This day in history: The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) began their national meeting at the Chicago Coliseum on this day in 1969. After reporters refused to pay a $25 fee for the right to watch the convention, or to sign an affidavit pledging not to divulge any information about the SDS or its members before any investigative body, the press was barred from the building. Bernardine Dohrn, the SDS press secretary, then issued a statement that "The capitalistic press will not be admitted to the convention under any circumstances." Although the Worker Student Alliance faction had 900 delegates, Dohrn and her followers organized as the Revolutionary Youth Movement which they would later rename the Weather Underground. By the time the convention adjourned on Sunday, the "Weathermen" had taken possession of the SDS national headquarters in Chicago and its records.
From William Henry Chamberlin in 1969:
"The largest association of the New Left calls itself Students for a Democratic Society. Its aspirations are voiced partly by disorderly mass demonstration with mindless slogans, partly by such cloudy gobbledygook as the following excerpts from the Port Huron Statement of the SDS:
"The political order should serve to clarify problems in a way instrumental to their solution. Channels should be commonly available to relate men to knowledge and to power so that private problems from bad recreation facilities to personal alienation are formulated as general issues."
Make sense out of that if you can! At least it shows that the SDS leaders who formulated this piece of pretentious verbosity were quick to assimilate some of the worst intellectual and stylistic idiosyncracies of their less-gifted professors.
About the nearest the spokesmen for SDS come to formulating positive goals is to denounce poverty and discriminatory treatment of blacks and other racial minorities and to denounce what they portentously call the Establishment for alleged responsibility for both these ills. What they completely overlook is that there is some correlation (and this is true under any conceivable system) between individual diligence and ability and individual reward. All that is apparently necessary, in their view, is to pull a few mysterious levers and, Presto, a society of equals will emerge.
We have surely seen enough of the fruits of totalitarian fanaticism in the records of communism and Nazism. The New Left is suffering from a bad case of this spiritual and intellectual malady." Source
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