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Reviews
| Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History, by Harvey Pekar, art by Gary Dumm, and edited by Paul Buhle. New York: Hill and Wang, 2008. 214 pages. $22.00, cloth.
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| Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History is the latest of several graphic novels that American history teachers can welcome for classroom use. In this work, historian Paul Buhle and renowned graphic novelist Harvey Pekar make a good case for their belief that a comic version can add to history "insight unbounded by the limits of prose analysis" (p. vii). |
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Divided into two sections, the first offers an overview of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), while the second consists of a variety of mostly firsthand accounts that show the power of personal and local history to illuminate broader historical themes. Part one shows the origins of the SDS in the League of Industrial Democracy, and its development into a student movement that produced the ground-breaking Port Huron Statement in 1962 at a United Auto Workers summer camp. In fifty-two pages of art and ideas, the first half covers the debates, choices, and policy decisions this nationwide organization grappled with, as its members faced and were part of the social change in the 1960s. Their early focus was on participatory democracy, community organization, civil rights, and economic reform, but SDS grew in numbers and ideas as the American war in Vietnam expanded. |
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The graphic format works well for depicting the factionalism (including the Weathermen's accidental bomb explosion) and opposition (including undercover police) that finally brought down SDS by the decade's end. The final panel in this first segment is of a young man, arms outstretched, asking "Where do we go from here?" (p. 52). |
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The second and longer section of this work addresses that question, while it features personal accounts (most first-hand) depicted by a variety of activists. These accounts add to the reality of the lived lives of so many of the sixties generation—activist or not—that were inseparable from the changes around them. Individually and collectively, these personal testimonies make palpable the myriad of social forces that define the sixties: the need to make a change, the war on poverty and ignorance, the campus, the war, the draft, drugs, growing awareness of women and minority rights, personal and generational conflicts, and the counterculture of music and art. |
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Two examples, Mark Naison's "White Boy Narrative" and Penelope Rosemont's "My Life in SDS," demonstrate how the juxtaposition of ideas in text with images of action can expand historical understanding. Mark Naison links together his Bronx Jewish upbringing, his involvement in the civil rights movement, and his recognition of corporate power as factors that compelled him to occupy Hamilton Hall at Columbia University. During his discussion of the occupation, his narrative takes a four-page "Romantic/Revolutionary Interlude" (p. 65) that reveals the fun and logistics of such a building takeover, as two of the occupiers get married. The power of humor in Students for a Democratic Society is revealed when the bride recounts how her parents wished she would have had a wedding dress, but were happy to make "a substantial contribution to (her) bail money the next day" (p. 68). Naison continues his narrative after this brief interruption. He writes about his family, popular culture, and the controversy over his interracial romance, all the while placing these personal issues into the larger political context. |
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Penelope Rosemont's account reveals the intellectual roots that fueled sixties' activism, from early Wobbly songs and French surrealism, to SDS's publications of pamphlets and the journal Radical America. In just fifteen pages, despite the emphasis on abstract ideas, the images accompanying these concepts include the 1886 McCormick riot with crowds throwing bricks at a horse-drawn police wagon; printing presses; bookstores; looters following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.; urban marchers carrying Anarchist signs; students throwing typewriters at American Nazis; Allen Ginsberg meditating; tear gas attacks: and the SDS convention at the Coliseum, the "former home of the 'Friday night fights'" (p. 89). |
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The other twenty-four essays are equally provocative and show the breadth of SDS involvement in several different locations with a variety of experiences. Nick Thorkelson works with coal miners in Kentucky; Alan Wald writes for a radical theater group in Cleveland; Harvey Pekar describes the successful "Join" (Jobs of Incomes Now) activities in Chicago; Heather Tobis Booth links civil rights, university complicity with the "War Machine," and abortion rights; Mariann Wizard shows SDS women challenging sexism in Austin; and Eric Gordon, in New Orleans, reveals the irony of his neighbor offering to protect him from federal agents because he is "in the klan." |
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Among other topics covered are the Madison University Strike, Dow Chemical protests, Paris student revolts, Children's Strike for Peace, minority rights at UCLA, and Kent State killings. Throughout the book, and in most of the personal accounts, the authors pay homage to those who inspired them or fought for the same causes. Among those pictured are Upton Sinclair, Emma Goldman, Fannie Lou Hamer, Kropotkin, Lenin, and Fanon. There is a whole chapter on Phil Ochs, the singer who brought so many of SDS's ideas together as he sang "I Ain't Marchin' Anymore." |
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The last chapter of the book challenges interpretations of SDS that define it simply as a radical group that collapsed in the violence of the Weathermen. Implicitly addressing the question of its legacy and the future, Bruce Rubenstein argues that SDS "should be remembered for its unique decentralized democracy" (p. 206). He notes that SDS started up again in 2006—new on-line links for a "multigenerational, diverse radical movement with everyone as a participant" (p. 208). The final panel of the book features artist Gary Dumm's depiction of himself amazed as his drawing comes alive and a new generation of people with SDS buttons and peace signs leaps off the page. |
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History teachers will find SDS: A Graphic History to be a helpful teaching tool for high school and college level students. Its one drawback is its overreliance on often unexplained acronyms that once held much meaning, but now are just confusing. This minor flaw is overshadowed by the power of the stories and the graphic art format, making this an important piece for understanding a segment of American history. |
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| California State University, Long Beach |
Linda Kelly Alkana |
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