By the time I found myself in the middle of the political upheavals and doctrinal arguments associated with the New Left, the Port Huron Statement was less a tangible presence than the ghost of a recently departed relative. This was the late 1960s and early 1970s, and much had changed since the founders of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) met on the shore of Lake Huron in 1962 and issued their manifesto. In his contribution to the essays in this edited collection that accompany the Statement, which he drafted, Tom Hayden points to the assassinations of Medgar Evers and President John Kennedy in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy in 1968 as factors that changed the political landscape envisioned in it, along with escalation of the war in Vietnam and its consequences for the funding of programs associated with the War on Poverty. He is right to do so, but the list alone cannot convey the texture of the times and why, by 1970, the Statement had become a specter. This can be seen by noting the changing context over the decade of the 1960s with respect to the impact of black Civil Rights activism on white radicals, the politics of the university, and the relationship between liberals and radical democrats.
The editors of this volume, Nelson Lichtenstein and Richard Flacks, who was at Port Huron, rightly emphasize the significance of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on the early SDS members. SNCC grew out of a lunch counter sit-in by four African American students in Greensboro, South Carolina. Hayden and Paul Potter, another SDS founder, went to Mississippi to help organize along with SNCC activists and were beaten and jailed by local whites, giving them a first-hand glimpse of the dangers confronting black organizers (a danger that earned Mississippi greater national attention after the murder of Evers and, in June 1964, of two white and one black organizers of the Congress for Racial Equality [CORE], during the so-called freedom summer). But it also schooled them in the practices of participatory political participation and the notion that such participation was itself a form of political education. Translated into the concept of participatory democracy, the influence of SNCC on the Port Huron Statement became its lasting legacy. But the violence unleashed against black activists pushed them necessarily in more radical directions. By 1970, it was the Black Panther Party that provided a very different activist model for many urban white radicals to emulate.
Student activism on a broad scale was notional at the time the Statement was drafted, but that began to change with the free speech movement (FSM) at Berkeley in the middle of the decade, which was largely directed internally against the emergence of the “megaversity” and the business ethos it implied. By contrast, the 1968 strike at Columbia University, in part led by an increasingly more militant SDS and in part by a group of African American activists, that began several days before King’s assassination on April 4 and escalated afterward, was outer directed. The two principal issues were the university’s affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), an independent think tank that was conducting research for the U.S. Defense Department, on the one hand, and Columbia’s plan to build a gymnasium in Morningside Park, adjacent to the campus and the predominantly African American neighborhood of Harlem, on the other. The strike and building occupations came to a violent end on April 30 when police were called in, resulting in more than 700 arrests and scores injured. The intervening period between the FSM and the Columbia events are an indication of how the Vietnam War and racial politics were increasingly intersecting in explosive ways by the end of the decade. And then the Cambodia incursion in late April 1970 led to demonstrations on campuses across the county, which in turn resulted in the national guard shootings at Kent State in Ohio on May 4, killing four white youths, and, 11 days later, in two African American deaths from police bullets at Jackson State in Mississippi.
Meanwhile, whatever hope was articulated in the Port Huron Statement for an alliance between radicals and liberals dissipated within a few years. Hayden underplays this in his essay, but he was an eyewitness to that dissipation at the Democratic Party National Convention in Chicago in August 1968, which nominated Hubert Humphrey while Chicago police beat and teargassed demonstrators in the streets. Hayden was indicted along with seven others for traveling across state lines to incite a riot. The so-called Chicago Eight became the Chicago Seven when codefendant Bobby Seale, a Black Panther leader, was first bound and gagged in the courtroom during the ensuing trial and then separated from the others and sentenced to four years in jail for contempt of court. The remaining seven included a range of left political persuasions, including, most theatrically, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffmann, so-called Yippies, who once appeared in court wearing judicial robes and when ordered to remove them, revealed the Chicago Police Department uniforms they had on underneath—a far cry from the earnest young men and women of the SDS founding era.
These events, along with the increasingly frequent and large-scale demonstrations and other protests against the war in Vietnam, help explain why, as Michael Kazin notes in his contribution, there was no mention of the Port Huron Statement in the essays collected by former SDS president Carl Oglesby and published in The New Left Reader in 1969. Among the authors represented in that volume are Fidel Castro, Daniel Cohn-Bendit (who rose to fame during the Paris events of 1968), Rudi Dutschke (leader of the German SDS), Frantz Fanon, Louis Althusser, Herbert Marcuse, and the Black Panther Huey Newton. Only C. Wright Mills remains as someone whose writings helped inspire the Statement. The effort to articulate a distinctly American radical tradition was floundering as the nation’s institutions were collapsing.
It is, therefore, a mistake to treat the New Left as a single entity. What was perhaps common to the various political groups with which I associated, at least, was the idea of participatory democracy, if not always the practice. In that sense, the legacy of the SNCC organizers was more important than any text, but it was the Port Huron Statement that named it, and it was that sometimes vague notion that wafted through the New Left. However, the sort of analyses of political, economic, and cultural institutions presented in the Statement struck me as naive, lacking in complexity, and highly moralizing as compared to those found in Oglesby’s collection. I turned in particular toward the European Marxism represented by the young Georg Lukàcs, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Korsch, Antonio Gramsci, and the early Frankfurt School to make sense of the political clashes in which I took part. But along with these texts, I studied the struggle between the forces of order and change in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe to give me perspective on my own experience. Political science, as such, offered me little in that regard, but political theory promised more. (I recall talking to a fellow student activist and saying that I found Leviathan difficult and was surprised that he did not. But then I realized that he thought we were talking about an underground paper out of Chicago by that name, while I was talking about Hobbes.) The proper study of politics as I understood it then, and understand it now, is theoretical and historical.
The ghost of the Port Huron Statement continues to haunt, however. Less than the text itself, the specter is the tradition of American radicalism that had seemed to die in the New Left’s fragmentation. The quarterly democracy: A Journal of Political Renewal and Radical Change, whose editor was Sheldon S. Wolin, was an effort in which I participated in the early 1980s to rethink and resuscitate that tradition, warts and all. The guiding spirit of that effort was the belief that participatory democracy is an essential defining characteristic of American radicalism. The journal lasted only a few years, but the Port Huron Statement rises from the grave from time to time to remind us of that legacy and that aspiration.
