This Day in Political History (SDS Gives Birth to Port Huron Statement, New Left Manifesto)

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.

This Day in Political History (Daley Unleashes Cops on Protesters)

August 28, 1968—In Chicago, as delegates at the Democratic Convention prepared to nominate Hubert H. Humphrey for President, television viewers were stunned at what they saw from the Second City—ugly discord in the nation and in the party in charge.

Outside, in the city’s downtown, 26,000 city police and National Guardsmen, on orders of Mayor Richard Daley, cracked down on 10,000 protesters against the Vietnam War.

Inside the convention, while nominating George McGovern for President, his colleague, Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, noted pointedly that with the Senator from South Dakota in the Oval Office, “we wouldn’t have to have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago!” With an irate Daley shouting back “You faker” and “Jew SOB,” Ribicoff smiled and said, “How hard it is to accept the truth.”

The convention in Chicago had consequences that would reverberate through the years:

* Students for a Democratic Society, the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE), the Youth International Party (Yippies) did not mobilize middle-class youths through the protest, as they had hoped, but annoyed the majority of the 89 million viewers to side with the cops, according to polls taken after the event.

* The protest split the old-style, blue-collar elements of the Democratic Party from the “New Left.” As journalist Mark Stricherz chronicled in Why the Democrats are Blue: Secular Liberalism and the Decline of the People's Party (2007), the Democrats decided to embrace groups that had been disenfranchised at the convention--young people, blacks, and college-educated suburbanites--with new delegate-apportioning rules. The core issues of these groups—opposition to the war, combating racism, abortion—were alien to the economic concerns that motivated the blue-collar Northern ethnic Catholics and Southern white Protestants who played key roles in the New Deal coalition.

* The man who championed these “Dutton Rules” (named for party activist Fred Dutton) was Senator McGovern, who would take the arcane nominating rules that he had helped shepherd into being and win the 1972 Democratic nomination for President in the process. That reminds me a bit of one of the funniest columns by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, in which she noted how Dick Cheney, hired to vet George W. Bush’s Vice-Presidential selections in 2000, ended up being the running mate—sort of like a beauty-pageant judge who ends up with the tiara herself.

* The protest played into the hands of Richard Nixon, who had been making political hay all year with the notion of “crime in the streets”—and who, upon being elected President, put it in a vastly more convenient spot for him: in the Oval Office.

* The sheer messiness of the cop-authorized rampage authorized by Daley—combined with that of the 1972, Duttton Rules-dominated Democratic Convention—has led both parties to move increasingly toward the kind of boring, choreographed convention derided by David Frum in a recent Wall Street Journal article.

(This past week, the Democrats may have done the unthinkable: instead of persuading the electorate to turn out an unbelievably unpopular incumbent party, they might have bored viewers to death with umpteen repetitions of the word “change.” It's hard to produce the kind of electricity Obama did four years ago when everyone this time was not only singing from the same hymnbook, but doing so with the exact same notes.)

Although Mayor Daley despised the protesters as privileged kids, he had something in common with them that neither recognized at the time, and that is not even realized very well to this date. According to Charles Kaiser’s 1968 in America, Daley had told Bobby Kennedy already that he hated the Vietnam War.

For a particularly vivid account of these turbulent days in Chicago by an extremely interested—and uncommonly perceptive—observer, take a look at Private Faces, Public Places, by Abigail McCarthy, wife of (though, four years after the events, she was separated from) defeated candidate Eugene McCarthy.

From 1974 to 1999, Abigail McCarthy was a columnist for Commonweal, a magazine for moderate-to-liberal Catholics. Judging from her memoir, I’m sorry I didn’t read her more often while I had the chance. I doubt that even to this day whether any spouse of a major candidate has written an account so wrenchingly honest about the costs of campaigning on a candidate’s family. She knew all too well about this, having been hospitalized three times during the long primary season.

It was Abigail’s misfortune to come to Chicago after her third convalescence. If that wasn’t enough to send herback to the hospital, I don’t know what would. Especially as she relates what was happening in Grant Park as she looked out from the Hilton that day:

“From our windows we could see the menacing blue lines of police and the massing of the National Guard, the constant passing of the weird jeeps armed with front screens of flesh-tearing barbed wire….I listened in dread as the announcements from the police bullhorns bounced against the hotel walls and the refusals echoed back….With each police incident, with each person stopped and questioned, with each one shoved aside at the hotel entrances, the demonstrators in the park had more and more sympathizers in the hotel.”

One of the worst legacies of Richard Daley was an economically and racially polarized city. Miraculously, this past week witnessed an African-American sojourner who set down roots in this same city—now being led by Daley's son Richard—who won the nomination of his party, at a convention far more peaceful than the one that convulsed the City of Broad Shoulders 40 years ago to the day.