Radicals To Return To Chicago After 37 Years
http://www.nysun.com/article/36594 By GARY SHAPIRO July 24, 2006 Students for a Democratic Society, the "New Left" organization whose numbers swelled on college campuses in the 1960s, has resurrected itself and is planning its first national convention in 37 years. Next week, on August 4-7, the reconstituted group returns to Chicago, the same city where SDS had its headquarters and where rioting erupted at the 1968 Democratic Party convention. "We're attempting to have a convention that is unifying, to heal the wounds of the last convention," an SDS New York regional coordinator, Thomas Good, 48, said. "Our radical ideas include health care for everyone and stopping torture as an instrument of foreign policy." "I am a little skeptical or bemused at the idea that you can go back and pluck a name out of history," a Hamilton College history professor, Maurice Isserman, 55, said. The author of "If I Had A Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and The Birth of the New Left," Mr. Isserman remains unapologetic about his own membership in SDS in 1968-9 but is nevertheless baffled why anyone would want to re-create the group today. He compared it to "something like a costume drama" of "dressing up in other people's clothes." To announce the convention, an SDS member from the University of Arizona in Tucson, Geoff White, 21, adapted the design of a red fist from an old poster announcing the "Days of Rage" in 1969, when an SDS faction, the Weathermen, rampaged on Chicago's streets in response to the trial of the "Chicago Seven," who had been indicted for inciting the riots a year earlier. The new convention came about after Pat Korte, 18, who started an SDS chapter at Stonington High School in Connecticut, sent out e-mails last November to students and veteran activists hoping to connect various SDS chapters into a national structure. He contacted Mr. Good, who helped build a Web site linking the chapters. Mr. Good said 150 people so far have signed up for the convention, and he believes that number could more than triple. The Web site www.studentsforademocraticsociety.org lists 22 high school and 82 university chapter contacts. Mr. Good said the organization signed up its 1,000th member earlier this month. In March, members of SDS were among those arrested in Times Square protesting the Iraq War. Begun in 1960, SDS was a radical campus organization that developed from the youth section of the League for Industrial Democracy, whose roots in turn could be traced to the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. In 1962, SDS adopted a document calling for participatory democracy, "The Port Huron Statement," which helped catapult its principal author, Tom Hayden, to national prominence. Membership grew steadily between 1962 and 1965 and dramatically thereafter, reaching an estimated total of 100,000 before its leadership splintered into Weathermen and Maoist factions during its final convention in Chicago in 1969. A Cooper Union professor, Fred Siegel, 61, said, "The great advantage the New Left had was a sense of enormous promise of walking down unexplored paths. Now, 35 years later, we see that those paths led to personal and social breakdown. There's no returning to the earlier innocence." The author of "Power and the Idealists," Paul Berman, who was a freshman at Columbia in 1968, said: "I myself think that student radicalism of the 1960s does have a legacy today: NGO humanitarianism and international human rights activism. It's a living tradition. It's not at all a nostalgic leftism." "To the extent that achieving democracy is nostalgic," Mr. Good said, "then I'm nostalgic." "These people can't give up the mystique of democracy," a CUNY Graduate Center historian, John Patrick Diggins, 71, said. Mr. Diggins, whose forthcoming book is a liberal appreciation of Ronald Reagan, said SDS's absolute faith in democracy bringing about freedom was misplaced: "This is not how freedom comes into existence. Historically it was security of life and self-preservation that came before liberty." A cabinetmaker in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Robert Alan Haber, 69, who was the first president of SDS between 1960 and 1962 and is part of the current effort to revitalize the organization, conceded that the name SDS carries "baggage," but he said it mostly generates a positive reaction. Mr. Haber, who has organized SDS meetings in Ann Arbor in the past couple of years, said responses he hears are "congratulations" or "Leave it to the kids to do what they want to do." A former editor of Ramparts, a new left magazine, and now a fellow of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, Sol Stern, 70, said, "Forget the slogan, 'Don't trust anyone over 30.' Now, it's 'What do you do with septuagenarians?'" Mr. Haber said a "multi-generational" movement could fill a gap in our current "fragmented" political culture. Adults can join the SDS affiliate "Movement for a Democratic Society." Calls to the office of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, 64, the eldest son of the Chicago mayor during the riots in the 1960s, the late Richard J. Daley, were not returned by press time. . --^---------------------------------------------------------------- This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?b1deLP.b61dqi.Y2hhbmdl Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For Topica's complete suite of email marketing solutions visit: http://www.topica.com/?p=TEXFOOTER --^---------------------------------------------------------------- John Johnson Change-Links Progressive Newspaper [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://change-links.org Subscribe to our list server. Email [EMAIL PROTECTED] (818) 782-1412 Cell (818) 681-7448. === --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
