Revisiting the Port Huron Statement

An existential cry from the ’60s speaks to our condition today

Tom Hayden, principal author of the Port Huron Statement (at left) at an SDS gathering in 1963, a year after the manifesto was proclaimed. (Photo by C. Clark Kissinger)

In 1962, a group of young activists gathered at a labor union retreat center in Port Huron, Michigan to promote an emerging organization they were calling Students for a Democratic Society. They produced a manifesto, The Port Huron Statement, that criticized the essential features of modern society and proclaimed their vision of participatory democracy.

The Port Huron Statement expressed the concerns that fueled the countercultural rebellion of the 1960s, but it is not merely a quaint relic of that era’s youthful angst. The manifesto was an eloquent existential response to the age of modernity that the post-World War Two generation was the first to experience fully. In the twenty-first century, we are drowning in modernity — sometimes literally, given the consequences of global warming — and desperately seeking life preservers. The Port Huron Statement offers one, and it is well worth revisiting today.

The young people who came of age in the 1950s and early ’60s were disturbed by several aspects of the modern world that are still with us today:

• They chafed under the impersonal administration of mass institutions, particularly the universities and educational system, which they experienced directly, and…