Where possible, the peace movement should challenge the "peace credentials" of the otherwise-liberals by threatening or actually running candidates against them. To submit a correction for our consideration, click here. In 1966 new SDS leaders rejected the PHS as “too reformist.” It was certainly true; the PHS did envision reforms—substantive rather than token, rapid though not overnight—and revolution was seen more as an undefined aspiration or long-term hope. As a Cold War document, the Port Huron Statement is … Death, our old nemesis, also intervened. Barack Obama, born in 1961, the year the Freedom Rides began, very much owes his election to the voting rights reforms that brought about this realignment. According to Kirkpatrick Sale’s SDS, published in 1970 and still the most comprehensive history of the organization, the PHS “may have been the most widely distributed document of the American left in the sixties,” with 60,000 copies printed and sold for 25 cents each between 1962 and 1966. [6] In particular, the statement viewed race ("symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry") and Cold War–induced alienation ("symbolized by the presence of the Bomb") as the two main problems of modern society. If that was true, what was the point of depending on mainstream public opinion? There was a growing peace movement, which many in our ranks eagerly joined. 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 … Strict anarchist theory suggests that any reforms only legitimize and strengthen structures that should be toppled or dissolved. I don’t mean to say that all Occupiers oppose reform. Most of the thinkers who inspired the early SDS—Mills, John Dewey, Camus, Lessing, James Baldwin—were shelved in search of an ideology that only Marxism seemed to offer. Nor was their deep paranoia unjustified. In domestic matters, it criticized racial discrimination, economic inequality, big businesses, trade unions and political parties. It was written by political activist… SNCC’s early organizing method was based on listening to local people and taking action on behalf of their demands. 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 hadn’t put into words. Indeed, the greatest outpouring of youth, student, GI, liberal, feminist and environmentalist sentiment—of perhaps any previous era in American history—occurred after SDS had closed its doors. By signing up to receive emails, you agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation's journalism. These issues were prefigured in the PHS 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 felt they were being processed like IBM punch cards. There is endless speculation these days about the future of Occupy Wall Street. 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. 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. 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. By using this website, you consent to our use of cookies. Of course, there are differences between the Port Huron Statement and the Occupy Wall Street manifesto, but they should not be overstated. One link between these events was the leadership of United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther; his brother Victor; and a top UAW officer, Mildred Jeffrey, the mother of a key SDS founder at Port Huron, Sharon Jeffrey. We were fully aware of the dangers of being co-opted into the system, the managed cooling of street heat, the predictable countermovements that would rise up. Full text of "Port Huron Statement" See other formats THE PORT HURON STATEMENT ... we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation They also criticized the United States for its exaggerated paranoia and exclusive condemnation of the Soviet Union, and blamed this for being the reason for failing to achieve disarmament and to assure peace. tn_keyword: ['peace-acti'], The climate of officially sponsored terrorism ebbed in the South, and leaders like the Rev. Sale made two observations about the Statement: First, the PHS 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. Early in 1960, the SLID changed its name into Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). We are not as badly off as Americans were in the 1930s, of course, if only because of the safety net reforms that were achieved in that earlier dangerous time. For the first time, students were thinking of themselves as “agents of social change.” The buoyancy of this strategy, perhaps carried on the innocence of the young, was a momentous break from the culture of the left in those times, which was dispirited by McCarthyism, bogged down in poisonous factional disputes and weighted with the ideological language and baggage of a Marxism that remained foreign to most Americans. By “system” I mean the intersecting (though not coordinated) hierarchies of banks, corporations, the military, media and religion, dominant then as now (though there are far more women and people of color at the upper levels today). By risking their lives daily in sit-ins and voter drives, SNCC and rural black people would soon crumble the foundation of Dixiecrat power. Early in 1960, the SLID changed its name into Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Port Huron Revisited.” About This is Democracy. On May 9, 1970, one week after the National Guard killed four protesting students at Kent State, and after Walter Reuther demanded an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, he and five others were killed in a charter-jet crash. The energy of some SNCC and SDS organizers also overflowed into the nascent farmworkers’ organizing efforts in the Southwest at around the same time. But the early SDS saw no alternative to winning reforms from the state and corporate sectors. tn_subject: ['activism', 'occupy-mov', 'social-jus'], What is a Chicano? What do Chavez, Gonzales, and Tijerina all have in common? The folk music revival was at its peak; the Beatles were just ahead. The technological revolution of the Internet and social media is propelling a global revival of participatory democracy. VIDEO: People in Denmark Are a Lot Happier Than People in the United States. The second generation of SDS, and the movement generally, was learning hard lessons from experiences not available to us in 1960–62. In 2009 came a movement echoing the 1961 Freedom Rides: undocumented students taking the risk of deportation while demanding passage of the DREAM Act. The Port Huron Statement's great contribution to political language was ''participatory democracy'' -the notion, in essence, that people should take part in the decisions that affect their lives. This was the “power elite” described by Mills. So begins the legendary Port Huron Statement (PHS), the 75-page manifesto published June 15, 1962, that would come to define the historic student movement of the 1960s. tn_pos: 'rectangle_1', Here’s Why. These reforms came about, as Zinn would rightly warn, as pragmatic institutional responses or concessions meant largely to restore order. On the one hand, the UAW’s Reuther brothers helped fund and provide conference quarters at Port Huron; supported the March on Washington and the early UFW organizing effort; and were frustrated by Meany’s archconservative views. At present the majority of America’s ‘public sector,’ the largest part of our public spending, is for the military. We even thrashed out basic views of human nature day after day, not the usual subject of political platforms. SDS was banned on many campuses. tn_author: ['tom-h'], Listening and speaking in clear vernacular English was crucial. On the other hand, there are sources of hope now that we couldn’t imagine in 1962. 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 PHS’s concept of a government-led anti-poverty program foreshadowed the Office of Economic Opportunity, a project envisioned by John F. Kennedy and adopted by Lyndon Johnson. The Statement’s economic program was an extension of the New Deal and a call for deeper participatory democratic reform. Globally, however, the unfettered appetites of capitalism have created an intolerable human condition. That brief generation tried to make sense of the terrible and traumatizing events of the time. And in response, new movements arose across the planet against war, sweatshops, hunger and environmental destruction. The same dilemmas arose in the ’60s in the relationships between SNCC and the national civil rights leadership, and between SDS and the liberal Democrats we blamed for starting the Vietnam War. But there is a broad suspicion of seeking reforms that require alliances with top-down organizations, especially with progressive elected officials. The CIA also ran covert operations through the AFL-CIO’s international affairs department. The writers of the document believed that ordinary citizens, particularly students, could create change through non-violent means. The PHS was even prophetic in condemning the. I believe the Port Huron vision of a progressive alliance would have succeeded in bringing a new governing majority to power in 1964, with a likelihood of avoiding the Vietnam War, were it not for the murder of Kennedy and Johnson’s subsequent escalation of it. The same spirit of popular participation that inspired OWS drove the electoral successes of Latin American nations emerging from dictatorships in the 1990s. Copyright (c) 2020 The Nation Company LLC, Georgia Senators Loeffler and Perdue Are Campaigning Against Democracy. In foreign policy, the statement took issue with the American government's handling of the Cold War, both the existential threat of nuclear war, and the actual arms race. The SDS call for a participatory democracy echoes today in student-led democracy movements around the world, even appearing as the first principle of the Occupy Wall Street September 17 declaration. Softer counterinsurgency techniques included the screening-out of the “protest prone” by admissions officers and the use of psychological counseling to “treat” alienated students. 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. Finally came Occupy Wall Street. While the Port Huron Statement was criticized by an older generation as too far left, an opposite attack came from the mid-1960s generation. Perhaps it would take a vanguard of martyrs to incite an American revolution, or so the thinking went. We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit. The SDS manifesto, known as the Port Huron Statement, was adopted at the organization's first convention in June 1962, based on an earlier draft by staff member Tom Hayden. It may be sobering for today’s Wall Street critics to read in the PHS 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. 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. Yet the document was con-scious of the organization’s historical ties to labor and the working- class movement. J. Edgar Hoover’s orders to “neutralize” protest leaders are well documented. Rampant conspiracy theories seemed to negate the prospects of popular movements and peaceful transitions through elections. Radical reform depended on independent social movements in combination with awakened progressives within political institutions rather than any revolutionary conquest of state and corporate power. The unmovable obstacle to the coalition we hoped to build with organized labor was the secret pro–cold war element within liberalism, directly and indirectly tied to the CIA, which was fiercely opposed to our break from cold war thinking. Even a philosophical anarchist (or “libertarian socialist”) like Noam Chomsky has written in favor of radical reform: There is a state sector that does awful things, but it also happens to do some good things. The new generation claimed that this strategy was based on delusional liberal hopes. Professor Jim Soto spoke about the Port Huron Statement, a political manifesto written in the summer of 1962 by the Students for a Democratic Society. 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. That’s under attack in an effort to minimize the state. It is also a measure of the depths of despair we fell to in the years to come, a despair that lingers today among those who experienced both the beautiful struggle and the bitter fruit. If so, “participatory democracy” and the priorities of Port Huron continue to offer clues to building a committed movement toward a society responsive to the needs of the vast majority. When I first saw a computer in 1964 it was the size of a room, and the professor who predicted microprocessors seemed nuts. The consequences for realignment were far different from our predictions. 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. 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). The importance of this sojourn into left-wing history is that SDS and SNCC (and King, among others) were unaware of the company we were keeping. 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. “It is to this latter yearning, at once the spark and engine of change, that we direct our present appeal.”. It was written to reflect their view that all problems in every area were linked to each other. It is time for a participatory New Deal, to bring the banks and corporations under the regulations and reforms they have escaped through runaway globalization. SDS developed from the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the youth branch of a socialist educational organization known as the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). The Port Huron Statement offered a new vision of social change while defining freedom to mean participatory democracy. The elite of the World Economic Forum, flying into Davos on corporate jets, were challenged by the World Social Forum, in which thousands of campesinos, indigenous people, workers, students and artists made their way to Porto Alegre, Brazil. It may be wishful thinking, but I believe the evidence is that Kennedy would not have sent 100,000 ground troops to Vietnam, as his successor did (after promising not to). Participatory Democracy: From the Port Huron Statement to Occupy Wall Street On its fiftieth anniversary, the founding declaration of SDS echoes today in democracy movements around the world. Spontaneous democratic demonstrations erupted in Russia late last year, organized on Facebook by young people seeking honest elections. First, there was the assassination of John Kennedy, which devastated any rational basis for strategy. What did Port Huron say in his statement? SDS developed from the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the youth branch of a socialist educational organization known as the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). The 25,700-word statement "articulated the fundamental problems of American society and laid out a radical vision for a better future". The early SDS certainly identified with the Wobblies, the anarchists who organized the 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts; the Haymarket Square martyrs; and the historic wildcat strikes across the Western mining country. After these democratic transitions came the uprisings across the Arab world. They must support Southern voter registration and Negro political candidates and demand that Democratic Party liberals do the same (in the last Congress, Dixiecrats split with Northern Democrats on 119 of 300 roll-calls, mostly on civil rights, area redevelopment and foreign aid bills; and breach was much larger than in the previous several sessions). And finally, the power elite ruled beyond, or behind, elected officials. In short, "They must consciously build a base for their assault upon the loci of power. It included the November 1969 Moratorium against the war, up to that point the largest peace march in American history; Earth Day 1970, for which. Sign up for our free daily newsletter, along with occasional offers for programs that support our journalism. But none of that mattered.” 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.”, 1963 SDS National Council Meeting (C. Clark Kissinger), 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. It was a splendid bedlam of participatory democracy, which led neither to socialism nor fascism but to Keynesian economics and a vision of the state as an instrument that can sometimes be bent to the popular will and public interest. The oppressive paradigm the PHS tried to discredit was the cold war between two blocs engaged in nuclear brinkmanship. The vast constituency of Occupy surely knows that a participatory future cannot be protected without engaging in some sort of politics in the present. The Port Huron Statement was notable for addressing universities and students as potential agents of democratic change. Elections produce popular mandates, and mandates spur popular activism. Making the paranoia all the more justified was the palpable sense among many of us that we had been abandoned by our parents; a 1969 Gallup survey indicated that 82 percent of Americans wanted student demonstrators expelled. The document provided ideas of what and how to work for and to improve, and also advocated nonviolent civil disobedience as the means by which student youth could bring forth the concept of "participatory democracy.". 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