On 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.
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