The Port Huron Statement

From June 11 to 15, 1962, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) delegates from across America met near this spot to debate and approve what became the Port Huron Statement. At the time, this was a United Automobile Workers retreat called FDR Camp. After a December 1961 meeting held at the University of Michigan, SDS decided to build a student movement with a manifesto that provided a “truly demo-cratic alternative to the present.” Using an original draft by Tom Hayden (1939-2016), about sixty students, working in groups, reviewed and debated each section. Their work was the catalyst for the student anti-war and social reform movement that changed the United States in the 1960s. Within four years, some 60,000 copies of the 25,750-word manifesto were printed. “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit,” began the Port Huron Statement. Intended to be an “Agenda for a Generation" facing the Cold War and racial and economic inequality, the manifesto advocated for a “participatory democracy,” where all people would have a say in the decisions that affected their lives. It described all people as “infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love.” The authors detailed economic, social, political, and academic causes of the “contemporary malaise.” Yet they were idealistic, hopeful, and urgent: “If we appear to seek the unattainable, as has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.”