Youth Movements, as the organized expression of viewpoints held autonomously by a large number of young people, have been rare in the United States. Not until the 1960s did an autonomous youth movement in the sense familiar to people in many other nations achieve a full growth in America. Yet, throughout much of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, young people on college campuses have taken conspicuous part in social causes of various kinds.
The largest manifestations of student activism in the period before World War I involved settlement-house work and Christian missionary endeavors. From the 1910s through the 1930s, some college students in the Young Women's Christian Organization forged ties with working-class women to try to improve their working conditions, rather than to proselytize. The Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS), founded in 1905 and later renamed the League for Industrial Democracy, had about 1,300 undergraduate members in seventy campus chapters at its peak before World War I. During the 1920s, an independent student voice on public issues began to be heard. The National Student Forum (1921–1929), a clearly liberal organization, was important chiefly because of its weekly newspaper, the New Student, which combined intercollegiate news with liberal commentary.
Campuses first became prominent centers of radical activity in the 1930s, with the main focus on foreign policy. Communist Party members and sympathizers played an important role, especially through the American Student Union (1935–1940), a merger of the Communist-led National Student League (1932–1936) and the student affiliate of the social-democratic League for Industrial Democracy. Antiwar sentiment spread far and wide, as an estimated 500,000 students took part in demonstrations or rallies against war in 1936, the third year of such demonstrations. An undetermined but large number of students took the Oxford Pledge, promising refusal to fight in a war if the United States became involved. For the most part the 1930s student movement focused on off-campus issues, except threats to campus freedom of expression.
The 1930s student movement was overshadowed by World War II, and a national climate of intense anticommunism stifled a brief radical political revival in the late 1940s. The federal government and some everyday Americans treated dissenting political ideas as suspect, and left-leaning teachers and students were subjected to various forms of harassment, including loss of jobs. In this atmosphere the only visible "student" group in the 1950s was the National Student Association (NSA) established in 1946, which soon came to depend on covert funding from the Central Intelligence Agency for its survival; the subsidies were given in the belief that the NSA, which took fairly liberal stands on many issues, could be a credible front for the U.S. government in dealing with foreign student groups.
It was the civil rights movement that broke this long period of quietude. Beginning in 1960, students at black colleges in the South held sit-ins at whites-only lunch counters demanding the right to equal service, and student protest groups across the South founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Sympathetic students on predominantly white northern campuses joined SNCC's efforts, and SNCC became an organization of full-time field-workers risking their lives by challenging racial discrimination in some of the most firmly segregationist areas of the Deep South. Student participation in civil rights activity continued, most notably in the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964, in which northern volunteers shared the work and dangers of the civil rights organizers.
The 1960s saw numerous other campus movements. During the early 1960s, an antinuclear movement arose. The Student Peace Union (founded 1959) reached its peak of activity in 1961–1962, with about 2,000 members. In the free speech movement at the University of California, Berkeley, in the fall of 1964, participants criticized the modern state university as being factorylike in its operation and purposes.
By the mid-1960s, the campus-based movement known as the New Left had emerged. Growing out of the civil rights movement and the free speech movement (along with smaller but similar protest movements at a number of schools), it was greatly stimulated by the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965. The New Left, whose main organizational vehicle was the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)—although it was much broader than SDS—was the only American radical movement that centered on young people rather than being an adult movement with a following among youth. SDS broke off its nominal affiliation with the social-democratic League for Industrial Democracy in 1965 and did not affiliate with any other political group. The New Left focused on racial oppression at home and American imperialism abroad, rather than on class issues. Offering a rebellious youth culture and cogent criticism of the way of life that America offered to its young people, the movement brought in hundreds of thousands of sympathizers. Even though SDS disintegrated in 1969, spontaneous campus protest remained strong through the 1969–1970 school year. The American invasion of Cambodia in 1970, coupled with the killing of four Kent State University students by the Ohio National Guard, touched off the greatest wave of campus protests in American history, and hundreds of colleges were closed by protesting students or worried administrators. This was the last major thrust of the student revolt of the 1960s, however. Campuses became quieter over the next several years, partly from cynicism over the benefits of protest and partly from the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam in 1973.
In the 1980s, despite increasing conservativism overall, student activism revived around the issue of racial apartheid in South Africa. Students at campuses across the nation pitched tents in campus "shantytowns" and conducted other protest activities to draw attention to the sordid conditions under which most black South Africans were forced to live. The antiapartheid movement pressured college and university administrations to divest of their holdings in companies that did business in or with South Africa.
In the 1990s and the early twenty-first century, students at a number of major universities launched protests against the use of sweatshops by the manufacturers of college-logo clothing. At the same time, a new, more liberal leadership in the AFL-CIO, the nation's major labor organization, showed increasing interest in organizing previously unorganized groups (such as low-wage chicken processing jobs). The organization began holding "Union Summers," programs in which college students spent a summer learning how to do labor organizing. On many campuses, students and hourly workers joined in "Living Wage" campaigns, seeking to raise wages above the federally mandated minimum. As the twenty-first century opened, political youth movements appeared to be growing again and forging ties beyond campus.
Bibliography
Bloom, Alexander, ed. Long Time Gone: Sixties America Then and Now. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Brax, Ralph S. The First Student Movement: Student Activism in the United States during the 1930s. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1981.
