Students for a Democratic Society: 1960-1969
From the time when the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement were exploding, SDS sprouted as the most widespread and influential student radical groups. SDS was the youthful offspring of the League for Industrial Democracy. League for Industrial Democracy was a spin off from Intercollegiate Socialist Society created in 1905. All of these organizations pursued industrial democracy, student democracy, and labor democracy.

SDS held its first meeting on the campus of the University of Michigan in 1960 where Alan Haber was elected president. The group’s manifesto called the Port Huron Statement was drafted by Tom Hayden most know from his marriage to Jane Fonda. The Port Huron Statement was highly critical of the political system of the United States. It was highly critical of the Cold War militarism, Civil Rights infringements on the black population, economic inequality, and runaway Capitalism. Here is a statement from the Port Huron Statement:

“The decline of utopia and hope is in fact one of the defining features of social life today. The reasons are various: the dreams of the older left were perverted by Stalinism and never recreated; the congressional stalemate makes men narrow their view of the possible; the specialization of human activity leaves little room for sweeping thought; the horrors of the twentieth century, symbolized in the gas-ovens and concentration camps and atom bombs, have blasted hopefulness. To be idealistic is to be considered apocalyptic, deluded. To have no serious aspirations, on the contrary, is to be "toughminded".”

As you can see, the statement is heavily suggesting that the Lenin-Marxist model is ideal. The claim that Stalinism perverted Socialism is the extreme political perversion that Tom Hayden was seduced by. It was in fact Socialism that perverted Stalin. Make no mistake that the unbridled power of the government and the worship of man’s power is what drove Stalin to believe he was in fact god. It was he who believed that he must exterminate in the name of Socialism which was the rationalization for his evil carnal perversions.

After siding with the Soviet Union on the Cold War, SDS came under fire by LID. Micheal Harrington, most know for his highly influential book to Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” The Other America: Poverty in the United States ,wanted SDS to denounce the Soviet Union as the cause of the Cold War. SDS refused and separated from LID.
From the SDS movement, many similar movements sprouted around the country. Groups like the Black Panther Party and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which was once chaired by former D.C Mayor and convicted felon, took off with their version of radicalism. When Lyndon Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam, SDS and other radical groups began holding protests. These protests were covered by the news media as an extension of the former Progressive movement under the New Left.
The movement grew and demonstrations were held at prominent colleges all over the country. Interesting enough the colleges were homes of the Frankfurt Marxists. The most notable demonstrations were held at University of Michigan, University of California Berkley, and Columbia University. One of SDS’s big claims to fame was its shutting down of Columbia University in 1968 which was led by its Chairman Mark Rudd.

After some inner fighting between the several groups within SDS, the only groups to come out of the split with any relevance were the Black Panther Party and the Weather Underground Organization. It was from the influence of SDS that the modern Progressive movement would flourish. The factions that spread to various areas of the political spectrum can be seen throughout the political system.

What is important to recognize is the relevance of SDS today. The radicals that came from this group dispersed as college professors, high school teachers, elementary teachers, daycare workers, politicians, and businessmen to propagate their SDS ambitions. The Fabian Socialists and the Frankfurt Marxists would influence them through academics. The ineffectiveness of radical force to change the political structure would provide the proof that they must align with the Fabian Socialist and Frankfurt Marxist model. This model was to patiently and legitimately infiltrate the current political system and gradually topple the United States and raise the new American Union.

In 2006, SDS would reform again to continue its political strategy.