the LID signaled that it was willing to reconsider. An Executive Committee meeting on the ninth of that month thrashed out the whole education-activist debate once more, finally deciding "to see whether the student conflict can be resolved during the coming week."

At that point Haber made concessions of his own. In a lengthy memo to the Executive Committee he modified his image, drew in his horns, and tried to placate their fears. He toned down his grandiose organizational plans, proposing a staff of four, a modest series of mailings, and a small citywide conference. He played up his anti-Communism and the job SDS could do "as an effective democratic counter-force to the ... activity and influence of Communist oriented youth," not to mention how it could of course "represent the aspirations, problems and programs of the labor movement to the current student generation."

He played down his activism and stressed how SDS could "serve as a clearing house for publication, information and research on the left" with "primarily an education program" that should cause "no difficulty with our tax status." He agreed to LID demands that there be no convention that year, just to smooth everything over and lessen the chances for a youthful revolt. And he stressed how invaluable he himself could be, not only for running the SDS office at a pace no one had seen before but—and here was the clincher—for undertaking personally the responsibility to raise the money for the student program.

The one thing he would not compromise on, and he made no bones about it, was the necessity for the student group to have "a greater flexibility in the kinds of membership and chapter relations" than before and to develop "relations with as many other democratic issue and action groups as possible"—in other words, no anti-Communist hysteria from the elders. The LID, to its credit, bought it. Trepidations there were, and even some dark predictions. But there was also the frank recognition that the LID itself had fallen on somewhat scabrous days—not only were contributions diminishing, not only was the leadership generation growing old and rickety, but the whole purpose of the organization in the context of the sixties seemed blurry and uncertain: it had not been uncommon for people at board meetings to raise the question of just what was the LID’s current reason for being, and in fact a series of committees had recently been established to determine exactly that, each successive one failing to provide an answer. The strong feeling now was that if there were to be new blood and energy and life in the LID, it would have to come from the SDS; and if there was to be any life in SDS, it would probably have to come from Haber.

Haber was rehired.

Flush with his considerable victory, Haber chose the first opportunity to cement it. At the August convention of the NSA in Madison, he broadcast the virtues of the new SDS from every stump and platform, the start of a process of using this particular forum for publicity and recruitment that would continue for the next four years. An unlikely forum it may have seemed: the NSA was composed of student-government types, many of them churchly dogooders who, for the most part, stood politically somewhere to the right of Adlai Stevenson, and it was being financed—though no one but the top leaders knew it at the time—by the Cold War moneys of the State Department and the CIA in their attempt to create a safe, not-too-liberal, uncritical weapon in their propaganda arsenal. But Haber knew that the convention was one of the few student meetings that attracted people from all over the country, it was well covered by the media ballyhooing it as the voice of the nation's campuses, it did attract a number of serious politically minded students who had no place else to go and who proved susceptible to the SDS position, and it was a convenient way for SDSers to meet and talk, to establish the lines of communication that during the rest of the year tended to become blurred and overextended.

At the 1961 NSA meeting SDS established a formal caucus with the Campus Americans for Democratic Actions—Campus ADA was the closest thing to SDS in those days, though acknowledged to be to its right—which was known (with caution characteristic of the time) as the Liberal Study Group. For the next three years the Liberal Study Group proved to be SDS's vehicle both to argue left-liberal positions in the convention itself and to publish mimeographed papers on current political topics with which to propagandize the participants (papers that later became the bulk of SDS's literature list during the rest of the year).

With the beginning of the 1961-1962 school year, "SDS" began to be a set of initials heard of, at least by the political fringe, at a growing number of campuses. It was essentially only a two-man operation: Haber, in what was called the National Office in New York, coordinated the meetings, made the contacts, wrote the letters, gave the speeches, attended the conferences, and mimeographed the pamphlets; and Tom Hayden, who had just graduated from Michigan and been hired by the LID to be the SDS Field Secretary (at a munificent $12 a day), worked out of Atlanta, involving himself firsthand in the burgeoning civil-rights movement. It wasn't much—"Tom was SDS's project and Al was SDS's office," as Paul Booth says—but with the two of them operating at full and dedicated pace it slowly became the liveliest and most interesting student organization at work then, and the ripples began to go out in rings from the active center. By mid-fall SDS claimed a membership of 575 and twenty campus chapters.°

Haber was of course the indispensable element, for it was his vision, his enthusiasm, and his energy (Booth says, "Haber slept underneath the mimeograph machine") that kept everything moving. But his choice of confederate was a stroke of happy genius. Thomas Emmett Hayden was a charged and vibrant person, with heavy dark eyes and a beaker nose on a striking face chiaroscuroed by gentle acne scars on the cheeks, a lopsided cleft in the chin, and angular dimples at the sides of the mouth; he would stand with shoulders slumped and slightly hunched, as if keeping himself on guard, somehow always wary but polite, interested, listening. He had been born in 1940 of middle-class Irish parents (his father was an accountant) in Royal Oak, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit; they were Catholicthough later divorced—and his early schooling was in parochial schools. He had gotten to the University of Michigan on a tennis scholarship in 1957, was an English major as well as editor of the paper, and graduated the previous June. Now he thought of himself primarily as a journalist, though of the involved rather than the "objective" kind, and was writing articles not only for SDS but for such publications as the SDS-affiliated Activist run by Jonathan Eisen at Oberlin, the Socialist Party's New America, Liberation in New York, and even Mademoiselle the next year he would go on to be a graduate student in journalism—at least formally—at the University of Michigan.

Hayden, blessed with an instinct for being in the right place at the right time, and carrying out Haber's civil-rights strategy for SDS, operated in the South with the SNCC voter-registration drive, sending back periodic reports which the National Office mimeographed and distributed to the campuses.

Quietly, dryly he reported on the beatings, the murders, the harrowing lives of the SNCC youngsters trying to organize black voters in redneck country, "in more danger than nearly any student in this American generation has faced."”

These were practically the only writings coming out about the SNCC drive at that time, and they carried the unquestioned authenticity of one who had not only been there, but had been beaten (in McComb, Mississippi, in October) and jailed (in Albany, Georgia, in November).

Through the SDS—chiefly in a twenty-eight-page pamphlet called "Revolution in Mississippi" sent out late that fall—and through other student publications such as the Activist (which carried a vivid photograph in one issue showing Hayden getting beaten), Hayden's writings reached a considerable campus audience. Betty Garman, a Skidmore graduate then working for the NSA, repeats what others have said, "These reports were very important to me: that's really the reason I went into SDS."

It is significant that Haber chose civil rights as SDS's initial emphasis and that Hayden was able to manifest it so dramatically, because it meant that SDS was able to make a reputation and an impact which it might not if it had chosen, say, anti-bomb activity, peace research, academic freedom, poverty, or university reform, all of which were current issues and any one of which might have seemed the "inevitable" trigger to student activism. Civil rights was the one cause with the greatest moral power, eventually the greatest national publicity, ultimately the strongest national impact, and having Haber's mind and Hayden's body so evidently on the line redounded to SDS's benefit. It was one measure of how accurately SDS was to read the student pulse, and profit thereby.

But SDS was also alive to the wider student mood from which the civil-rights activities sprang, as Hayden indicated in an essay in the Activist in the winter of 1961 called (in conscious imitation of C. Wright Mills) "A Letter to the New (Young) Left." It is not a profound essay, and its ideas are jumbled, half-formed, tentative, but it had the essential virtue of expressing much that was in the reaches of the student mind.

Hayden shared some of the ground-rock liberal values of the time—he railed against the bomb, the "population problem," the "threatening future of China," "an incredibly conservative Congress," "the decline of already-meager social welfare legislation"—and expressed them in a litany that would have fit comfortably into the pages of the New Republic. But he also sensed, largely from his university experience, the inadequacy of liberal thought in either grasping the problems or suggesting anything but slippery welfaristic solutions, and its plastic-like susceptibility to distortion and subversion in the hands of people like Daniel Bell, Richard Hofstadter, and Arthur Schlesinger, where it simply became conservatism with a high forehead and a smiling face.

In this acceptance of traditional liberal ends and simultaneous awareness of traditional liberal bankruptcy, Hayden was expressing what many of his generation were feeling not only among the left but also among the right, the sham and shabbiness of the liberal tradition in which they all had grown up was slowly coming to be felt.

Hayden's solution to liberalism is "radicalism," by which he seems to mean—the difficulty is with his language, which is abstract and rhetorical—first an understanding of the underlying "real causes" of the problems of present society and then "a practice" that demands living outside that society ("the decision to disengage oneself entirely from the system being confronted"); in short, radicalism is the SDS style of making root connections plus the growing practice of operating on those connections in the real world beyond the campuses.

Not to be overlooked here is the unspoken notion that inevitably one will lead to another, that an accurate analysis of root causes in America will inevitably create disgust, disenchantment, disengagement, and, ultimately, a willingness to change them. Hayden's radicalism, of course, is not very radical—what he wants is a kind of reformism "drawing on what remains of the adult labor, academic and political communities, not just revolting in despair against them"—and its ends go no further than the need to "visualize and then build structures to counter those which we oppose."

It is, perhaps not surprisingly, a gut radicalism, a negative radicalism, what Hayden himself saw as "an almost instinctive opposition," for the times seemed to demand that the primary battle be against the easy acceptance of the system in power rather than for any particular alternative to it. Whatever its failings, and to an extent because of them, this kind of radicalism was an acute expression of the attitudes of many of the young of the period. Students read Hayden's essay he began to become a "figure."