INTRODUCTION

Begin by forgetting. Very little you’ve heard and read about Students for a Democratic Society is true any more. Some of it never was. SDS is not the band of crazed young rowdies you probably think it is: high on some dreadful potion of ingratitude and power-lust, rampaging around the campuses and in city streets, flailing away at a society that’s been too charitable with such clowns. Neither is it the underground network of arrogant bombers and arsonists whose acts of terror have been in the news so much. Nor is SDS dead, finally expired after ten years of leading violent campus rebellions, as some too quickly relieved members of the establishment have been thankfully pronouncing it lately.

It’s true that for a while SDS got carried away with leading students in power tantrums. But a sense of failure and frustration set in just about when it seemed, from the outside, that SDS was reveling in marauding. Major social change, not destruction, has always been the goal for SDS. And when the desired restructuring of society wasn’t actually being accomplished, disillusionment brought with it a whole new approach.

"Trashing buildings is a lot of garbage," SDS declared last Year. The flashy but feeble exercise of student power that used to characterize the radicals is now ridiculed openly by the organization. It may have created the illusion of attacking the system, today’s SDSers say, but in reality it rarely even posed a threat.

SDS has not grown passive or decided to co-operate in quiet efforts at reform, of course. The old tactics are still sometimes called into play, but the goals are a lot more serious now. SDS has become an amazingly dedicated cadre of college students and postgraduate (or ungraduated) hangers-on committed to battling the systematic evils of our society. SDS has no desire to run the universities any more. It’s out to eradicate hatred between the races; the wars that it sees being brought on by the expansionist drives of the world powers; the inherent inequities of wealth and power in American society; and the degradation and abuse of women. SDS has learned from experience that it must set very rigid standards about which battles to engage in and which to avoid because victories in them won’t mean much. The goals are everything. Fighting the police to prevent the eviction of a poor working family from its home is laudable, but fighting them to show you dare is child’s play.

Bombing buildings is out, no matter why you do it. SDS was never in on the bombings. For a while a group of SDS leaders was heading the organization in that direction. But a great many of the members disagreed. A classical Left conflict developed between those who said you should build a movement by involving others and those who said forget about mass movements-we can do it ourselves. One faction wanted to link SDS’ efforts with the power of industrial workers. The other said that’s old hat-youth culture’s the thing.

In June, 1969, after months of bitter internal bickering, SDS was torn apart by the conflicts. A small splinter of the membership, along with the most famous leaders, broke away t o try to put the youth culture, go-it-alone approach into practice. In a few months they became known as the Weathermen. They were no longer organizing on the campuses, they were "underground," building bombs. They had new slogans that made those who remained in SDS cringe: "Bring the War Home" and "Smash the Glass of the Ruling Class."

The SDS they left behind moved sharply in a new direction, too. The organization started putting into effect the socialist concept of uniting militant students with a much larger and more powerful force --workers. SDS chapters began concentrating on supporting strikes and trying to defend campus workers who were being harassed or fired for organizing. SDS even launched a national effort to build protests against the skyrocketing level of unemployment.

Far from being two fraternal groups, the Weathermen and SDS were quickly at one another’s throats. The Weathermen hated the radicals who were still taking the approach of educating the public to their views. They called them "chicken shits" and bureaucrats. And SDS hated the Weathermen even worse because it could hardly be effective with its proselytizing efforts if prospective allies immediately rejected it as a gang of "mad bombers." The groups brawled repeatedly and at one point SDS was actually afraid it would become one of the Weathermen’s bombing targets. Each group cursed the other for being "cops." They were getting in the way of one another’s program for revolution. Clearly, however slow or reluctant the news media may be in acknowledging the split that occurred two years ago, the Weathermen are no more a "faction" of SDS now than Eve was a "faction" of Adam following the rib surgery.

The split has thrown SDS into a torturous period of evolution which could conceivably lead it into extinction. Many other species of political groups have disappeared that way. It’s possible that the days this book chronicles will turn out to be SDS’ last. But at this point the organization is still clinging to life, though its kicking may seem peculiar compared to what one has come to expect from the famous organization of student radicals. Unlike the Weathermen, SDS is an amazingly open organization. It has to be since its whole strategy is to reach thousands of new people and "win them over" to joining the long-term battle against the system. Pity the foolish police agents who bother to infiltrate their way into the endless series of tedious meetings and utterly legal demonstrations by which the organization now exists. Other than some embarrassing internal rivalries, SDS has nothing to hide. If there are lots of strange faces at a meeting, the members feel more secure. It means their ideas are catching on. I came to them from the "belly of the beast," as the Black Panthers say: straight from three years with the Wall Street Journal. I was welcomed. Some helped me enthusiastically with this book. Others were a little afraid of it-cynical that it would "tell the truth about SDS," since so little has.

The book that follows does tell the truth. But "objective journalism," when it actually exists, is often a waste and I make no pretense of it here. It would be foolish to have to seem dispassionate about the vital challenges SDS is posing to the structure of contemporary American society. But this is not a manifesto either. It couldn’t be since I have no right to speak for SDS.

This is a profile of SDS by someone who went through college six years ago, when there were "teach-ins" about Vietnam and a lot of people were actually rising to defend the war. It is by someone who has experienced the same limitations of liberal reform politics that have frustrated SDS as an organization. By someone who used to say: "I support those student radicals. I believe in their cause, and if 1 were still a student I’d be one of them." But by someone who has since come to understand that if you do believe strongly in a cause, there’s no excuse for only giving it that kind of lip-service support.

Alan Adelson New York, 1971