Spring 1962

Spring 1962

"Where," Tom Hayden said in a letter to the SDS membership, "does one begin thinking about manifestoes?" There was little for the generation of the sixties to turn to for guidance in setting out its politics, for the left tradition in this country had been strangulated by the forties and fifties and the left tradition in other nations was never applicable. It was faced with the enormous task of creating a political philosophy almost in a void.*

Hayden plowed into the task undaunted nonetheless and spent most of his energies on it throughout the spring. Retired now from the Southern battlefields, he steeped himself in political philosophies, reading omnivorously, comparing, sifting, searching, constructing. He pored over works by C. Wright Mills, on whom he had written a dissertation in college, and by Harold Taylor, whose educational humanism he found congenial. He looked into Camus, Michels, Fromm, into David Riesman, Robert Nisbet, Michael Harrington, into Iris Murdoch, Sheldon Wolin, Norman O. Brown, William Appleman Williams, into Studies on the Left and the British New Left Review. He examined himself, his student generation, the awakening activists, the Southern black students with whom he had traveled; he looked at the professors he had known, the schools, the classes, the texts, the universities. He began putting things on paper: "We are the inheritors and the victims of a barren period in the development of human values." .... "Strangely, we are in the universities but gain little enlightenment there—the old promise that knowledge and increased rationality would liberate society seems hollow, if not a lie." ... "The liberation of this individual potential is the just end of society; the directing of the same potential, through voluntary participation, to the benefit of society, is the just end of the individual." ... "The role of the intellectuals and of the universities (and therefore, I think, SDS) is to enable people to actively enjoy the common life and feel some sense of genuine influence over their personal and collective affairs." ... "I am proposing that the world is not too complex, our knowledge not too limited, our time not so short, as to prevent the orderly building of a house of theory [the phrase is Murdoch's], or at least its foundation, right out in public, in the middle of the neighborhood." Slowly a set of ideas, a frail kind of ideology, a house of theory, did begin to appear.

In March, preparing for a speech he was to give at the University of Michigan, Hayden sharpened his critique of the American society: We must have a try at bringing society under human control. We must wrest

control somehow from the endless machines that grind up men's jobs, the

few hundred corporations that exercise greater power over the economy and

the country than in feudal societies, the vast military profession that came

into existence with universal military training during our brief lifetime, the

irresponsible politicians secured by the ideological overlap, the seniority

system and the gerrymandered base of our political structure, and the

pervasive bureaucracy that perpetuates and multiplies itself everywhere:

these are the dominators of human beings, the real, definable phenomena

that make human beings feel victimized by undefinable "circumstance."

Sadly, the university in America has become a part of this hierarchy of power,

rather than an instrument to make men free.” Shortly afterward, in the early months of the spring, he sent out three "convention documents" in mimeographed form to the entire SDS mailing list, setting out his tentative thoughts about "values"—a concept very much on his mind—about the nature of democracy (complete with a bibliography), and about the ways in which students can make their politics felt. None of them was particularly inspiring—with the exception of a phrase or two, none has the life and clarity that would eventually mark the final manifesto’—nor did they elicit the massive membership response that they were designed to. But they were the first attempts at putting the vision of student activists into public form, and invaluable for that.

“ With the exception of two paragraphs in the first document and some phrases about "participatory democracy" in the second, none of the wording in these documents was used in the final statement.

While all this was going on, Hayden was still traveling, visiting the chapters, absorbing thoughts (and sometimes writing them down verbatim) from all manner of people on and near the campuses—" ... not much letter-writing," as he put it, "but MANY DISCUSSIONS with people all around the country."? One of the most formative came, somewhat unexpectedly, at a meeting of the National Executive Committee (and friends) at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in May. At that meeting Hayden outlined his thinking to date in some detail, and suddenly ran into fire from a New York contingent consisting of Steve Max and James Brook, leaders of a struggling New York chapter growing out of a group called the FDR-Four Freedoms Club, and Harlon Joye, a New School SDSer and formerly editor of a defunct SDS magazine called Venture. Max, a dark, good-looking, serious, and intense young man, was a true "red-diaper baby"—his father was a former editor of the Workerand he had been a member of the Communist Labor Youth League until he broke with the CP in 1956 while still in his early teens; he had graduated from high school but chose not to go on to college, devoting himself chiefly to political work and a few odd jobs. In a curious way he represented the Old Left rather than the New, an Old Left that had abandoned (as had the Communist Party) the sectarianism of the early thirties for what was in the sixties being called "realignment"—a reorganization of the Democratic Party into a party of liberals, blacks, poor, and those in the churches, labor unions, media, and universities; an Old Left that not only chose to work through conventional machinery (political parties) for immediate ends (electoral victories), but did so with a minimum of moralizing (willingness to compromise and work with imperfect others), a disdain of Utopian theorizing, and (especially characteristic of the young New York City leftists) a knowledge of the theories and experiences of the left of the thirties. Max, though young enough to feel the stirrings on the campuses and sensible enough to see that SDS might turn them to good advantage, was more or less tied to this tradition and he was profoundly disturbed by what he heard from Hayden about the manifesto. With a skill developed by years of political infighting on New York's sectarian left, he attacked Hayden's ideas for being insufficiently concrete, overly Utopian, weak on practical politics, and impossibly full of mysterious talk about "relevance" and "values." He urged instead a document with a more political cast, related to practical politics, which would "advocate political realignment and orient SDS to bringing realignment about"—a document, by coincidence, which his friend Brook just happened to be in the process of writing. Hayden, no mean debater himself, argued just as vigorously that a "political" analysis would produce too much of a "sectarian political line" for a broadbased group to follow, and smack too much of the discredited Old Left; and, he added, SDS "should have no single strategy such as realignment," since that would keep it from being open-ended and "receptive to new ideas."

With the support of most of the NEC, Hayden managed to vote down the Max-Brook attack, but it was an important indication nonetheless of an incipient split in SDS ranks. It was generally conceived as a right-left split as time went on, with the "realignment" people regarded as rightists and the "value" people thought to be on the left, but at this point it was really more a difference in styles, in strategies, in emphasis, and, though little love was lost between the two factions, the difference was livable with. Still, Hayden came out of this conference more convinced than before of the need to set out a broad definition of common values rather than a lot of narrow statements about this or that political or economic policy, which he was now convinced was hopelessly outmoded. Throughout the month of May he worked on the manifesto, refined it, and buttressed it, and then on the first of June it was mimeographed at the New York headquarters. A week before the convention itself, more than a hundred copies of the final draft were sent out across the country.

Meanwhile, SDS was gathering itself for the convention. It had gotten a little publicity for joining an antitesting march of some five thousand people led by the Student Peace Union in front of the White House that February—one of the first strong manifestations of the new student spirit but which at the time got attention from the press largely because President Kennedy chose to send out coffee and cocoa to warm the protesters. It held a conference at Oberlin in April, organized by Oberlin student leader Rennie Davis, drawing over 120 people to discuss the form and purposes of campus political parties. It was also continuing to get attention with its civil-rights activity, chiefly through a conference in Chapel Hill just before the NEC meeting which was designed to enlist Southerners into the SNCC voter-registration cause. (The Chapel Hill meeting was a superficial failure in that it attracted very few Southerners, but it was another of those remarkable meetings where a lot of basically likeminded people got together, talked warmly, and felt themselves in union.)

At this point SDS had about two thousand people on various mailing lists, about eight hundred or so who were considered members, of whom more than half had paid their dollar-a-year dues: evidence of some growth, though hardly spectacular, during the Haber tenure. Chapters of, as Haber put it, "varying degrees of success and constitutionality" were functioning at Michigan (a hundred members), Oberlin, Columbia, Swarthmore, Temple, Johns Hopkins, Syracuse, Vassar, Earlham, and Central State (a small black school in Ohio which Don Freeman had enlisted); the New York City "at-large" membership was put at 198. The National Office now had thirty-odd mimeographed pieces of literature on hand, though the speed and reliability with which they were sent out to those who asked for them was open to considerable fluctuation. (In fact the condition of the New York office led Haber to write at one point that spring, "I've lost all confidence in central office functioning,” and to add at the bottom of one letter which was mailed two weeks after it was dated, "SDS screws up again.") The budget was now up to $10,000 a year, and apparently was being met by the LID, which in the preceding months had enjoyed its own good fortune with a variety of gifts—$7,500 from the American Federation of Labor, $5,000 from the estate of Mrs. Loula Lasker, $4,000 from the ILG—and had experienced its own minor revivification as Mike Harrington and trade unionist Emanuel Muravchik were added to the Student Activities Committee, Harry Fleischman became Executive Committee Chairman, and Vera Rony, who had directed the liberal-labor Workers' Defense League for the last six years, became Executive Director.*

SDS was, in fact, one of the most promising student groups going—though, given the stillmodest strength of the student movement, this wasn't saying much. (The Student Peace Union probably had 3,000 members at this point. Campus ADA about the same. Turn Toward Peace perhaps half that, the Communist Party's Progressive Youth Organizing Committee was virtually defunct, YPSL had degenerated into a permanent floating faction fight, and there was very little else on the scene.) In fact Norman Thomas, as Michael Harrington remembers, was telling young people who asked his advice to go into SDS instead of YPSL so that they would avoid sterile faction fights and find something "more native, more healthy."?

It was somehow typical of SDS that two weeks before its scheduled convention it didn't have a place to hold it. The National Office had begun by looking for places in the Midwest, since the Michigan chapter was by far the largest in the country, but had scoured Pennsylvania and New York as well looking for something remote and cheap, and hadn't come up with a thing. Just fifteen days before the convention was to start Robb Burlage, a young activist from Texas then doing graduate work at Harvard, wrote to Haber, "I look forward to hearing from you further about ... such details as WHERE THE HELL IS IT GOING TO BE?" Finally settled on, reluctantly and at the last minute, was the $250,000 FDR Camp belonging to the United Automobile Workers at Port Huron, Michigan, some forty miles north of Detroit at the southern end of Lake Huron; it was, by an unconscious bit of historical appropriateness, the same camp where SLID members had gone in the late forties and early fifties to be staff members for UAW summer retreats. According to SDS figures, 59 people attended some or all of the five-day session from June 11 to 15, though only 43 of them were full-fledged members with constitutional power to cast votes, and no more than 35 showed up at most of the working sessions. The biggest delegations of voting members were from New York City (13) and Michigan (5), but there’ were also representatives from chapters at Oberlin (3), Johns Hopkins (3), Swarthmore (2), and Earlham (1), while the Vassar chapter was represented by proxies and the Bowdoin group by an observer; no one attended from the chapters at Temple and Central State, and the Syracuse chapter hadn't made it through the spring intact. A number of voting members were unaffiliated with chapters or came representing other youth groups such as SNCC, Young Democrats, Campus ADA, Student Peace Union, NAACP, YPSL, and CORE. Three groups had nonvoting observers: the Young Christian Students, the National Student Christian Federation, and the Progressive Youth Organizing Committee. From the LID came Harry Fleischman, Michael Harrington, now generally regarded as the LID's "link to the youth," and Harold Taylor, former president of Sarah Lawrence College and a member of the Executive Committee.

(There was at least one foreign visitor, Michael Vester, a member of the German SDSSozialistischer Deutsche Studentenbund, or League of German Socialist Students—who had been observing the American SDS for the previous few months.) Gary Weissman, former student body president at Wisconsin and a graduate student there, was elected chairman; Maria Varela, from Emmanuel College in Boston, was the secretary.

Some idea of the thoroughly staid and unregenerately middle-class nature of the delegates is given by a look at those elected to the National Executive Committee—consisting of the President, Vice President, and fifteen members elected at large—at the end of the conference. All but five of them had already graduated from college (and of those five all but Max were going to school), and all but Robb Burlage (from Texas) had attended colleges east of the Mississippi. Four of the NEC officers were from the University of Michigan, two from Swarthmore, two from Wisconsin, two from Howard. Seven of them had been in elected positions in student government and four had gone on to work for the NSA.*

“Among those present: Paul Booth, Jim Brook, Robb Burlage, Judith Cowan, Richard Flacks, Don Freeman, Al Haber, Casey Hayden, Tom Hayden, Peter Henig, Sharon Jeffrey, Tim Jenkins, Tom Kahn, Mike Locker, Steve Max, Chuck McDew, Jim Monsonis, Ted Reed, Richard Roman, Bob Ross, Maria Varela, Monroe Wasch, Gary Weissman, and Bob Zellner. Among older participants, LIDers, and outside observers present were Harry Fleischman, Roger Hagan, Michael Harrington, Jim Hawley, Arnold Kaufman, Herschel Kaminsky, Michael Liebowitz, Don Slaiman, Harold Taylor, and Michael Vester.

* The NEC members were Tom Hayden, elected President, Paul Booth, Vice President, and Rebecca Adams (Swarthmore), Robb Burlage (then at Harvard), Ann Cook (Sarah Lawrence graduate, then at the Fletcher School), Judith Cowan (Wisconsin), Richard Flacks (Michigan graduate student), Betty Garman (Skidmore, then at Berkeley), Al Haber, Timothy Jenkins (Yale graduate student), Tom Kahn (Howard), Steve Max, Theodore Reed (Oberlin), Dick Roman (YPSL), Bob Ross (Michigan), Gary Weissman (Wisconsin), and Bob Zellner (Huntingdon, then SNCC).

The Port Huron meeting was essentially a drafting session, directed primarily to putting together a final document on the basis of Hayden's last version of the manifesto. The bulk of the work was done in small study groups into which the conference divided, one for the "values" section, one for economics, one for domestic politics, one for foreign affairs, and so on. These study groups made recommendations which were reported to the convention at large, and these were then debated upon according to a formula of bones-widgets-andgizmos," under which bones (essential matters) could be given an hour's debate, gizmos (effluvia) only ten minutes, and widgets (of medium importance) something in between.

Whole sections of the original draft were thrown out, the economics section was rewritten entirely, the values section was (in a shrewd stroke) moved up to the front, and many modifications suggested from the floor were adopted. The manifesto was such a growing document that the delegates couldn't even get through the business of approving it all by the last day and gave it over to a special committee headed by Hayden to produce a final statement. In fact, they left the manifesto-drafting convention without seeing the manifesto itself, which was not produced in full (and final) form until a full month later.

What emerged from all this was a document not so much written as stitched together, with inevitable hallmarks of the committee system. It was heavily derivative of all those authors Hayden had been absorbing over the spring, especially C. Wright Mills, and it was heavily sprinkled with the rhetoric, often the jargon, of sociology. It was unabashedly middle class, concerned with poverty of vision rather than poverty of life, with' apathy rather than poverty, with the world of the white student rather than the world of the blacks, the poor, or the workers. It was set firmly in mainstream politics, seeking the reform of wayward institutions rather than their abolition, and it had no comprehension of the dynamics of capitalism, of imperialism, of class conflict, certainly no conception of revolution. But none of that mattered. For The Port Huron Statement so thoroughly plumbed and analyzed the conditions of mid-century American society, and so successfully captured and shaped the spirit of the new student mood, that it became not only a statement of principles for the few hundred students around SDS, not only a political expression for the hundreds who were to come into the organization in succeeding years, but even more a summary of beliefs for much of the student generation as a whole, then and for several years to come.

Nearly four-fifths of the final document is taken up with a thoroughgoing critique of the present American system in all its aspects—political parties, big businesses, labor unions, the military-industrial complex, the arms race, nuclear stockpiling, racial discriminationcoupled with a series of suggested reforms—party realignment, expanded public spending, disarmament, foreign aid, civil-rights programs, and increased welfare. On foreign policy, it seeks an end to the Cold War through "universal controlled disarmament" by careful stages, the downgrading of NATO, "denuclearization" of the Third World, "national inspection systems," and it calls for the acceptance of "neutralism as a tolerable principle" and of "authoritarian variants of socialism" in undeveloped countries; in domestic matters, it argues for greater democracy through a political realignment producing "two genuine parties" (including "the shuttling of Southern Democrats out of the Democratic Party"), the establishment of citizens' lobbies, increased "worker participation" in business management, an expanded "public sector" within the economy subject to popular control, and it urges a vastly expanded welfare state that would undertake a "program against poverty," and improve housing, medical care, social security, mental hospitals, prisons, schools, and farms. A good deal of this, of course, is fairly familiar reformist politics in the traditional mold of enlightened liberalism as represented by, say, the ADA—but what gave it a particular strength was its radical sense that all of these problems were interconnected, that there was a total system of America within which its multiple parts functioned, and that social ills in one area were intimately linked to those in another, so that solutions, too, had to be connected. Each part of the document is informed with the same overall vision, a vision of how men and communities can and should behave, and each subject that it takes up is measured against this vision and criticized accordingly. The initial importance of the manifesto, therefore, is that it shapes and gives coherence to the awakening political sense of this generation of students.° Even more important, however, is the other one-fifth of the document, for this is the part that supplies the analysis from which the critique stems, enunciates the vision against which it is measured, and provides, for the new generation, the strategy by which it can be altered—in short, nothing less than an ideology, however raw and imperfect and however much they would have resisted that word. And it does so, moreover, with a power and excitement rare to any document, rarer still to the documents of this time, with a dignity in its language, persuasiveness in its arguments, catholicity in its scope, and quiet skill in its presentation.

The analysis of the present system begins with the inescapable facts of militarism and racism ("the presence of the Bomb ... the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation"), which it sees as only the two most glaring symbols of an America gone wrong:

America rests in national stalemate, its goals ambiguous and tradition-bound

instead of informed and clear, its democratic system apathetic and

manipulated rather than "of, by, and for the people." ... The American

political system is not the democratic model of which its glorifiers speak. In

actuality it frustrates democracy by confusing the individual citizen,

paralyzing policy discussion, and consolidating the irresponsible power of

military and business interests .... America is without community, impulse,

without the inner momentum necessary for an age when societies cannot

successfully perpetuate themselves by their military weapons, when

democracy must be viable because of the quality of life, not its quantity of

rockets. ... Americans are in withdrawal from public life, from any collective

effort at directing their own affairs.

The vision of a future system rests on a set of "social goals and values" that are quite simple, even classical, in isolation and quite potent in synergy. There is humanism: We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love .... Men have unrealized potential for selfcultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity.

Individualism: The goal of men and society should be human independence ... . The individualism we affirm is not egoism [but the] kind that imprints one's unique individual qualities in the relation to other men, and to all human activity.

Community: Human relationships should involve fraternity and honesty. Human interdependence is a 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.

And, as the medium for all the rest, participatory democracy: We seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, 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 participatory democracy, the political life would be based in several root principles: that decision-making of basic social consequence be carried on by public groups; that politics be seen positively, as the art of collectively creating an acceptable pattern of social relations; that politics has the function of bringing people out of isolation and into community, thus being a necessary, though not sufficient, means of finding meaning in personal life; that the political order should ... provide outlets for the expression of personal grievance and aspiration [and] channels should be commonly available to relate men to knowledge and to power so that private problems—from bad recreation facilities to personal alienation—are formulated as general issues.

And the strategy for getting from the present to the future is rooted in the awareness that

students, academics, and intellectuals can forge a new left for America, using not the

legislatures or the factories or the streets but the universities as the "potential base and

agency in a movement of social change": 1. Any new left in American must be, in large measure, a left with real intellectual skills, committed to deliberativeness, honesty, reflection as working tools. The university permits the political life to be an adjunct to the academic one, and action to be informed by reason.

2. A new left must be distributed in significant social roles throughout the country. The universities are distributed in such a manner.

3. A new left must consist of younger people who matured in the post-war world, and partially be directed to the recruitment of younger people. The university is an obvious beginning point.

4. A new left must include liberals and socialists, the former for their relevance, the latter for their sense of thoroughgoing reforms in the system.

The university is a more sensible place than a political party for these two traditions to begin to discuss their differences and look for political synthesis.

5. A new left must start controversy across the land, if national policies and

national apathy are to be reversed. The ideal university is a community of

controversy, within itself and in its effects on communities beyond.

6. A new left must transform modem complexity into issues that can be

understood and felt close-up by every human being. It must give form to the

feelings of helplessness and indifference, so that people may see the political,

social and economic sources of their private troubles and organize to change

society. In a time of Supposed prosperity, moral complacency and political

manipulation, a new left cannot rely on only aching stomachs to be the engine

force of social reform. The case for change, for alternatives that will involve

uncomfortable personal efforts must be argued as never before. The

university is a relevant place for all of these activities.

And there is the special and inescapable importance of The Port Huron Statement: it gave to those dissatisfied with their nation an analysis by which to dissect it, to those pressing instinctively for change a vision of what to work for, to those feeling within themselves the need to act a strategy by which to become effective. No ideology can do more.

It was not only in drafting this new statement, however, that the Port Huron convention made a break with the past. In other ways as well it undertook a process, in some ways unconscious, of umbilicus-cutting, of separating themselves permanently from the politicsso starkly represented by the LID—of the postwar years.

The convention began with a symbol of this break. Jim Hawley, the delegate from the Communist Progressive Youth Organizing Committee, had come along to the convention and asked to be seated as an observer. The people from YPSL, who had done furious battle with the Communists often enough in the past, objected, especially YPSL officers Roman and Kahn. But most of the SDSers, not veterans of these particular internecine battles and somehow not convinced that one Communist, acting as an observer, was going to push the organization into the Soviet camp, took a what-the-hell-let-him-sit attitude. " 'Observer' status was mere recognition that the PYOC member was there," the SDS leadership said later. "It implied no expression of fraternity or approval or even acceptance of him as a member of our 'community.' " Hawley was seated.’ As the convention continued, it became even clearer that SDSers were no longer going to play the anti-Communism tune that, like a Musak melody, had been so depressingly standard in the political offices of the fifties. The statement itself explicitly attacked that past:

An unreasoning anti-communism has become a major social problem for

those who want to construct a more democratic America. McCarthyism and

other forms of exaggerated and conservative anti-communism seriously

weaken democratic institutions and spawn movements contrary to the

interest of basic freedoms and peace ... . Even many liberals and socialists

[read: LID members] share static and repetitious participation in the anticommunist crusade and often discourage tentative, inquiring discussion about

"the Russian question" within their ranks.

It disputed the received Cold War view of the monolithic evil of the Soviet Union—"Our basic national policy-making assumption that the Soviet Union is inherently expansionist and aggressive ... is certainly open to question and debate"—and specifically blamed the United States for continuation of the Cold War:

Our paranoia about the Soviet Union has made us incapable of achieving

agreements absolutely necessary for disarmament and the preservation of

peace ....

There is, too, our own reluctance to face the uncertain world beyond the Cold

War, our own shocking assumption that the risks of the present are fewer

than the risks of a policy re-orientation to disarmament, our own

unwillingness to face the implementation of our rhetorical commitments to

peace and freedom.

Now none of this of course implied any particular cordiality toward the Soviet Union or conviviality toward the doctrines of Communism. On the contrary, disclaimers—sincere ones, too, not meant to deceive—abound: "Such a harsh critique of what we are' doing as a nation by no means implies that sole blame for the Cold War rests on the United States," "There is Russian intransigence and evasiveness," "As democrats we are in basic opposition to the communist system," "The communist movement has failed, in every sense, to achieve its stated intentions of leading a worldwide movement for human emancipation," Russian and Chinese forced economic expansion is "brutal," the Berlin wall represents "inhumanity," and so on. But the other sentiments were sure to ruffle some feathers in New York.

And in drafting a new constitution the convention went further in its break with the past, making several sweeping changes in the basic document that with only a few alterations had been the guiding light of the organization since 1946. It voted to scrap the original preamble:®

Students for a Democratic Society is a non-partisan educational organization

which seeks to promote greater action participation on the part of American

students in the resolution of present-day problems. It is hoped that such

participation will contribute to their awareness of the need for the

establishment in the United States of a cooperative commonwealth in which

the principle regulating production, distribution, and exchange will be the

supplying of human needs, and under which human rights will be protected

and extended.

In its place was put this formulation (which had been devised by Haber several months before):

Students for a Democratic Society is an association of young people on the

left. It seeks to create a sustained community of educational and political

concern: one bringing together liberals and radicals, activists and scholars,

students and faculty.

It maintains a vision of a democratic society, where at all levels the people

have control of the decisions which affect them and the resources on which

they are dependent. It seeks a re/evance through the continual focus on

realities and on the programs necessary to effect change at the most basic

levels of economic, political and social organization. It feels the urgency to

put forth a radical, democratic program counterposed to authoritarian

movements both of communism and the domestic right.

The earlier version, as Haber told the group, smacked too much of the " 'we have a panacea' impression or the impression that the Utopia is defined solely by an economic principle," it was too explicitly limited to students rather than the university community at large, and it was too vaguely oriented to some kind of bland "participation." The new preamble was broader, unafraid of such words as "left" and "radical," and held to that humanism-in-sociologese which was characteristic of the manifesto itself.

The convention also threw out the exclusion clause that had been the special pride of Harry Laidler, for most of its existence the guiding hand of the LID:

Advocates of dictatorship and totalitarianism and of any political system that

fails to provide for freedom of speech, of press, of religion, of assembly, and

of political, economic, and cultural organization; or of any system that would

deny civil rights to any person because of race, color, creed, or national origin

are not eligible for membership.

In scrapping this as too negative and too "redbaiting," the delegates voted on a simpler, indeed rather a neat, formulation:

SDS is an organization of democrats. It is civil libertarian in its treatment of

those with whom it disagrees, but clear in its opposition to any totalitarian

principle as a basis for government or social organization. Advocates or

apologists for such a principle are not eligible for membership.”

The convention also made other modifications in the constitution, which, though having nothing to do with anti-Communism, also signaled the new organization's independence. For one thing, it put into the charter Haber's conception of loose affiliation with campus groups: SDS would recognize not only formal chapters (which now needed only five members rather than the ten required heretofore) but also "associated groups" of independent campus clubs and "fraternal organizations" such as NSA and Campus ADA; and these chapters would no longer be required to adhere to the national organizational line or to report their independent stands to the NEC. For another, it established a new body, the National Council—composed of the seventeen national officers and delegates from each chapterwhich was to meet regularly to establish policy on specific issues, freeing the annual convention for broad outlines and general orientation, and which was to become a kind of periodic town-meeting-of-the-college for quick and accurate readings of the campus pulse.

Finally, it decided to spell out de jure the independence from the LID which Haber had won de facto the year before: "The SDS shall be autonomously constituted though its policy and functioning shall be within the broad aims and principles of the LID."

“In later years even this was seen as too exclusionary, but for Haber, its primary creator, as for many others of the early SDS generation, it was a way of asserting a genuine revulsion to authoritarianism and at the same time avoiding anti-Communism. As Haber explained in an essay on "exclusionism" three years later, "SDS rejects the formulation of anti-communism implicit (and explicit) in the exclusionist position. This rejection should not, however, be confused with an acceptance or tolerance of authoritarian or totalitarian values." (SDS paper, 1965, excerpted in Massimo Teodori, The New Left: A Documentary History, p. 218.) Ironically, just four years after that, “anti-communism" was carefully employed by SDS, though in a completely reversed way: the members of one SDS faction expelled the Progressive Labor Party faction because PLP was held to be "anti-communist," while they themselves were the "true" communists

There was no confusion among the Port Huron delegates as to the dimensions of their departure from the past, and if there had been it would have been dispelled on the convention floor itself, where a number of the older participants made it abundantly clear that they thought it an unrelieved tragedy. Chief among them were Michael Harrington, a veteran socialist who had done many battles with Communist groups during the days of the fifties when the issue of how many Lenins could dance on the head of a pin divided the tiny forces of the left into more factions than there were Lenins, and Donald Slaiman, a veteran trade unionist who was working as an executive for the unremittingly anti-Communist AFLCIO, and between them they carried on a vigorous floor fight against the new changes.

Harrington was appalled by much of the manifesto draft—especially the sections which he felt were calculated to infuriate liberals, upon whom his realignment politics depended, and the parts taking a bland and insufficiently critical attitude toward the Soviet Union and other authoritarian regimes—and he didn't hesitate to make this clear to the younger delegates with all his considerable powers of argumentation and oratory. But the new generation found an unexpected defender of its policies in Roger Hagan, a liberal who had been active in the peace-oriented Committee of Correspondence of the period and who shared their sense of the futility of earlier Cold War formulations. "Hagan was a very important figure for us," Paul Booth recalls; "he was like an elder statesman, and he gave people a lot of confidence"? in standing up to Harrington. The debates between the two, perhaps the most vivid clashes of the convention, ended with the draft formulations more or less intact, and the constitutional changes unaltered.”

The delegates left Port Huron after just five days together with a clear sense that they were starting something new, something fresh, something different from all that had gone before. Paul Booth says:

We were exhilarated at the end—it was a tremendous experience. We were

physically at the end of our rope—the last session went all night—but we

really thought that we had done a great job. We knew we had a great

document.

Max, who remembers this euphoria as "more like grogginess"—"when we saw that sun come up on the last day, I think we were all pretty fuzzy-headed"—also remembers the sense that for the first time a bunch of like-minded people got together and "really got something done," coming away with a sense that, "if there are so many of us who feel the same way, we can form a real organization." Perhaps Bob Ross says it best: "It was a little like starting a journey."’°

1 Hayden, ibid. Hayden's initial thoughts are from mimeographed letters (Convention Documents #1-3), undated (spring 1962).

2 "We must have," "Student Social Action," SDS pamphlet, 1962, reprinted (with errors) in Cohen and Hale (1967), pp. 272 ff.

3 "not much letter-writing," anonymous minutes of SDS-LID meeting, July C 1962. For Chapel Hill meeting, mimeographed minutes (Burlage's copy), and Harlon Joye, Common Sense (published by FDR Four Freedoms Club, New York), spring 1962.

“ Maria Varela recalls her attitude—and possibly that of the majority of the delegates—to that battle: "I couldn't figure out why Harrington and his buddy [Slaiman] were so upset at Huron and found out later it was because the Statement didn't take an anti-Stalinist stand .... and even when I found that out it didn't make any sense to me." (Letter to author, February 15, 1970.)

* Membership figures and "varying degrees," minutes of Chapel Hill meeting. "I've lost all," letter to Burlage, April 18,1962. "SDS screws up," letter to Burlage, May 16, 1962. LID finances. Harry Laidler papers, Tamiment.

° Thomas, quoted by Harrington, interview. Burlage, letter to Haber and Hayden, May 26,1962. "SDS figures," mimeographed "Appeal Statement" from SDS to LID, July 12,1962.

© The Port Huron Statement was first mimeographed and later printed as a pamphlet by SDS, available in most major libraries; small portions have been reprinted in Cohen and Hale (1967), pp. 292 ff., Jacobs and Landau, pp. 150 ff., and Teodori, pp. 163 ff.

?"'Observer' status," SDS "Appeal Statement," op. cit.

8 The 1962 constitution is reprinted in the appendix; earlier versions are in the archives.

° Harrington, interview. "Hagan was" and "We were," Booth, interview.

10 Max, interview. Ross, quoted in Newfield, p. 96.

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