1968 - Mark Kurlansky [51]
1968 poster
(Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture)
He sent articles to the Daily about the emerging new Left. Back in Michigan, the university administration accused him of inventing the news rather than reporting on it. He knew that there was a new Left, but he realized that the faculty and most people in America were still completely unaware of it.
Hayden spent his senior year dreaming of going south and participating. He took food to blacks in Tennessee driven out of their homes for registering to vote. But he wanted to do more. “I was chafing to graduate; the South was beckoning,” he later wrote. He did graduate and went south as an SDS liaison with SNCC. But he quickly learned that SNCC was well staffed and didn’t need him. Hayden felt alone in his very arduous and at times dangerous task in the South. “I didn’t want to go from beating to beating, jail to jail,” Hayden wrote. In December 1961, from a jail cell in Albany, Georgia, he wrote to his fellow SDS organizers in Michigan proposing a meeting to try to make SDS a larger, more important organization like SNCC. SDS had eight hundred members around the United States paying $1 in dues a year. It needed to define itself in order to grow.
In June 1962, the small circle of young people who called themselves SDS activists, some sixty people, met in Port Huron, Michigan, where as a boy Tom Hayden used to fish with his father. Hayden, playing Jefferson to Haber’s Adams, was asked to draft a document that would be “an agenda for a generation.” Looking back, Hayden was amazed at the grandiose terms of the project. “I still don’t know,” he wrote decades later, “where this messianic sense, this belief in being right, this confidence that we could speak for a generation, came from.” But the resulting document, known as the Port Huron Statement, to a remarkable extent did capture the thoughts, sensibilities, and perspective of their generation. By 1968, when it had become clear to older people that a younger generation thought very differently, the Port Huron Statement was seized on as an insight into how they thought. College students of 1968 had been in junior high school when it was written but were now required to read it in sociology and political science courses.
It was not a manifesto for the entire generation. It was clearly addressed to upper-middle-class whites—privileged people who knew they were privileged and were angry about this injustice. The statement began:
We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed in the universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.
Remarking that neither southern blacks nor college students were allowed to vote, the statement called for participatory democracy. “The goal of society and man should be human independence.” The statement rebuked the United States for its use of military power, which it said had done more to stop democracy than stop communism. The document steered a careful course between communism and anticommunism, denying any support to either. What became known as the “New Left” had been defined, a Left that had little use for liberals, who could not be trusted, or communists, who were authoritarian, or capitalists, who robbed people of freedom, or anticommunists, who were bullies. And if the New Left was American, it sounded very much like the 1968 students of Poland, France, and Mexico. Allen Ginsberg, who always said things a little more forcefully than others around him, wrote:
And the Communists have nothing to offer but fat cheeks and eyeglasses and lying policemen
and the Capitalists proffer Napalm and money in green suitcases to