In the first chapter, we spoke of the alienated kids of the fifties, how they grew up in peaceful, joyless, and dead suburbs where they learned that they were being trained to become corporate drones and mindless consumers. Tom Hayden was one of those kids. As he wrote later, “Our generation was troubled by contradiction between the ideals we’d been taught and realities we experienced. We felt these contradictions, or paradoxes, in the form of insults—status rankings, bullying, belittling, snubbing, threats, punishments, sheer unfairness—that we either accepted and internalized or questioned, resisted, and, ultimately, defied.”1
Nothing in his world made sense. Hayden and his generation knew that hiding under their desks, a strategy taught as duck and cover, would not protect them from nuclear blasts, although their government and their teachers said it would. They knew that the eternal war machine built by Eisenhower, who later warned us about the military-industrial complex he had helped to create, could not lead to peace. They sensed that the policy of mutually assured destruction would lead only to mutual destruction. They also sensed that, even if they survived, a life in the corporate world was going to deaden their souls and lead only to the empty lives their parents led.
No, something else was needed and the Beat generation, with their emphasis on choosing to be outsiders, on rejecting the dictates of our society, arrived just in time to show Hayden and his generation a possible alternative, a paradigm into which they could fit.. After reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Hayden accepted the author as a role model and did his own hitch-hiking journeys around the country.2 But then he discovered radical politics. Studying journalism at the University of Michigan, he became a member of the National Student Association, which he quickly found out was far too moderate for him. It was like being a mercenary soldier and joining the Boy Scouts. Maybe the organization had something to do with his goals, but it couldn’t come close to where he needed to be. Using the idea that if what you needed wasn’t there you create it, Hayden helped form the more radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), becoming president of the organization in 1962.3 The year before, he had married Sandra Carson, who worked for SNCC, and as soon as he graduated from college Hayden joined the Freedom Riders.
But serving wasn’t enough. Hayden needed to lead. He got his opportunity in 1962, when the United Auto Workers held a retreat at Port Huron, Michigan. As one of the top guns of SDS, Hayden was called upon to be the writer of record of the Port Huron Statement, a mission statement for SDS that was to be unveiled at that meeting.
The 27,000-word document called for participatory democracy, a type of bottom-up leadership where all major decisions were made by all members of the organization. Instead of a few people in power passing down a policy decision to the masses, power was given to the masses; no decision could be made without their input. While some on the left hailed this idea as a widening of freedom, others complained that it led to endless arguments and long, dull meetings in which nothing was accomplished because too many people served their own egos and agendas and could never reach a decision. Still, the left welcomed the notion of participatory democracy, which still serves as the operating model in groups such as the Occupy movement. The text of the Port Huron Statement called for three main thrusts of action: disarmament, changing the Democratic Party, and reforming colleges and universities.
Hayden’s was the first generation to grow up with the threat of nuclear annihilation. At any moment, a button could be pushed by either of the world’s two atomic powers and the world would end. This was, of course, an unacceptable development and the young radicals had been fighting it for some time. Ad hoc groups had been demonstrating outside defense plants for several years, but now, with the Port Huron Statement, disarmament became an official policy of the emerging New Left. The text read, “Universal controlled disarmament must replace deterrence and arms control as the national defense goal.”4
Folk music contributed to the creation of this policy position. Songs about the threat of nuclear holocaust dominated the early sixties the way songs about dying teenagers dominated pop music. In 1962 Bonnie Dobson wrote “Morning Dew,” a mournful song in which the planet is destroyed by nuclear weapons. The song was first recorded by Vince Martin and Fred Neil before going on to become a classic covered by dozens of musicians, including Dobson herself, Tim Rose, Melanie Safka, and such artists as the Grateful Dead, Nazareth, the Pozo Seco Singers, Long John Baldry, Jeff Beck, Robert Plant, and Lulu. “Morning Dew” was a song that captured the angst and fears of the time, a song that spoke what was on young people’s minds and was quite powerful. It was one of those rare songs that changes things. Vince Martin remembers: “I learned the song from—actually I don’t remember from who. It might have been Len Chandler or maybe Ritchie Havens. I taught it to Freddie [Neil] and we sang it around and then recorded it. That’s it. I had no idea it was going to become a classic. You sing a song, turn it loose and it goes where it goes. ‘Morning Dew’ is the kind of song I really love.”
The years 1962 and 1963 brought on songs about the nuclear holocaust. Malvina Reynolds contributed “What Have They Done to the Rain,” which dramatized the issue of death from nuclear fallout. It also became a hit, recorded by Reynolds herself, Melanie Safka, Joan Baez, the Searchers, the Seekers, and Marianne Faithful. Bob Dylan contributed “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” “Masters of War,” and one of the first songs to treat nuclear annihilation with humor, “Talkin’ World War III Blues.”
By the mid-sixties, after the Port Huron Statement restored the issue to popular consciousness, the songs took on a slightly different and sometimes more complex form. Instead of preaching a standard message, they looked at the issue from other angles. The Byrds did “I Come and Stand at Every Door,” Crosby, Stills and Nash added “Wooden Ships” to the collection, and Lowell Blanchard and the Valley Trio began a short-lived trend to using nuclear weapons as a symbol of God’s power by recording “Jesus Hits Like the Atomic Bomb,” which was covered by dozens of gospel groups, including the Pilgrim Travelers. The Louvin Brothers urged people to get right with God so they could escape the coming nuclear holocaust in “Great Atomic Power.” Rockabilly artists also mined the possibility of a nuclear holocaust for material. Warren Smith did “Uranium Rock,” while Mary Robbins contributed “This Cold War with You,” and Sonny Russell joined the throng with “50 Megatons.” Wanda Jackson, who was billed as the female Elvis, had a minor hit in the States but a massive hit in Japan with “Fujiama Mama.”
All of these songs created a mood in the young people who made up SDS and while they cannot be given all of the credit they certainly helped shape a mood that led the young to oppose war and the nuclear arms race. While the establishment politicians pursued a policy of mutually assured destruction, claiming that only the threat of the destruction of our entire planet would lead to peace and that beating back a perceived communist threat was the most important thing, the young were being conditioned by the music and by the New Left to reject those ideas and to try to create a world that loved and respected life. Universal disarmament was seen as the first step.
At the time of the writing of the statement, efforts of the Democrats in Congress to make positive changes in civil rights and foreign policy were for the most part blocked by the Dixiecrats, a powerful group of reactionary southern members of the party who had broken off from the mainstream Democratic party and organized as a separate entity in 1948.5 The specific goal of the Dixiecrats was to advance state’s rights, thereby limiting the power of the federal government in order to make sure segregation remained the law of the land. In that way they could keep the federal government from advancing the civil rights of minorities. The Dixiecrats were also strongly anti-union.6 In short, the group was committed to protecting what they saw as the southern way of life, which to them meant protecting Jim Crow laws and white supremacy. Adopting these positions, of course, meant that they opposed the granting or extension of voting rights.
The group formally broke away from the Democratic Party in 1948 when President Harry Truman ordered an end to segregation and discrimination in the military. This action caused South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond and Mississippi’s Fielding L. Wright to pledge to leave the party and hold an alternate convention in Birmingham if Truman got the presidential nomination at the Democratic convention. When Truman won at the convention—who, in the eyes of the Dixiecrats added insult to injury by adopting a plank calling for civil rights—Thurmond and Wright made good on their threat and at their separate convention removed Truman’s name from the ballot and offered up a ticket consisting of Thurmond for president and Wright as the vice presidential candidate. They called the new party the States’ Rights Democratic Party and their platform read in part as follows:
We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race; the constitutional right to choose one’s associates; to accept private employment without governmental interference, and to earn one’s living in any lawful way. We oppose the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statutes, the control of private employment by Federal bureaucrats called for by the misnamed civil rights program. We favor home-rule, local self-government and a minimum interference with individual rights.7
The American people did not flock to the Dixiecrat Party in big numbers; the election was a disaster for the new organization as voters ignored them the way they would a sudden bad smell in church. After the shellacking the Dixiecrats endured in the 1948 elections the party officially folded, but the term lingered in the political lexicon and is still used to refer to conservative southern democrats. The former members of the party continued to hold power in the Democratic Party when the Port Huron Statement was written. About changing the Democratic Party, the manifesto read as follows:
An imperative task for these publicly disinherited groups, then, is to demand a Democratic party responsible to their interests. They must support Southern voter registration and Negro political candidates and demand that Democratic Party liberals do the same (in the last Congress, Dixiecrats split with Northern Democrats on 119 of 300 roll-calls, mostly on civil rights, area redevelopment and foreign aid bills; and breach was much larger than in the previous several sessions). Labor should begin a major drive in the South. In the North, reform clubs (either independent or Democratic) should be formed to run against big city regimes on such issues as peace, civil rights, and urban needs. Demonstrations should be held at every Congressional or convention seating of Dixiecrats. A massive research and publicity campaign should be initiated, showing to every housewife, doctor, professor, and worker the damage done to their interests every day a racist occupies a place in the Democratic Party. Where possible, the peace movement should challenge the “peace credentials” of the otherwise-liberals by threatening or actually running candidates against them.8
We have previously discussed the music that came out of the civil rights movement, which was partially a result of the Dixiecrat Revolution and the Port Huron Statement. We will simply reiterate here that songs like “Oh Freedom,” “We Shall Overcome,” “When Will We Be Paid for the Work We’ve Done,” and “We Shall Not Be Moved,” inspired young people, black and white, and helped create the rebellion that broke the Dixiecrat’s hold on the American South.
In the fifties, colleges and universities, despite the rantings of conservative intellectuals such as William F. Buckley, were far from the hotbeds of radicalism that conservative intellectuals accused them of being. Conservative and cautious, given to maintaining society as it was, the colleges saw their mission as protecting the status quo. Built on a model that the Crusaders brought back from the Middle East in the 1400s, the schools looked to the past for inspiration and direction. In the humanities, the emphasis was on what was known as the “Established Dead” and the canon consisted of work by dead white men. The most widely used undergraduate literature text of the time, the 1962 edition of the Norton American Literature anthology, contained only one poem by a woman, the Puritan Anne Bradstreet, who advocated surrender to men.9 Business programs were designed to lead their graduates into the corporate life, and in the social sciences humanist psychologists like Carl Rogers fought for acceptance of their theories and a place in the academic world at a time when B.F. Skinner’s behaviorism ruled psychology departments.
Young women were shuttled into education programs, destined for teaching jobs, as teaching was considered at the time to be a secondary and female occupation. The four-year colleges that offered nursing programs were filled with females also, as the schools reflected society at large by continuing to look at nursing as a woman’s occupation. Most nursing education was considered beneath the dignity of universities, though, and took place in specialized schools.
College politics were generally conservative. Student clubs and organizations like the Young Republicans and Young Democrats again reflected the larger culture; even in college, the young were being channeled into the existing system by both custom and by fiat. The University of California system, as we have seen, forbade students from creating more radical groups on campus. As the members of the newly formed SDS saw it, young people were idealistic and their schools were not. Overall, Hayden and his coauthors saw the universities as a conspiracy to keep the young in an ongoing state of apathy. The situation outside college was no better. The Port Huron Statement declared that all of the movements available to students—civil rights, peace, student, and labor—lacked the power to make positive changes, and people should look to the “only mainstream institution … open to participation by individuals of nearly every viewpoint,” the universities.10
How would the universities help the various movements? People of good will would reform the colleges by forming an alliance of students and faculty who would beat back the educational institutes’ bureaucracies and make a place for public issues inside the curriculum, thus introducing debate and controversy into the picture and reforming the curriculum so that the schools would be relevant to the lives of the people who attended or worked in them. The statement was adopted, but by 1964, with the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the ascendency to the presidency by Lyndon Johnson, things changed in the political world and a new edition of the manifesto was issued, with a preface that stated that most of the original writers of the decree would not agree with all of its conclusions and that the first edition of the statement should be seen almost as a historical document.11
Still, it was the statement of the guiding principles of SDS, which carried its principles into Freedom Summer and then, when the mostly white activists found themselves pushed aside there, into the anti-war movement.