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.

