Democracy is in the streets: from Port Huron to the siege of Chicago.

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas

Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago.

James Miller. Simon & Schuster, $19.95. Students for a Democratic Society, whose name is curiously absent from the title of this history of its founding, today stimulates the urge to debunk. It's hard to see why it deserves the immense respect it's accorded from both left and right as a potent political force. What did SDS do, exactly? It was only a minor participant in the civil rights movement, which stands as the great example in modern American history of the power of nonviolent direct action. Its main activity (aside from a lot of theorizing) was a series of community organizing efforts in ghettos that had no lasting effect. It is most famous for its role in the antiwar movement, but, as James Miller demonstrates here, the war swelled SDS's membership rolls just at the moment when it was falling apart as a real organization; anyway, the war that SDS supposedly helped end went on long after SDS had become defunct. SDS wanted to establish a lasting student movement in this country, but today places ranging from West Germany to Korea to Mexico have vastly more active left-wing student movements left over from the sixties than the United States does. To the extent that SDS helped to polarize the country in general and the Democratic Party in particular in the late sixties, it may have held back the achievement of its policy goals.

This book is written from the assumption that SDS was a major political movement--is there any other left-wing group whose meetings, manifestos, and internecene squabbles would attract the attention of a big commercial publisher like Simon & Schuster? There's a sense among people between, say, 35 and 45 that the importance of SDS is so obvious that it doesn't really need to be established. But Miller is so thorough and so intellectually honest that he does also shed considerable light on what SDS really amounted to. In conception, SDS was most noteworthy for being an organization of the left that simply didn't care about socialism. This was due mostly to the influence of Tom Hayden, who is the hero of this book. Coming out of a non-political midwestern background, Hayden was motivated by moral idealism, not by hatred of capitalism; in an early draft of the Port Huron Statement, he had a line praising small business for being anti-elitist. On the other hand he infuriated SDS's original parent organization, a rabidly anti-Stalinist branch of the...