Luke Morris

                                                                                                                        4/17/2002

                                                                                                                        History 105

                                                                                                                        Dr. Birzer

 

Student Activism in the 1960s

 

            After the relative political complacency of the 1950s, college students in the 1960s took part in an outburst of political activism throughout the United States, as they formed campus organizations for the purpose of influencing social and political change.  Since students from various philosophical backgrounds involved themselves, though, the groups they created acted on very different premises about the nature of society and government.  Among these college organizations, William F. Buckley’s conservative Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) and Tom Hayden’s socially liberal Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) became two of the more influential student coalitions in the early part of the decade. Although the members of both of these associations saw something wrong with their world, they supported radically opposite ideas about the nature of society and government.  M. Stanton Evans of the YAF, for instance, in the Sharon Statement of 1960, conveyed the members’ common beliefs in free markets, limited government, and the rights of the individual.  On the other side, Hayden and the SDS published the Port Huron Statement two years later, in which they expressed a collective, generational desire for democratic rule in all aspects of economic, political, and social life.  Thus, while the members of the YAF believed in the traditional republican view that individuals possessed certain rights that they expressed best in a community, the SDS members held the belief that the community defined the individual, and the majority should therefore rule over him.

            As a declaration of classical liberal rights and traditional republican values, the Sharon Statement presented the basic principle of the political conservatives of the day: that the individual’s rights stem from his freedom to choose from different courses of action, and he consequently expresses such rights optimally in the context of a community.  As the Statement says, “foremost among the transcendent values is the individual’s use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force” (Reader 539).  Hence, the individual joins society or forms a community to protect himself from such unjust coercion, since, as John Locke wrote, “Men . . . enter into society . . . the better to preserve himself, his liberty and property” (Reader 87).  Economic freedom thus becomes indispensable to political freedom, for when one’s property or social interactions become restricted, the country embarks on the road to tyranny.  The YAF therefore supported the free market economy, not only as the most productive economic system, but also as the only one consistent with the conditions of a free society, under a government that limited itself to the protection of life, liberty, and property.  As the Sharon Statement explains, “the purposes of government are to protect those freedoms . . . [and] when government ventures beyond these rightful functions, it accumulates power which tends to diminish liberty” (Reader 539).  Since liberty is essential to man’s expression of his rights through the use of his free will, he must take responsibility for his own actions, and remain cautious of the authority that he delegates to his protective agency.  Calvin Coolidge warned America in 1924, that, “If we permit some one to come and support us, we can not prevent some one from coming to govern us.  If we are too weak to take charge of our own morality, we shall not be strong enough to take charge of our own liberty” (Reader 428).  In other words, if we allow government to move beyond its proper sphere, which is the protection of individuals from unlawful force, and permit it to intrude into the economic transactions and social lives of individuals, we will eventually have to completely surrender our freedoms and submit to despotism.

Whereas the Young Americans for Freedom believed that an individual expressed his rights best within community, the Students for a Democratic Society viewed community rather as the central force, and the political world as the sphere that defined an individual’s life.  Stemming from this thought, the SDS promoted the idea of ‘participatory democracy’ – the proposal that a vote of the people should determine the response to all social issues.  The Port Huron Statement, accordingly, demands that, “decision-making of basic social consequence be carried on by public groupings” (Reader 541).  In other words, majority rule should determine all public aspects of society, as well as society’s relationship to the individual.  The document follows up this assertion by implying that participatory democracy can create solutions, not only to public issues, but also to such private problems as ‘personal alienation’.  The Statement thereby argues that, “the political order should serve to clarify problems in a way instrumental to their solution . . . channels should be commonly available to relate men to knowledge and power so that private problems . . . are formulated as general issues” (Reader 541).  Such thinking about the interconnectedness of man and the state goes back to the French Revolution and the French National Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man, which promoted the idea that “the source of all sovereignty resides in the nation.  No body, no individual can exercise authority that does not explicitly proceed from it” (Reader 131).  Lorenzo Dow expounded on this thought in America in 1814, as he wrote, “every generation of men have [sic] as good a right to govern itself as the generation that preceded it, by the same rule that every man is born equal in right with his contemporary” (Reader 177), meaning that the whole generation of men, and one’s equality with his peers therein, is the primary arbiter of society and governmental policy.  The Port Huron Statement restated this line of thinking by focusing on the young generation of the day as the culmination of political thought, viewing the people of that generation as a collective consciousness that wanted to create something new, a political and social system better than anything that went before it.  Such generation-based thinking diminishes the individual by submitting him to egalitarian authority, and thereby attacks the concept of free will and self-determination.  The SDS, consequently, put society above man, and, adapting political ideas from the progressives, endorsed majority rule as the supreme principle of society.  As Teddy Roosevelt once wrote, “The object of government is the welfare of the people.  The material progress and prosperity of a nation are desirable chiefly so far as they lead to the moral and material welfare of all good citizens” (Reader 378).  According to this view, the individual exists in order to serve the majority, and therefore the ideas of privacy and personal responsibility are inconsequential, since the only judgment one may make of an action is whether or not it is for the good of ‘all’.  The application of this philosophy requires the placement of the economy – and hence all those working therein, along with all accompanying social institutions – under governmental control.  As the Port Huron Statement says, the economy “should be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation” (Reader 541), since men who act according to their own best interests and the law of supply and demand will not necessarily act in accordance with the will of the majority, unless the government forces them to do so.

            College students of the Sixties were clearly important spokesmen in the national political scene, as their conflicting viewpoints reawakened the American struggle between those who believed in individual liberty, private virtue, and government’s properly restricted role, and those who advocated the primacy of community, the moral superiority of the new generation, and the unlimited rule of the majority.  The Young Americans for Freedom stated the case for individual rights and limited government, specifying not only the actions one should take in a free society, such as free trade in the market economy, but also those protective measures to which the people should constrain the government’s focus.  Conversely, the Students for a Democratic Society argued for generational supremacy and the submission of the individual to ‘participatory democracy’ in all aspects of life.  Though the Port Huron Statement only covers what should be done in society, and gives no specifics to who might put its program into practice, it implies that government, under majority rule, should take control and provide a political structure for the social, economic, and even private matters of the individual’s life.