Tom Hayden Travels Back Into His Past

For some, this is where the ‘60s began.

To be sure, there was the Free Speech movement of Berkeley, and love power, and the misguided promise of freedom through drugs. There was the gunfire of assassinations, of riots in the ghettos, of war in Vietnam.

But before all this, there was Port Huron, and the “Port Huron Statement.”

Over the weekend, Tom Hayden returned here to the lakeside camp where he presented his treatise to 58 other discontented students a quarter of a century ago this month.

“We thought we’d change the world,” Hayden recalled.

The 64-page typewritten statement became the manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society, the SDS. It is as good a place as any to mark the start of the political unrest and intellectual rebellion that swept the colleges in the 1960s.

“This statement is one of the pivotal documents in post-war American history,” writes author James Miller in a sympathetic (and well-received) new biography of the era called “Democracy Is in the Streets.”

Of Hayden and the others, Miller writes: “They succeeded, against all odds, in catalyzing a Movement that attracted hundreds of thousands of converts throughout the Sixties.”

Some have figured the Port Huron Statement was the most widely circulated document of the leftist politics of its generation.

The opening sentence sets the tone: “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.”

Hayden, after a decade of struggling to grow out of his past, was now on a journey of rediscovery.

The Democratic California assemblyman from Santa Monica, and husband of actress Jane Fonda, is halfway through writing a book about his roller-coaster life. He is enjoying political confidence in Sacramento and Santa Monica. And, at 47, he is feeling his age.

During his visit, Hayden pursued his self-discovery across Michigan, to Port Huron, to his 30th high school reunion outside Detroit and to Ann Arbor and his alma mater, the University of Michigan.

“My parents are dead; I’m the head of the family; I’ve turned into middle age, and 1988 is upon us,” Hayden said, reflectively.

He stopped and worked out a calculation with pencil and paper.

“You know, I figure I’ve gotten up 10,000 mornings in a row trying to change the world. That’s a lot of work.”

Here, just north of the community of Port Huron, the world seemed within quick grasp of change in June, 1962--if only the right words could be put on paper. After all, the students told themselves, great documents had inspired great change throughout history.

The Port Huron Statement strived for these heights by demanding “participatory Democracy” in America.

A state park occupies what was then a camp operated by organized labor along a sandy beach beside Lake Huron. Gone are the buildings where the students from across the country met for four days to debate their manifesto.

No Markers

This day, a few families picnic. Otherwise, it is still. There are no markers.

“We left an uncertain legacy,” said Hayden, strolling down the beach and into a waterfront glade. “The concept of participatory Democracy has become embedded in a thousand places in our lives--the home, the workplace. But in the end, we succumbed to nihilism and despair. . . . We paid a price.

“We started by believing we were masters of our own destinies. That’s what knitted us together. We learned from bitter experience that we weren’t.

“We learned we couldn’t control our own lives. Our marriages broke up. We were sure of the contours and stability of our nation, and then a president was shot. We wanted civil rights and poverty put at the top of the agenda, and we got the Vietnam War.”

The SDS grew from dreamy liberal-New Leftism to violent Marxist radicalism over the years between 1962 and 1969. Mostly the organization is known, if it is known at all these days, for excesses such as the violence at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

More With Hope Than Rage

But Hayden and author Miller argue that the founding Port Huron Statement was filled more with hope than rage, and promised social refinement short of revolution. Its chapters included analyses of the economy, anti-communism, communism and foreign policy, discrimination and concluded with one titled, “Alternatives to Helplessness.”

“If we appear to seek the unattainable, as it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable,” the statement declared, self-consciously.

On the beach, Hayden wondered if anyone in Port Huron remembered.

In a five-and-dime, he bought a T-shirt that reads: “Port Huron Big Reds.” Nobody here got the joke. Hereabouts, Big Reds are not Communists, but the high school football team. Hayden was unrecognized.

In fact, only once all weekend did a stranger pick him out as someone famous.

“Say, aren’t you . . . er, John Updike?” the stranger asked.

Along the lake shore at the former camp, Hayden happened upon Gary Young, park ranger in the summer and a high school teacher the rest of the year. Yes, Young said, the Port Huron Statement is taught as part of the local history in a class called POD--Problems of Democracy.

But high school students today, Young confessed, are not all that interested. “They’re more reactionary; more conservative.”

Even college students do not come much any more. A decade ago, Young said, “You’d see them here. They wanted to have something to share with this Movement.”

Hayden talked expansively about his roots in the Midwest, his love for Lake Huron and especially this small glade. Offshore, he used to fish for perch with his father, who later shunned Hayden because of his politics.

“You have to imagine yourself writing a manuscript around the clock at a place like this, and the sun coming up over the lake. It was more of a chapel than a real chapel. It’s what the Indians called a Power Spot, where the natural elements come together and you can get a creative charge of energy,” Hayden said, his arms churning this way and that.

Weekend Reunion

Leaving Port Huron, Hayden traveled farther back in time, to the weekend reunion of his 1957 class of Dondero High School in Royal Oak, Mich.

From the look of things, Hayden was much the same kind of person then as now.

He edited the school newspaper and received honor grades. But his final editorial branded him a radical. It was eight paragraphs long. The first letter in each paragraph spelled out “GO TO HELL.” Such a scandalous deed cost Hayden membership in the National Honor Society and he was prohibited from attending graduation ceremonies.

The scandalous editorial was on proud display at the reunion, as was an underground newspaper Hayden helped produce. Its motto: “Tis a bright day that brings forth the adder.”

Unnerving Occasions

“He had a mind of his own,” 1957 Dondero High teacher Bob Coughlin said, chuckling.

Reunions, for those who have not attended them, are unnerving occasions at which judgment is rendered on who got fat, who got rich, who got what and went where.

Oddly enough, Hayden, who has bearded convention for more than a generation, was caught by the pressures.

He fretted and stalled before entering the reunion hall an hour and a half late, having summed up his standing to himself:

“I guess I’ve been to jail the most and married the woman with the most money.”