Wednesday, October 26, 2016 // The Statement
8B

Still Making a Statement 

B Y T O M H AY D E N , P U B L I S H E D O C T O B E R 2 5 , 2 0 1 2

F

ew Ann Arbor residents know that The Statement, 
the Daily’s weekly news magazine, is named in 
memory of the Port Huron Statement, drafted by 

myself as the founding document of Students for a Dem-
ocratic Society 50 years ago.

This week, the University will host a conference 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 move-
ment was a call for participatory democracy, the guiding 
concept 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 development decisions, family 
equality in place of Father Knows Best and online, open 
source participation in a world dominated by computer-
ized 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 defin-

ing this era. One year after graduating from the Uni-
versity, where I edited The Michigan Daily, I drafted 
the 25,000 word Port Huron Statement that served as a 
manifesto for “participatory democracy,” which initial-
ly came to us from a University faculty adviser, Arnold 
Kaufman. The Students for a Democratic Society found-
er, Al Haber, fostered a hotbed of debate between 1961 
and 1963, before our vision came to fruition in Berke-
ley’s Free Speech Movement and the first national Viet-
nam teach-ins organized at the University.

Ann Arbor was also a central site of the New Fron-

tier. 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 quantity of their goods,” at a 1964 University 
commencement 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 democracy 
and the administration’s anti-poverty programs.

JFK’s assassination staggered us, but his signing of 

the nuclear test ban treaty before his death made us 
hope for a thaw in the Cold War arms race, which almost 

obliterated millions during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I left graduate school at the University in summer 1964 

to begin community organizing in the slums of Newark, 
N.J. As a member of about 200 SDS activists who planned 
to devote our lives to a nationwide equivalent of the Mis-
sissippi Summer Project, I believed that “an interracial 
movement of the poor” could empower a new constitu-
ency demanding jobs and economic equality.

The United Auto Workers, which was led by Walter 

Reuther, gave us the Port Huron Conference Center 
courtesy of a top officer, “Millie” Jeffrey, whose daugh-
ter was an SDS leader at the University. The UAW also 
donated funds to the SDS community organizing proj-
ects, as well as major resources for Dr. Martin Luther 
King Jr., the United Farm Workers and the early activ-
ists of what became the National Organization for 
Women. In that brief period, our hoped-for coalition 
seemed to be coming together.

The final sentence of the Statement warned, howev-

er, that “If we appear to seek the unattainable, let it be 
known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.” The 
unimaginable was about to happen.

The Cold War was the mountain we could not climb. 

Much like today’s War on Terrorism – the official Cold 
War assumption was that nothing could be spared to 
protect Americans from conspiratorial threats. The par-
anoid Cold War assumption was that the 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, pro-

posing nuclear de-escalation and disarmament. We did 
this not because we were “pro-Communist” but because 
we knew that militarized and unbalanced anti-Commu-
nism 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 secretary, Robert McNamara – he called 
him Bob – because he was “one of us,” a liberal intellec-
tual who lived just off Geddes Avenue and drove into his 
Ford Motor office in 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 ene-
my’s vital nuclear capabilities” in the event of a crisis. 
It foreshadowed our greatest fears, which almost came 
true in the Cuban Missile Crisis just months later.

Tragically, the Cold War led liberal intellectuals 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 assert-
ed in August 1964 that the bombing of North Vietnam 
was due to “naked aggression” by Hanoi, a claim he pri-
vately 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 during his presidential cam-
paign, there were 184,000 Americans deployed to Viet-
nam by late 1965.

Nothing turned out as I once imagined. There was one 

constant: the tides of movements and counter-move-
ments kept churning. Movements based on participatory 
democracy eventually gained some meaningful 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 primary 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 democracy – “the river of 
my people” – which kept flowing.

Now, to paraphrase Port Huron, we are the elders of 

this generation looking uncomfortably to the world we 
leave behind as inheritance. The reforms we achieved 
are under constant assault from the right and stagnating 
with the passage of time.

We are in the process of a new beginning, signaled by 

the deep American discontent with the wars in Afghani-
stan 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 coun-
tries without serious congressional oversight or civic 
awareness. Like the ‘60s, the long war leaves greater 
economic inequality and environmental depletion in its 
wake.

Perhaps most disturbing of all, “The wealthiest 1 per-

cent of Americans own more than 80 percent of all per-
sonal shares of stock,” just as we wrote at Port Huron. 
That unchanged economic inequality threatens political 
democracy at the core.

What can one say in the face of these terrible chal-

lenges, so reminiscent of yesteryear? Perhaps, just per-
haps, the ripples of today’s student protest movements 
foreshadow a coming revolt of those who will not settle. 
Or perhaps today’s generation will accommodate and 
live the rest of their lives in a defensive crouch. Who can 
be sure? We know that movements begin unexpectedly. 
Rebellion begins anew, like a first flower forcing win-
ter’s passing, as it happened in Ann Arbor in that spring-
time long ago. The Port Huron Statement is a message 
sent in a bottle, and participatory democracy a tradition 
for future rebels to drink from.

Editor’s note: Two days ago, the University of Michigan community lost one of its most influential members, Tom Hayden, who died at 76 in 

his California home. A former editor in chief of The Michigan Daily, Hayden began his career as a political activist as a University student, and 

soon after his graduation founded the Students for a Democratic Society, one of the most important groups in the New Left movement. More 
than 50 years ago, while jailed in Georgia after participating in the Freedom Rider protests, he wrote the Port Huron Statement, a manifesto 

for left-wing student protests that shaped a nascent generation of activism. He was at the vanguard of the civil rights and anti-war movements 

of the ‘60s and ‘70s, leading protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. He leaves a legacy of fervent activism for participatory 

democracy and a commitment to galvanizing student political engagement.

The Statement is named in part after Hayden’s manifesto. To honor his life and work, we are reprinting a piece he submitted to The 

Statement in 2012, written for the 50th year anniversary of the Port Huron Statement. A half-century couldn’t quell his indefatigable belief in 

the power of the people to enact change.

