396 ChaPter^8
in the New Left version, the dominant class, the elite who were responsible
for the American class system and the Military-Industrial Complex. Liberals
did seek reform, but the changes they wanted would make society more stable,
and thus more profitable, and would prevent more “radical” changes from
taking place. Reform, in the New Left version, came often from the top down.
It was, thus, the liberals who were the barrier to democracy and reform, not
the agents of it.Creating a New Democracy
In 1964, students at the University of California in Berkeley went to battle
against the administration. They had a tradition of putting up tables outside
the administration building and giving out information about various political
groups or issues, from left to right. But the administration finally tired of the
political atmosphere and decided to shut it down. The students, however,
protested, even surrounding a campus police car which was there to force the
students out. A graduate student, a working-class kid from Pittsburgh, Mario
Savio, became a national figure when he took a microphone and urged the
students to stand fast. His eloquent words spread to campuses all over, and
helped create a movement. “There is a time when the operation of the
machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take
part; you can’t even passively take part,” he said, “and you’ve got to put your
bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the
apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the
people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the
machine will be prevented from working at all!” This gave rise to the Free
Speech Movement, a desire by students and youth especially to be heard, to have
their criticisms of American politics and society be taken seriously and even
acted out.
Others had already been doing such work. No group took ideas like these
to heart as much as SDS, or the Students for a Democratic Society. In June
1962, a group of students and other activists [many of whom had gotten
involved in the Civil Rights Movement already] met in Port Huron, Michigan
to establish SDS and publish the now-famous Port Huron Statement, which
became something of a rallying cry and description of politics for a new soci-
ety. “We are people of this generation bred it at least modest comfort, housed