When I happily agreed to contribute to this symposium, I expected it all to be very familiar. After all, everyone seemed to agree that the Port Huron manifesto was the work of callow young people who, as young people are prone to do, placed their faith in a not very sophisticated call for participatory democracy. That at least was what I remembered.

So I am glad that Jeff Isaac provoked me to reread this remarkable document, and I am chastened too because my memory was so flawed. These young people might have been inexperienced, but they were also nothing short of brilliant, astonishingly level-headed and well informed. This was, to be sure, a call for the eventual transformation of the American political economy, but the process of change they envisioned was incremental and reformist and certainly not revolutionary. Moreover, they saw the path to reform as strewn with huge obstacles; there were not going to be easy or quick victories. Rather, they were urging young people to set off on a path that at best would be marked by partial successes. Port Huron announces a direction rather than a set of solutions. It is not callow at all. It is wise.

Consistent with this orientation toward the hard labor of incremental reform, Port Huron expresses none of the scorn with which later 1960s radicals regarded Big Labor, the Democratic Party, and the New Deal. There is simply none of that in the Port Huron Statement. Instead of castigating the Democrats, they call for more programmatic political parties, something that the American Political Science Association had endorsed not long before! It would be a good thing, they also said, if the Democrats rid themselves of the conservative and racist southern wing, and also good if there was less influence by business lobbyists. Nothing to quarrel with on either point.

It is an even bigger mistake to associate Port Huron with the student movement of the late 1960s, when sectarian fissures and fractures and a kind of movement madness shattered and overwhelmed the movement. The Port Huron Statement itself is not mad or sectarian at all. It is not even utopian, a cast of mind that I think may well encourage sectarianism.

So while, yes, the Statement calls for a more participatory democracy, it has no illusions about an easy way to remedy our democratic deficits. On the one hand, the writers looked around at their elders and saw the problem as an overwhelming apathy and alienation. On the other hand, they thought apathy and alienation were themselves the result of the objective arrangements that separate people from the political and economic pinnacles of power where decisions are made, while smothering them in propaganda and consumerism. Participatory democracy was a possible solution, but the statement does not read as if the writers were confident of its possibility.

Moreover, the concerns of the young intellectuals, (because this is what they were, movement intellectuals), ranged far beyond a flawed political process. They named the major problems that continue to cripple American society, including racism and poverty, the concentration of wealth and economic power (presciently, they wrote of the 1% even then), and the grip of the military apparatus. Indeed, war and the Cold War, and the growing power of the American war machine, loom as the big concern of the young writers, and this some years before the war in Southeast Asia became a major public concern, and the focus of the historic student antiwar movement.

Of course, they did not figure this out in a vacuum. The Port Huron preoccupations reflected the issues of the already emerging 1960s movements, and the manifesto then lent energy to the movements. Young activists went south to join Civil Rights protests, and in the northern cities, they worked in local communities to organize protests by the growing concentrations of the poor, many of them internal migrants from the South or Puerto Rico. Not only did the southern Civil Rights movement win the voting rights that had been denied blacks after the Civil War (Republican efforts at vote suppression notwithstanding), but the rancorous divisions caused by the movement actually forced the regional realignment of the parties that the writers envisioned for a more programmatic party system. The Civil Rights movement also helped to give birth to a sister movement of the minority poor in the northern cities that succeeded in forcing an expansion of U.S. social welfare programs. And as the war in Southeast Asia escalated, the Port Huron thinkers became the intellectual leaders of the antiwar movement, whose repercussions eventually forced the American war machine to withdraw. So Port Huron was important, and it was the movements to which the statement lent purpose, coherence, and élan that made it important.

What about the craziness that came a little later—the internal splits and the dramatic pronouncements and the fatuous violence? Well, the truth is that we do not have a good understanding of the life course of movements. But what is immediately obvious is that the ideas of Port Huron could not be to blame. Movements, especially big movements, are subject to many influences, not least the influences of those who respond to them or fail to respond to them. In any case, the sometimes twisted life course of movements in decline is not my subject. Port Huron is, and 50 years after the issuing of the statement, I can only hope that an emerging new generation of young activists will profit from its wisdom and take heart from the victories to which it contributed.