The Port Huron Statement

Sources and Legacies of the New Left's Founding Manifesto

Richard Flacks, Nelson Lichtenstein, Richard Flacks, Nelson Lichtenstein

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780812290998
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The Port Huron Statement was the most important manifesto of the New Left student movement of the 1960s. Initially drafted by Tom Hayden and debated over the course of three days in 1962 at a meeting of student leaders, the statement was issued by Students for a Democratic Society as their founding document. Its key idea, "participatory democracy, " proved a watchword for Sixties radicalism that has also reemerged in popular protests from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street.Featuring essays by some of the original contributors as well as prominent scholars who were influenced by the manifesto, The Port Huron Statement probes the origins, content, and contemporary influence of the document that heralded the emergence of a vibrant New Left in American culture and politics. Opening with an essay by Tom Hayden that provides a sweeping reflection on the document's enduring significance, the volume explores the diverse intellectual and cultural roots of the Statement, the uneasy dynamics between liberals and radicals that led to and followed this convergence, the ways participatory democracy was defined and deployed in the 1960s, and the continuing resonances this idea has for political movements today. An appendix includes the complete text of the original document. The Port Huron Statement offers a vivid portrait of a unique moment in the history of radicalism, showing that the ideas that inspired a generation of young radicals more than half a century ago are just as important and provocative today. Contributors: Robert Cohen, Richard Flacks, Jennifer Frost, Daniel Geary, Barbara Haber, Grace Elizabeth Hale, Tom Hayden, Michael Kazin, Nelson Lichtenstein, Jane Mansbridge, Lisa McGirr, James Miller, Robert J. S. Ross, Michael Vester, Erik Olin Wright.

Chapter 1

Crafting the Port Huron Statement:
Measuring Its Impact in the 1960s and After

Tom Hayden

We are now in the sixth decade since publication of the Port Huron Statement, the founding declaration of Students for a Democratic Society, issued as a “living document” in 1962. The SDS call for a participatory democracy echoes today in student-led democracy movements around the world, even appearing as the first principle in the September 17, 2011, declaration of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters.

As a signpost of the early 1960s, the Port Huron Statement is worth treasuring for its idealism and for the spark it ignited in many an imagination. The Port Huron call for a life and politics built on moral values as opposed to expedient politics; its condemnation of the Cold War, echoed in today’s questioning of the “war on terror”; its grounding in social movements against racism and poverty; its first-ever identification of students as agents of social change; and its call to extend participatory democracy to the economic, community, and foreign policy spheres—these themes constitute much of today’s progressive sensibility.

The same spirit of popular participation that inspired OWS drove the electoral successes of Latin American nations emerging from dictatorships in the 1990s. It appeared among the demands of young people in Tunisia, Egypt, and other Middle Eastern countries in the Arab Spring of 2011. Spontaneous democratic demonstrations have also erupted in Russia, Israel, Brazil, and Iran, organized on Facebook by young people seeking honest elections and a more equitable distribution of wealth. The Statement was even prophetic in condemning the 1 percent, who in 1962 owned more than 80 percent of all personal shares of stock. It may be sobering for today’s Wall Street critics to read in the Statement original draft that despite the radical reforms of the 1930s, the share of wealth held by the 1 percent in 1960 had remained constant since the 1920s.

On the other hand, there are sources of hope now that we could not imagine in 1962. The technological revolution of the Internet and social media is propelling a global revival of participatory democracy. Facebook and Twitter are credited with a key role in movements from Cairo to the volunteer campaign for Barack Obama. For the next generations, perhaps the most important issue for participatory democracy will be ownership and control of the means of producing and distributing information. These issues were prefigured in the Statement in the briefest of complaints about computerized problem solving and in the outcry two years later from Berkeley students in the Free Speech Movement, who claimed they were being processed like IBM punch cards. The Statement criticized the profit motive behind automation while noting that the new technology, if democratically controlled, could eliminate much drudgery at work, open more leisure time, and make education “a continuing process for all people.”

According to Kirkpatrick Sale’s SDS, published in 1973 and still the most comprehensive history of the organization, the Statement “may have been the most widely distributed document of the American left in the sixties,” with 60,000 copies printed and sold for twenty-five cents each between 1962 and 1966. Sale made two observations about the Statement. First, the Statement contained “a power and excitement rare to any document, rarer still in the documents of this time, with a dignity in its language, persuasiveness in its arguments, catholicity in its scope, and quiet skill in its presentation . . . a summary of beliefs for much of the student generation as a whole, then and for several years to come.” Second, “it was set firmly in mainstream politics, seeking the reform of mainstream institutions rather than their abolition, and it had no comprehension of the dynamics of capitalism, of imperialism, of class conflict, certainly no conception of revolution. But none of that mattered.”¹ More recently, historian Michael Kazin wrote that the Statement “is the most ambitious, the most specific, and the most eloquent manifesto in the history of the American Left.”²

Who We Were, What We Said

I wrote the first notes for the Port Huron Statement in December 1961, when I was briefly in an Albany, Georgia, jail cell after a Freedom Ride to fight segregation in the South. The high school and college students engaged in direct action there changed my life. I had never met young people willing to take a risk—perhaps the ultimate risk—for a cause they believed in. Quite simply, I wanted to live like them. Those feelings, and the inspiration they gave me, might explain the utopian urgency of the Statement’s final sentence: “If we appear to seek the unattainable, as it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.” (I have no recollection of where this exhortation originated.)

Even today I find it hard to explain the “power and excitement,” the “dignity” and the “persuasiveness” of this document, which sprawls over 124 pages in book form.³ Though I was already a student editor and a budding pamphleteer, I remember myself, just twenty-two, as a kind of vessel for channeling a larger spirit that was just in the air—blowin’ in the wind—and coursing through the lives of my friends.

The Port Huron attendees insisted that it begin with an emphasis on “we,” to be followed immediately by a section on values. And so we described ourselves as a new generation “raised in modest comfort, looking uncomfortably at the world we inherit.” This was an uncertain trumpet compared with, say, the triumphal tones of The Communist Manifesto. Why did it resonate with so many activists?

In fact, a few sons and daughters of former Communist Party members were present, but their previous family dogmas and loyalties lay shattered by the crushing of the democratic Hungarian revolution in 1956 and the revelations about the Stalinist gulag by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. There were also children of New Deal democratic socialists now experiencing liberal middle-class lives, and there were plenty of mainstream idealistic student leaders, graduate sociology students, a few pacifists, and a number of the spiritually inspired.

Though they were not at Port Huron, there were other philosophical searchers at the time who practiced participatory democracy. Bob Moses, perhaps the single greatest influence on the early SDS and SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), could be described as a philosophical existentialist given to the democratic method. The Free Speech Movement’s Mario Savio described himself as a non-Marxist radical shaped by secular liberation theology who was “an avid supporter of participatory democracy.” We were all influenced by Ella Baker, an elder adviser to SNCC with a long experience of organizing in the South for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Ms. Baker, as everyone referred to her, was critical of the top-down methods of black preachers and organizations, including her friend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She argued that SNCC should remain autonomous and not become a youth branch of the older organizations. She spoke of and personified participatory democracy.

SNCC played a direct role in shaping my values, as it did with many SDS founders. SNCC’s early organizing method was based on listening to local people and taking action on behalf of their demands. Listening and speaking in clear vernacular English was crucial. Books were treasured, but where you stood, with whom, and against what risks was even more important, because if the people you were organizing could not understand your theories, you had to adjust. This led to a language and a form of thinking cleansed of ideological infection, with an emphasis on trying to say what people were already thinking but had not put into words.

The right to vote was no intellectual matter, as it was for many on the left who felt it was based on illusions about where real power lay. Again and again, SNCC organizers heard rural black people emphasize how much they wanted that right. Typically they would say, “I fought in World War II; I fought in Korea; and all I want before I die is the right to vote.” (Many decades earlier, twenty-two-year-old Emma Goldman learned from a similar experience, after an early lecture in which she had scornfully dismissed the eight-hour day as a stupid token demand. When a worker in her audience replied that he could not wait for the overthrow of capitalism but that he also needed two hours less work “to feel human, to read a book or take a walk in daylight,” the experience gave Goldman the consciousness of a great organizer.)⁴

The “Values” section of the Statement reflected our eclectic, existential, sometimes apocalyptic, take on life. “We have no sure formulas, no closed theories.” We would accept no hand-me-down ideologies. “A first task of any social movement is to convince people that the search for orienting theories and the creation of human values is complex but worthwhile.” We agreed with French existentialist novelist Albert Camus, who argued that a previous generation of revolutionaries had sometimes rationalized horrific slaughters in the name of future utopias like “land reform.” Still, we wanted to argue, carefully, for a restoration of the utopian spirit amid the deadening compromises all around us. We wrote that “we are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present” (the same phrase later employed by Margaret Thatcher). Our diagnosis of the prevailing apathy was that deep anxieties had fostered “a developed indifference” about public life but also a yearning to believe in something better. “It is to this latter yearning, at once the spark and engine of change, that we direct our present appeal.”

We even thrashed out basic views of human nature day after day, not the usual subject of political platforms. We asserted a belief that “men [are] infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom and love.” (Use of the term “men” was unquestioned; Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique was one year away.) This formulation followed long discussions in which we repudiated doctrines of pessimism about the fallen human condition, as well as the liberal humanist belief in human “perfectibility.” It may have been influenced also by the Vatican II reforms then sweeping the Catholic Church. The formulation about “unrealized potential” was the premise for believing that human beings were capable of participating in the decisions affecting their lives, a sharp difference from the dominant view that an irrational mass society could be managed only by experts, or the too hopeful Enlightenment view of Tom Paine that our world could be created anew.

What Participatory Democracy Meant

Much was omitted because in 1962 awakenings just around the corner were not anticipated. Many of us read Doris Lessing and Simone de Beauvoir, but the first women’s consciousness-raising groups were two years in the future and would be provoked in part by our own chauvinism. American combat in Vietnam was unseen over the horizon, though the Statement opposed U.S. support for the “free world’s” dictators, including South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem and Cuba’s Fulgencio Batista. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published just two months after Port Huron, but all the Statement observed about the environment was that “uncontrolled exploitation governs the sapping of the earth’s physical resources.” There was no counterculture, no drug culture, no hippies—all that was to come. The folk music revival was at its peak; the Beatles were just ahead. The Statement would need major updating, but its passionate democratic core was of permanent value.

What did we mean by participatory democracy? Obviously the concept arose from our common desire to participate in making our own destiny, and in response to the severe limitations of an undemocratic system that we saw as representing an oligarchy. At its most basic, it meant the right to vote, as Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “not with a mere strip of paper but with one’s whole life.” It meant simplicity in registration and voting, unfettered from the dominance of wealth, property requirements, literacy tests, and poll taxes. It meant exercising the right to popular initiatives, referendums, and recalls, as achieved by Progressives in the early twentieth century. And it meant widening participation to include the economic sphere (workplace democracy and consumer watchdogs), neighborhood assemblies, and family life itself, where women and children were subordinates. It meant a greater role for citizens in the ultimate questions of war and peace, then considered the secret realm of experts.

Participatory democracy was a psychologically liberating antidote to the paralysis of the apathetic “lonely crowd” depicted by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney in the 1950 sociological study by that title. The kind of democracy we were proposing was more than a blueprint for structural rearrangements. It was a way of empowering the individual as autonomous but interdependent with other individuals, and the community as a civic society. Without this empowerment on both levels, the Statement warned, we were living in “a democracy without publics,” in the phrase of C. Wright Mills, the rebel sociologist who was one of our intellectual heroes.

The Statement’s economic program was an extension of the New Deal and a call for deeper participatory democratic reform. Proposals for a government-led poverty program and “medical care . . . as a lifetime human right” anticipated the Medicare legislation that came in 1965, and the Statement’s concept of a government-led antipoverty program foreshadowed the Office of Economic Opportunity, a project envisioned by John F. Kennedy and adopted by Lyndon Johnson.

But the Statement also called for economic democracy, as distinct from the New Deal’s more bureaucratic approach: the major resources and means of production should be “open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation.” There was a danger of “bureaucratic coagulation” and too much emphasis in Kennedy’s New Frontier belief that “problems are easiest for computers to solve.” There should be experiments in decentralization, we said, devolving the power of “monster cities” to local communities seeded with more developmental incentives. Returning to the Statement’s moral focus, since a human being’s economic experience has “crucial influence on habits, perceptions and individual ethics,” we insisted that there be incentives beyond money or survival, ones that are “educative, not stultifying; creative, not mechanical; self-directed, not manipulated; encouraging independence, a respect for others, a sense of dignity, and a willingness to accept social responsibility.”

Not that Marxism was irrelevant to the Port Huron gathering. Most of the participants were shaped and informed in part by Marxist traditions. But the convention was never intended as a revival ceremony for Marxism. The document at one point mentioned a need to bring together “liberals and socialists, the former for their relevance and the latter for their sense of thoroughgoing reforms in the system.” Even those at Port Huron who were children of the Old Left had concluded that moral values and democracy were more important than any ideological renovation of Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, or anarchism. It seemed we agreed that we were something new: a movement, perhaps an embryonic blessed community. When those from an earlier tradition pointed out, sometimes vehemently, that we were not only not new but descendants of the left, the New Left became our hybrid brand. No one had complained when that label was suggested in 1960 by C. Wright Mills, in his open “Letter to the New Left.”

Breaking the Political Stalemate

In his American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation, Michael Kazin argued that the role of the American left has been to make lasting cultural and normative contributions while never actually coming to power. We were dreamers too, but dreamers who had a plan for achieving political influence and power.

The Kennedy administration was in a crossfire between two opposing forces: the civil rights movement versus the dinosaurs of the Dixiecrat South, on which the party depended for its national majority. By risking their lives daily in sit-ins and voter drives, SNCC and rural black people would soon crumble the foundation of Dixiecrat power.

The Port Huron Statement articulated a strategy of “political realignment,” in which the goal was to end the “organized stalemate” in Washington and open the possibility of a more progressive party. Realignment was embraced by King, Bayard Rustin, and Michael Harrington, and it was the implicit agenda of the vast March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963. Soon northern students were streaming south in 1964 for the Mississippi Summer Project, whose aim was to unseat the state’s white Democratic delegation and replace it with a democratically chosen slate, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, at the convention that year in Atlantic City. By 1965 the Voting Rights Act was passed, establishing federal oversight of Deep South voting patterns.

The energy of some SNCC and SDS organizers also overflowed into the nascent farmworkers’ organizing efforts in the Southwest at around the same time. The Statement condemned the disenfranchisement of migrant workers while also citing them as a potential base for rebirth of a “broader and more forceful unionism.” In 1964 the government’s hated bracero program was forced to its end. Political realignment was advanced that same year when the Supreme Court decreed that voter representation must be based on population rather than the land holdings of growers. By 1966 the United Farm Workers (UFW) were bringing new energy to the labor movement; that same year, Congress moved to include minimum-wage protections for farmworkers, who had been excluded for the previous twenty-eight years under the Fair Labor Standards Act. We saw the UFW’s four-year global consumer boycott of grapes as a channel of participatory democracy that attracted thousands of new activists.⁵

One link between these events was the leadership of United Automobile Workers...