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Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago
Chronicles the development of the new left from 1962 to 1968
432 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1987
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368 people want to read
About the author
James Miller
12 books31 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
James Miller is a professor of politics and the chair of liberal studies at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of Examined Lives, The Passion of Michel Foucault, and Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock & Roll, 1947–1977, among other books. He lives in New York City.
http://us.macmillan.com/author/jamesm...
James Miller is a professor of politics and the chair of liberal studies at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of Examined Lives, The Passion of Michel Foucault, and Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock & Roll, 1947–1977, among other books. He lives in New York City.
http://us.macmillan.com/author/jamesm...
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
August 11, 2022
The American radical student movement of the sixties has had an ambiguous effect on American culture and politics. It raised the political consciousness of a generation and contributed significantly to the spirit of opposition that was reflected in music, social relations, and politics. It drew on the youth's idealism that also expressed itself in the Peace Corps, the Kennedys, and the Great Society. However, the movement also sowed the seeds of its own destruction by becoming increasingly militant. James Miller captures the spirit of a part of the political culture of the sixties in his study that is half a biography of several key movement leaders and half a history of the Students for a Democratic Society, the prominent organization of the period.
Miller's work is valuable because it discusses some of the most important people in the movement, but it is also incomplete and somewhat distorted for the same reason. The group that the author has chosen to portray, the people responsible for creating the SDS and shaping its early direction, does not represent the range of political orientations of the decade.
This study is still evocative of an important period in American political life, though. The author has chosen several individuals to demonstrate what he saw as the driving force of the period – idealism, a combination of American pragmatism and radicalism, and a willingness to try new approaches to politics and social change.
The person who is the focus of Miller's work is, Tom Hayden, the husband of Jane Fonda and leader of an informal, west-coast liberal-radical coalition. Hayden, who came from a conservative middle western background, was radicalized at the University of Michigan, where he edited the campus newspaper and eventually joined SDS and became its most influential leader for a period. Several of the other important people also came from the University of Michigan. Al Haber, the son of a liberal college professor, was an intellectual leader in the movement. Sharon Jeffery, another Michigan student, also assumed a leadership role. The author discusses the family backgrounds, ideological orientations and activities of these people and several other leaders.
As the author explains, the SDS, at least in the early sixties, was affiliated to the League for Industrial Democracy, a social-democratic educational organization with strong ties to several of the progressive labor unions in New York. The LID was not at all pleased with the more radical direction of the SDS, and tried, unsuccessfully, to reign it. The mediator was Michael Harrington, an LID member, who was in his thirties at the time and in touch with the student generation. Harrington had just published The Other America, an influential book on poverty, and was widely respected. He felt at the time that the SDS leaders, who were new to radicalism, did not have a sufficiently strong anti-Communist position, although he later realized that the LID leadership was too harsh on the SDS and that the break was an error. As Miller notes, generational politics played a role in the development of the New Left.
An important document in this work is the Port Huron Statement, which the author sees as one of the most important political manifestos of the period and a symbol of a new approach to American radical politics. The statement was drafted by Tom Hayden and revised at an SDS conference in 1962. It reflects the concerns of the newly politicized, campus-based movement for social change. It is remarkably free of the ideological baggage of previous generations of American radicalism and is, in many ways, an American political document for social change. The author sees it as the rallying cry of a generation, but he might be exaggerating – many of the students who joined the Movement after 1964 had never heard of the Port Huron Statement.
The author also traces how different political issues were combined by the members of the movement. For instance, one of the reasons for the rise of the SDS was its ability to link concerns such as the newly emerging civil rights movement, anti-war activism, and a desire to work for social equality. They would not have gained such strong support if they had focused solely on Vietnam because the American students were not as aware of the American involvement in the Vietnam conflict at the time. One of the first initiatives of the SDS was a series of campaigns to organize poor people in several inner-city areas. Hayden himself directed an only modestly successful effort in Newark, New Jersey. A number of SDS leaders quit the university in order to participate in these off-campus movements, but their impact on the student population was minimal. It was not until the Vietnam conflict escalated that the SDS gain a massive following in the universities. As the author narrates, this success proved to be seriously problematic for the organization because it made quick decision-making difficult.
The author chronicles the various changes in the SDS up to the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, when the police rioted and student politics became significantly radicalized, from the perspective of the people whom he depicts. Although this is an effective way of bringing the turbulent American student politics to life, it does not provide a sense of the diversity of activism in the country. For instance, the Berkeley student revolt of 1964, which is considered to have started the student movement in America because of its wide coverage in the mass media, was not led by SDS and is not given much attention in this book. It is of course impossible to cover everything with one study, but the author's focus on the SDS leaders only does not demonstrate how complex and variegated the Movement actually was.
DEMOCRACY IS IN THE STREETS is a study that brings to life some of the people in important positions of student leadership. It follows their thoughts and careers. It shows them as sometimes confused and sometimes inspired individuals working for social change in a rapidly changing and increasingly divided society. However, Miller tells only part of the story, forgetting about the important precursors of the SDS and the rank and file of the Movement. This book is still a great, evocative read, though.
Miller's work is valuable because it discusses some of the most important people in the movement, but it is also incomplete and somewhat distorted for the same reason. The group that the author has chosen to portray, the people responsible for creating the SDS and shaping its early direction, does not represent the range of political orientations of the decade.
This study is still evocative of an important period in American political life, though. The author has chosen several individuals to demonstrate what he saw as the driving force of the period – idealism, a combination of American pragmatism and radicalism, and a willingness to try new approaches to politics and social change.
The person who is the focus of Miller's work is, Tom Hayden, the husband of Jane Fonda and leader of an informal, west-coast liberal-radical coalition. Hayden, who came from a conservative middle western background, was radicalized at the University of Michigan, where he edited the campus newspaper and eventually joined SDS and became its most influential leader for a period. Several of the other important people also came from the University of Michigan. Al Haber, the son of a liberal college professor, was an intellectual leader in the movement. Sharon Jeffery, another Michigan student, also assumed a leadership role. The author discusses the family backgrounds, ideological orientations and activities of these people and several other leaders.
As the author explains, the SDS, at least in the early sixties, was affiliated to the League for Industrial Democracy, a social-democratic educational organization with strong ties to several of the progressive labor unions in New York. The LID was not at all pleased with the more radical direction of the SDS, and tried, unsuccessfully, to reign it. The mediator was Michael Harrington, an LID member, who was in his thirties at the time and in touch with the student generation. Harrington had just published The Other America, an influential book on poverty, and was widely respected. He felt at the time that the SDS leaders, who were new to radicalism, did not have a sufficiently strong anti-Communist position, although he later realized that the LID leadership was too harsh on the SDS and that the break was an error. As Miller notes, generational politics played a role in the development of the New Left.
An important document in this work is the Port Huron Statement, which the author sees as one of the most important political manifestos of the period and a symbol of a new approach to American radical politics. The statement was drafted by Tom Hayden and revised at an SDS conference in 1962. It reflects the concerns of the newly politicized, campus-based movement for social change. It is remarkably free of the ideological baggage of previous generations of American radicalism and is, in many ways, an American political document for social change. The author sees it as the rallying cry of a generation, but he might be exaggerating – many of the students who joined the Movement after 1964 had never heard of the Port Huron Statement.
The author also traces how different political issues were combined by the members of the movement. For instance, one of the reasons for the rise of the SDS was its ability to link concerns such as the newly emerging civil rights movement, anti-war activism, and a desire to work for social equality. They would not have gained such strong support if they had focused solely on Vietnam because the American students were not as aware of the American involvement in the Vietnam conflict at the time. One of the first initiatives of the SDS was a series of campaigns to organize poor people in several inner-city areas. Hayden himself directed an only modestly successful effort in Newark, New Jersey. A number of SDS leaders quit the university in order to participate in these off-campus movements, but their impact on the student population was minimal. It was not until the Vietnam conflict escalated that the SDS gain a massive following in the universities. As the author narrates, this success proved to be seriously problematic for the organization because it made quick decision-making difficult.
The author chronicles the various changes in the SDS up to the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, when the police rioted and student politics became significantly radicalized, from the perspective of the people whom he depicts. Although this is an effective way of bringing the turbulent American student politics to life, it does not provide a sense of the diversity of activism in the country. For instance, the Berkeley student revolt of 1964, which is considered to have started the student movement in America because of its wide coverage in the mass media, was not led by SDS and is not given much attention in this book. It is of course impossible to cover everything with one study, but the author's focus on the SDS leaders only does not demonstrate how complex and variegated the Movement actually was.
DEMOCRACY IS IN THE STREETS is a study that brings to life some of the people in important positions of student leadership. It follows their thoughts and careers. It shows them as sometimes confused and sometimes inspired individuals working for social change in a rapidly changing and increasingly divided society. However, Miller tells only part of the story, forgetting about the important precursors of the SDS and the rank and file of the Movement. This book is still a great, evocative read, though.
August 11, 2018
A straightforward overview of the New Left from the late Fifties through the early Seventies. Unlike some of Tom Hayden's, Todd Gitlin's, and other SDSers' retrospective work--valuable and compelling in its own way--Miller's account benefits from its linearity and a little more emotional distance. However, he might have done better without the frame device of following four individuals--Dick Flacks, Sharon Jeffrey, Paul Booth, and Tom Hayden--on their journeys through and beyond SDS. Only in Hayden's case is this biographical approach consistent and clear; Flacks and Jeffrey don't loom much larger in their own chapters than anybody else, and in Booth's chapter it's often difficult to tell who the leading figure is even supposed to be. That small structural malfunction aside, it's a solid introduction to the saga of SDS and its offspring. (However, I would highly recommend reading the Port Huron Statement--which is included as an appendix at the back of the book--before you get started.)
November 19, 2015
An excellent introduction to the theory and tangled history of the idea of "participatory democracy" which, to my mind, represents the best that the New Left had to offer during the turbulent period between the Port Huron Conference, where the defining statement of (early) Students for a Democratic Society, was drafted to the tragic denouement represented by the chaos at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Miller, who was a participant and who not surprisingly reveals his biases at several key junctures, builds the story around the biographies of people who played key roles in SDS: Tom Hayden, Al Habar, Sharon Jeffrey, Paul Booth; Richard Flacks. As Wini Breines noted in an excellent overview of New Left scholarship published in The Journal of American History in the late 80s (still as good an essay as there is on the movement and its problems), Miller's approach sacrifices a certain amount of historical breadth; you can find that in Todd Gittlin's Years of Hope, Days of Rage (which I think is more deeply flawed).
What Miller does very very well is examine the process that led SDS to participatory democracy; the strange combination of emotional and moral precision and theoretical ambiguity embedded in the idea; and the practical difficulties that helped squander SDS's potential. (As Breines underscores, you can't separate that, or the increasing violence on the fringes of the New Left, from the massive violence of US policy in Vietnam and the intensive attacks on the movement by government agencies.) I think Miller's wrong when he downplays the impact of the Civil Rights Movement on SDS and, though he's better than Gittlin on the sexism within the movement, he shunts important figures like Casey Cason and Mary King into the shadows. He does a better job with Jeffrey.
No single book has yet done a definitive job with the New Left, but this is probably the best place to start.
What Miller does very very well is examine the process that led SDS to participatory democracy; the strange combination of emotional and moral precision and theoretical ambiguity embedded in the idea; and the practical difficulties that helped squander SDS's potential. (As Breines underscores, you can't separate that, or the increasing violence on the fringes of the New Left, from the massive violence of US policy in Vietnam and the intensive attacks on the movement by government agencies.) I think Miller's wrong when he downplays the impact of the Civil Rights Movement on SDS and, though he's better than Gittlin on the sexism within the movement, he shunts important figures like Casey Cason and Mary King into the shadows. He does a better job with Jeffrey.
No single book has yet done a definitive job with the New Left, but this is probably the best place to start.
November 3, 2007
My college mentor, Ray Seidelman, died this week. I am devastated.
He was the best teacher I ever had, and that's saying a lot, since I went to Sarah Lawrence College. That's sorta like being the bat boy for the 1927 NY Yankees. The campus was filled with great professors -- Jefferson Adams, Paul Josephson, Tara Fitzpatrick, Miriam Conant, Michael Davis. But Ray was Babe Ruth to their Gehrig, Meusel, Combs, Penncock, and Hoyt. When he stepped up to the plate, everybody backed the fuck up, because they knew they were contending with a force of nature.
Ray assigned this book to me in my junior year. The youth, vigor, and courage portrayed in it made me humble and envious. I wanted to take to the streets and change the world, too. These people had actually done it. Democracy Is in the Streets continually asks whether sixties radicals really made a difference. From my perspective, the answer is an unequivocal yes, and mostly for the better. I'm so grateful to these people for breaking down barriers of race and gender, while challenging the idea of absolute governmental power. How I wish my generation would pose a similar threat to the current presidential administration.
Anyway, Ray is dead, and I feel like a little of my youthful optimism has died, too. I'm going to go away and cry, now. But not before saying thanks, Dr. Seidelman, for being such an inspiring teacher and caring friend. You changed my life, and it was all for the better.
He was the best teacher I ever had, and that's saying a lot, since I went to Sarah Lawrence College. That's sorta like being the bat boy for the 1927 NY Yankees. The campus was filled with great professors -- Jefferson Adams, Paul Josephson, Tara Fitzpatrick, Miriam Conant, Michael Davis. But Ray was Babe Ruth to their Gehrig, Meusel, Combs, Penncock, and Hoyt. When he stepped up to the plate, everybody backed the fuck up, because they knew they were contending with a force of nature.
Ray assigned this book to me in my junior year. The youth, vigor, and courage portrayed in it made me humble and envious. I wanted to take to the streets and change the world, too. These people had actually done it. Democracy Is in the Streets continually asks whether sixties radicals really made a difference. From my perspective, the answer is an unequivocal yes, and mostly for the better. I'm so grateful to these people for breaking down barriers of race and gender, while challenging the idea of absolute governmental power. How I wish my generation would pose a similar threat to the current presidential administration.
Anyway, Ray is dead, and I feel like a little of my youthful optimism has died, too. I'm going to go away and cry, now. But not before saying thanks, Dr. Seidelman, for being such an inspiring teacher and caring friend. You changed my life, and it was all for the better.
July 25, 2007
I've been rereading this book once or twice a year since I first found it. It is primarily a biography of the early years of Students for a Democratic Society, though it tends to focus on Tom Hayden, the group's intellectual leader and the main architect of the Port Huron Statement.
Miller--author of rather decent volumes on both Rousseau and the early years of Rock and Roll--ably analyzes the intellectual foundations of the group, from C. Wright Mills and Arnold Kaufman to the organizing principles of the LID or Quaker activists. The book manages to be both sobering and inspiring and is perhaps the only true intellectual biography of the various student activist movements of the sixties.
Miller--author of rather decent volumes on both Rousseau and the early years of Rock and Roll--ably analyzes the intellectual foundations of the group, from C. Wright Mills and Arnold Kaufman to the organizing principles of the LID or Quaker activists. The book manages to be both sobering and inspiring and is perhaps the only true intellectual biography of the various student activist movements of the sixties.
June 14, 2020
One of the most interesting questions during the BLM period is whether 2020 is somehow like 1968.
To help get some context for that, I decided to re-read a history of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and "the Movement," encompassing the various commitments and protests of the 60s era. I wanted to re-read The Sixties: Years Of Hope, Days Of Rage, but I couldn't find my copy in the house, so I settled for this one, James Miller's Democracy is in the Streets (the reissue from 1994 with a new preface). The book originally came out in 1987. I read it back in the early 90s, when I was trying to understand the intellectual history that undergirded the assumptions of the critical theory I was reading then. At the time, the book blew me away. Now re-reading it, you see its flaws: While the book acknowledges the influence of SNCC on SDS, there's just not enough about the Black democratic/self-governance efforts. Feminism is scantly addressed, amounting to just a citation of Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left, and some now somewhat embarrassing quotations (p. 186: cringe-worthy). In his 1994 preface Miller notes these gaps.
Anyway, the obvious fact is that the problems of 1968 and 2020 are pretty much the same: Black unemployment, the threat of automation (noted several times in the book), the police, and systemic racism (not called that here). The problems were conceptualized differently, though: In 1968 people didn't talk about systemic or structural racism. In fact, very broadly SDS took a Marxian class-oriented approach, so besides their activism in poor black neighborhoods in Newark and elsewhere, they worked with poor whites who had left Appalachia for northern cities.
Meanwhile, you feel like the backdrop of the Vietnam war has some symmetry with COVID-19: In that era, the nightly news showed the number of deaths in Vietnam each night and now we see the toll from COVID-19 via Twitter.
One contrast I would draw would be that this time the problems are perceived as domestic (even though COVID-19 and systemic racism are both world-wide pandemics); while in 1968, the increase in hostilities with Vietnam tended to disrupt SDS's work in the cities: Students' energies recentered to the anti-war effort. So, arguably, this time we might not lose steam fixing the system because there isn't (or isn't yet) the distraction of a full-on war.
The most alarming thing re-reading this book is the vanguardism of the students. There is talk in the book of the students listening to communities, but, really, the student movement situated themselves as the people who exercised their intellectual powers to tell the non-university-educated what to do. Maybe I'm exaggerating that, but in hindsight the overweening self-regard is amazing.
One section that really stood out was Chapter 11, "A Leader in Search of Legitimacy," with page after page describing the conflicts between top-down organization and the countervailing bottom-up "participatory democracy" (which is also called "self-government" a couple of times). I think our movements today could learn a lot here. Back in the 60s, it seems that it was really difficult to get stuff done with communes and consensus: At that time, a big national movement needed big national organization: It will be interesting to see how/if BLM addresses this.
The book also touches on the role of celebrity in the Movement, and here the book is acute. On p. 271 and following, Miller traces out Tom Hayden's story as he becomes more and more famous, which undermines many of Hayden's relationships within SDS. The Movement valued authenticity so much, but by the end of the book, no one, except for the people who stuck to their local community work, could be said to have retained their authenticity.
Let's see, what else? So the moral center of the book is the protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. But the story extends from 1962 to 1971 or so. What this means for the present moment is that future historians will help us out by looking back to 2014 (if not earlier) and show how BLM, as a movement, was really full-developed years ago even though the white media wasn't registering it very well. The other disturbing thing is that the Movement and SDS petered out in the early 70s. This time let's hope that doesn't happen.
To help get some context for that, I decided to re-read a history of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and "the Movement," encompassing the various commitments and protests of the 60s era. I wanted to re-read The Sixties: Years Of Hope, Days Of Rage, but I couldn't find my copy in the house, so I settled for this one, James Miller's Democracy is in the Streets (the reissue from 1994 with a new preface). The book originally came out in 1987. I read it back in the early 90s, when I was trying to understand the intellectual history that undergirded the assumptions of the critical theory I was reading then. At the time, the book blew me away. Now re-reading it, you see its flaws: While the book acknowledges the influence of SNCC on SDS, there's just not enough about the Black democratic/self-governance efforts. Feminism is scantly addressed, amounting to just a citation of Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left, and some now somewhat embarrassing quotations (p. 186: cringe-worthy). In his 1994 preface Miller notes these gaps.
Anyway, the obvious fact is that the problems of 1968 and 2020 are pretty much the same: Black unemployment, the threat of automation (noted several times in the book), the police, and systemic racism (not called that here). The problems were conceptualized differently, though: In 1968 people didn't talk about systemic or structural racism. In fact, very broadly SDS took a Marxian class-oriented approach, so besides their activism in poor black neighborhoods in Newark and elsewhere, they worked with poor whites who had left Appalachia for northern cities.
Meanwhile, you feel like the backdrop of the Vietnam war has some symmetry with COVID-19: In that era, the nightly news showed the number of deaths in Vietnam each night and now we see the toll from COVID-19 via Twitter.
One contrast I would draw would be that this time the problems are perceived as domestic (even though COVID-19 and systemic racism are both world-wide pandemics); while in 1968, the increase in hostilities with Vietnam tended to disrupt SDS's work in the cities: Students' energies recentered to the anti-war effort. So, arguably, this time we might not lose steam fixing the system because there isn't (or isn't yet) the distraction of a full-on war.
The most alarming thing re-reading this book is the vanguardism of the students. There is talk in the book of the students listening to communities, but, really, the student movement situated themselves as the people who exercised their intellectual powers to tell the non-university-educated what to do. Maybe I'm exaggerating that, but in hindsight the overweening self-regard is amazing.
One section that really stood out was Chapter 11, "A Leader in Search of Legitimacy," with page after page describing the conflicts between top-down organization and the countervailing bottom-up "participatory democracy" (which is also called "self-government" a couple of times). I think our movements today could learn a lot here. Back in the 60s, it seems that it was really difficult to get stuff done with communes and consensus: At that time, a big national movement needed big national organization: It will be interesting to see how/if BLM addresses this.
The book also touches on the role of celebrity in the Movement, and here the book is acute. On p. 271 and following, Miller traces out Tom Hayden's story as he becomes more and more famous, which undermines many of Hayden's relationships within SDS. The Movement valued authenticity so much, but by the end of the book, no one, except for the people who stuck to their local community work, could be said to have retained their authenticity.
Let's see, what else? So the moral center of the book is the protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. But the story extends from 1962 to 1971 or so. What this means for the present moment is that future historians will help us out by looking back to 2014 (if not earlier) and show how BLM, as a movement, was really full-developed years ago even though the white media wasn't registering it very well. The other disturbing thing is that the Movement and SDS petered out in the early 70s. This time let's hope that doesn't happen.
December 24, 2019
(Really a 4.5 stars - Goodreads is the worst.)
This was overall a top-notch engaging history of SDS and some of its prime movers and organizers, as well as the larger political streams surrounding it as an organization. My only quibble with the book is that it smashed together a big picture historical narrative with biographical snapshots in a way that felt somewhat disjointed - instead of alternating between individuals and the collective throughout the book, there was 1/3 big picture then 2/3 with chapters focusing on specific characters in the story to dive deeper into the various contradictions and experiments of SDS. This does reflect the trajectory of the organization though, so overall it still works despite being a bit clanky. This is also well worth the read because it contains the full text of the Port Huron Statement, which I had never read before and is well worth reading 50+ years after the fact to see how much SDS got right AND how the seeds of their destruction were planted in their initial analysis.
This was overall a top-notch engaging history of SDS and some of its prime movers and organizers, as well as the larger political streams surrounding it as an organization. My only quibble with the book is that it smashed together a big picture historical narrative with biographical snapshots in a way that felt somewhat disjointed - instead of alternating between individuals and the collective throughout the book, there was 1/3 big picture then 2/3 with chapters focusing on specific characters in the story to dive deeper into the various contradictions and experiments of SDS. This does reflect the trajectory of the organization though, so overall it still works despite being a bit clanky. This is also well worth the read because it contains the full text of the Port Huron Statement, which I had never read before and is well worth reading 50+ years after the fact to see how much SDS got right AND how the seeds of their destruction were planted in their initial analysis.
February 7, 2024
This was a super deep dive into the philosophy of Tom Hayden and Students for a Democratic Society--if you want a day by day history of how SDS was formed, this is it! I really wish it had offered more of a zoomed out perspective on how SDS's approaches impacted groups both during the 60s and afterwards. Miller offered a tiny bit of that in the final chapter and conclusion, but it felt rushed compared to the depth and detail that was offered to minutiae of the philosophical arguments that were outlined and dissected earlier in the book. Can't say I really recommend unless you're doing research on SDS.
February 5, 2023
Read this while at University, really enjoyed it.
June 29, 2008
Serious lefty ideological combat is soooo yesteryear. Yet this book made me wonder if we're missing something by avoiding any ideological debate today. For a variety of (I think) good reasons, I've always been basically allergic to debate over left-wing ideology. Now I am wondering if it isn't time to start thinking a little bit about the big picture again.
Is a society with plentiful social goods, leisure time and education for everyone possible? Does a massive social democratic role for government lead to some level of repression? How about a loss of individual initiative? It feels like in the wake of the Bush disaster, the left might emerge from total oblivion in America - so maybe we should start up some big think if we're going to have even a tiny measure of power.
The Port Huron students were explicitly reshaping a left-wing tradition. As brash students, they really thought they could change the world - and took their internal debate really seriously. Their "intellectual work" (really wild speculation about movements and society dressed up as serious debate) certainly had an influence, changing the form and rhetoric of the student movement and activism more broadly.
Eventually, as SDS fell to shit, the savvier ones realized that they were ignoring the practical realities in favor of a BS, ill-defined vision of what they called "participatory democracy". Their early debates and statements, like at Port Huron, while lively, were ultimately sterile because they were removed from reality.
Today, it almost feels like there is something analogous happening, with the left poised to influence the broader society. But instead of surfacing debate, various bloggers subsume real differences of opinion and ideology - and instead very consciously spend their energy on tactical debates and rhetorical fussilades (don't get me wrong - I think that's great).
That "big" ideas matter - a statement I've always viewed as a lazy substitute for the actual, gritty work of campaign and advocacy work - might be more true today. Maybe we need some confrontation, especially of the biases that many of the bloggers exhibit, but don't don't understand i.e. many have a libertarian bent that is hostile to regulation. That strain of thinking could have a real negative impact if a left policy agenda is actual gets debated on a national level.
Anyway - back to the book, which is very good... tho the initial recounting of the intellectual debate is quite dry. The narrative speeds up as SDS splinters and the VC-flag waving "sixties" start.
I wish there had been a little more analysis about what went right and what went wrong - the author almost catches the brass ring, but the last few chapters leave a lot of loose ends. In any case, thought-provoking and well worth the read.
Is a society with plentiful social goods, leisure time and education for everyone possible? Does a massive social democratic role for government lead to some level of repression? How about a loss of individual initiative? It feels like in the wake of the Bush disaster, the left might emerge from total oblivion in America - so maybe we should start up some big think if we're going to have even a tiny measure of power.
The Port Huron students were explicitly reshaping a left-wing tradition. As brash students, they really thought they could change the world - and took their internal debate really seriously. Their "intellectual work" (really wild speculation about movements and society dressed up as serious debate) certainly had an influence, changing the form and rhetoric of the student movement and activism more broadly.
Eventually, as SDS fell to shit, the savvier ones realized that they were ignoring the practical realities in favor of a BS, ill-defined vision of what they called "participatory democracy". Their early debates and statements, like at Port Huron, while lively, were ultimately sterile because they were removed from reality.
Today, it almost feels like there is something analogous happening, with the left poised to influence the broader society. But instead of surfacing debate, various bloggers subsume real differences of opinion and ideology - and instead very consciously spend their energy on tactical debates and rhetorical fussilades (don't get me wrong - I think that's great).
That "big" ideas matter - a statement I've always viewed as a lazy substitute for the actual, gritty work of campaign and advocacy work - might be more true today. Maybe we need some confrontation, especially of the biases that many of the bloggers exhibit, but don't don't understand i.e. many have a libertarian bent that is hostile to regulation. That strain of thinking could have a real negative impact if a left policy agenda is actual gets debated on a national level.
Anyway - back to the book, which is very good... tho the initial recounting of the intellectual debate is quite dry. The narrative speeds up as SDS splinters and the VC-flag waving "sixties" start.
I wish there had been a little more analysis about what went right and what went wrong - the author almost catches the brass ring, but the last few chapters leave a lot of loose ends. In any case, thought-provoking and well worth the read.
February 17, 2017
This was assigned to me when I was in college, and it left such an impression on me. I was so moved and motivated by the story of the origins of the SDS and it was what made me want to be in Ann Arbor. I'm here now and it's no longer the center of student activism it once was, which makes me kind of sad. Maybe it can be again. There are lessons to be learned in here, especially in this day and age.
November 25, 2015
Two stars may be harsh - this was probably more two and a half. The book's strengths are a detailed analysis of SDS's origins and intellectual roots, and the attention throughout to the potential and pitfalls of its organizational structure from the beginning to collapse. However, the problems with the text keep it from being satisfying - namely, despite identifying the years of intense growth (1964-68) as the pivotal time in which SDS expanded but fell apart, the focus remains on the 'Old Guard', especially Tom Hayden, giving little sense of what the new members did or thought. Very disappointing was that the text failed to thoroughly weigh SDS's continuing impact on American politics, even if the impact was primarily cultural. The text as is feels only half-completed.
April 13, 2009
Intellectual history of the most serious sixties protest movements. Very interesting. If you really want to get inside and examine the actual work that was going on, not the myth and not the coca-cola ad, I don't know of a better source.
May 30, 2009
Excellent history of SDS and the 60s New Left in USA. Discusses importance of C. Wright Mills on Tom Hayden and other early SDSers. Miller, who analyzed Rousseau's influence on the French Revolution, brings a strong understanding of direct/participatory democracy to SDS.
June 1, 2007
fantastic history of a fantastic group. i only wish i could have lived in the late 60s, so i could have joined it, and participated in political protest (not as a VISTA, of course)
January 23, 2009
I learned about the SDS, Students for a Democratic Society and what they were before the Weathermen usurped the group. Fascinating study of the student left in the 1960s.
Want to read
August 3, 2012For Generational Politics class.
July 23, 2016
Re-read
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