Summer 1962

Summer 1962

It is not difficult to feel that the Port Huron convention was a pristine example of, in Lewis Feuer's phrase, the conflict of generations.’ The umbilicus-cutting need not have been a wholly conscious act on the part of the delegates, but the effect of the convention nonetheless was to put the world, and the LID, on notice that something new had been born, and with all the talent of the newborn for making noise beyond any calculation of its size.

The LID was bound to react, and, as Mike Harrington among others had told the convention time and again, the reaction was predictable: "They'll go through the roof." They did, and Harrington was among the first into the shingles. The morning of the next to last day he returned to New York and gave the LID a blow by blow report of what the convention had wrought. The LID called SDS onto the carpet.

Of course the LID leaders realized that with the concession made to Haber the year before it was inevitable that SDS would continue to assert its independence from the parent organization in various ways. Indeed, SDSers all year long had been talking about their independent position, and Haber himself had had a long meeting with Student Activities Committee Chairman Emanuel Muravchik in the middle of May at which he tried to get the SDS position across. But the elders apparently never expected the treachery of Port Huron, and it was not long before they began to feel very much like a corporate Dr. Frankenstein.

On Thursday, June 28, some two weeks after the convention, the LID held the first meeting with SDSers. Harry Fleischman and Vera Rony heard firsthand what Port Huron had done, and they were horrified. "To our amazement," as Rony put it just afterward,

.. the SDS convention adopted a policy statement which placed the blame for the cold war largely upon the U.S ... . The students placed the blame for the present impasse on nuclear disarmament largely upon the U.S. and bitterly scored our foreign policy as a whole, while making the merest passing criticism of Soviet actions in this sphere. In addition, Communist youth observers were seated at the convention and given speaking rights ... After these events, the LID Executive Committee met to decide the position of the adult organization. It was the general view that we could not countenance a student body which disagreed with us on basic principles and adopted a popular front position.”

And so Haber, still the National Secretary, and Hayden, the new President of the organization, were summoned to a "hearing" to "discover whether or not the officers of the SDS acted and plan to act in accordance with the basic principles of the parent organization.

Until that time no materials, manifestos, constitutions, or other publications having to do with policy in any way, shape or form whatsoever may be mailed or distributed by the students under the identification of SDS." SDS, by the tone of the summons, was clearly condemned in advance.

At three o'clock on Friday, July 6, the hearing began. The LID was represented by Fleischman, Rony, Harrington, Roman, and Muravchik, the SDS by Haber, Hayden, and NECers Tim Jenkins, Robb Burlage, and Betty Garman, with a dozen other SDSers waiting nervously in the SDS office downstairs. The LID case, though more often sputtered than reasoned, was based largely on the issue of anti-Communism, but the hearing began with the argument that the convention was neither valid nor representative. As Harrington put it to the students:

Let's get to the broad problem. There is no SDS as a functioning organization with a political life. It does not exist. So how can you get a representative convention from a nonorganization? Besides, this document of cosmic scope was given to the delegates—that's obviously not representative. It would require a year's discussion to get a really representative document.

This can't even try to express the view of the people who were there—even that's not possible in such a short meeting. A founding convention should take ten days to two weeks and a year of discussion.?

Hayden answered that there was an organization, there was a convention, and "SDS will grow as an organization to the extent it has a political position—and for that it must draw up a large statement first." As to the statement, it's not meant to be a manifesto—"We identify it not as that, but as the beginning of a dialogue, as it says right on the cover." Then the attack began in earnest, starting with the seating of the PYOC observer: Rony: "Do you think that the LID would allow a communist-front group to be seated at a convention? Do you think you're trying to run SDS within LID as the elders would?"

Harrington:

"There is a basic clash here between SDS's and Lid’s concept of how to deal with other groups .... PYOC is the youth group of the CP!—it's not a front group. There's a tradition, and a good one, not to give it a voice or vote in the community."

Harden:

"But we just allowed him to be seated, without any declaration implying support or condemnation."

Harrington:

"We should have nothing to do with those people."

Fleishman:

"Would you give seats to the Nazis too?"

Harrington:

"United frontism means accepting reds to your meeting .... You knew this would send LID through the roof. This issue was settled on the left ten or twenty years ago—and that you could countenance any united frontism now is inconceivable. And you voted down the authoritarianism section [of the constitution], too."

Harden: "United frontism is a slanderous charge. We're not supporting these groups but merely stating our opinions procedurally." And then the statement's alleged "softness on communism":

Rony:

"We too are critical of the U.S., but we believe the U.S.S.R. is clearly morally as vulnerable, or more so. This position [in the document] makes it impossible to talk to the American people as a whole. There's no mention of Russia breaking the test banno reference—the American public must notice this."

Fleishman:

"It is the feeling of the Executive Committee that there is a ‘single standard’ lacking—this lambastes the U.S. and taps the Soviets on the wrist."

Rony:

"Hungary is dismissed. The Berlin Wall. You don't even mention their faults.

Testing. Hungary ... ."

Hayden:

"We are not blind toward the Soviet Union, just read the sections. And just read the values section—there absolutely aren't double standards—we use a single standard. You have to Look at the document."

Harrington:

"Document shmocuments. Slaiman and I said that this was antithetical to the LID and everything it's stood for."

Harden:

"There was no notion at Port Huron that these differences were irreconcilable. The document doesn't confuse community and fraternity."

And so it went, for better than two hours. The LID brought out other arguments, too. They objected to the fact that Steve Max had been chosen as a Field Secretary for the fall—his father was a Communist, you know, and wasn't he a Communist himself once? They harked back to a demonstration earlier that year at which SDS had joined other groups including PYOC in demonstrating against a rally held by the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom. They objected to the convention's sending greetings to a Japanese "World Conference Against Atom and Hydrogen Bombs and for the Prevention of Nuclear War," led by a pro-Soviet group (though in fact the greetings were sent by Haber rather than the convention and were by no means uncritical).

The hearing eventually disintegrated into isolated cocoons of anger. Both sides were so deeply involved, in a sense so disappointed in the other, that they could no longer hear.

Haber ended the meeting by saying that the LID reaction was based on premature evidence and that Harrington's and Slaiman's arguments at the convention itself had been "taken to heart" in drafting the final version; he suggested the meeting adjourn until the following week, when he hoped to have the final statement ready for the LID to read with care. The SDSers left.

It seemed like a temporary truce. It wasn't. An hour later Rony called Haber to say that the Executive Board had made several decisions: the elections which took place at the convention would be allowed to stand, but the staff members—Haber and Hayden—were off salary from that moment; the LID would have to have final approval over all documents for the time being; the LID would eventually appoint a secretary for the student division who would be responsible not to SDS but to the LID Executive Committee. What she didn't say was that the LID had cut off all funds for SDS, was hoping to confiscate the mailing lists so that no appeals could be directed over its head, and was in the process of changing the lock on the SDS office door. This last act, which SDSers didn't discover until Monday morning, was particularly galling to the students—more than anything else during the whole dispute it served over the next few years to symbolize what they saw as the petty-mindedness, the decadence, even the totalitarianism, of the LID: "Well," they would say more than once, "they locked us out of our own office, you know."

The enormity of the gulf between the two generations only slowly dawned on the SDSers, who had expected at most a little sniping but nothing like this barrage. Except for Haber, they didn't know the LID leadership well, and their experience with such LIDers as Harrington and Harold Taylor did not prepare them for the assault. Their reaction was seething anger.

Thirteen of the top nineteen officers (President, Vice President, NEC, and staff) came into New York, prepared for battle. Bob Ross recalls, with excusable synecdoche, "All of us felt our careers were going to be ruined, and America's best liberals were on the lip of redbaiting us out of existence. We knew we weren't communists, but the idea that our parent organization thought we were, was Kafkaesque."°

Steve Max, in whose apartment the SDSers gathered to debate what to do next, remembers the fear of a McCarthyite attack: "We knew the LID would spend its energies trying to blackball us and make us some Communist organization if we broke with them."

Paul Booth says, "They were vicious, personally vicious." Hayden took it especially hard. He had been fairly close friends with Harrington, who had sent him one of the first copies of The Other America, and they had drunk, traveled, and communed together. In fact, he had had a vision of a career not unlike that of Harrington's—a Catholic boy from the Midwest coming to New York to be a writer, to play a part in the liberal-socialist intellectual community—and he assumed that he would be accepted easily there, or, if there were disagreements, that they would be debated freely in the left community known for its democratic traditions and civil libertarian stands. To find that this community was petty, rigid, and mean was a blow. He told Jack Newfield, the Village Voice writer, then also in SDS, "It taught me that social democrats aren't radicals and can't be trusted in a radical movement. It taught me what social democrats really think about civil liberties and organizational integrity."®

The SDS leaders met almost continuously Sunday and Monday in Max's apartment. (On Friday they had, with foresight, taken the mailing list from their offices, assuring for themselves what is, in the print-oriented world of the left, a most powerful weapon.) Shock and hurt eventually gave way to determination, a determination that may in the end have been as important as the Port Huron meeting itself in solidifying the fragile young organization.

There was considerable sentiment to split from the LID entirely, but there were several practical reasons against it. Primarily, SDS relied heavily on LID income, office space, and equipment, which would be enormously difficult to replace at any time, but almost impossible if SDS were to be branded as a pro-Soviet, popular-fronting. Communistinfiltrated organization. Moreover, some argued, a student organization cut adrift from the liberal community would probably have no means of building wide political support and no means of enlisting that community on its behalf, things that all SDSers agreed then was crucial to any real change in the country. Finally, many of them thought it would be possible, if the present trouble could be weathered without any substantial compromise, to end-run the LID in the fall and carry on at the colleges as if nothing had happened; the LIDers would be too tired and too busy to spend very much time finding out what was going on from day to day, anyway.

The decision of the NEC, therefore—with one negative vote and one abstention, presumably the two YPSLites, Roman and Kahn—was to make a vigorous and uncompromising appeal to the LID Board. Hayden was set the task of compiling a statement of appeal to be presented to an emergency LID Executive Committee meeting called for July 12, and for the next three days SDSers worked almost around the clock. On the morning of the twelfth they came up with a twenty-seven-page single-spaced document whose completeness, honesty, and lack of compromise, if nothing else, must have impressed the LID elders.

The appeal document began by complaining about how the LID handled the crisis:

"We have been maligned by deliberate anti-democratic procedure."

It assailed the Lid’s firings without a proper hearing, its use of financial sanctions, and its unilateral interference with SDS staff:

"Such meddling is at all times alien to the effort to honor and stimulate internal democratic mechanisms in a developing organization." It dismissed the charges of popular-frontism as "a splicing of falsehood, exaggeration and slander," and carefully and methodically quoted from The Port Huron Statement to show that, though the analysis was hard on America, it was by no means pro-Soviet.

And, throughout, it put forth a case for SDS's independence from the parent group without censorship or control, and, with more ingenuousness than straightforwardness, suggested that any conflicts resulting from this would merely "provide the basis for dialogue between well-defined adult traditions and a new and inquiring student tradition .... Friction between the generations represented in the LID is both necessary and proper—and a spark of hope for change in our times."”

The emergency meeting was inconclusive. The LID had cooled to the point where they were looking for ways to save the relationship rather than cut SDS adrift, but they were still worried and threatened by the creeping New Leftism, and they wanted to be able to assert some control.

They gave the office back, agreed to give Hayden and Haber a special hearing and consider the question of severance pay for them, and, having taken the time to read it, they found that the revised manifesto really wasn't so bad as they had at first supposed and agreed to let it be issued.” But they still demanded a "regular review" of the major SDS papers and of the groups with which SDS wanted to cooperate, and they still wanted an LID-paid Student Secretary to oversee National Office work, in the ancient tradition of the forties and fifties.

The cutting edge for SDS within LID councils was Harold Taylor, and he apparently played a crucial role in modifying LID rigidity, helped by young Andrew Norman and old Norman Thomas. As he was to Say several years later:

In the debates and difficulties which ensued [from the convention], ... I was

impressed not only by the intelligence and forcefulness with which these

young men of twenty-two made arguments which were essentially my own,

but by the fact that they showed more faith in the power of democracy and in

what they could do with it in political action than did their elders in the parent

organization.

In the series of informal meetings between SDS and LID which occupied most of July this support for the students proved valuable in forcing the LID Board members to reconsider, especially coming from one who not only was a well-known educator but who also had been financially generous to the LID in the past.

As talks between the two factions continued, tempers faded and both began to see the wisdom of compromise. Gradually it became clear to the SDS that the basic work of the convention—the manifesto, officers, and constitution—would be allowed to stand, and that the LID would settle for the imposition of its own National Secretary and a few meaningless bows to "dialogue" and "cooperation"—nothing that couldn't be gotten around.

The LID elders just didn't have the staying power, or even the same passionate concern, that the SDSers did, nor was their own organizational house that much in order. By the end of July it was apparent that they were willing to settle the affair with a few face-saves: Haber was to leave the New York office, and in his stead Jim Monsonis was to serve as the LID-paid National Secretary; the LID would draw up a "statement of principles" for all to see and abide by; a "dialogue" was to continue between the students and the Student Activities Committee; and that committee would have the nominal right to review SDS documents issued in the name of the organization (which were few, since most papers SDS sent out were written by and credited to individuals).

SDS, sadder, wiser, but organizationally pretty much unscathed, agreed. In late July Hayden scribbled a note to Burlage: "Things are 'patched.'? Monsonis hired; LID without $$, still trying to write their 'statement of principles.’ " The next month Muravchik, Fleischman, Thomas, and Harrington flew out to Columbus to cement things with the SDSers at that year's NSA meeting, and their attitude was genuinely conciliatory, expressive of their desire to keep the student division. Port Huron stood intact.

But the post-Port Huron experience was a Searing one for the young radicals. The awakening as to how political affairs are conducted in the real world, at least by those of the Old Left, was sharp, but all the better remembered for its sharpness. Increasingly they came to see the LID as a temporary convenience, cynically feeling that they would use it, but no longer trusting it. Increasingly, too, they came to feel their own strength, their own unity, their own distance from the past. The events of that summer shaped a new kind of organization, gave reality to a new movement.

The impact of The Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society—its official name by the time of the final mimeographing in July—was remarkably swift, considering the times. It was handed out at the NSA meeting, instantly became the object of heated discussions, and right then and there won over a handful of NSA delegates into SDS ranks. One NSAer, Vivian Franklin from the University of Texas, was so taken with the document that she spent hours discussing it with the SDSers around and, as she wrote to Robb Burlage:

By the time I started home, I felt a very real identity with the group, and found myself rather sad to be leaving them ... . Upon arriving here, I went over The Port Huron Statement in detail and now find myself enthusiastic over the vision put forward therein to the point of effervescing these ideas to anyone even faintly inclined to have a comprehending ear.*°

A month later she was an SDS member, two months later she was asking for more copies of The Port Huron Statement to give her friends, and thrffee months later she was the organizer of a successful SDS civil-rights conference in Dallas. As soon as school opened in the fall, other people had similar reactions. SDS chapters quickly distributed the statement aroundoften the National Office's slowness in reproducing copies meant that one tattered document passed through the hands of a dozen students—and found that arguments and adherents were produced with surprising regularity.

By November the New York office was completely out of copies and trying to find time to mimeograph more. In the next two years no fewer than twenty thousand mimeographed copies (sixty-six single-spaced pages) were sent out from the National Office; in late 1964 another twenty thousand copies were printed as a small sixty-four-page booklet, which also was sold out after two years, and in the fall of 1966 still another twenty thousand copies were printed up: The Port Huron Statement may have been the most widely distributed document of the American left in the sixties.

The Port Huron Statement marks the end of SDS's period of reorganization and the beginning of SDS's serious, though as yet limited, impact on the campuses. It sets the tone for the years ahead. Its stated appeal to the privileged student—"bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities"—attracts the brighter, the consciously intellectual, youths at the best and most prestigious colleges, those of middle-class background or aspiration who were the leaders of the "post-scarcity" generation. Its spirit of (in Todd Gitlin's phrase) radical disappointment in America and its liberalism strikes a chord among those who had come to feel that a nation of lofty ideals had become perverted by militarism, racism, apathy, materialism, and cynicism. Its visions of reform energize those who have newly awakened to activism and seek to reassert America's values, regenerate its institutions, reorganize its priorities.

The Port Huron Statement, as it stresses in its introduction, is "a beginning": "in our own debate and education, in our dialogue with society," in the establishment of a new organization, in the creation of a new ideology, in the development of a new student movement and a new left. It marked, Harold Taylor was to observe some years later, "a turning point in American political history, the point at which a coalition of student movements had become possible and a radical student movement had been formed. It also marked the coming of age of the new generation."*?