When was port huron statement written

The one-party system in the South, attached to the Dixiecrat-Republican complex nationally, cuts off the Negro's hope for real political expression and representation.

The fact of economic dependence on the white, with little labor union protection, cuts off the Negro's independent powers as a citizen. Discrimination in employment, along with labor's accommodation to "lily-white" hiring practices, guarantees the lowest slot in the economy to the "nonwhite". North or South, those oppressed are conditioned by their inheritance and their surroundings to expect more of the same: in housing, schools, recreation, travel all their potential is circumscribed, thwarted, and often extinguished.

Automation grinds up job opportunities, and ineffective or nonexistent retraining programs makes the already-handicapped "nonwhite" even less equipped to participate in "technological progress". Horatio Alger Americans typically believe that the "nonwhites" are gradually being "accepted" and "rising". They see more Negroes on television and so assume that Negroes are "better off".

They hear the President talking about Negroes and so assume they are politically represented. They are aware of black peoples in the United Nations and so assume that men are much more tolerant these days. They don't drive through the South, or through the slum areas of there, so they assume that squalor is disappearing. They express generalities about "time and gradualism" to hide the fact that they don't know what is happening.

The advancement of the Negro and the other "nonwhites" in America has not been altogether by means of the crusades of liberalism, but rather through unavoidable changes in social structure.

The economic pressures of World War II opened new jobs, new mobility, new insights to Southern Negroes, who then began great migrations from the South to the bigger urban areas of the North where their absolute wage was greater, though unchanged in relation to the white man in the same stratum. More important than the World War II openings was the colonial revolution. The worldwide upsurge of dark peoples against white colonial exploitation stirred the aspiration and created urgency among the Negroes of America.

At the same time it threatened the power structure of the United States enough to concede gains to the Negro, thus spurring his spirit.

Produced by outer pressure from the newly-moving peoples rather than by the internal conscience of American government, the gains were keyed to improving "the American image" more than to reconstructing a society that prospered on top of its minorities. Thus came the historic Supreme Court decision of , desegregating theoretically Southern schools. That the decision was more a proclamation than a harbinger of social change is reflected in the fact that only a fraction of Southern school districts have desegregated—and federal officials have done very little to hasten the process.

It has been said that the Kennedy Administration did more in two years than the Eisenhower Administration did in eight. Of this there can be no doubt—but it is analogous to comparing a whisper to silence when humanity demands forcefulness in statement and deed. Kennedy leapt ahead of the Eisenhower record when he made his second reference to the race problem; Eisenhower did not utter a meaningful public statement until his last month in office when he mentioned the "blemish" of bigotry.

To avoid conflict with the Dixiecrat-Republican alliance, Kennedy has developed a civil rights philosophy of "enforcement, not enactment", implying that existing statutory tools are sufficient to change the lot of the Negro. So far he has employed executive power usefully to appoint Negroes to various offices, and seems actively interested in seeing the Southern Negro registered to vote although he appointed a racist judge in Mississippi and seems disinclined to support voter registration unless pressured.

While campaigning, the President criticized the Eisenhower administration for not signing a federal order forbidding the use of public funds in building houses—but since his election, the promised housing order has several times been delayed so as to avoid conflicts. Only two civil rights bills, one to abolish the poll tax in five states and another to prevent unfair use of literacy tests in registration, have been proposed—Kennedy giving active public support to neither the more important, that involving literacy tests, was crushed in the Senate.

The Administration is decidedly "cool" a phrase of Robert Kennedy's toward any mass nonviolent movement in the South, though by the support of racist Dixiecrats the Administration makes impossible gradual action through conventional channels. The Federal Bureau of Investigation in the South is composed of Southerners: their intervention in situations of "racial tension" is always after the incident, not before.

Kennedy has refused to "enforce" the legal prerogative to keep federal marshals active in Southern areas before, during and after any "situations" this would invite Negroes to exercise their rights and it would infuriate the Southerners in Congress because of its "insulting" features. While hungry "nonwhites" the world around assume rightful dominance, the American fights to keep integrated housing out of the suburbs.

While a fully interracial world becomes a biological probability, the American persists in opposing marriage between the races. While whole cultures gradually interpenetrate, white America is ignorant still of nonwhite America—and openly, if necessary, glad of it.

The white lives almost completely within his immediate, close-up world where things are tolerable, there are no Negroes except on the bus corners going to and from work, and where it is important the daughter marry "right". White, like might, makes right. Not knowing the "nonwhite", however, the white knows something less than himself.

Not comfortable around "different people", he reclines in whiteness instead of preparing for diversity. Refusing to yield objective social freedom to the "nonwhite", the white loses his personal, subjective freedom by turning away from "all these damn causes".

But the right to refuse service to anyone is no longer reserved to the Americans. The minority groups, internationally, are changing place. When we were kids the United States was the strongest country in the world: the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred, the only major country untouched by modern war, the wealthiest and boomingest country, and one entering a United Nations which would distribute American and British influence throughout the world.

As we grew and perceived more, our country's virtue was denuded: the ugliness began to show, sometimes glaringly, sometimes imperceptibly. Most concretely, it was there in the alliance with the old colonialists as the new revolutionaries were emerging in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The denuding, however, was the result of our hard efforts to see, not of America's desire to show herself. The ugliness was observed; America did not introspect, although it became fashionable to examine national purposes.

Almost as if the truths about America were too much to bear, many turned to concentration on image, on posture, on outer relations rather than on inner realities. We have tried to describe what our observations led us to conclude. America is locked in a world crisis. The dimensions of crisis are huge and new: the menace of thermonuclear war, over-population, international anarchy, the demise of ancien regime before new radicalism, supertechnology altering the relation of man to man, man to work, man to community.

Instead of trying to understand and abate the crisis, American economic and military elites, with the ratification of the politicians and the indirect reinforcement of the communications, advertising and educational systems, have contributed to its aggravation.

Domestically, the militarizating of society, the stalemated and unrepresentative Congress, the domination of major corporations, the mimicry of convention by churches, schools and the mass media, all induce a severe sense of apathy into the national life, a glaze above anxieties.

The apathy is not contentment amidst prosperity, as opinion-formers would have us believe. A capitalist prosperity creates anxiety, the anxiety which can find no outlet save in "more of the same", and it is this sense of "more of the same", the closed room, the giant rat race effect of modern society, that brings on real apathy, real, developed indifference to human affairs. The fact that each individual sees apathy in his fellows perpetuates the common reluctance to organize for change. The dominant institutions in society are complex enough to wither most potential critics, so there are few charismatic proponents of change.

The same institutions are so monstrous that they swiftly dissipate or repel the energies of protest and reform, limiting human expectancies. Then, too, we are a materially stronger society, a fact that in its implication of success carries with it the implication of stagnation. By our own expansion we seem to have diminished the case for still more change.

Beneath the expressed notion that America will "get by somehow", beneath the helplessness of those who are convinced that the world will soon blow up, beneath the stagnation of those who close their minds to the future, is the rarely articulated feeling that there are no alternatives to the present. Feeling the press of complexity upon the emptiness of life, people are very fearful of the thought that at any moment things will thrust out of control.

They are fearful of change itself, since change might smash whatever invisible framework seems to hold back chaos for them now. For most Americans, all crusades are suspect. For some, the only crusade that is not suspect is that of the reactionaries, going backwards to consolidate Old America from the modern fates that seem to beset her. Curiously, contemporary anxiety produces not only suspicion, but its opposite as well, the yearning to believe there is an alternative, that something can be done to improve circumstances.

The push and pull between suspicion of change and desire for change, between dogmatics and radicalism, is the restless force, and perhaps the dynamic force, in Americans today. It is the faith that alternatives exist, and can be discovered, that must move men. The grasp of human values, of the nature of man, of the makeup of modern society, is the urgent task before reformers. What do we ourselves believe, what should we urge others to believe, and how shall we organize to make our values operate in human affairs?

Making values explicit—that is, creating and defending a vision of what ought to be—is a task that has been devalued and undervalued. The conventional moral terms of the age, the politician moralities—"free world", "people's democracies"—reflect realities poorly, if at all, and seem to function more as ruling myths than as descriptive principles.

But neither has our experience in the universities gained us moral enlightenment—the old promise that knowledge and increased rationality would liberate society seems hollow. Our professors and administrators sacrifice controversy to public relations; their curriculums change more slowly than the living events of the world; their skills and silence are purchased by investors in the arms race; passion is ruled unscholastic.

The questions we might want raised—what is really important? Can we live in a better way than this way? What should he regard as beautiful? Unlike youth in other countries we are accustomed to moral leadership being exercised and moral dimensions being clarified by our elders. But today the preachments of the past seem inadequate to the forms of the present.

These are incomplete, and there are few new prophets. It has been said that our liberal and socialist predecessors were plagued by vision without program, while our generation is plagued by program without vision.

There is today astute grasp of method, technique—the committee, the ad hoc group, the lobbyist, the hard and soft sells, the make, the image projected—but, if pressed critically, such expertise is incompetent to explain its unstated ideals. It is highly fashionable to identify oneself by old categories, or by naming a respected political figure, or by explaining "how we would vote" on various issues.

Theoretic chaos has replaced idealistic thinking—and, unable to reestablish theoretic order, men have condemned idealism itself. The retreat from ideals and utopias is in face one of the defining features of social life in America. The reasons are various: the older dreams of the left were perverted by Stalinism and never recreated; the congressional stalemate makes men limit their definitions of "the possible"; the specialization of activity leaves no place for sweeping thought; the very horrors of the twentieth century, notably the gas ovens and concentration camps and atom bombs, have blasted hopefulness and ushered in the mood of despair.

To be hopeful is to be considered apocalyptic, deluded. To have no aspiration, on the contrary, is to be considered "tough-minded. In suggesting social goals and theories, therefore, we are aware of entering a realm of disrepute. Perhaps matured by the past, we have no sure formulas, no closed theories—but that does not mean values are beyond discussion and tentative determination. We are convinced that a first task of any new social movement is to convince people that the search for orienting theories and the creation of human values are both possible and worthwhile.

We propose that the world is not too complex, our knowledge not too limited, our time not so short, as to prevent the systematic building of a structure of theory, one for man and about man. The inner thoughts of men and appreciative communicating between men can be regenerated. Men can integrate their confused sentiments and discrete notions, becoming creators and self-makers, rather than pitiful, buffeted things unable to understand the forces that control.

Our social goals involve conceptions of man, human relationships, and social systems. We regard Man as infinitely precious and infinitely perfectible. In affirming these principles we are countering perhaps the dominant conceptions of man in the twentieth century: that he is a thing to be manipulated, and that he is inherently incapable of directing his own affairs.

We oppose the depersonalization that reduces human beings to the status of things, and we regard it as a preface to irresponsibility; if anything, the brutalities of the twentieth century teach that means and ends are intimately related, that vague appeals to "posterity" cannot justify the mutilation of the present. We oppose, too, the notion of human incompetence because it rests essentially on the modern fact that men have been manipulated into incompetence; we see little reason why men cannot meet with increasing skill the complexities and responsibilities of their situation, society is organized not for minority, but for majority, participation in decision-making.

Men have infinite potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we regard as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the human potentiality for violence, unreason, and submission to authority.

The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic; a quality of mind not compulsively driven by a sense of powerlessness, nor one which unthinkingly adopts status values, nor one which represses all threats to its habits, but one which has full, spontaneous access to present and past experiences, one which easily unites the fragmented parts of personal history, one which openly faces problems which are troubling and unresolved; one with an intuitive awareness of possibilities, an active sense of curiosity, and ability and willingness to learn.

This kind of independence does not mean egoistic individualism—the object is not to have one's way so much as it is to have a way that is one's own. Nor do we deify man—we merely have faith in his potential. Human relationships should involve fraternity and honesty. Human interdependence is contemporary fact; human brotherhood must be willed however, as a condition of future survival and as the most appropriate form of social relations. Personal links between man and man are needed, especially to go beyond the partial and fragmentary bonds of function that bind men only as worker to worker, employer to employee, teacher to student, American to Russian.

Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today. These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a love of man by man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by man. As the individualism we affirm is not egoism, the selflessness we affirm is not self-elimination. On the contrary, we believe in sacrifice of a kind that imprints one's unique individual qualities in the relation to other men, and to all human activity.

Further, to dislike isolation is not to favor the abolition of privacy; the latter differs from isolation in that it occurs or is abolished according to individual will. Finally, we would replace power and personal uniqueness rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity.

As a social system we seek the establishment of a participatory democracy, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.

In a participative community, social decision-making is carried on not through private groupings but through public ones. The political experience is not viewed as separate and "lower" than other private experiences, nor are the instruments of politics mere tools by which man defends himself from his fellows.

Rather, the political life involves men commonly engaged in the art of creating an acceptable pattern of social relations and arrangements. Political life should be a necessary, though not sufficient, part of the total experience by which men find meaning in their personal and collective life and by which they establish a society to meet their collectively-determined needs. Politics, therefore, is the effort to clarify and solve problems facing the community.

Institutionally, it should provide outlets for the expression of personal grievance and aspiration, opposing views should be organized so as to illuminate choices and facilitate the attainment of goals, channels should be commonly available to relate men to knowledge and to power so that private problems—from bad recreative facilities to personal alienation—are formulated and considered as general issues.

Violence is an abhorrent form of social interchange. We seek, through participative community, to prevent elite control of the means of violence, but more importantly, to develop the institutions—local, national, international—that encourage and guarantee nonviolence as a condition of conflict. As political life does not make power the incentive to political action in a participatory democracy, the economic life should involve incentives worthier than money or survival, such as creative satisfaction and personal growth from work.

With the political experience, the economic one is of such relevance that the individual must share in its determination. His work, both present and future, should be educative, not stultifying; creative, not mechanical; self-directed, not manipulated. Around this experience men invariably will come to form their habits, their perceptions, their social ethics.

It is imperative that work encourage independence, respect for others, a sense of dignity and a willingness to accept social responsibilities. Again, as with politics, the economy is of such social importance that its major resources and means of production should be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation.

Private enterprise is not inherently immoral or undemocratic—indeed, it may at times contribute to offset elitist tendencies—but where it decisively affects the society's functioning it should be democratically responsible to the needs and aspirations of society, not to the private interests of profit and productivity.

As with the political and economic spheres, all parts of a participatory democracy should have as a goal the fullest development of independence and social responsibility in the individual. A The educational system should impart a sense of common human culture through the liberal arts and technical studies, as well as one or more specialized skills for each student.

The measure of university greatness should not lie in the quantity of buildings, athletes, fraternities and sororities, but in the quality of independence and control which characterizes the teachers and students who actually participate in the educational process. The goal is neither specialized robots nor dispassionate eclecticism, but human beings with values and skills sufficient to live fully in the world.

B Prisons, mental health institutions, and hospitals should be directed to rehabilitation and restoration rather than to punishment or aggravation of human problems. C Minimum needs in food and housing, or in case of debilitating accident, should be met by society for each of its members. D Systems of transportation and communications should be shaped according to human need, not according to efficiency or profitability alone.

E The creative arts should be given high importance in human experience, and should be promoted by the whole society. In all areas the society's goal should be to guarantee equality of opportunity, and the basic freedoms to think and communicate. To make these freedoms and opportunities for participation appealing, societies should seek eventual decentralization as a principle in political and economic life.

How to end the Cold War? How to increase democracy in America? These are the decisive issues confronting liberal and socialist forces today. To us, the issues are intimately related, the struggle for one invariably being a struggle for the other. What policy and structural alterations are needed to obtain these ends? Universal controlled disarmament must replace deterrence and arms control as the national defense goal.

The strategy of mutual threat can only temporarily prevent thermonuclear war, and it cannot but erode democratic institutions here while consolidating oppressive institutions in the Soviet Union. Yet American leadership, while giving rhetorical due to the ideal of disarmament, persists in accepting mixed deterrence as its policy formula: under Kennedy we have seen first-strike and second-strike weapons, counter-military and counter-population intentions, tactical atomic weapons and guerilla warriors, etc.

The convenient rationalization that our weapons potpourri will confuse the enemy into fear of misbehaving is absurd and threatening.

Our own intentions, once clearly retaliatory, are now ambiguous since the President has indicated we might in certain circumstances be the first to use nuclear weapons. We can expect that Russia will become more anxious herself, and perhaps even prepare to "preempt" us, and we expecting the worst from the Russians will nervously consider "pre-emption" ourselves.

The symmetry of threat and counter-threat leads not to stability but to the edge of hell. It is necessary that America make disarmament, not nuclear deterrence, "credible" to the Soviets and to the world. That is, disarmament should be continually avowed as a national goal; concrete plans should be presented at conference tables; real machinery for a disarming and disarmed world—national and international—should be created while the disarming process itself goes on.

The long-standing idea of unilateral initiative should be implemented as a basic feature of American disarmament strategy: initiatives that are graduated in their risk potential, accompanied by invitations to reciprocation, done regardless of reciprocation, openly planned for a significant period of future time.

Their function should not be to strip America of weapons, but to induce a climate in which disarmament can be discussed with less mutual hostility and threat. They might include: a unilateral nuclear test moratorium, withdrawal of several bases near the Soviet Union, proposals to experiment in disarmament by stabilization of zone of controversy; cessation of all apparent first-strike preparations, such as the development of 41 Polaris by while Naval theorists state that "about 45" constitutes a provocative force; inviting a special United Nations agency to observe and inspect the launchings of all American flights into outer space; and numerous others.

The story of the '60s is illuminated with images of freedom protests, atom bombs, flower power, and a nation divided by war. R3 P67 H39 Tom Hayden Visits SC4. SC4 Library. But Jews continued to be prominent in the white New Left out of all proportion to their numbers in the American population—just as they were in Marxist parties from the s through the s.

This ethnic continuity may help explain why, after SDS imploded and disappeared, its more historically minded survivors found much to praise in the Old Left tradition they had once been so keen to bury. One aspect of the old Marxism that Port Huron mercifully interred was its twin faith in the inevitability that world capitalism would collapse and that a free and equal order would surely arise from the rubble.

Distant and above it all for the moment, the revolutionary cadre circles, awaiting the hour of his predestinated dinner. What appealed to most of the young people who began to use the term was not so homespun a tradition.

It was the promise of participatory democracy to utterly transform the society of over-managed, bureaucratic, formally representative institutions they believed were stifling their independence of thought and action. The merits of participatory democracy, as an ideal and a practice, should be obvious. However, participatory democracy was plagued by major blind spots, too. Claimed as the path to the good society, it had no answer to the question of what happens to the vast majority of citizens who have little or no taste for politics.

Only an activist aflame with the impatient desire for a revolution could believe that the apolitical masses are a bunch of alienated, sad human beings who would welcome liberation by young zealots they have never met. Most people, after all, prefer to have their orgasms in private. IT WAS also a serious mistake to equate democracy with participation in a social movement and to view all elected officials as either ineffectual cogs or corrupt parasites in an unjust system.

The history of the American Left from the abolitionists to the civil rights movement proves that only when representative and participatory forms of democracy work together do egalitarian reforms succeed and political leaders emerge who can be held accountable to the will of their constituents. Tom Hayden recognized this himself in the mids when he took to wearing a tie on a daily basis in his new career as a progressive and often successful Democratic politician.

Notwithstanding their vast differences, all these demonstrations sought to bring people out of isolation and into politics without requiring that they abandon their individual desires for the uncertain security of a hierarchical organization. Many of the protests were either organized by or helped to gestate mass movements. In the s, we discovered the need to identify and campaign for peace-minded politicians too. But by the time George McGovern was nominated for president in , he was unable to mobilize the dwindling energies of the antiwar movement without being held captive to its popular image as a band of scruffy, violent anti-Americans.

Since most Americans were not about to become full-time political activists, it was natural for the writers of the Port Huron Statement to pin their hopes for a truly radical, fully democratic society on the only group whose members had the time, the vigor, and the inclination to dedicate their lives to bringing it about: college students of all races with a strong intellectual bent.

These together make the university a potential base and agency in a movement of social change. The grand synthesis of liberalism and radicalism was stillborn. However, by the end of the sixties, the reigning culture at universities was beginning to undergo a rapid and, for young radicals, a most salutary change. The Port Huron Statement voiced the philosophy towards politics and social change that a whole generation of student activists in the New Left was adhering to at the time.

It gave the youth an ideological argument for the transformation that they wanted to see in American life and politics. Its ideas radicalized the approach that people took towards changing serious issues throughout the s and onwards. Without the Port Huron Statement, SDS would not have had an ideological manifesto to grow from, and the student-led anti-Vietnam War Movement would not have taken off as quickly, with as much potency, as it did.

Citations for this page individual document citations are at the full document links. Michigan in the World features exhibitions of research conducted by undergraduate students about the history of the University of Michigan and its relationships beyond its borders.