Best History Paper
The Statement of an Uncomfortable
Generation
Steve Beha
“We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.”[1] These words formed the opening sentence of The Port Huron Statement of 1962, but they held much more significance. These words shaped a new movement that changed the role of students within the American political system. The Port Huron Statement became the most circulated literature of the 1960’s student movement and influenced the ideas that were being formed throughout the educational institutions of America.[2] With this document as its manifesto, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) catapulted itself into the forefront of student activism. The Port Huron Statement has remained a statement that sheds light on the New Left generation of the 1960’s and their hope to entice social change in America.
To understand the critical role that The Port Huron Statement played in the student movement of the 1960s, one must first understand the environment that fashioned the original drafting of the SDS manifesto. SDS started as a student offspring of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID) to spread the ideas of the American labor movement throughout the 1950s and to promote anticommunist beliefs all through the student population. In 1958, the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID) only had three chapters remaining on college campuses. However, in 1960, SDS was formed from the remains of SLID and funding was given to University of Michigan graduate student, Alan Haber, to form a national student “think tank” that would publish papers for the student movement that would advance the ideas of the LID.[3]
Haber provided SDS with organizational and intellectual skills that were needed to run a national program; Thomas Hayden provided the passion and that propelled SDS into the front lines of the student movement. He was a University of Michigan student and editor of the student paper, Michigan Daily. Hayden was selected as the field secretary reporting in the South, while Haber served as the national officer. Haber believed that the student movement must begin with academic writing and political pushes by SDS. Hayden, on the other hand, wanted to pursue an action based plan to implement social programs for the poor and then allow the working class to make the political moves. Nevertheless, both men wanted to unite the liberal students and the radical students that wanted a voice in their national government as well as in their local universities.[4]
Hayden had been greatly influenced by the writings of sociologist C. Wright Mills, especially his Letter to the New Left.[5] Having been selected to create a draft for the SDS manifesto, Hayden used many ideas that Mills had originally put forth. One such idea was that the student movement had grown out of apathy and would end what Mills called an “Age of Complacency”.[6] Mills argued that there could be a revolutionary student movement that would end the dependence on workers by the socialists and could also become the energy behind radical changes in America.[7]
Together, Haber and Hayden wrote a statement that represented the direction of student activism and presented it on June 11th of 1962 to the SDS convention at Port Huron, Michigan. A group of forty to sixty students gathered to debate the new manifesto that was to guide the student movement through civil rights and other political movements that were led by students.[8] SDS quickly alienated their parent organization, LID, which was a hard-line anticommunist group. The reason for the split was because of SDS’s strong words against the United States’ participation in the Cold War. SDS shared more common ground with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1962 and they had helped SNCC advance civil rights during the previous two years. The draft that Haber and Hayden proposed to SDS placed civil rights at the top of their priorities because of their work with SNCC and because of their belief in a participatory democracy.[9]
Participatory democracy was central to The Port Huron Statement and was the main political statement made by Haber and Hayden. With the acceptance of the SDS manifesto, the members agreed to push toward a society that would allow every person a voice not only in governmental representation, but also an individual ability to affect changes deemed necessary to society. Hayden refused to believe that only a privileged few men could control an entire population of individuals. Instead, Hayden said, “Independence can be a fact about ordinary people. And democracy, real participating democracy, rests on the independence of ordinary people.”[10]
The ability of the masses to control governmental decisions has some socialistic ideals in it. However, unlike socialism, The Port Huron Statement never states the steps needed to achieve a participatory democracy. Instead, Hayden incorporated a list of political principles that a participatory democracy needed to abide by in order to succeed.[11] Nevertheless, many of the members of SDS agreed that the democracy that governed their country did not need to be overthrown, but rather a social change needed to be advanced by SDS and the student movement. The vagueness of The Port Huron Statement allowed it to be a “living” document that could be changed as needed over time. The distribution of the indistinct SDS manifesto “was an open invitation to embark on a shared adventure of political discovery”.[12]
Besides the new political system that the SDS manifesto suggested, the position of students and the educational system within the movement was essential to The Port Huron Statement. The idea of a participatory democracy made this group of students different from students of the Old Left. The New Student Left’s rejection of a national radical party to lead the movement was another major difference that separated the generations of students. Hayden and Haber suggested that the student population of America had grown stagnant and, as a result, had become subjugated by the government. Thus, they concluded that the students and teachers would not only lead the movement, but they would also gain the most from change.[13]
Some deficiencies of The Port Huron Statement have been made clear since its first presentation in 1962. One problem with the statement was the call for all students to disengage from society. SDS wanted to form a society of truth and honesty. They claimed that the American society was not truthful or honest. Therefore, they had to separate themselves from that society to remain pure. The question, then, was how would they change a society in which they would not participate? The answer that Hayden and the rest of the upper-middle class members of SDS enacted was the development of a project called the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). The ERAP was designed to organize poor communities and enable them to create their own jobs. This gave SDS “a way to act effectively in the world without becoming corrupted by it”.[14]
Another problem with the manifesto was the audience to which it attempted to reach and the belief that change could be inspired by the poor-working class. The idea that change could arise from the bottom up was a central notion to the movements sponsored by SDS. The members of SDS concluded that it was the bureaucracy of the American government that did not care about the individuals that were the backbone of society.[15] However, The Port Huron Statement was not written for the working class of America; it was written for the intellectual middle class students that attended the elite universities across America. It was these intellectual elites who were to organize the lower classes and form the skeletal structure to lure the working class to revolt.[16]
The idea that the lower class would lead the charge for social change, but only with the help of the students of the middle class, was a fallacy that Hayden addressed in his manifesto. The working class, he would argue, would not revolt on its own and would not implement drastic changes to its society without being prompted by the New Left students. His idea of a change from the bottom up relied on the fact that the working industrial class was the only population large enough to make a difference to the American society as a whole.[17] Richard Flacks, a major contributor to the social ideas of SDS, wrote in an essay that “the new leftist had been socialized for elite roles.” He continued to comment on the fact that most people who induce political change came from the upper-middle class, but the members of SDS were different because of their parents’ infusion of moral obligation to those who were less fortunate. Flacks argued that any political change must come from the social elite that felt guilt for any self-serving actions for themselves.[18]
The theoretical ideas of a new political system and the contradictory language of The Port Huron Statement is not the entire substance of the document. Haber and Hayden also listed problems they viewed with American society and policy. Moreover, they included solutions to the problems and listed who they believed should act to correct them. The apathy of American students and teachers was viewed as a catalyst for the student movement, but it was still a problem that needed to be addressed. The lack of difference between the two major political parties was also a major concern. The purpose of the parties was to create a choice for the public; with the parties so close on many major issues, the public no longer had a voice in governmental decisions. America’s foreign policy regarding communism was another issue that the manifesto stated was a problem that affected American society. The choice made by the government to approach all encounters with communism with a militant response was a great fear, not only to SDS, but also to the general public. The last major problem was that of the inequality between social classes. Haber and Hayden concluded that the resources to end poverty were becoming progressively more available, but they were not being utilized to their full potential.[19]
Haber and Hayden then turned their focus to the solutions needed to correct the problems caused by the American government. Their solutions were not revolutionary and stated the obvious answers. However, their inclusion in The Port Huron Statement publicized the fact that the remedies were there, they just had to be implemented. The manifesto proposed that the public sector be inflated and that public housing should be more available to the poor. Health insurance coverage needed to be increased by Congress to provide more people with the healthcare that they needed. SDS promoted the position that the United States should not be competing in a nuclear arms race. The leaders of SDS understood that the students could not implement these reforms on their own; they needed the help of organized labor, civil rights leaders, and other liberal forces that could carry more political weight than students alone.[20]
The final step in understanding The Port Huron Statement and its impact on the student movement is to appreciate the document’s denouncement of violence and how SDS dissolved because of their decent into violence as the 1960’s came to an end. Hayden wrote in his memoirs that the statement which included his stance on violence was an afterthought and did not receive much debate during the drafting of The Port Huron Statement. The manifesto stated “violence to be abhorrent because it requires generally the transformation of the target, be it a human being or a community of people, into a depersonalized object of hate.” This declaration clearly portrayed the position of Hayden and SDS against violence. The fact that Hayden considered it an afterthought confirms the fact that SDS never foresaw violence as a part of its future.[21]
In fact, it was the violence of the student movement that created the national attention that social programs never achieved. A pamphlet distributed by SDS in 1969 describes the differences between the early years of SDS and the student group as it existed in 1969. The pamphlet describes the early years as a time of multiple issues and ideology inspired by The Port Huron Statement. The change in 1969, the pamphlet concludes, was a move away from the left-liberal stance of the SDS manifesto and the mass population of students that became anti-imperialists and radicals.[22]
In the SDS convention notes of 1968, Hayden was still promoting non-violence; however, his position on the effectiveness of violence had clearly changed. He claimed that violence was “a major method of change”, but it was impossible to mobilize the mass of students to fight a war at the conventions. He did state, however, that “wars may be fought locally.” He also recommended that violence not be used because it might have affected the amount of new recruits negatively. There was still a slight hint that Hayden believed that the social issues of civil rights would inspire new recruits.[23]
In 1969, the House Committee on Internal Security issued a report that discussed the involvement of SDS in the high schools of America. The committee reported that “there has never been such a determined effort by young people [SDS] to destroy established authority.” It was clear that the radical message had reached the House of Representatives. However, the committee had not met to enact social changes as The Port Huron Statement had wished. Instead, the committee was trying to devise a plan to keep the violent radicals out of high schools. The committee concluded that SDS was dedicated to “direct action and violence” and that it had crossed the line of disorderly dissent “long ago.”[24]
The impact of The Port Huron Statement can be measured in many different ways: as a new set of ideas written as a manifesto, as a document to be interpreted and implemented by leadership, and as an ignored statement advocating peaceful change. The manifesto of SDS has served as the framework for political and social change, as well as a vague statement that remained open to analysis and execution. The refusal of SDS to follow the non-violent path that their manifesto suggested eventually led to its dissolution and the end to a movement that was striding towards social change. In the end, the members of SDS rejected The Port Huron Statement and left the condition of the world in the same “uncomfortable” state as they had found it.
[1] James Miller, Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1987), 329.
[2] Thomas Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York, New York: Random House, 1988), 102.
[3] Richard J. Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America, eds. Wilson Carey McWilliams and Lance Banning (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 116-117.
[5] Alan Adelson, SDS (New York, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1972), 206.
[6] Tom Hayden, Radical Nomad: C. Wright Mills and His Times (Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), 55.
[8] Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left: 1962-1968 (South Hadley, Massachusetts: J. F. Bergin Publishers, Inc., 1982), 11.
[9] Van Gosse, The Movements of the New Left, 1950-1975: A Brief History with Documents (New York, New York: Plavgrave Macmillan, 2005), 12.
[10] Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left: 1962-1968, 57
[11] Adelson, SDS, 207-208
[12] Miller, Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago, 142-143
[13] Irwin Unger, The Movement: A History of the American New Left 1959-1972 (New York, New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc., 1974), 54, 97.
[14] Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America, 124-125
[15] R. David Myers, Toward a History of the New Left: Essays from within the Movement (Brooklyn, New York: Carlson Publishing, Inc., 1989), 3-5.
[16] Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York, New York: Random House, 1973), 69-70.
[17] Unger, The Movement: A History of the American New Left 1959-1972, 57
[18] Richard Flacks, "Making History Vs. Making Life: Dilemmas of an American Left" in Toward a History of the New Left: Essays from within the Movement, ed. R. David Myers (Brooklyn, New York: Carlson Publishing Inc., 1989), 139.
[19] Unger, The Movement: A History of the American New Left 1959-1972, 55
[21] Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir, 97-98
[22] Students for a Democratic Society, "SDS: An Introduction" in Vandals in the Bomb Factory: The History and Literature of the Students for a Democratic Society, ed. G. Louis Heath, Distributed during March and April, 1969 at Cornell and Yale Universities (Metuchen, New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1976), 210-215.
[23] Students for a Democratic Society, "Convention Notes" in Vandals in the Bomb Factory: The History and Literature of the Students for a Democratic Society, ed. G. Louis Heath, Distributed by the Students for a Democratic Society, February 17, 1968 (Metuchen, New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1976), 238-246.
[24] Committee on Internal Security, SDS Plans for America's High Schools (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office,[1969]).
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