Fifty years later, still making a statement PERSONAL STATEMENT by Tom Hayden t w Ii w Weneda, cobr 01 - UmntE the leaders and the worst by zach bergson and kaitlin williams LEADERS a week of daily stories ew Ann Arbor residents know that The Statement, the Daily's weekly news magazine, is named in memo- ry of the Port Huron Statement, drafted by myself as the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society 50 years ago. This week, the University will host a con- ference to explore the' legacy of what many Ann Arbor students birthed half a century ago. The vision of the Port Huron Statement lives on. The first principle of last year's Occupy Wall Street movement was a call for participatory democracy, the guidingconcept of the Port Huron Statement. From SDS to Occupy, students have led movements demanding a voice. We believed in not just an electoral democracy, but also in direct participation of students in their remote-controlled universities, of employees in workplace decisions, of consumers in the marketplace, of neighborhoods in develop- ment decisions, family equality in place of Father Knows Best and online, open source participation in a world dominated by com- puterized systems of power. The Port Huron Statement represented the dawn of an era, which began with the student sit-in movement and the Beat Generation, and didn't end until 1975, with the fall of Richard Nixon and Saigon. Students in Ann Arbor played a leading role in defining this era. One year after gradu- ating from the University, where I edited The Michigan Daily, I drafted the 25,000 word Port Huron Statement that served as a mani- festo for "participatory democracy," which initially came to us from a University faculty adviser, Arnold Kaufman. The Students-for a Democratic Society founder, Al Haber, fos- tered a hotbed of debate between 1961 and 1963, before our vision came to fruition in Berkeley's Free Speech Movement and the first national Vietnam teach-ins organized at the University. Ann Arbor was also a central site of the New Frontier. University students, myself included, approached Sen. John F. Kennedy in October 1960 to request that he endorse international service as an alternative to the military draft. He read our letter and, over worries from his advisers, proposed the Peace Corps on the steps of the Michigan Union that night. As an example of what might have been, President Lyndon Johnson proposed a "Great Society ... where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quan- tity of their goods," at a 1964 University com- mencement address. The author of LBJ's speech, Richard Goodwin, credited the Port Huron Statement as being a major influence. Goodwin later wrote a note "to Tom Hayden, who ... without knowing it inspired the Great Society," referring to participatory democ- racy and the administration's anti-poverty programs. JFK's assassination staggered us, but his signing of the nuclear test ban treaty before his death gave made us hope for a thaw in the Cold War arms race, which almost obliterated millions during the Cuban Mis- sile Crisis. I left graduate school at the University in summer 1964 to begin community organizing in the slums of Newark, N.J. About 200 SDS activists and I planned to devote our lives to a nationwide equivalent of the Mississippi Summer Project. I believed that "an interra- cial movement of the poor" could empower a new constituency demanding jobs and eco- nomic equality. The United Auto Workers, which was led by Walter Reuther, gave us the Port Huron Conference Center courtesy of a Soviet Union now was plotting to take over the world. Small countries like Vietnam were seen as pawns in this global plot. Peace and civil rights groups at home, even leaders like Dr. King, were surveilled as The Enemy Within. The Port Huron Statement challenged all that, proposing nuclear de-escalation and disarmament. We did this not because we were "pro-Communist" but because we knew that militarized and unbalanced anti-Com- munism would divert America's attention away from our needs at home. In 1961, the eminent professor Robert Angell told me soothingly over breakfast that I could trust Kennedy's new defense, sec- retary, Robert McNamara - he called him Bob - because he was "one of us," a liberal intellectual who lived just off Geddes Ave- nue and drove into his Ford Motor office in ing his presidential campaign, there were 184,000 Americans deployed to Vietnam by late 1965. Nothing turned out as I once imagined. There was one constant: the tides of move- ments and counter-movements kept churn- ing. Movements based on participatory democracy eventually gained some mean- ingful reforms: voting rights for southern black people and 18-year olds, the fall of two presidents, amnesty for 50,000 war resisters in Canada, the Freedom of Information Act, democratic reforms of the presidential pri- mary systems, collective bargaining rights for public employees and farmworkers, the Roe v. Wade decision, the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species acts, a long list of reforms gained in less than a decade. Social change did occur, precious inch by bloody inch, becoming sacred ground that had to be protected, decade after decade, from both reaction and oblivion. Underlying all of this tumultuous history lay the rocky river of participatory democ- racy - "the river of my people" - which kept flowing. Now, to paraphrase Port Huron, we are the elders of this generation looking uncomfort- ably to the world we leave behind as inheri- tance. The reforms we achieved are under constant assault from the right and stagnat- ing with the passage of time. "The Port Huron Statement represented the golden dawn of the era of the '60s, which began with the student sit-in movement and the Beat Generation, and didn't end until 1975, with the fall of Richard Nixon and Saigon." We are in the process of a new beginning, signaled by the deep American discontent with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the threat of more wars to come and the immense diversion of trillions of tax dollars from our needs at home for health care and affordable education. Like the '60s, another imperial presidency is on the rise, unleashing covert military operations in multiple countries without serious congressional oversight or civic awareness. Like the '60s, the long war leaves greater economic inequality and envi- See STATEMENT, Page 8B o Octomom checked herself into rehab after discovering her oldest son watch- ing her porn video. We don't even have to joke about this one. * The former Bengals cheerleader who confessed to having sex with a minor is getting her own reality show. If this is reality, leave us out. Last Saturday, the Wolverines lost to Nebraska 23-9. Quarterback Denard Robinson was injured during the game, but he's expected to play against Minnesota this Saturday. top officer, "Millie" Jeffrey, whose daugh- ter was an SDS leader at the University. The UAW also donated funds to the SDS community organizing projects, as well as major resources for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the United Farm Workers and the early activists of what became the Nation- al Organization for Women. In that brief period, our hoped-for coalition seemed to be coming together. The final sentence of the Statement warned, however, that "If we appear to seek the unattainable, let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable." The unimagi- nable was about to happen. The Cold War was the mountain we could not climb. Much like today's War on Ter- rorism - the official Cold War assumption was that nothing could be spared to protect Americans from conspiratorial threats. The paranoid Cold War assumption was that the Detroit every day. On June 9, just as the Port Huron convention was opening, McNamara gave a speech in Ann Arbor defending what he called a "centrally-controlled campaign against all of the enemy's vital nuclear-capa- bilities" in the event of a crisis. It foreshad- owed our greatest fears, which almost came true in the Cuban Missile Crisis just months later. Tragically, the Cold War led liberal intel- lectuals like McNamara, along with our key allies in the UAW, into the bloody quagmire of Vietnam. McNamara channeled his personal brilliance into propaganda when he asserted in August 1964 that the bombing of North Vietnam was due to "raked aggression" by Hanoi, a claim he privately knew to be false. When LBJ pledged "no wider war," only two Democratic senators opposed the Gulf of Tonkin war authorization. After promising not to send American ground troops dur- People who try to take advantage of ~disasters via social media, like this guy who tried to pass off a photoshopped image of a shark swimming in a New Jersey lawn should be thrown in the' Gulag. * Politico media reporter Dylan Byers penned a story about how The New York Times' Fivethirtyeight blogger Nate Silver's election fore- casting methods are questionable. His two sources were political pun- dits. One works for HIS OWN PUB- LICATION. Go back to J-school, WORST The Michigan Zombie Club and the University's chapter of Phi Sigma Pi National Honor Fraternity collected canned goods to raise aware- ness for the Michigan Food Gatherers Society on Monday.