Spring 1960

Spring 1960

As the decade of the sixties began, the Student League for Industrial Democracy—SLID, as it was known—gave no sign that it would grow into the most important student organization in the country's history. It had a part-time headquarters in a lower Manhattan office building, a single regular officer who had more or less dropped from sight, and a budget of no more than $3,500 a year. It had, at best, a few hundred members, most of whom were once-a-year activists and many of whom were well past their undergraduate years. It had only three chapters—at Columbia and Yale, where both were known as the "John Dewey Discussion Club," and at Michigan—and they operated on their campuses with scant attention from the student body. Its activities consisted of sending occasional speakers to Eastern colleges, sponsoring a week-long summer "institute" to discuss the burning liberal problems of the day, and putting out occasional newsletters and pamphlets devoted to such questions as unionism and the Cold War. Its policies, if that is not too grand a word for the aimless whiffs of belief that floated around its offices, were approximately those set forth in the preamble to its constitution: "The Student League for Industrial Democracy is a nonpartisan educational organization which seeks to promote greater active participation on the part of American students in the resolution of present-day problems."!

And yet SLID was not without virtues. It could trace its history back to the formation of the nation's first student political organization in 1905 and through the two high points of twentieth-century radicalism in the 1910’s and 1930’s. It had a parent organization, the League for Industrial Democracy, which in many ways was a decrepit social-democratic hold-over from another age but which did give the student department a few thousand dollars each year, some office space and equipment, and an occasional pamphlet or speaker to put through its mill.

It had that legacy of skills essential for all struggling organizations of the political outer-world, a capacity for chapter building, pamphlet mongering, and conference holding, plus the quintessential ability to keep going with a shoestring budget and a horse-collar load. It had the distinction of being one of the few student organizations in the land at a time when events on the campuses suggested that something was struggling to be born:

* the formation of a student party called SLATE at Berkeley in 1957, a three-thousand-strong student-power demonstration at Cornell in 1958, a ten-thousand-strong march for school desegregation in Washington the same year and another march with twice as many people the next, the founding of the pacifist Student Peace Union in 1959, and the first issue of the proto-Marxist Studies on the Left in the same year.

And it had a small nucleus of people who discerned this imminent birth and were prepared to be its midwives, young men and women who, on looking at the campuses, wrote, "We sense a growing climate of insecurity in the land, a growing inclination to probe and question: What is happening to us, where are we going, what can we do?"”

It was a measure of the new restlessness on the campuses that the members of SLID decided early in 1960 that the time had come to change its name. The stated reasons were simple—"industrial democracy" was too narrow an idea, it made the organization sound too labor oriented, it was too hard to recruit on college campuses with an antiquated and cumbersome name—but the overriding reason was that SLID felt, perhaps mostly unconsciously, the need to dissociate itself from the old and tired leadership of the League for Industrial Democracy in response to the new college mood.

A poll among members the previous July had shown "Student League for Effective Democracy" and "Students for Social Democracy" to be the strong favorites for the new title, with the milder "Student Forum" and "Student Liberal Union"—wisps of the McCarthyite fog of the fifties still lingered even in those days, especially around LID—coming in not far behind.

An October meeting of the SLID leaders had debated "National Student Forum" without being able to engender much enthusiasm, but a month later a new choice, "Students for a Democratic Society," emerged as the clear favorite: it was dignified without being stuffy, explicit without being precise, and it had the ring of freshness. In January 1960, with some trepidation as to how the elders in LID would take it, the young leaders of SLID made the switch.

As a name change, it was important only to a handful of people around the New York office—but it was symbolic of a new attitude within the organization, a new awareness that the American studentry was getting ready to shed its apathy for a resurgent life of activism and that a student organization like SDS could help it on its way.

There was in 1960 no Tocqueville to warn, as the count did in 1830, that "we are sitting on a volcano," though the universities were stuffed with people whose specialty it was to predict, or at least give a glimmering of, how human beings might behave. There was no presidential commission, no professorial committee, no scientific assembly foretelling what was to come. Academics were preparing no books on students as the harbingers of a revived left—their attention was still on juvenile gangs, or the dangers of apathy. And yet the volcano was there, and smoldering.

The reasons for the renaissance of student activity in the 1960s are generally familiar but they bear reexamination because they help to explain why there was a new mood at this time, why it was felt particularly among the young, and why it so directly affected the student population.

The first reason for the resurgence of the student left was that the American system by 1960 had reached a point of serious—though disguised and usually unadmitted—crisis. The social fabric of the nation was clearly tattered: families were no longer the places where the young learned their values or the old sought their solace; marriages collapsed at a greater and greater rate, or were artificially sustained after the life had left them; sexuality was seen, and used, as a commodity; organized religion had lost its purpose and many of its followers; alcohol was accepted as the necessary basis for much social and economic converse and many familial arrangements, to which drugs ran a close second and were to increase; crime was abnormally high and on the verge of a threefold jump; cities were choked with an excess population they could not cope with, becoming behavioral sinks in which neither air nor relationships could be cleansed.”

The economic structure that had begun to crack in the thirties and had since been sustained by artificial means (government intervention, a permanent military economy, aerospace boondoggles, colonial investment, overseas monopolies, racial and sexual subjugation, waste, pollution, advertising, planned obsolescence, and inefficiency) began to show new signs of deterioration: high and unstoppable unemployment (especially among the young and the blacks), permanent poverty for a third of the nation, runaway inflation, recurrent dollar crises leading to devaluation, and minority control of much of the economy through vast new conglomerates, monopolies, and investment funds. The political life of the nation as it sank in its postwar doldrums was increasingly seen to be characterized by corruption, inefficiency, giant federal bureaucracies, identically rigidified parties, favors for the rich, apathy among the voters, power among the special interests and lobbies, and general unresponsiveness and remoteness—ultimately moving toward a profound swapping process in which the populace passively agreed to sacrifice certain individual rights and freedoms (privacy, speech, political belief, social mobility) for government promises of personal security, material comfort, and national quietude. And the international position of the nation, tied to a Cold War ideology. involved an acknowledged practice of foreign intervention (covertly through a massive secret "intelligence" system assuring regimes bought, coerced, or overthrown to our liking, overtly through economic penetration and military occupation) and the production of a vast system of planet-destroying armaments, rattled from crisis to crisis with an effect especially debilitating for the young. Taken together, all of this evidence argued persuasively that the nation's systems were severely strained and distended—and this was felt by many people, but particularly the young, as the decade opened.?

The second and related reason for the troubles of the sixties was that the crisis of the system was accompanied by the crisis of belief. Becoming aware, even if subliminally, of the unworkability and distortions of many institutions, millions of Americans began to question those institutions—and many, dissatisfied with the answers, grew to distrust and reject them. The evidence is abundant that perhaps a half of the population—and certainly such sensitive minorities as the media, the intelligentsia, the blacks, and the young—were coming to have serious doubts about the nation's course: the staid National Committee for an Effective Congress later in the decade reported bluntly that "at all levels of American life people show similar fears, insecurities, and gnawing doubts to such an intense degree that the country may in fact be suffering from a kind of national nervous breakdown."

For many this led to what the sociologists called the "delegitimization" of authority and the "deauthorization" of the entire system. The media played an important role in this, uncovering at least the surface deceit and corruption in the belief that by exposure the institutions would be self-correcting, and so too did the universities, inheritors of the strong tradition of skepticism in Western scholarship and stocked with a professoriate whose jobs had given them special knowledge of the weakness of national institutions. The young were most particularly affected, in part because they were confronted every day with disbelievers in their classrooms and on their ubiquitous television sets, in part because as youth they were predisposed to challenge and criticize parental institutions, and in part because they had had less time to become molded by the dominant culture and its values. They reacted initially with a sense of loss and a feeling of betrayal, then with a youthful moral outrage, and finally with an outburst of protest; Lewis Feuer is probably right in arguing that "every student movement is the outcome of a de-authorization of the elder generation."

The third reason for protest by the young was that for the first time in the nation's history they occupied a distinct and powerful position in society. It was not just that there were more people below the age of twenty-five than ever before (27.2 million between fourteen and twenty-four in 1960, growing to 40 million by 1970) and more in proportion to the rest of the population (15 percent in 1960, growing to 20 percent by 1970). It was not only that they were better educated than any previous American generation—there were more than twice as many high-school graduates in 1960 as in 1940, and more than 20 percent of the college-age population in universities (compared to 10 percent in 1920), growing to nearly 50 percent by 1970. More important was that, especially among the middle class and upward-reaching, the young of this generation had been specially invested by their parents with the opportunity of living out lives of money, education, mobility, ease (and presumably therefore happiness) that the parents themselves had been deprived of by the Depression and war years—and this is the central reason for the permissive upbringing, and the popularity of Dr. Spock, during the postwar period. Additionally, because these youths were thus allowed more money than earlier generations, and because there were so many of them, an economy continually in search of artificial stimulants immediately made them into a "youth market," accountable for no less than $40-45 billion by 1970; for the first time whole businesses catered to the young, designing clothes, music, foods, cosmetics, movies, and paraphernalia specifically for them. And the youth market did more than supply the young, it eventually defined the group, economically and socially, establishing a consciousness in society at large (and particularly among the young) of their separatenessso, just as adolescence had been culturally created in the early part of the twentieth century as an "inevitable" human stage, now youth came to be regarded as a distinct developmental stage, with its own special needs and attitudes to go along with its own special clothes and music.

Particular to this generation, too, was a new psychological position that accompanied its new socioeconomic one, a position highly directed toward protest. This generation, going through early childhood in the postwar years of (generally) permissiveness and childoriented families, was uniquely caught in the tension between initiative (independence, selfexpression, aggressiveness toward parents) and guilt (brought on by that independence and aggressiveness); it turns out now, according to a number of psychologists (Erik Erikson prominent among them) that the type of personality which goes through this tension at the ages of four and five is likely to become both "anti-authoritarian" (from the emphasis on initiative) and "hyper-moralistic" (brought on by guilt).

Thus the adolescents of college age in the sixties were inclined to protest not just out of the blue, but rather because they were likely to be the products of a psychological upbringing predisposing them to distrust and resist authority and to emphasize moral values, especially those lacking in the parental generation. They were, moreover, joined with thousands of others on the college campuses who shared these traits in a setting where there was little dilution from other social influences. Protest is the almost inevitable result: it would be so in a world disinfected of faults, it is doubly so in a nation so fertile with them.° The final reason for protest in the sixties is that students were gathered together in greater numbers than ever before and—as the products of a university system which was now absolutely vital for the functioning of the nation—had more power than ever before.

The sixties began with 3,789,000 people in institutions of higher education and ended with 7,852,000 enrolled. In the sixties, for the first time in the history of any nation, there were more students than there were farmers—indeed, in any year after 1962 there were more people engaged in formal studies than employed in transportation, public utilities, construction work, mining, or farming. But it was not sheer numbers—students (as graduates) were also crucial now to the maintenance of the highly complex technology on which the society had come to depend, to the functioning of such areas as government bureaucracy and the service industries which were now vital to the artificial economy, and to the transmission of the dominant culture in such expanding professions as teaching, reporting, social work, and the arts. Universities in fact now occupied a quite central position in American society: they were indispensable help-meets of the federal government in the production of weapons, the development of scientific processes, the maintenance of the economy, and the study and manipulation of foreign cultures; they accounted for expenditures of nearly $7 billion in 1960, which was to rise to $22.7 billion by 1970; and they were the most important part of an $80-billion "knowledge industry" which accounted for as much as 29 percent of the Gross National Product in 1962 and 40 percent of it in 1970 and which employed some 43 percent of all American workers as the decade opened, more than 50 percent when it closed, Clark Kerr, one of the first to understand the new importance of universities, stated it best:°

The university has become a prime instrument of national purpose. This is new ... What the railroads did for the second half of the 19th century and the automobile for the first half of this century, the knowledge industry may do for the second half of this century: that is to serve as the focal point for national growth. And the university is at the center of the knowledge process. And the students, be it not forgotten, were at the center of the university. That, then, is the basis for protest in the sixties: the severe dislocations of the American system that by 1960 were beginning to produce a crisis of function and a crisis of belief, combined with a massive new generation which was coming to occupy a new c position in society and which, at the university level, was starting to have a new importance in the workings of the system at the same time that they were disposed to challenge those very workings. It had never happened before.

SDS began the decade prosaically enough, planning a conference to be held at Ann Arbor that spring on "Human Rights in the North." Proposed by the 1959 convention, the conference looked as if it would be just one more of those speechified meetings characteristic not only of SLID/SDS but of student organizations in general, in which the grim seriousness of the problems discussed is outweighed only by the grim seriousness of the discussion itself. But this conference was to be different: on February 1, 1960, four black students walked into the Woolworth five-and-ten-cents store in the little town of Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at the previously whites-only lunch counter, and ordered four cups of coffee.

The four black students were well aware that what they were doing was dramatic and different, but they could have had no idea what a change they were to bring. Before the month was over sit-ins were held at segregated restaurants in twenty cities throughout the South, by the end of that spring students at perhaps a hundred Northern colleges had been mobilized in support, and over the next year civil-rights activity touched almost every campus in the country: support groups formed, fund-raising committees were established, local sit-ins and pickets took place, campus civil-rights clubs began, students from around the country traveled to the South. The alliance-in-action between Southern blacks and young Northern whites, founded on a principle that was both morally pure and politically powerful, gave the student movement a strength that it had never before experienced.

The birth of the civil-rights movement also gave SDS its initial cause and the fortuitous Ann Arbor conference gave SDS its initial identification with that cause. The conference, held May 5-7 at the University of Michigan, was a clear success, at least on the scale of those days. There was wide attendance from civil rights leaders—Bayard Rustin, James Farmer (a former full-time organizer for SLID), Marvin Rich and James McCain from CORE, Herbert Hill from the NAACP, Michael Harrington from the Young People's Socialist League—and from the newly active students—SDSers from the Midwest, representatives of a new group called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and two people later important in SDS, Bob Ross, a recent graduate of the prestigious Bronx High School of Science and a studentgovernment leader at Michigan, and Tom Hayden, then the editor of the Michigan Daily.

Nothing very grand was decided, but important friendships were formed, a new sense of commitment to civil-rights action was cemented, and SDS was set on a path of civil-rights support that provided it with much-needed visibility in the years ahead.’

Then, in the wake of this conference, came a second fortuitous stroke, a grant to SDS of $10,000 from Detroit's United Automobile Workers Union, the deus ex (literally) machina whose largesse was periodically visited upon the student group over the next few years.

And because of this grant SDS was able, for the first time in five years, to hire a full-time national officer with the responsibility of strengthening and energizing the organization. The position was to be called Field Secretary and the man selected was Robert Alan Haber.

Haber, then a graduate student at the University of Michigan and the Vice President of SDS, would prove to be the indispensable element in SDS's initial success. A short, balding, scholarly, introspective type, he had grown up in an academic atmosphere in Ann Arborwhere his father, an LID member in his younger days, was then a professor at the University of Michigan—and he was familiar with the university world; in addition, he had been a campus leader at Michigan, where he majored in sociology, a participant in leftish student politics from 1956, and for the last two years an increasingly active figure in SLID.

Not only was he close to the student movement at a time when few even knew it existed but he was perceptive about its depth and direction. "I wish I were able better to convey," he wrote to the LID elders after he assumed office, "the enthusiasm and optimism that the young feel for a new movement on the campus. I wish I could give to you a sense of the energy and vitality that is going into it." And again, "I know that if any really radical liberal force is going to develop in America, it is going to come from the colleges and the young.

Even baby steps toward our vision of a 'social transformation’ are going to have to be [taken] on campuses."® But more than that, Haber also had the consequential perception of how SDS could capitalize upon this new mood and become a central part of it.

First, he argued, SDS should play down the old SLID idea of establishing its own little chapters for its own little purposes at various campuses and concentrate instead on forming alliances with the existing campus groups that had al ready come into being in response to their own local needs—student political parties, single-issue organizations (peace committees, civil-rights clubs), and ad hoc action groups built around civil-rights picketing, sit-in support, and the like.

Second, he said, SDS could play its most valuable role by trying to coordinate these groups and service their needs on a national scale, publishing newsletters, sending literature, organizing conferences, keeping the leaders in touch with one another, giving them a sense of participating in a wider movement beyond their particular campuses.

Third, SDS should involve itself as much as possible with j direct social action—support for and participation in pickets, sit-ins, freedom marches, boycotts, protest demonstrations—rather than limiting itself, as it had in the past, to strictly educational work. And finally, SDS should abandon the ideological line-toeing that had characterized SLID, work with any groups that were genuinely involved in seeking social change, and content itself with giving them a nonsectarian vision of the totality of the American system and the connections between the various single-issue maladies.

This last point is crucial. It is a vision which Haber felt must lie at the heart of any organization that is truly radica/—that is, any organization that seeks to understand, make connections between, and operate on the root causes of present conditions; as Haber put it later that year:

In its early stage, student activity is neither very radical nor very profound social protest. It generally does not go beyond a single issue, or see issues are inter-related, or stress that involvement in one issue necessarily leads to others. It does not, in short, seek root causes .... There is no recognition that the various objects of protest are not sui generis but are symptomatic of institutional forces with which the movement must ultimately deal .... The challenge ahead is to appraise and evolve radical alternatives to the inadequate society of today, and to develop an institutionalized communication system that will give perspective to our immediate actions. We will then have the groundwork for a radical student movement in America.

This vision—of a group which connects, and operates on, otherwise isolated issuesaccounts for much of SDS's early success. Philosophically, it is a kind of proto-ideology, a way of linking otherwise disjointed problems so that they can be seen to rise from a single set of national conditions and thus can be held in the mind, examined, dealt with.

Psychologically, it satisfies the search for ideology which, as psychologists point out, is a crucial element in adolescence, especially for the moral young, and accounts for the enlistment in SDS right from the start of a group of very smart but heretofore undirected youths who had not been able to find a way to synthesize their dissatisfactions with the system and who became excited and energetic once they could. And strategically, itis a way of bringing together a number of disparate single-issue clubs and ad hoc groups on different campuses and of easily admitting or working with new causes as they arise; this is important for an organization that has to grow both geographically (so that its chapters can vary from campus to campus, giving expression to a wide variety of issues of student discontent) and chronologically (so that it can take on a succession of shifting causes from the bomb to civil rights to the war to imperialism).

Shortly after Haber was installed in the New York office with his new responsibility and his new perception, the first convention of SDS was held, on June 17-19, 1960. No longer the drab union halls and YMCA auditoriums of the fifties—now the meeting took place at the Barbizon-Plaza in New York. No longer the subdued and somewhat defeated attitude of conventions past—now, as one student put it, there was an awareness of "the widespread emergence of new student thinking on social issues" which the convention symbolized by holding a reception on behalf of students jailed and expelled from Florida A & M for a civil-rights sit-in. No longer the perfunctory panels on remote issues of "Freedom for the Captive Nations" and "The Need for Agricultural Price Supports"—now the convention started with a panel on "Student Radicalism: From the Close of World War I through the McCarthy Period" (with the unspoken assumption that it had not quite been reborn yet) and the discussion was so animated it was carried over to the next day (suggesting that it soon was likely to be). All that seemed to remain of the past was the sorry attendance—only twenty-nine members from nine universities—but among them were some people who were to be instrumental in the future:

Sharon Jeffrey, a Michigan student whose mother was a Democratic Party committeewoman with close ties to the UAW; Jesse Lemisch, then at Yale and soon to make a mark as a major revisionist historian; Jonathan Weiss, an activist at Antioch; and Michigan junior Bob Ross. The largest number (eleven) came from Michigan, where Haber had done his spadework well, others from Columbia, Yale, and Wisconsin, and an additional fifty or so were guests, including Murray Kempton, Norman Thomas, trade unionist Don Slaiman, James Farmer, and banquet speaker Dwight Macdonald, whose topic was "The Relevance of Anarchism." Haber was elected President, his strong Michigan contingent coming through; Weiss, Vice President; and Yale student Eric Walther, International Vice President.”

It all seemed a fitting, a propitious, ending to the spring's first flush of student activism.

Haber, reviewing what had been accomplished on the campuses and what had happened to his organization, concluded:

"We have spoken at last, with vigor, idealism and urgency, supporting our words with picket lines, demonstrations, money and even our own bodies ... We have taken the initiative from the adult spokesmen and leadership, setting the pace and policy as our actions evolve their own dynamic.

Pessimism and cynicism have given way to direct action."