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sds new left notes…There is only one answer…STRIKE.

[Boston, MA, 1972]. Illustrated broadsheet, 22.625” x 14.75”, with black and red text. CONDITION: Very good, central horizontal and vertical folds.

A very scarce broadsheet published by Students for a Democratic Society urging an allied strike by students and workers in the immediate wake of President Nixon’s mining of all north Vietnamese ports in 1972.

Nixon’s Operation Pocket Money was an aerial mining campaign against North Vietnamese ports in order to stop or slow the flow of military supplies into the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and thereby hobble its invasion of the southern Republic of Vietnam begun on March 30th. The campaign was announced to the American public on May 8th, 1972. In response, this broadsheet outlines four numbered actions aimed at “push[ing] the Government and the rich businessmen who back it over on their fat asses and FORC[ING] the U.S. Out of S.E. Asia,” including “massive” university strikes with “MILITANT picket lines” and “NO CLASSES”; meetings to make “concrete plans for demanding an end to university’s involvement in the war effort, (example: ROTC on campus, war research, military recruiters…)”; and the establishment of robust worker-student alliances. A black-bordered paragraph explains how the Vietnam War is “A Racist War,” and a photo to its right shows “Harvard Black students” rallying in support of “Angolese liberation fighters…against Harvard’s Gulf Oil interest in Angola.” 

Two images on the verso show more student protests and accompany updates on May Day actions; condemnations of senator and presidential candidate George McGovern (based on a May 9th, 1972 Boston Herald Traveler article, which is partially shown); and invitations to readers to “come and CONFRONT” the racist UC Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen upon his visit to UCLA; “Contact SDS in your Area” (with phone numbers for some thirty-five cities and states in the U.S. and Canada); and “Join SDS!” or “change my address for the summer.”

Founded in 1959 out of the student arm of the socialist League for Industrial Democracy, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) gained momentum in the mid-1960s through its opposition to increasing U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Its slogans, including “Make love—not war,” became cornerstone rallying cries of the anti-war movement, and its organizing inspired “a political awakening across college campuses that was dubbed the New Left and became the core of the counterculture movements that dominated student activism during the sixties” (Riggs). At the time of its last national convention in 1969, the SDS had “300 campus chapters and 30,000 supporters” nationwide (“Students for a Democratic Society”). It splintered that year, and was taken over by two allied Boston-based factions, the Progressive Labor Party and the Worker Student Alliance, which together carried on publishing the New Left Notes until 1974. (A rival faction, the Weathermen, operated a short-lived publication under the same name.)

Just one holding recorded in OCLC, at the University of Kansas.

REFERENCES: Riggs, William W. “Students for a Democratic Society” at Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University online; “Students for a Democratic Society” at the Encyclopedia of anti-Revisionism On-Line.

Item #8768

Price: $950.00

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