Student organizer Tom Hayden admired C. Wright Mills's criticism of American society, but found little guidance about what to do next. Mills described the power of those at the top without giving Hayden a clear path to challenge them.[11] Hayden later used Mills's ideas to examine who held power at the University of Michigan.[12]
Mills was an American sociologist who studied how power was held and used. In 1948, he looked to labor unions as the base of a new left. As he grew more doubtful about union leaders, he asked whether young writers, scholars and students could open another route to change. Hayden belonged to the American New Left. The student organizing examined here drew on older socialist groups and the struggle for civil rights as well as on Mills's work.[2][4][7][9][12]
How did Mills's criticism become useful to students building that movement? The story begins with his hopes for labor in 1948 and follows students who used his work while challenging its limits. By 1963, Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, was calling for a “new insurgency.” It called for local organizing to give people a stronger voice in their workplaces, communities and government. Following that development shows how arguments about power became part of plans to build it.[1]
Mills begins with labor
In The New Men of Power, published in 1948, Mills looked to unions as the base of a new American left. He studied labor leaders: the people who could bring workers together, bargain with employers, and decide how union strength would be used. He wanted that strength used to challenge those who held wealth and power. Leaders who only made deals with powerful groups would leave the larger system intact.[2]
His study had begun in 1941. J. B. S. Hardman of the Inter-Union Institute helped shape his thinking about unions, and Helen Schneider helped study the polling responses. His case for labor grew from research and contact with people who knew the movement's work.[2]
Those hopes came with limits. Hardship would not produce a movement by itself. Poor workers might give up. Organizers had to explain why people shared problems, who was to blame, and how change could be won. Mills called for an alliance of workers, alert leaders and labor intellectuals. These were people who could use research and ideas to help unions. They would link daily grievances to the larger course of events.[2]
He wanted unions to reach people beyond their own ranks. They would also need allies among office workers and other middle-class groups. This meant building power from below instead of relying on deals at the top. Yet he doubted that current leaders would take on the task. His final page left unions at the center of the movement he sought, while questioning the men who ran them.[2]
Reaching beyond unions raised another problem: people who shared a place in the economy might have little sense of a common cause. In White Collar in 1951, Mills studied the growing world of salaried staff. Their numbers and role in offices did not make them a united force. They lacked the shared outlook and groups through which to act on their own. He also argued that the press and other media helped shape how they saw their lives.[3]
His doubts extended to unions themselves. In The Power Elite in 1956, Mills traced the power held by top business, military and government leaders. He saw unions as weaker than their public standing might suggest. Their leaders, he argued, mostly adjusted to events instead of setting their course. The movement he wanted still needed a force able to challenge those at the top.[4]
Writers and teachers had a role in helping people understand that problem. In The Sociological Imagination in 1959, Mills explained how troubles often treated as private failures could arise from wider conditions. Someone who could not find work, for example, needed to understand more than personal faults. The job market, public policy and access to power also mattered. Mills wanted teachers to help people connect private troubles to public issues and develop the ability to think and debate for themselves.[5][6]
Students learn through organizing
By 1960, students were finding ways to act through civil-rights campaigns and campus politics. Alan Haber worked through the Student League for Industrial Democracy, the student arm of the League for Industrial Democracy. Robert J. S. Ross later described its social-democratic heritage and the disputes that accompanied its turn toward activism.[7] Haber's 1962 letterhead still identified SDS as the League for Industrial Democracy's student department.[16]
Ross recalled entering this work through the 1960 sit-in movement. He joined picketers in Ann Arbor who backed the fight to open lunch counters to Black customers. After a local human-rights conference, Haber asked him and others to join the student group. Ross remembered long talks in which Haber made democracy the basis of his case for a new left. He was winning over people who had already begun to act.[7]
Campus politics offered another route. Ross recalled that Tom Hayden returned from Berkeley impressed by SLATE. This group took student government seriously as a place to work for change. At Michigan, Hayden helped start VOICE. Ross and Sharon Jeffrey then built it through elections and campaigns and linked it to SDS. They fought racial bias and rules through which the university controlled student life. This work helped them reach people beyond a small circle of radicals.[7]
Civil-rights work put such beliefs to a harder test. Speaking to the National Student Association in August 1960, Casey Hayden defended the sit-ins as a moral choice. She rejected the view that protesters were to blame when others attacked them. An unjust law could require peaceful defiance, even though the protester would have to accept the cost. To support equal rights meant deciding what to do when those rights were denied.[8]
Casey Hayden spoke of her own duty to stand with people who were treated unjustly. She also hoped commitment and action could change those who took part. Her speech presented protest as a way to become more fully human, even apart from its success in opening lunch counters.[8]
The picketing and recruitment Ross dated to spring 1960 preceded Mills's Letter to the New Left, which appeared in September-October. Students were already taking action before that appeal reached print. Hayden's later writing supplies the specific evidence of his use of Mills discussed below.[7][9][11][12]
Mills asks who can act
Mills addressed his letter to the British New Left after reading Out of Apathy.[9][20] He attacked the claim that the West's wealth had ended the need for a serious clash of ideas. He wanted criticism tied to demands and programs. His question was practical: who could bring about structural change? By this he meant changing how major bodies worked and who held power within them.[9]
He challenged the claim that industrial workers must lead that change. He called this a “labour metaphysic.” A hope drawn from certain times and places had become a rule that no longer needed proof. Mills still called for work with labor where it acted as a force for change. He wanted its role judged from the facts.[9]
Mills pointed to young writers, scholars and students taking action across the world. Their movements, he argued, might show where change could start. Writers should learn from their work and help give it direction. He called for study and joint work with these new forces. That did not mean that all of them shared one aim.[9]
The letter drew a direct American Marxist reply. In summer 1961, George Novack, writing as William F. Warde, disputed Mills's case in the International Socialist Review. Novack welcomed students' energy and saw grounds for joint action. But he rejected the idea that students or scholars could take the place of the working class. He argued that workers needed a revolutionary party to lead the fight for socialism.[10]
Novack's reply exposed a dispute over the place of student action. Mills wanted to learn from new movements; Novack insisted that workers and a revolutionary party remained essential to socialism. Welcoming student protest did not settle what political role it should have.[9][10]
Hayden turns criticism toward a program
Hayden also found a gap between Mills's criticism and a path to action. In A Letter to the New (Young) Left, he admired Mills's force as a writer but found no clear route out of defeat in his bleak outlook. A later reprint dates the essay to The Activist, Winter 1961. Hayden wanted a movement to explain what people could do about the power Mills described.[11]
Hayden wanted a way of thinking that kept asking why a problem existed and tested its answers against experience. He drew on John Dewey to explain this approach. He also stressed the gap between a target and a goal. Ending the House Un-American Activities Committee, for example, would not by itself remove the beliefs and interests behind attacks on dissent. A movement needed a view of the society it wanted and groups able to work toward it.[11]
This could range from forming a national student group to planning a different social order. Hayden called for drawing on adults in unions, colleges and politics. He expected years of work and modest gains. Anger at injustice was a start, but it needed lasting groups through which to act.[11]
Hayden also used Mills to teach students how to look at power on campus. In Decomposition of Democracy, he named Mills while discussing the gap between people's daily lives and the larger forces that shaped them. The Activist printed the speech excerpt in an issue cataloged as spring 1962. Hayden asked who held power at Michigan. What role did faculty have? How did research funds and outside interests affect what students learned?[12]
The university gave students a place to investigate those relationships. A rule governing student life could lead to questions about who made decisions and whose interests the school served. Hayden was using Mills's approach to turn familiar campus grievances into a study of power.[12]
Hayden also used Mills in preparing for the SDS convention. His March 19, 1962 notes on values quoted Mills on writers' and scholars' duty to speak and act in public. The same paper used Iris Murdoch's call for a theory that could link socialist ideals to the facts of social life. Hayden brought these views together for members to debate. They did not have to accept one writer's whole system.[13]
A companion paper, also dated March 19, explored “participatory democracy”: a society in which people had the chance and the skills to shape choices that affected their lives. This would apply at work as well as at the ballot box. Hayden also asked how it would differ from a mass movement led from above by a dictator. People could share a cause and feel part of a group while having little say over what it did.[14]
In considering how to judge democracy in developing countries, Hayden used Erich Fromm's May Man Prevail? He drew on Fromm's questions about freedom of speech, whom the economy served, and how much say a person had at work. Hayden found these tests useful but open to challenge. His papers brought several writers into a debate over the kind of democracy SDS should seek.[14]
Making Port Huron together
To agree on a statement, members had to exchange and revise these ideas. In a memo before the convention, Hayden asked SDS's executive committee and others to respond to his papers. He planned to copy and send out replies so members could learn from one another. His plan used correspondence and copied replies to build a shared discussion.[15]
The memo was direct about his aims. Hayden wanted to reach liberal students, make their views more radical, and bring them into action so that those views would last. He made the university the basic unit around which to build. It could be a place to debate, study, write and act. He also wanted to work within mainstream groups enough to gain influence, while keeping the freedom to criticize them.[15]
Haber was building contacts for that work. He wrote to people whose names came from a peace-education survey sent out by Harold Taylor and Norman Thomas. He sought joint work on courses, research and seminars. He urged people who wanted peace to enter local politics and plan for jobs beyond arms production. The letter invited them to meet from June 11 to 15, 1962, at the FDR Labor Center near Port Huron. There they would debate a manifesto, a statement of aims and plans.[16]
At the convention, members debated and revised the main draft Hayden had supplied. The final Port Huron Statement described itself as the result of months of writing and discussion, followed by changes at the meeting.[18][17]
They disagreed about its direction. Kim Moody later recalled arriving through civil-rights and peace work, with a growing interest in labor. At Port Huron he joined talks on the economy because he thought the draft gave labor too little space. He remembered Robb Burlage leading an effort to deepen its critique of capitalism. Moody also opposed the plan to change the Democratic Party from within.[17]
In Moody's account, the economics group sought a deeper critique of capitalism and more attention to labor. Moody did not claim to recall each sentence he helped add. His later account helps explain the disagreements; the final statement records the program members adopted.[17][18]
A campus base and allies beyond it
The agreed program made campuses part of a wider plan. They brought young people, knowledge and skills together in places spread across the country. Students and faculty could put public questions into courses and research. They could challenge those who ran their schools and build ties to groups beyond campus. Its authors wanted liberals and socialists to debate their views and find ways to join them.[18]
The aim went beyond a stronger student voice. The statement called for people to share in decisions about the economy's major resources and means of production, such as factories. These would be subject to democratic social regulation. Its authors wanted people to gain power over their working lives as well as government. They sought changes in who controlled resources and set public goals. How to make those changes remained open to debate.[18]
Labor remained central to the plan. The statement attacked the caution and top-down rule of union leaders. But it also recognized labor's role in improving American life and its place among the main forces in society. It sought a renewed movement, including union drives in the South. Campus groups would need to work with labor, civil-rights groups and other allies to gain power.[18]
One route was political realignment: changing the alliances within the party system. The statement urged support for Black voter registration and candidates in the South. It called for pressure on Democratic liberals and challenges to Southern Democrats who upheld segregation. In the cities, it called for reform clubs to fight the local party machines. This was a plan to break the conservative alliance that blocked the changes SDS sought.[18]
The statement's authors argued that campus organizing should serve struggles beyond the university. Students could bring research and recruits to wider struggles, while working with groups that had roots outside college. Its authors recognized that campuses alone could not sustain the movement they sought.[18]
SDS names the new insurgency
In America and the New Era, SDS asked how those wider struggles could gain strength. Its newspaper later dated the text to the June 1963 convention. The program attacked liberal groups for relying on lobbying and access to those in office while doing too little to organize people. Under the heading “The New Insurgency,” it proposed building local movements with power of their own.[19]
SDS described activists whom recent experiences were making more radical. In its account, civil-rights workers were linking racial oppression to wider economic problems. Peace activists were looking at domestic power, students were questioning university authority, and some trade unionists were seeking union reform. SDS saw these groups as possible bases for new local movements.[19]
The text described local activity already underway alongside efforts it said had barely begun. Voter drives and direct action could challenge officials and party machines. Study groups, journals and local research could help people understand the conditions they wanted to change. Union drives and organizing among poor residents would bring people into politics on their own behalf. The proposal joined learning to forms of collective action through which people could press their demands.[19]
SDS argued that new local groups could change the balance of power. Its criticism of lobbying was that access to leaders carried too little weight without an organized base. New groups pressing their own demands, it hoped, would put existing institutions under pressure. Labor might act as a force in its own right again, alongside middle-class groups seeking a wider democracy. The text linked change at home to a shift of funds away from arms and toward social needs.[19]
It also admitted how much was missing. Activists needed money and other resources, a sound grasp of the problems, and a program. The authors warned that the militancy of summer 1963 was bound to ebb and flow. The text moved between work it believed was taking shape and the larger movement it hoped to build. Its closing pages called for deep changes in the economy and politics. Work could begin within the current system, but the goals went further.[19]
Hayden's use of Mills shows how a reader could turn criticism toward a place where students could act. SDS's programs set campus work within a wider effort to build political power.[12][15][18] By 1963, its call for a new insurgency posed a practical test: could local organizing bring people into politics on their own behalf, with the resources to sustain their work? The authors said that resources, analysis and a political program still had to be developed.[19]