Tom Hayden: “The Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The excerpt reproduced here is the introduction to “The Port Huron Statement.” Hayden articulates the principles and concerns of the SDS, beginning with the belief that many students have become disillusioned in recent years. They have grown up in relative comfort in a powerful and affluent nation, but they have come to recognize “events too troubling to dismiss.” One is the struggle for racial equality, particularly in the American South. The other is the cold war (the state of tension between the United States and the Soviet Union) and the threat of nuclear annihilation—and, indeed, just four months later the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the United States and the Soviets to the brink of nuclear war. He calls these issues “paradoxes,” for they undermine American ideals that “all men are created equal” and that the goal of American foreign policy is peace. He also calls attention to such problems as meaningless work, undernourishment, and the exploitation of the earth's resources. He places this disillusionment in the context of the decline of colonialism and imperialism, overpopulation, the threat of war, and the entrenchment of totalitarian states throughout the world.

Hayden then calls for change. He asserts that people in general are apathetic and fearful of change, unable to envision any alternatives to matters as they currently stand. He rejects the belief that anxiety and fearfulness necessarily result in paralysis, and he believes that under the glaze of indifference is a yearning for something better: “It is to this latter yearning, at once the spark and engine of change, that we direct our present appeal.” Fundamentally, Hayden calls for a resurgence of idealism, a vision of a better future and a willingness to take action to make that future a reality. He takes a radically optimistic view of society: “We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love.” Later, he states that “men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity.”

In Hayden's view, though, the events of the twentieth century have depersonalized human beings and rendered them incompetent because they have been treated as objects to be manipulated. On this basis, Hayden calls for a more participatory democracy, one that allows individuals to share in social decisions and encourages interdependence among people. One way to achieve these goals is to reform the economic system by recognizing that “work should involve incentives worthier than money or survival,” that individuals must share in the determination of the shape of the “economic experience,” and that the economy's major resources and means of production should “be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation.” This emphasis on economic relations is undoubtedly a reflection of the SDS's roots in its predecessor organization, the Student League for Industrial Democracy, which was a branch of a socialist educational organization called the League for Industrial Democracy; the organization evolved into the SDS as a way of widening its appeal among college and university students.