New Agenda for A Generation?: Patty Hearst and The Port Huron Statement

The staged reading at the Blackbird Theatre of Barton Bund's new musical about the events surrounding the 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a revolutionary group, which justified its acts of violence against others on the grounds that such means were necessary to change an unjust and oppressive American society, has triggered a chain of memories.

I suspect many locals, some of you listeners and readers of a2ethics.org, who lived in Ann Arbor and in SE Michigan during the 60s, recall local events, people and places during that decade and into the early 70s, when Patty became news. These events, people and places call on us to remember some of the very issues and concerns her kidnapping and her subsequent recruitment into the Symbionese Liberation cause and some of its goals: economic, racial and gender justice, cultural freedoms and participatory democracy.

To get into the proper frame of mind, you might consider taking this brief tour of 60s Ann Arbor before you go to see the musical, which is being read on January 23rd and 24th at the Blackbird Theatre (Note: Barton Bund is a2ethics.org Web Director. He is also the co-founder and Artistic Director of the Blackbird Theatre. Please go to www.blackbirdtheatre.org if you are interested in purchasing tickets to the staged reading.):

1. The two houses on Hill Street where John and Leni Sinclair, along with Pun Plamondon and fellow members of The White Panther Party lived. The Sinclairs and Plamondon started the White Panther Party, the anti-racist, political collective, whose central activity was to promote a cultural revolution that favored "rock n' roll, dope, sex in the streets and the abolishing of capitalism."

2. The West Side band shell where the music of the MC5, Sinclair's famous ambassadors of revolutionary rock 'n roll, still reverberates with their rallying cry, "Kick Out The Jams, Motherfuckers!"

And then, it might be equally worth your while to take a road trip to Port Huron, in Michigan's thumb country. Why? Because that is where twelve years before, several Michigan college students and activists (about 60), convened at the United Auto Workers conference center to write what became known as the Port Huron Statement. The Port Huron Statement is its own rallying cry and a manifesto for a new generation of what they themselves wanted to be called, the New Left.

What does The Port Huron Statement have to do with taking the time to revisit the period and some of the local places leading up to the Patty Hearst incident?

There are at least two reasons I can think of. Hearing the words of the statement again, as you can by listening to our podcast, the first in our Great Ethics Documents Project, I think you will begin to appreciate the sense of idealism that marked the era and the great hopefulness that became contagious for everyone in the early 60s. (Click to: www.a2ethics.org/node/516).

Second, you will appreciate the enthusiasm for manifestos and documents, early mission statements I think that have become part of the DNA of every organization on the planet, and in particular have been co-opted by the very corporations the activists were trying to transform through revolutionary action. And indeed, The Port Huron Statement itself was issued as a response to an earlier manifesto, The Sharon Statement, adopted two years before by the Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative group championed by Russell Kirk and William Buckley, Jr. It, too, was suffused with a sense of idealism and great hopefulness.

Likewise, the Symbionese Liberation Army had its own manifesto.

Then what went wrong? How did the movement created to advocate nonviolent consensus decision-making and participatory democracy give rise to the violent approaches., frustration and anger of a group like the Symbionese Liberation Army?

By 1974, The Port Huron Statement, which had launched a new organization called Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) numbering over 350 chapters on campuses across the nation, had disbanded. The New Left was no longer new, and it had splintered into many factions and rogue groups, who called themselves new leftists, but who did not live up to the ideals promoted by the Statement or their own manifestos.

A new hopefulness has dawned in America. It is a different time to be sure. Some have argued the new generation and its agenda, the agenda of the students and other activists who have elected Barack Obama, will no doubt, serve to get us, "outta the woods, outta the dark and outta the night..."

And I can't wait until inaugural day, and this new dawn.

The Port Huron Statement, the Sharon Statement, and yes even the Symbionese Liberation Army State/meant, remind us that agendas for a generation are inspiring and noble.

But given what we now know has happened over the last 4 decades, are we prepared to write any more agendas for a generation?