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* Radical student group during the 1960s
* Spearheaded the Anti-Vietnam War movement
* Was transformed into Weatherman, a terrorist cult
Forming the core of the 1960s counter-cultural movement known collectively as the New Left, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a radical organization that aspired to overthrow America's democratic institutions, remake its government in a Marxist image, and help America's enemies defeat her sons on the battlefield in Vietnam. The group developed from the Student League for Industrial Democracy, the youth branch of the socialist League for Industrial Democracy.
Established in late 1959 by Aryeh Neier (Director of the socialist League for Industrial Democracy), SDS held its first meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1960. Its first President was Alan Haber, and its first impress on the political landscape was the Port Huron Statement of 1962, drafted principally by Tom Hayden, a former editor of the University of Michigan's student newspaper. The Port Huron Statement adopted the position of "anti-anti-Communism," refusing to support the West in the Cold War. The statement denounced bigotry in the United States, world hunger and American abundance, materialism, personal alienation, industrialization, the threat of nuclear war, military spending, and the Cold War. Its prescribed solution to Cold War tensions reads as follows:
"Universal controlled disarmament must replace deterrence and arms control as the [American] national defense goal. ... It is necessary that America make disarmament, not nuclear deterrence, 'credible' to the Soviets and to the world. That is, disarmament should be continually avowed as a national goal; concrete plans should be presented at conference tables."
Calling for "participatory democracy," the Port Huron Statement continued: "[The] allocation of resources must be based on social needs. A truly 'public sector' must be established, and its nature debated and planned. At present the majority of America's 'public sector,' the largest part of our public spending is for the military. When great social needs are so pressing, our concept of 'government spending is wrapped up in the 'permanent war economy.'" The Statement promoted the politicization of the University, a call that was answered in Berkeley's Free Speech Movement of 1964, which permanently altered the political atmosphere on college campuses.
SDS's initial efforts at the promotion of civil rights, voting rights, and urban reform were gradually overshadowed by its focus on the Vietnam War. In April 1965, SDS advertised its opposition to the War by participating in the March on Washington.
Many key SDS members were "red-diaper babies," children of parents who were Communist Party members or Communist activists in the 1930s. In 1966, when President Lyndon Johnson abolished student draft deferments, some 300 new SDS chapters were formed. Among the organization's activities were: disrupting ROTC classes, staging draft card burnings, and harassing campus recruiters for the CIA and for firms that conducted research tied in some way to national defense. SDS also occupied buildings at universities such as Columbia and destroyed draft records.
At the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, SDS protestors, organized by Tom Hayden, created a riot in order to destroy the electoral chances of the pro-war liberal Hubert Humphrey, and thereby set the stage for a confrontation with the Nixon Administration over the Vietnam War. Hayden and his cohorts -- including Jerry Rubin, Abby Hoffman and Black Panther Bobby Seale -- were arrested and indicted for crossing state lines to incite a riot. They became known as The Chicago Seven. In a celebrated trial (whose guilty verdict was subsequently overturned on a technicality), they were given token sentences.
In 1969 SDS began imploding into factions. One of them, a group calling itself Weatherman, was elected to SDS leadership and proclaimed that the time had come to launch a race war on behalf of the Third World and against the United States. The new entity dissolved SDS and formed a terrorist cult in its place, which was given the name Weather Underground.
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SDS: Students for Democratic Society
Students for Democratic Society (SDS) were part of the New Left, the student political movement that protested the Vietnam War in the United States.
Related Terms:
RED DIAPER BABIES--The children of people who had been active members of progressive, sometimes even radical, social movements during the 1930s (Webster's Dictionary, 9th ed.)
NEW LEFT--A political movement originating in the United States in the 1960s that actively advocated (as by demonstrations and education efforts) radical changes in prevailing social, political, and educational practices (Webster's Dictionary, 9th ed.).
LEAGUE FOR INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY--A socialist organization whose youth branch developed into Students for a Democratic Society (Webster's Dictionary, 9th ed.).
FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT (FSM)--Student movement at the University of California, Berkeley, formed in 1964 to protest limitations on political activities on campus (Webster's Dictionary, 9th ed.).
COUNTERCULTURE--Various alternatives to mainstream values and behaviors that became popular in the 1960s, including experimentation with psychedelic drugs, communal living, a return to the land, Asian religions, and experimental art (Webster's Dictionary, 9th ed.).
WEATHER UNDERGROUND (WEATHERMEN)--Hardline, terroristic faction that split off from SDS in 1969 and went underground.
CHICAGO SEVEN-Seven young men who were arrested and tried as leaders of the antiwar protests at the Democratic National Convention in 1968.
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Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a radical youth group established in the United States in 1959, developed out of the youth branch of an older socialist educational organization, the League for Industrial Democracy. The newly formed SDS held its first organizational meeting in 1960 at Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Robert Alan Haber was elected president.
The political manifesto for SDS, the Port Huron Statement, was written for the most part by Tom Hayden, a twenty-two-year-old former editor of the student newspaper at the University of Michigan. The document, adopted in 1962 by the sixty or so founding members of SDS, criticized the American political system for failing to achieve international peace or to effectively address a myriad of social ills, including racism, materialism, militarism, poverty, and exploitation. The Port Huron Statement called for a fully “participatory democracy,” which would empower citizens to share in the social decisions that directly affected their lives and well-being. It was the founders’ fervent, if somewhat naïve, belief that a nonviolent youth movement could transform U.S. society into a model political system in which the people, rather than just the social elite, would control social policy.
At first SDS focused its efforts on helping to promote the civil rights movement and on efforts to improve conditions in urban ghettoes. In April of 1965, SDS organized a national march on Washington, D.C., and from that point on the movement grew increasingly militant, especially in its opposition to the Vietnam War, employing such tactics as rowdy (though not violent) demonstrations and occupation of administration buildings on college campuses. After 1965, SDS became known primarily for its leading role in the youth movement against the Vietnam War.
SDS was part of a more general youth movement aimed at correcting social injustice in the United States. The civil rights movement that led to the formation of SDS also precipitated another politicized youth movement, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM), led by a junior philosophy major named Mario Savio. Savio urged his generation to fight against the educational-corporate machine, “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick to heart that . . . you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.”
The Free Speech Movement arose as a reaction against the heavy-handed attempts by Berkeley officials, under pressure by prominent local conservatives, to prevent students from collecting donations and recruiting other students for work in the civil rights movement in the segregated South. Official overreaction to mild student resistance led to massive sit-ins and occupation of the university administration building. The arrest of over five hundred demonstrators led to several weeks of even more massive demonstrations and a strike by nearly 70 percent of the Berkeley student body.
The “countercultural” youth movement that SDS and the Free Speech Movement were such a prominent part of was driven by a radical minority of liberal-arts majors and graduate students attending some of the country’s most elite educational institutions. This campus political awakening, dubbed the “New Left,” developed around a core of “red-diaper babies,” the children of parents who were themselves politically active and who had participated in progressive, and even radical, social movements in the 1930s. It was, after all, the youth branch of a socialist organization that had evolved into SDS, and most of SDS’s early recruits were red-diaper babies.
The somewhat vague idealism and altruism of the early SDS is captured in the ringing declarations of the Port Huron Statement: “We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege or circumstances, with power rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason and creativity.” The Port Huron Statement also decried “the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry. . . . [and] the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb,” which drove the younger generation “as individuals to take responsibility for encounter and resolution.”
The campus activism heralded by the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and SDS’s Port Huron Statement soon spread to colleges and universities all over the United States. Even students who never joined SDS heeded the call to action embodied in the Port Huron Statement and other SDS manifestos. SDS also used a small grant from the United AutoWorkers union to initiate a campaign for grassroots political awakening in working-class neighborhoods. In Hayden’s and Savio’s rhetoric, thousands of students found the vision of a just society that motivated their resistance to what they saw as the impersonality, insensitivity, and rigidity of America’s educational institutions and of the society those institutions served.
Student protesters targeted many perceived injustices, focusing at first on loosening up the university culture itself. They demonstrated against racial discrimination in sororities and fraternities, dress codes, course requirements, and the grading system. They especially protested against university research that benefited the military-industrial complex.
When in January of 1966 President Lyndon Johnson’s administration announced it would abolish automatic student deferments from the draft, student anger over the escalation of the war in Vietnam became more personal and intense. SDS, as a leader of the New Left student movement, seized on antiwar sentiment to kindle a mass student movement. By the end of 1966, over three hundred new SDS chapters had been formed on campuses across the country.
The most popular of SDS’s rallying cries, “Make Love--Not War!” became the motto for the antiwar movement. SDS organized draft-card burnings and disruptions of ROTC classes. Campus recruiters for the military were hounded and harassed by large groups of student protesters. A massive SDS-orchestrated demonstration in New York’s Central Park, the Spring Mobilization to end the War in Vietnam (1969), drew half a million antiwar protesters. Chanting, “Burn cards, not people,” and “Hell, no we won’t go!” hundreds of young men threw their draft cards into a large bonfire.
In 1968, about forty thousand students on nearly a hundred campuses across the country demonstrated against the Vietnam War and against racism. Protest against one often morphed into protest against the other, as at Columbia University, where an antiracist demonstration developed into a huge protest against the war and against military research at the university. The administration building and other campus buildings were occupied by nearly a thousand angry students, who set up barricades and established “revolutionary communes” behind the barricades. When the police stormed the buildings and brutalized the occupying students, the moderate majority of students at Columbia joined in a boycott of classes that shut down the university.
During the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, Mayor Daley’s police attacked five thousand antiwar demonstrators in what investigators would later term a “police riot.” Unfortunately, worse violence was yet to come. The most shocking incident was the unprovoked shooting by Ohio National Guardsmen of four students at Kent State University on 4 May 1970. Also in May, Mississippi state highway patrolmen investigating a student protest fired into a women’s dormitory at Jackson State College, killing two students and wounding eleven. These two incidents led to even more protests on college campuses, though by the time school resumed in the fall, the wave of protests had pretty much burned itself out.
As student activism subsided on the nation’s college campuses, SDS itself began to fall victim to its own internal divisions. Within the SDS organization, highly disciplined factions of hard-line followers of the revolutionary philosophies of Mao Zedong and Che Guevara began to take over the movement. By 1969 these factions were already in evidence. The most notorious of them was the Weather Underground, or Weathermen, which went underground to employ terrorist violence, thus providing the justification the FBI and other government agencies wanted to crack down on the New Left.
Other SDS factions withdrew from the national organization to focus their efforts on the Third World or on the now radicalized Black Power movement. As the Vietnam War began to enter its closing stages, SDS lost much of its rationale for national activism, and by the mid-1970s the organization was essentially dead.
Tom Hayden, the main author of the Port Huron Statement and one of the Chicago Seven, became a progressive politician and to this day remains active in California state politics. His political career is one of the few lasting effects of the movement SDS initiate to make the United States a more just and more humane society. Ironically, one other lasting effect was the right-wing backlash of the late 1970s and 1980s, in which newly politicized social and religious conservatives made use of grassroots organizing techniques borrowed from SDS to propel Ronald Reagan into the presidency and to enact a conservative agenda that rolled back many of the liberal programs and policies of the 1960s and early 1970s.
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Early life and career
Main article: Early life and career of Barack Obama
Obama was born on August 4, 1961, at the Kapiolani Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Obama, Sr., a Black Kenyan of Nyang’oma Kogelo, Siaya District, Kenya, and Ann Dunham, a White American from Wichita, Kansas. His parents met while attending the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was a foreign student.[4] They separated when he was two years old and later divorced.[5] Obama's father returned to Kenya and saw him only once more before dying in an automobile accident in 1982.[6] After her divorce, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, and the family moved to Soetoro's home country of Indonesia in 1967, where Obama attended local schools in Jakarta until he was ten years old. He then returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents while attending Punahou School from the fifth grade in 1971 until his graduation from high school in 1979.[7] Obama's mother returned to Hawaii in 1972 for several years and then back to Indonesia for her fieldwork. She died of ovarian cancer in 1995.[8]
Following high school, Obama moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at Occidental College for two years.[9] He then transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in political science with a specialization in international relations.[10] Obama graduated with a B.A. from Columbia in 1983, then worked for a year at the Business International Corporation[11] and then at the New York Public Interest Research Group.[12][13]
After four years in New York City, Obama moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer for three years from June 1985 to May 1988 as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland (Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale) on Chicago's far South Side.[12][14] During his three years as the DCP's director, its staff grew from 1 to 13 and its annual budget grew from $70,000 to $400,000, with accomplishments including helping set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens.[15] Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute.[16] In mid-1988, he traveled for the first time to Europe for three weeks then Kenya for five weeks where he met many of his Kenyan relatives for the first time.[17]
Obama entered Harvard Law School in late 1988 and at the end of his first year was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review based on his grades and a writing competition.[18] In his second year he was elected president of the Law Review, a full-time volunteer position functioning as editor-in-chief and supervising the law review's staff of 80 editors.[19] Obama's election in February 1990 as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review was widely reported and followed by several long, detailed profiles.[19] He graduated with a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard in 1991 and returned to Chicago where he had worked as a summer associate at the law firms of Sidley & Austin in 1989 and Hopkins & Sutter in 1990.[18][20]
The publicity from his election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review led to a contract and advance to write a book about race relations.[21] In an effort to recruit him to their faculty, the University of Chicago Law School provided Obama with a fellowship and an office to work on his book.[21] He originally planned to finish the book in one year, but it took much longer as the book evolved into a personal memoir. In order to work without interruptions, Obama and his wife, Michelle, traveled to Bali where he wrote for several months. The manuscript was finally published as Dreams from My Father in mid-1995.[21]
- Wikipedia -
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2008 ELECTIONS:
Cyber_Warfare_HQ - BIOGRAPHY (http://anncoulterloves.blogspot.com/)
Ann Coulter – BIOGRAPHY (http://anncoulterloves.blogspot.com/)
SATWAR - BIOGRAPHY (http://www.blogger.com/profile/06880683584382683410)