A Man's World & Welcome To It
Women's Liberation
This article, by Kae Halonen, provides a Marxist feminist analysis of her upbringing, women's history, the job market, property relations and factory workers.
Radical Education Project, Detroit, Michigan
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
mimeograph
article
A.J. Muste at 5th Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade (1 image)
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
Roz Payne photograph of legendary pacifist and anti-war activist, A.J. Muste, during a 5th Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade in New York City, perhaps in 1965 or 1966.
During the mid-1960s, the Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade organized dozens of local peace and anti-war groups in a series of anti-war parades, “peace-ins” and other events. Dave Dellinger, who would later gain notoriety as a member of the Chicago 7 during the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago, and Norma Becker, who worked for the War Resisters League, led the group.
A.J. Muste was born in the Netherlands in 1885 and emigrated to the United States in 1901, where his father was a factory worker at a plant in Michigan. Muste was ordained as a Dutch Reform minister in his young adulthood and moved to New York City with his wife and three children. There, he was introduced to liberal theology and pragmatism and joined the local chapter of the National Civil Liberties Union, which would later become the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist organization formed in opposition to WWI by Muste, Jane Addams and Bishop Paul Jones. Muste’s stance against the war compelled his more conservative congregation to oust him.
Following his rejection by the church, Muste focused his peace and justice work on the political left. During the late-1910s and 1920s, Muste worked within the labor movement, famously leading striking textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and serving as the director of the Brookwood Labor College, a training school for the militant Congress of Industrial Organizations. In 1929, the more conservative American Federation of Labor accused Muste of being a communist, prompting him to found the Conference for Progressive Labor Action, a faction dedicated to organizing for militant industrial unionism. The CPLA ultimately evolved into the Trotskeyite, American Workers Party, which Muste led until a religious experience in 1936 prompted him to break with Marxist-Leninism and rededicate himself to Christian pacifism.
As national secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Muste dedicated himself to training a new generation in nonviolent direct action against racial segregation. He also published an important book, Nonviolence in an Aggressive World, in 1940. As the southern black freedom movement gained steam, Muste became an important adviser and ally to prominent advocates of non-violence, like Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King, Jr.
During the post-WWII era, Muste was also focused on opposition to the Cold War and U.S. militarism. He continued to write and counseled draft and tax resistance to oppose those policies. In 1941 he said, “The problem after a war is the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will now teach him a lesson?” Later, he argued, "We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life. Disarmament cannot be achieved nor can the problem of war be resolved without being accompanied by profound changes in the economic order and the structure of society.” Muste helped form several organizations dedicated to militant nonviolence and the creation of a New Left.
As a new generation of young activists rose in opposition to the war in Vietnam, Muste gained a new following and influence. In an article in a 1965 issue of Liberation, titled, “Who Has the Spiritual Atom Bomb, he wrote, “It is said that if the United States were to stop shooting and withdraw its troops from Vietnam, the Viet Cong would then stage a great purge of the people who we have been seeking to protect — have pledged to protect. First of all, so far they have been getting precious little protection from us. The Vietnamese people as human individuals have been shot at by the French, by us, by Communists, by guerrillas for years. Maybe, if only somebody would stop shooting at them that would be something to the good.” In a 1967 New York Times article, “Debasing Dissent,” Muste was famously quoted, “There is no way to peace; peace is the way.” In defense of dissent, Muste wrote in 1967, shortly before his death, “There is a certain indolence in us, a wish not to be disturbed, which tempts us to think that when things are quiet, all is well. Subconsciously, we tend to give the preference to 'social peace,' though it be only apparent, because our lives and possessions seem then secure. Actually, human beings acquiesce too easily in evil conditions; they rebel far too little and too seldom. There is nothing noble about acquiescence in a cramped life or mere submission to superior force.” Muste played a central role in organizing the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. Muste died in 1967.
Roz Payne
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1965 or 1966
Ann Arbor Sun, December 1974
New Left
The Ann Arbor Sun was a newspaper founded by John Sinclair in November 1968 as a vehicle for the White Panther Party. In the 1970s, the newspaper transitioned into an independent publication covering local issues, left-wing politics, music, and arts. Finally in 1976, publication was suspended indefinitely.
This issue includes articles on the Oneida community; military intelligence and the Ann St. Armory; Midland Nuclear Plant; rent control; food coops; community radio; the Rockefellers and oil industry; Warren Commission; “Planet News”; the sugar industry; consumer’s guide to stereos; the great quadrophonic sound debate; music reviews; community calendar; letters.
Ann Arbor Sun, Inc.
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
December 1974
newspaper
Ann Arbor Sun, January 1975, vol. 3, issue 1
New Left
The Ann Arbor Sun was a newspaper founded by John Sinclair in November 1968 as a vehicle for the White Panther Party. In the 1970s, the newspaper transitioned into an independent publication covering local issues, left-wing politics, music, and arts. Finally in 1976, publication was suspended indefinitely.
This issue includes articles on military science and research at the University of Michigan; ROTC; cuts to social services; Gerald Ford inquiry into the CIA; international briefs; the war in Vietnam; Kissinger and the Middle East; police Turn in a Pusher program; history of cocaine; Showcase of International Wares; community calendar; book, music and performance reviews.
Ann Arbor Sun, Inc.
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
January 1975
newspaper
Ann Arbor Sun, September 24 to October 8, 1973
New Left
The Ann Arbor Sun was a newspaper founded by John Sinclair in November 1968 as a vehicle for the White Panther Party. In the 1970s, the newspaper transitioned into an independent publication covering local issues, left-wing politics, music, and arts. Finally in 1976, publication was suspended indefinitely.
This issue includes articles on media coverage of Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival; an interview with John Sinclair; women’s health; Lee Gill; acupuncture; tuition increases; community calendar; music and film reviews; letters.
Sun Tribe
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
September 24 to October 8, 1973
newspaper
Attica - My Lai Both the Same
Black Power and Prisoner Rights Movement
This leaflet compares the Attica Uprising massacre to the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.
Prisoners Solidarity Committee
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. early-1970s
mimeograph
leaflet
Attica - Tip of the Iceberg
Prisoner's Rights Movement
This document explores the Attica Prison Uprising and links it to other race rebellions and massacres of the time period, including the war in Vietnam; the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa; police killings of students at Jackson State, Greensboro and Augusta, Georgia; and uprisings in Watts, Newark and Detroit. The artifact also includes a "Letter to the People of America"; a tribute to George Jackson by Angela Davis; "Demands for Albany National Action; a letter from Angela Davis to Ericka Huggins, profiles of three men in Attica during the uprising - Richard Clark, Herbert X. Blyden, and Sam Melville; a reprint of a New York Times article by Tom Wicker, "The Animals at Attica"; and a statement released by prisoners at Attica on 9/20/71.
The Attica Liberation Faction
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. early-1970s
mimeograph
leaflet
Black Judgement
Racial Justice
Published originally in 1968, this early book of poetry by Nikki Giovanni explored and appreciated black militancy. The volume was published by Broadside Press in Detroit, Michigan. This copy, which is the seventh printing of the first edition, came out in 1972 and was signed by Giovanni to Roz Payne in 1986.
Nikki Giovanni
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968, 1972
small press publication
Children’s Community School
Alternative Education
The Children’s Community School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was an experimental primary school modeled after Summerhill, the more famous alternative school in England that was popular among education reformers and counterculturists during the 1960s. The CCS, which was established in the mid-1960s, was student-led, emphasized "love and understanding" toward children and practiced equality between black and white students.
Bill Ayers and Diana Oughton, who both went on to greater fame (or, is it infamy?) as members of SDS and the Weather Underground, served as early leaders of the school. By 1968, a series of challenges forced the school's closing.
Diana Oughton created this fundraising button for the Children's Community School, which features the CCS logo, a hand drawn smiley face, and the phrase, “Kids are only newer people.”
Children’s Community School
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. mid-1960s
Button
Physical Object
CIA Conspiracy Trial Office
White Panther Party
This communiqué, written by Genie Plamondon, explores the changing politics of the White Panther Party during the late-1960s.
Genie Plamondon joined the White Panther Party in the summer of 1967. An organizer and activist, Plamondon was in charge of communications between WPP chapters, as well as chapter training, an organizer of the Red Star Sisters, and also held a leadership position as “Minister of Foreign Affairs” in the organization. During the late-1960s, she traveled overseas to Vietnam as a civilian observer and eyewitness and attended Woodstock to promote the Free John Sinclair campaign.
White Panther Party
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1969
leaflet
First Annual Detroit-Area Hookers' Halloween Masquerade
Sexual Liberation
Text at the top reads, "First Annual Detroit-Area Hookers' Halloween Masquerade October 28 9-2 Detroit City Women's Club Park at Elizabeth Tickets at the door - $5.00 Regular $3.00 Unemployed, welfare, youth, seniors, costume contest at 12 prizes for costumes from the fast life, best hooker, trick, pimp vile-cop, live music and entertainment. Cash Bar." Text along the bottom reads, "sponsored by CUPIDS Citizens to Upgrade Prostitution in Detroit and Suburbs. Sister to Coyote chapter of PEP the Prostitution Education Project of Michigan PO Box 32174 Detroit 48232 (313) 331-7703."
CUPIDS Citizens to Upgrade Prostitution in Detroit and Suburbs
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1990
poster
Free John Sinclair
New Left
Founder of the Black Panther counterpart, the White Panther Party, John Sinclair was arrested in 1969 for drug possession. Labelled a political prisoner by the New Left, Sinclair’s case inspired landmark litigation, specifically the 1972 Supreme Court ruling, U.S. vs. U.S. District Court, which stated that law enforcement officials were required to issue a warrant prior to conducting investigations on electronic media.
This particular button promotes the "Free John Sinclair Rally" at the Grand Ballroom in Detroit, Michigan, on January 24, 1970, a date proclaimed ‘International Free John Sinclair Day’ by The Fifth Estate and The Seed. The rally featured 24 acts, including MC5, The Stooges, Commander Cody, Amboy Dukes, Bob Seger. Speakers included Abbie Hoffman and attorney Ken Cockrell.
The following year, an even bigger "John Sinclair Freedom Rally" was held at the University of Michigan's Chrisler Arena on December 10, 1971, to honor of John Sinclair and to encourage an end the state ban on marijuana. John Lennon & Yoko Ono headlined this event, which also featured Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, Bob Seger, Phil Ochs, Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, poet Ed Sanders, Black Panther Party chairman Bobby Seale, Chicago Seven defendant Rennie Davis, radical priest Father James Groppi, and jazz legend Archie Shepp. Sinclair was released from jail shortly after the 1971 event.
Free John Sinclair
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1970
Button
Physical Object
Guerrilla, vol. 1, no. 1, January 1967
Guerrilla, vol. 1, no. 1, January 1967
In 1966, Detroit cultural radicals, Allen Van Newkirk, John Sinclair and Gary Grimshaw created Guerrilla, “a monthly newspaper of contemporary kulchur” and “weapon of cultural warfare.” The newspaper was a part of a larger project, the Detroit Artists Workshop, which was formed in 1964, “a local attempt in self-determination for artists of all disciplines.” Guerrilla mixed “humor, politics and music under the circus big top of surrealism and pop culture.” It was primarily a cultural review and included an international artistic perspective. Soon after its first issue appeared, Van Newkirk, who was a revolutionary anarchist with an antipathy for the hippie counterculture and slackers, split with the Detroit Artists Workshop and fired Sinclair, who was more aligned with the hippie counterculture. Despite their ideological and political differences, the two, in fact, continued to work together on Guerrilla, though Van Newkirk’s vision predominated. In subsequent issues, Van Newkirk included a series of oversized political posters. This inaugural issue includes articles on the New Consciousness by Michael McClure; a defense of obscenity; Black Dada by Tom Fiofori; Film Math and Music by Stan Brakhage; poetry by Diane di Prima, Andre Codrescu and Robert Kelly; jazz music reviews by John Sinclair; an interview with Jazz altoist Marion Brown; a statement by Albert Ayler; a section of Joel Oppenheimer’s new play; and Andre Breton and Diego Rivera’s famous essay on “revolutionary art.”
Artists' Workshop Press
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
January 1967
underground press
Midnight Special Prisoners News, vol. 3, no. 7, July 1973
Prisoner's Rights Movement
Midnight Special Prisoners News was published in the early-1970s by the National Lawyers Guild in New York. The newspaper was a part of the larger prisoner’s rights movement and sought to provide news about conditions inside prisons from the prisoner’s point of view. It also shared legal information aimed at helping prisoners and expanding their rights. In this issue, articles focus on the Intensive Treatment Program Center in Marquette, Michigan; conditions at Attica State Prison; the purpose of police; reports from prisons in Milan, Michigan, Lorton, Virginia, Springfield, Missouri, Clinton and Bordertown, New Jersey, Bedford Hills, New York, Frontera, California, Dannemora, New York, Mattewan State Hospital in New York, and Riker’s Island, New York; a plea for prisoner unity; the case of the Virgin Island 5; the Wounded Knee 8; poetry; race, class and prisoner unity; the Polar Bear Party; education and liberation; update on a Brooklyn prisoner rights lawsuit; letters to the editor.
National Lawyers Guild
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
July 1973
underground press
New Harbinger, 1972
Food Coops
The Journal of the New Harbinger was published by the North American Students of Cooperation, a federation of housing cooperatives in Canada and the United States, started in 1968 and centered in Ann Arbor. The Journal of the New Harbinger focused on the promotion and development of food coops. This issue includes articles about food coops in Madison, Montreal, Oakland, Amherst, Philadelphia, New York, Berkeley and Boston.
North American Students of Cooperation
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
February 1972
small press publication
Patriot, issue 39, June 7-21, 1972
New Left
Patriot was an underground press newspaper published by the Kalamazoo Patriot Collective in Kalamazoo, Michigan, during the early-1970s. In this issue, articles focus on local community news; prison poems; Attica Prison rebellion; the trial of Bill Smith; technology and militarism; a historical profile of Mother Jones; the bursting of a dam in Buffalo Creek, West Virginia; a poem by Utah Phillips.
Sunshine Publications
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
June 7-21, 1972
underground press
Port Huron Statement
New Left
<p>The Port Huron Statement was written in Port Huron, Michigan, at an early meeting of Students for a Democratic Society.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> SDS leader, Tom Hayden, was the driving force behind the manifesto.</span></p>
<br />Noted historian of the 1960s-era, Michael Kazin, wrote the following reflection for <em>Dissent</em> on the Port Huron Statement's 50th anniversary in 2010:<br /><br /><em>The Port Huron Statement of Students for a Democratic Society, written fifty years ago this June, is the most ambitious, the most specific, and the most eloquent manifesto in the history of the American Left. It is also, at just over 25,000 words, undoubtedly the longest one. But it had to be lengthy to accomplish its aim—to propose an entire “agenda for a generation.” Consider the variety of topics about which Tom Hayden and his fellow delegates to that SDS meeting held at the FDR Camp in Port Heron, Michigan, had intelligent and provocative things to say: moral values, American politics, the U.S. economy, the nation’s intellectual and academic life, the labor movement, the cold war, the nuclear arms race, the anticolonial revolution, and a vivid description of why the black freedom movement was so pivotal to the birth of a new Left. All this was informed by a sensibility attuned to what one might call the “national psychology.” And that’s just a summary of the first half of the statement.</em><br /><br /><em>The second part—“What Is Needed”— glowed with a passion and elegance not usually found in such a long and detailed document. What was needed, according to the thirty-five or so young drafters, included both such strategic aims as consolidating the Democrats into a principled liberal party by expelling the Dixiecrats and details fine-grained enough to delight the heart of any policy analyst. To wit: “there were fewer mental hospital beds in relation to the numbers of mentally ill in 1959 than there were in 1948.”* In addition, the statement combined varieties of prose not commonly featured in one document: existential longings inspired by Albert Camus, a quote from an encyclical by Pope John XXIII, urgent descriptions of the most serious issues facing humankind (then known as “mankind”), and far-reaching proposals for how to go about the prodigious task of democratizing the nation and the world.</em><br /><br /><em>Remarkably, most of the activist-intellectuals who accomplished all this were still in their early twenties. Hayden, at twenty-one, was the age at which most students are preparing to graduate from college. The previous year, the Activist, an obscure magazine edited at Oberlin College, had published Hayden’s “A Letter to the New (Young) Left.” After Port Huron, that article read like a textbook example of false modesty: “It is not as though we even know what to do,” Hayden wrote in the Activist, “we have no real visionaries for our leaders, we are not much more than literate ourselves.” Somehow, he and his comrades figured it out. I cannot imagine a group of Americans, of any age, writing such a manifesto today. In our era of high anxiety and blasted visions, we could certainly use one.</em><br /><em>But, for all its brilliance, Port Huron was not so much a break with the radical tradition as it was an artful meld of what remained fresh and stirring in the often tortured history of the American Left. Thus, “young,” the adjective Hayden had placed in parentheses, was more accurate than “new,” which remains the word nearly everyone since has affixed to the movement of which SDS played a vital part.</em><br /><br /><em>The statement managed to fuse two types of ideological advocacy that are often viewed as antagonists: first, the romantic desire for achieving an authentic self through crusading for individual rights and, second, the yearning for a democratic socialist order that would favor the collective good over freedom of the self. This fusion was wrapped in language whose utopian tone resembled that articulated by other messianic movements in American history—from the abolitionists and Owenite socialists to the Wobblies and Debsian Socialists to such radical feminists as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Emma Goldman.</em><br /><br /><em>The similarity to the language of the abolitionists was particularly strong. Consider this bold assertion from the Values section of the statement: “The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with . . . popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic. . . .This kind of independence does not mean egotistic individualism—the object is not to have one’s way so much as it is to have a way that is one’s own.” Compare it to the late-life reflection by the anti-slavery crusader Theodore Weld: “The starting point and power of every great reform must be the reformer’s self,“ declared Weld. “He must first set himself apart its sacred devotee, baptized into its spirit, consecrated to its service, feeling its profound necessity, its constraining motives, impelling causes, and all [the] reasons why.” Devout Christians were a distinct minority at the conference; evangelical Protestants were entirely absent. But the SDSers were expressing the same ultra-romantic idea that a free society can be built only by individuals who define that freedom for themselves that had inspired fervently Protestant abolitionists more than a century before.</em><br /><br /><em>In this sense, Port Huron demonstrated how the new, young Left—in its rebellion against a managed society and its hunger for an authentic one—was beginning to turn back, if unintentionally, to similar impulses that had inspired Weld and such fellow crusaders as his wife, Angelina Grimke, as well as William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and David Walker. Both groups insisted that one had to live one’s politics as well as preach them. Both took delight in smashing taboos about interracial sex, about the proper roles of men and women, and even about dress and diet. Both experimented with styles of communal living they believed would allow individuals to realize their “true” nature and to find happiness in doing so.</em><br /><br /><em>Whether pious or secular, radicals before the Civil War and their counterparts during the Cold War both struggled fiercely to free their minds and bodies from an evil society and to fill the world with individuals who aspired to perfection. The passion for self-improvement in the cause of social transformation could be found nearly everywhere on the young left in the 1960s and 1970s. “I had to find out who I am and what kind of man I should be, and what I could do to become the best of which I was capable,” confessed Eldridge Cleaver, in a neglected passage of Soul on Ice. In 1970, in his Politics of Authenticity, Marshall Berman observed, “the New Left’s complaint against democratic capitalism was not that it was too individualistic, but rather that it wasn’t individualistic enough.” In 1977, the black lesbians in the Combahee River Collective asserted, “Our politics . . . sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s but because of our need as human persons for autonomy.” So the final American Left of the industrial age gestured back, in spirit, to the first.</em><br /><em>AT THE same time, long stretches of the Port Huron Statement echo not just the spirit but the letter of the social democratic tradition, which these young radicals were determined to transcend. One sees this in the statement’s harsh attack on corporate power and its vision of an egalitarian society that would expand civic participation rather than restrict it, as in both capitalist and communist nations. Michael Harrington bridled at the “anti-anti-Communism” of the section on the Cold War, but he could have found little to argue with in the lengthy list of proposals for economic planning, party realignment, mobilizing black voters, and more.</em><br /><em>Even when the statement criticized organized labor, it did so in a tone of disappointment and with hope for its renewal. “Labor continues to be the most liberal—and most frustrated—institution in mainstream America,” the SDSers commented. Then they noted that, although union members showed little enthusiasm for politics, “there are some indications . . . that labor might regain its missing idealism”: the threat of automation, splits among union leaders over nuclear testing, and the demand by black activists for labor to take a clear stand for equal rights and to organize interracial unions in the South and elsewhere. The statement continued, “Either labor will continue to decline as a social force, or it must constitute itself as a mass political force demanding not only that society recognize its rights to organize but also a program going beyond desired labor legislation and welfare improvements.” SDSers were not in thrall to what C. Wright Mills called “the labor metaphysic,” the idea that only the proletariat could bring to birth a new world from the ruin of the old. But of organized labor’s significance, the statement left no doubt: “a new politics must include a revitalized labor movement.” At the time, not coincidentally, that not-so-vital movement was keeping SDS in business. The United Auto Workers and other unions were the main contributors to SDS’s modest budget, and the FDR Camp, where the meeting took place, was owned by the Michigan AFL-CIO. Moreover, as Nelson Lichtenstein pointed out in his biography of Walter Reuther, most of the program outlined at Port Huron was already the “common coin of the UAW leadership strata.”</em><br /><br /><em>THUS, LIKE socialists from Eugene Debs and Crystal Eastman to Norman Thomas and A. Philip Randolph, Hayden and his comrades understood the need to straddle the line between imagining a radically new society and improving the lives of the people who had to live in the deeply flawed old one. So it should not be startling to read in Hayden’s memoir that ”Immediately after the Port Huron convention, [SDS president]Al Haber and I drove to Washington to take our statement to the White House. We met there for an hour with Arthur Schlesinger [the historian and Kennedy advisor] . . . and he agreed to bring our views to the attention of the president. For the occasion, I wore a tie.”</em><br /><br /><em>Of course, early SDSers did break with some hallowed traditions on the American Left: they usually eschewed the socialist label and, most important, they followed the moral lead, the north star, of the black freedom movement. This was a clear break from the labor-centered vision and strategy of a social democracy created and led by white people. But, at the time the statement was written, progressive union stalwarts like Reuther and Jerry Wurf of AFSCME were, at worst, the uneasy allies of most civil rights organizers. And at best, labor liberals and civil rights activists could rock the nation together, as they showed at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom just fourteen months after the campers had returned to their colleges and urban enclaves.</em><br /><br /><em>And is it even necessary to point out that close to a majority of the participants at Port Huron were secular Jews? That demographic fact also represented a continuity with both the socialist and communist Lefts over the previous four decades. The association of radicalism with opposition to the First World War and the ensuing rupture in the Socialist Party had led, fairly rapidly, to the desertion of most of the white working-class Christians who had been the majority in the People’s Party, the pre-war SP, and the Industrial Workers of the World. Few of their grandchildren rushed to join SDS.</em><br /><br /><em>But Jews continued to be prominent in the white New Left out of all proportion to their numbers in the American population—just as they were in Marxist parties from the 1920s through the 1950s. Tom Hayden, Paul Potter, Jane Adams, Greg Calvert, and Diana Oughton, all of whom were raised as Christians, were outnumbered by the likes of Dick Flacks, Todd Gitlin, Paul Booth, Heather Booth, Paul Berman, Mark Rudd, Bernadine Dohrn, Robin Morgan, Abbie Hoffman, Karen Nussbaum, and Mike Klonsky—not to speak of middle-aged Jewish mentors such as Arnold Kaufmann, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky. This ethnic continuity may help explain why, after SDS imploded and disappeared, its more historically minded survivors found much to praise in the Old Left tradition they had once been so keen to bury.</em><br /><br /><em>One aspect of the old Marxism that Port Huron mercifully interred was its twin faith in the inevitability that world capitalism would collapse and that a free and equal order would surely arise from the rubble. Carl Oglesby, in a brilliant essay published in 1969, called this faith “almost a carrion-bird politics. Distant and above it all for the moment, the revolutionary cadre circles, awaiting the hour of his predestinated dinner.” The introduction to the Port Huron Statement replaced such grim delusions with the grim realism of the nuclear age: the next global conflict would destroy the human race, not liberate it.</em><br /><br /><em>The statement then moved briskly to propose a fresh, utopian alternative to the old vision of state socialism that had been smashed into dust six years earlier by Khruschev’s not-so-“secret” speech and then by the bloody suppression of Hungary’s revolt that he directed a few months later. SDS’s alternative was “participatory democracy.” As Jim Miller wrote insightfully, “p.d.” was, at its creation, a profoundly ambiguous idea that did not become any more coherent over time. “It pointed toward daring personal experiments and modest social reforms,” wrote Miller. “It implied a political revolution” but with a patriotic ring, evoking New England town meetings where neighbors debated and made the key decisions that affected their communities.</em><br /><br /><em>What appealed to most of the young people who began to use the term was not so homespun a tradition. It was the promise of participatory democracy to utterly transform the society of over-managed, bureaucratic, formally representative institutions they believed were stifling their independence of thought and action. That is why Mario Savio’s famous speech in 1964 on the steps of UC Berkeley’s Sproul Hall with his feverish plea to “put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels” of the “odious” machine became so emblematic and why consensus decision-making turned into the process of choice for many SDS chapters and then for the growing radical feminist movement as well.</em><br /><br /><em>The merits of participatory democracy, as an ideal and a practice, should be obvious. Only when “the people” stand up for themselves in their neighborhoods, their workplaces, and the streets of their cities will they learn how power works and how they can use it to advance their own interests. The Port Huron Statement went further, arguing, in one of its most famous lines that, “politics has the function of bringing people out of isolation and into community, thus being a necessary, though not sufficient, means of finding meaning in personal life.” Aided by this implicit promise of psychic benefits, the white New Left, at its zenith in the late 1960s and early 1970s, convinced several million Americans to engage in modes of civic life—ranging from teach-ins to civil disobedience to consciousness-raising groups to running wild in the streets—that were educational, exhilarating, and at times almost orgasmic.</em><br /><br /><em>However, participatory democracy was plagued by major blind spots, too. Claimed as the path to the good society, it had no answer to the question of what happens to the vast majority of citizens who have little or no taste for politics. Only an activist aflame with the impatient desire for a revolution could believe that the apolitical masses are a bunch of alienated, sad human beings who would welcome liberation by young zealots they have never met. Most people, after all, prefer to have their orgasms in private.</em><br /><br /><em>IT WAS also a serious mistake to equate democracy with participation in a social movement and to view all elected officials as either ineffectual cogs or corrupt parasites in an unjust system. The history of the American Left from the abolitionists to the civil rights movement proves that only when representative and participatory forms of democracy work together do egalitarian reforms succeed and political leaders emerge who can be held accountable to the will of their constituents. Tom Hayden recognized this himself in the mid-1970s when he took to wearing a tie on a daily basis in his new career as a progressive and often successful Democratic politician.</em><br /><br /><em>In 2011, we witnessed protests—from Tunisia to Madrid to Madison to Tel Aviv to Cairo to Moscow to Zuccotti Park—that were reminiscent of the kind of change the Port Huronites were advocating. Notwithstanding their vast differences, all these demonstrations sought to bring people out of isolation and into politics without requiring that they abandon their individual desires for the uncertain security of a hierarchical organization. Many of the protests were either organized by or helped to gestate mass movements. In the United States, the Occupiers took up the slogan, “This is what democracy looks like.”</em><br /><br /><em>UNFORTUNATELY, THAT is just a partial truth and one that contains the seeds of disillusionment, if not a movement’s decline. The New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier is skeptical about nearly every mass protest, yet he did recently ask a good question: “Why do demonstrators always confuse the quality of their own experience, their mystical moments of unity, with the condition of their country, with its progress?” Later in the 1960s, I was among the SDSers who imagined that our takeovers of campus buildings and our huge demonstrations in Washington, D.C., and other cities were the tip of a popular rebellion that would not stop with ending the war in Vietnam. In the 1970s, we discovered the need to identify and campaign for peace-minded politicians too. But by the time George McGovern was nominated for president in 1972, he was unable to mobilize the dwindling energies of the antiwar movement without being held captive to its popular image as a band of scruffy, violent anti-Americans.</em><br /><br /><em>Since most Americans were not about to become full-time political activists, it was natural for the writers of the Port Huron Statement to pin their hopes for a truly radical, fully democratic society on the only group whose members had the time, the vigor, and the inclination to dedicate their lives to bringing it about: college students of all races with a strong intellectual bent. Academia was “an overlooked seat of influence,” they argued, because of its “social relevance, the accessibility of knowledge, and internal openness. These together make the university a potential base and agency in a movement of social change.” The statement added that, to grow, the New Left would require a partnership between liberals and socialists; the university was “a more sensible place than a political party for these two traditions to begin to discuss their differences and look for political synthesis.”</em><br /><br /><em>Just a few years later, that last goal sounded naïve and outmoded, when opposing the war in Vietnam consumed most SDS activists. Since liberal presidents and their appointees had planned and carried out the assault on Indochina, “humanist liberals,” as Oglesby, then the president of SDS, called them in 1965, had to denounce that legacy or else become what he called “grudging apologists for the corporate state.” Soon, on campuses from Palo Alto and Kent, Ohio to Cambridge and Manhattan, SDS members were battling liberal administrators and forcing liberal professors to choose up sides. The grand synthesis of liberalism and radicalism was stillborn.</em><br /><br /><em>However, by the end of the sixties, the reigning culture at universities was beginning to undergo a rapid and, for young radicals, a most salutary change. The delegates at Port Huron had not anticipated this. Ironically, they lodged a critique of academic life that was as damning as anything Allan Bloom, the idol of neoconservativism, would say a quarter-century later. “The actual intellectual effect of the college experience,” they complained, “ is hardly distinguishable from that of any other communications channel—say a television set—passing on the stock truths of the day. Students leave college more ‘tolerant’ than when they arrived, but basically unchallenged in their values and political orientations.”</em><br /><br /><em>While young radicals did not overthrow the System, they certainly helped alter what passed for “stock truths” in every humanities discipline and in most of the social sciences as well. Alas, the “long march through the institutions” that German SDS leader Rudi Dutschke had called for, was, in the United States at least, more successful in colleges and universities than anywhere else. Ironically, the former student activists who went on to careers in academia did more to create a refuge from the nation’s rightward drift than a mass base for progressive social change. Last December, Kalle Lasn, the editor of Adbusters magazine who helped create Occupy Wall Street, declared, “Revolutions always start at universities.” Perhaps. But they can end there too.</em><br /><br /><em>The emphasis at Port Huron and after on the radical potential of the young also obscured an analytical flaw beneath the undeniable excitement of a generation on the move. The fact that the New Left heralded itself as a young Left was critical to its growth—and to its ultimate demise. Radical movements everywhere depend on the zealous energies of people who need little sleep and do not have to worry about the feeding, clothing, and sleep schedules of children. The average age of the Bolshevik leaders who took power in Petrograd in 1917 was all of twenty-six. But never before had an American Left made youth itself a badge of rebellion—or prided itself on breaking away from its older predecessors. Jack Weinberg, the Berkeley radical who coined the famous line—“We don’t trust anyone over 30”—meant it as a rebuttal to the charge that subversive adults were pulling the strings. But few people, inside or outside the Movement, got the joke.</em><br /><br /><em>The notion of a “revolution” made almost exclusively by the young was both brilliant and absurd. On the one hand, it expressed the self-confidence of activists from a generation that was both larger and better educated than any in U.S. history. College enrollment tripled during the 1960s to nearly ten million, and few students had experienced the privations of the Great Depression. For many Americans who believed that one can always remake one’s life, the plain-spoken brashness of young radicals was often appealing, even when they disagreed with the point of their protests.</em><br /><br /><em>Yet age has no intrinsic political merit, and the impatience of nearly all young radicals and the arrogance of some also led them astray. Contemptuous of liberals, they came to spurn the very idea of inter-class, interracial reform coalitions that was still a live option for the authors of the Port Huron statement. Disenchanted with old formulas for remaking American society, they gave little thought to devising new ones. For the antiwar militants who flooded into SDS after 1965, “participatory democracy” seemed too hazy and abstract both in meaning and application to guide a revolution. Frustration at the lack of an alternative led an aggressive minority in the movement to take up one variety of Leninist dogma or another, while other activists sought to refashion a liberalism cleansed of cold war hypocrisies. Neither project was successful.</em><br /><br /><em>So Port Huron’s “agenda for a generation” devolved, perhaps inevitably, into a set of stirring principles for an activist, mostly white minority of that generation. And by the end of the sixties, the visibility of the text itself had faded. Even as a much abridged pamphlet, the statement was not high on the reading list at most SDS chapters. The radical movement had grown much larger, as well as much angrier and prone to an ideological rigidity that had been refreshingly absent at the convention camp. The New Left Reader, a popular anthology edited by Carl Oglesby in 1969, included documents by everyone from Louis Althusser and Fidel Castro to Huey Newton and Mark Rudd—but not a word of the Port Huron Statement.</em><br /><br /><em>AND FOR all its capaciousness, Port Huron had nothing to say about three groups that would become major factors in American politics and culture by the end of the decade: environmentalists, feminists, and the New Right. It would be unfair to criticize the Port Huronites for failing to anticipate the coming of Earth Day or the emergence of the women’s liberation movement; Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring wasn’t published until the fall of 1962, and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique did not reach bookstores until half a year later. But the conservative Young Americans for Freedom had roughly 30,000 members in 1962. That March, YAF sponsored a rally that filled Madison Square Garden. In a text that devoted thousands of words to the shortcomings of liberalism, some attention might have been paid to what, even then, was its main opposition.</em><br /><br /><em>Still, what was produced at Port Huron has aged better than the apocalyptic, hypermilitant pronouncements that drew so much attention forty years ago yet elicit mostly puzzlement or derision today. “I liked both the longing for a total explanation and the uncertainty as to what it might be,” Todd Gitlin recalled about his first reading of the Statement. Indeed, for radicals, a little self-doubt is a valuable thing. In the class I teach about the 1960s, I show undergraduates a film clip of Mario Savio shouting on the steps of Sproul Hall on the Berkeley campus about throwing his body on the machine. Then I ask, “What was this man so angry about?” They haven’t got a clue, although his passion is rather compelling. Huey Newton’s talk of “revolutionary suicide” has, thankfully, no appeal at all. To young Americans who worked hard to elect Barack Obama in 2008 and have sympathized or taken part in Occupy events, the idea of building a movement to restructure the system instead of blowing the whole thing up just sounds like common sense.</em><br /><br /><em>BUT THEY need—we need—the utopian spirit of Port Huron as much we do its attention to posing practical solutions to the outrages committed by power elites at every level of society, in the United States and around the world. Fifty years ago, that band of twenty-somethings dared to imagine the making of a more decent, more humane as well as a more democratic society. “We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity,” they declared. That one sentence captured the larger ideal that animated many civil rights organizers as well as the feminist and gay insurgencies soon to come. These movements greatly expanded the scope of individual freedom in America: to work wherever one is qualified, to live anyplace one can afford, and to love and marry anyone who loves and wants to marry you—to an extent unimaginable at the time the statement was written.</em><br /><br /><em>Today, the international regime of freebooting capitalism has delivered neither material abundance, nor social harmony, nor security to most of the world’s people. Failed states, religious wars, environmental disaster, austerity in the face of poverty, clashes between immigrants and the native born are common features of current history, as they were in previous eras. But the perception that there is no alternative to chronic crisis but, somehow, to muddle through only exacerbates the problems.</em><br /><br /><em>At the end of his book about the Port Huron Statement, Jim Miller rhapsodized that “for anyone who joined in the search for a democracy of individual participation—and certainly for anyone who remembers the happiness and holds to the hopes that the quest itself aroused—the sense of what politics can mean will never be quite the same again.”</em><br /><br /><em>For those who believe in and work for beneficial and enduring change, such longings should never be dismissed as merely “utopian.” They are, instead, the very soul of realism—the only way to motivate large numbers of people to join and commit themselves to the lofty purposes of left-wing social movements. As the memorable coda of the Port Huron Statement put it, “If we appear to seek the unattainable . . . then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.” Future writers of manifestos could do worse than to begin right there.</em>
small press publication
Prisoners Solidarity Committee, September 17, 1971
Prisoner's Rights Movement
The Prisoners Solidarity Committee was organized in 1971 by the Workers World Party, a revolutionary Marxist organization made up mainly of white radicals, to provide outside help for the incarcerated after a prison uprising in Auburn, New York. Initially formed in New York, the PSC ultimately spread to other locations across the country, including Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee and Wilmington, Delaware. In addition to white leftists, the group also included relatives of prisoners and some ex-prisoners. The PSC sought to publicize the conditions inside U.S. prisons and advocate for reform.
The group also played a role in the Attica Prison uprising. This special newsletter on Attica includes articles on conditions inside the prison; prisoner demands; prisoners’ relatives; a meeting with community members; solidarity protests in other cities.
Prisoners Solidarity Committee
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
September 17, 1971
underground press
Revolution Revolution - Eldridge Cleaver for President
Black Power
In 1966, Detroit cultural radicals, Allen Van Newkirk, John Sinclair and Gary Grimshaw created Guerrilla, “a monthly newspaper of contemporary kulchur” and “weapon of cultural warfare.” The newspaper was a part of a larger project, the Detroit Artists Workshop, which was formed in 1964, “a local attempt in self-determination for artists of all disciplines.” Guerrilla mixed “humor, politics and music under the circus big top of surrealism and pop culture.” It was primarily a cultural review and included an international artistic perspective. Soon after its first issue appeared, Van Newkirk, who was an revolutionary anarchist with an antipathy for the hippie counterculture and slackers, split with the Detroit Artists Workshop and fired Sinclair, who was more aligned with the hippie counterculture. Despite their ideological and political differences, the two, in fact, continued to work together on Guerrilla, though Van Newkirk’s vision predominated. In subsequent issues, Van Newkirk included a series of oversized political posters, including this one.
The text on this poster reads: "A Rule Of Thumb Of Revolutionary Politics / Is That No Matter How Oppressive The Ruling Class May Be / No Matter How Impossible The Task Of Making / Revolution / May Seem / The Means Of Making That / Revolution / Are Always At Hand." At the center is information on a publication, Guerrilla with the quote "our purpose in entering the political arena / is to send the jackass back to the farm and the elephant back to the zoo." At the bottom is "Eldridge / Cleaver / For President / Minister of information/Black Panther Party".
Eldridge Cleaver was the controversial "Minister of Information" for the Black Panther Party. Cleaver, who edited the Black Panther Party newspaper, is credited with crafting a more radical and incendiary public rhetoric for the organization. His 1968 book, Soul On Ice, was a best-seller, simultaneously praised and condemned, and much-debated. Cleaver was the presidential candidate for the Peace & Freedom Party in 1968, earning .05% of the vote. Following a deadly altercation with Oakland police that same year, Cleaver fled the United States, first to Cuba, then to Algeria and ultimately France, before he returned to the United States in 1975. An ideological split between Cleaver and party co-founder, Huey Newton, led to Cleaver's ouster from the party. Following his exile, Eldridge Cleaver became a born-again Christian, dabbling in a variety of different denominations. He also participated in conservative politics through the Republican Party. Cleaver died in 1998.
Guerilla: Free Newspaper of the Streets
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
poster
Right On!
Black Panther Party
Right On! was published by the Revolutionary Peoples Communications Network and the Black Community News Service of the Black Panther Party. This issue includes articles about Attica Prison Rebellion; Eldridge Cleaver and Algeria; the murder of George Jackson; the aftermath of San Quentin; prison resistance by Afeni Shakur; the murder of Leroy King; police shoot-out in Detroit; slumlords; the Black Liberation Army; police repression against Black Panthers in New Jersey; political corruption in New Jersey; Black Liberation Army in Los Angeles; Free Food Program; welfare; prison and trial news; capitalism, dope and genocide; international acts; on Revolutionary Justice; voodoo in the black community; cartoons; poetry and the Ten-Point Program.
Black Community News Service
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
September 15-30, 1971
underground press
Ten-Point Program of the White Panther Party
White Anti-Racism
Founded in 1968 by Pun Plamondon, Leni Sinclair, and John Sinclair as a response to Huey P. Newton’s call for separate, white, anti-racist groups in support of the Black Panther Party, the White Panthers served as a countercultural group dedicated to "cultural revolution." The group was most active in Detroit, Michigan, and was connected with the porto-punk band, MC5. Though a white anti-racist organization, the White Panthers worked with a variety of other groups in what was known as the Rainbow Coalition.
The Red Star Sisters was the name given to women in the
White Panther Party. In a 1970 statement, the Red Star Sisters wrote, "The Red Star is a universal symbol of COMMUNEism, of living and working together, coming together, a symbol of righteous revolution and love for ALL of humanity. We, the sisters of the White Panther Party, take the Red Star as the symbol of our own liberation, and align I ourselves with all oppressed people on the planet."
This artifact includes the White Panther's adaptation of the Black Panther Party's famous Ten-Point Program.
White Panther Party and Red Star Sisters
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1970
mimeograph
leaflet
The Sun, October 1975
New Left
The Ann Arbor Sun was a newspaper founded by John Sinclair in November 1968 as a vehicle for the White Panther Party. In the 1970s, the newspaper transitioned into an independent publication covering local issues, left-wing politics, music, and arts. In 1975, the newspaper evolved into The Sun, which focused more on Detroit than Ann Arbor. Finally in 1976, publication was suspended indefinitely.
This issue includes articles on the state of the city; red-lining; overdoses; busing in Detroit; rent strikes in Ann Arbor; Police Athletic League; Angola; heroin industry and police; interview with Howard Kohn; Francis Ford Coppola interview; music and performance reviews; community calendar.
Ann Arbor Sun, Inc.
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
October 1975
newspaper
White Panther Party
Anti-Racist Movement
Founded in 1968 by Pun Plamondon, Leni Sinclair, and John Sinclair as a response to Huey P. Newton’s call for separate, white, anti-racist groups in support of the Black Panther Party, the White Panthers served as a countercultural group dedicated to "cultural revolution." The group was most active in Detroit, Michigan, and was connected with the porto-punk band, MC5. Though a white anti-racist organization, the White Panthers worked with a variety of other groups in what was known as the Rainbow Coalition.
White Panther Party
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1968
Button
Physical Object
White Panther Party "Ten-Point Program"
White Panther Party
Founded in 1968 by Pun Plamondon, Leni Sinclair, and John Sinclair as a response to Huey P. Newton’s call for separate, white, anti-racist groups in support of the Black Panther Party, the White Panthers served as a countercultural group dedicated to "cultural revolution." The group was most active in Detroit, Michigan, and was connected with the porto-punk band, MC5. Though a white anti-racist organization, the White Panthers worked with a variety of other groups in what was known as the Rainbow Coalition.
This "Ten-Point Program" is a variation of the Black Panther Party's original "Ten-Point Program."
White Panther Party
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
July 4, 1970
manifesto
Zimbabwe Liberation Day
Third World Liberation
This poster, promotes a Zimbabwe Liberation Day event in Pittsburgh, sponsored by the local chapter of the African Liberation Support Committee. According to the African Activist Archive, “The African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC), a black activist organization that supported Pan Africanism, was organized at a conference in September 1972 in Detroit, Michigan. ALSC grew out of the first African Liberation Day (ALD) on May 27, 1972 that drew some 60,000 demonstrators in cities across the U.S. and Canada. The first ALD grew out of a trip of a group of black activists to Mozambique's liberated areas in the summer of 1971. One of the activists on that trip was Owusu Sadaukai who, upon his return, convened a meeting in Greensboro, North Carolina that led to the first ALD demonstration, which was designed to show support for African liberation struggles. A second ALSC conference was held in 1974 and was attended by 51 local committees from 27 states and six countries. ALSC organized African Liberation Day each May, and in 1973 demonstrations were held in more than 30 cities with an estimated 100,000 participants. The 1973 African Liberation Day included a call to boycott Portuguese products and Gulf Oil because of its operation in Angola. By 1974 ideological conflicts and other factors including class and regional differences weakened the organization. Many of those who had been involved in ALSC went on to found or join other organizations supporting African struggles against colonialism and apartheid.” During the late-1970s, the United States and Soviet Union engaged in diplomatic maneuvers to discuss Cold War politics on the African continent, including Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia).
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. late-1970s
poster