“All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.”
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1849.[1]
“This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, November 19th, 1863.[2]
In just over two minutes amidst one of the darkest periods of American history, Abraham Lincoln succinctly outlined the guiding principles of modern democracy. Many have struggled to reach this utopian vision of government and it is a struggle that was to be repeated a century after Lincoln’s address by an emerging intellectual movement that put all people at the centre of their political framework—a movement that came to be labeled the New Left. Radical 1960s political idealism is often characterised by the New Left, but Van Gosse has argued that it is ineffective to view the trajectory of the New Left movement within the explicit confines of the 1960s but “acknowledge that the New Left began earlier and lasted longer than a focus on the Kennedy and Johnson years will permit”.[3] In order to broadly understand New Left radicalism of the 1960s an examination of each individual movement is necessary, as Gosse argues, “in terms of its own inner development, which a best reproduces the enormously diverse and plural character of the New Left”.[4] Gosse’s argument for a methodology for understanding the New Left certainly carries weight; however, a comprehensive historiographical analysis of the multi-faceted nature of the New Left is beyond the scope of this essay. This essay will focus primarily on the politicisation of college students within the New Left and their shift in strategy and rhetoric. The New Left movement, although rooted in intellectual origins (among other factors to be discussed) that suggested young college students were the new revolutionary class to overthrow capitalism, at the beginning of the 1960s did not appear overtly revolutionary, but rather reformist from a community focused perspective. However, because of the movement's rejection of a hierarchical political methodology, its quixotic aims, and failure to gain widespread popularity outside the student populous, combined with the intensification of opposition to the Vietnam War, the momentum of Civil Rights movement, and the failure of the Federal Government to respond to criticism (aside from violent suppression), the New Left movement took on a more revolutionary disposition. The growing membership of various New Left movements could not be systematically organised without a rigorous and coordinated structure, and as a consequence the movement split into factions—each with its own tactics and ends without any popular support.
The guise of the New Left in the United States in the wake of World War II and the McCarthyism of the 1950s served to offer a neo-Marxist critique of American society. This was in contrast to methodology and rhetoric of Old Left criticism, which believed that the working class was the primary impetus for socialist revolutionary change. Academics of the Old Left had succumbed or acquiesced to American liberalism; their effectiveness reduced by the storm of anti-communist purges of the Red Scare.[5] Amidst the height of Cold War tensions younger radicals were averse to the centralisation, authoritarianism, and bureaucracy of Soviet socialism. Irwin Unger has argued that the conformity and banality of 1950s America—in contrast to the economic upheavals and war of previous decades—was a recipe for an estranged youth.[6] Although post-war "American society produced material abundance, it also produced alienation, especially among its youth".[7]
It can seem difficult to understand how a radical movement can form in such favourable social and economic conditions, but it is these very conditions that provided the foundation for the disposition of the New Left movement. America was prosperous; incomes were on the rise and unemployment on the decline. Americans were immersed in more consumerism than they had ever experienced. Maurice Isserman has drawn upon the juxtaposition of the omnivorous Baby-boom consumption with the ever increasing sense of alienation that questioned the structural truth of society. The consensus of the liberal political status quo, free from the tyranny of Nazism, and stifling Soviet socialism, what Daniel Bell called the end of ideology somehow failed to appeal as an end to the burgeoning college populous who sought to discern the contradictions of American society. It was the leaderless working class in prosperous capitalist economies of the West, which had no vision of its true interests, that C. Wright Mills argued was no longer capable of being a revolutionary movement. As well as pointing out the exploitation and powerlessness of an expanding middle class, Mills asserted in 1960, in his aptly titled "Letter to the New Left", that young intellectuals were the driving reformist and revolutionary force. Intellectual radicals such as Mills expressed disenchantment with the industrial working class.[8] Herbert Marcuse criticised the advanced technological society, that America had become, claiming it created false wants through social conditioning. Marcuse emphasised that it was the will of the dominant classes that was projected onto society that created a false consciousness among the middle and working class.[9]
The nexus for the radicalisation of student was primarily focused on the University of California Berkeley, University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbour. These public institutions were joined by like-minded intellectuals at the private universities of Harvard, Stanford, Swarthmore, Oberlin, and the University of Chicago.[10] Gosse has traced the roots of the New Left to the ideals embodied in the American Revolution, drawing upon Thomas Jefferson's declaration that "all men are created equal" with "inalienable rights" thus not characterising the movement as explicitly Marxist—providing the movement a uniquely American character and disposition.[11] The primary impetus for student New Left radicalism was Students for a Democratic Society, formed in 1960 at Ann Abour by Al Harber as a youth off-shoot from the League for Industrial Democracy. Students for Democratic Society's manifesto written in 1962, the Port Huron Statement, drafted by Tom Hayden reflects this character and was certainly a divergence from the verbatim of the Maxist rhetoric of the Old Left. Hayden argued that the United States had failed its mission to live up to its Revolutionary ideals by failing the true radical roots of democracy, that "its democratic system [was] apathetic and manipulated rather than 'of, by, and for the people'".[12] Hayden believed in democracy in its purest form, and as America had failed its foundations, it too had failed. The SDS aim was simple, something that many Americans could agree on: "that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence of men and provide the media for their common participation".[13] Hayden's sentiment speaks directly to American values of individualism and idealism while channeling the importance of communities rather than faceless corporations or bureaucracies as the authors’ of their lives.[14] The Old Left’s criticism of the SDS as “kids” with no understanding of the dangers of Stalinism in the wake of the Port Huron Statement further served to widen the rift between the New and Old.[15]
The Port Huron Statement does not strike its reader as particularly revolutionary, rather it is suggesting that society's structures have changed and misguided, for the worst, around citizens and that change must happen through communities, within, rather than without the system. America was in some sense democratic; the New Left wanted to extend this democracy to all so that it penetrated all communities at an individual level far beyond the out-of-touch elitism of representative democracy. Isserman has contended that through the Port Huron Statement the New Left cast of the shackles of previous failed movements by starting with a clean slate that put participatory democracy at the centre of a long struggle.[16] Similarly, Gosse has eloquently suggested “with tremendous audacity, this group of intellectual agitators indicted their universities and the entire structure of power underlying higher education. They proposed nothing less than a reorganization of American society”.[17] However, as David Chalmers has pointed out, the difficulty participatory democracy faced was "how to politically combine individualism and face-to-face relationships with radically reforming the modern leviathan national industrial state".[18] Was the task of reforming the enormity of American institutionalism beyond the insular nature of the movement's intelligentsia that was often mistrusted by many in the United States?[19]
The radicalisation of New Left student movements, particularly SDS, Rebecca Klatch has argued, came about through a variety of processes including intellectual and political growth, but more apparently through an increasing sense of frustration with a lack of social change, confrontation with government authorities, and often violent police brutality.[20] The New Left began to show the signs of its own failure within two years of Port Huron. By June 1964, as the SDS national convention approached, as James Miller has argued, it was clear there was a notable transformation within the organisation.[21] What was once a "freewheeling seminar for young intellectuals" became a "ragtag army of activists preparing to invade the ghettos of nine American cities".[22] With a burgeoning membership from the influx of large campus populations, inevitably with a variety of values and intentions, the word "faction" was beginning to be used regularly in SDS circles.[23] Klatch has made this apparent by drawing on research that suggests even within SDS young politically active students were pulled in multiple directions. She has noted students becoming sympathetic towards Ho Chi Minn as well as students within SDS who ended up at the opposite end of the political spectrum (but still through a process of radicalisation)—a process Klatch refers to as "crossover".[24] One such instance was a student's attraction to the far-right paramilitary group the Minutemen as a consequence of a somewhat libertarian outlook. However, in a moment of ambivalence the student gravitated instead towards the anarchist faction of SDS, repulsed by the Minutemen's neo-Nazi tendencies.
Tom Hayden, expressing doubt about universities as a site for far-reaching social change was instead motivated by the grass roots community approach of Civil Rights organisations like NAACP and SNCC, and the powerful displays of solidarity as showcased by the August 1963 March on Washington.[25] In September 1963, just days after Martin Luther King delivered his stirring elocution to hundreds of thousands on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, SDS initiated the Economic Research and Action Project—a project designed to create grass roots activism through engaging with impoverished communities. The project was influenced by Swarthmore College undergraduate Carl Wittman’s work with the NAACP’s push for equal social treatment for Blacks in Chester, Pennsylvania. Paul Potter suggested Wittman and Hayden’s theoretical paper for the formation of ERAP “An Interracial Movement of the Poor?” expressed a distant departure from the hopefulness of Port Huron and took on a thinly veiled and closed vulgar Marxist tone.[26] The ERAP found some successes in the space of two years by gaining some concessions with local authorities, however, the project failed to gain traction because of the falling unemployment in many American cities.[27] In engaging in the communal activism that the ERAP required, Miller has argued, “radicals increasingly saw themselves as would-be revolutionaries trying to build ‘counter-societies’ and ‘counter institutions’”, and as a consequence “local authorities treated them accordingly [with disdain]”.[28]
SDS organised its first anti-war rally for April 17, 1965, and attracted an impressive turnout of 25,000 demonstrators. Paul Potter, then president of SDS in 1965, presented a powerful speech to the crowd that vehemently opposed the war, institutionalised racism, and criticised the very foundations of morality in American domestic and foreign policy. But most of all, Potter’s speech was an implicitly vociferous attack on the morality of the deeply rooted American capitalist system, vividly exemplified by a series of rhetorical questions designed instill a sense of moral outrage in its recipients:
What kind of a system is it that disenfranchises people in the South, leaves millions upon millions of people throughout this country impoverished and excluded from the mainstream and promise of American society, that creates faceless and terrible bureaucracies and makes those places where people spend their lives and their work, that consistently puts material values above human values—and still persists in calling itself free and still persists in finding itself fit to police the world?[29]
Potter then provided an open-ended directive to the crowd by asserting “We must name that system”.[30] Potter subsequently paused for effect and in the silence a bystander shouted “Capitalism!”[31] Potter then concluded his thought: “We must name it, describe it, analyze it, understand it, and then change it”.[32] Potter later commented that before the march there was much debate within SDS as to whether or not to explicitly name the system, capitalism, but instead he decided to leave the imperative open ended and ambiguous for effect.[33] Seven months later at another anti-war rally, new SDS president Carl Oglesby would twist the knife on liberalism by declaring "others will make of it that I sound mighty anti-American. To these, I say: Don't blame me for that! Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart".[34]
As the decade wore on, racial violence erupted, the war in Vietnam intensified, and as the New Left's goals seemed too far from reach, it stagnated, fragmented, and many elements turned militant and espoused revolutionary ideals. From April to May 1968 there was a large student occupation of the Columbia University campus that coincidentally matched a violent student uprising in Paris, France. In response to the Columbia occupation Hayden called for a shift from “symbolic civil disobedience to barricaded resistance” and for the conception of “two, three, many Columbias”.[35] In March 1968 Lyndon Johnson announced his decision not to seek reelection for President. The New Left’s hopes for a strong anti-war candidate within the Democratic Party now rested on the late John F. Kennedy’s brother Robert. These hopes were dashed on June 6th, just two months after Martin Luther King’s assassination, when a Jordanian dissident assassinated Kennedy. The Democratic nomination was to be contended between an adherent of Johnson’s Vietnam policy Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, detested by young intellectuals as a compromiser, and Eugene McCarthy, supported by the New Left. The presidential nomination by the Democratic Party was made at its Convention in Chicago in August 26th as 10,000 anti-war demonstrators gathered outside the convention. The nomination of Humphrey destroyed any hope of an anti-war nominee as thousands of police descended on the protest; the subsequent confrontation can be described as nothing short of violent and bloody. Hayden declared that the process of negotiating with unresponsive institutions was over and the only method available to deliver the New Left’s revolutionary message was “bringing the war home”.[36]
The 1969 SDS conference would prove to be its Rubicon with various factions pushing their own agenda for revolutionary change that meant it was no longer a cohesive political organisation. The initial split in SDS came earlier in the decade, in the form of a Marxist-Leninist faction calling itself Progressive Labor, but did not fully manifest itself until late 1968. Rob Jacobs has argued that Progressive Labor’s theoretical superiority enabled them to form a greater power basis within SDS and have an increase in manipulation of decision making, so much so that by 1968 the rift between the two factions was irreparable.[37] The remainder of SDS coalesced around a smaller faction, in opposition to PL, that took influence from the armed tactics of the Black Panther Party as well as calling for an outright armed revolution.[38] However, the anti-PL faction was not without its own internal squabbles. Although all within the faction believed in armed revolution, there was disagreement of how to achieve it. As a consequence the faction split in two: one group calling itself Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM; later changed to RYM II) that saw a shift towards classical Marxism as espoused by its belief that masses of the working class in opposition to the war could form a “united front against imperialism”; the second group, the Weather Underground Organization, rejected reform as an attempt to gain privilege for an already privileged White population—as well as echoing Marcuse’s criticism of advanced capitalism they dismissed struggles for social justice as genuinely revolutionary.[39] In December 1968 Mike Klansky of RYM II, then National Secretary of SDS, asserted in contrast to Mills and Marcuse that “students alone cannot possibly bring about the downfall of capitalism”.[40] The Weather Underground was explicit in its revolutionary vitriol for the “destruction of U.S. imperialism” to create a “classless world: world communism”, and would spend the best part of the next decade on a desperate campaign of bombings that achieved nothing other than its increasing isolation from the New Left as well as mainstream American consciousness[41] The Weatherman’s campaign arguably reached its nadir on March 6th 1970, in Greenwich, New York, when three members were accidentally killed by a prematurely detonated a nail bomb they were preparing for an attack—and true to the organisation’s name they were indefinitely driven underground.
In the immediate years following the New Left's demise, argues Wini Breins, there was almost uniform criticism of the movement from across the political spectrum; because it was utopian, anti-organisational, even anti-political, critics argued that it was bound to fail.[42] Breins has drawn attention to Max Weber's ethic of ultimate ends as a basis for for an older generation of liberal and left academics' criticism of the New Left's political methodology. The youthful idealism of SDS failed to grasp the political realties of an existing framework—failing Weber's ethic of responsibility—and as consequence intellectual descriptions of the movement included nihilist, incoherent, chaotic, fanatic, irrational, anti-intellectual, romantic, manipulative, extremist, and irresponsible.[43] The expressive politics of the New Left, Breines argues, "does not recognise the need for or value of compromise ... it has no strategic orientation".[44] The refusal for compromise was in direct contradiction to the movement's argument for democracy, which relies on compromise. However, as Breines points out, the interpretation of democracy is often loosely defined and varies with ideological perspective. The idealism of the New Left's grass roots activism, community organisation, and participatory democracy, although not ubiquitously revolutionary, was a far cry from the pluralism of the American political status quo. The movement's success (or failure) rested on a tension between rigid hierarchical structural organisation and equal individual participation—neither which was explicitly congruent with the other.
Early sociological criticisms of the movement have been from a realpolitik perspective that had a narrow and uncompromising view of democracy (i.e. unwilling to consider participatory democracy) that favoured stringent rules and a very narrow path to efficacious political action. The utopian aspects, although ultimately its downfall because of the antagonism with the existing political framework, was what was relevant to the movement when viewed from a New Left perspective. Breines contends that instrumental criticisms fail to recognise there was an attempt to synthesise a Weberian ethic of ultimate ends with an ethic of responsibility.[45] It was a concerted effort to work within an existing framework without conforming to it in order to achieve ideological ends. However, it was this attempt to synthesise two radically inconsistent political methodologies that reduced the movement's efficacy, ability to gain traction within an unwelcoming framework, and ultimately led to its splintering and demise. It was an attempt to integrate two dichotomous political methodologies, instrumental, focused on organisational means, with a utopian vision focused on ends, in order to achieve a situation that was antagonistic towards the former but relied on it to achieve the later.
Without widespread popular support the New Left’s gradual revolutionary turn was destined to fail, or as Unger has quite rightly pointed out in the immediate aftermath of the movement’s decline “[revolutions] were bloody and destructive. They torn down existing structures of societies and only with difficulty replaced them with new ones”—something many Americans were not prepared to face.[46] The violent factions of SDS were severely criticised by progressive intellectuals for giving mainstream America a reason to chide the broader New Left movement, ultimately leading to its downfall. But to suggest that the American political landscape remained the same after the movement’s demise is grasping at straws. The political institutions of America remained intact but their internal character had changed: the New Left served to realign the Democratic Party around its fragments, significantly weakening it, and contributed to a resurgence of conservatism within the Republican Party.[47] However, as Gosse has argued, we must not overlook the New Left’s contribution to a “radical extension of democracy, by breaking down the Red Scare’s limits on freedom of expression”.[48] In 1971 John Lennon, then living in New York, penned Imagine, a poignant ballad that questioned the moral foundations of modern society and implicitly summarised the values of the New Left. It is speculative to ask whether Lennon was attempting a last gasp at popular social change or painting a utopian vision in the face of failure—a cry for a world that could have been, but never was. However, Lennon echoed the New Left's concern by suggesting the primary motivation for governing society was the human subject, not isolated or subservient to bureaucracies and corporations, but in a community.
[1] Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays, New York, 1993, p. 3.
[2] Abraham Lincoln, ‘Address Delivered at the Dedication of the Cemetery at Gettysburg’, in Roy P. Basler, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in Translation, Washington, 1972.
[3] Van Gosse, Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretative History, New York, 2005, p. x.
[4] ibid.; Gosse broadly incorporates many movments concerned with social justice into the broader New Left movement including Civil Rights movements, student movements, feminist movements, and gay liberation movements.
[5] Irwin Unger, with the assistance of Debi Unger, The Movement: A History of the American New Left, 1959-1972, New York, 1974, p. 13; David Chalmers, And the Crooked Places Made Straight: The Struggle for Social Change in the 1960s, Baltimore, 1991.
[6] Unger, p. 19.
[7] ibid.
[8] C. Wright Mills, ‘Letter to the New Left’, New Left Review, 5, September-October, 1960, pp. 18-23.
[9] Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, London, 1964.
[10] Gosse, Rethinking the New Left, p. 65.
[11] Van Gosse, The Movements of the New Left, 1950-1975: A Brief History with Documents, Boston, 2005, p. 2.
[12] The Port Huron Statement, 1962, in Robert Griffith and Paula Baker, eds., Major Problems in American History since 1945, Boston, 2001, p. 325.
[13] ibid., p. 327.
[14] David Chalmers, And the Crooked Places Made Straight: The Struggle for Social Change in the 1960s, Baltimore, 1991, p. 82.
[15] Gosse, Rethinking the New Left, p. 69.
[16] Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left, New York, 1987.
[17] Gosse, Rethinking the New Left, p. 65.
[18] Chalmers, p. 82.
[19] Unger, p. 22.
[20] Rebecca Klatch, A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s, California, 1999, p. 109.
[21] James Miller, Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago, New York, 1987.
[22] ibid.
[23] ibid., p. 223.
[24] Klatch, pp. 111-2.
[25] Miller, pp. 187-90.
[26] ibid., p. 190.
[27] ibid., p. 213.
[28] ibid.
[29] Paul Potter, ‘The Incredible War’, 1965, in Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines, eds., “Takin’ It to the Streets”, New York, 1995, pp. 217-8.
[30] ibid., p. 218.
[31] Miller, p. 232.
[32] Potter, p. 218.
[33] Miller, p. 233.
[34] Carl Oglesby, ‘Trapped in a System’, 1965, in Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines, eds., “Takin’ It to the Streets”, New York, 1995, pp. 220-225.
[35] Tom Hayden, ‘Two, Three, Many Columbias’, in Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines, eds., “Takin’ It to the Streets”, New York, 1995, p. 385, 387.
[36] ibid., p. 387.
[37] Ron Jacobs, The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground, London, 1997, p
[38] ibid., p. 39.
[39] ibid., p. 40.
[40] Mike Klansky, “Towards a Revolutionary Youth Movement”, in Van Gosse, The Movements of the New Left, 1950-1975: A Brief History with Documents, Boston, 2005, p. 129.
[41] The Weathermen’s Call for Revolution’, in Robert Griffith and Paula Baker, eds., Major Problems in American History since 1945, Boston, 2001, p. 330.
[42] Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962-1968: The Great Refusal, Rutgers, 1989.
[43] ibid., p. 2.
[44] ibid., p. 3.
[45] ibid., p. 4-5.
[46] Unger, p. 22.
[47] Gosse, The Movements of the New Left, pp. 35-6.
[48] ibid., p. 38.
———————————————————————————————————————— "... we can explore space together, both inner and outer, forever in peace." —W. M. Hicks.
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