Patriots’ Day, 1975, dawned cold and wet in Concord, Massachusetts, with morning lows in the thirties and a chilling rain. Even so, as many as 45,000 hardy souls occupied a knoll near the North Bridge, where Minutemen had clashed with British regulars 200 years earlier, firing the shot heard around the world. Assembled by the Peoples Bicentennial Commission (PBC), a New Left group, for what was billed as the largest economic rally since the Great Depression, the crowd seemed familiar, in many ways, to journalist Andrew Kopkind, known for his sympathetic coverage of the student and anti–Vietnam War movements. Like the stereotypical activists of yore, the demonstrators massed in Concord wore denim and surplus jackets and coats. Their hair was long. They carried homemade placards bearing New Left-y slogans such as “Economic Democracy.” They listened to much of the same music that had soundtracked the iconic gatherings of the past: Early-morning performances by folk musicians Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie got the crowd on its feet and ready to jeer President Gerald Ford, who was due to arrive soon.Footnote ²

But the Concord protestors were remarkable in at least one respect: Rather than denouncing “Amerika” or flying the colors of the United States’ adversary in Southeast Asia, the Viet Cong, these “new patriots,” as they styled themselves, waved flags associated with the American Revolution, such as the yellow Gadsden flag featuring a coiled rattlesnake and the motto, “Don’t Tread on Me,” and the red, white, and, blue Bennington flag that included thirteen stars arranged in a semi-circle around the numbers “76” in reference to the historic events of 1776. Their banners and posters read “Long Live the American Revolution,” “The Spirit of ’76 Lives,” and “Send a Message to Wall St.” They paid homage to the United States’ founders Sam Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Abigail Adams, as opposed to Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, and other third-world leaders. And they assented to a version of the Declaration of Independence that adapted the liberal principles of the 1776 original to the economic realities of the 1970s, as the PBC understood them.Footnote ³

The Concord gathering reflected the ambitions of the PBC, a nonprofit public foundation established in the fall of 1971 to stage an alternative to the official “Tory” commemoration of the nation’s 200th anniversary led by the federal government and big business. Headed by Jeremy Rifkin, an anti–Vietnam War activist, the PBC pursued a red, white, and, blue brand of protest that paired the ideas of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) with the theatrics of the Yippies, the members of the Youth International Party (YIP) led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, to highlight the revolutionary memory of the American Revolutionary in hopes of reclaiming patriotism from the right, galvanizing the New Left, and reshaping the United States. According to David Helvarg, the group’s West Coast coordinator, the PBC was “a little Tom Paine and a little Abbie Hoffman.” It aimed, Helvarg said, to “reclaim the flag for dissent, to reclaim the American Revolution for revolutionaries.”Footnote ⁴ The group sought to make left-wing protest patriotic again.

To judge by the crowd massed in Concord, the PBC had grown into a potent force in just three and a half years. Its populist call for economic democracy resonated in April 1975, when many Americans felt buffeted by forces beyond their control, with inflation above 10 percent and joblessness at 8.8 percent, the highest rate recorded since the end of World War II. The crowd was prepared to heckle when President Ford appeared as scheduled just across the Concord River—on the “British” side of the river, where Redcoats had massed in 1775, PBC spokespersons gleefully noted. “Recall Ford.” “Live free or die.” “Jobs not speeches,” they cried as he began his Patriots’ Day address.Footnote ⁵

* * *

The Peoples Bicentennial Commission is little remembered today. Too radical for some, not radical enough for others, the group has not fared well in accounts of the 1970s when it has fared at all. Kopkind set the tone. Suspicious of the PBC’s overt displays of patriotism, unpersuaded that the group represented anything more than a pale imitation of the late great New Left organizations of the past, the radical journalist referred to the commission as a “rabble without a cause.” Historians ever since have generally seen the PBC as a temporary diversion, an anachronistic vestige of the New Left that failed to leave a lasting mark on the seventies, a transformative decade that saw the nation move to the right, both culturally and politically. As one writer put it, the PBC represented “the last gasp of 1960s-style political activism”—an end, rather than a beginning.Footnote ⁶

There was no questioning the PBC’s impact, however, at the moment it burst onto the national scene in the summer of 1972. Its rapid ascent occurred when the Washington Post published a series of articles based on leaked records the PBC had obtained from a disgruntled employee of the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission (ARBC), the federal agency established in 1966 to plan and coordinate events commemorating the nation’s 200th anniversary. Known as the “Bicentennial Papers,” the files indicated that the ARBC was attempting to politicize the country’s landmark anniversary. To the surprise of some, President Richard Nixon, upon assuming office in 1969, had accepted pro forma resignation letters submitted by the preexisting commissioners, a generally distinguished, nonpartisan mix of Democrats, Republicans, and expert advisors. Nixon proceeded to make his own appointments, with the result that by 1972 the ARBC commission consisted, according to the Post, of “a lackluster lot of Republican Party contributors, very middle-aged, very white and top heavy with corporate conservatives.”Footnote ⁷

These included the commission’s chair, David J. Mahoney, a self-described “drinking and football buddy” of Nixon’s who had contributed to Nixon’s 1968 election effort. Mahoney, chief executive officer of Norton Simon Inc., owner of Max Factor cosmetics, Hunt-Wesson foods, and other major consumer brands, had handpicked a fellow business executive, Jack Levant, to serve as the commission’s director, and together, the Post reported, they were attempting to exploit the national holiday for partisan political purposes. The Bicentennial Papers included a memorandum ARBC director Levant had written to Mahoney. Marked “Confidential—Eyes Only,” the memo said that the 1976 commemoration “could be the greatest opportunity Nixon, the party and the Government has as a beacon of light for reunification within the nation and the world.” Mahoney, the memo continued, needed to exercise full and complete authority to ensure that the president’s wishes were carried out.Footnote ⁸

The papers also suggested that Nixon’s ARBC was busy selling off the “Buy-centennial,” as the PBC called it, to the highest bidders. Federal officials were in talks with firms to produce all manner of commemorative kitsch, from sparkling new red, white, and, blue Mack Trucks to special Hallmark cards and Baskin-Robbins ice cream flavors like “Betsy Ross Twirl” and “George Washington Cherry Tree.” Even a line of toilet seats bearing the official bicentennial logo was in the works.Footnote ⁹

The Bicentennial Papers caused an uproar, especially as their publication coincided with reports that some of the men who in June had been caught burglarizing the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) at Washington’s Watergate complex had ties to the Nixon White House. Former DNC Chair Lawrence O’Brien, whose offices had been burgled, decried the misuse of the nation’s birthday: “The continuing revelations about the commercial and political uses of the American Bicentennial by the Nixon administration are a source of deep distress to American citizens of all persuasions.”Footnote ¹⁰

Levant resigned in August. Mahoney left his post later that year. And in 1973 Congress replaced the ARBC with a new federal agency, the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration (ARBA), that was tasked with depoliticizing and decentralizing the national commemoration to place greater emphasis on local communities, voluntary groups, and grassroots organizations. Henceforth, the bicentennial would be “a hometown affair,” organizers said, working to “bring dissidents as well as neighbors and friends together in common purpose.”Footnote ¹¹

With the federal agency in disarray, the Peoples Bicentennial Commission, the ragtag outfit behind the papers’ release, emerged as the nation’s foremost bicentennial authority. Founded in 1971, the PBC was an outgrowth of the New Left, specifically the New American Movement (NAM). One of many groups that emerged to assume leadership of the left following the collapse of SDS, which had splintered into competing factions at its last national convention in 1969, NAM aimed to grow into a mass organization that appealed to radicals and non-radicals alike.Footnote ¹²

A big-tent organization, NAM welcomed members from many corners of the left. According to the left-wing newspaper The Guardian, the group mostly included former SDSers who did not feel comfortable in the Weather Underground or the other more radical sects and factions into which SDS had divided. But NAM also welcomed antiwar activists, representatives of the old Marxist–Leninist left, and “a strong ‘Americanist’ contingent that wants to emphasize the American revolutionary tradition to the exclusion of all things ‘foreign’ (such as Marxism, or solidarity with third-world liberation struggles).”Footnote ¹³

Although The Guardian did not name names, the latter was in all likelihood a reference to a delegation led by John Rossen, an Old Leftist who had broken with the Communist Party to pursue a “New Patriotic Movement,” and Jeremy Rifkin, a twenty-six-year-old Chicagoan. Despite his youth, Rifkin had achieved some renown as coordinator for the National Committee for a Citizens Commission of Inquiry (CCI), a public interest group founded in 1969 to investigate possible war crimes committed by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. The CCI, whose governing committee included the former general secretary of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, Ralph Schoeman, and academic luminaries such as Noam Chomsky and Eugene Genovese, disbanded two years later, at which point Rifkin landed at NAM, attending the group’s first national meeting, held in Chicago in October 1971.Footnote ¹⁴

Rifkin first proposed the idea that grew into the PBC within a NAM framework. In a 1971 statement published in NAM’s newsletter, he argued that the upcoming bicentennial commemoration offered a unique forum for revolutionary forces, as he called them, to gain mass media attention and expose the general public to radical views. Reactionary elements, he noted, had already begun mobilizing for the anniversary. The ARBC, aided by big business, had launched a coordinated “propaganda campaign” expressly to celebrate the American experience. Official bicentennial programming, he predicted, would ignore America’s revolutionary heritage of challenging oppression and instead reinforce “the reactionary beliefs that reinforce the capitalist system and its political institutions.”Footnote ¹⁵

Leftists had to counter with bicentennial programming of their own, Rifkin argued; otherwise, they risked finding themselves even more isolated than they already were and at greater risk of being targeted by “chauvinist appeals.” If radicals took the offensive, though, with bicentennial programming that recalled the revolutionary legacy of 1776, they could “move millions of people in a revolutionary direction.” As such, he encouraged local NAM chapters to form “Peoples Bicentennial Commissions” to monitor the commemorative activities of local officials, publish anniversary materials, and sponsor events “with a peoples Bicentennial motif.”Footnote ¹⁶

If the PBC originated within the New Left, it also stood apart from the movement in at least one important respect. The student movement, Rifkin explained in a grant application to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), began in hopes of getting American institutions to live up to the nation’s founding principles. For example, the text that had initiated the New Left’s early years, SDS’s 1962 Port Huron Statement, referred optimistically to the Declaration of Independence’s liberating claim that all are created equal. Ten years later, those words rang hollow in the wake of political killings, urban unrest, and the tragedy of Vietnam—and in the face of continuing racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination, despite strenuous attempts to remedy them. Disillusioned, frustrated with the slow pace of change, many lost faith in the American experiment, convinced, as Rifkin put it, that the persistent “gap between performance and principle was attributable to the [fundamentally] hypocritical, deceitful, dishonest, and evil character of … political leaders, the American people, and, by association, American history and ideology.” Some dismissed American patriotism as a smokescreen for imperialism or an excuse to squelch dissent. Others, in the words of historians Michael Kazin and Joseph McCartin, embraced a “passionate anti-Americanism,” looking abroad to Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, and other revolutionary leaders in an effort to bring the war home to “the imperialist mother country.”Footnote ¹⁷

From Rifkin’s perspective, the New Left’s radicalization, though explicable, had disastrous cultural and political consequences. When protestors waved Viet Cong flags or denounced “Amerika” as a fascist country, they made it easy for opponents to condemn them as un-American. Activists’ “non-American style and rhetoric,” he wrote in 1971, had turned the left into a “perfect target for the forces of reaction.”Footnote ¹⁸

Hailing foreign leaders also alienated the left from the majority of Americans. Rifkin wrote, “The left movement’s character has become increasingly strange and at times even frightening to many Americans. Most people perceive little or nothing in common with the New Left.” Conservatives monopolized the flag as a result. “By the late 1960s,” write Kazin and McCartin, “Americanism had become virtually the exclusive property of the cultural and political right.”Footnote ¹⁹

As a remedy, Rifkin proposed to forge a “Red, White, and Blue Left” that embraced the United States’ revolutionary heritage. The American Revolution, as many historians were busily pointing out in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was not all that revolutionary in many respects: It did not end slavery, eliminate gender inequality, or halt the displacement of Native Americans. But it did unleash a constellation of democratic principles—human equality; unalienable rights; and government of the people, by the people, and for the people, as expressed in the Declaration—that together formed what Rifkin called “the revolutionary aspect of the American experience.” These aspirations remained vital 200 years later, for they continued to hold power to account. Without them, Rifkin argued, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for critics, leftists included, to point out the country’s shortcomings—and demand change in the name of national improvement. Radicals, he argued, must therefore discard their self-imposed ideological isolation and rededicate themselves to a “new patriotism,” one that called for allegiance to the “revolutionary democratic principles” that already had launched one revolution—and might launch another two centuries later.Footnote ²⁰

With these goals in mind, Rifkin announced, in October 1971, the existence of the Peoples Bicentennial Commission. Formed separate and apart from the NAM, the PBC sought to offset the government- and corporate-backed bicentennial celebrations that were likely to end in an irrelevant orgy of commercialized excess. “Our feeling is that people are really not too interested in plastic Liberty Bells and giant national birthday cakes,” Rifkin told the Washington Post. Instead, the PBC, with a small staff headquartered in Washington, DC, and chapters spread across the country, aimed to recall the revolutionary memory of America’s origins, one emphasizing that the American Revolution was more than just a fight for independence; it sparked an ongoing battle for democratization as well. “We intend to rekindle the true revolutionary spirit of ’76,” Rifkin said.Footnote ²¹

This goal entailed honoring America’s homegrown revolutionary heroes, who, it turned out, “included some far-out agitators too,” the Post noted. These included Thomas Paine, the corset maker’s son who spoke for the propertyless underclass; Benjamin Rush, a “leftwinger” who signed the Declaration of Independence; and Sam Adams, who helped arrange America’s first guerrilla theater, the Boston Tea Party. They also included Lucy Stone, a pioneering nineteenth-century women’s rights activist; abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison; barn-burning populists such as William Jennings Bryan; civil rights legend W. E. B. DuBois; and socialist Eugene Debs, who was imprisoned in the early twentieth century for speaking out against war. These historical figures deserved attention, Rifkin insisted, because each in their own way had attempted to improve the human condition in the face of unwarranted concentrations of power.Footnote ²²

The PBC prepared pamphlets and newsletters and books and radio and television programming to school audiences in the revolutionary lessons of American history. Voices of the American Revolution, a 1974 book, included quotations from the nation’s founding fathers and mothers addressing major issues of importance in a democracy—from the role of banks and corporations to women’s rights, foreign affairs, press freedoms, taxes, and other subjects. One chapter began with the words of Benjamin Rush, who in 1787 wrote that, while the American War of Independence was over, the American Revolution was only just beginning. A monthly magazine, Common Sense, borrowed from Thomas Paine’s eighteenth-century pamphlet to encourage readers to rise up against “economic royalists,” “corporate monarchs,” and other twentieth-century aristocrats.Footnote ²³

And the commission planned headline-grabbing protests on the 200th anniversaries of major Revolutionary-era events, from the Boston Tea Party and the battles of Lexington and Concord to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In this regard, the PBC mimicked the Yippies, known for using street theater and performance art to protest the Vietnam War and demand social change. According to PBC co-director Ted Howard, the group took a “dramatic and theatrical approach” to problems. PBCers aimed to be “provocative.”Footnote ²⁴

History was at the core of the PBC project to resuscitate the New Left. (The Bancroft Award–winner Page Smith acted as the PBC’s historical advisor, contributing articles to the group’s magazine, Common Sense, on African Americans, labor, and the American Revolution.) Patriotic appeals to the nation’s revolutionary heritage could certainly build bridges with mainstream Americans, those outside the struggle who, Rifkin said, were appalled by the left’s embrace of foreign revolutionaries. But deeper knowledge of the United States’ revolutionary history could also strengthen the New Left itself, which after years of civil rights action, antiwar protests, and campus takeovers faced significant headwinds as the 1970s opened. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen had shot and killed four unarmed Kent State University students protesting the expansion of the Vietnam War into neighboring Cambodia. Two more died at Jackson State University days later when Mississippi police fired into a crowd of Black students. The shootings prompted demonstrations across the country. According to one count, more than 4 million students staged protests at 1,350 colleges and universities across the country. But those protests were overshadowed by the backlash they prompted, including in New York City’s Lower Manhattan, where student demonstrators were assaulted by steamfitters, ironworkers, plumbers, and other construction workers, some of whom displayed American flags or chanted “U–S–A. All the way!”Footnote ²⁵

For New Leftists, historians Maurice Isserman and Michel Kazin later remarked, 1970 marked the “beginning of the ebb,” a tidal change as significant as the summer of 1968, when Jerry Rubin, SDS leader Tom Hayden, and six others were indicted for disrupting the Chicago Democratic Convention. Wrapping protest in the American flag, Jeremy Rifkin argued, offered a viable path forward in such a hostile environment where the left faced stiff opposition, including from the White House, where President Nixon’s aides welcomed the Hard Hat Riot as a positive development in the administration’s effort to combat dissidents. “These, quite candidly, are our people now,” special assistant Patrick Buchanan wrote of working-class noncollege whites in a memo to the president. White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman wrote in his diary, “The college demonstrators have overplayed their hands, evidence is the blue-collar group rising up against them, and [the] president can mobilize them.”Footnote ²⁶

From the PBC’s perspective, draping demands for economic and political justice in the mantle of Americanism made sense in this context, armoring radicals against both physical and ideological attack—just as appeals to American principles had helped advance the struggle for civil rights. Invoking the rhetoric of the American Revolution served constructive purposes as well, building bridges with Middle Americans even as leftists gained a renewed sense of vigor and purpose. Studying the United States’ revolutionary past, including the deeds of working-class heroes such as Thomas Paine, would help develop a common identity among twentieth-century radicals, working to unite the fractured New Left and give it the necessary confidence to move forth in challenging times. “We cannot build a contemporary revolution without an acute awareness of ourselves as a people, as citizens of a nation born in revolution,” Rifkin wrote.Footnote ²⁷

There was, in his view, no better alternative. “I don’t see anything positive in burning the American flag,” Rifkin told the Washington Post.Footnote ²⁸

* * *

The Peoples Bicentennial Commission fired the first volley of the American Revolution’s 200th anniversary in Boston, a hub of commemorative activity due to the city’s rich Revolutionary history. On Sunday, December 16, 1973, an estimated 15,000–20,000 people braved heavy snow to gather at Boston Harbor for ceremonies marking the bicentennial of the Boston Tea Party. Official proceedings, organized by the city of Boston and sponsored by Salada Tea, began as expected: Historical reenactors boarded Beaver II, a freshly refurbished replica of one of the Tea Party ships, and dumped crates of ersatz tea into the harbor.Footnote ²⁹

But events went off script when a phalanx of PBC marchers arrived. They had paraded from Faneuil Hall, retracing the path the Sons of Liberty had taken on their way to the wharf 200 years earlier (Figure 1). Chanting “Nixon, Exxon, ITT, drive the tyrants in the sea!” they seized the Beaver and unfurled banners over its side that read “Impeach Nixon,” “Turn the Heat on the Oil Cos.,” and “Heed the People. Tax the Rich. Jail the Tyrant.” Backed by a “people’s navy” of canoes and rowboats, demonstrators also dumped empty oil drums overboard to protest rising energy prices and the growing power of the world’s oil giants—the twentieth-century equivalents of the East India Company, the PBC said, whose unfair practices had sparked 1773’s tea action.Footnote ³⁰

Figure 1.

Peoples Bicentennial Commission marchers near Boston’s Faneuil Hall, Dec. 16, 1973.

Source: Spencer Grant/Getty Images.

Figure 1. Long description

A large crowd of Peoples Bicentennial Commission marchers near Boston’s Faneuil Hall, holding various signs and banners, on December 16, 1973. The signs include messages such as ‘Impeach Nixon,’ ‘Make the oil companies pay,’ ‘No taxation without representation,’ and ‘Long live the American revolution.’ The crowd is gathered closely together, with many individuals wearing winter clothing and hats. The atmosphere appears to be one of protest and advocacy, with a sense of historical significance as the marchers retrace the path of the Sons of Liberty.

History appeared to be on the PBC’s side. Consumer frustration with big oil and other “corporate monarchs,” as the PBC called them, was mounting. Sunday, December 16, 1973, was the nation’s third gasless Sunday since President Nixon had called for a nationwide prohibition on sales of gasoline on Sundays to reduce energy consumption in the wake of an oil embargo that Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had imposed in October against the United States for its support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Compliance with Sunday closures remained voluntary, and the oil crisis would not reach its nadir until early 1974. But consumers were already feeling the ill effects of the crisis in dwindling fuel supplies, lengthening lines at the pump, and rising prices for gasoline and home heating oil that pushed inflation to a then-record 8.7 percent. “The customers are fit to be tied,” said Richard Radoian, owner of an Exxon station in Teaneck, New Jersey.Footnote ³¹

Opposition to Nixon was growing as well. Two months earlier, on October 20, Nixon had ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had subpoenaed recordings of the president’s White House conservations, which contained evidence of Nixon’s attempted cover-up of his administration’s ties to the DNC break-in. When Richardson refused to obey Nixon’s order and resigned in protest, the president had turned to Richardson’s deputy, William Ruckelshaus, who also refused and resigned, before finding a third Justice Department official, Solicitor General Robert Bork, who was willing to fire Cox. Widely seen as a blatant abuse of presidential power and an attempt to obstruct justice, the “Saturday Night Massacre,” as the purge was known, marked a turning point in the evolving Watergate scandal. Telegrams poured into the White House and congressional offices criticizing Nixon’s actions. For the first time, a plurality of Americans supported his removal from office. The U.S. House of Representatives initiated formal impeachment proceedings on October 30.Footnote ³²

These were times that tried men’s souls, the Boston Globe, paraphrasing Thomas Paine, opined in a December 1973 editorial. Titled “The Boston Tea Party…and this Generation,” the editorial asked, “Are we again today not made indignant by the abuse of power, violations of oaths of office, indifference to the public good, undermining of the people’s confidence?” Mistakes were one thing, the Globe continued. Leaders were fallible, after all. But elected officeholders who disserved the public interest were intolerable in the twentieth century no less than the eighteenth. “Our generation, too, has to act on democratic—and Constitutional—principles in the face of arrogant use of power.”Footnote ³³

Bostonians took out their ire on a five-foot-high papier-mâché Nixon head that a man, a PBC prankster, wore as he paraded through the tea party assemblage in a deliberate attempt to provoke a reaction. As “King Richard,” crowned with gold and adorned with corporate logos, waved to the crowd, mocking the president’s signature “V for Victory” gesture, boos and catcalls and snowballs rained down on him. “Down with the king!” voices yelled.Footnote ³⁴

The “Boston Oil Party,” as the press dubbed it, left officials disappointed. Their “first anguished attempt to make something—anything—out of one of America’s most meaningful historic events,” the Washington Post noted, had been effectively hijacked by a bunch of protestors. Peoples Bicentennial Commission leaders, on the other hand, were ecstatic. The tea party experience—the ease with which they had drawn a crowd and controlled the narrative—demonstrated the viability of their patriotic approach. As Ted Howard put it, the Boston event acted as “a reaffirmation of a past struggle that had been waged throughout our history, and was still unfolding in the America of the 1970s.” The events that occurred at Boston Harbor in 1973 comprised “a truly American scene,” he added, as American as anything that had happened 200 years earlier at that same location.Footnote ³⁵

Forty-five thousand PBC patriots occupied the knoll in Concord sixteen months later. Though the oil crisis of 1973–1974 was over by Patriots’ Day, 1975, the U.S. economy was in worse shape than it had been when the PBC assembled in Boston. The “misery index,” a new statistic introduced by economists in the 1970s to gauge the real-world pain inflicted by unemployment and inflation, stood at a near-record 19.01 in April 1975. To judge by the crowd assembled in Concord, many Americans continued to feel wracked by vast economic forces. Yellow Gadsden flags fluttered in the breeze, as did banners and posters reading “Lay off profits, not people,” “Send a Message to Wall St.,” and “Democracy for the Economy.” Effigies of corporate giants—ITT, Exxon, and General Motors—hung from ancient oaks.Footnote ³⁶

Richard Nixon no longer occupied the Oval Office. Faced with almost certain removal from office after the House Judiciary Committee’s adoption of articles of impeachment, he had resigned in August 1974. Gerald Ford, Nixon’s sixty-one-year-old vice president, assumed office the next day. Ford attempted to move beyond Watergate. “My fellow Americans,” he remarked upon taking the oath of office, “our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men.”Footnote ³⁷

Watergate resisted easy closure, though. Among Ford’s first major acts as president was to grant Nixon an unconditional pardon for all offenses he had committed or “may have committed” while in office. Pardoning Nixon served the country’s interests, Ford claimed. Any trial or other legal actions Nixon might face for obstructing justice, abusing power, or holding Congress in contempt were likely to be prolonged, with no clear end in sight, during which time the nightmare of Watergate would have continued, polarizing society and challenging the credibility of the nation’s governing institutions. Ford said it was time to move on: “My conscience tells me it is my duty, not merely to proclaim domestic tranquility but to use every means that I have to insure it.”Footnote ³⁸

Ford’s decision, though, prompted a major backlash. Ford’s hasty pardon, critics alleged, allowed Nixon to escape justice. It also fueled speculation that Ford, as vice president, had agreed to a secret deal with Nixon to trade the presidency for a pardon. These charges were never fully substantiated. But they irreparably harmed Ford’s standing. His approval rating plummeted from 71 percent to 49 percent, the biggest drop ever measured. Suddenly, an ally said, Ford “was vulnerable. And he was vulnerable because he had pardoned Nixon.”Footnote ³⁹

Distrust of the executive branch deepened. “Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years,” read a December 22, 1974, New York Times headline. Although the news article itself did not implicate Ford directly—the misdeeds the Times documented occurred before he assumed office—the paper’s claim that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had conducted, under previous administrations, “a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation” against antiwar protestors, civil rights activists, and other dissident groups subjected the presidency to closer scrutiny. Congress opened investigations of the CIA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other portions of the U.S. intelligence community—inquiries that continued to unfold as Ford arrived in Concord to deliver his Patriots’ Day address.Footnote ⁴⁰

“Recall Ford.” “Don’t tread on me.” “Live free or die!” dissenters chanted as he droned on about the need for national reconciliation. Some booed the president, waved banners, or shouted obscenities. Others gave him the finger. About a dozen demonstrators, perhaps emboldened by a little beer or some pot, attempted to cross the Concord River, where they were promptly met by police, who made five arrests. Ford quickly wrapped up his remarks before hustling back to the safety of his motorcade. According to Newsweek, the band of protestors “gave Ford what was probably the worst public razzing of his presidency.”Footnote ⁴¹

To channel this energy in a positive direction, the PBC introduced, at Concord, a statement calling for a full-scale restructuring of economic power and wealth. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” began the statement, “A Declaration of Economic Independence.” All people are equal, the declaration continued, imitating the words of the Declaration of Independence, endowed with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To secure these rights, “economic institutions are instituted among people, deriving their just power from the consent of the citizens.” And when institutions become destructive of those ends, the people have a right to alter or abolish them, and to institute new ones, organized in such a way as to promote general welfare and happiness.Footnote ⁴²

Economic systems long established, the PBC’s declaration cautioned, should not be changed for light or transient reasons. But a long train of abuses and usurpations compelled the people to act. These facts, submitted to a candid world, included big corporations that had destroyed thousands of small businesses and forced millions of Americans to become wage laborers; monopolies that controlled major industries, requiring consumers to pay inflated prices for goods and services; and multinational corporations that had pushed millions of Americans into unemployment lines by systematically closing down their American plants and moving their operations abroad in search of higher profits. The end result was an undemocratic political economy in which the “absolute tyranny” of corporate power thwarted the will of the people.Footnote ⁴³

“We, therefore, the Citizens of the United States of America,” the declaration concluded, “hereby call for the abolition of these giant institutions of tyranny and the establishment of new economic enterprises … to provide for the [common good].” Specifically, the PBC called for the breakup of large corporations into “decentralized economic enterprises,” in which management and decision making was widely shared.Footnote ⁴⁴

The Declaration of Economic Independence had little hope of inspiring a radical uprising in the United States in the foreseeable future. But the PBC, in issuing the document, continued a long tradition of publishing alternative declarations of independence. This tradition, as chronicled by historian Philip Foner, a PBC supporter, adopted the words and principles of the original Declaration to push for economic equality and rights for working people. The custom began in the 1820s, by which time the Fourth of July had become fixed as a working-class day of celebration—a day of parades, banquets, and festivals, but also a day, Foner noted, “for renewing the Spirit of ’76, for dramatizing the demands of the working class, for rewriting the Declaration of Independence … to finish ‘the unfinished work’ of the American Revolution.”Footnote ⁴⁵

The practice of issuing alternative declarations gathered strength over the next century, with dozens published by socialists, trade unionists, and other labor groups, often on July Fourth. In the early twentieth century, though, the tradition abruptly ceased. For many radicals, frequently suppressed by the very same federal government that appealed to the principles of 1776, the Declaration rang hollow. Members of the Old Left often dismissed the American Revolution as a capitalist revolution, initiated and led by the bourgeoisie to benefit the elite at the expense of working people, who had been duped into supporting the contest by the founders’ talk of life, liberty, and happiness. According to Foner, only one alternative declaration appeared in the forty-plus years after 1933, and it was the product not of labor organizers but of African American activists who resolved to “disrupt the machinery of Oppression” in a country that, despite its founding principles, had brought their forebears to its shores in chains.Footnote ⁴⁶

The PBC’s declaration, then, represented a small but important step, for it reintroduced a rhetorical tool that American activists had used for almost 150 years to hold American leaders and institutions to account for the words and principles of 1776. To be sure, those words, drafted principally by Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder, did not apply to the 500,000 persons who were held in bondage in the thirteen states when independence was declared, nor to the millions of Native Americans who inhabited North America at the time. Nor did Jefferson specify what rights some 1.25 million women, roughly half the population, might enjoy in the newly independent nation. Yet the Declaration of Independence, as historian Pauline Maier has argued, set a “moral standard” to which not only workers and farmers but also women’s suffragists and civil rights leaders appealed time and again in the pursuit of liberty from their oppressors, be those would-be tyrants foreign (British kings) or domestic (homegrown enslavers). As the Philadelphia Trades’ Union put it in 1836, “While we remember that foreign tyranny found a limit in 1776, we yet hope that domestic oppression may find as stern and as successful a foe in the strong union of the working men.”Footnote ⁴⁷

And activists returned to the Declaration of Independence in the late twentieth century, author Staughton Lynd argued, because the Declaration, despite its many shortcomings, represents America’s single most concentrated expression of radical thought. “For almost 200 years all kinds of American radicals have traced their intellectual origins to the Declaration of Independence and to the Revolution it justified,” Lynd wrote. “They have stubbornly refused to surrender the memory of the American Revolution to liberalism or reaction, insisting that only radicalism could make real the rhetoric of 1776.”Footnote ⁴⁸

* * *

The PBC had made its mark by the United States’ bicentennial year. It had mustered 45,000 new patriots in Concord. It had dumped big oil in Boston. It had defeated the “Tory” ARBC in 1972, and in the eyes of many it continued to outwit the ARBA still. “With a strong sense of theater and a nose for clever mischief,” the group, Robert Reinhold of the New York Times wrote in January 1976, “has usurped a good piece of the Bicentennial action, appropriating such symbols of old-fashioned patriotism as the three-cornered hat, the musket and the ‘don’t tread on me’ snake as its own—leaving the government and business holding the red-white-and-blue plastic place mats and the nightly television trivia.”Footnote ⁴⁹

In only four short years, the PBC had grown from a small staff of about a dozen people headquartered in a rented office in Washington, DC, into a sizable organization that boasted more than seventy chapters and 20,000 paid members from every state in the union. Some 924 radio stations aired the commission’s radio series, “The Voices of ’76,” on a daily basis. Over 100 television stations carried its public service announcements offering alternative interpretations of U.S. history. The group’s ambitious book program had scored successes with major publishers, such as Bantam Books and Simon and Schuster.Footnote ⁵⁰

According to PBC reports, thousands of libraries, churches, fraternal clubs, schools, and civic associations were using educational materials and programs prepared by the PBC. The Camp Fire Girls and the National Council of Churches endorsed the group’s activities. “There is no question in my mind that these are sincere folks,” said Rev. Everett Francis of the National Council of Churches. “I would call them Declaration of Independence fundamentalists.”Footnote ⁵¹

The PBC even had evidence to suggest that its larger message was resonating. In late 1975, pollster Peter Hart released the results of a national survey examining the economic outlook of more than 1,200 Americans. Commissioned by the PBC, the poll showed that 84 percent of respondents gave business low marks when it came to keeping living costs low. Almost two-thirds believed that there was a big-business conspiracy to set prices as high as possible. And 58 percent thought that America’s major corporations exerted too much political power, determining the actions of public officials in Washington.Footnote ⁵²

Critics questioned the data, arguing that the PBC tailored the poll’s questions to suit its agenda. But the numbers were telling. According to the survey, 66 percent of those interviewed thought that the PBC’s proposed solution—employee ownership and management of companies—made sense. Only 25 percent felt that employee ownership would do more harm than good. Furthermore, Hart found that a plurality, 41 percent, wanted “major” changes to make the system work for working people—not just the wealthy few.Footnote ⁵³

To the PBC, the results affirmed not only its work but that of the New Left. According to PBC co-director Sheila Rollins, they showed that “thirteen years after a fledgling SDS issued the celebrated Port Huron Statement, a majority of the American public are voting their approval by calling for a participatory democratic economy,” to include employee control of companies, public ownership of oil and natural resources, and consumer representation on corporate boards. Support for such measures was strong, given the stubbornly high rate of inflation, which remained at 9.72 percent when the poll was taken in July 1975. Even the Wall Street Journal conceded that “anti-business feelings [ran] high”—and not just among progressives.Footnote ⁵⁴

Business leaders took notice. In 1975, Arch N. Booth, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, called the PBC “the most serious and effective anti-big business force in the last quarter century.”Footnote ⁵⁵

* * *

The reaction, though slow in coming, was fierce. It began in the aftermath of Concord, where critics said the PBC’s disorderly behavior had ruined what should have been a dignified historical commemoration. Concord, wrote Howard Flieger, executive editor of U.S. News and World Report, was less a protest than “a rumble by a bunch of juvenile delinquents.”Footnote ⁵⁶

The backlash strengthened in late 1975, when Ronald Reagan claimed that the PBC was fomenting dissension on the taxpayer’s dime. Pointing to the $7,210 startup grant the commission had received from the NEH years earlier, the former California governor said that PBC radicals were using the funds to “twist” the nation’s milestone birthday for revolutionary purposes. “So much for U.S. history,” Reagan quipped.Footnote ⁵⁷

And the assault arrived in force in March 1976, when the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) held hearings on the PBC’s alleged attempt to “steal” the nation’s bicentennial. The SISS was not as fearsome as it once had been. A vestige of the early Cold War, the subcommittee was authorized in 1951 to investigate subversive activities in the United States, broadly defined to include alleged espionage, sabotage, and disruption by persons, organizations, or movements that were working under the control of “the world Communist movement or … seeking to overthrow the Government of the United States by force and violence.” But the subcommittee, the Senate equivalent of the House Un-American Activities Committee, had used its broad powers to investigate subversive activities, both real and imagined, for decades. And it remained fully capable of making accusations that could damage reputations and ruin careers.Footnote ⁵⁸

Senator James O. Eastland (D-MS), the subcommittee’s longtime chair, set the tone in his opening statement of March 17. The Peoples Bicentennial Commission was not what it claimed to be. It was not a patriotic society committed to the country’s welfare. Rather, said Eastland, a well-known red-baiter with a track record of using accusations of communism to smear civil rights activists and silence political opponents, the PBC was an extremist group hatched in the sinister recesses of the international communist conspiracy to destroy American society. He intended to use hearings to “peel back the patriotic veneer” of the PBC and show the American people the ugly truth behind the façade.Footnote ⁵⁹

Over two days, the subcommittee heard from two witnesses: Frank M. Watson Jr., a retired Army officer with a master’s degree in journalism who had worked in the field of media analysis; and Mary Walton, an Illinoisan who had served on a state advisory council on student radicalism. Each detailed how the PBC, in their view, obscured its true purpose. Frank Watson claimed in his testimony that the PBC had attempted to cover up its New Left origins. In public, the commission spoke of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush and the bicentennial as an opportunity to advance economic democracy and other reforms. In private with other radicals, though, PBC leaders spoke of Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh, and the 200th anniversary as a “tactical weapon” to foment a contemporary revolution in the United States.Footnote ⁶⁰

The hearings focused less on Jeremy Rifkin than John Rossen, the onetime Communist Party member who had participated with Rifkin in the New American Movement. Rifkin, the witnesses alleged, was just a figurehead; Rossen was the real force behind the PBC. It was Rossen, they stated, who had originated the PBC’s core concept of using American nationalism for Marxist ends. As an example, the witnesses pointed to an open letter to the American left issued by the Johnny Appleseed Movement for Peace and Human Rights, a Chicago-based group led by Rossen. Published in 1969, the letter stated that the road to socialism in the United States could open “only as an unfolding of the unique history and the unique experiences of the American nation, as a further development and flowering of the great American Revolution of 1776.” The goal, as another Johnny Appleseed publication put it, was to “Radicalize Americans by Americanizing radicalism.”Footnote ⁶¹

Rossen refined the concept of revolutionary nationalism in The New Patriot, a newspaper he published. Then, guessing that his communist past might draw unwanted attention, he supposedly gave the blueprint—“lock, stock, and barrel,” Mary Walton said—to Rifkin, a younger colleague with a shorter left-wing record. Rifkin slapped a new label on the organization and moved it from Chicago to Washington. As evidence, Frank Watson produced a photograph of Rossen and Rifkin sitting side-by-side at an Illinois PBC meeting. The two men, he added, had co-edited a 1973 anthology, How to Commit Revolution American Style, in which Rifkin had repeated his call for a “Red, White, and Blue Left.” Rossen “designed the whole thing,” Watson testified.Footnote ⁶²

Rossen, moreover, supposedly remained in charge in 1976, pulling strings behind the scenes. “John Rossen is very obviously in command,” Mary Walton testified. Rifkin served only as the PBC’s public face.Footnote ⁶³

Regardless of who was in the driver’s seat, the PBC’s patriotic masquerade had succeeded, investigators found, enabling the commission to reach well beyond the radical left and connect with Middle Americans. This was precisely what made the PBC so dangerous. “Cloaked with patriotic trappings,” the PBC, Mary Walton said, was “diabolically using the commemoration of our Nation’s birth … to ensnare Americans and lead them down the path to a Soviet or Castro style socialism.” Champions of the PBC were gaining converts with their all-American rhetoric. Indeed, the group had found “a fresh way to identity with the American people.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Frank Watson had attended PBC meetings in Champaign–Urbana, Illinois, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, as part of his intelligence-gathering effort. He was surprised to find that attendees seemed, well, normal, hailing from almost every state in the Midwest: Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Nebraska, Missouri, Minnesota, and Iowa, as well as Illinois and Michigan. They came from all walks of life as well. “The attendees,” he testified, “were a mix of people running from rather radical-looking students on the campus to middle-aged and middle-class businessmen and housewives, … librarians, teachers, people like that.”Footnote ⁶⁵

The PBC, he continued, had probably “set some new sort of record.” It had succeeded in “attracting large numbers of people who [otherwise] might not feel comfortable relating directly to a radical organization.” Were it not for its patriotic claims, he said, many of the organization’s supporters “would not have touched it with the proverbial ten-foot pole.”Footnote ⁶⁶

In its final report, published in April 1976, Eastland’s subcommittee credited the PBC’s patriotic “camouflage” with giving the commission “a popular credibility a thousand times greater than anything it could expect to enjoy if it presented its objectives honestly to the American people.” Innocent people had been fooled, sometimes mistaking the PBC for the nation’s official bicentennial agency, so clever was the peoples commission in obscuring its true purpose. An elementary school teacher in Fort Dodge, Iowa, for example, wrote the ARBA to ask if “the Peoples Bicentennial Commission is another name for your group of coordinators, or if it is a separate organization.” According to Eastland, such evidence indicated that the PBC had effectively stolen the bicentennial. Despite its leftist origins, the peoples commission, the senator stated, “has been far more successful in reaching our churches, our schools, and our media than has the official Bicentennial organization, ARBA.”Footnote ⁶⁷

The SISS exaggerated for effect. Its portrait of John Rossen’s influence was wildly inflated, based largely on circumstantial evidence, as Rossen himself told the Chicago Tribune. He said his role in the PBC was limited to a seat on the Illinois chapter’s steering committee. He was not a member of the PBC’s national staff, headquartered in Washington, DC, nor did he have a hand in establishing the commission in the first place. For that matter, he had left the Communist Party long ago. He said, “I reject Marxism and Stalinism and Maoism. I have abandoned any ideas that were purely Marxist.” Claims to the contrary were “fairy tales of the Right.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Peoples Bicentennial Commission allies denounced the proceedings as a witch hunt reminiscent of the Joseph McCarthy era. Neither Rifkin nor anyone affiliated with the PBC was given an opportunity to appear before the subcommittee or to offer testimony in response. Rifkin assured the press that the PBC was not un-American, as the SISS report portrayed it to be. Rather, his organization was merely a critic of corporate tyranny that sought “to bring more democracy into the economic life of the country.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Nevertheless, the subcommittee’s findings triggered an anti-communist reaction that crossed party lines. In AFL-CIO News, columnist John P. Roche, a former advisor to President Lyndon B. Johnson, accused the PBC of “quite cunningly [disguising] anti-Americanism as Americanism.” The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers issued statements warning against the PBC’s Marxist attempt to stir up anti-business resentment. Paul Harvey, the radio commentator known for dispensing folksy wisdom and right-wing views, denounced the commission for sowing discord.Footnote ⁷⁰

National Review, the conservative journal edited by William F. Buckley Jr., likened the PBC to a covert operator. Operating under the guise of the bicentennial, the peoples commission was in fact a communist agent whose true purpose, the journal alleged, was to destroy the United States from within. Its push for economic democracy, for example, masked a drive to form “workers’ soviets” in America.Footnote ⁷¹

William A. Rusher, the National Review’s publisher, also questioned the PBC’s integrity. In the conservative journal Human Events, Rusher likened Rifkin and his comrades to “con men” who were attempting to trick Americans into thinking there were a patriotic group, when in actuality they were working feverishly to turn the nation’s landmark anniversary “into a Hate Business orgy.” With its talk of revolution, the PBC, Rusher noted, had already incited one “mob” to disrupt an official bicentennial proceeding in Concord the previous year. And now, he warned, the PBC was planning its “biggest and nastiest spasm” for the nation’s capital on July 4, 1976, when it hoped “a quarter of a million hippies, Maoists and assorted freak-outs will foregather to blot out all serious attempts to celebrate the day and observe it instead with a mass anti-capitalist demonstration.” Rusher urged readers to be on the lookout for this outfit as 1976 advanced, for it was aiming “to trash America’s birthday party.”Footnote ⁷²

* * *

July Fourth, 1976, did not go well for the Peoples Bicentennial Commission. Only 10,000–15,000 persons attended the group’s rally held near the U.S. Capitol, even though the event featured headliner speakers such as boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter and actress Jane Fonda and musicians Gil Scott-Heron, Don McLean, and Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary fame. Organizers expected as many as 250,000 to sign the commission’s Declaration of Economic Independence.Footnote ⁷³

A blame game ensued, with critics holding the PBC responsible for its own misfortune. They pointed to Campaign Corporate Exposure, a 1976 effort in which the PBC had addressed phone calls and letters to the wives of leading business executives urging them to self-investigate their husbands’ involvement in or awareness of corporate malfeasance. Thousands of administrative assistants who worked for Fortune 500 companies also received letters offering $25,000 cash rewards in exchange for information that led to the arrest, conviction, and imprisonment of a C-level executive for criminal activity. These invasive tactics accomplished little aside from seriously harming the PBC’s brand. A New York Times editorial stated that the group had “totally destroyed whatever credibility it had” by stooping “to that oldest of totalitarian subversions—the organizing of internal spy systems in family, business or community.” The appearance of Jane Fonda, or “Hanoi Jane,” as she was widely known following her 1972 visit to the Vietnamese capital, at the PBC’s July Fourth rally did little to improve the group’s image among members of the establishment.Footnote ⁷⁴

Jeremy Rifkin attributed the Independence Day shortfall to the right’s monthslong campaign to discredit the PBC—an effort that seemed designed to suppress attendance, especially insofar as it continued right up to the very eve of the Fourth. On June 18, 1976, the SISS held another set of bicentennial hearings, these focusing on the security threat to the peaceful observance of Independence Day allegedly posed by left-wing “terrorist groups,” as the presiding member, Senator Strom Thurmond (D-SC) called them. The SISS heard from several witnesses, including police officers, who voiced concern mainly about Philadelphia, where the Weather Underground’s aboveground faction, the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, was preparing a protest activity in league with Puerto Rican nationalists, Black Panther Party representatives, and other militants. But the potential for violence remained significant wherever people congregated in large numbers. According to Robert L. Rabe, deputy chief of the District of Columbia’s Metropolitan Police Department, “radical elements will be causing disruptions during the Bicentennial period of July 3 and 4 ranging from mass civil disobedience to multiple random bombings, all across the country, particularly in Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles.”Footnote ⁷⁵

There were other mitigating factors, including that the locus of bicentennial activity was not limited to the District but was decentralized to include places such as Philadelphia, where President Ford traveled to deliver Independence Day remarks. In any event, July 4, 1976, went down in history as a day when the “squares” won, as the conservative magazine The American Spectator put it. That is, a day on which patriotic Americans finally returned to their senses after years of listening to “the hippies, freaks, feminists, and far-our Left.”Footnote ⁷⁶

The PBC lost, it seemed, unable to attract a massive crowd on July Fourth, much less to restrain the “Buy-centennial.” American capitalism prevailed, and consumers found themselves awash in 1976 in a vast sea of commemorative products from plates, mugs, and glassware decaled with a bald eagle or the likeness of George Washington, to belt buckles, pins, and T-shirts emblazoned with the Liberty Bell or the American flag. “There’s nothing wrong with making a buck,” said Robert Williams, executive secretary of the New York chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution. “Free enterprise is the thing that has made this country go zowee.”Footnote ⁷⁷

That view, though, minimizes the significance of a group that, at its best, held the patriotic high ground. While wrapping itself in the flag ultimately afforded little protection from right-wing attack, the commission’s rapid growth into an organization of 20,000 members—fewer than SDS, which boasted as many as 100,000, but more than many New Left groups combined—demonstrated the possibilities (and perils) of a red, white, and, blue left. And the ferocity of the attack, when it did come, only spoke to the organizing power of the American revolutionary tradition. The PBC, former member Bob Leonard recalled, inspired an emotional response from the right precisely because the commission was “encroaching on the right wing’s emotional” center with its patriotic claim to represent the interests of true Americans. Opponents used the means at their disposal, including intimidation and red-baiting, to defend a core political value.Footnote ⁷⁸

The 200th anniversary of the American Revolution was truer to the United States’ revolutionary roots due to the PBC, which worked for more than four years to offset official bicentennial programming. The Peoples Bicentennial Commission, as much as any organization, including the federal ARBA, shaped public dialogue about the legacy of the American Revolution and how to commemorate it in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate age. The result, writes historian Christopher Capozzola, was a relatively reflective commemoration appropriate for ambivalent times.Footnote ⁷⁹

Moreover, the PBC’s populist call for economic democracy, though yet unmet, worked to extend the radical spirit of the 1960s. As co-director Sheila Rollins noted, the results of the 1975 Hart poll, commissioned by the PBC, showed that support for “a participatory democratic economy” was still alive some thirteen years after the SDS had issued its Port Huron Statement. In that regard, the commission made a modest contribution to the long history of the 1960s that would see the emergence of democratic socialism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The PBC, as no less an authority than the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce attested, ranked among the most effective anti–big business forces to emerge in the United States in quite some time.