Robert Alan Haber was the first president of Students for a Democratic Society, a U.S. radical student activist organization. Haber was elected at the first meeting of SDS in 1960. FBI files at the time indicated his official title as Field Secretary (Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1991).
Described variously at the time as "Ann Arbor's resident radical" and "reticent visionary" (Towne, 1998), Haber organized a human rights conference in April of that year which "marked the debut of SDS" (Zulick, 1996) and invited four organizers of the 1960 NAACP sit-ins against segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Haber "came from a leftist background" (Towne, 1998); his father was an "energetic" supporter of U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal with socialist-progressive sympathies (Miller, 1987). This resulted in the younger Haber being tagged as a red diaper baby, an epithet directed at the time toward children of known or suspected members of the Communist Party or its sympathizers. Ironically it was Haber who would later express misgivings that the SDS was becoming too stridently anti-capitalist and Communist (Sale, 1973).
Haber's parents named him after former Wisconsin governor, congressman and senator Robert M. La Follette, Sr., advocate of the Wisconsin Idea political reforms in the late 19th century and early 20th century (Levine, 2000).
References
Levine, Peter, "The New Progressive Era: Toward a Fair and Deliberative Democracy", Rowman and Littlefield, 2000.
Miller, James, "Democracy is in the Streets: Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago", Simon and Schuster, 1987.
Sale, Kirkpatrick, "SDS: Ten Years Towards a Revolution", Random House, 1973.
Scholarly Resources, Inc., "Guide to the Microfilm Edition of the FBI File on the Students for a Democratic Society and the Weatherman Underground Organization", 1991.
Towne, David, J.D., "SDS: Rage Against the Machine", undergraduate research paper, Albion College, 1998.
Zulick, Margaret, Ph.D., "Movement Chronology from the Civil War to the Present", from syllabus for graduate course on American Rhetorical Movements (COM 341), Wake Forest University, 1996.
