THE PORT HURON STATEMENT: A MANIFESTO RECONSIDERED
SUNDAY, MAY 6, 2012 AT 12:01PM
This op-ed originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times on May 6, 2012.
An Occupy protester wearing a Guy Fawkes mask is shown in Oakland, Calif. Occupy Wall Street's insistence that 1% of the population shouldn't control such a vast portion of the country's wealth feels like a direct echo of the Port Huron Statement, which complained in 1962 that 1% of Americans owned 80% of all corporate stock, and that their percentage of all wealth had remained constant since the 1920s, in spite of the New Deal reforms. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images / May 1, 2012)Looking back at that summer 50 years ago, it feels as though the Port Huron Statement wrote us, not the other way around.
"We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit."
Those were the opening words of the Port Huron Statement, which I helped draft 50 years ago this summer as the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society. The statement, written in the idealistic early days of the New Left, laid out a vision for a nation in which racial equality would be finally achieved, disarmament embraced and true participatory democracy would become the norm.
The group that gathered in Port Huron, Mich., in 1962 to produce the statement included children who'd rejected the Old Left of their parents, black student civil rights activists seeking Northern campus allies, children of