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.