And I completely disagree with your analysis. More like incredibly intelligent kids who felt like there was no longer a choice.

SDS was a serious force in US politics until they took it over and led it into Direct Action BS that ended up destroying it (thereby eliminating choice, not being forced because of no choice)?
The part where they said they were doing their violence in support of the Black Panthers, but the BP said they wanted nothing to do with the foolish jerks?
The part where their bombings create the fear that breeds conservatism that helps Nixon and Reagan?

They were dismissed as a bunch of scruffy college kids who were OK as a freak show to fill air time on the evening news, but that's it.

You're giving them and the WU far too much credit.

In any case, the SDS hated the WU.

I was actually there.

history.

It had next to no influence outside the schools.

The feeling was confirmed when, in the fall of 1964, a huge movement broke out at the University of California at Berkeley. Led by a coalition of groups, including SDS, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement energized tens of thousands of students in a struggle against a university ban on political organizing on campus, which quickly became a huge movement for student rights, culminating in a student strike that shut down the university...

In November, Johnson was elected president. In January, he began aerial bombing and a massive military build-up in Vietnam.

That April, SDS called a national protest in Washington, D.C. They expected a few thousand to turn up; 25,000 joined the protest.

In campuses around the country, teach-ins were organized to expose the truth about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The largest of these, in Berkeley, lasted 36 hours and was attended by over 35,000 people.

For thousands of students, the teach-ins and early demonstrations were eye-opening. Most people had been brought up believing in the Cold War idea that the U.S. was a force for good in the world...The realization that Vietnam was not the exception to U.S. foreign policy, but the rule, led thousands of activists to begin asking larger questions about American society...

SDS MUSHROOMED from an organization of 2,500 in December 1964 to an organization of 25,000 in October 1966. New chapters sprang up...Beginning in 1967, SDS organized a series of direct actions aimed at not just protesting the war, but disrupting the "war machine."

In Madison, the local chapter of SDS helped organize a demonstration to prevent Dow Chemicals, makers of napalm, from recruiting on campus. In October, in the Bay Area, SDS helped organize a weeklong series of actions aimed at disrupting the draft.

SDS increasingly began to see the war not just as a mistaken policy, but as an outgrowth of a social system based on competition and profit...1968 was a watershed year. In January, the Vietnamese guerrilla army resisting U.S. forces launched the Tet Offensive across South Vietnam. Television journalist Walter Cronkite announced that the war was now "unwinnable." On April 4, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Students and faculty at Columbia University in New York City went on strike for six weeks. Massive student struggles were put down violently in Czechoslovakia and Mexico.

Protests organized by SDS and other groups at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago turned into three nights of police violence, in which demonstrators, reporters, even bystanders were beaten indiscriminately.

And perhaps most spectacularly, on May 6, students in Paris led an occupation of the Sorbonne University, which resulted in running battles with the police. In response, 10 million workers struck against the government.

The student movement had put the war on the front page--no small accomplishment in the United States. But it didn't have the power to make a revolution. Suddenly the questions of the Old Left, which just a few years earlier members of SDS had dismissed as irrelevant, seemed to take on new urgency.

IN 1968, the revolutionary left took off. Before this, the movement had prided itself in being non-ideological--now, it quickly turned to revolutionary politics. According to one poll in 1969, more than 1 million students considered themselves revolutionaries and socialists of some kind.

SDS reached a peak of 100,000 members in 1969. It then collapsed more quickly than it had risen...

http://socialistworker.org/2006-1/586/586_10_SDS.shtml

To the contrary, it could be argued that a degree of socialism is necessary to maintain a semblance of a democratic society. Unregulated capitalism seems to lead inevitably to oligarchy and even neo-feudalism.

The Police Riot they experienced, some questioned non-violence, this was my last SDS mtg.

Black Panthers were with the underground. Do you remember the part where they realized they were making mistakes and bombing for bombings sake was stupid?

So what stopped the people who didn't vote to take the group in another direction from continuing with their work? Absolutely no reason SDS couldn't have remained the power force they were. I always knew SDS was a force to be reckoned with. I actually remember it.

I am not saying I agree with their tactics. I am saying I disagree with your analysis. Big difference.

I also believe, wholeheartedly, that Reagan would have happened anyway. He came into power because of a weak president (absolutely LOVE Jimmy Carter, but as President, he was ineffectual in many regards) and a materialistic group coming of age in the late 70s early 80s.

Not exactly sure how you can blame Nixon on WU. They didn't even come into existence until mid 1969. Nixon won in 1972 because he bombarded the democratic party with lies and complete bullshit that wasn't proven until after Watergate.

and the RYM, loosely associated with the Ann Arbor SDS, formally broke with them in December, 1969.

Reagan got in because he promised income tax cuts to middle class morons who couldn't do the math to see they'd get a few pennies while millionaires got thousands.

I don't understand your points. I didn't say anything to the contrary. What I said still holds true

I never said that. It was said to me

But I don't believe it was because they were "guilt ridden"

The same way progressives are often accused of "white guilt" for speaking up against racism.

They saw the backlash against all the peaceful protests leading to Nixon's first term in 1968, the country's parents voting him in because they were terrified their kids would stop taking baths and do drugs and turn communist.

It was hopelessness turned into rage, guilt didn't factor into it because none of them saw their upbringing as particularly privileged. Yes, they were surrounded by stuff, but they also came from a place of isolation, regimentation, segregation, and all the soul killing isms the 1950s could heap onto us.

I understood them but I wished they'd catch a clue and knock it off. They weren't doing us any favors and they were blowing up too many of themselves in the process.

When he's not using a magnifying glass to melt the heads off soviet army men, he's trying to find some way, any way, to hammer a wedge between the left and what he defines as 'progressiveness" - which seems, as far as I can tell, to be typical neocon stuff with a very thin varnish of pretending to care about gay people (only in the context of exploiting them to justify hating someone else, of course.)

by our standards today. There is no middle class today. Anybody with the standard of living and material wealth of the middle class during that bygone era would be considered rich today. Maybe that's what the original poster meant.

They were middle class kids, the middle class then being large and stable, end of story.

I knew a lot of trust fund kids and they were far more concerned with things like the whole foods movement and doing art. The middle class kids had taken the brunt of post war middle class culture and there was a lot to rebel against. The rich kids had little reason to rebel and spent their time exploring various things.

Corporate management didn't have a license to steal. They had use of a jet, a yacht, a summer home, and other accoutrements of the rich, but those things belonged to the company and their use had to be scheduled like time share use.

Rich meant you owned all that stuff outright. Corporate management back then was not part of the plutocracy. They were upper middle class hired help.

You seem to think the world has always been as it is now. That's not the case, at all.

about your perspective.

The Weather Underground splintered off from SDS?

Both groups, along with the Black Panthers were infiltrated by agent provocateurs.

And you can't blame WU for SDS not continuing. Not you, just in general, you

Last edited Tue Mar 3, 2015, 06:19 AM - Edit history (1)

The infiltrators took them all down.

With the end of the war, there was no longer any glue holding them together and they started to split into factions, always a problem on the left. Another problem was that they simply grew up and needed to go out and earn a living. It's hard to work and commute and have energy to put into demonstrations, meetings, and the rest of it. Some of us gave it our best try, the rest of us were just out of passion and energy at that point, especially if we had kids to care for.

I remember very well the game of "spot the goons." The footwear gave a lot of them away. The violence at peaceful demos also did that, so we learned to link arms around them and march them over to the cops with a description of what they'd done. The cops were pissed off and there was never a report on the blotter the next day, funny how that worked.

And some, like Abbie Hoffman, simply couldn't cope with the Reagan years and offed themselves. I've lost quite a few friends that way.

The fact that the 'movement' back then was made up primarily of college students and college age people, was it's biggest weakness as, like you say, after leaving college making a living became the priority.

including the silent one of complete disconnect during the Reagan years, wondering just how it was that people weren't hearing the same things I was on the evening news.

I still say that man's voice created mass hypnosis.

I'm not going to armchair-revolutionary them on this.

unnecessary, it's just history.

What was unnecessary was the war.

You complaint about broken windows here is noted. I do not see your complaint about villages of innocent children and adults we burned to death, (for a time it was a Mai Lai every month, according to some), to save them? This nation practiced genocide for years, just as a matter of policy, and you complain about people who were trying to stop it. Along with our domestic issues of racism and poverty, made worse by our prosecution of our war.

Your ride-by on your high-horse is noted. Do you do contract Communist-bashing as well, or just unsubstantiated smear jobs?

With all due respect, of course.

well-paying jobs after the 60s, and which are dead or still in prison.

There's a definite class and color divide, for starters. and maybe something else.

The SDS was considered a student fad, a silly phase the kiddies were going through before they grew up and settled down. Only Nixon's extreme paranoia gave them any credence at all. Everybody else pretty much ignored them.

The Panthers, on the other hand, scared the white power structure to death, all those black soldiers who had survived Vietnam coming back with all that military training and joining a militant black group? Oh, heavens to Betsey! We have to do something!

The drug war was turned into a war against young black men while young white men sailed into corporate middle management once they were out of college. That was the major divide, right there.

The hell of it is that if anything, the Panthers were less violent, that military training translating into restraint.

Last edited Tue Mar 3, 2015, 05:43 AM - Edit history (1)

fad, a silly phase" without attributing them to anyone in particular.

There are still sds members in prison, as there are still panthers in prison.

the panthers were less violent than sds? hardly.

and hoovers fbi was quite interested in sds as well as the panthers

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/26558-the-fbi-and-the-shattering-of-students-for-a-democratic-society

and perhaps had a bit to do with the way the split went...

I agree with ND-Dem. The Senate's Church Committee in the late 1970s documented the FBI's illegal tactics used against the opponents of the Vietnam War, including me. To the feds, every political dissident was a terrorist. If there was no evidence of terrorist acts, the FBI invented their own facts. If a groups was not inclined to commit violent acts, the FBI/AFT/etc. would send in agent provocateurs to "encourage" them. Illegal entrapment was used in hundreds of cases.

For younger folks not familiar with the time in question, a lot can be learned by searching on "Tommy the traveler"and "The Harrisburg Seven".

It was a combination of internal factionalism, hubris, extremism, and covert government interference.

The Weather Underground was only one of many organizations, formal and informal, national and local, who did what they could to fight against the war and a system that was manifestly evil. Did we fuck up? You bet we did. We had plenty of help doing the wrong thing and making the wrong choices all over the place, but we certainly share the blame.


These creeps helped Nixon and Reagan to get in power. Warning: Some disturbing and unnecessary gore footage from Vietnam.


That's right all that "unnecessary gore footage" from the 1-2 MILLION people we killed in viet nam. Nothing to see there. Move along. What a fucking shameful ignorant conclusion you reached.

The massive violent protests of the late 60's and early 70s convinced the government that it had to end the war. Whatever else happened, however much we fucked up, we did that.

Humphrey ran as a war hawk. The nation wanted the war to end.
Nixon promised an end, although it was a lie. The Chi convention showed HHH standing over the balcony grinning as the cops beat the shit out of the protestors. He lost because of that photo.
Don't forget either that the Rs had met with N. Vietnam and same as with the Raygun incident, proffered deals behind the Dems backs.

The Dem party was full of war hawks in the 60s, That's why the country turned to the lunatic fringe(Rs).

After Nixon was in office, not only did he not end the war, he escalated it, put the Chicago 7 on the FBI's hit list and THAT is why the SDS faded. With Hoffman and Rubin on the run, the neo-leftist Tom Hayden in congress all the nation needed was for Patty Hearst(and others) to discredit the left.

JMO.