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Port Huron Statement USHistoryAtlas.com Primary Sources Port Huron Statement Date # June 15, 1962 Place # Port Huron, Michigan Type of Source # Political Movement Document Author # Students for a Democratic Society, drafted by Tom Hayden Context # The post-World War II generation experienced unprecedented prosperity and opportunity. Despite these advantages, there was a sense of unease among the youth. The Cold War threatened global annihilation. The Civil Rights Movement was exposing American racism, which government seemed unwilling or unable to stop. Society seemed dominated by big institutions who didn’t care about the individual. In 1962, a little-known group, Students for a Democratic Society, held its first convention at Port Huron. The statement of the convention would express the hopes of the 1960s Youth Movement, often called the New Left. initiator creator, starter e are the people of this generation , bred in at least modest W complacency comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the smugness world we inherit. permeating When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest covering everything country in the world; the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by victimizing modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute victim-making Western influence throughout the world. Freedom and equality for each degradation individual, government of, by, and for the people –– these American values we humiliation found good, principles by which we could live as men. Many of us began bigotry maturing in complacency . prejudice enclosing As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to overwhelming dismiss. First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation , the Bomb symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry , compelled most of us nuclear weapons from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized resolution by the presence of the Bomb , brought awareness that we ourselves, and our the solution friends, and millions of abstract "others" we knew more directly because of our rankled common peril, might die at any time. We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or bothered fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two, for these were too subjective immediate and crushing in their impact, too challenging in the demand that we personal as individuals take the responsibility for encounter and resolution . paradoxes contradictions, two things While these and other problems either directly oppressed us or rankled that shouldn’t exist at the our consciences and became our own subjective concerns, we began to see same time complicated and disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding America. The contradicted declaration "all men are created equal..." rang hollow before the facts of Negro challenged life in the South and the big cities of the North. The proclaimed peaceful status quo intentions of the United States contradicted its economic and military existing state of affairs investments in the Cold War status quo . NYSTROM HERFF JONES EDUCATION DIVISION page 1 of 4 Port Huron Statement USHistoryAtlas.com Primary Sources We witnessed, and continue to witness, other paradoxes . With nuclear incurred energy whole cities can easily be powered, yet the dominant nation-states seem caused more likely to unleash destruction greater than that incurred in all wars of idleness human history. Although our own technology is destroying old and creating new unemployment forms of social organization, men still tolerate meaningless work and idleness . superfluous While two-thirds of mankind suffers under nourishment, our own upper classes excessive revel amidst superfluous abundance. Although world population is expected to anarchy double in forty years, the nations still tolerate anarchy as a major principle of chaos, no government international conduct and uncontrolled exploitation governs the sapping of the exploitation earth's physical resources. Although mankind desperately needs revolutionary misuse leadership, America rests in national stalemate , its goals ambiguous and sapping tradition-bound instead of informed and clear, its democratic system apathetic draining and manipulated rather than "of, by, and for the people." stalemate deadlock Not only did tarnish appear on our image of American virtue, not only did ambiguous disillusion occur when the hypocrisy of American ideals was discovered, but we unclear began to sense that what we had originally seen as the American Golden Age was apathetic actually the decline of an era. The worldwide outbreak of revolution against uncaring, disinterested colonialism and imperialism , the entrenchment of totalitarian states, the tarnish menace of war, overpopulation, international disorder, supertechnology –– these stain trends were testing the tenacity of our own commitment to democracy and disillusion freedom and our abilities to visualize their application to a world in upheaval. disappointment hypocrisy Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the lies experiment with living. But we are a minority –– the vast majority of our people imperialism regard the temporary equilibriums of our society and world as eternally foreign rule functional parts. In this is perhaps the outstanding paradox ; we ourselves are entrenchment imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable consolidating alternative to the present. Beneath the reassuring tones of the politicians, tenacity beneath the common opinion that America will "muddle through," beneath the determination stagnation of those who have closed their minds to the future, is the pervading visualize feeling that there simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the see exhaustion not only of Utopias , but of any new departures as well. equilibriums ####### balances imbued In the last few years, thousands of American students demonstrated that drenched they at least felt the urgency of the times. They moved actively and directly viable against racial injustices, the threat of war, violations of individual rights of workable conscience , and, less frequently, against economic manipulation. They stagnation succeeded in restoring a small measure of controversy to the campuses after the trapping McCarthy period stillness of the . They succeeded, too, in gaining some pervading concessions from the people and institutions they opposed, especially in the overwhelming fight against racial bigotry. Utopias imaginary paradises The significance of these scattered movements lies not in their success or conscience failure in gaining objectives –– at least, not yet. Nor does the significance lie in morality the intellectual "competence" or "maturity" of the students involved –– as some McCarthy period pedantic elders allege . The significance is in the fact that students are breaking alienation the anti-communist the crust of apathy and overcoming the inner that remain the campaign of the 1940s defining characteristics of American college life. and 1950s NYSTROM HERFF JONES EDUCATION DIVISION page 2 of 4 Port Huron Statement USHistoryAtlas.com Primary Sources If student movements for change are still rarities on the campus scene, concessions what is commonplace there? The real campus, the familiar campus, is a place of compromises private people, engaged in their notorious " inner emigration ." It is a place of pedantic fussy commitment to business-as-usual, getting ahead, playing it cool. It is a place of allege mass affirmation of the Twist, but mass reluctance toward the controversial claim public stance. Rules are accepted as "inevitable," bureaucracy as "just alienation irrelevance martyrdom circumstances," as "scholarship," selflessness as " ," isolation politics as "just another way to make people, and an unprofitable one, too." rarities oddities Almost no students value activity as citizens. Passive in public, they are inner emigration hardly more idealistic in arranging their private lives: Gallup concludes they will withdrawing into private settle for "low success, and won't risk high failure." There is not much life. The phrase had been willingness to take risks (not even in business), no setting of dangerous goals, no coined by writers in Nazi real conception of personal identity except one manufactured in the image of Germany to justify their acceptance of the others, no real urge for personal fulfillment except to be almost as successful as government. the very successful people. Attention is being paid to social status (the quality of irrelevance shirt collars, meeting people, getting wives or husbands, making solid contacts pointlessness, for later on); much, too, is paid to academic status (grades, honors, the med meaninglessness school rat race). But neglected generally is real intellectual status, the personal martyrdom cultivation of the mind. self-sacrifice Passive "Students don't even give a damn abut the apathy ," one has said. Apathy Accepting toward apathy begets a privately constructed universe, a place of systematic begets study schedules, two nights each week for beer, a girl or two, and early marriage; brings on a framework infused with personality, warmth, and under control, no matter infused how unsatisfying otherwise. filled new left ####### SDS wanted a movement more connected to students Social relevance, the accessibility to knowledge, and internal openness –– and minorities and less to these together make the university
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