Student League for Industrial Democracy (1946-1959)

The Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID) of 1946 to 1959 was the second incarnation of the League for Industrial Democracy's student group. It changed its name to the Students for a Democratic Society on January 1, 1960, and severed its connection to the LID in 1965.

After the autonomous Student League for Industrial Democracy merged with other groups to form the American Student Union in 1935, the League for Industrial Democracy still tried to keep a campus presence.In the late 1930s and early war years they organized summer institutes to educate students in union organizing and sponsored lecture tours by Joel Seidman and LeRoy Bower. After the war, with the campus population swelling with returning veterans on the GI Bill, renewed interest in the LID began to be felt at the grassroots. The first post-war campus chapter was founded by Frank Wallick at Antioch College. The LID engaged Jesse Cavileer and Elizabeth Healy to begin an organizing tour of the country's colleges, setting up SLID chapters at City College of New York, Brooklyn College, Harvard, and Cornell. During the Christmas break of 1946-1947 a provisional conference was held at the Rand School to reconstitute SLID. It was attended by representatives of 30 colleges and three high schools. Eric Hayden was elected temporary chairman and Gustav Papenek temporary vice-chairman. An executive committee was also elected.

Forty delegates from twelve schools attended the SLIDS first official post-war convention in April 1947 at the Labor Temple in New York. Papanek was elected president, John Roche vice-president and Hannah Kaiser secretary. The convention passed a resolution banning all "totalitarians" from membership, a measure designed to keep out Communists and other infiltrators. The Cornell chapter was tasked with publishing a national organ, SLID Voice. SLID enjoyed popularity in the immediate post-war years, before the concept of the Cold War and McCarthyism had set in. By 1948 it had 700 members.

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