On The Road In The 1970's: Part 83

To pass the time inside Downtown Indianapolis's main central public library building, until it closed in the evening and I would then start walking further downtown to Washington Street and east on U.S. 40, until I hitched a ride, I ended up spending three or four hours reading through parts of a hard-cover library edition of Kirkpatrick Sale's early 1970's-published book, SDS; which, before I noticed it on one of the library's shelves, I hadn't realized had been written.

Reading Kirkpatrick Sale's SDS book at this point in the 1970's, some years after former Columbia-Barnard SDS Vice-Chair Ted Gold's and National SDS's disintegration, and during a 1970's historical period when most of the white New Left Movement organizers I had known from the 1960's were either then underground or had apparently sold-out politically in some way and drifted back into a white upper middle-class careerist life style, felt like I was reading about ancient history, in many ways.

And it reminded me how differently the 1970's in the USA had turned out politically from how most Columbia-Barnard Students For A Democratic Society [SDS] hard-core organizers, who were members of the "Generation of 1968," had thought, during the months after the April-May 1968 Columbia Student Revolt, the 1970's in the USA was going to turn out politically.

Most of the SDS activists who were the most active in either late 1960's National SDS Movement circles or within 1966-1969 Columbia-Barnard inner leadership circles were not interviewed by Kirkpatrick Sale before he wrote his SDS book (usually because they were either underground, no longer active politically or keeping a low 1970's political profile). So his book's reference to Columbia-Barnard SDS's November 1966 to June 1969 internal political history reflects less accurately Columbia SDS's internal history than does my 1980's and early 1990's-written Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories manuscript. And his SDS book's perspective on National SDS's late 1960's history is more politically distorted than the later-written historical narrative contained in books like Dan Berger's Outlaws of America.

But Kirkpatrick Sale did a great job of examining as thoroughly as possible all the internal organizational documents that National SDS, some SDS regional offices and many SDS campus chapters generated during the 1960's and all the corporate media, underground press, student newspaper and previously-written books that contained references to SDS. In addition, he described accurately in great detail the 1960's historical and U.S. Movement context in which 1960's SDS was able to attract 100,000 members across the USA.

So Kirkpatrick Sale's SDS book is probably still, overall, the best book about 1960's white New Left Movement and SDS history that was ever published, despite the fact that Kirkpatrick Sale, himself, had not been a participant in any SDS activism during the 1960's.