Inspiring Participatory Democracy

Student Movements from Port Huron to Today

Tom Hayden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317257486
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The famous 1962 Port Huron Statement by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) introduced the concept of participatory democracy to popular discourse and practice. In Inspiring Participatory Democracy Tom Hayden, one of the principal architects of the statement, analyses its historical impact and relevance to today's movements. Inspiring Participatory Democracy includes the full transcript of the Port Huron statment and shows how it played an important role in the movements for black civil rights, against the Vietnam war and for the Freedom of Information Act. Published during the year of Port Huron's 50th anniversary, Inspiring Participatory Democracy will be of great interest to readers interested in social history, politics and social activism.

PART 1

PREFACE AND INTRODUCTION

THE PORT HURON STATEMENT AT 50

By Robert Cohen

Last fall, The New York Post spent months denouncing Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters as 1960s retreads, dirty hippies, and violent radicals. Similarly, on November 8, 2011, Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn mocked the Occupy Wall Street Movement as “a lark. For Woodstock wannabes, [for whom] it’s a romantic trip back to the Vietnam War protests…. Occupy Wall Street has taken a high-profile part of Manhattan and turned it into an anarchist campground … of the homeless and a haven for drug dealing.”¹

This evocation of the radical ’60s, drugs, and anarchy is by now an old trope of the American Right. As Bernard von Bothmer documents in his book Framing the Sixties: The Use and Abuse of a Decade from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush (2010), for generations right-wing politicians, dating back to Ronald Reagan, have used negative images of the 1960s (an emotionally charged caricature of that decade) that amount to demonization to discredit—or at least try to discredit—even moderately liberal forces for political change. This was what that noise John McCain and Sarah Palin were making was all about during the last presidential race when they used this 1960s–guilt by association discourse to try to slander Barack Obama. Remember? Palin repeatedly trumpeted Obama’s connection to the left-wing “terrorist” Bill Ayers—she said Obama was “palling around with terrorists,”² as if the Democratic presidential nominee was an honorary member of the Weather Underground, when in fact Obama was an 8-year-old child at the time when Weather formed. As a historian of the 1960s who has been reading these politicians and their campaigns ’60s-bashing screeds for decades, I find them as significant for what they leave out as for what they use as targets of this demonization. For example, they never mention Berkeley Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio (the subject of a biography I published in 2009), and they also are averse to mentioning or focusing upon the Port Huron Statement (PHS). In fact, von Bothmer interviewed scores of conservative Republican politicos for his book Framing the Sixties and not one of them mentioned the PHS or Savio. And I think there are pretty much identical reasons why neither Savio nor the PHS has been a major target of this ’60s-bashing. Neither the PHS nor Savio’s speeches are susceptible to being caricatured to fit the Republican cartoon version of the 1960s as a violent, irrational, frighteningly subversive, drug-filled, immoral nightmare. Yes, it is true that a couple of extreme right-wingers—David Horowitz and Robert Bork—have tried to treat the PHS as a commie plot, but this attempt to mistake the New Left for the Old Left never gained any traction with Republicans involved in the real world of electoral politics, probably because that argument is so over the top (the PHS, after all, criticized both sides in the Cold War, and advocated participatory democracy) that it never had the slightest chance of resonating with voters, especially since the Cold War has been over for decades.

The PHS represents a part of the 1960s that the American Right would prefer we forget: the early 1960s, when Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activists at Port Huron, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) civil-rights organizers in Mississippi, and Free Speech Movement protesters at Berkeley were organizing nonviolently to make America a more democratic, egalitarian, and free society. The only activist students who were violent in the early 1960s were not organizers on the Left, but racists on the Right who, at the University of Georgia in 1961 and the University of Mississippi in 1962, fomented segregationist riots to oppose the admissions of the first black students on their Deep South campuses. As for the student Left in the Port Huron era, these activists were doing historic work envisioning a new America, and struggling to push the nation beyond its Cold War limitations, away from the arms race, counter-revolutionary military coups and wars, the anti-democratic legacies of Jim Crow and Joseph McCarthy, and the paralysis of political indifference and apathy. The early New Left aspired to a reinvigorated form of political community that the Port Huron Statement termed participatory democracy. So yes, most politicians of the Right stay away from the PHS statement because they cannot rebut its deeply felt and idealistic democratic faith and cannot handle the questions it raises as to why a wealthy nation is marred by poverty, why an America that prides itself on its peaceful nature is so addicted to the use of force abroad, why its two-party system offers so little choice and disengages millions of its citizens, why its universities do so little to use their resources and expertise to battle social inequality, why its black community remains so separate and unequal.

Read into historical context, the PHS (authored by Tom Hayden and 60 or so SDS activists at Port Huron, Michigan, in 1962) connects with traditions of dissent that go back to way before the 1960s. Its challenge to the two-party system’s compromises with racism and segregation calls to mind William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator and Frederick Douglass’s North Star editorials breaking with the antebellum American two-party system’s consensus over permitting slavery to exist in the South. The PHS statement’s dissent from Cold War America’s infatuation with military solutions and the arms race calls to mind Henry David Thoreau’s classic essay On Civil Disobedience, where he explains and justifies his refusal to pay taxes for an unjust war, which results in his going to jail for nonviolent resistance. Additionally, Thoreau and the PHS shared a commitment to participatory democracy, displayed when—in referring to civil disobedience—Thoreau urged Americans to vote “not merely with a strip of paper but with your whole life.” And as surely as the women’s movement’s 1848 Declaration of Sentiments constituted its declaration of independence from a male monopoly on power and voting, the PHS was the 1960s student movement’s declaration of independence from Cold War America’s politics of inequality, its “warfare state” mentality, and its skewed budget priorities.

Historian Howard Zinn dubbed as “new abolitionists” SNCC’s civil-rights organizers, who spearheaded the black-led student movement of the 1960s. These new abolitionists risked their lives in the struggle to free the South from racism, segregation, and black disfranchisement.³ And there are a number of levels on which the PHS’s authors can also be seen as new abolitionists. First, because some of the leading figures in SDS and the New Left, most notably Tom Hayden, developed their hyper-democratic politics in part under the influence of SNCC. Hayden had worked with SNCC in its daring freedom-organizing in Mississippi and came to Port Huron shortly after risking his life as a Freedom Rider in SNCC’s courageous campaign against Jim Crow in Albany, Georgia. Since activists in that movement were putting their bodies and their very lives on the line, all were active participants in its decisions, and the freedom movement modeled—actually lived and breathed—the ethos of participatory democracy.

The PHS was political, but its concerns were deeply moral as well. This too resembles the abolitionists, for as the historian Richard Hofstadter noted, “the abolitionist movement was based upon a moral … not an economic discontent. … Almost all abolitionists were middle class people who had no material stake in the slave system,” but were founding a movement to abolish slavery out of moral concerns.⁴ Similarly, the mostly middle-class students who wrote the PHS were fired not by their own economic grievances—and in fact the opening lines of the PHS speak of their having been “bred in at least modest comfort” and “housed now in universities.” They were seeking, as Bob Moses put it, to “bring morality to politics,” unlike their compromising elders who too often seemed to bring “politics to their morality.”⁵ In fact, the PHS started off not with a laundry list of political demands, but with a morally focused section on “values.” As Tom Hayden explained in his 2005 retrospective on Port Huron, “We chose to put ‘values’ forward as the first priority in challenging the conditions of apathy and forging a new politics. Embracing values meant making choices as morally autonomous human beings against a world that advertised in every possible way that there were no choices, that the present was just a warm up for the future.”⁶

I have highlighted the connections between PHS and this long tradition of dissent to show that we can learn much about the PHS if we think about its historical roots and avoid lumping it with sensationalized images of the late 1960s. But while connected to that earlier tradition of dissent we ought not lose sight of what was distinctive about the PHS, about the time of its writing in the early 1960s, for this was a time very different from the polarized world of late-1960s America, when so much of the political discourse had been poisoned by violence—the bloodshed of Vietnam and the tragedies of one assassination after another, from Medgar Evers to JFK, Martin Luther King, and RFK. The early ’60s was a time of promise when liberals and radicals were not yet enemies (before Atlantic City—where Lyndon Johnson’s Democratic establishment refused to support the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s challenge to the Magnolia State’s Jim Crow delegation—and Vietnam had soured many radicals on liberalism’s opportunism); it was a period when both were involved in extraordinarily deep explorations of the limitations of American political, social, and intellectual life. Reminding us of the distinctiveness of what Tom Hayden has referred to as this “Port Huron moment” of the early 1960s, intellectual historian David A. Hollinger concluded in our recent email exchange that

The Port Huron Statement, whatever else it may be as a historical document, is a compelling example of the political and intellectual creativity of the very special historical moment of the early 1960s. That historical moment is too often conflated in popular memory with events of the later 1960s and early 1970s, which sometimes produced works of a quite different character. Mixing a forthright commitment to “reason” with a candid and explicit celebration of the human capacity for “love,” the Port Huron Statement was a deliberate, non-sloganeering, carefully formulated presentation of a vision of democracy very similar to that developed much earlier by John Dewey. The Port Huron Statement shares a distinctive historical moment with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities, Michael Harrington’s The Other America, and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, plus a number of less politically salient works that continue to provide basic vocabularies with which we discuss central aspects of our culture, including Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and Clark Kerr’s The Uses of the University.⁷

What was it that made the early 1960s, the Port Huron moment, such a time of intellectual creativity and searching social criticism? Perhaps it was the relief of finally being done with the dark night of McCarthyism. Or the sense of possibility of democratic renewal fostered both by a young and energetic president—JFK—and by the sit-in movement, born in Greensboro, North Carolina, and quickly spreading, first across the South and then from coast to coast. The Port Huron Statement’s sense of generational mission seems to have been, then, more than baby-boomer egotism, but reflected the fact that by 1962 youth were already beginning to lead the way towards democratic change from the Deep South to the White House. And yet this was a youth movement that lacked generational chauvinism; it was not merely willing but eager to build on the insights of dissident elders, symbolized by the attendance at Port Huron of Michigan Philosophy professor Arnold Kaufman, whose participatory-democracy idealism—along with that of John Dewey’s—helped set the tone of the PHS, as did the critical sensibility of the late Columbia sociologist C. Wright Mills, with his memorable indictment of the American power elites for monopolizing political and economic decision-making.

Despite its strong element of social criticism, there was almost a sweetness to some of the rhetoric and tone of the PHS, a faith in reason, and an optimism about the possibilities of converting dysfunctional or status quo–oriented institutions, like the two-party system and the universities, into instruments of progressive social change. As Hollinger put it, the PHS offered “deliberate language’ in its effort” to outline a program based on both theoretical reflection and an empirical view of the historical circumstances of the moment.⁸ The document’s identification of “reason, freedom, and love” as key ideals and “the cultivation of the mind” as central to university education made it a call to action that wedded an upbeat and moderate tone to a radically democratic sensibility.

This was emblematic of, as Mario Savio put it, the New Left’s early and most appealing phase, when it was speaking in plain language, a rhetoric of “communication,” eager to reach out to others and build a mass nonviolent movement. A world away from the angry and dogmatic rhetoric of the late ’60s that Savio termed the rhetoric of “confrontation,” a rhetoric born ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Part 1. Preface and Introduction
• Part 2. The Way We Were and the World Now: Reflections by Port Huron Veterans
• Part 3. Teaching Strategies, Final Thoughts, and the Port Huron Statement
• Index