Port Huron at 50: Still Communist After All These Years

by Jacob Laksin
Before there was Occupy Wall Street and Zuccotti Park there was Students for a Democratic Society and Port Huron. When it was written in 1962, the Port Huron Statement announced the birth of the radical student group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and with it the launch of what would become the so-called New Left. The manifesto’s legacy has since been sullied by the destructive history of SDS, which within a few years splintered into a bevy of revolutionary Marxist and militant organizations – most notoriously the terrorist Weather Underground – that came to embrace the very form of communist totalitarianism the Port Huron Statement professed to reject.
That morally stained history has not prevented SDS veterans, led by the document’s principal author, Tom Hayden, from periodically celebrating the Port Huron Statement as something it never was: a reformist treatise that succeeded in spirit even as it failed to transform America in line with SDS’s radical vision. Hayden has been the leading propagandist of the Port Huron Statement’s supposedly lasting cultural importance, penning and delivering near-annual tributes to the document while divulging little about its troubling history. The latest of these commemorative efforts occurred last week at New York University in New York City, which hosted a two-day conference on the Port Huron Statement to celebrate its 50-year anniversary and to reflect on its historical impact.
Headlined by Hayden, who delivered the keynote address, the conference was a class reunion of sorts of 60-era radicals. The audience was full of aging activists, their nostalgia for the political currents of the sixties betrayed by their graying ponytails, Che Guevara T-shirts, and well-thumbed copies of The Nation. Several said they had been present when the Port Huron Statement was issued in 1962.