A Sermon by the Rev. Melanie
Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist
Church of New Orleans
Sunday, August 12, 2012
In a funny scene in an even funnier movie, “The Big Lebowski,”
the iconic “Dude,” portrayed by Jeff Bridges, tries to impress a woman by
claiming to have been one of the authors of “the original Port Huron statement”
and disavows any connection to what he disparagingly calls “the compromised 2nd draft.” For millions of people, this is all
they know of the Port Huron Statement, which marked its 50th
anniversary in June. But I think
we should remember the Port Huron Statement, remember that it was brave and
prophetic and visionary, remember that despite its relative obscurity to the
general public, it had a far-reaching effect on justice movements that followed
it. Learning the story can be an
object lesson in how being effective in the long term can mean failing in the
short term – something I believe that we religious liberals need to be reminded
of from time to time.
It is difficult to look back now on the summer of 1962. It was an almost impossibly innocent
time, very different from today.
There was almost no campus unrest.
The only public protests were coming from disenfranchised African-Americans
in the South and these were not yet highly publicized. There had not been a political assassination of a national
figure in this country since the shooting death of Huey Long in Louisiana in 1935. The Cold War was raging, and many
people feared nuclear Armageddon was imminent. A proxy war was going on in a place called Vietnam, where
American troop levels had recently tripled, but the war had not yet escalated,
and American casualties had yet to become an issue. There was no second-wave feminism, no American Indian
movement, and no environmental movement (indeed, as shown on an episode of Mad
Men, at this time many families routinely abandoned their trash at picnic
sites). Gay, lesbian, and
transgender folks were deeply in the closet. For the most part, people, especially white people, felt
they could trust their government.
Most of it sounds almost comically foreign to today’s world.
And into this time of relative comfort, relative prosperity,
and relative apathy, came a group of fewer than 100 university students, most
of them white and middle class, for a convention at a run-down camp outside of
Detroit owned by the AFL-CIO. The
group had already undergone an evolution:
begun as the Student League for Industrial Democracy back in 1905, it
had been for generations the university arm of the organized labor
movement. In 1960, deciding that
the name and the overt labor connection were not conducive to recruiting new
members, a group at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor changed the name to
Students for a Democratic Society, SDS for short. A convention was called for June 1962 in Port Huron, Michigan, and students all over the country were invited.
To prime the pump, so to speak, a draft statement was written
before the convention by recent graduate and fledgling journalist (later SDS
president) Tom Hayden. He worked
on it from March until the convention began on June 11, citing diverse secular
and religious philosophers, including Pope John XXIII (hard to imagine any
so-called radical group today quoting a Catholic pope!), and drawing on the
concept of “participatory democracy” espoused by his philosophy professor at
Michigan, Arnold Kaufman. This
draft – hotly debated, edited, and revised – became what was released on the
convention’s last day. The copy I
downloaded from the Internet runs to 40 pages and over 25,000 words.
It is an interesting and idealistic,
if dated, document. In it, SDS
criticizes big business AND organized labor; economic inequality and lack of
jobs AND the arms race (for which it faults Russia and the United States
equally); the Republican Party AND the Democratic Party. It attacks racial discrimination and
the idea that America is always virtuous.
It calls for increased worker involvement in decisions about their
workplaces, and for an enlarged public sector with more protections for those
at the bottom of society. It
promotes participatory democracy, with real participation by real people, as a
solution to most of what it critiques about American society.
Presciently, the Port Huron Statement decries single-issue
politics, and declares that all the problems it cites – racism, militarism,
classism, colonialism, ethnocentrism, lack of jobs, corruption in big-city
politics, urban blight, political apathy, and so on – are interrelated, and
must be fought together. This
view of political and moral challenges being all-of-a-piece was definitely well
ahead of its time and presaged the UU principle of the interconnected web by
several years.
The statement was unabashedly spiritual in its focus, citing
a “disillusion” in American values when faced with the hypocrisy of the arms
race and the racial situation, and a “decline of hope” in the country, saying
that to be idealistic was considered “deluded.” The authors declare the country
to be in “stalemate” and its people “apathetic and manipulated,” living in a
pervasive climate of fear. They stared
down materialism, and ringingly declared (in the original exclusive language):
Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the
vast distance between man and man today.
These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by better personnel
management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a love of man overcomes the
idolatrous worship of things by man.
And this in a time when there weren‘t nearly the over-whelming
amount and ubiquity of “gadgets” in society as there are today. (Indeed, one even wonders exactly what gadgets
the young adults of 1962 could have been so concerned about.)
A page earlier, the authors wrote movingly, with
near-religious fervor (again in the exclusive language of its time), “We regard men as infinitely precious and
possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love.” A beautiful statement of faith in
humanity, completely unscientific and unprovable and thus clearly in the realm
of spirituality.
The Port Huron Statement went further and called for the arms
race to be supplanted by a “peace race,” and declared that the country’s
“principal goal should be creating a world where hunger, poverty, disease,
ignorance, violence, and exploitation are replaced…by abundance, reason, love,
and international cooperation” – propositions which they admitted would be seen
by “many” as “juvenile hallucination.”
But this also presaged another principle of Unitarian Universalism, that of “the goal
of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.”
The statement was ahead of its time
in other important ways as well, decrying the plight of America’s great cities
(which hadn’t even deteriorated in 1962 to the extent they have today), lack of
mental health facilities and adequate pub-lic hospitals (ditto), prisons as
“enforcers of misery,” the de-cline of American public education (this at a
time that many today consider a “golden age” of public schools), “institutions
and practices that stifle dissent,” and agricultural policies based on
scarcity. Who among us here today
would argue with any of these points?
And who doesn’t feel a certain frisson of disappointment that the points
and the suggestions made by the idealistic young people in the Port Huron
Statement were not more widely shared and implemented?
Our Children’s Story this morning,
adapted from one in “Tales for Little Rebels,” was first published in the early
part of the 20th century, 1912 to be exact. It speaks of someone imprisoned behind
walls, a place once comforting and nurturing, but growing to consciousness of
confinement and constriction, and finally having to break out of quietness and
apathy to break down the walls. The
young people of Students for a Democratic Society also came to consciousness of
confinement and constriction, in a time of quietness and apathy, and decided that
they too had to break down the walls.
It is not the place of this sermon
to defend what happened later inside the SDS, nor to offer an apology for any
actions taken in later years by disaffected former members. My purpose was to lift up the content
of the Port Huron Statement (to remember what it really said, and not what folks may think it said), and to
salute the authors and signers for their prescient assessment of important
political and moral issues, and their heart-felt endorsement of humanity with
peace, equality, justice, freedom, and participatory democracy for all. They were, at least for a time, on the
side of the angels. Their concerns
are our concerns (or ought to be); their commitment to true democratic
principles is our commitment; their religious faith in the potential of every
human person is also ours.
If I have piqued your interest, and
stimulated you to read the statement in full, and/or to watch the SDS segment
of the series on the 60s on the PBS website, or if this sermon just causes you
to rethink your opinions in some way, then I will feel I have accomplished some
small thing. And if this sermon inspires you to get involved in the participatory democracy movements and justice issues of our time, so much the better.
So dedicated were these brave young
prophets from Port Huron, now in their 70s, to collective action and
non-hierarchical relations that we know very few of their names. But we can still send out our grateful
thanks for their ideas, their idealism, their dedication, and their spiritual
grounding. Whether consciously or
not, the movements that followed them owe them no little debt, including the
Occupy movement of today.
Let us rededicate ourselves, as the
Port Huron Statement says, to “abolish squalor, terminate neglect, and establish
an environment for people to live in with dignity and creativeness.” May
this be so! AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM –
SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!
