Port Huron Statement

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The Port Huron Statement is the manifesto of the American student activist movement Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), written primarily by Tom Hayden, then the Field Secretary of SDS, and completed on June 15, 1962 at an SDS convention at what is now a state park in Lakeport, Mich., a community north of Port Huron[1]. Like much else which occurred in the Sixties, the meaning and significance of The Port Huron Statement depends upon the reader’s point of view and political beliefs. President Bill Clinton has described the problems inherent in interpreting the events which occurred during those turbulent years by aptly observing “if you look back on the sixties and, on balance, you think there was more good than harm, then you’re probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you’re probably a Republican."[2]

Contents

[edit] Background

Because the Port Huron Statement was written as a policy statement for the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), one of the major activist groups of the Sixties, it is probably subject to more interpretative disagreement than most documents. Further compounding the debate over its meaning is the controversial nature of the SDS, which went through a series of evolutions, while also adding and spinning off various factions over the years. These factions and spin-offs ranged from the anti-communist League for Industrial Democracy and the non-violent Worker Student Alliance to the communist inspired Progressive Labor party and the violent Revolutionary Youth Movement, which later turned into the Weather Underground.

The loose decentralized nature of the national organization also added to the multi-faceted nature of the SDS’ image, since individual chapters varied greatly in their agenda and actions. As noted by the U.S. Supreme court in Healy v. James[3], which established the right of a local chapter to receive university recognition,

"Students for a Democratic Society, as conceded by the College and the lower courts, is loosely organized, having various factions and promoting a number of diverse social and political views, only some of which call for unlawful action."

Some critiques of The Port Huron Statement appear to be based upon the authors view of the SDS and its various militant factions as they subsequently evolved in the late 60’s, rather than the nature of the organization at the time the statement was drafted. Therefore, the best way for one to interpret the Port Huron Statement is to read it and make up one’s own mind.[4]

Much of the Port Huron Statement was authored by Tom Hayden, a University of Michigan student, who was one of the founders of the SDS, later one of the Chicago 8 and much later a long term member of California’s state legislature. Hayden was active in the civil rights movement at the time when institutionalized racism was the norm in many places in America, before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the series of decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, which outlawed discrimination in housing, transportation, dining, recreation, employment and voting practices.[5]

The SDS began as “a derivative of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID),” which had been “organized as an advocacy group for the anti-communist labor-Left. . ."[6] In order to appeal to a broader coalition expanding beyond its labor origins, the organization grew into the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) so as to draw in other activist groups, such as the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was at the front lines of the civil rights movement.

As described by Tom Hayden in looking back at the Port Huron Statement 40 years later in 2002,

"The original idea, conceived at a winter meeting in Ann Arbor in 1961, was modest: to produce an organizing tool for the movement we were trying to spread through SDS. Then the statement became more audacious. The roughly sixty young people who finalized the statement during a week at a United Auto Workers retreat in Port Huron, Michigan, experienced what one could only call an inspirational moment. As the words flowed night and day, we felt we were giving voice to a new generation of rebels." [7]

[edit] The Theme

Although addressing a multitude of issues, the central theme of the Port Huron Statement was a call to action against apathy and hypocrisy. The introduction of the statement spelled out the SDS’ discontent with what its members saw as “the contradiction of ideals we were taught and realities we experienced”[8] and urged students to become involved in what was termed as “participatory democracy.” The statement defined institutionalized racism and Cold War mentality as the two major barriers to its vision of a better America in its “Agenda for a Generation,” by providing:

"We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit. When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world: the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world. Freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people — these American values we found good, principles by which we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency. As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss. First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract “others” we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time. We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two, for these two were too immediate and crushing in their impact, too challenging in the demand that we as individuals take the responsibility for encounter and resolution."[9]

[edit] Historical Context

In order to understand The Port Huron Statement, some historical context is necessary. The Port Huron Statement was written between 1961 and 1962, in the midst of the historic civil rights struggle. The late 50’s and 60’s saw the Rosa Parks inspired Montgomery bus boycotts, the Freedom Rides into the South, the Greensboro sit-ins and the Selma marches, which were responded to by the murder of civil rights workers, organized police brutality in some southern communities, the re-emergence of the KKK and the assassination of leaders such as Martin Luther King and Medgar Evans.

The Port Huron Statement was also written at a time when many influential and mainstream Americans were expressing concern over the potential ramifications of the cold war. Less than a year earlier, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, perhaps the greatest American war hero since George Washington, cautioned in his often quoted farewell address, that the nation “must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex.”[10]

Just two years later, as elementary school students were taught to protect themselves from nuclear fall out with periodic “duck and cover” drills as part of their daily routine, the nation literally went to the brink of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The same year, the book Fail-Safe, about a fictionalized nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union launched by a mistake, reached the top of the best seller lists.

Later in 1963, President John F. Kennedy followed these events with his famous “Let Us Examine Our Attitude Toward The Cold War Speech,”[11] which raised many of the same concerns as the Port Huron Statement.

"Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil to the far corners of the globe or to generations yet unborn."

[edit] The Statement Itself

The Port Huron Statement challenged what it viewed as most American’s complacency with the status quo, although it blamed much of such complacency upon the efforts of an entrenched power elite to maintain its status,

"The apathy here is, first subjective — the felt powerlessness of ordinary people, the resignation before the enormity of events. But subjective apathy is encouraged by the objective American situation — the actual structural separation of people from power, from relevant knowledge, from pinnacles of decision making. . . . The American political system is not the democratic model of which its glorifiers speak. In actuality it frustrates democracy by confusing the individual citizen, paralyzing policy discussion, and consolidating the irresponsible power of military and business interests."[12]

Although some critics have accused The Port Huron Statement of espousing Marxist beliefs,[13] the statement itself strongly condemned communism,

"As democrats we are in basic opposition to the communist system. The Soviet Union, as a system, rests on the total suppression of organized opposition, as well as on a vision of the future in the name of which much human life has been sacrificed, and numerous small and large denials of human dignity rationalized. The Communist party has equated falsely the “triumph of true socialism” with centralized bureaucracy. The Soviet state lacks independent labor organizations and other liberties we consider basic. . . Communist parties throughout the rest of the word are generally undemocratic in internal structure and mode of action. . . The communist movement has failed, in every sense, to achieve its stated intentions of leading a worldwide movement for human emancipation."[14]

While rejecting communism, The Port Huron Statement also rejected “Free Market Capitalism,” contending that it had produced a system which had failed to meet both the physical and spiritual needs of Americans.

"We live amidst a national celebration of economic prosperity while poverty and deprivation remain an unbreakable way of life for millions in the “affluent society,” including many of our own generation. . . Work, too, is often unfulfilling and victimizing, accepted as a channel to status or plenty, if not in the way to pay the bills, rarely as a means of understanding and controlling self and events. . . . Money, instead of dignity of character, remains a pivotal American value and profitability, instead of social use, a pivotal standard in determining priorities of resource allocation."[15]

The statement also disdained the American Cold War foreign policy of the time, which it concluded was based upon “our basic national policy-making assumption that the Soviet Union is inherently expansionist and aggressive, prepared to dominate the rest of the world by military means.”[16] Although acknowledging that “the Soviet state has used force and the threat of force to promote or defend its perceived national interests,” the statement contended that America’s response had not only be ineffective in meeting these threats, but had made the world more unsafe, while also diverting resources that could have been better spent in helping the poor and middle class.

Following its critiques of existing policy and its expressions of aspirational goals, The Port Huron Statement set forth a number of specific policy recommendations, including

1. “Universal controlled disarmament must replace deterrence and arms control as the national defense goal.”[17]

2. “The United States’ principal goal should be creating a world where hunger, poverty, disease, ignorance, violence, and exploitation are replaced as central features by abundance, reason, love, and international cooperation. . . We should undertake here and now a fifty-year effort to prepare for all nations the conditions of industrialization.”[18]

3. “America should show its commitment to democratic institutions not by withdrawing support from undemocratic regimes, but by making domestic democracy exemplary. Worldwide amusement, cynicism and hatred toward the United States as a democracy is not simply a communist propaganda trick, but an objectively justifiable phenomenon. If respect for democracy is to be international, then the significance of democracy must emanate from American shores. . .”[19]

4. “America must abolish its political party stalemate. Two genuine parties, centered around issues and essential values, demanding allegiance to party principles shall supplant the current system or organized stalemate. . .”[20]

5. “Mechanisms of voluntary association must be created through which political information can be imparted and political participation encouraged. Political parties, even if realigned, would not provide adequate outlets for popular involvement. Institutions should be created that engage people with issues and express political preference. . .Private in nature, these should be organized around single issues (medical care, transportation systems reform, etc., concrete interest (labor and minority group organizations), multiple issues or general issues.”[21]

6. “Corporations must be made publicly responsible. It is not possible to believe that true democracy can exist where a minority utterly controls enormous wealth and power. The influence of corporate elites on foreign policy is neither reliable nor democratic. . . a way must be found to direct our economic resources to genuine human needs, not the private needs of corporations nor the rigged needs of maneuvered citizenry. We can no longer rely upon competition of the many to insure that business enterprise is responsive to social needs.”[22]

7. “The allocation of resources must be based on social needs. . . When great social needs are so pressing, our concept of “government spending” is wrapped up in the “permanent war economy.” [23]

[edit] Criticisms

Some critics[who?] claim the Port Huron Statement is a polemical compilation of Marxist and anti-American/European premise, employing in particular racial and class issues[citation needed]. It is supported with utopian arguments concerning human nature. The document ends with a step-by-step plan on how to employ the American university system as a catalyst for social and political change.- [24]

The Port Huron statement has been widely viewed[who?] as a rejection of the Kennedy administration for its betrayal of domestic left-wing policies in favour of an antagonistic foreign policy.[citation needed]

Excerpt from the Introduction: The decline of utopia and hope is in fact one of the defining features of social life today. The reasons are various: the dreams of the older left were perverted by Stalinism and never recreated; the congressional stalemate makes men narrow their view of the possible; the specialization of human activity leaves little room for sweeping thought; the horrors of the twentieth century, symbolized in the gas-ovens and concentration camps and atom bombs, have blasted hopefulness. To be idealistic is to be considered apocalyptic, deluded.

Excerpt:

The national heritage of racial discrimination via slavery has been a part of America since Christopher Columbus' advent on the new continent. As such, racism not only antedates the Republic and the thirteen Colonies, but even the use of the English language in this hemisphere.

Much of the Statement is an unrelenting attack on European America and corporations. It is apocalyptic and revolutionary using words and phrases such as "must organize", "must transform", "must start controversy" to overthrow the old order for racial and class justice.[citation needed]

[edit] Background

The SDS was part of the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the youth group of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). The LID and its youth group were social democratic organizations that were strongly anti-communist. Their opposition to communism came from a left-libertarian critique of the Soviet Union. The SDS rejected this left wing anti-communism and without being pro-communist (though some members were), it became anti-anti – communist.[citation needed]

The Port Huron Statement was seen[who?] as the unofficial rebuttal to the Sharon Statement, the founding principles of the Young Americans for Freedom. The principles outlined in the competing statements would frame the ideological disputes that took place on American college campuses in the 1960s.[citation needed]

[edit] References

The Dude in the film The Big Lebowski claims authorship of the Port Huron Statement.

  1. ^ Finished document (Hayden)
  2. ^ Clinton, William, My Life (New York: Knopf 2004).
  3. ^ 408 U.S. 169 (1972).
  4. ^ See Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society (1962), [1] (visited December 4, 2009).
  5. ^ See e.g. Heart of Atlanta Motel v. U.S., 379 U.S. 241 (1964)(upheld federal statute prohibiting racial discrimination in public accommodations serving travelers in interstate commerce); Katzenbach v. McClung, 379 U.S. 294 (1964)(upheld federal statute prohibiting racial discrimination by restaurants serving patrons in interstate commerce); Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967)(struck down Virginia’s statue prohibiting inter-racial marriage); McLaughlin v. Florida, 379 U.S. 184 (1964)(declaring unconstitutional Florida’s law prohibiting inter-racial cohabitation).
  6. ^ Hayden, Tom, The Long Sixties From 1960 to Barack Obama, Paradigm Publishers (2009), p. 25.
  7. ^ Hayden & Flacks, The Port Huron Statement at 40, The Nation, July 18, 2002,[2](visited November 30,2009).
  8. ^ Hayden, Tom, The Long Sixties From 1960 to Barack Obama, Paradigm Publishers (2009), p. 9.
  9. ^ Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society (1962), page 1, [3](visited December 4, 2009).
  10. ^ Eisenhower, Dwight, Farewell Address, January 17, 1961 reprinted in My Fellow Americans, The Most Important Speeches of America’s Presidents, Sourcebooks, Inc. (2003), p. 156.
  11. ^ Kennedy, John, F., Let Us Examine Our Attitude Toward The Cold War,1961 reprinted in My Fellow Americans, The Most Important Speeches of America’s Presidents, Sourcebooks, Inc. (2003), at p. 175.
  12. ^ Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society (1962), page 7, [4](visited December 4, 2009).
  13. ^ <See e.g. David Horowitz, Forty Years After Port Huron, Salon, July 29, 2002, Salon, July 7, 2009, [5] (visited December 4, 2009).
  14. ^ Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society (1962), page 19, [6](visited December 4, 2009).
  15. ^ Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society (1962), page 10-11, [7](visited December 4, 2009).
  16. ^ Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society (1962), page 10-11, [8](visited December 4, 2009).
  17. ^ Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society (1962), page 23, [9](visited December 4, 2009).
  18. ^ Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society (1962), page 26, [10](visited December 4, 2009).
  19. ^ Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society (1962), page 27, [11](visited December 4, 2009).
  20. ^ Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society (1962), page 29, [12](visited December 4, 2009).
  21. ^ Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society (1962), page 29, [13](visited December 4, 2009).
  22. ^ Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society (1962), page 29-30, [14](visited December 4, 2009).
  23. ^ Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society (1962), page 30, [15](visited December 4, 2009).
  24. ^ David Horowitz, Forty Years After Port Huron, Salon, July 29, 2002[16]

[edit] External links

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