Port Huron Statement
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The Port Huron Statement is the manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), written primarily by Tom Hayden, then the Field Secretary of SDS, and completed on June 15, 1962 at an SDS convention in Port Huron, Michigan.
| We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit... |
The main concerns of the statement included racial bigotry, nuclear weapons, and the gulf between ideals such as "all men are created equal" and the "facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities of the North." Overall, poverty and the civil rights of African Americans were the main concern, while Cold War and peace issues were secondary. Vietnam, which came to be a central concern of SDS only a few years later during the Vietnam War, is mentioned once.
The statement popularized the idea of Participatory democracy being a democracy rooted in the principles of decision-making being carried on by public groupings, politics being defined as the art of collectively creating an acceptable pattern of social relations as well as having the function of bringing people out of isolation and into community, and the political order being focussed on providing outlets for expression of grievances, as well as providing channels relating men to knowledge and power so that private problems are formulated as general issues.
The Port Huron Statement was written partly as a response to Young Americans for Freedom's founding statement of principles, known as the Sharon Statement.
[edit] Cultural references
The SDS was part of the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the youth group of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). The LID and its youth group were social democratic organizations that were strongly anti-Communist. Their opposition to Communism came from a left critique of the totalitarian character of the regime. The SDS rejected this left wing anti-communism and without being pro-communist, became anti-anti-communist. One principle they espoused was "participatory democracy." This idea later was translated into "community control" and led to school decentralization in New York, Detroit and other places. The Weathermen, a violent radical group, was an offshoot of SDS.
In the 1998 film The Big Lebowski, the main character the Dude claims to have been one of the authors of an early, more radical draft of the Port Huron Statement ("the original Port Huron Statement, not the compromised second draft"). He also claims to have been a member of the Seattle Seven, a group that indeed included Jeff "the Dude" Dowd, the real-life inspiration for the character.
The Raleigh-based pop-rock band, The Port Huron Statement, named itself based on the Lebowski reference and an interest in obscure history.
