Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) (United States)

Abstract

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was the leading national organization in the white student movement of the 1960s. SDS originated as the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), whose roots were in the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, founded in 1905. The latter group, founded by such notables as Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Walter Lippmann, became the League for Industrial Democracy in 1921. SLID was its youth wing and was part of the burgeoning student Left of the 1930s; it declined in membership and visibility through the 1950s. The mobilization of black students beginning in 1960, and the stirrings then of political interest on the part of some grouplets of white students, provided opportunity for a revitalized organized student Left. Al Haber, seeing that the SLID was an organizational shell with some resources, led an effort to change its name to Students for a Democratic Society, and actively recruited a number of student activist leaders to construct an ideological center for the emerging student movement. One of those he recruited, Tom Hayden, editor of the University of Michigan Daily agreed to draft a manifesto for SDS and the wider movement. This draft was debated and adopted, along with a new constitution, at the founding convention of the newly constituted SDS in June 1962, at a United Auto Workers conference center in Port Huron, Michigan. The conference was attended by several dozen students from campuses in the northeast and Midwest. Many of these, like Hayden, were student government leaders and campus activists; a number of leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) came to the Port Huron meeting.