The old New Left witnessed a progression from larger and/or more
selective elite institutions, outward to more broad-based institutions.
>From Michigan, Swarthmore, and Harvard early on, for example, chapters
later developed at places like Indiana, St. Cloud State, and Roosevelt
University in Chicago. This process took five years and was speeded up
after SDS was discovered by the national press around the time of the
(first) March on Washington to End the War in Vietnam, in April 1965. By
the late Sixties community colleges had chapters of SDS or other New
left groups.
The current pattern of outward diffusion has some, but highly compressed
similarity to the Sixties.¹¹ From 1999–2000 there was marked “outward”
movement from more to less elite campuses. The first wave of sit-ins, in
1999, was at relatively “elite” or flagship state universities. In this
regard, looking for initiating movement groups among young adults with
higher income and/or educational family backgrounds is similar in both
generations.
However, history is moving at warp speed. Despite the fact that the
early and strongest presence of USAS was, as with SDS, at the most
cosmopolitan institutions, outward motion is very rapid in comparison to
SDS. During the next spring, 2000, sit-ins were much more representative
of the national student
body. (See Table 3) The speed with which chapter construction is moving
to non-elite places—and growing—is faster than SDS before the War in
Vietnam.
It compares to the Southern students’ civil rights movement, which
spread the sit-ins and lunch counter boycotts around the south within
weeks, and created SNCC within three months of the first sit-in. It also
compares to the tremendous growth of SDS after the March on Washington
of April 1965.(For materialon SDS chapter growth, see Sale 1973)
Already, by the fall of 1999 campuses in Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia
were involved and active. There were contacts at South Carolina, and a
few community colleges. Acting in response to local demonstrations, or
fear of them, or even a desire to do the right thing, 122 universities
had joined the Fair LaborAssociation by June of 1999, 150 by Spring of
2000. Then when USAS initiated WRC, and campaigned against the FLA,
membership increase slowed drastically.There are 178 college and
university members of the Fair Labor Association(as of March 2003),a
growth of only 28 in two years.In the meantime the WRC “Who are the
Student Boat Rockers?” Later, in the opening of the Port Huron
Statement he wrote, in answer to that question:“We are people of this
generation bred in at least modest affluence,housed in the
universities,looking uncomfortably to the worlds we inherit.” For white
civil rights and antiwar students, and the New Left of SDS and other
groups, the earliest movement participants came disproportionately from
upper middle class homes.⁹,¹⁰ Eventually however, by 1967, the movement
and SDS membership spread among students of work-ing class and lower
white-collar families. Institutionally, the movement began at exclusive
or elite private colleges, for example, Swarthmore and Harvard, but also
at the cosmopolitan public institutions with long histories of radical
colonies
–like Berkeley,Wisconsin and Michigan.