June 11, 1962—
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), perhaps the most influential of Sixties
radical groups, began its founding convention in Michigan. By the end of the week,
the nearly 60 members gathered together had issued its manifesto, the
Port Huron Statement,
which critiqued social injustice, America’s consumer culture, and the nuclear-arms
race.
The group’s chief challenge, however, was to the liberal
administration then holding sway in Washington. By the end of the decade, SDS would
self-destruct, but not before engaging in a fratricidal conflict with the
more traditionally liberal Johnson administration over the Vietnam War.
Unlike the “Old Left” of the 1930s, the New Left came of age
in a time of abundance. That legacy filled them not with thanks, but with overwhelming
guilt, as evidenced by the opening lines of the manifesto, which was based in
no small part on a draft submitted by 22-year-old
Tom Hayden (pictured): "
We are people of this generation, bred in at least
modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world
we inherit." (Hayden himself, raised in comfortable suburban Detroit, would spend several years in the early Sixties assuaging his guilt by working to alleviate poverty in urban Newark.)
Crucial to the manifesto—and to the arc of
subsequent radicalism in the 1960s—was the notion of participatory democracy—open
debate and action in the streets to effect change and testify to principle—as opposed
to liberalism, which, in its desire to use constitutional government to resolve
conflict, had become, in the view of SDS, perverted by
elites.
In recognizing what Henry David Thoreau called “quiet
desperation,” the Port Huron Statement
offered a contemporary version of the soulless industrialization outraging the New England transcendentalist, minus the
hymn to nature. (That would come later, albeit without the rhapsodic prose, in the
last decade, when Hayden turned his attention to sustainability issues.)
Commercially, however, it did considerably better than Walden had in its first few years, going through four editions and
60,000 copies in four years.
While reflecting the preoccupations of its era, the Port Huron Statement picked up other changes
in the cultural atmosphere that became increasingly apparent with time. Its
disdain for bureaucracy—what students saw firsthand in colleges and what they
dreaded in the outside world—was something that, oddly enough, they shared with
right-wingers. (See George Wallace’s rage against “bearded bureaucrats.”) But much of the rest of this critique had
been expressed in bestsellers such as Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System and William
H. Whyte’s The Organization Man.
But one of its prescriptions for this condition—the elimination
of hierarchy—has become a defining characteristic of protest movements of the
last several years, from the left and the right: Occupy Wall Street and the Tea
Party.
Differences in background and viewpoint inevitably
divided Old and New Left, a schism demonstrated nowhere more clearly than in literary
critic and Dissent editor Irving Howe’s
1982 memoir, A Margin of Hope. He
writes of a visit by several SDS leaders, including Hayden, to his publication’s
editorial board. While praising the “evident sincerity” of the young men,
including the brilliance of Hayden, he criticizes the latter in no uncertain
terms:
“Pinched in manner, holding in some obscure personal
rage, he spoke as if he were already an experienced, canny ‘political’; after
the meeting a number of Dissenters
remarked spontaneously that in Hayden’s clenched style—that air of distance
suggesting reserves of power—one could already begin to see the makings of a
commissar.”
In some ways, Howe’s depiction of Hayden as
unwilling to reconsider other points of view is misplaced—or at least time has
allowed him some further opportunities to reflect. In his meditation on his
ethnic background, for instance, Irish on
the Inside, the onetime street agitator came to understand—though without
excusing—how big-city bosses such as Richard Daley had chosen political
machines as a means of protection against a hostile, prejudiced, anti-immigrant
society.
But to this day, he seems, as Howe rightly noted three decades ago,
tone-deaf to the very real dangers once posed by the Soviet Union. In 2005, for
instance, he noted that radical Islam had arisen in “the vacuum created by the
failures of political Arab nationalism (and the end of the Soviet Union, which,
whatever else may be said, supported non-religious revolutionary movements).”
That “whatever else may be said” is a rather brisk sweep under the carpet for a
host of very real human-rights violations he was slow to criticize while that
state still existed.
By 1969, SDS had collapsed, riven by the sectarian
divisions endemic to radical movements. Before its disintegration into mindless
political street theater, however, it had sparked a backlash. Ronald Reagan’s
first campaign, the California gubernatorial race against Pat Brown, was
launched by attacks against the Berkeley campus, especially in the wake of the SDS-inspired
“Free Speech” movement there in 1964. And by destabilizing governments led by
liberals, it sparked a belief in the crumbling of law and order that made many
Americans look longingly to those who promised an end to incoherence—the once-despised
ideologues of the right.
Gauzy nostalgia now clings to the Port Huron Statement, so much so that
its very mention evokes an entire era and set of attitudes. In The Big Lebowski, Jeff Bridges’ “Dude”
claims to have helped draft the original version of the document. In an episode
in Season 2 of Mad Men, one of the
young Turks newly hired at Sterling Cooper speaks virtually verbatim from the document to a skeptical Don Draper. It's an interesting denouement to one of the major radical American documents of the last century.
