Word: sds
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...SDS, continues to make headlines on occasion: Former members may, for example, sell themselves as born-again Wall Street brokers, or shoot up armored bank trucks and their passengers. With time, it becomes increasingly easy, and even fashionable, to dismiss the unusual attitudes and-actions of the Sixties as merely the source of this ludicrous legacy...
Racial discrimination was the loose thread, which, when repeatedly yanked by Southern Black civil rights workers, began to unravel the myth of a just society for thousands of white students in the North. This revelation, not Vietnam, inspired SDS to pull away from its democratic-socialist parent organization. Starting with a few hundred members scattered from Harvard to Berkeley, the group gradually constructed a platform which linked the students' own impatience with mainstream Democratic politics to the suffering of the non-white and the destitute. In its 1962 manifesto, The Port Huron Statement, SDS zeroed in on the links between...
...passing, the group put its theory to work in the form of community organizing squads dispatched to galvanize the urban poor. The Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) sponsored outposts in as many as 10 major cities at its peak and, with its hundreds of volunteers, dominated the SDS agenda through the summer...
...SMALL BODY of scholarship that bothers to examine the student movement's early years with any care, most commentary treats the SDS leadership with a degree of respect verging on reverence. "Ideological contamination," the authors of Roots call it, and they argue a convincing case for the generalization. The most-often cited secondary sources on SDS were written by people who openly proclaim their sympathy for, if not actual participation in, some aspect of the New Left. Kirkpatrick Sale, author of the meticulously detailed SDS, describes the group's charter members as "a remarkable group of people... committed, energetic, perceptive...
Rothman and Lichter take the opposite approach, searching for self-interest even in the halcyon formative stages of SDS. Their initial quantitative ethnic survey of group members finds that over half of the initial SDS leadership was Jewish, rather than the more commonly accepted estimate in Sale's book of "perhaps a third." Operating with that in mind, the authors offer a complicated two-pronged assessment: 1) Jewish psychological defense mechanisms, not radical idealism, sparked what turned out to be a valuable new critique of American society and 2) when the original leadership gave way to a largely non-Jewish...