A half-century of mostly hard political times can put a halo of nostalgia on any experience. The words of old timers about the good old days are and ought to be suspect. I begin by pleading guilty: the Port Huron convention is high on my list of most cherished memories. I pride myself immensely on having had the good sense to get there, and I carry a special warmth and respect for those who were there with me that has withstood later political differences, personal animosities, and long years of separation.1
But the glow Port Huron carries for me is not newly coined. The people who gathered were impressive, smart, humorous, politically experienced, energetic, and committed. We held a shared assumption that through collective thinking we could understand the world, and that with passionate dedication we could change it.
We understood our project to be momentous—no less than the reshaping of political discourse, moving beyond both liberalism and socialism into something profoundly new and radical. We brought to Port Huron an astounding breadth and depth of knowledge about world events and moral philosophy, an unabashed confidence in our own abilities, and a determination to place intellection fully in the service of radical social change. We yearned for self-transformation and high-stakes venture, both of which many of us had tasted in civil rights organizing. The high spirits born of shared moral purpose, a sense of historic mission, and the sweet company of kindred souls were infectious.
The centerpiece of the convention was the Manifesto, later called the Port Huron Statement. Drafts had been circulating for discussion throughout the spring. Revising it was the task that drew us together, the framework that structured our thinking, the medium within which we began to shape our collective political vision. Since then I have seen political organizations founder over the hacking out of dreary one-page lists of “principles of unity.” That was not what we were about. In our cultivated naiveté, we intended to create a piece of literature, well written, in clear American English, something that would actually be read, reflected upon, remembered. We had no interest in creating a litmus test of political correctness. Our aims were more generous: to freshly envision the radical possibilities of political culture, to provide ourselves with a rough map by which we could guide our political lives, and to fire the political imaginations of our contemporaries.
We were a group of perhaps fifty young people (and a few elders), mostly white (a few of our black civil rights comrades attended) mostly from elite schools, more men than women (although the numbers are distorted by sexism; no one kept records, and the women have tended to be forgotten). We were mostly handpicked by SDS insiders. We were experienced organizers, veterans of the civil rights movement, peace movement, and student organizations. Some of us were red-diaper babies, and a few of us had earlier discovered socialism on our own. I had been aware of SDS for about two and a half years. As an officer of the Brandeis Socialist Club, I had been recruited by an SDS organizer.
We drew our inspiration from others—most significantly from blacks struggling for equality in the South, but also from the cultural rebels of the Beat Generation and an eclectic array of intellectuals, C. Wright Mills, Albert Camus, and Karl Marx. We had come together to build a political community rooted in our own perceptions of the world and our own discontents without prescribed social destinies. We saw ourselves not as bit players in a social drama dominated by blue-collar workers, but as bona fide agents of change. We reasoned (correctly, I believe) that in a society increasingly dominated by information and high technology, students—who would serve as technicians, managers, and professionals—occupied a strategically vital position.
We were not, at Port Huron, asserting student hegemony over social change; we aspired to the role of catalyst, and we claimed without shame our rightful place as a legitimate segment of a social movement. As students, we saw our primary and immediate task to organize students. As civil rights veterans, we knew our own courage and zeal, and we insisted on our prerogative to utilize them in the service of movement-building.
For many of us the civil rights movement had already begun a transformative process within. The black struggle, and the vibrant communities that sprang up within it, were the harsh mirror in which we saw reflected the banalities and complacency of white middle-class life. We had tasted the heady brew of life (or at least moments) lived within communities of protest. We compared that with the lives of our parents’ generation and the stereotypic social niches that were waiting for us, and we were repelled. We had already found something better. The task was to translate that something better into a society in which all people could live lives of meaning, vitality, and, yes, adventure. Privatism, alienation, and conformity were the chief demons in our white middle-class hell (though the Port Huron Statement reflects considerable grasp of economic and military factors). Community, founded on political engagement, was the antidote. In an age when traditional bases of community—the extended family, the stable neighborhood, the church—had waned, and their remnants looked uninviting, we saw shared political commitment as the only viable basis for community, and community as the only context within which the individual could find fulfillment and meaning.
Changing history, an honorable and deeply desired project in itself, was for many of us also the means by which our personal lives could be transformed. Long before we discovered that the personal was political, we had embraced the political as personal. The confluence of desire for personal transformation and political agency lies at the center of New Left politics, and it was the source of both strengths and weaknesses. Our intoxication with risk and our disdain for the ordinary led at times to overvaluation of extravaganza and to limitations in our ability to form alliances and endure slow processes of change. But the existential gusto with which we offered ourselves to the political process was the source of our incisive critique of our own culture and our experimental brashness in action. Without these, the many accomplishments of the New Left would not have happened.
From our civil rights experience we had also gained a sense of how change could come. Not yet a strategy (SDS never did achieve that), the Port Huron Statement suggested a raw, tactical game plan rooted in a distrust of the long, plodding processes of mainstream institutions that kept things as they were. The great leap forward, most of us believed, would come not in the halls of Congress (though there was a small but potent realignment faction in SDS, whose views are included in the Port Huron Statement) or through the mainstream labor movement (though here too the Port Huron Statement pays lip service). Change would come through a combination of tough, unyielding, grassroots organizations spread throughout society, coupled with dramatic acts of protest and courage that would demonstrate to the world, in irresistible images, the themes and demands on which we wanted to focus attention. Although in its purest form this view of tactics proved needlessly divisive and destroyed potentially valuable alliances, in the main it was a smart idea and an important contribution in its time, one that is still valid today.
My idyllic sense of in-tuneness at Port Huron was unmarred by any consciousness of sexism. I did not know about sexism when I went to Port Huron. I do not believe the word had yet been invented. Although, in retrospect, I can visualize scenes in which sexism was manifest at the convention, at the time the kind wool of ignorance shielded my eyes. Not only did the state of my own consciousness obscure sexism, however; there was a real atmosphere of inclusion and respectfulness extended to women. The process itself, at least in the “values” committee where I spent much of my time, exemplified the ideals, soon to be articulated, of the feminist movement. We met in a small group to collectively understand, modify, and accept a part of the Port Huron Statement. Much care was expended to encourage reticent members to express their views. Ideas and questions were responded to without condescension or acrimony. Good-naturedness, tolerance, and curiosity characterized our discussions. In plenaries, though there were hot and heavy debates (mostly participated in by men), trust, affection, and the desire to make it work seemed to predominate. It would not be long, however, before my eyes opened: a mere few weeks after the convention, I would find myself enraged at experiences in the SDS national office, where I had started working, for which I had no name. Slowly, over the next three years, first in informal “bitch sessions” with other SDS women, later through formal meetings and papers, I would learn, reluctantly, about sexism.
On the face of it, the Port Huron Statement itself can be dismissed as hopelessly sexist. The pronouns are all in the male gender; there is no acknowledgment of the oppression of women; issues of family life, child-rearing, reproduction, sexual violence, and unequal opportunity and pay, so crucial in today’s feminist movement, all are missing. Yet as I reread the Port Huron Statement so many years later, I am struck by the many elements that seem to prefigure early feminist thinking. It occurs to me that the Port Huron Statement may have played a catalytic role in developing feminist consciousness. The Statement’s critique and vision contain the seeds of several key feminist ideas. The contrast between its worldview to which we women claimed co-ownership, and the actual practice within SDS, undoubtedly stimulated consciousness and action. It is no accident that after a week of immersion in the Port Huron Statement and the relatively benign environment of the convention, I found myself excruciatingly intolerant of the blatant sexism I encountered in SDS.
From a feminist perspective it is significant that the Port Huron Statement starts with a statement of who we are, followed by a section delineating values. This beginning is one of the most eloquent and lasting parts of the Statement. Rather than lead with a classic Marxist analysis of economic factors, we chose to open with an evocative description of our own lives and the moral lessons we had derived from them. The quest for orienting human values is seen as the first task of a social movement. Working outward from concrete, immediate experience to derive general values, and using those values as criteria for comprehending structures and evaluating events, are procedures of thought common among women, that would later become hallmarks of feminist process.
The specific values enumerated in the Port Huron Statement spoke, without naming women as referents, to our thwarted aspirations, and our approach to remedying our situation. The trademark concept of the New Left and the Statement—participatory democracy—held special promise for women as we began to confront the rigidity, emptiness, and inaccessibility of institutions of decision making. Emphasis on the need to radically alter the very structures of decision processes was adopted early on by feminists as we sought to get some control over our lives. Participatory democracy provided a model for people with common concerns to come together to talk, to argue, to decide on issues of importance to them. Of course, it is now clear how vague this concept is and how difficult to implement. Yet it is equally clear that without a radical shift in the structure and process of decision making, no real democracy can emerge. While it does not provide a solution, the idea of participatory democracy at least correctly names the problem and offers a provocative model that moves in the right direction.
For women the need for participatory democracy was concrete and immediate; we had little or no control over when and whether to have babies, when and with whom to have sex, or what job options to pursue. We had little access to the seats of power, in government, in the military, in industry, or in our own political organization, SDS. As radical women, we came to understand that reformist accommodations and tokenism within existing white, male, ruling-class institutions would do little to change our situation. This understanding was to come a few years later, but our comprehension of the need for structural transformation of decision making and our experiments in practicing it within our own groups can be traced to the Port Huron Statement and the ongoing dialogue that it spawned about what participatory democracy meant and how it could be put into practice.
The high priority placed by the Port Huron Statement on relatedness and community was also congruent with female values. The assertion that people had “unrealized potential” but had been manipulated into incompetence went to the heart of women’s bitterness. The depersonalization of the male-dominated public sphere, and the isolation and disengagement of feminine home life, are eloquently decried.
Other sections of the Port Huron Statement also had special application to women. When the Statement attacks in loco parentis, it is attacking a doctrine that imposed a Victorian double standard on women students. Rules, such as the then common curfews for women, ostensibly aimed at protecting helpless women from uncontrollable men, were actually used to rationalize the limitation of women’s freedom and autonomy. And when the Statement points out the contradiction between educational purpose and the social purposes of university life (for women, to find a suitable husband), it is illuminating a particularly female version of the “let’s pretend” irrelevance of much university experience. On the other hand, as the Statement points out, universities offered a growing number of students real opportunities for intellectual and organizational development. As graduation approached, newly confident college-educated women faced a world that expected them to settle for low-status, low-paying, unchallenging stopgap jobs. Their real social task was to “catch” that eligible, upwardly mobile man, through whom they would attain identity and security, and to whom they were to devote their lives. The Port Huron Statement spoke to women faced with this situation, validating our desire to use university-gained skills to engage in public life. The Statement held out the right promise to women at the right time: through political involvement we could create lives of meaning that would further develop our skills. SDS’s inability to keep that promise catapulted many women in and around SDS into the formation of a radical, autonomous women’s movement.
By painting an image of an ideal democracy in which all members participated in decisions affecting their daily lives, the Port Huron Statement intensified and clarified for women the contradiction between what could be and what was. The idea that people working collectively can change the course of history and have the right to do so (a traditional left idea given contemporary application by the Port Huron Statement) gave impetus to women in SDS as a feminist viewpoint began to emerge from our experience. The Port Huron Statement, while eradicating women from its categories of thought, gave us rudiments of an intellectual and moral groundwork with which we could begin to conceptualize our own situation.
The breadth and audacity of the Port Huron Statement and the depth of the SDS commitment to radical change offered hope for a better world for all people. That inclusiveness and basic soundness (and the urgency many felt about the Vietnam War) kept many women in SDS for several years before our anger and effectiveness forced us to separate. This was a good thing, although it cost us a great deal to stay. It allowed us, in our politically formative years, to develop a full political consciousness cognizant of issues and dilemmas faced by others, and it helped us develop the habit of seeing connections among the plethora of issues with which we were constantly flooded. At our best, women who lived that experience have been able to infuse the feminist movement with these valuable qualities of mind.
We were a generation of generalists in a world growing more and more atomized and obscure, and the Port Huron Statement reflected our conviction that atomization and obscurantism endangered the last hope for a meaningful and a humane culture. We were right. In recent decades the world has slipped further from the possibility of an empowered, participating public. Manipulation is in full sway; its technology so sophisticated and pervasive that it boggles the imagination to think of undoing its control over our minds and lives. Activism abounds, but is splintered and isolated, attempting to make change, single issue by single issue. The obstacles to creating a broad-based, nonsectarian radical movement of vision and relevance seem overwhelming. Yet there are signs that create hope: an upsurge in student activism, the perseverance and growth of women’s organizations, the tenaciousness of numerous single-issue or constituency groups, many the legacy of the 1960s, and the lasting interest of young people in the music and politics of our movement.
As I have written I have had young people on my mind. If a new movement is to emerge, the lead will come from the young, who, in spite of far more constricted economic opportunities than we faced, decide to devote themselves, at least for a time, to changing history. The greatest value I can imagine for this volume’s republication of the Port Huron Statement is that it will offer inspiration to young activists, not to accept our ideas, but to rethink the world for themselves, and to act reflectively, courageously, and collectively to change it, as best they can.