1960s essay huron launched port revolution statement that
Most cities of a certain size and age will have at least some interesting tales to tell, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, is no exception. In fact, Ann Arbor sits on a story brimming with drama, excitement, and historical significance, one that is generally unknown but cries out to be heard—especially today, when it's perhaps more relevant than ever. The story in question isn't from the nineteenth century, or even the early twentieth. There's no need to go back that far.
Sunday School
Students for a Democratic Society SDS was a national student activist organization in the United States during the s, and was one of the principal representations of the New Left. Disdaining permanent leaders, hierarchical relationships and parliamentary procedure, the founders conceived of the organization as a broad exercise in "participatory democracy.
The organization splintered at that convention amidst rivalry between factions seeking to impose national leadership and direction, and disputing "revolutionary" positions on, among other issues, the Vietnam War and Black Power. A new national network for left-wing student organizing, calling itself Students for a Democratic Society, was founded in Early in , to broaden the scope for recruitment beyond labor issues, the Student League for Industrial Democracy were reconstituted as SDS. The SDS manifesto, known as the Port Huron Statement , was adopted at the organization's first convention in June , [2] based on an earlier draft by staff member Tom Hayden.
The Port Huron Statement [3] decried what it described as "disturbing paradoxes": that the world's "wealthiest and strongest country" should "tolerate anarchy as a major principle of international conduct"; that it should allow "the declaration 'all men are created equal In searching for "the spark and engine of change" the authors disclaimed any "formulas" or "closed theories. The Statement proposed the university, with its "accessibility to knowledge" and an "internal openness", as a "base" from which students would "look outwards to the less exotic but more lasting struggles for justice.
For the sponsoring League for Industrial Democracy there was an immediate issue. The Statement omitted the LID's standard denunciation of communism: the regret it expressed at the "perversion of the older left by Stalinism" was too discriminating, and its references to Cold-War tensions too even handed.
Hayden, who had succeeded Haber as SDS president, was called to a meeting where, refusing any further concession, he clashed with Michael Harrington as he later would with Irving Howe.
As security against "a united-front style takeover of its youth arm" the LID had inserted a communist-exclusion clause in the SDS constitution. When in those who considered this too obvious a concession to the Cold-War doctrines of the right succeeded in removing the language, there was a final parting of the ways. The students' tie to their parent organization was severed by mutual agreement [5]. There were nine chapters with, at most, about members. As a student group with a strong belief in decentralization and a distrust for most organizations, the SDS had not developed, and was never to develop, a strong central directorate.
National Office staffers worked long hours for little pay to service the local chapters, and to help establish new ones. By the end of the academic year, there were over delegates at the annual convention at Pine Hill, New York , from 32 different colleges and universities.
The convention chose a confederal structure. Policy and direction would be discussed in a quarterly conclave of chapter delegates, the National Council. National officers, in the spirit of "participatory democracy", would be selected annually by consensus. In "racial equality" remained the cause celebre. From November through April , the demonstrations focused on ending the de facto segregation that resulted in the racial categorization of Chester public schools, even after the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v.
The Board of Education of Topeka. However within the Congress of Racial Equality , and within the SNCC particularly after the Freedom Summer , there was the suggestion that white activists might better advance the cause of civil rights by organising "their own. Michael Harrington's The Other America [9] "was the rage". Ralph Helstein , president of the United Packinghouse Workers of America , arranged for Hayden and Gitlin to meet with Saul Alinsky who, with twenty-five years experience in Chicago and across the country, was the acknowledged father of community organizing.
To Helstein's dismay Alinsky dismissed the SDSers' venture into the field as naive and doomed to failure. Their view of the poor and of what could be achieved by consensus was absurdly romantic. Placing a premium on strong local leadership, structure and accountability, Alinsky's "citizen participation" was something "fundamentally different" from the "participatory democracy" envisaged by Hayden and Gitlin.
With the election of new leadership at the July national SDS convention there was already dissension. Clark Kissinger cautioned against "the temptation to 'take one generation of campus leadership and run! The emphasis on "the problems of the dispossessed" had been misplaced: "It is through the experience of the middle class and the anesthetic of bureaucracy and mass society that the vision and program of participatory democracy will come—if it is to come.
Hayden, who committed himself to community organizing in Newark there to witness the "race riots" in [18] later suggested that if ERAP failed to build to greater success it was because of the escalating U. Tending to the "less exotic struggles" of the urban poor had been a dispiriting experience.
However much the volunteers might talk at night about "transforming the system," "building alternative institutions," and "revolutionary potential", credibility on the doorstep rested on their ability to secure concessions from, and thus to develop relations with, the local power structures.
Regardless of the agenda welfare checks, rent, day-care, police harassment, garbage pick-up the daytime reality was of delivery built "around all the shoddy instruments of the state. Lyndon B. Johnson 's landslide in the November presidential election swamped considerations of Democratic-primary, or independent candidature, interventions—a path that had been tentatively explored in a Political Education Project.
Local chapters expanded activity across a range of projects, including University reform, community-university relations, and were beginning to focus on the issue of the draft and Vietnam War. They did so within the confines of university bans on on-campus political organization and activity.
While students at Kent State, Ohio, had been protesting for the right of to organize politically on campus a full year before, it is the televised birth of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley that is generally recognized as the first major challenge to campus governance [22] On October 1, crowds of upwards of three thousand students surrounded a police cruiser holding a student arrested for setting up an informational card table for the Congress of Racial Equality CORE.
The sit-down prevented the car from moving for 32 hours. By the end of the year, demonstrations, meetings and strikes all but shut the university down. Hundreds of students were arrested. In February , President Johnson dramatically escalated the war in Vietnam. Campus chapters of SDS all over the country started to lead small, localized demonstrations against the war. On April 17 the National Office coordinated a march in Washington.
Co-sponsored by Women Strike for Peace , and with endorsements from nearly all of the other peace groups, 25, attended. The first teach-in against the war was held in the University of Michigan , followed by hundreds more across the country.
The SDS became recognized nationally as the leading student group against the war. Edgar Hoover reported, by observers from "practically every subversive organization in the United States" [24] selected as President Carl Oglesby Antioch College.
He had come the SDSers' attention with an article against the war written while he had been working for a defense contractor. Vice President was Jeff Shero, from the increasingly influential University of Texas chapter in Austin [25] Consensus, however, was not reached on a national program [26].
At the September National Council meeting "an entire cacophony of strategies was put forward" on what had clearly become the central issue, Vietnam. Some urged negotiation, others immediate U.
When on November 27, at a further anti-war demonstration in Washington, he suggested as much--that U. The new, more radical, and uncompromising anti-war profile this suggested, appeared to drive the growth in membership. The but influx discomfited older members like Tom Gitlin who, as he later conceded, simply had no "feel" for an anti-war movement [30] No consensus was reached as to what role the SDS should play in stopping the war.
A final attempt by the old guard at a "rethinking conference" to establish a coherent new direction for the organization failed. The conference, held on the University of Illinois campus at Champaign-Urbana over Christmas vacation, , was attended by about people from 66 chapters, many of whom were new to SDS.
Despite a great deal of discussion, no substantial decisions were made. SDS chapters continued to use the draft as a rallying issue. Over the rest of the academic year, with the universities supplying the Selective Service Boards with class ranking, SDSer began to attack university complicity in the war. The University of Chicago's administration building was taken over in a three-day sit-in in May.
The war, however, was not the only issue driving the new militancy. There were new and growing calls to seriously question a college experience that the Fort Huron Statement had described as "hardly distinguishable from that of any other communications channel--say, a television set. So serious was the challenge, that universities soon began to offer run seminars run on similar student-responsive lines, and a "liberal swallow-up" began.
The summer convention of was moved farther west, to Clear Lake , Iowa. The convention marked a further turn towards organization around campus issues by local chapters, with the National Office cast in a strictly supporting role. Campus issues ranged from bad food, powerless student "governments," various in loco parentis manifestations, on-campus recruiting for the military and, again, ranking for the draft. Despite the absence of a politically effective campus SDS chapter, Berkeley again became a center of particularly dramatic radical upheaval over the university's repressive anti-free-speech actions.
One description of the convening of an enthusiastically supported student strike suggests the distance travelled from both the Left, and the civil rights, roots of earlier activism. Over "a sea of cheering bodies" before the Union building a twenty-foot banner proclaimed "Happiness Is Student Power. The working class in this country is moving to the right. Students are going to be the revolutionary force in this country. Students are going to make the revolution because we have the will.
After a three-hour open mike meeting in the Life Sciences building, instead of closing with the civil-rights anthem "We Shall Overcome," the crowd "grabbed hands and sang the chorus to 'Yellow Submarine'". SDSers understanding of their "own" was increasingly colored by the country's exploding countercultural scene. There were explorations—some earnest, some playful—of the anarchist or libertarian implications of the commitment to participatory democracy.
At the large and active University of Texas chapter in Austin, The Rag , an underground newspaper founded by SDS leaders Thorne Dreyer and Carol Neiman has been described as the first underground paper in the country to incorporate the "participatory democracy, community organizing and synthesis of politics and culture that the New Left of the midsixties was trying to develop.
Inspired by a leaflet distributed by some poets in San Francisco, and organized by the Rag and the SDS in the belief that "there is nothing wrong with fun", a "Gentle Thursday" event in the fall of drew hundreds of area residents, bringing kids, dogs, balloons, picnics and music, to the UT West Mall.
A summary ban by the UT administration ensured an even bigger, more enthusiastic, turnout for the second Gentle Thursday in the spring of Part of "Flipped Out Week," organized in coordination with a national mobilization against the war, it was a more defiant and overtly political affair.
The example set a precedent for campus events across the country [36] [37]. The Winter and Spring of saw an escalation in the militancy of campus protests. Demonstrations against military-contractors and other campus recruiters were widespread, and ranking and the draft issues grew in scale.
The school year had started with a large demonstration against Dow Chemical Company recruitment at the University of Wisconsin in Madison on October Peaceful at first, the demonstrations turned to a sit-in that was violently dispersed by the Madison police and riot squad, resulting in many injuries and arrests. A mass rally and a student strike then closed the university for several days. A nation-wide coordinated series of demonstrations against the draft led by members of the Resistance, the War Resisters League , and SDS added fuel to the fire of protest.
After conventional civil rights tactics of peaceful pickets seemed to have failed, the Oakland, California, Stop the Draft Week ended in mass hit and run skirmishes with the police. The huge , people October 21 March on the Pentagon saw hundreds arrested and injured. Night-time raids on draft offices began to spread. The National Office sought to provide greater coordination and direction partly through New Left Notes , its weekly correspondence with the membership.
In the spring of , National SDS activists led an effort on the campuses called "Ten Days of Resistance" and local chapters cooperated with the Student Mobilization Committee in rallies, marches, sit-ins and teach-ins, and on April 18 in a one-day strike. About a million students stayed away from classes that day, the largest student strike to date. But it was the student shutdown of Columbia University in New York that commanded the national media.
reprinted in Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, ed. The SDS Port Huron Statement is reprinted as an appendix in James Miller, Peter B. Levy, The New Left and Labor in the s (Urbana: University of Illinois, and Cherry Hill, New Jersey, opened in and , respectively. Our revolution here had a number of preparatory steps. for the nonviolent 60s peace movement Havel's production of new essays and In , Havel helped found Civic Forum, the movement launched in the Here again we can see the influence of s manifestos such as the New Left's Port Huron Statement.
Students for a Democratic Society SDS was a national student activist organization in the United States during the s, and was one of the principal representations of the New Left. Disdaining permanent leaders, hierarchical relationships and parliamentary procedure, the founders conceived of the organization as a broad exercise in "participatory democracy. The organization splintered at that convention amidst rivalry between factions seeking to impose national leadership and direction, and disputing "revolutionary" positions on, among other issues, the Vietnam War and Black Power. A new national network for left-wing student organizing, calling itself Students for a Democratic Society, was founded in
Often regarded as synonymous with the student radicalism of the s, which culminated in the mass protests of most notably the events of May in France , it may also refer more narrowly to particular segments within or alongside those movements. Anticolonialism and the problems of the Third World were increasingly salient , especially after the Cuban revolution of
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A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times
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A Manifesto at 50
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Today it seems naive and in some ways misguided—yet it raised questions that still agitate Americans today.
