The first time I read the “Port Huron Statement,” I thought that this was what I had been waiting for. It was the opening salvo of what came to be identified with the “New Left,” young people who didn’t care a bit about Communism, but knew something was wrong with the American system that condoned racial segregation and the Vietnam War. The Statement called for a society based on fraternity, honesty, and brotherhood. A watchword was “participatory democracy.” I wondered what other kind there could be.
Later I learned that Tom Hayden was the author of the Port Huron statement and a founding member of the Students for a Democratic Society. When I was in grad school at Penn State, I was all set to join SDS, but my roommate asked me not to. He hoped to get a security clearance, and he thought that having a roommate in SDS would preclude that.
In Hayden’s obituary I read that the FBI had amassed a 22,000 page file on Mr. Hayden and J. Edgar Hoover said that a prime objective of the F.B.I. “should be to neutralize him in the New Left Movement.” Maybe my roommate was right to be concerned.
Hayden, one of the “Chicago Seven,” was later heavily involved in California politics, serving in both the California Assembly and Senate, where he supported legislation on environmental, educational, and civil rights issues. He is one of my heroes, and he was a true American patriot.
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