when we were young (1)
Thursday I’ll give a talk to the “Sixties Discussion Group / Book Club of Mercer County.”
Joe Melillo was in Rutgers SDS from 1964 to 1968. I got there in 1969 and took over his place in SDS. So I’ll give some background about the organization and then introduce Joe. Together we’ll talk about our experiences, about the campus scene of the Sixties, and about the arc of build-up and fall-apart of Students for a Democratic Society:
SDS took us — our generation of activists — from the Old Left to the New Left.
It started out as a creature of the Old Left. The mentors of the SDS students were Socialist Party leaders like Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington.
Few Americans these days are aware of how significant the Socialist Party was during several periods of the 20th century. It was formed all the way back in 1901. The times were such that it experienced very rapid growth between 1901 and about 1915. The SP elected two socialists to the US House of Representatives, elected dozens of state legislators, more than 100 mayors (including in such large cities as Milwaukee and Buffalo), and elected thousands of lower-office officials. Its presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, got over 6% of the vote in 1912.
When it seemed to be a significant growing force in American politics the establishment found an excuse to suppress it. The Socialist Party took a stand against US involvement in WWI. The government said that was subversive and instituted a program of repression against it. For example, it jailed some of its leaders and banned its magazines from being delivered by the postal service. The repression worked and the SP’s membership declined.
After that its membership numbers went up and down for decades. It revived for a while under the leadership of Norman Thomas when the capitalist system was being disparaged during the Great Depression years of the 1930s. But competition with the Communist Party and a social democratic turn of the Democratic Party under the New Deal drew membership away from the SP, and then the McCarthy period of the 1950s drove it to the margins of American political life.
Anyway, meanwhile, relevant to the creation of SDS . . . in 1905 the Socialist Party had established a campus-based youth organization called the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (I.S.S.). Prominent co-founders included people you might have heard of: Upton Sinclair, Walter Lippmann, Clarence Darrow, and Jack London. The I.S.S. and its subsequent iterations remained the educational affiliate of the Socialist Party. Over the years it went through a couple of name changes. During the 1920s I.S.S. became the Student League for Industrial Democracy (S.L.I.D.) … and then in 1960, in order to broaden the scope for recruitment beyond labor issues, it was reconstituted as Students for a Democratic Society. When they first heard about it, most Americans thought SDS was a new organization, but it really had roots going all the way back to 1905.
So in 1960 there was a new name and a sense of a new period, a post-McCarthy period, evidenced by the election of John F. Kennedy, widespread civil rights activism, and ban-the-bomb protests on campuses. SDS responded by issuing its famous manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, which was based on a draft written by staff member Tom Hayden. It turned out to be a key document during the development of the New Left. It was adopted at the first national SDS convention, held in June 1962 in Port Huron, Michigan. Expenses associated with the convention were paid for by the United Auto Workers labor union which, at the time, had ties to the Socialist Party. But the union and the party expressed displeasure with the Port Huron Statement and with the direction SDS was starting to take. The old guard socialists felt that SDS was becoming too radical. They got even more upset when Joe Melillo joined SDS in 1964. I’ll turn it over to him so we can hear about his experiences with the Rutgers chapter during the middle years of the Sixties.
