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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

RETRACING THE NEW LEFT: THE SDS OUTCASTS

ADAM MIKHAIL

A Thesis submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2013 Adam Mikhail defended this thesis on November 12, 2013. The members of the supervisory committee were:

Neil Jumonville Professor Directing Thesis

James P. Jones, Jr. Committee Member

Kristine C. Harper Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

For Lala and Misso, who give and give and give.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would first like to thank my committee for all their help, not only during this thesis process, but throughout my time at Florida State University. I owe special thanks to my major professor, Dr. Neil Jumonville, who first introduced me to the New Left. He challenged me to think big, giving me constant encouragement along the way. I could not have hoped for a more understanding or supportive major professor. His kind words were never taken for granted.

For an incredibly thorough editing of my thesis, I express my gratitude to Dr. Kristine Harper, who generously decorated this manuscript with ample amounts of red. This is a much better thesis because of her dedication, and I can’t thank her enough.

My friend, the legendary Dr. Jim Jones, made my experience at Florida State memorable. I will miss his profanity-laced lectures, but they will always stay with me. I was lucky enough to take Dr. Jones’s World War II course as my first college history class and even luckier to end my time as a historian with him on my committee. Thank you for everything.

I must also thank all the history instructors I’ve had over the years, each of whom contributed to my development. I have not a bad word to say about anyone. In addition, I must also give thanks the FSU History Department for honoring me with the Walbolt MA Fellowship.

Lastly, I am nothing without my family’s unwavering love and support. I love you all.

“The astronomer is as blind to the significant phenomena, or the significance of phenomena, as the wood-sawyer who wears glasses to defend his eyes from sawdust. The question is not what you look at—but how you look and whether you see.”1 – Henry David Thoreau

1 Henry David Thoreau, The Journal of Henry David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1906), 373. v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... vii

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION ...... 1 50 YEARS AFTER PORT HURON ...... 1

REDEFINING THE NEW LEFT ...... 4

TRACING THE THREADS ...... 7

HISTORIOGRAPHY ...... 8

CHAPTER TWO: BECOMING THE NEW LEFT ...... 15 RING OUT THE OLD ...... 15

COURTING TOM ...... 17

THE PORT HURON STATEMENT ...... 22

CHAPTER THREE: THE SPLINTERING OF SDS ...... 27 “HIGH ON ANALYSIS, LOW ON ACTION” ...... 27

THE HAYDEN‐HABER DEBATE ...... 29

THE CONSOLATION PRIZE ...... 34

CHAPTER FOUR: A FAMILIAR VANGUARD ...... 38 STAYING RELEVANT ...... 38

“AN INTERRACIAL MOVEMENT OF THE POOR?” ...... 41

CHAPTER FIVE: THE POLITICAL EDUCATION PROJECT (PEP) ...... 43 COUNTERING GOLDWATERISM AND THE “WHITE BACKLASH” ...... 43

“PART OF THE WAY WITH LBJ” ...... 47

GONE WITH GOLDWATER ...... 51

REMEMBERING THE POLITICAL EDUCATION PROJECT ...... 52

CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUSION ...... 54

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 59

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 64

ABSTRACT

There comes a time in 1963/4 when many in the New Left/SDS start to perceive that the movement is high on analysis and low on action. They have ample idealism, but it’s never acted upon. Harnessing this desire to act tangibly, SDS splits into two distinctive and opposing factions, the Political Education Project

(PEP) and the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). PEP recognizes the threat posed by Barry Goldwater’s nomination as the Republican Party’s presidential candidate in 1964 as the beginning of a shift in American culture and politics that could seriously inhibit “leftward” politics. PEP leaders (Steve Max and

Jim Williams) try to mobilize support for the Democratic Party, much to the chagrin of the rest of SDS, who view these acts as adhering to the “old way” of fostering change. Instead, SDS focuses on ERAP, a multi-city organization that aims to bring about an interracial movement of the poor through community organizing. This study argues that historians have too often focused on the community organizing faction of SDS in an effort to continue a narrative that leads the most active part of the organization, the Vietnam War protests in the later 1960s. In doing so, they have incorrectly ignored that the actual tenets of the New Left were carried on by

PEP.

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CHATPER ONE

INTRODUCTION

50 Years After Port Huron

All stories must have an ending. For the New Left, this cliché has traditionally been satisfied by any of several historical episodes, each equally unceremonious. The New Left, the student movement that has come to be defined by its largest organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), had begun in the early 1960s, brimming with the lofty optimism of youth. In 1962, members of the budding movement met in Port Huron, Michigan, to transcribe the ideas they hoped would define their decade. The result of this meeting was the creation of the most important political document of the Sixties, the manifesto of the New Left, The

Port Huron Statement.

The statement, written by SDS field secretary Tom Hayden, attempted both to reveal the origins of the movement and to define how it would develop in the

future. It was to be the “agenda for a generation.”2 The Port Huron Statement has

been referred to as “the most ambitious, the most specific, and the most eloquent

manifesto in the history of the American Left.”3 The document is so detailed that it

clarifies precisely what a “new” Left would entail. Therefore, to understand the New

2 Milestone Documents, "Tom Hayden: ‘The Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society’." Accessed August 2013. https://www.milestonedocuments.com/documents/view/tom-hayden- the-port-huron-statement-of-the-students-for-a-democratic-societ/text 3 Michael Kazin, "The Port Huron Statement at Fifty," Dissent 59, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 83. 1

Left, one must understand Port Huron, which begins, “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.”4

The Port Huron Statement has provided both a logical and necessary starting point for studies of the New Left. The SDS members present at the conference, together with historians, have rightly recognized that the ideas presented in The

Port Huron Statement were something innovative. Upon leaving Port Huron,

Michigan, SDS members had become imbued with an impetus for activism. Hayden recalled that his then wife, Casey Cason, who was also a drafter, described finishing the manifesto as “a holy moment.”5 The sense of a saintly crusade was embodied by the final lines: “If we appear to seek the unattainable, as it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.”6

Despite the enthusiasm, within a decade the spirit of Port Huron was well dead. Although the statement had seemingly charted a specific course, its general direction had been all but abandoned by SDS. In Chicago, the remnants of a once peaceful SDS had organized a violent protest to “bring the [Vietnam] war home,” only to be subdued by police force. The Weather Underground, the SDS faction that had planned the Chicago protests, continued its activities clandestinely by bombing various government buildings in retaliation against U.S. foreign policy. The organization, which had originally sought to implement change through the power

4 Hayden, Port Huron. 5 Tom Hayden, "A Manifesto Reconsidered," Los Angeles Times, May 6, 2012, A26. 6 James Miller, Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 329. 2

of its ideas had itself changed, descending into the uncontrollable chaos it is often

remembered for. For the forbearers of the organization, SDS had become a source of

shame and disappointment, marked poignantly by former SDS president Todd

Gitlin’s suggestion in 1972 that leftists begin looking toward a “new” New Left.7

Scholars interested in the New Left understandably wasted little time

interpreting events that were the first of their kind in the United States. In 1973,

Irwin Unger’s The Movement, the first study published on the topic, declared, “The

phenomenon we called the New Left is over.”8 Unger’s postmortem focused on the origins of the discontent that formed the largely affluent New Left, and analyzed the legacy of the movement. He asked, “What was accomplished in these twelve or thirteen momentous years,” and, “did the New Left achieve anything of comparable significance in the country’s domestic life?”9 Unger, who adopted a critical tone throughout his study, concluded that the movement accomplished little, but helped

push the United States out of Vietnam.

However, published just a few years after the movement’s climax, it was

perhaps too soon to evaluate the New Left’s legacy. Still, the legacy of this

groundbreaking movement remains today as important a question for the modern

historian as it was for the movement’s first historian. In 2012, The Port Huron

Statement turned 50 years old, providing an opportunity for reflection with a proper

perspective.

7 Todd Gitlin, "Toward a New New Left," Partisan Review 39, no. 3, (Summer 1972): 458. 8 Irwin Unger, The Movement: A History of the American New Left, 1959-1972 (New York: Addison- Wesley Educational Publishers, 1998), v. 9 Ibid., 207. 3

Redefining The New Left

The drafters of The Port Huron Statement had described themselves as the

“New Left” by defining the basis for a new movement for which the students would be the torchbearers. Port Huron first catalogued an ideology for the movement, and subsequently indicates how this ideology can be fulfilled. The movement described was to be a movement that would seek utopian aims—ending poverty, curbing the nuclear arms race, empowering society’s alienated, etc.—by seeking to radicalize universities, thus developing adults who would be committed to activism. These new radicals, Port Huron explains, would then effect change through the traditional structures of power by realigning the Democratic Party to reflect a new constituency. These premises, catalogued by Port Huron, should be seen not only as the tenets of a group of people, the New Left—but the tenets of an ideology: New

Leftism.

This distinction has too often been overlooked. Historians have traditionally

defined The New Left only as a movement of people, failing to give enough attention

to the principles guiding those people. That is, historians have answered what the

New Left was by describing who members of the New Left were. Viewed under this

singular paradigm, the New Left was the activism of certain students, operating for roughly a decade in the 1960s, encapsulated almost entirely by the rise and fall of

SDS. Since Port Huron adopted of the title “New Left,” historians have chosen to assume that every new chapter in SDS history was a new chapter in New Left

history, regardless of whether the organization’s actions adhered to principles of the

ideology stipulated by the document.

While it is convenient to tie a movement, something relatively intangible, to

the tangible lifespan of an organization, I will argue that this view is misguided, the result of an adherence to SDS members’ self-perception as the vanguard of a movement. Although SDS could, with the creation of the Port Huron Statement, be

seen as the ideological forefather of the New Left, its actions should not be viewed

as inherently representative of the movement, particularly after its decision to abandon the college campus as a base for radicalism.

It should then be asked: can the New Left be the New Left without the college campus? Because Port Huron places the university at the epicenter of the

New Left, we are left scrambling for a notion that is distinctive enough to warrant

classification as a new movement. Simply being student activists is neither

sufficiently encompassing nor original to constitute SDS members as the New Left.

As shown below, a majority of SDS chose community organizing as the successor to

campus organizing. When SDS moved on to a completely different orientation,

historians simply accepted this as a continuation of the New Left, ignoring two crucial points.

First, there were other members of SDS, increasingly ostracized, who were rejecting the abandonment of Port Huron and attempting to fulfill its mission themselves. After 1965, however, these rebels within the rebels were effectively ejected from the organization. With their departure, all semblance of Port Huron’s

message left SDS, replaced by increasingly aggressive single-issue activism guided

not by an ideological structure, such as Port Huron, but by a sense of immediacy. As shown below, it became difficult to complete the traditional narrative of the New

Left if we follow its ideas, rather than the organization that first announced those ideas. Today, the ideas of Port Huron and the New Left are more relevant than

members of SDS.

Also overlooked is that by shifting its focus to community organizing, SDS

was forgoing what had made it new, what had allowed it to become an avant-garde

movement. When so many in the country were already practicing community

organizing, and when others had previously practiced community organizing, we

must inquire whether this participation entails part of a new movement. SDS

members were neither the only Americans nor the only students to be participating

in community organizing at the time. It then becomes important to ask what

differentiates SDS community organizers from other student organizers, and whether any differences may be seen as sufficient for classifying SDS as a distinct entity.

Finally, the question remains: if SDS, which itself specified what the principles and course of the movement should be, and then discarded that course and most of the principles, should historians continue to view SDS as the New Left simply because SDS members did? By adhering to Port Huron, which both launched the organization and defined the movement, I will argue that the New Left lived on as an intellectual movement—as New Leftism—but was not epitomized by SDS

after 1965. Importantly, historians must then disjoin SDS and the New Left,

differentiating between the organization and the movement.

Several decades after the fall of SDS, Tom Hayden concisely summarized the

Port Huron strategy to implement a New Left. His remarks, when compared to

SDS’s development, highlight the divergence between the proposal and execution.

“The plan was… to change the power structure of the south, making the Democratic Party the party of civil rights and awakening a coalition of students, labor and environmentalists, and women, middle class people that would constitute an emerging majority.”10 Unlike other studies, I will track the New Left by following the small group of

SDSers who complied with Port Huron’s definition of the movement, rather than latching onto the ever-changing actions of those who constituted the majority of the organization.

Tracing the Threads

This study traces the developments of the New Left from the Port Huron

conference to what were the truly decisive years of the movement, the mid-1960s.

To define the movement, I will show how the New Left broke with the Old Left, and

then discuss the creation of SDS by focusing on the lives of its two most significant

early leaders, Al Haber and Tom Hayden. Haber and Hayden’s increasing

ideological differences came to a head in 1963 during the SDS National Council meeting, which was to decide the future of the organization and changed the course of SDS. By the end of the meeting, SDS had splintered into two distinct factions:

10 Tom Hayden, “50th Anniversary of the Port Huron Statement,” (speech, Port Huron, Michigan, August 28, 2012), St. Clair Community College, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtG8jWO5MkI. 7

those who supported the continued emphasis on campus activism and those who

argued for a move to community organizing.

The division was symbolized by two projects that emerged shortly thereafter: the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) and the Political Education

Project (PEP). The majority of SDS’s funding went toward ERAP, which became the center of both the organization and its community organizing effort. The organization later approved the creation of PEP as a conciliatory measure to the campus faction of SDS and provided it with scant funding. PEP would function as the political arm of the Democratic Party on college campuses, organizing voters for the 1964 presidential election between Lyndon B. Johnson and Barry Goldwater. I will examine both of these projects, as representatives of their factions, and in a new approach, place them into dialogue.

Historiography

An organization comprised entirely of scholars breeds an abundance of

scholarship. As has been previously stated, the student activism of the 1960s was, at the time, a historical anomaly in the United States. As such, this uniqueness has presented a challenge for historians of the era, who have sought to catalogue a movement that struggled to maintain a seamless development. The novelty of SDS and the New Left is just one of the problems that have affected the field. Having been controversial from their beginnings, the student movements of the 1960s have roused passion from supporters and detractors alike, making it difficult to settle on

a narrative. Of course, historians often gravitate to controversial subjects, and the

Sixties are not unique in this respect. However, historians do not usually live their histories firsthand, as can be said about the majority of SDS scholars. Interestingly, historians who were once SDS members have dominated the New Left historiography.11

These studies, which have been appropriately referred to by Sixties’ historian

John McMillian as “The New Left Consensus,” were published in a deluge during the late 1980s, with few analyses preceding them, and have been particularly prominent in the historiography.12 McMillan details the overarching narrative formulated by these historians.13 For its notable concision and significance, it is worthwhile to reproduce it here:

Allowing for a few variations and shifts of emphasis, the reigning narrative of the 1960s—we can safely call it the “New Left consensus”—proceeds accordingly: In 1962, with Kennedyesque optimism and youthful enthusiasm, a cadre of student activists began the New Left when they gathered at Port Huron under the somewhat impertinent notion that they might set forth “an agenda for a generation.” They were influenced by a wide array of sources, including the critical sociology of C. Wright Mills, French existentialism, and theories of participatory democracy derived from the civil rights

11 See Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Publishing, 1987); James Miller, Democracy Is In The Streets: From Port Hurton to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); Maurice Isserman’s If I Had A Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987); Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Harper Perennial, 1985). 12 The two exceptions: Irwin Unger’s The Movement and Kirkpatrick Sale’s brilliant SDS: The Rise and Development of the Students for a Democratic Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), which is perhaps the most comprehensive study of the organization. 13 John McMillian and Paul Buhle, eds., The New Left Revisited (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003). 9

movement… although they were not communist sympathizers, they refused to declare themselves anticommunist, thereby distinguishing themselves from parts of the Old Left… But even at its vigorous origins, a serious[sic] of unavoidable dilemmas” threatened the New Left’s project… Rather than seeing themselves as radical agents, student activists were constantly on the lookout for another “revolutionary vanguard” that would facilitate meaningful social change… Having already sown the seeds of its destruction, the movement’s decline was predictable: Activists were ill prepared to cope with the intransigence of war, government repression, internal differences, unresolved cultural contradictions, and a backlash from the established culture… Then—to make absolutely sure that everyone understood the movement was over—they sounded its death knell at a series of symbolic end-points: the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the “Days of Rage,” the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont… With all this, the movement that had promised to change society “collapsed, plummeting into cultural oblivion as if it had been some kind of political Hula-Hoop.”14 For the contemporary historian, these studies provide a valuable insight into

SDS and the competing viewpoints therein. Many of the consensus narrative’s

deductions are insightful and have generally not been contested. There are,

however, issues with an SDS-dominated historiography. The most apparent, which

has often been noted, is a lack of objectivity. This is understandable, given that

activism must carry emotion with it. As Elinor Langer, a former member of SDS, has stated: “The problem of interpreting the movement is [that] things that contradict each other at the surface are not necessarily contradictory at their

14 McMillan and Buhle, Revisited, 3-4; McMillan and Buhle’s final quote taken from Miller, “Democracy is in the Streets,” 311. 10 heart.”15 However, there is another criticism that can be made that is perhaps more important than impartiality, that of emphasis.

“The New Left consensus” dominates the subjects of the historiographical conversation, if not the interpretation. Parts of the New Left history have remained relatively untouched by recent historians because they were overlooked by the influential 1980s histories.16 A noteworthy example of how the historiography has

glossed over parts of SDS and the New Left can be seen with the Political Education

Project (PEP).17

The Political Education Project—SDS’s political faction during the 1964

presidential election—aimed to counter the “white backlash,” which had given Barry

Goldwater the nomination for the Republican Party, by organizing support for

President Lyndon B. Johnson. Born of controversy during the 1964 SDS National

Convention, PEP never gained a great deal of support from the SDS and did not

survive long after Johnson’s landslide victory in the presidential election. And studies

of the movement, most of which are notably honed in on SDS, have given little (if any)

attention to the project. The singular exception is Kirkpatrick Sale’s 1973 study, SDS:

The Rise and Development of the Students for a Democratic Society, which discusses the project’s formation and its eventual downfall, but does not examine its views or operations. Sale’s work is one of the first comprehensive studies of SDS published after

15 Elinor Langer, “Notes for Next Time: A Memoir of the 1960s,” in Toward a History of the New Left: Essays From Within The Movement, ed. R. David Myers (New York: Carlson Publishing, 1989), 121. 16 Doug Rossinow’s The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), is the most notable exception to this. His study reveals the previously unexamined link between Christian existentialism and the New Left. 17 Sale, SDS, 101. 11 its decline in the early 1970s and impressively details each year of the SDS’s existence.

Since this landmark study, which ushered in the period of “New Left consensus” historians, there has been little mention of the Political Education Project.

The reason for the omission is explainable if we consider the role of PEP in SDS relative to the background of the SDS members who became historians of the movement. As previously stated, PEP never had overwhelming support for its existence within SDS. Not only was Lyndon B. Johnson an unpopular president for many in SDS, but partaking in the traditional political game by garnering votes and support for a candidate was looked at as an “old” way of bringing about serious change.

James Williams, PEP, remembers that SDS leadership was so resistant to anything considered “old” that Williams was regarded as a member with “old thoughts.”18 What was considered new for the SDS in 1964 was community organizing through the

Economic Research and Action Project, which gave SDS a chance to be directly

involved in societal change. The project occupied a large percentage of the

organization’s efforts and finances in the years before and after the election of 1964,

making it nearly impossible for any other activist venture to function properly.

When the SDS National Council created ERAP, it allotted it $5000 ($37000 in

2012, adjusted for inflation) for start-up funds.19 PEP, conversely, relied on the

Industrial Union Department of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of

Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) for the majority of its funds, which was a $1500

18 Sale, SDS, 72. Quote taken from Williams’s interview in Jack Newfield, A Prophetic Minority (New York: New American Library, 1965). 19 Jim Williams to Rennie Davis, 1964, Students for a Democratic Society Papers, 1958 through 1970, Wisconsin State Historical Society. 12 grant ($11000 in 2012, adjusted for inflation).20 PEP’s small budget only allowed for two staff members, director James Williams and assistant director Steve Max, neither of whom have published accounts of their time as SDS members. With so few SDS members privy to PEP experiences, and with even fewer supporting their actions, we begin to see how it could have been neglected in studies of the New Left, some of which are supposedly grand narratives spanning from beginning to end (although emphases vary). It could be said that the lack of interest from SDS members at the time PEP was

founded has, given the makeup of the historians, translated into a lack of interest in its

history.

Although short-lived, dissolving less than a year after its creation due to financial constraints and lack of organizational support, PEP provides an interesting

opportunity to gain insight into SDS and the New Left as a whole. Nearly forty years

have passed since Sale’s 1973 study lightly scratched the surface of the Political

Education Project. The political developments that have transpired in the decades

since are considerable and require PEP to be reevaluated with a twenty-first century

perspective. Reviewing PEP’s political theorization, which came to represent the last

bastion in SDS for the ideals of The Port Huron Statement, I will argue that PEP

helped to develop the ideas for building the Democratic Party’s twenty-first century

voting coalition. Although PEP has been seen as somewhat ineffectual and was

unpopular within SDS, the ideas expressed by its leaders about undertaking mass

voter registration in urban ghettos and on college campuses were ahead of their time,

20 Political Education Project, "Summary of the 1964 Campaign Activity Conducted by the Political Education Project Associated with Students for a Democratic Society (1964)," Memorandum. From Wisconsin State Historical Society, Students for a Democratic Society Papers, 1958 through 1970. 13 and show notable understanding of American society and foresight into future developments in American politics.

A decade as tumultuous as the Sixties provides several distinct stages to

direct historical analysis. The inconsistency of SDS, which oscillated between different emphases and adopted contrasting characteristics at different moments in its history, has had a corresponding effect on the historiography. Instead of thoroughly examining the entirety of the period, historians have been forced by the scope of the material to hone in on particular phases, and make more encompassing pronouncements about the New Left based on these subdivisions. This tradition will be continued here, hoping to satisfy historian Jon Wiener’s call for more focus to be placed on the “real 60s”: the middle-60s.21

21 Jon Wiener, "The New Left as History," Radical History Review 42 (Fall 1988): 175. 14

CHAPTER TWO

BECOMING THE NEW LEFT

Ring Out the Old

Historians have repeatedly examined the relationship between the Old Left

and the budding student activists who would become the New Left. No study has

done more to advance our knowledge of this relationship than Maurice Isserman’s If

I Had a Hammer.22 Isserman shows that the influence and energy of the Old Left—

descendants of socialist thought and New York intellectuals—had waned in the

1950s.23 It was clear that the thrust of their energies, which had always been

pragmatic rather than utopian, had been blunted over the years. Leaders of the Old

Left, notably sociologist C. Wright Mills and writers in Dissent magazine, were

actively preparing to nurture a new leftist movement that would learn from the

mistakes of the past.24

Among the many questions Isserman seeks to answer, one is particularly relevant to this study. Why did the New Left begin in the early Sixties, as opposed to the mid-fifties, when conditions were arguably more ripe for a reinvigorated leftist push? The second half of the 1950s saw the loosening of McCarthyism’s intellectual grip on collective leftist attitudes and the growing influence of the civil

22 Maurice Isserman, If I Had A Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987). 23 Neil Jumonville, Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 24 Wiener, “The New Left as History,” 177. 15 rights movement. The rejection of communism following Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations of Joseph Stalin’s crimes created a body of vulnerable leftists who needed only to be herded into new activism.

As Isserman shows, Old Left theorists recognized the suitability of these conditions, but for various reasons, attempts to organize compatible minds failed.

These failures created a dearth in both leftist leadership and impetus, which would soon be filled by a new political force: university students. The Old Left had failed to identify the prominence students would have in a “new” leftist movement. For many, “a ‘New Left’ would not be a student movement, but rather a regrouping of adult radicals… their ideas and strategies would be new.”25 Historical precedence explains this oversight. Whereas other countries had experienced well-defined student movements in the past, the United States, nearly two hundred years since its founding, had all but kept its students out of the political arena. When a “new” left arrived in 1962, signaled by The Port Huron Statement, the Old Left had not foreseen the age of its members or its outlook.

By the 1960s, the Old Left had been fully tempered by the Cold War and

McCarthyism. Staunch anti-communism had become a tenet of the Old Left and would seemingly remain so for next leftist movement. The New Left, as it developed, was separated from the Old Left by more than just a few years, but by a generation. The New Left’s mentality had developed differently in an entirely new environment. The worldview of fifty-nine attendees at the Port Huron Conference

25 Wiener, “The New Left as History,” 174. 16 was born out of a rejection and revulsion of McCarthyism, rather than compliance

to it. This repudiating sentiment was applied to the entire American status quo,

which they saw as riddled with “complicated and disturbing paradoxes” too serious

to ignore.26 The critiques of America by the New Left would, from the beginning, be

too harsh for many Old Leftists to accept. Although they had prepared to educate a

contemporary leftist movement, the Old Left’s eventual relationship with student

activists was one of mutual distrust.

Courting Tom

The first chapter in SDS’s story revolves around two men, Robert Alan Haber

and Thomas Hayden. Haber, the founder of SDS, and Hayden, the author of Port

Huron, perhaps more than any others, were responsible for shaping the

organization. For their significance to SDS, and the insightful circumstances of their eventual falling out, they are at the center of much of this study.

Robert Alan “Al” Haber, a student at the University of Michigan in Ann

Arbor in the 1960s, was “Ann Arbor’s resident radical.”27 He had come from a family

of Old Leftists, supporters of the New Deal and perpetual Socialist Party

presidential candidate Norman Thomas. Haber had followed his father to

University of Michigan, where the latter had been a professor for nearly his entire

adult life. Haber was a model intellectual, fueled by an insatiable curiosity that arguably kept him at Michigan for many more years than required to complete a

26 Hayden, The Port Huron Statement. 27 Miller, Democracy is in the Streets, 23. 17 degree.28 Without this curiosity, it is likely he would have left the university long before the formation of SDS. Whether events in the Sixties would have proceeded in a similar fashion without Haber, however, is questionable.

As a budding student activist, Haber came to consider that students, rather than the Old Left-emphasized proletariat, could become the vessels for

radicalization. Students, although motivated, had lacked “an organization that

could illuminate the connections between issues like the arms race, poverty and

racism and the discontents of the students themselves.”29 He expressed his

confidence early on: “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.”30 The

organization that Haber was then affiliated with, a student subsidiary of the

League for Industrial Democracy (LID)—the Student League for Industrial

Democracy (SLID)—lacked the appeal or the incentive necessary to recruit

effectively at the university.

SLID leadership decided in 1960 to change its name to Students for a

Democratic Society. It was more than a change of name, it was also a change of

direction. Haber, always the visionary, detailed exactly what the organization

should focus on, and these notions would be the direct precursors to The Port Huron

Statement. He envisioned an organization that worked with existing activists,

coordinating and assisting them, slowly building the coalition that he wanted to

28 Miller, Democracy is in the Streets, 23. 29 Ibid. 30 Haber quote taken from Sale, SDS, 14. 18 achieve. Student activists needed, Haber argued, to understand the “root causes”

that underlie social issues; this would require research, understanding, and most of

all, time. As a friend of Haber, Thomas Hayden would rightly put it many years

later, “Movements take a while to succeed.”31

Aside from a propensity for activism, Thomas “Tom” Hayden shared little in

common with Al Haber in 1959. Unlike Haber, Hayden did not come from a political

background. Attending a Catholic school in his youth, Hayden, before college, had

not been exposed to leftist politics. A philosophy major at the University of

Michigan, Hayden was the editor of The Michigan Daily, the university’s student

newspaper. The aspiring journalist had first come to Haber’s attention through an

editorial he had written about a civil rights demonstration in Ann Arbor. The

activism’s verve “excited” Hayden, who would again be stimulated by the civil rights

movement in later years.32 In Tom Hayden, Al Haber saw an opportunity to make

his first significant SDS recruit. He could not predict, however, that Hayden would

one day become the organization’s leader at his expense.

Al Haber had become president of the budding SDS in 1960 after a human

rights conference had brought together students from different universities. The

University of Michigan delegation, which Haber led, was the largest, and when it

came time to choose a president, Haber had the most support. His new position

would force him to relocate to the SDS office in New York, but before he departed he

was determined to leave Michigan with a significant new recruit before his

31 Hayden, “50th Anniversary of the Port Huron Statement.” 32 Hayden, Reunion, 31. 19 departure. Visiting Hayden in his office at The Michigan Daily, Haber pitched the

visionary SDS platform. The older Haber informed Hayden that he was convinced

that a new student movement would arise soon and wanted Hayden to be a part of

it.

In Hayden, Haber seemingly saw an opportunity to use the university’s

newspaper editor’s clout to awaken dormant student activists. Hayden had given no

indication that he was of a particularly leftist political persuasion. As Haber’s

girlfriend and SDS co-founder Sharon Jeffrey would say, “He didn’t have any

politics… he didn’t understand economics.”33 Unlike Haber and his two closest

associates, Sharon Jeffrey and Bob Ross, Hayden had been raised in a conservative

Midwestern family. He was, however, the exact type of student Haber believed he

would need to recruit and radicalize in order to develop the campus as an infleuntial political force.34 In more than one way, Hayden would become “the archetype of the new student radical.”35

Hayden was immediately captivated by Haber’s personality: “When I visited his one-room apartment, I was amazed that every wall, from floor to ceiling, was filled with books… Al’s eccentricities and nondescript appearance created a certain charisma.”36 Perhaps in a sign of future developments, however, Hayden was wary

of Haber’s involvement in “theoretical abstraction” and SDS’s “cerebral” nature.37

33 Jennifer Frost, An Interracial Movement of the Poor (New York: NYU Press, 2001), 17. 34 Miller, Democracy is in the Streets, 41. 35 Ibid., 42. 36 Hayden, Reunion, 31. 37 Ibid., 31, 40. 20

He would, at the time, reject Haber’s invitation and instead focus on his editorial work.

The call to activism plagued Hayden like a persistent itch. As the civil rights movement continued to build, the editor, still ambivalent about Haber’s project, began to see the potential in a future dedicated to effecting change. While the appeal pulled him in the direction of student activism, he still did not see SDS as a suitable platform for his objectives. His concern, he remembered, was a

distrust of New York-based politics and sense of the problems inherent in building an independent organization with no resources save those of the inbred and old-fashioned New York circles whose time-bound and overly ideological institutions were alien to my student experiences.38 He was instead attracted to the National Student Association (NSA), an organization founded in 1947 and secretly controlled by the Central Intelligence

Agency (CIA). Hayden ran for the NSA’s office of vice president for national affairs, where he hoped to be “the bridge to SNCC and civil rights efforts.”39 Before the election, Hayden acquired an NSA document that detailed a plan, likely influenced by the CIA, to prevent him and other “radicals” from obtaining office in the organization.40 Regardless of its effectiveness, Hayden was defeated. Hayden credits this failure, and his pursuit of love, for pushing him to take a position as SDS field secretary of the South. SDS would allow him to join his future wife, Casey Cason,

38 Hayden, Reunion, 50. 39 Ibid., 51; “SNCC” refers to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, created by Ella Baker in 1960. 40 Ibid. 21 an activist for the southern-based Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

(SNCC), in Atlanta.

It is important to recognize the circumstances that preceded Tom Hayden’s

affiliation with SDS. As a result of the “hurt” caused by failing to procure office with

the NSA, Hayden had only grudgingly come to join the organization he would later

lead, seeing it as a necessary, but not sufficient, base for a future in activism.41 He

had felt fundamental concerns about Haber’s vision even before accepting the field

secretary position, but would overlook them out of obligation for the time being. It is also noteworthy that Hayden’s primary (and arguably only) concern at the time was that of civil rights; it was his prerequisite for action in both the NSA and SDS. The

trajectory that SDS sought—to oversee activist groups, create an intellectual

platform to radicalize students, and form a coalition for traditional political action—

had neither Hayden’s attention nor support. To be the progenitor of an entirely new

movement was not, in 1961, on Hayden’s radar.

The Port Huron Statement

By 1962, SDS, still largely funded by the League for Industrial Democracy

(LID), had assembled a membership of approximately 800 students across various

college campuses.42 Leaders of the organization began compiling their beliefs in the

hope of creating a manifesto that would define a direction for both the organization

and a new movement. As a former editor, the task of drafting the manuscript fell to

41 Hayden, Reunion, 52. 42 Sale, SDS, 30. 22

Tom Hayden, who presented a rough draft in Port Huron, Michigan, to a delegation of SDS members that included Al Haber and future PEP leader, Steve Max.

After many revisions and alterations to Hayden’s draft, the convention adopted a document that was significantly different to the original.43 To avoid unsuitable comparisons, SDS decided against referring to it as a manifesto, and

instead called it simply The Port Huron Statement. The final product housed many

of the ideas Haber had expressed in the past, infused with a utopian spirit that

captured the students’ hopefulness. Hayden’s personal ideological contribution,

which was significant, was that of “participatory democracy.” 44

The Port Huron Statement described an America riddled with affliction—a

disease whose source was a combination of apathy and alienation. In the United

States, too few people made too many decisions; the average citizen was detached

from a power “rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance.”45 The individual

must, the statement argued, have more control over the decisions that dictate “the

quality and direction” of his or her life.46 Society should be “organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.”47

These premises would form the principles of “participatory democracy,” the

ideological lynchpin of the New Left.

43 An original draft of The Port Huron Statement can be found here: http://www.sds- 1960s.org/PortHuronStatement-draft.htm 44 Hayden, The Port Huron Statement; “Participatory democracy” was first described as an ideology by one of Tom Hayden’s professors at the University of Michigan, Arnold Kaufman. Kaufman authored an essay called, “Participatory Democracy and Human Nature,” where he discusses increasing responsibilities for citizens. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 23

The statement cites two issues that were responsible for rousing students from the supposed silence of generations past: human degradation caused by racism, particularly in the South, and the existential threat of the Cold War, marked by the nuclear age. These activists

might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two, for these were too immediate and crushing in their impact, too challenging in the demand that we as individuals take the responsibility for encounter and resolution.48 While elevated, the grievances listed in the document were not limited to civil rights and the nuclear age. The 25,000-word statement also criticized American foreign policy, McCarthyism, poverty, and what the drafters saw as dispassion on college campuses.

Importantly, The Port Huron Statement is divided into two distinct parts: one addresses what the ideology of the New Left should be, and the other regarding

“what is needed,” to implement such reforms.49 Although The Port Huron

Statement detailed how a participatory democracy would function, it failed to adequately explain how such a foundational reform would be implemented. Still, as a theoretical proposition, it was very appealing to a group of individuals who wanted to be included in a system they perceived as exclusionary.50 Unlike the

Marxism of the Old Left, which had foreign origins, participatory democracy was an alternative that had a distinctly American flavor, championing a system that would

48 Miller, 329. 49 Ibid., 355. 50 The twenty-sixth amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, was not passed until 1971. This means that some of the Port Huron drafters were unable to vote. 24 be more directly democratic.51 This type of overarching idealism was typical of the manifesto’s optimism—an optimism not of the status quo, but for the future and for

the righteousness of their principles.

Of the previous generation, the statement declares, “Not only did tarnish appear on our image of American virtue, not only did disillusion occur when the hypocrisy of American ideals was discovered, but we began to sense that what we had originally seen as the American Golden Age was actually the decline of an era.”52 Seeing themselves as the progenitors of the New Left, the Port Huron attendees included a description of what the movement should be. For a “new” left, as they referred to it, students, rather than workers, would be the instruments of social change. As such, the university would be the principal location for reform and hold paramount significance. The focus on the campus was one of the early tenets of

SDS, although, as it will be demonstrated, this model would evolve as the organization aged.

Given the common values and interests of the “peace, civil rights and civil liberties labor” movements, The Port Huron Statement said, a coalition should be

formed to consolidate their power.53 A new left should also include not only

students, it reads, but “liberals and socialists, the former for their relevance, the

51 Neil Jumonville, “The New Left,” Lecture, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, October 11, 2010. 52 Hayden, The Port Huron Statement. 53 Ibid. 25 latter for their sense of thoroughgoing reforms in the system.”54 Most importantly,

“Any new left in America must be, in large measure, a left with real intellectual skills, committed to deliberativeness, honesty, reflection as working tools. The university permits the political life to be an adjunct to the academic one, and action to be informed by reason.”55 That these groups, until this point, had felt “no political expression, no political channel” was due “in large measure to the existence of a Democratic Party which tolerates the perverse unity of liberalism and racism, prevents the social change wanted by Negroes, peace protesters, labor unions, students, reform

Democrats, and other liberals.”56 A new left, then, should “demand a Democratic

Party responsible to their interests.”57 This was, as Hayden has described, the realignment plan. This definition and outlook of the New Left, which signifies a distinct break with the Old Left, will be referred to regularly throughout this text.

54 Hayden, The Port Huron Statement. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 26

CHAPTER THREE

THE SPLINTERING OF SDS

“High on Analysis, Low on Action”

In 1963, “the year following The Port Huron Statement, SDS became plagued by

uncertainty about what an organization should do beyond discussing papers.”58

Certain SDS members concluded that, in their current state as campus thinkers, they

were too “high on analysis,” and too “low on action.”59 Many in SDS had begun to become skeptical about the potential for the university to be a base for radicalization.

Compared to what the civil rights movement was performing in the streets, the university only seemed to produce ideas. These notions were expounded upon in

America and the New Era, a document produced by some within SDS, including Tom

Hayden.

America and the New Era was a considerable ideological shift away from Port

Huron. Besides devaluing the university, it advocated assisting radical movements where they already were, namely in the civil rights movement. It may seem surprising that Hayden had so quickly distanced himself from Port Huron, the document he had

authored, but when thought of in the context of Hayden’s earlier qualms with SDS, and

the prevalence of Haber’s ideas in the text, it becomes more understandable. The

document was the first time SDS members had officially advocated moving away from

58 Richard J. Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 124. 59 Richard Rothstein, “A Short History of ERAP,” SDS Bulletin 4 [November 1965]. 27 the campus to get directly involved in activism. It called for a “new insurgency,”

chastising “intellectuals, both in and out of universities,” for allowing themselves to be

“merely used, [but] not cherished.”60 This view was not shared by all in the

organization, but SDS was established to be a multi-tendency organization. Haber,

who was still president at the time, became concerned with the “unfortunate anti-

intellectualism” developing.61

With this mindset, the student organization ventured away from campus

organizing and moved into urban sectors to attempt community organizing through the

expansion of their Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP), which satisfied the

recommendations of America and the New Era for new insurgencies. The goal of ERAP

was to bring about social and cultural change in a personal way, something that was

new for SDS, but not for American activism. Leading the community organizing charge

were many of the old intellectual stalwarts from the founding of SDS, notably Tom

Hayden and Carl Wittman. Although the idea of community organizing gained

considerable support within SDS, it also caused a decisive split that factionalized the

organization and was never resolved.62

As a direct result of the shift toward ERAP, two distinct factions developed

within SDS: one that favored SDS becoming an organization completely dedicated to

community organizing, and another that thought SDS should remain on the campus to

60 Students for a Democratic Society. “America and the New Era." Accessed August, 2013. http://archive.lib.msu.edu/DMC/AmRad/americanewera.pdf 61 Haber quote taken from Sale, SDS, 74. 62 Miller, Democracy is in the Streets, 194. 28 radicalize students.63 Although the director of ERAP at its founding, Al Haber led the campus organizing faction. He rejected the idea that SDS should move away from campuses, essentially stressing the “research” aspect of ERAP. Hayden had instead favored an approach that would see the organization shift almost completely into ghettos. Steadily intensifying, the debate over SDS’s future reached a dramatic climax at the National Council meeting in December 1963, a seminal moment in New Left history.

The Hayden-Haber Debate

Coming into the National Council meeting, SDS’s two most influential leaders

were undoubtedly Al Haber and Tom Hayden. Until this point, Haber and Hayden had agreed on all major aspects of the organization.64 They could not, however, come to a consensus on either the purpose of ERAP or its significance within SDS. As its

director, Haber believed ERAP should continue to work within its existing framework

on the campus. As the name suggests, the Economic Research and Action Project was, at the time of its formation in fall 1963, meant to research economic inequality as it pertained to race and provide guidelines for future action.

ERAP was initially to be “a strategic compliment to the work of civil rights activists,” rather than directly fulfilling the activism.65 For Haber, ERAP represented one part of SDS’s (and the New Left’s) general plan to both educate students and build a meaningful coalition. He explained,

63 Sale, SDS, 72. 64 Hayden, Reunion, 125. 65 Frost, Interracial Movement of the Poor, 12. 29

To speak of an alliance is to talk of a strategy for social change. In very broad terms, the strategy we see is realignment—the development of political organization on the local level representing the demands of labor, the Negro and other minorities, the city poor, the small farmer and businessman, the liberal intellectual; and the extension of that organization to the national level through the expulsion of the Dixiecrats and urban machines from domination of the Democratic Party. In this we see university centers playing a crucial generating role for political ideas and programs and a crucial supporting role in strategically designed research or action motives.”66 This is precisely the strategy detailed both by The Port Huron Statement, which defined the New Left, and Tom Hayden in his later years.

Hayden in 1963, however, wanted SDS to act immediately. “To me,” remembered Hayden, “he[Haber] represented an inconclusive intellectualism that was frustrating the birth of SDS as an active force.”67 In the year since he had emphasized the development of future radicals in his Port Huron Statement, Tom

Hayden’s appetite for activism had yet not been satisfied. His ideology changed decisively during this period, perhaps a result of the escalation of civil rights activism developing around him. Hayden had taken part in some of these demonstrations, including the March on Washington in the summer of 1963.

Compared to that event, SDS’s intellectualism seemed more like dithering.

66 Alan Haber, Students and Labor (Position paper published by SDS, New York, New York), 7. 67 Hayden, Reunion, 125. 30

Haber described the developing verve of Hayden and other likeminded SDS

members in terms of a “cult” of action.68 As both the leader of this faction and the document that launched the New Left, Hayden’s significant shift, as representative of the same shift in many SDS members, is important to analyze and understand.

Symbolically, Hayden and Haber, on completion of The Port Huron Statement, had driven to the White House to deliver a copy to presidential advisor Arthur

Schlesinger, Jr.69 As historian Richard Ellis describes, “The Hayden of 1962 had stressed the need ‘to work within social and political structures so as to grasp and influence their dynamic,’ ‘to be involved enough within the structural mainstream to be influential.’”70

This viewpoint, however, was evolving as Hayden became more frustrated with both the rate and degree of change. Working within the campus paradigm was inside the “structural mainstream” that Hayden had begun to believe was too rigid for meaningful results.71 Hayden would eventually reject his earlier proclamations, stating, “We want a movement and that means, for now, the development of activity

outside of all existing institutions, except those in the area of civil rights.”72 Moving

to the ghetto and organizing the poor provided an opportunity for Hayden and

others to build a power base through non-traditional means.

68 Hayden, Reunion, 125. 69 Hayden, Manifesto Reconsidered. 70 Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left, 126. 71 Ibid. 72 Hayden quote taken from Ellis, 126. 31

When the issue of SDS’s direction came under discussion at the National

Council meeting, Hayden and Haber each defended their positions in an intense

debate. The Hayden-Haber debate, as it became known, divided the National

Council, and was the beginning of an ideological split that would never be properly

resolved. The debate pinned the intellectualism and campus focus of Port Huron

against the direct action insurgency of America and the New Era.

Haber, who was older and more tempered than most of the attendees, warned against sacrificing their development as activists for a few years of living in the ghetto. ERAP, under his leadership, had been a vehicle for intellectual research on the matter of poverty; the “action” portion of the acronym would be fulfilled after a methodology was properly investigated. For now, SDS and ERAP, Haber argued, should support other activists through their research and focus on radicalizing students. Haber forewarned, “The cult of the ghetto has diverted SDS away from the primary and most difficult task of educating radicals. As an organization for students,

SDS will have failed.”73

Hayden channeled the spirited rhetoric of America and the New Era in defense of community organizing. ERAP, he argued, should act as an insurgency, aiming to put direct pressure on the existing power structure. Without this, SDS would remain purely academic and intellectual, and eventually become irrelevant.

ERAP would,

get to the grass roots, get to where the people are. There we can listen to them, learn from them, organize them to give voice to their

73 Quote taken from Sale, 72: Al Haber, March-April SDS Bulletin, 1964. 32

legitimate complaints, mobilize them to demand from the society the decent life that is rightfully theirs. ERAP can be the insurgent action that would truly propel SDS on a ‘revolutionary trajectory.’74 The belief that the country was on the brink of being pushed on a revolutionary trajectory was taken directly from SNCC doctrine.75

Remembering her time in SDS, Elinor Langer described the organization as being “ahistorical and smug, since it mistook revolution, a rare historical event, for a moral choice.”76 Haber made the point that Hayden’s claim that revolution was near was nothing more than assumption and that decisions should not be based on this speculation, especially given SDS’s limited financial resources.77 SDS could not,

Haber argued, fund full-fledged community organizing projects across the country without abandoning attention to different fronts.

Much to Haber’s dismay, the National Council voted 20-6 in favor of Hayden’s proposal.78 SDS was to channel the majority of its funding and energy to ERAP, which would begin community organizing. Hayden and Haber’s disagreements were left unresolved, both personally and organizationally, at the end of the conference.

Going forward, SDS was a house-divided. Haber was replaced as ERAP director by

Rennie Davis and would never regain a leadership position in SDS . The man who

had given both the impetus to create the organization and recruited Tom Hayden,

74 Sale, SDS, 70. 75 Frost, Interracial Movement of the Poor, 17. 76 Langer, “Notes for Next Time,” 107. 77 Frost, Interracial Movement of the Poor, 17. 78 Sale, SDS, 70. 33 was now an outcast. Although possibly the first, Haber would not be the last SDS member sidelined after opposing the organization’s hegemony.

Dave Strauss, who was present for the debate, recalled why he supported

Hayden’s position: “I wanted to do something that felt right and relevant… The civil rights movement is exploding all over the place and we’re sitting there saying… if we just stay on campus we’re not gonna be there when we’re needed.”79 That the civil rights movement influenced SDS has never been contested. However, based on the temporal proximity between the adoption of Port Huron and its subsequent rejection, it seems likely that SDS would have remained on its original path for at least some time had it not been fueled by the civil rights movement’s eminence.

Still, the 1963 National Council meeting did not rid SDS of all those who preferred to follow Port Huron. Although ignored, underfunded and eventually destroyed, that faction, for the next two years, would venture to fulfill what Port Huron had called

“new Left” by attempting to build a substantial coalition to realign the Democratic

Party.

The Consolation Prize

Also present at the National Council meeting were Steve Max and Jim

Williams, the future directors of the Political Education Project (PEP), who agreed with

Haber’s position. Jim Williams criticized ERAP for “ghetto-jumping,” rather than

79 Strauss quote taken from Frost, Interracial Movement of the Poor, 19. 34 working to build a coalition of the poor through traditional power structures.80 In

Max’s view, “SDS should be an organization that recruited and created programs on

the basis of a clear political position. He [Max] wanted SDS to provide leadership and an organization base to the student movement.”81 Haber’s declining influence following the debate created a leadership void for the campus faction of SDS, which Max and

Williams filled for a time.

In ERAP, the future leaders of PEP saw an opportunity to use community organizing to expand the Democratic Party’s voting pool. Max believed that “electoral politics could wrest ‘from the hands of the exploiters the power through which they exploit—that is, the political power of government.’”82 After the National Council,

ERAP leaders rejected this idea because playing the political game was considered too old-fashioned to bring about real change. Conversely, Max saw community organizing not channeled toward electoral politics as only capable of temporary, unsustainable change.83 He mockingly defined SDS’s tone toward politics at this time as: “Politics is dirty! Power corrupts! Leaders sell out!”84 Because of the ERAP’s refusal to direct community organizing toward politics, Max and Williams began to push SDS to create a political arm to help bring about a realignment of the Democratic Party.

The SDS National Convention in summer 1964 again brought together its contrasting ideological factions. Between the December 1963 National Council meeting

80 Williams quote taken from Frost: 44. Letter to Rennie Davis, February 27, 1964. 81 Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left: 1962-1968 (New York, New York: J. F. Bergins Publishers, Inc, 1982), 86. 82 Frost, Interracial Movement of the Poor, 121. 83 Ibid, 99. 84 Steve Max, “Words, Butter, No Parsnips: Remarks on the Nature of Community Political Organization,” SDS Bulletin 2 (May 1964), 21. 35 and the June 1964 SDS National Convention, an unofficial debate over ERAP had continued to intensify. Hayden and others were beginning to suggest that SDS should pursue a “new movement,” centered solely around ERAP.85 They encouraged students

to drop out of the university to pursue community organizing full-time.

Haber, Max, and others committed to SDS’s original purpose attempted, with little success, to sway opinions. His influence diminishing, Haber published a bulletin cynically criticizing ERAP for corrupting SDS and pressuring students to drop out.

Writing to Max, Don McKelvey, a critic of community organizing, wrote that the ERAP

members were beginning to see themselves as “the movement rather than a particular

sector of it.”86 Despairingly, SDS President Todd Gitlin remarked at the time that, “it began to appear that SDS wasn’t broad enough to encompass all its divergences.”87

It was believed by its members that SDS would once and for all decide its orientation at its 1964 National Convention. For the first time, Haber, disillusioned by

SDS’s new direction, refused to attend the convention.88 Each group attempted to sway the convention to adopt a position that would become the central purpose of SDS.

Neither, however, were able to convince the convention to approve a stance unanimously. The status quo remained, with a new Political Education Project created

to satisfy Max, a founder of SDS, and the rest of the campus faction.89 Max remembers that the creation of PEP did not reflect the composition of SDS: “The dominant tone

85 Sale, SDS, 71. 86 McKelvey quote taken from Sale, SDS, 71. 87 Gitlin quote taken from Sale, SDS, 72. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid., 73. 36 was this thing about privilege, that we were bourgeoisie and we should go out and work for the poor.”90 Max, the son of avowed communists, was perhaps particularly observant to ideas that channeled Marxism.

It is important to note that PEP’s creation in SDS was little more than a consolation prize for Max and likeminded supporters. Its ideas were considered outdated and going against the organization’s dominant tide. The result would be a lack of SDS support, both emotionally and financially, from the moment of its creation.

Williams admits that PEP was only allowed to exist because “SDS had always been considered a multi-tendency organization.”91 The notion of SDS as having multiple tendencies would be tested with the creation of PEP.

90 Max quote taken from Sale, SDS, 73. 91 Ibid., 101. 37

CHAPTER FOUR

A FAMILIAR VANGUARD

Staying Relevant

“Perhaps the chief virtue of SDS in the last few years has been its insistence

on relevance,” wrote Richard Rothstein in 1965.92 An SDS member, Rothstein’s

analysis in the midst of the Sixties is both insightful and revealing. Most of all, the

youth of SDS wanted to be involved firsthand in bringing about change during a

time they rightly recognized as particularly volatile. Inverting Rothstein’s

statement, we can then argue that it was the fear of becoming irrelevant vis-à-vis the civil rights movement that inspired SDS to move into the ghettos.

Discussed above, the impetus for creating ERAP and abandoning the campus

strategy was directly linked to an increase in civil rights activities in both the North

and South.93 As a great force for societal change in the 1960s, SDS consistently strove to place itself within the ethos of the civil rights movement. These attempts

manifested themselves in different ways, with varying degrees of individuality between the two entities. The venture into community organizing with ERAP

represented the closest association of the two and an inversion in the dynamic of the

student activist. Whereas before, SDS had housed student activists with civil rights

concerns, ERAP volunteers had disavowed the campus and their unique identity as

92 Richard Rothstein, "A Short History of ERAP," SDS Bulletin 4 (November 1965): special 1. 93 Frost, Interracial Movement of the Poor, 11. 38 students to become part of a relatively monolithic block of civil rights activists. As

Steve Max put it, they were not “students, but rather… young adults interested in community work.”94

Previously, organizing on the campus and researching ideas were viewed as a

necessary precursor to shepherding in change. What SDS had decided at the

National Council meeting was that they would skip this researching step altogether

and, with their limited numbers and resources, move to confront American issues

firsthand, lest the Sixties pass them by. Being face-to-face with society’s issues was, after all, what fellow students of the Northern Student Movement (NSM) and the mostly black Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were already

doing around the country. These students did not, however, match the SDS

demographic composition of white and affluent. In this light, it is problematic to

label what SDS did as part of a new movement simply because it was new for

whites.

However, it is important to note that SDS came to community organizing primarily through SNCC and NSM, organizations that have regularly been placed into the greater civil rights movement rather than into the New Left. SDS’s relationship with civil rights was not only motivational—the result of admiring the liveliness of other organizations—but also one in which SNCC and NSM leaders both advised and directed SDS’s community organizing venture.

94 Breines, Community and Organizing, 131. 39

SDS had “founded ERAP in self-conscious imitation of SNCC’s work in the

South, and SNCC’s intellectual leadership had inspired and shaped the project’s

organizing style and content.”95 At a meeting with future SNCC Chairman Stokely

Carmichael, SDS representatives Tom Hayden and Lee Webb sought his advice on a

move into community organizing. Carmichael suggested that SDS focus on

organizing poor whites, building on the idea that racism could be quelled through

economic alleviation. These were musings sounded from within SDS as well. Sharon

Jeffrey, the only female member on the ERAP Supervisory Committee advised,

“Briefly, I think NSM activities raise many questions about [the] way SDS… is thinking about forming an adult group to effectuate change.”96

Tom Hayden had similarly remarked, “Can we spread our organizational power as far as our ideological influence, or are we inevitably assigned to a vague

educational role in a society that increasingly is built deaf to the sounds of protest?”97

What SNCC and NSM offered was something dramatic: “putting your body on the line” for what you believe in.98 For Hayden and Jeffrey, radicalizing the campus was not consequential enough when compared to the work of students in the civil rights movement.

Of course, solely participating in activities attributed to the civil rights

movement did not inherently mean forgoing the New Left template, which was

95 David Barber, A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why It Failed (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 21. 96 Jeffrey quote taken from Miller, 187: Sharon Jeffrey to SDS group in Ann Arbor, February 23, 1963; Flacks papers. 97 Hayden quote taken from Miller, 187: Tom Hayden, SDS Bulletin 4 (March-April 1963), 16. 98 Frost, Interracial Movement of the Poor, 10. 40

always multi-faceted. Indeed, the original intent behind the creation of ERAP

stayed very much in line with the plan to build a coalition of voters as detailed by

Port Huron. ERAP was one of the means to this end, or so Haber and Max thought.

What happened at the National Council meeting, however, made ERAP the single

means to an entirely different end. The ERAP plan was not only unoriginal in practice, but in its theoretical framework as well, which came in the form of an

ERAP report entitled An Interracial Movement of the Poor?

“An Interracial Movement of the Poor?”

Having been spurred on by Carmichael and the success of their position at

the 1963 National Council, Tom Hayden and Carl Wittman distributed the influential

An Interracial Movement of the Poor?—a defense and structure for community

organizing—to college campuses. In the essay, Hayden and Wittman argued that only by physically working with people could SDS successfully change society. The people who were most suitable for organization and radicalization, they argued, were the poor, who shared similar plights across class lines. Through community organizing, ERAP and SDS could theoretically end poverty and its parasite, racism.

It is worth noting that Hayden and Wittman were advocating a substantial shift in SDS’s emphasis, even framing it in terms of a new movement. How this community

organizing project was a distinct enough entity to constitute itself as a new movement

vis-à-vis nearly identical civil rights projects that had already been implemented is

somewhat mystifying. Operating under the guise of a new movement was undoubtedly

41 a self-fulfilling premise for ERAP members and stressed their yearning for relevance.

Realistically, it was simply a new direction for an organization whose greatest success up to this point was the widely circulated Port Huron Statement they had shied away

from.

By placing a theoretical framework around community organizing, Hayden

and Wittman were seemingly attempting to counter claims by Haber and others

that they were being reactionary. As ERAP historian Jennifer Frost has shown, An

Interracial Movement of the Poor?, although written before the contentious convention, was only distributed afterward.99 However, as it stresses the link between economic issues and class, the ideology underpinning the document closely resembles Marxism. As SDS member Paul Potter commented, it was “hardly the most refreshing document to come out of the New Left.”100 Originality was more readily available in a project that ERAP members believed was old-fashioned.

99 Frost, Interracial Movement of the Poor, 27. 100 Miller, Democracy is in the Streets, 189. 42

CHAPTER FIVE

THE POLITICAL EDUCATION PROJECT (PEP)

Countering Goldwaterism and the “White Backlash”

The nomination of Barry Goldwater as the 1964 Republican Party candidate for

president, more than any other event, troubled the small politically minded faction of

SDS that would create the Political Education Project. Whereas SDS had spent years

trying to move the country toward the left, the nomination of Goldwater, the staunch

conservative who accepted his party’s call with his famous declaration, “Extremism in

the defense of liberty is no vice,” seemed a tangible failure.101 Much like the SDS had

attempted, Goldwater had at least partly succeeded in radicalizing a portion of the

American public. For the New Left, however, this shift was going in the wrong

direction and represented a real danger for their goals. For the future PEP founders,

notably Jim Williams, Steve Max, and Doug Ireland, Goldwaterism needed to be

explained and, most importantly, countered.

The central question the politically-oriented faction of the SDS sought to answer

was why the middle class of the Republican Party had opted for what PEP saw as a

reactionary politician in a time of relative affluence and stability. Jim Williams

acknowledges in his essay, “Goldwaterism and its Origins,” that reactionary strands

have always existed in American politics, but that Goldwaterism had “achieved an

101 Barry Goldwater, 1964 Republican National Convention (San Francisco, 1964). 43 organizational sophistication which it [reactionary politics] never previously had.”102

Williams explains this phenomenon as the result of a change in the economic background of the middle class. Members of the middle class in America were once shopkeepers and artisans who had some amount of influence on society. As Williams describes it, “the modern professional man,” of the 1960s, as an employee, exercised negligible influence on society while simultaneously being pressured by the stress of long-standing financial obligations, such as mortgages, college, and interest payments on credit cards.103 While maintaining relative affluence, the middle class was “suffering from a profound sense of economic insecurity,” which was agitated by the growing stature of African-Americans and other minorities. 104 The doctrine of equal opportunity, Williams argues, caused a “white backlash” that elevated Goldwater to the Republican Party’s frontrunner.

The “white backlash” against civil rights advancements presented a challenge for the New Left political organizers. The constituency that had elevated George

Wallace to a national figure, however, was something more easily explained as part of the unwinnable “racist vote;” the “white backlash” against civil rights could not so easily be defined as strictly racist. It was a “new racism” that had been recently developed by parts of the middle class, and was another dangerous regression for the nation. “Goldwater and the White Backlash,” a paper published by the Political

Education Project and written by Tom Kahn, a director of the League for Industrial

102 Jim Williams, "Goldwaterism: Its Origin and Impact," Political Education Project of Students for a Democratic Society (1964), 3. 103 Ibid., 4. 104 Ibid., 5. 44

Democracy (LID), describes the backlash as the result of a mistaken view that African-

Americans were progressing too fast—a view that created economic anxiety for whites.

He writes, “The ‘white backlash’ then is part and parcel of an American tradition which holds that once the legal disabilities are cleared from an individual’s path, full opportunity to succeed has been guaranteed, subsequent success or failure is the individual’s responsibility.”105

The reality was that legal roadblocks were only part of the problem for the

African-American condition in the nation. Much more embedded in society were the social and economic traditions that solidified the status quo without the visibility of tangible laws. Kahn recognizes that this argument is difficult to make on a national stage, as people are guided by their personal experiences. It is precisely for this reason

that Kahn argued the “white backlash” is so dangerous and required serious

consideration. His own idea was to eliminate race from the argument and fight for

social and economic change as necessary to counter poverty.

Concern for this conservative shift was not unanimous in SDS. The ERAP

portion of the organization, which was then the largest SDS faction, had placed its energies outside the political field and away from university campuses in favor of urban ghettoes. A former member of the organization, Maurice Isserman, describes the

attitude of SDS as

Unlike radicals who could remember back to the 1950s and who viewed the

present political climate as a recent and fragile development, radicals who

105 Tom Kahn, "Goldwater and the White Backlash," Political Education Project of Students for a Democratic Society (1964), 2. 45

became active in the early 1960s tended to take it for granted that liberal

Democrats would remain in power forever—the only important issue was how

far and how fast the balance of political power in the nation could be shifted

toward the left.106

Those SDS members with an eye on politics attempted to convince their colleagues of the danger that Barry Goldwater and his coalition presented the nation. Even if

Goldwater’s likelihood for victory was slim, these members recognized the right-wing base that was developing. According to the statement read out at PEP’s first chapter meeting reads, “His [Goldwater] supporters combine a strange mixture of reaction and rebellion, which most liberals have yet to understand.”107

The attitude toward Goldwater within SDS was generally dismissive and

derisive. PEP members admitted that Goldwater’s low polling numbers and radical

stances made him an unlikely victor in the election, but the Republican’s candidacy

signaled a dangerous shift. Don McKelvey, assistant national secretary for SDS during

the election season, wrote to his colleague Paul Booth that Goldwater should be treated

as an “extremely important political phenomenon.”108 The Political Education Project’s

analysis of the political climate proved to be right on many fronts. Although receiving

only 39 percent of the vote on election day, Goldwater’s candidacy signaled a growing

conservative tide in American politics that would steadily grow from the 1968 election

of Richard Nixon to the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

106 Isserman, If I Had A Hammer (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 215. 107 Political Education Project of Students for a Democratic Society, "The 1964 Presidential Campaign” (1964). 108 Don McKelvey to Paul Booth, July 23, 1964. Students for a Democratic Society Papers, 1958 through 1970, Wisconsin State Historical Society. 46

Nixon’s campaign manager, Kevin Phillips, believed that the Republicans could win the South by catering to the conservatives. Phillips documented the Republicans’ potential in his influential book, The Emerging Republican Majority, which laid the

groundwork for the Republicans’ “Southern strategy.” Nixon became the first

Republican to win large portions of the South in 1968, and won the entire South in

1972. PEP had also recognized in 1964 that the Democrats were at risk of losing the

South in the future primarily because of the conservative coalition that the Republican

Party was building. As Williams almost prophetically states, “An electoral defeat will not rid us of the organization.”109

“Part of the Way with LBJ”

As a recurrent SDS theme, the Political Education Project came into existence with many ideas, but had difficulty implementing them. The early months of PEP’s development saw it struggle to provide a financial prospectus to SDS leadership. PEP had only come into existence in June of 1964 and quickly had to create a plan to influence the presidential election in November. Its position was not helped by its unpopularity within the organization. SDS President Paul Potter questioned PEP’s direction and criticized it for not having a “strategic organizing vision.”110 Before creating a concrete plan, PEP attempted to gather demographic information and gather more funds than the $1000 it had been allotted by SDS. The PEP Committee

109 Williams, “Goldwaterism,” 6. 110 Paul Potter to PEP Committee (1964), Students for a Democratic Society Papers, 1958 through 1970. Wisconsin State Historical Society. 47 succeeded in securing a grant from AFL-CIO that exceeded that of the SDS. So close

was PEP’s relationship to AFL-CIO in the initial months that there was a question of

whether the project would remain a part of SDS or be absorbed by AFL-CIO.111

Perhaps the most remembered aspects of the Political Education Project are its two campaign slogans. “Part of the Way with LBJ,” was printed on thousands of buttons and stickers distributed on college campuses. PEP members referred to their ideology as, “Johnson With Eyes Open,” which similarly became the second campaign slogan. Both these slogans reveal the audience that PEP was trying to win over. As

Johnson was unpopular among youth, neither slogan endorsed Johnson excitedly, opting for more of a concession to Johnson. Similarly, its first action was to distribute theoretical papers on the Goldwater threat. The project more often portrayed the necessity to vote as a necessity to beat Goldwater, rather than to elect Lyndon B.

Johnson. Indeed, PEP openly admitted that “Goldwater’s defeat is the issue.”112

President Johnson was not important for PEP’s ultimate goal of pushing the

Democratic Party further left. Making the leftist youth vote a bigger percentage of the

Democratic Party’s total return would ideally give them more influence.

As previously discussed, PEP had serious concerns about the coalition that had built around Barry Goldwater. Believing this coalition signaled a marked shift toward the ultra-right, PEP advocated bringing together a new Democratic coalition that would counter the advances of the ultra-right coalition. PEP leaders sought to build on previously developed ideas among civil rights and leftist leaders to form a coalition of

111 Doug Ireland to Sumner (1964), Students for a Democratic Society Papers, 1958 through 1970, Wisconsin State Historical Society. 112 Williams, "Goldwaterism," 8. 48

African-American, labor, and liberal groups. They argued that the coalition must not

only include these three groups, but it must tap into the voting potential of “the other

America,” which referred to urban and rural poor along with African-Americans in

ghettos.113 Registering African-Americans to vote was what they had hoped ERAP

would help them accomplish, but ERAP’s rejection of using community organizing for

political purposes forced the impetus onto PEP.

Another potential voting base that had not been properly exploited was the

student base. Jim Williams referred to the Democratic Party as “not doing much at

all” on college campuses.114 PEP attempted to counter the Democrats’ lack of a

presence by printing and distributing tens of thousands of pieces of literature

provided to them by various liberal organizations and working to get out the vote..

During the 1960s, voting restrictions on college students that prevented them from

registering to vote in states that were not their official residence. PEP wanted to

challenge these restrictions, and organize absentee ballots for students who could

only register in their hometowns. The project recommended staging “go home and

out-of-state universities.115 This campaign was carried out on twenty college

campuses around the nation.116 PEP also encouraged its chapters to set up voter

registrations around their local community. The primary target of these efforts

113 Williams, "Goldwaterism,” 7; SDS members were heavily influenced by Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1962) 114 Jim Williams to Bill Knapp, 1964, Students for a Democratic Society Papers, 1958 through 1970, Wisconsin State Historical Society. 115 Williams, "Goldwaterism,” 8. 116 Doug Ireland and Steve Max, “SDS and ’64 – A Tactical Approach,” SDS Bulletin, 1964, 2. 49 would be laborers who could act as counter-balances for the “white backlash” votes

Goldwater was bound to receive.

The Political Education Project recognized that the Supreme Court declaration that all congressional districts must have a similar population provided an unprecedented opportunity to make significant Democratic gains in the upcoming election.117 Redistricting would allow for highly populated urban centers to be given

more representatives in Congress. Although these areas usually produced low voter turnout, PEP wanted to initiate voter registration and begin to increase the voter base.

They also saw Georgia’s recent change to lower the voting age to 18 as another opportunity. PEP began to research methods in which they could push through the 18 year old vote on a state level.118

While their successes may not have been as pronounced as they would have hoped, the Political Education Project from very early on recognized several voting bases that the Democratic Party could potentially capitalize on to increase their own coalition and counter the growing rightist coalition. Since the 1960s, the Democrats, as

PEP had encouraged, have increased their influence in the student population and the

“other America” that had been too apathetic to vote. As they did when analyzing the growing threat of Goldwaterism, the PEP faction of the New Left demonstrated an understanding of American society and American politics. These realizations proved hard to act on, however, as the project would not survive to see another election after

1964.

117 Doug Ireland and Steve Max, “Tactical Approach,” 1. 118 Political Education Project, “18 year old vote [1964],” Memorandum. From Wisconsin State Historical Society, Students for a Democratic Society Papers, 1958 through 1970. 50

Gone With Goldwater

The Political Education Project had built itself up primarily as an opposition

group to Barry Goldwater. While they had always maintained that Goldwater’s

chances for victory were extremely unlikely, the danger they had discussed before

the election now seemed almost sensational in the face of the results. James Miller

wrote that “to many activists,” PEP “seemed increasingly irrelevant” after the

election. It had been an unpopular endeavor within SDS from the beginning, and

had justified its existence by emphasizing the dangers of the Goldwater candidacy.

Although many of these warnings now seem justified when the 1968 election is

considered, it was hard to argue against the electoral college results of the current

year.

Steve Max and Jim Williams traveled to the National Council in late 1964

knowing that the project’s days were numbered. Writing to ERAP director Rennie

Davis before the November election, Williams acknowledged that “at this point we

have to fight for our life as a project… we are broke.”119 PEP’s problems were not just limited to a lack of interest and a lack of financial stability. Compounding these issues were members within SDS who were opposed to PEP’s existence and had

attempted to dismantle it. Then SDS National Secretary Lee Webb referred to the

efforts against PEP as an “irresponsible campaign of political assassination.”120

119 Jim Williams to Rennie Davis, October 13, 1964, Students for a Democratic Society Papers, 1958 through 1970, Wisconsin State Historical Society. 120 Sale, SDS, 102. 51

At the 1964 National Council meeting, the project attempted to revive itself with a proposal to set up a community voter registration in Cairo, Illinois. Both Max and Williams knew that the chances of PEP continuing on were slim. Instead of authorizing a continuation of PEP, ERAP adopted PEP’s Cairo plan, and then days later, ERAP scrapped the idea all together. Paul Potter remembers it as “the prime example of sectarianism in SDS. We destroyed them.”121 Days later, Steve Max and

Jim Williams sent out the Political Education Project’s final notice:

Regretfully we announce that the Political Education Project is closing operations. Of course Jim and I feel that an operation like PEP should be a major priority in an organization like SDS. Perhaps some of the funds now being used to build up large full-time community-work staffs could better be employed in research and education on the campus level. Unfortunately the organization has set its priorities in another way.122

Remembering the Political Education Project

The Political Education Project represents a number of approaches for

Students for a Democratic Society. By adhering to the political system, it

represented a traditional way of attempting to bring about societal change, showing

that not all of those in SDS had agreed to an about-face. PEP also showed that the

SDS was not an all-inclusive organization and was subject to factions that were

willing to eliminate opposing views.

121 Sale, SDS, 103. 122 Max quote taken from Sale, 103: Steve Max, "Regretfully [February 23, 1965]" Worklist Mailing.

Perhaps what is most interesting about the Political Education Project was its impressive understanding of American society and American politics. Even before the project was formed, Steve Max saw the potential of building a new coalition for the Democratic Party. PEP recognized what the Goldwater nomination had meant for the country. The Republican Party had begun to build a base that presented a real danger for the Democratic Party and leftists. PEP had foreseen the possibility of a conservative resurgence and attempted to counter it. The conservative shift did occur, only four years later with the election of Richard Nixon.

While PEP perceived the Republican coalition that could, and eventually did, present a problem to the Democrats dominance of the 1960s, it also detailed the liberal coalition that would be able to counter it. PEP had attempted to register a great number of students to vote and brought political campaigning to the college campus, much like the Democratic Party has done in the 2000s. It similarly attempted to penetrate the apathy of the poverty and minority vote, both of which have become strong electoral bases of the Democrats. The recent shift in electoral demographics has arguably been the cause of the Democratic successes in the past four out of six presidential elections. These were shifts that the Political Education

Project in 1964 had both encouraged and attempted to bring about. That is to say, the Political Education Project developed ideas that were before their time.

CHAPTER SIX

CONCLUSION

Historians have divided SDS’s activities into distinct phases, assuming a

continuity of the New Left ran through it, as if an entire movement was reorienting

simply because an organization was reorienting. Taken alone, it can be argued that

moving away from the campus was not enough to destroy the New Left movement.

After all, the chronology of SDS shows that the organization, after failing to make a

community impact, reverted back to the campus to protest the war in Vietnam in

the second half of the 1960s. This argument is inherently made by historians who

have pointed to other mishaps of the organization as the cause of the movement’s

failure. However, because ERAP was an immediate fiasco, and because the

movement had dedicated nearly all its resources toward the effort, it was unable to

reestablish itself on the campus permanently.

While SDS’s Vietnam protests were the largest numerical representation of

the organization, they were students brought to the organization by that single

issue. Their involvement subsequently died with the war, as is evident by the

organization sinking to its nadir so soon after its peak. SDS had spent years off- campus struggling to organize the poor, rather than building foundations on college campuses. While drafting The Port Huron Statement was a proactive undertaking, spurred on by nothing but a desire within themselves, protesting Vietnam was very

54 much a reactive endeavor from SDS, owing more to Johnson’s escalation than their prowess.

The Political Education Project represents a path not taken for SDS that closely mirrors the original way that Port Huron saw the organization functioning.

This young breed of radicals needed to research issues and understand them in order to formulate solutions. Those involved with PEP did just that, unaware of how accurate their analysis of the parties would be.

Historian Stephen B. Young, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Port

Huron has written,

The statement then argued for ‘two genuine parties, centered around issues and essential values, demanding allegiance to party principles.’ The opposing ideological party was to be a fusion of white southern Democrats with white Republicans into a conservative party protecting status quo privileges and property. The Democrat and Republican parties that we have today are the very ones proposed by the Port Huron Statement… For our current winter of political despair, we have partly to thank ideas set forth 50 years ago. Ideas can have long shelf lives, ruling our minds long after their original proponents have been forgotten.123

Indeed, we do have The Port Huron Statement to thank partly for the realignment.

The organization that sponsored the document, however, deserves little credit for

enacting these ideas, save for a few of its outcasts.

123 Stephen B. Young, “It's the Port Huron Statement, Stupid." Saint Paul Legal Ledger Capitol Report, 27 Feb. 2013. Academic OneFile. Web. 29 Oct. 2013. 55

Given its intellectual proximity to a Port Huron-defined New Left, PEP’s

exclusion from studies of the movement is disappointing, although explainable in the context of the Sixties. It is the result of an abundance of scholars who perceived the events of the 1960s firsthand and have given precedence to the most vocal and visible portion of the decade, the increasingly violent anti-war protests. The construction of their narratives reflects a sense of what was to come in later years, as if it were inevitable. Although often written chronologically, the narratives are consistently maneuvered onto a path that leads to the opposition to Vietnam. In doing so, historians—although beginning their narratives with Port Huron—have failed to track the progression of the ideology it entailed because, as it relates to

SDS, its end arrived much sooner than the Vietnam demonstrations.

While building to the Vietnam demonstrations is one method of interpreting the events of Sixties, it assumes a false sense of continuity through SDS. Historians have taken SDS’s two peak moments of relevance—those of drafting Port Huron and protesting Vietnam—and forced an uninterrupted New Left narrative between them. This is explainable given that SDS had continually seen itself as a new movement, no matter where its ephemeral interests took it. While this methodology of “connecting the dots” is sufficient to detail the life of an organization, it fails to encapsulate something as intangible as a movement. The scholars from within SDS who wrote about the organization, reinforced this seemingly structural link of their organization to a new movement.

As Sixties’ scholar Wini Breines has argued, relating the early developmental

years of SDS to the future allowed historians from within the movement to

highlight what was best about the organization: the adherence to democratic

principles and the development of new ideas.124 Instead, “they distance themselves from the student movement after 1967 and 1968, repelled by increasingly militant mass demonstrations and confrontations, and increasingly total rejection of the system.125 Their lack of content regarding events of later years is not to be mistaken for a lack of concern.

In reality, these years were their primary concern; their task was partly to defend and contextualize the descent into violence that had tarnished the organization’s name. Not only did the Vietnam War have the greatest visceral impact on the American public, but it emotionally scarred many SDS members who lost their revolutionary vanguard. Reinforcing the imaginative intellectualism of

the early years provided a counterweight to the later years by placing the violence

in a much greater context. As it has been shown, however, the ethos that developed

at Port Huron lasted only briefly for SDS, dragged along by an increasingly

marginalized and eventually terminated group. These consensus historians have for

too long underplayed the meaning of abandoning Port Huron, seeing it simply as a

new phase of the New Left, rather than a complete partition.

Future historians of the New Left, now fifty years removed, should reject

further examinations of the movement that banally are propelled to a

124 Winifred Breines, "Whose New Left?," The Journal of American History 75, no. 2 (Sep 1988): 530. 125 Ibid., 528. 57 predetermined ending, as little is to be gained in terms of analysis. This study has uncovered a previously ignored SDS sect, and underlined its adherence to an inventive way of implementing change that rightly was defined as a New Left. Still, more work is needed that traces the influence of Port Huron and the New Left in

the years following the dissolution of PEP.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Adam Mikhail was born in Alexandria, Egypt. He received his B.A. in History from Florida State University. As a graduate student at FSU, he was awarded the

Walbolt MA Fellowship and completed his master’s degree in 2013. He is an avid

Chelsea FC supporter.