A New Kind of Democracy? Political and Cultural Developments in the 1960s 397now in universities, [but] looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit,”
they began, and called for a new energy in American politics and a commit-
ment to participatory democracy. The SDS activists had been bred in the
middle class and enjoyed more privilege than any similar group before it, yet
“look[ed] uncomfortably” at a future with racial segregation, an arms race,
poverty and inequality, and other social ills still damaging American life.
Taking a cue from Mills, they attacked the power elite and called for a new
idea of democracy, one in which people would not be passive, not simply vote
every two or four years and then let elected officials run the country from
the top down, but would participate in the decisions that affected their lives
on all levels, local and national, political and economic. Since elites had
grabbed control of American life, people had become alienated as their lives
were run by bureaucracies. “Participatory Democracy” would be the cure for
that–all citizens would take an active role in American society, deciding not
just who would be elected to office [which in itself, was not really demo-
cratic since the power elite, through its financial contributions, determined
who ran for political positions anyway], but which policies would be enacted,
and even how the economy and class system would be structured. It was obvi-
ously an ambitious and challenging ideology, but one that the students
involved in SDS and other groups believed was essential to make the U.S. a
“real” democracy.
SDS did indeed attempt to put these ideas into practice. It created pro-
grams to send its members into poor communities where they would live
among and organize the residents there. SDS hoped to create an “interracial
movement of the poor” at the grassroots level to create social change.The
group would address fundamental problems like housing, welfare, voting
rights, police brutality, public sanitation, and other local issues, as SDS envi-
sioned it. So SDS activists developed programs in various cities—Baltimore,
Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Louisville, Newark, Philadelphia, and others—in
the summer of 1964, but often had trouble working within the established
communities. To a large degree, SDS was trying to “empower” poor people,
or give them a voice in making political decisions, which alarmed the power
elite.
In Cleveland, possibly the most successful city where it operated, SDS
organized a tenants’ union to force landlords to keep up the apartments they
rented to the poor, and a welfare rights organization for women especially to