Every half century or so, whether we need it or not…
by digby
Tom Hayden looks back on the Port Huron statement:
“We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.”
Those were the opening words of the Port Huron Statement, which I helped draft 50 years ago this summer as the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society. The statement, written in the idealistic early days of the New Left, laid out a vision for a nation in which racial equality would be finally achieved, disarmament embraced and true participatory democracy would become the norm.
The group that gathered in Port Huron, Mich., in 1962 to produce the statement included children who’d rejected the Old Left of their parents, black student civil rights activists seeking Northern campus allies, children of the New Deal labor-left and student journalists from Austin, Texas; Ann Arbor, Mich.; and elsewhere in the country. We gathered in small groups at a conference center near Lake Huron to discuss and revise sections of the draft that addressed racism and poverty, the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, campus apathy and the need for a new majority movement with students as the catalysts of social change[…]
It was hardly a perfect document. It contained sexist language (it was written a year before the publication of Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique”), and there were many things it didn’t foresee, such as the assassination of President Kennedy, the 1965 escalation in Vietnam and the looming environmental threats to the planet. But when we finished, it seemed like “a holy moment,” as my then-wife, Sandra Cason, later put it. Al Haber and I even drove to the White House to deliver a copy to presidential advisor Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in case the Cold War liberals could be engaged in discussion.
That sounds weirdly familiar.
In case you think it was all a big fat failure though, consider this:
The achievements that came from participatory democratic activism in the years that followed the statement’s publication were considerable: the ending of the Vietnam War and the draft, the enfranchisement of Southern blacks and young people, the rise of the feminist movement, the Roe vs. Wade decision, the growth and strengthening of public employee unions and California farmworkers, Richard Nixon’s unsurpassed environmental laws (in response to the first Earth Day), the Americans with Disabilities Act (in response to activists in wheelchairs occupying federal buildings), and much more. Former Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg remembers carrying her copy of the statement to study groups during the free-speech movement, and Carl Wittman, a Port Huron-era activist who was closeted in 1962, later drew on it for inspiration in writing “A Gay Manifesto.”
The American left tends to be the lovers not the fighters. But every now and then, it gets riled up. And what follows is progress, one painful step at a time.
He concludes with the observation that he sees the same spirit today in the DREAM students and the Wisconsin uprising and Occupy Wall Street, And he concludes with this:
These new movements have grown up because courageous people saw wrong and decided to push for what was right. And if they should begin to grow cynical or discouraged by how difficult it is to make change, they might consider how things looked to us in 1962. As we put it in the final words of the Port Huron Statement:
“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.”
In those days, of course, the unimaginable was a constant threat of nuclear war. Who says things never get better?
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