This year marks the 50th anniversary of the signing of the 1962 Port Huron Statement, the founding document of SDS. The Statement advocated for participatory democracy and helped launch the student movement of the 1960s. Tens of thousands of copies of the 25,000-word document were printed in booklet form.
The Statement began with this famous line: quote, “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” It ended with these words: quote, “If we appear to seek the unattainable, it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.”
Tom Hayden talking:
I was the editor of the Michigan Daily in Ann Arbor. I had read “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg and On the Road by Jack Kerouac, and I was a big fan of James Dean and Rebels Without a Cause and looking for my cause. And I met the young black students from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and I fell in love with them. And it was because the—they were the alternative to the life of apathetic absurdity that faced those of us like myself, and they were doing something that they believed in at the risk of their own lives and careers and reputations. And I had never met people who were willing to make that risk. And that was it.
I was gradually converted to becoming an activist. It was not an overnight Saint Paul kind of conversion; it was slow. But I came to realize, just as I think Juan did, that you can be a writer, a journalist, an autonomous person, and be deeply engaged and not a propagandist. You begin to see things, see realities, by being involved.
Port Huron. It was a miracle. It’s like “how did Democracy Now! happen?” A few people said—it must have been something in the air, something blowing in the wind, and we wanted to write an agenda for our generation. And 50 or 60 people did, and very inspired by SNCC. The first notes toward it were written by myself in an Albany, Georgia, jail after a Freedom Ride. Some of the SNCC people came. They were trying to recruit us. And we wanted to do something about the lack of student power. Students couldn’t vote. We could be drafted. There were dorm hours. People would make out with their dates, but there were dorm counselors that made everybody have “two couples, three legs on the floor, please.” I have to set the timing of this: 1960, ’62, a very special time.
So, we decided we would write this manifesto. And a professor named Arnold Kaufman suggested we use the term “participatory democracy.” It also came from Ms. Ella Baker, who was the elder adviser to SNCC, who wanted the students in the South to have an autonomous movement, bottom-up movement, a self-determined movement, and not just follow the elder clergy. And the components came together, and the Statement was somehow produced. And it was called a living document, because we thought it should be open to revision. The sentence you read that opened it is not exactly The Communist Manifesto. You know, it’s like we’re people of this generation, bred in modest comfort, looking uncomfortably.
And so, we’re having a meeting at NYU, that everybody is invited to, all day today, a reflection. Many of the originals are there.
Occupy makes us all very happy, very pleased. We’ve seen this come before and go, and come again. And it will.
Al Haber was the man carrying the idea of a student organization around. He was like the elder of the group. Robb Burlage, who I had dinner with last night, was a editor at the University of Texas newspaper. My first wife, Casey, was a sit-in leader and a kind of existentialist from Austin. There were student body presidents, student newspaper editors. SNCC people were there. Charles McDew, who’s here in New York, was there. It’s an interesting cross-section of about 50 people. That’s all.
the movement began with sit-ins, which were occupations of lunch counters. I was a Freedom Rider. I occupied a train from Atlanta to Albany, Georgia. But very swiftly, the organizers kept hearing from, particularly elderly people, black people in the South, “I want to vote before I die. I served in Korea. I want, just once, to be able to vote.” And the principle was to help people accomplish what they already wanted to do. And there was a strategy also because the disenfranchisement of all these people was the power foundation on which the Dixiecrats, the white racist wing of the Democratic Party that dominated all the committees, was based upon. And so, it was not an accident that these projects occurred in McComb, Mississippi, or in Lowndes County, Alabama, or Albany, Georgia. And they weren’t—it wasn’t an either/or of direct action or voter registration, because the vote was a real threat to the status quo.
And SNCC people made virtually a blood oath to spend at least five years—nobody knew who would live and who would not—but to attack this problem. And it took great courage and—but also strategic intelligence, listening to people who had been waiting for all these years. And it resulted in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which, fortunately, had some teeth. That’s why the right wing is complaining today, and the Confederate states are complaining, because they’re still under a monitoring provision of the 1965 act. So, in a sense, SNCC accomplished that. I remember I was at a SNCC reunion, 50th, last year, year before. And the attorney general of the United States, Holder, was there, and he gave a talk, and he said, “You know, there’s a straight line between those projects in the Deep South and where I sit today at the Department of Justice. And I owe it to SNCC.”
Voting Rights Act and then the protests that occurred against the war in Vietnam led as well to the mass defections from the Democratic Party of so many Southern whites and, of course, the Nixon strategy in ’68 to basically woo the South, the Republican Party, woo Southern Democrats away, and that really made a major shift in the political alignment in the country for a generation.
that was a failure of the Liberal Democrats. The plan was this: risk your neck to do the voter registration and, in doing so, awaken a liberal constituency of clergy, of labor, of like-minded people around the country, and, yes, get the white racists out of the Democratic Party base, move them to wherever they want to go: the Klan, the Republican Party, whatever.
I don’t remember that being part of the plan. They’re entitled to their role. The plan was to replace them with progressive forces and realign the Democratic Party. And the failure, the absolute turning point, came where—1964, everything had happened. Kennedy had been assassinated, and SNCC launched the Mississippi Freedom Summer. I went into a long-term community organizing project in Newark
The idea was an interracial or a multiracial movement of the poor to galvanize everybody else. We did not anticipate the war in Vietnam and the draft and the polarization. But the idea was that—I think if Johnson had stayed out of the war, you could have accomplished that without the right-wing strategy that followed. It was the right-wing response to the draft resistance, the black uprisings and all that between ’65, ’67, that made it possible to have another realignment that favored the rising Republican Party, which is now the Tea Party.
parallels between organizing in the age of Obama and organizing in the age of John Kennedy.
I think, in short, the movement thought that we needed federal protection. And the problem with the federal government was that the Democrats in power had a power base that included liberals, but it also included the Dixiecrat, right-wing, racist element that prevented anything from happening. And I guess we thought, or gambled, that through direct action and voter registration we would make them choose.
And so, we saw Kennedy, I think, evolve a little bit. There’s dispute about this, but I think he evolved in three years towards more sympathy for the March on Washington, which he initially was worried about because he didn’t want to offend the Dixiecrats—march for jobs and justice, not just for voting rights. It was a big deal. It was one year after Port Huron. And he also evolved on the question of nuclear—the nuclear arms race.
the idea was that we had to make them choose. And when a president makes the right choice, you don’t claim that you pushed him into it. You say, “That’s what happened, and so we were successful.” Similarly on the nuclear arms race. Women Strike for Peace began the same time around radioactive testing fallout, mother’s milk, contamination. Seemed like a very obscure issue, but very real, very human. And we saw Kennedy, especially after the insanity of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which we all lived through, two months after Port Huron, sign the first Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and then give a speech saying he was critical of the Cold War, that the Cold War with the Soviet Union had to be replaced by a peace race, had to end. And then he was killed.
So, there was a kind of sense of the possible, that we had a hand in creating, but we became might-have-beens. We don’t know what might have happened. We were on course. No professor or textbook told us that you should think about assassinations as part of the landscape of history and social change, and they can derail you or distort you in ways you can’t even predict.
the headline said that the demonstrators stormed the Pentagon, and the narrator’s voice said it was a parade. I leave it to the visual. But I think that a lot of images of the ’60s consist of bedlam, unless you were there. The logic of an occupation, I think, is if you feel voiceless about a burning issue of great, great importance, and the institutions have failed you, the only way to get leverage for your voice is to occupy their space in order to get their attention. This goes way back to occupations of factories in the ’30s. You know the history. Occupy Wall Street is only the latest stage. And it’s because of the failure of Wall Street, the collapse of the economy, the disappearance of an economic future for this generation of students, and the failure of the political system to deliver reform or jobs. So they occupy.
And I think, at Columbia, Columbia was expanding its economic interests into Harlem at a time of great racism and exclusion of Puerto Ricans, of blacks, from the university. And they had war contractors that were making money off the war. And students had had enough. And then they tried to kick some students out of school. It’s not unlike University of California today or Santa Monica College, where they’re pepper-spraying kids, in response to tuition hikes. And so, you occupy.
Then, of course, you have to transform. You can’t occupy permanently. But it does—it’s like the reason for trade unions is to get leverage for working people to advance their wages. An occupation gives the occupiers some leverage to try to get attention to their issues. And if we had leadership in New York state—pardon me as a foreigner from California—somebody should say, “Well, we agree with you. We’re going to do something about Wall Street now. One, two, three.” And maybe the process would move forward. But it seems stuck now, as it was in the early ’60s, on the failure of the institutions to do something about a situation that people can’t stand.
from a politician point of view, they can only tolerate so much occupation, for their own reasons, but the police should really think about this, because they’re public employees. There is a conspiracy theory afoot that they coordinated the crackdowns. I don’t think we have all the evidence on that. For instance, the sweeping of L.A. was more benign—and it’s never benign to have plastic cuffs on you and so on, but it was more benign than New York or Oakland or Chicago. I don’t know why.
But the police are not the agency to deal with Wall Street. And the use of police only creates further anger, further polarization. As you can see from this morning, it doesn’t eliminate the desire to occupy, because that derives not from just trying to stand up to the police, it derives from the fact that you got—I’ll tell you, like at Logan Square, I was interviewing a young man named Bobby. He’s a TA, a teaching assistant, at Boston College. And I said, “Why are you here?” I was just interviewing people in my—that’s my favorite mode. I should be a reporter for your program. He said, “Where else could I be? There’s nothing else to do.” So he was taking his stand in the freezing weather in this tent, because as a college-educated person and a TA, he had no future, and he could find no way to move the institutions to do anything about this obvious fact.
I’m a Port Huron expert. It’s my little Talmud. I look at—it’s the Dead Sea Scrolls of the New Left. And I found in it this really stunning reference that said, in the economic section, that 1 percent of Americans own 80 percent of the corporate stock. And then it went on, in the further sentence, to say, this despite the fact that the New Deal reforms occurred in the ’30s; it’s the same 1 percent since the 1920s, when these statistics were measured. So the failure of our generation, if you want to talk in terms of failure or inability, we couldn’t—we could diversify, we could democratize, we could pluralize, we could create more space, but the 1 percent is still the 1 percent. That is the fact.
And so, if this present movement concentrates on Wall Street, including its various tentacles and impacts, the question is, for me, can they take the legacy further and actually do something about the 1 percent, which has maintained its rule, or its influence—not rule, but influence—despite the black presidency, despite the rise of the black caucus, the Latino caucus, the immigrant rights base of the labor movement, the coming and going of the consumer movement, Ralph Nader, all through these years, the women’s movement? They’re still—all these changes notwithstanding, they’re still the 1 percent. That’s the great opportunity they have, to finally get to the business that we failed to finish.
Discussion with Tom Hayden.
Tom Hayden, longtime activist and former California state senator. He was one of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society. In 1962, he was the principal author of the Port Huron Statement, the founding statement of SDS.
– source democracynow.org