The Port Huron Statement at 60: Still Not as Good as Its Counterpart

O n June 15, 1962, members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) met for their first national conference at a labor-union retreat camp just outside of Port Huron, Mich. They produced the famous Port Huron Statement, which outlined the ideology of the New Left in its discomfort with the U.S. posture in the Cold War and other policies or institutions its members believed led to oppression.

The statement claimed to speak on behalf of the “people of this generation” disillusioned with their contemporary world and discontent with the “depersonalization that reduces human beings to the status of things.” As a solution, it called for a movement away from genteel liberal politics, and an embrace of a more radical type. At home, it recommended the economy become “open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation.” Abroad, it advocated a more muted foreign policy that admitted it was unfair “to blame only communism for the present menacing situation” the world faced.

The 1960s are known for their turbulent, often violent politics. If one wants to find the source of the tumult, he should look no further than the SDS. The Port Huron Statement’s legacy is one of violence, leading to unrest across the country. Yet despite its length of 25,700 words and idolization by college professors, it still pales in comparison in both its philosophy and its accomplishments to the 368-word Sharon Statement, the founding document of Young Americans for Freedom, drafted by young people two years earlier.

While Port Huron was created in despair, Sharon was drafted in hope. YAF members meeting at William F. Buckley Jr.’s home in Sharon, Conn., in September 1960 gathered there to “to affirm certain eternal truths,” including the individual’s “right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force,” and “that the Constitution of the United States is the best arrangement yet devised for empowering government to fulfill its proper role.” In contrast to SDS longing for a more regulated economy, the Sharon Statement vaunted the market economy as “the single economic system compatible with the requirements of personal freedom and constitutional government,” stressing its abundance and the harm to the nation that comes from the market’s over-restriction. Most importantly, in contrast to SDS’s foreign-policy equivocation, the Sharon Statement emphasized “that the United States should stress victory over, rather than coexistence with” communism. Even Buckley’s column in National Review announcing the creation of the group was full of optimism. He predicted that the new group would “influence the political future of this country, as why should it not, considering that its membership is young, intelligent, articulate and determined, its principles enduring.”

The Bible tells us to judge a tree by its fruits, and the fruits of Sharon far surpass those of Port Huron. The first great victory for the conservative movement it galvanized was in 1964, when Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination for president. It was the first time a true free-market, limited-government conservative had run on a major party’s platform since 1936. Although Goldwater would go on to lose embarrassingly against Lyndon Johnson, conservatives saw his nomination as a great victory because it enshrined them as a serious force within the Republican Party. Most important, conservatives got Goldwater on the ticket through legitimate voter persuasion in the democratic process.

The SDS could not say the same of its first major foray into party politics. At the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, SDS members, including Tom Hayden, who authored the Port Huron Statement, rioted and clashed with police as they protested Hubert Humphrey’s support for continuing the Vietnam War. A year later, during the trial of the “Chicago Seven” for the riots, the Weathermen, a radical faction of SDS activists egged on by Hayden, returned to the city to carry out the “Days of Rage.” The group arrived wearing football helmets and shoulder pads for protests they had expressly intended to turn violent. Their actions caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, totaling almost $1.5 million in today’s money. The Chicago Seven, which included Hayden, were all either acquitted of their charges or had their convictions reversed on appeal, but the youthful idealism they expressed in the Port Huron Statement faded, and SDS disbanded in the 1970s.

At that time, YAF and Buckley’s conservative movement still constituted a prominent political force, though those in the movement had to muddle through more than a decade of settling for moderate candidates such as Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. But we all know what happened next. The conservatives gelled around Ronald Reagan, again without the help of political violence, and the ideology outlined in the Sharon Statement led the president to institute policies that resulted in economic prosperity and to call upon Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall!” Rather than lament that previous generations had given them a raw deal, conservatives at Sharon resolved to live subservient to the wisdom of their ancestors and to preserve the system their forefathers created. The gratitude they displayed allowed them to bring down an evil empire.

Today, the Port Huron statement appears to be dead. The union camp where it was drafted is now a state park, the group it spawned is defunct, and the communist state it could only oppose, at best, in mealy-mouthed terms (and at worst didn’t oppose at all) is no more. But its ideas remain alive and well in the halls of the very places that it originally targeted with SDS activism. The university system still carries the scars of the radical campaigns to which they were treated, and the disciples of Hayden and the SDS are in control. They are breeding the same system-level disillusionment they expressed in 1962, and it is beginning to seep into the society beyond.

Among the protests and outrage in the present day, there are some who refuse to give in to the pessimism. These students see how the conservative movement has found success, most recently in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and they are ready to endure the SDS-style violence our country could see from abortion supporters. They take their cues from the young people who saw the future of freedom that was before them. Armed with the Sharon Statement’s values of limited government, economic freedom, and a strong national defense, these present-day campus conservatives stand ready to defend American ideals in higher education before their leftist peers. In these values they find inspiration, and they know that adhering to them will bring about victory.