“The nation was at a crossroads in the 1960s,” Louis Menand writes, of the birth of the New Left. “We are at another crossroads today.”
’s “Siddhartha,” which he had frantically underlined. They got married in 1961 and eventually moved to New York City, and it was there, in a railroad flat on West Twenty-second Street, that Hayden wrote the first draft of what would be known as the Port Huron Statement. “I was influenced deeply by ‘The Power Elite,’ ” Hayden said, and the effect of C. Wright Mills’s 1956 book is obvious.
The Port Huron Statement echoes Mills. It says that the Cold War had made the military the dominant power in what Hayden called “the triangular relations of the business, military, and political arenas.” Domestic needs, from housing and health care to minority rights, were all subordinated “to the primary objective of the ‘military and economic strength of the Free World.’ ” The Cold War was making the United States undemocratic.
Mills’s “Letter” was mocked by his Columbia colleague Daniel Bell, who called Mills “a kind of faculty adviser to the ‘young angries’ and ‘would-be angries’ of the Western world.” But the “Letter” was taken up by S.D.S., which circulated copies among its members and reprinted it in a journal,launched by graduate students at the University of Wisconsin. “He seemed to be speaking to us directly,” Hayden wrote about the “Letter.
The Port Huron convention began on June 12, 1962, with fifty-nine registered participants from S.D.S.’s eleven chapters. Participatory democracy—“democracy is in the streets”—and authenticity were the core principles of Hayden’s forty-nine-page draft. In that spirit, the delegates debated the entire document, section by section.
The Port Huron deliberations lasted three days. They ended at dawn. Hayden was elected president of S.D.S. , and the delegates walked together to the shore of Lake Huron, where they stood in silence, holding hands. “It was exalting,” one of them, Sharon Jeffrey, said later. “We felt that we were different, and that we were going to do things differently. We thought that we knew what had to be done, and that we were going to do it. It felt like the dawn of a new age.
It seemed to erupt spontaneously. That was part of its appeal and part of its mystique: no one planned it, and no one ran it. It had no connection to S.D.S. or any other national political group. The reason is that the F.S.M. was a parochial affair. It was not a war for social justice. It was a war against the university administration.
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