History of the Green Party of the United States

The Green Party is a United States political party. It has its origins dating back to 1984, when 62 people from around the U.S. came to St. Paul, MN to found the first national Green organization - the Committees of Correspondence. Since then, U.S. Greens have gone through several evolutions, from debating theory and praxis in the 1980s, to starting state parties in the 1990s, to the founding of a national political party (recognized by the Federal Elections Commission) in the 2000s.

At the first North American Bio-regional Congress in May 1984, (convened by David Haenke of the Ozark Area Community Congress and in Missouri), a group met to discuss the need for a green movement in the U.S.. They approved a Green Movement Committee statement "concerning the formation of a Green political organization in the USA." From this initial gathering, a larger meeting was planned for August 1984.

In August 1984, 62 people met at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota and founded the Committees of Correspondence (or CoC, so named after the Committees of Correspondence of the American Revolutionary War).

The three-day meeting included activists from peace, ecology and justice groups; veterans of the women's, civil rights, and community movements; and farmers, community leaders, church activists and teachers. There were social ecologists, deep ecologists, eco-feminists, anarchists, socialists and more.

The organizing committee was made up of professor Charlene Spretnak of California, Harry Boyte, Catherine Burton, Gloria Goldberg and David Haenke; and they invited 200 people from 27 issues areas.

The CoC was broadly formed to organize local Green groups and work toward creating a Green political organization in the U.S, including the forming of an interim Inter-Regional Committee (IC).

The meeting also started the creation of the Green Ten Key Values, as the new organization's guiding principles. Differing accounts of this process have been written by Mark Satin and Spretnak.

The first CoC clearinghouse was established in late 1984 in St. Paul with Harry Boyte, but was hampered by a division at the Macalester meeting as to its role, with a division between those who favored coordinated decentralization and those favoring radical decentralization, to the degree that the clearinghouse be a mail drop and information resource, but not an outreach vehicle.

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