Wednesday, March 22, 2023 // The Statement — 5
Appraisals from Port Huron
When our editorial team de-
cided to make the one-and-a-half-
hour drive to Port Huron, Mich.,
where Hayden and nearly four dozen
members of SDS composed the 1962
manifesto, our ambitions were high
and our expectations higher still: we
imagined unearthing documents that
our peers back in Ann Arbor could
envy, we envisioned deep revelations,
hours spent dissecting the power of
good journalism.
But when we arrive at the town’s
main drag, the cold is clarifying,
and reality quickly arranges itself
before us. The area resembles our
own, disappointingly-familiar Mid-
western hometowns, and the only
other people out on the sidewalks are
buzzed, middle-aged celebrants of
a St. Patrick’s Day bar crawl. Those
who do engage us in conversation
— shopowners and locals — surprise
us by claiming no recognition at the
mention of Hayden’s name, or of the
Port Huron Statement. Out on the
street again, we dissolve into laugh-
ter, imagining that we’ve come to the
wrong Port Huron.
In speaking with one of the
shopowners, though, we learn that
many of the museums in Port Huron
are free, renewing our energies. The
nearest is the Port Huron Museum
at Carnegie Center, which we come
upon in a matter of minutes –– a
building that, in the snow’s bleak ex-
panse, is easy to miss.
The museum spans four floors,
and is crammed with naval artifacts:
yellowed maps and archived ship
logs, wheel helms to spin and impos-
sibly heavy copper diving helmets —
but no mentions of Tom Hayden, or
of The Port Huron Statement. When
we approach the museum’s recep-
tionist, hopeful with inquiry, she deli-
cately shields her unfamiliarity with
intrigue.
We pass the signed copy of The
Port Huron Statement, which we’ve
brought along — I think as a kind of
talisman — over to her. She receives it
tenderly, slides a business card for the
museum’s archivist over the lip of the
desk in return, and promptly begins
to thumb a binder full of donation
sheets to serve as an ad-hoc informa-
tion request form.
I think we’ve gone into the mu-
seum — the town, really — with high-
er, or perhaps outsized, expectations
of the town’s interest in Hayden’s
legacy. Maybe people who start civil
unrest don’t often get statues. After
all, we arrived to find the site of a revo-
lution swept away by a forlorn ocean
of parking lots.
Having exhausted the down-
town area, we head to Lakeport
State Park — formerly a United Auto
Workers (UAW) retreat — and where
the Port Huron Statement, over the
course of five tireless days, was writ-
ten. We hear the water before we can
see it, and those of us with low-top
shoes begin to lament the existence
of low-top shoes. Mud splashes our
ankles as we trudge along the path
and towards the shore.
Finding a seat on which to
hold conversation proves more chal-
lenging; no surface is without snow.
Finally having located a log to sit on,
we waste no time in jumping into the
conversation we’ve been building up
to all day. We playfully lament the
cyclical nature of college journalism,
brief iterations of leadership which
make it difficult to affect any long-
standing change. What it comes
down to, it seems, is trust. Inspira-
tion. Subtler, smoother impressions
that can’t be codified, leadership in-
herited.
Where to go from here? We
can shepherd our signed copy of
The Port Huron Statement back
to the newsroom in Ann Arbor; we
can look fondly back on the pictures
we took and the notes we scrawled
standing up, but we hadn’t wound up
really changing anything. We didn’t
protest at the Democratic National
Convention, or start a new cultural
movement. We couldn’t even have
the Oxford comma added to The
Daily’s style guide.
We’d driven out to Port Huron
though, and told a few people about
Hayden’s legacy. We’d documented
our experience, and our priorities
here in writing, so that our efforts
might turn up in a decade or two
when someone else goes digging
through the archives.
Even if we went to Port Huron
and nobody knew who Tom Hayden
was — which nobody did — the point
was that we knew who he was, and
that we cared enough to find out.
Jeremy Weine/DAILY
Jeremy Weine/DAILY
Jeremy Weine/DAILY
Jeremy Weine/DAILY
Reese and Julia in Lakeport State Park.
Barren trees in the state park.
Taylor steps out of the car in a Port Huron parking lot.
Taylor, John, Reese and Julia on the lakefront beach.