Port Huron at Fifty: The New Left and Labor: An Interview with Kim Moody

This interview with Kim Moody, who was present at the Port Huron convention of 1962 as a twenty-two-year-old Johns Hopkins University student, illuminates the early history of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), especially the neglected labor-related portions of The Port Huron Statement of 1962, one of the most influential manifestos of the sixties radicalization. In a wide-ranging discussion on labor and the New Left, Moody explains the different views of labor represented at Port Huron, appraises individual thinkers such as Tom Hayden and C. Wright Mills, and explores topics such as the meaning of participatory democracy, the politics of labor in the 1960s, class relations in the civil rights movement, the SDS economic and research action projects, and the general relationship between organized labor and the New Left.