A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times

6 | Reflections on Women and the Culture of Port Huron

In 1962 I arrived at Port Huron a very fortunate young woman, having lived a string of amazing and life-altering experiences over the previous ten years. When I was twelve I had entered the adult world of painting at the Art Students League in New York City. At sixteen, an unsupervised summer at the League in Woodstock deepened my desire for a life of art and bohemian community. A year later at Brandeis, I studied Marx, Lenin, and other left thinkers with Herbert Marcuse himself, and I adopted a democratic vision of socialism that I learned from my teacher and mentor, Irving Howe. I began, very tentatively, to take myself seriously as an intellectual and was encouraged by some male professors to consider an academic career—not an expected path for women at that time. At Brandeis I also strengthened my sense that the words “never again” called me, as a Jew, to act against oppression.

When four students sat down at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, during my senior year, I was galvanized into two years of intense and passionate civil rights organizing. I learned to mobilize large groups for weekly Woolworth department store picket lines. I took nonviolence training. I attended the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) founding convention. After graduation, I worked with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Baltimore. We had weekly sit-ins at segregated restaurants on the Eastern Shore, sometimes followed by a night in jail, where we talked and sang freedom songs from our segregated cells. These experiences allowed me, for the first time, to know African Americans as comrades and friends. Their commitment, intelligence, and courage, laced with humor and kindness, provided me with a template for the kind of person I wanted to be.

Nevertheless, I encountered quite early the growing ambivalence of some Black activists about the role of whites in the civil rights movement. By May 1962 I decided it was time to leave.

I moved to New York, ready to devote myself to a new phase of political work with others who shared my radical vision of social change. I was not at all drawn to the array of old socialist groups I’d learned about at Brandeis. I had in mind a group I’d known of for some time, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). I’d heard glowing reports about two of SDS’s leaders, Al Haber and Tom Hayden, and read some of their pamphlets. SDS seemed to be a fresh and radical hybrid that was not specifically socialist, which I found intriguing. I arrived in New York one week before Port Huron and walked into the SDS office on Nineteenth Street. The office was funky, crowded, and bustling. I met Al, Tom, Casey Hayden, and others, all immersed in preparing for their upcoming convention. Tom handed me a copy of “the manifesto” (as the Port Huron Statement was then called) and urged me to come to Port Huron in Michigan. One week later, I found myself past midnight at the FDR Labor Camp, about to have my life changed once again, in ways I could not have imagined.

 
At Port Huron I felt I had found just what I was looking for. The people I met there were smart, humorous, politically experienced, and energetic. Those of us who gathered at Port Huron believed that through collective thinking we could understand our world and that with passionate dedication we could change it. The exuberance that came from our shared moral purpose and sense of historic mission was exhilarating!

It seemed at Port Huron that we had the elements needed to create a lasting organization and movement. Our task, revising the Port Huron Statement, gave us the medium in which to shape our collective political vision and a way to get to know one another. We were aiming to create a piece of literature that would actually be read, reflected upon, and remembered, as it has been. We wanted to envision, freshly, the radical possibilities of political culture; to provide ourselves with a rough map to guide our activist lives; and to fire the social imaginations of our contemporaries.

I came to Port Huron seeking personal transformation as well as political and social change. I believe this was true for others as well (though not for all). The values-driven and courageous lives of civil rights workers were not only our inspiration; they provided a compelling standard by which we judged the stereotypic and conformist social niches that were waiting for us—especially women!—and we were repelled. If my art, academic, and civil rights experiences had evoked in me a vision of a life of meaning, vitality, and adventure, it was SDS, as it seemed at Port Huron, that appeared to offer a community within which I could live that life. I sensed that this dream of a future was shared by others, which made it both more believable and more exciting. By the time I left Port Huron, I certainly expected to spend my life in SDS and “the Movement,” our name for something we were creating that was larger than SDS. I was beginning to feel some confidence at last that I had escaped the suburban housewife fate that awaited me and other women in those days, even educated and talented ones.

For many of us, our personal needs appeared, in that fleeting moment of Port Huron and the early days of SDS, to mesh seamlessly with our political goals. We were giving birth to a new kind of organization in which we believed that we could develop skills, carve out our own identities, and become effective agents of radical social change. That we pioneer SDS women felt this was possible testified to our considerable experience as serious students and competent organizers as well as to the unique form of organization and movement that we believed that we, men as well as women, were coaxing to life at Port Huron.

Although the simplicity and near perfection of moments such as Port Huron can never last, several unique elements of SDS culture held promise for a transformative personal and political community.

First, SDS was improvisational. It did not have at its core a full-fledged ideology. The Port Huron Statement had (and still has) so much life in it because it never aspired to a unified theory of historical cause and effect. Rather, it said, “Here are the big issues we’re thinking about, and here’s a guide to how we might continue to elaborate, shift, even change our thoughts over time.” About strategies and actions it was even less specific. Improvisation was at the root of the excitement we felt at Port Huron. It signaled a remarkable rejection of old, left ideologies, fully equipped as they were with hierarchy, primary contradiction, and anointed vanguard as the motor of change.

It was also a style of thinking with which many women felt at home. Never invited into the boys’ club of megatheory, raised by mothers whose lives were daily improvisations and balancing acts, and encouraged to know the arts and literature, we found this experimental style to be simpatico turf. Intellectually, many of us preferred research and writing grounded in observation and centered on lived experience rather than abstract theory—subject areas that benefit from an improvisational approach.

Improvisational politics demanded of its participants flexibility and personal transformation in ways that traditional politics had not. It opened up creative space in which a rich mix of red diaper babies and children of liberals, dreamy bohemians and middle Americans, Jews and Christians, and practical planners and visionaries could approach one another with curiosity and respect, sometimes even with affection and love. Those outside our movement whom we sought to recruit could see or sense this spirit; it drew them to us and cleared a path for them to join us.

Second, improvisational politics is quintessentially relational, which was also a good fit for many women (as well as for some SDS men). Without ongoing investment in relationships, improv falls apart. Early SDS happened because Al Haber, Tom Hayden, Sharon Jeffrey, and an expanding band of sisters and brothers reached out in the early days, with their ideas and their selves, person by person, group by group.

This small-scale, relatively egalitarian approach to organization building was inviting to women. It drew on experiences and skills many women had. As students, and as young women entering the work world, we had needed to cultivate skills in relational agility in order to impress yet not offend.

At Port Huron, and at our best moments in SDS, we were able to initiate and sustain complex, high-stakes dialog with one another, even those with different political tilts, personalities, and priorities of the moment. Women contributed a great deal to this process.

Improvisational and relational abilities played a large and fluctuating role over the next several years in how we rose and fell, what we accomplished and how we failed, what we saw clearly, and where we were blinded.

The third guiding cultural value of early SDS was community. The civil rights movement idea of the beloved community as both necessary means and ultimate goal had been adopted by many of us early SDSers. At Port Huron and beyond, we were trying to create a community that was sustaining and resilient, that would help us thrive and withstand whatever external pressures and pitfalls came our way. (We could never have imagined the weight of events that would come at us soon and relentlessly.)

We also sensed that community might address the surging alienation that many young white people experienced and attract them to joining us. So community promised both a strategic advantage for recruitment and a sustainability advantage for us.

Women, of course, were leaders in community building. From nuclear and extended families, to neighborhood groups, to faith and civil organizations, to the grunt work that kept unions and political organizations going—all the backroom work, the uncredited weaving of communal fabric—this has been historically the work of women. We’d grown up absorbing those skills and the unspoken understanding that community building was up to us. Although we aspired to intellectual and organizing roles in our movement work, we intuitively and automatically moved to weave that fabric. And the men expected it of us, were comfortable with us being there, thought it was where we belonged, and gave us emotional rewards for doing it.

The fourth defining cultural element of early SDS was participatory democracy, the term most identified with the Port Huron Statement. An intellectual and political Rorschach, participatory democracy implied an egalitarian invitation to a movement that would be broad-based, inclusive, and empowering. Amazingly, at Port Huron, and in the days after, we never examined collectively and in depth what participatory democracy meant. Was it something we needed to create, cultivate, and enact in the present, in our own internal processes? Was it primarily a macropromise of a way that individuals and publics would interact with government at some later time, as a result of political and social change? Or did it need to be both? And if so, how would we go about envisioning, creating, and sustaining it? What would it demand of us? Would a focus on it within our community distract from large-scale organizing around important social issues?

I have found myself wondering what might have happened if, at Port Huron, in that rare moment of openness and imagination, we’d had a circle in which each of us put out our visions, our reservations, our hopes for participatory democracy. Even at that early stage, some woman might have said, “Participatory democracy has to be now, here, us, not just a promise for later. It has to mean that we women are listened to, respected, and encouraged to participate fully as organizers, writers, and speakers.” And might other women, emboldened by her audacity, have said, “Me too”? Certainly, we women had all tasted moments of being supported, challenged, and included as students, thinkers, and organizers. But experiences in which we were condescended to, ignored, or punished for our outspokenness or ambition far outweighed them. For many of us, our most painful negative moments had come within our political world. SDS and the Port Huron Statement had raised our expectations. And what would later come to be called sexism was more deeply hurtful and less tolerable in our chosen community and from our comrades, friends, and lovers.

We expected “our men” to be different and better. But they were at the stage of life in which masculine culture demanded that young elite men make their moves to establish their place in the world. Our wonderful SDS men would have been heavy contenders in the professional, managerial, and mainstream political worlds. Part of what was going on in early SDS was a transfer of male ambition and competition to a higher purpose. Women were not a part of that story for men in or outside of our movement: the competition for place was to be among men. We women were to be their supports. That was just the way it was.

Perhaps had we explored the meanings of participatory democracy, none of us women could have accessed our protofeminist consciousness or dared to rock our lovely boat right then. And had we done so, we might have been met by incomprehension, superficial reassurance, bad jokes, subtle (or not so subtle) rejection—even shunning and isolation. Perhaps such daring would have ruptured the rapport among us women. But maybe, just maybe, the seed of equality would have come into the sun. Maybe the bare beginning of a growing feminist consciousness could have had room to blossom within SDS before years of rancor piled up and led to an explosive and wrenching tearing apart of what was, by then, our not-so-beloved community. It might even have opened space for other groups, which were also silenced, to speak out in the name of participating democratically—gays and lesbians, people of color, members from poor families and rural cultures, and men who were not seen as alpha men.

By 1965, a mere three years after Port Huron, SDS was in crisis, unable to handle its growth in size and diversity, swamped by competing strategic and organizational models, and bedeviled by incompetence and lack of accountability.

The alienation of women in SDS, first voiced formally by Casey Hayden and Mary King in their manifesto, “Sex and Caste,” led to a mass walk out by women from a midwinter 1965 meeting that was attempting to set a new course for SDS. The meeting failed, but for women working within SDS and the growing antiwar movement, our terms of engagement changed decisively. The liberation of women, which demanded root changes in gender relationships, now took center stage for us. Many of us continued to work in antiwar, antipoverty, and other mixed-left projects. Naming sexism and making it visible in SDS did open spaces for some women to function more effectively, but by and large our concerns were not addressed. Our working and personal relationships with our male comrades were increasingly stressed and unstable. More and more women opted out of the mixed—or male, as it was often called—left and devoted themselves to creating an independent women’s movement.

From 1965 until its demise in 1969, SDS careened from a radically antileadership, antistructure, and thus inevitably unaccountable morass into its opposite. A gaggle of Marxist-Leninist groups arose espousing rigid theories of change and seeing themselves, in full-throttle arrogance, as the vanguard. Most disastrous, of course, was Weatherman, Leninist in its vision of change, with a new set of “primary contradictions” that would lead to revolution, an escalating embrace of violence, and a rock-star sexiness that attracted media attention. It was not only SDS, the organization, that they stole. Weatherman waged an attack on the principles and vision that underlay SDS. Damaged and divided, SDS was still the repository of a unique vision; of a willingness to endure the ambiguities of political improvisation; of trust in an imperfect community in which relationships, open dialog, and a democracy of full participation were our best hope; of commitment to creating a new society by winning the hearts and minds of the public; and of radical change as a long-term public and accountable process. This was not a vision of liberalism or reform; this was a fresh, new, bigger-than-we-could-have-imagined template for radical change.

What stopped those of us who still believed in the principles of Port Huron and early SDS from mounting a strong counterargument against Weatherman? A lot was at stake. Why was there no “we” capable of organizing such an enterprise? These are questions worth understanding for the historical record but more important as insight for future young activists who take on projects of major social change.

At Port Huron we had defined a new kind of politics that might have provided us with enough confidence and unity to argue for our vision. But the male-dominant, competitive culture we carried over from the mainstream squashed the impulses among most women and many men to carry out the promise of Port Huron to change ourselves into new kinds of left people and our organization into a culture that prefigured the society we wanted to create.

To withstand Weatherman, COINTELPRO, and other disintegrating forces, we needed a culture in which all members were listened to, respected, and included; their particular abilities nurtured, utilized, and acknowledged. We needed those among us with special talents and skills in process to be recognized as teachers essential to our project just as experts in foreign affairs and power-structure analysis were essential. These teachers, many of whom would have been women, might have helped create a broader political community that would attract people, as we had been attracted, to the taste and smell of a better life, living in community and filled with political purpose.

SDS accomplished much in a short time, not least of which was the spawning of the women’s movement and numerous other liberation movements. It played a major role in opposing the Vietnam War, shifting public opinion against it, and placing America’s involvement in the larger context of US imperialist policy. It helped raise awareness about poverty and inequality in America. It influenced a generation of young people to consider lives as agents of social change. It transformed many of its participants into people committed to living with their eyes open and fulfilling their obligation to speak and act for change.

Still, our organization died young, leaving a tarnished legacy and, for many participants, memories of a painful experience of movement life that required long years of healing. The death of SDS and the dominance of Weatherman as the public representative of our movement created a decades-long chasm and a discontinuity on the left, within which the right wing rose to great power, while the left shrank and was marginalized.

Of course radical change is always a long shot. Much has been written about the overwhelming impact that assassination, COINTELPRO, the tenacity of racism, and most of all the vicious system revealed by Vietnam had on our perception, our sense of urgency, and our outrage. It often seems as though the shift back to canned ideology and violent tactics that came so soon was inevitable. I do not want to underestimate the impact of these factors.

But history is always mean and unpredictable, and government response to potent adversaries is always full of horrible surprises. So we needed a set of qualities that would maximize our resilience, stability, and wisdom and thus allow us to withstand these without turning into what we had explicitly rejected. Our failure to develop these virtues meant as the sixties moved into the seventies, SDS was unable to evolve into a network of poststudent, varied-but-linked radical change groups, connected by the thread of common principle and longing, held by the bonds of long relationships of trust. It meant that the thread of continuity between us and the next generations of left activists was broken.

I consider myself fortunate to have been a pioneer SDS woman and to have participated in the major movements of the sixties, whatever their personal costs to me and the social limitations they revealed. I remain in awe of the genius with which we began our journey and the deep caring and intelligence with which we attempted to achieve more than was possible. And yet, for me and for so many of my compatriots, there is sadness as well, and always the question “What if . . . ?”