Students for a Democratic Society: Climax and Disintegration: 1968-1969

[Wilms]

snip

In the summer of 1969 the ninth SDS national convention was held at the Chicago Coliseum with some 2000 people attending. Many factions of the movement were actually present, and set up their literature tables all around the edges of the cavernous hall. The Young Socialist Alliance, Wobblies, Spartacists, Marxists and Maoists of various sorts, all together with various law enforcement spies and informers contributed to the air of impending expectations.

Each of the delegates were given the convention issue of New Left Notes, which contained a manifesto, "You don't need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows." This had been written by eleven member committee that included Mark Rudd, Bernardine Dohrn and John Jacobs, and represented the position of the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) wing of SDS, most of which subsequently turned into the Weather Underground Organization. The New Left Notes issue distributed at the convention was full of the language of the Old Left of the thirties; thus it was impenetrable to the majority of SDSers.

The convention quickly fell into disarray as the PL Worker Student Alliance faction, which was about evenly divided with the Revolutionary Youth Movement forces at the convention, moved to exert its power over SDS as a whole. When the Black Panther representatives attacked PL but at the same time proved itself inclined towards sexism by advocating "pussy power," the entire convention fell into something approaching chaos, or, worse, farce.

The RYM and the National Office faction, led by Bernardine Dohrn, voted by about 500 to 100 to expel the PL, and then walked out of the conference hall with that 500. By the next day there were two SDS organizations, neither of them recognizable to an older SDSer, nor to the bulk of the members back on the campuses. In the Fall of 1969 many of the SDS chapters also split up or disintegrated. The Weatherman faction evolved into a small underground organization that first took to street confrontations and then to blowing things up. There were no more national conventions. SDS was fully defunct by 1972.

snip

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_a_Democratic_Society#Climax_and_disintegration:__1968-1969

[Name removed]

1. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Wilms]

2. I haven't.

So I'll make a point of it.

Welcome (back) to DU. :hi:

[Warpy]

3. Uh, the SDS was alive and well into the early 70s

in Boston, although with the number of colleges in that town it may have been an aberration.

The Weather Underground was seen as a bunch of crazies who were best at blowing themselves up. They weren't the only splinter organization, either, just the best at building bombs that actually went off, if in the wrong place at the wrong time.

What killed the SDS was the end of the war. Without the pressure of the war to help organize people, the organization simply found itself depleted to death as members graduated and entered the work world.

Oh, and that language from the 30s? That was likely supplied by Nixon's goons.

[Kip Humphrey]

4. The rift was essentially over te use of violence as a tactic for the

movement. That, and a lot of personality conflicts - egos getting large. It split the coalition and the movement suffered after that, becoming increasingly disorganized and fractured. I began to lose faith in '71 and got out in early '72. Couldn't take the eat-our-own infighting any longer.