When, in June 1962, a group of progressive students met in Michigan to draft what became “The Port Huron Statement,” graduate students at Berkeley, where I was studying political science at the time, were only dimly aware of what was happening in the Middle West. Berkeley in the 1960s was more attuned to the Cold War, to the militarization of the American state, and to the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee across the Bay. Berkeley students’ protests against HUAC, which had been met by fire hoses in San Francisco, would lead to the free speech movement (FSM) that exploded two years later. It was HUAC and the FSM that radicalized many of us when the Port Huron Statement was drafted—and not Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

I began these comments with the anti-HUAC protests in the early 1960s not only because I was at Berkeley in those years but also to recall that the struggle for peace and against militarization were major sources of the New Left to which I think The Port Huron Statement gives insufficient attention. In the general radicalization of the Berkeley New Left that grew out of the FSM, the protests against HUAC were largely forgotten, but the struggle against the Vietnam War was the key to the cycle of contention that began in the early part of the decade.

Tom Hayden seems to agree. Writing in Richard Flacks and Nelson Lichtenstein’s volume, he argues (p. 25):

Hayden’s assessment of the “despair” of the New Left in the late 1960s can be read as sour grapes coming from someone whose reformism led him from the center of the Left to its periphery, or as his reading of the most complicated decade in recent American history, or as evidence of the interaction of war and social movements in general. I focus here on the relations between war and social movements.¹

Wars have always had a complex relationship to social movements. The French Revolution was, in part, the result of the inability of the Old Regime to pay for its wars and led directly to a series of new wars in which republican ideology was turned to the mission of defense of the patrie and aggression against France’s neighbors. The American Civil War was, in part, the result of the abolitionist and Free Soil movements and gave rise to a Radical Republicanism that would reshape the American state through the Reconstruction amendments. Italy’s entry into World War I was supported by a nationalist—and opposed by a socialist—movement, while the government’s failure to achieve its war aims led to Benito Mussolini’s fascist revolution. Although the Port Huron Statement and the formation of SDS had many sources, war and militarization played an important part both in the origins of the movement and in its collapse.

First, with respect to the movement’s origins: It is generally accepted that the New Left arose out of mobilization on behalf of Civil Rights. As Flacks and Lichtenstein write, “For virtually every early member of SDS, the rural, southern African American movement as exemplified in SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] was both political model and moral exemplar” (p. 6). Not only did future SDS leaders like Hayden win their spurs in the dangerous atmosphere of the Deep South; the new movement’s attachment to participatory democracy also drew directly on the Civil Rights movement’s “radically democratic form of decision making” (p. 5).

Civil Rights was a model for both the policy proposals and the participatory politics of the early SDS.² But it is often forgotten that Hayden and his colleagues were also deeply concerned with what they called “the general militarization of American society” and the installation of a defense-based economy (pp. 249–50). They worried about the role of the individual in the warfare state (pp. 254–55), and they were deeply concerned about the dangers to the human race of America’s deterrence strategy (pp. 255–56). Long before the Johnson administration’s escalation of the war in Vietnam, the Port Huron Statement called for “universal controlled disarmament” (p. 264).

This takes us to the impact of the New Left on the Vietnam War and of that war on the movement. There is no doubt that among the factors that led to ending the war in Southeast Asia was the mounting pressure of the movement and its impact on congressional resolutions and on the troops themselves (Burstein and Freudenberg Reference Burstein and Freudenberg1978; Cortright Reference Cortright1975). But the war also had a divisive impact on the movement. Alongside the uprisings in the black communities that drove a wedge between black and white citizens, the war drove a wedge between liberals and social democrats within the movement.

Hayden had no illusions about the difficulties SDS faced in bridging the cleavage over the war. For example, in trying to understand the failure of the New Left to build a coalition with organized labor, he points to “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” (p. 28). But the gap between liberalism and social democracy was more general: On the one hand, the racial disturbances in the black communities helped to cool white liberal support for Civil Rights and for the New Left more generally; on the other hand, the nation was at war, and that led many Americans to temper their criticisms of the American state. It was not until the end of the 1960s that solid majorities of Democratic Party voters came around to opposing the war (Berinsky Reference Berinsky2009, 19).

In the early 1960s, it could still seem to Hayden and his friends that blacks and whites, liberals, social democrats, and peace activists might come together in a “beautiful struggle” animated by participatory democracy. The Port Huron Statement was an eloquent expression of that dream. But war and domestic contention drove a deep wedge in that coalition, a coalition that only reappeared briefly in the movement against the Iraq War in 2003 (Heaney and Rojas Reference Heaney and Rojas2013) and remains elusive today.