Excerpt from the "Port Huron Statement" (1962)

Source: Tom Hayden et al., Port Huron Statement, mimeographed. N.p., Students for a Democratic Society, 1962.

Commentary

The "Port Huron Statement," the earliest and best known of the political manifestos produced by the New Left during the 1960s, laid the philosophical groundwork for at least a part of the later resistance to the Vietnam War. The questioning of the world view that led the United States into Vietnam started to spread when students at the nation's elite universities, most of them middle-class beneficiaries of America's postwar prosperity, joined with a few intellectuals and social commentators to criticize the Cold War complacency that they believed had seized the American people. A handful of these students at the University of Michigan, led by Robert "Al" Haber, founded the Students for a Democratic Society. The SDS threw itself into organizing chapters...