The years 1962 and 1963 witnessed the appearance of several path-breaking books that challenged one or another aspect of the 1950s consensus. James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time gave angry voice to the black revolution. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring exposed the environmental costs of economic growth. Michael Harrington’s The Other America revealed the persistence of poverty amid plenty. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs, criticized urban renewal, the removal of the poor from city centers, and the destruction of neighborhoods to build highways, accommodating cities to the needs of drivers rather than pedestrians. What made cities alive, she insisted, was density and diversity, the social interaction of people of different backgrounds encountering each other on urban streets.
Yet in some ways the most influential critique of all arose in 1962 from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), an offshoot of the socialist League for Industrial Democracy. Meeting at Port Huron, Michigan, some sixty college students adopted a document that captured the mood and summarized the beliefs of this generation of student protesters.
Members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at a 1963 National Council meeting in Indiana. Despite their raised fists, they appear eminently respectable compared to radicals who emerged later in the decade. The group is entirely white.
The Port Huron Statement devoted four-fifths of its text to criticism of institutions ranging from political parties to corporations, unions, and the military-industrial complex. But what made the document the guiding spirit of a new radicalism was the remainder, which offered a new vision of social change. “We seek the establishment,” it proclaimed, of “a democracy of individual participation, [in which] the individual shares in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life.” Freedom, for the New Left, meant “participatory democracy.” Although rarely defined with precision, this became a standard by which students judged existing social arrangements—workplaces, schools, government—and found them wanting. The idea suggested a rejection of the elitist strain that had marked liberal thinkers from the Progressives to postwar advocates of economic planning, in which government experts would establish national priorities in the name of the people.