SOURCE: Breines, Winifred. “Whose New Left?” Journal of American History 75, no. 2 (September 1988): 528-45.

[In the following essay, Breines compares several histories of the 1960s and claims that Gitlin's narrow male viewpoint in The Sixties overlooks the accomplishments of the women's movement and the gay rights movement.]

Most former participants who write about the movements of the sixties consider themselves wiser now than they were then. And most who write about the sixties are former participants; almost all are men. Certainly many are more cynical. James Miller freely acknowledges this: “Analyzing Rousseau, Marx and the French existentialists. … has left me profoundly skeptical of the assumptions about human nature and the good society held by many radicals; and a decade of covering the music business has left me cynical about the ‘revolutionary’ potential of youth. The New Left was obviously in some respects a dead end.”¹ It is not the whole decade about which Miller, Maurice Isserman, and especially Todd Gitlin are cynical, however. Rather, they distance themselves from the student movement after 1967 and 1968, repelled by increasingly militant mass demonstrations and confrontations, an increasingly total rejection of the “system,” and the increasing violence of both state repression and the movement's response.

There can be little disagreement that what happened in the 1960s and what people think happened then has shaped much of subsequent American history. Until very recently what people thought happened has been shaped by the reaction that set in with the election of Richard M. Nixon in 1968 and reached its crescendo in the Moral Majority, the New Right, the Reagan administration, and neoconservatism, all of which were, to a large degree, responses to the movements and impact of the 1960s. In their scenario, the self-indulgence and antiauthoritarianism characteristic of the decade triggered the breakdown of standards and morality. Now it appears that a new phase in the portrayal of the sixties may be upon us—one that distinguishes the good early period from the supposed insanity of the late sixties. These new books (with the exception of The Imagination of the New Left by George Katsiaficas) and the positive media response to them (a fertile topic itself) celebrate the early years of the student and civil rights movements.²

Todd Gitlin's presentation of the radicalization and commitment of idealistic white students [The Sixties], Jim Miller's account of early efforts by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to create a meaningful and participatory democracy [Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago], Mary King's picture of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) dedication to ending the segregation and second-class citizenship of poor southern black people [Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement], and Maurice Isserman's respectful depiction of the development of the early New Left out of the remnants of the Old Left of the 1950s [If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left]—all contribute to affirmative interpretations of the sixties. So does Katsiaficas's study, but he is the only author to extol the international student revolt of 1968 and the politics of the late sixties.

Nineteen sixty-eight, twenty years ago exactly, was an amazing year, the year of Lyndon B. Johnson's decision not to run again for president; the murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.; the urban riots after King's death; the Tet Offensive in Vietnam; the French May rebellion and the international student uprising; the Columbia University revolt, occupation, and bust; and the massive violence in the streets of Chicago at the August Democratic party convention.

Almost all books about the New Left note a turning point or an ending in 1968 when the leadership of the movement turned toward militancy and violence and SDS as an organization was collapsing. These are no exception. (They identify a similar but earlier point when the civil rights movement turned away from nonviolence and embraced black power and nationalism.)³ How the authors under review interpret the turning point is of interest because those interpretations are central to the disillusionment most of them reveal and are related to their (and their subjects') positions in the movement.

The global student insurrections of 1968 and the 1970 national student strike in the United States (in conjunction with resistance in the United States military and black liberation movements, primarily the Black Panther party) provide the focus of Katsiaficas's book. The year 1968 is a wonderful subject for a book, but The Imagination of the New Left is inadequate to its task. That is especially disappointing because it is the only recent book under review to attempt the worthy task of retrieving the emancipatory dimensions of the now widely scorned 1968 movements. It begins with a chapter on “The New Left as a World-Historical Movement,” considers the 1968 student movements internationally with a chapter devoted to May 1968 in France, and looks at 1970 in the United States, particularly the black liberation movement and the antiwar movement at home and in Vietnam. It concludes with two chapters devoted to the philosophical and political legacies of the New Left. To explain 1968 Katsiaficas uses the notion of an “eros effect.” The phrase is never clearly defined, but it appears to refer to the potential of the human species for justice and freedom, a potential expressed during global revolutionary periods. Katsiaficas believes 1968 and 1970 constituted such times: “it was in a period marked by the fusion of the various national, ethnic, and gender movements into a world-historical movement that a vision of a qualitatively different world-system (or non-system) emerged.”⁴ In political terms common twenty years ago, the book expresses unqualified enthusiasm about the late New Left. Indeed, Katsiaficas's own faith in the spontaneity of mass movements, his belief that the Third World represents the vanguard of the revolution, and his Hegelian Marxism suggest that, unlike the other authors reviewed, he has not changed his perspective. His endorsement of the New Left's embrace of the North Vietnamese, the Black Panther party, and Third World heroes, and of militancy and violence in the streets makes Katsiaficas the prototype new leftist the others, particularly Gitlin, warn against. Unfortunately the book appears to be unedited; it is marred by repetitions, awkward formulations, incoherent theoretical passages, and narrow and outdated references, all of which create difficulties even for the reader interested in recapturing the spirit of late sixties militant new leftism.

A number of themes surface repeatedly in work on the New Left, including the books by Gitlin, Isserman, and Miller. The themes include the absence of effective organization, the growth of militancy and violence, a lack of discipline, and a purportedly foolish utopianism irrelevant to the task of effecting serious political change in America. Analyses circle around those themes in an effort to explain what happened at the end of the decade when the New Left and student movement seemed to let success slip through their fingers. The books under review share the conviction that the New Left was responsible for its own downfall in the late 1960s. Its leaders did not build the kind of disciplined, democratic, and centralized organization that would have enabled the movement to function realistically in American politics. I share the authors' positive evaluations of the early New Left. Nevertheless I believe their books present a narrow view shaped by the authors' (or their informants') male leadership positions early in the decade and their current successes, which lead them to exaggerate both the role of leadership and organization in the New Left and the significance of the collapse of SDS. Effective organization (and success in the world of Democratic party politics) becomes the yardstick by which too much is measured. By focusing on the fate of SDS as an organization, these accounts diminish the mass movement after 1968: regional and local activity that did not depend on a national organization, grass-roots organizing by students and other activists (including women and black people), the counterculture, and the birth of other movements such as the women's liberation and gay movements. Thus the enormous impact of the sixties then and now is narrowed.

Ironically, in light of the celebration of the early years, no one writing about the sixties denies that the period from 1968 to 1970 (the year when four white students protesting the United States invasion of Cambodia were killed at Kent State University and a widespread student strike resulted) was the most successful period of the movement in numbers and demonstrations. In Gitlin's words, “battles raged” on campuses across the country. “Every week the underground press recorded arrests, trials, police hassles and brutalities, demonstrations against the war, demonstrations of blacks and then hispanics and other people of color and their white allies, demonstrations by GIs against the war, crackdowns by the military.” Of the 1968-1970 period, Gitlin writes evocatively:

In Vietnam, while some troops followed orders to the point of massacring the civilians, others “fragged” particularly tough officers. … High school students wore forbidden buttons, seminary students joined the Ultra Resistance, wives left husbands, husbands left wives, teenagers ran away from parents, priests and nuns married (sometimes each other), and people who didn't do these things talked with, and about, people who did. … From subversive questions welled up picket lines, sit-ins, a vast entangled web of organizations, collectives, publications, conferences, a great storm of nonnegotiable demands and radical caucuses and participatory democracy and “getting my head together.”⁵

While the movement blossomed, expanded numerically, and became more powerful in the everyday lives of tens of thousands after 1968, the first generation of sixties activists and early leaders of SDS and SNCC found themselves pushed aside. (Tom Hayden may be the exception; he embodied most of the white movement's permutations until the end of the decade.) Today it is precisely those white, male former new leftists who are writing, reviewing, and being written about in books on the New Left, thus eerily reconstituting the male voice that predominated twenty years ago.⁶ Their early goals, college achievements, elite status in the movements, and contemporary authorship suggest a trajectory of success that may have contributed to their estrangement from the movement late in the decade and certainly informs their retrospective interpretations. Miller's subjects (six early SDS activists) and Gitlin himself represent this group. Not accidentally, both authors use the male pronoun throughout, reflecting a reality characteristic of SDS twenty years ago.

Democracy Is in the Streets is about the origins and early years of the New Left when students launched what Miller calls “America's last great experiment in democratic idealism.” He focuses on the Port Huron Statement of 1962, the sixty-three page manifesto stating the goals and values of SDS, identifying it as “one of the pivotal documents in post-war American history.”⁷ The book is organized around six activists who were at Port Huron and follows their political lives until 1968 and the Democratic convention in Chicago. The book's hero is Tom Hayden, the primary author of the Port Huron Statement. Miller admires all six and early SDS as a whole. Miller believes that the concept of participatory democracy articulated in the Port Huron Statement—“let the individual share in those decisions affecting the quality and direction of [his] life”—was the central contribution of the New Left. He argues, however, that the unclarified and multiple political meanings in the idea of participatory democracy were responsible for SDS's disorganization and confusion after 1965.

Miller's project is to place the New Left's ideas within an indigenous American radical political tradition, articulated most clearly in a debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey in the 1920s, and to clarify the intellectual influences on early new leftists, particularly that of C. Wright Mills. That intellectual framework means that the powerful impact of the civil rights movement, particularly SNCC, on early SDS activists' definition of participatory democracy is not adequately acknowledged. Miller suggests that the failure to develop a coherent political theory or vision of participatory democracy led to problems in the late 1960s when the movement was developing a mass base because no shared vision or approach to the problem of democracy served to unite the activists. More important were the unresolved contradictory meanings of participatory democracy. On the one hand, according to Miller, the notion of participatory democracy involved a face-to-face community of direct democracy that depended on trust and friendship among friends. On the other hand, it implied a democratic experimentalism that encouraged spontaneity, imagination, and risk. The experimentalism undermined face-to-face community and trust, according to Miller. That unresolved theory of democracy, Miller seems to argue, engendered both the appeal of the New Left to students who yearned for democracy and the movement's confusion and demise in the late 1960s. Miller suggests that the New Left's “experiments in democracy perhaps most usefully demonstrated the incompatibility of rule-by-consensus with accountable, responsible government in a large organization—or even in a small group of people with divergent interests and a limited patience for meetings.”⁸ Thus he concludes that an intellectual clarity about how democracy could function justly and effectively was the missing ingredient. The failure of the early New Left to develop an adequate theory of participatory democracy was its central failure. Ironically, given his sympathy for the early period, Miller locates a critical vulnerability rooted in the early years that came back to haunt the New Left later.

Gitlin's The Sixties is a judgmental, impressive, histrionic, often finely written, and ambitious book, as the title suggests. The book is undoubtedly the most complete and compelling account of the 1960s we yet have. Although the movement (the white movement) is its focus, it begins as a history of the whole decade in the United States, including a significant section on the fifties. Imposing in its detail and broad scope, Gitlin's book interprets just about everything that happened in the New Left, student movement, and counterculture. For sheer information it is unequaled, although the civil rights movement and the historical context for the white movement's behavior, particular government policies, disappear after the early section of the book. The neglect of context creates the misleading impression that movement participants became militant extremists with no provocation. The order in which topics are considered also contributes to that sense. A long and disapproving section of the book devoted to the development of militance, the romance with the Third World, and the hopes for community based on drugs, sex, rock'n'roll, and mysticism (which reproduces the early SDS leadership's hostility to those developments) precedes the discussion of the escalation of the Vietnam War and of racial violence. By its omissions and its arrangement, the book conveys the impression that there was little relationship between the movement's development and government policies.

Gitlin's fluid style aestheticizes the material, creating a smooth and controlled interpretation of events and a very readable book. At the same time, the effort to interpret and thematize everything denies the multiplicity of movement experiences, particularly in the late sixties when Gitlin was most estranged. The Sixties is written from the perspective of an active new leftist with serious reservations, then and now. In essence the book is a political autobiography of a Harvard graduate, an early SDS activist and SDS president, and ultimately a sociology professor. From the time he was in high school, Gitlin assumed his own importance. That assumption, about which he is straightforward, colors his relationship to the movement. Being at Harvard in the early sixties encouraged activists to think of themselves as having access to power, which they did, and undoubtedly shaped their politics. Gitlin's undisguised ambition, openly admitted, and his successes in college, the movement, and later in life influence his harsh evaluation of the counterculture and the cultural politics he considers self-indulgent and useless.

“One of the core narratives of the Sixties is the story of the love-hate relations between liberals and radicals,” states Gitlin. Although the proposition is not self-evidently true about the decade, it is about him. The book's ambiguous voice reflects the dilemma. Gitlin balances his own disappointment in liberalism with his condemnation of the movement's growing disgust with liberals. He considers the rejection of liberalism (the very liberalism that he shows to be inadequate) fatal to the New Left. As the decade wore on, he was less and less able to find a place for himself. Describing the SDS leadership's meeting with Irving Howe in 1963, Gitlin writes, “I am the same age, forty-two, as Howe was in 1963. We agree about more today than we did when I was twenty. I know what it is like now to be attacked from my left—how galling.” (The meeting is also recounted in Miller's book, and Isserman devotes a chapter to Irving Howe and Dissent. Taken together, the three books suggest that Howe figures significantly in the first New Left generation's history and mythology.) Thus Gitlin makes his apologies to Howe for the New Left's arrogance, a recurrent theme, and aligns himself with an older generation of social democrats and liberals who now appear to Gitlin as wise then as he feels he is now.⁹ The effort to be true to the movement from his more recent vantage point creates mixed messages since the violence and militancy he so condemns were largely occasioned by the failures of liberalism. It is to the early period, when his political and personal inclinations coincided with the spirit of the movement, that Gitlin does the most justice. His account of the later period is on shakier ground, although his overall achievement is large.

Mary King, a former SNCC activist, has written an honest, impassioned, moving, and detailed record of SNCC. Like other SNCC activists, she defined herself completely by the organization. That intense identification is captured in Casey Hayden's preface: “The movement today is commonly known as the civil rights movement, but it was considerably more than that. To me, it was everything: home and family, food and work, love and a reason to live. When I was no longer welcome there, and then when it was no longer there at all, it was hard to go on.” Mary King and Casey Hayden, two white southern women who worked for SNCC until 1966, are best known for their 1964 and 1965 memos about sexism in SNCC and in the radical movements of the sixties. The memos influenced other woman to raise questions about the position of women in the movement and are among the earliest documents of a developing feminist movement among students and political activists.¹⁰ King remains devoted to SNCC's early principles of self-determination, racial justice, and integration, providing an analytical yet impassioned account. While Freedom Song makes palpable the extraordinary community, intensity, and courage SNCC created in and among its organizers, it is also unswervingly clear about SNCC's wellspring, the semislavery conditions in which many, if not most, rural black people lived in 1960.

King's book underscores the influence of Ella Baker, an older, black, woman activist, as a mentor to SNCC and to individuals like King in the organization. That acknowledgment connects her book to If I Had a Hammer by Isserman, which examines continuities between the Old Left and early New Left. Political (and personal) links between the two generations of activists are Isserman's topics. Despite popular impressions of a moratorium on radical activity in the 1950s, both SNCC and early new leftists were influenced by older individuals and organizations. Baker, Septima Clark, and the Highlander Folk School, for example, played important roles in the gestation of the civil rights movement. Socialists, pacifists, former Communists, and professors functioned in similar ways for the New Left: the influence of A. J. Muste, Michael Harrington, Allard Lowenstein, Dissent magazine, and ordinary Communists who influenced their children (red diaper babies), for example, implies quiet historical continuities.¹¹If I Had a Hammer provides evidence that the behavior and ideas of what remained of the Old Left had significant impacts, both negative and positive. If I Had a Hammer makes it clear that alongside the great American celebration of the 1950s, when most radical activity was ignored or destroyed, some Old Left and radical pacifist groups maintained themselves. By the late fifties and early sixties interactions between them (former Communist party members, Max Schachtman, Dissent, and the radical pacifists) and young activists were helping give shape to the New Left. The most obvious example is the hostile and punitive reaction of the League for Industrial Democracy, SDS's parent group, to SDS's refusal to accept anticommunism as a founding principle (an event discussed in the books by Miller, Gitlin, and Isserman). The incident exacerbated SDS's suspicion of the Old Left (and of anticommunism).

Like others who stress the New Left's organizational vulnerability, Isserman argues that the strengths the Old Left had to teach the New Left but did not were precisely the characteristics absent in the younger movement: a commitment to representative organizational structure and internal education, a patient long-term approach to building a movement, willingness to work with others with differing viewpoints in pursuit of limited goals, and an emphasis on winning small victories as part of a long-term strategy. The Old Left's sectarianism obscured the valuable lessons it had to teach the New Left, thus contributing to the New Left's organizational failure, Isserman suggests.

Isserman argues the 1950s were less static and the 1960s less sudden than they have heretofore seemed. It would be inaccurate to err on the side of continuity, however, since in many ways the movements of the sixties did represent a radical rupture with traditional socialist movements. In Isserman's terms, the early New Left, whose outlook was expressed in the Port Huron Statement, was both more a “merging of traditions and resources … than simply a break with the past” and a more American movement than much of the New York-based Old Left.¹² Isserman believes that the effort of some older leftists in the 1950s to shed old dogmas—unswerving commitment to the Soviet Union, ideological sectarianism, or rigidly centralized organization, to name a few—encouraged the younger radicals to be open and relevant. Yet while Isserman stresses this point, he also shows that the older generation did not distinguish themselves. Student activists had few mentors.

These books remind us of a time of hope and idealism, when young people spoke up and fought for racial equality, democracy, freedom, peace, and justice. And as King's book underscores, in the southern civil rights movement young people and students did not struggle alone. It was poor southern black people who were the heroes. They constituted the rank and file of the movement and literally risked their lives for freedom. The early years of the New Left and civil rights movements—when it appeared that liberalism might be responsive to demands for racial equality, for peace, and for an end to the war in Vietnam, before the murder of John F. Kennedy was nightmarishly repeated in the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy—cannot help but inspire admiration and respect. So do the civil rights workers and poor black people in the South who worked in the equivalent of a terrorized and poverty-striken Third World country in the midst of the United States. According to these accounts, most student activists in the early sixties believed they could make American conditions more consonant with American ideals, which is what they somewhat innocently set out to do.¹³ Miller, Gitlin, and King illuminate the activists' faith that the rightness of their cause would convince those in power to make the United States a more democratic and racially just society.

They rapidly learned, however, of a national hierarchy of power committed to the status quo. In that discovery, Miller makes clear, the intellectual influence of C. Wright Mills was important, especially for Tom Hayden and others who wrote the 1962 SDS Port Huron Statement. King shows that it was the hostile and violent response of southern “law enforcement” officials and the power structure to the effort by blacks to register to vote, a response apparently supported by the federal government, that educated civil rights workers about politics and power.

Disillusionment with the government radicalized many activists. In Mary King's words, “America had broken the hearts of the young idealists of SNCC.” Her words echo SDS president Carl Oglesby's 1965 statement that if his criticisms of the government's policy in Vietnam sounded anti-American, “Don't blame me for that! Blame those who mouthed liberal values and broke my American heart.”¹⁴

These and other accounts suggest that the early years were almost innocent, and in the case of SNCC, heroic, but they were not as uncontroversial then as they appear to be now. Gitlin, King, Miller, and Isserman show that during those early years there was enormous hostility directed toward the civil rights movement and New Left by conservatives, liberals, and leftists, particularly by the adult groups with which the student groups were affiliated who, in some cases, red-baited them.¹⁵ Ironically, belief in America or America's good intentions, even in the Mississippi or Mekong deltas, appears, in these retrospective accounts, to validate the integrity of a social movement. Unfortunately, however, many young people could not maintain such a belief in the face of evidence to the contrary during the decade. It is the later years of the sixties that inspire controversy now, perhaps because, in contrast to the rage and disillusionment that led to the street fighting, Marxism, and black nationalism then rife, the early years appear more innocent, part of the authors' or subjects' halcyon years. The hope that liberals could be trusted or convinced and that they might take a political stand on the basis of principle had not yet been smashed by the slowness of the federal government to protect southern black people's right to register to vote, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party compromise at Atlantic City in 1964 (King is eloquent about both), the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and the continued escalation of the Vietnam War. That hopefulness evokes a simpler political time when liberalism still seemed legitimate to many young radicals and when moral commitment and moral appeals seemed an adequate basis for politics.

For Gitlin and Miller (and Miller's early SDS activists), the demise of SDS as an organization in 1968 and 1969 and its abdication of the leadership of the white movement at a time when the movement was flourishing seems the most irresponsible and shocking fiasco, and an important source of their disillusionment. According to them, the late sixties saw a fatal and desperate but growing romance with violence, Third World revolution and revolutionaries, and politics as voluntarist action, the politics that Katsiaficas applauds. Gitlin and Miller agree that the New Left destroyed itself. In fact, in studies of the New Left and the student movement, the characterization “self-destructive” appears repeatedly; it is becoming the standard interpretation. With undisguised disgust, Gitlin condemns the movement for its own demise in an orgy of countercultural self-indulgence, lack of discipline, and mindless militance, all based on what felt good as the basis for politics.¹⁶

Two points are downplayed in these interpretations. The first is the responsibility of the liberals for the frustration of the late sixties. Their cowardliness vis-à-vis civil rights and the Vietnam War is the source of much of the anger and disillusionment attributed to the movement. Gitlin, in particular, wants to fault the movement for not organizing and making alliances with the liberals he exposes as bankrupt. The second point is the curious blame and horror at the white movement's militance and violence (which Katsiaficas does not share). The American government and American culture are violent (as Malcolm X and Rap Brown pointed out over twenty years ago). The massive level of state-perpetrated violence during the 1960s, whether it was in the South against local black people and civil rights workers, in the official response to the rebellions of the urban ghettos, or in the war on Vietnam that Americans watched on their televisions daily, shaped the movement opposed to that state. Rather than being an inherent flaw in the movement's politics, the militancy and preoccupation with violence by some activists was a response to state-sponsored violence, a point that can be overlooked when reading Gitlin's picture of self-generated apocalypse. Mary King says of the turning point in SNCC, when whites were expelled from the organization and separatism and sectarianism increased, “In a profound way, a new generation of younger black people in SNCC, as well as whites, and the old hands, were all victims in a curious, ironic, and absurd danse macabre caused by America's racism.”¹⁷ American values and institutions infiltrated the white movement. Blaming the movement by isolating its violence from the violence of the larger society obscures the historical interplay between them.

How are we to understand what in almost every analysis of the New Left, including Gitlin's, Miller's, and Isserman's, is identified as the abandonment of SDS and the student movement for the apparently destructive trends of the end of the decade? Unavoidably, the interpretation of the New Left as a failure raises the question of what success would have looked like. At the center of the answer, for these authors, is organization. The standard of success in American politics, shared by radicals, will always condemn a movement that does not issue in pragmatic compromises, coalitions, and durable organizations. Why was it, these books ask in one form or another, that the organizational political expression the authors value did not last? Gitlin is the most explicit, but Miller and Isserman also suggest that the current of moralism, participatory democracy, direct action, “putting your body on the line” for what you believe in, what Gitlin calls expressive politics, present in the civil rights movement and early New Left, found new suicidal expression late in the decade, particularly in the apocalyptic politics of the SDS faction known as Weatherman.

Isserman suggests a link between the radical pacifists of the later 1940s and 1950s and the politics of Weatherman: a moral urgency that precluded consideration of political effectiveness and a desire to display one's personal commitment, especially if it involved risk or injury.¹⁸ It is a politics associated with Albert Camus, who inspired many in the civil rights movement and early New Left, a statement of one's values through an existential act, a politics most characteristic of SNCC, some new leftists (often influenced by SNCC), and the Resistance to the draft. About turning in his draft card in 1966, David Harris, a leader of the leading draft resistance organization, said, “I was prepared to abandon what seemed a promising future and pit myself against the war one on one, believing I would redeem my country and realize myself in the process.” Mario Savio expressed a similar idea in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, “There's 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 tacitly take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon 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.” And Miller quotes Hayden's impression of a SNCC project he visited in 1961, “The whole emotion of defining not only yourself, but also your life by risking your life, and testing whether you're willing to die for your beliefs, was the powerful motive, I believe.” Four years later, Hayden characterized the Vietnamese fighting against the Americans in a way that struck a chord among many young Americans, “I saw a people in a state of epic transformation, making an ultimate sacrifice against apparently invincible odds. The war was a military epic; it was one of the most phenomenal struggles in the history of the world.”¹⁹

Those statements share a current that stresses individual morality and action as the basis of politics and assumes that in concert with others those performing such action can effect change, including the victory of a peasant nation over a superpower. They also share an environment in which such earnestness and faith could flourish and work, before disillusionment had set in. It is this strand, not necessarily socialist, which is identified by left, liberal, and conservative critics alike as apolitical, expressive, and uninstrumental. It led, they suggest, to the demise of organizational politics and organization itself. Gitlin takes the argument further, suggesting that the syndrome led to a politics of extremity and finally to a death culture in which the only politics that counted was confrontation, polarization, and disruption, and which ended, appropriately enough, in 1970 when three new leftists in Weatherman accidentally blew themselves up while making bombs. This criticism of New Left politics as personal and moralistic and leading toward confrontation is similar to that made by an earlier generation of liberal and social democratic academics hostile to the New Left.²⁰

My own book on the New Left identified a closely linked, but somewhat different, strand, which I called prefigurative politics. I analyzed a key dilemma facing the organization of SDS: its attempts to channel a mass movement into a strategically effective national organization. I suggested that SDS was unsuccessful in that attempt but, unlike most writers on the New Left before and since, I argued the result should not be considered a failure. Instead, the effort to build community, to create and prefigure in lived action and behavior the desired society, the emphasis on means and not ends, the spontaneous and utopian experiments that developed in the midst of political actions whose ultimate goal was a free and democratic society—all were central to the movements of the sixties and among their most important contribution. A centralized organization could neither have “saved” the movement, nor was it congruent with the New Left's suspicion of hierarchy, leadership, and the concentration of power. The movement was not simply unruly and undisciplined; it was experimenting with antihierarchical organizational forms.

Finally, the accomplishments and influence of the student movement and New Left on American culture and politics were and still are significant, although that is easy to overlook from the “strategic” or organizational perspective. Prefigurative politics were political and were what was new about the New Left.

In that regard, participatory democracy is critical. Participatory democracy inspired young people to join SDS and to live according to its, in Miller's terms, ambiguous precepts. SNCC lived it in its community projects and in the way the organization was run. Simply put, it implied forms of direct democracy and consensual decision making, decentralization, and community, forms that might ensure that individuals could participate in the decisions affecting their lives. For many, the experiments in participatory democracy and community, or prefigurative politics, were based on a fundamental mistrust of, and lack of interest in, mainstream power politics. For them, the maintenance of organization was not a priority.

Those two strands of movement politics—the moral urgency that issued in direct action often at personal risk and the emphasis on creating community and prefiguring future relationships while building a movement—led, according to the organizational perspective, to the romance with violence and to the ruin of SDS as an organization. Such an analysis, as we have seen, minimizes the war on Vietnam, the intransigence of the government in the face of antiwar sentiment, and state violence against black people as explanations of the movement's militancy. Such an analysis also returns us to the question of why the white and black movements “failed” according to these and other authors or, conversely, how success is measured.

The failure of socialist revolutions around the world to live up to the ideals and programs their revolutionaries fought for, the centralized power and authoritarianism of most existing socialist governments, and the hierarchical and undemocratic features of liberal technocracy put the failures and successes of the movements of the sixties in a different light. Critiques of the New Left assume that the lack of a single unified movement constituted a failure. That there should have been a coherent organizational representation of the movement is taken as self-evident. But it was precisely that assumption about which the early civil rights movement, the New Left, and the student movement raised questions. Perhaps postmodernists (in theory) and the decentered movement (in practice) are correct in that no unified center could have represented the multiplicity and variety of perspectives and activities. There were many centers of action in the movement, many actions, many interpretations, many visions, many experiences. There was no unity because each group, region, campus, commune, collective, and demonstration developed differently, but all shared in a spontaneous opposition to racism and inequality, the war in Vietnam, and the repressiveness of American social norms and culture, including centralization and hierarchy. In a multitude of places, perhaps most (California is the most obvious), SDS as an organization was irrelevant because there was a local movement with local and shifting leadership. Marginal people, the powerless and quiet, the oppressed and repressed, were heard from. And for once the privileged young listened and joined in, sometimes in self-righteousness but often out of identification and compassion. Unfamiliar voices and perspectives raged and communicated with one another. As Clayborne Carson states in his afterword to the King book, “SNCC's historical importance was based on its success in releasing the untapped energies of ordinary people who discovered their ability to do extraordinary things.”²¹ The same was true of the New Left and antiwar movements.

The movement cannot be measured on the basis of its instrumental achievements alone. It is probably not insignificant that King, one of the few female authors writing about this period, involved in the civil rights movement, and not the New Left (which was notoriously less hospitable to women), argues that the word “failure should never be applied to SNCC,” given the profundity of its vision and the overwhelming issues it tackled. SDS was not all that mattered, these authors notwithstanding. Studying leadership and organization encourages an evaluation of the sixties that overlooks the myriad expressions and influences of the movement. In fact, as all the authors acknowledge, not only a generation of people was changed, the whole culture was transformed.²² Everything was opened up to scrutiny. Most of the democratic and hopeful elements in American society even today have roots in the sixties: feminism; countercultural perspectives in the arts; the contributions of people of color finally acknowledged by white society; a distancing from patriotic, militaristic, and nationalistic sentiments; and the decentered political organizations and projects attempting to build a more equal, less competitive, multicultural, and tolerant society.

I do not believe it diminishes the movements of the 1960s to suggest that the demonstrations, confrontations, experiments in collectivity and democracy, questioning, militance, drugs and counterculture—and the radicalization that accompanied them—were what was accomplished. That suggestion is not foreign to Katsiaficas's emphasis on contestation, struggle, and the vision of a better world as the global New Left's unique contribution. They were not only means to another end, such as the realignment of the Democratic party; they were the end. Furthermore, an identification by white Americans with the Vietnamese or Third World people was not only a misguided and romantic adoption of victims who might make a revolution; it also represented a healthy rejection of the ethnocentrism and ignorance of other peoples so characteristic of American culture. For white students, solidarity with people of color and a rejection of empire contained a moment of internationalism that broke with superiority. In the occupation of Columbia or People's Park, in the Panthers' opposition to racism through the public carrying of arms, in the myriad expressions of the rejection of the rules, activists questioned authority and challenged the legitimacy of the government and major institutions.

While the imagery and tactics of violence and revolution associated mainly with Weatherman (a very small number of SDS-related people) at the end of the decade may have been extreme, Gitlin's horror at the counterculture, expressive politics, and street fighting reproduces the distance of many early SDS leaders from the movements they helped to generate, had difficulty organizing, and became estranged from. It was not all an orgy of death and vanguardist politics. In the larger picture it was only a few new leftists who journeyed to Vietnam or Cuba and romanticized “the other side,” belonged to the most extremist groups, and fantasized about violence. The politics of the late sixties, after 1967 and 1968, were not simple signs of the deterioration of the movement. There were imaginative political experiments as well as desperate responses to the apparent uselessness of years of peaceful demonstrations and organizing in the face of continued escalation of the war. And there were the movements growing out of the civil rights and student movements that continued the drive for equality and peace in American society. The mistake in the social democratic evaluation is to focus on left extremists and in the process devalue or ignore how individuals became radicalized in the midst of movement activities, achieved some victories, and transformed the terms of the culture.

The critique of the movement of the late sixties now articulated by these white male leaders turned authors (or subjects) of books reproduces their distance from the movements then, a distance created in part by their identification with SDS as an organization. Their analyses duplicate the early SDS leadership's unsuccessful effort to channel the movement into an organization. This instrumental yardstick recreates the tensions of more than twenty years ago between the early New Left leadership, those who espoused strategic politics and lost, and the mass movement, whose disregard for organization still generates dismay. The perspective that dismisses the more anarchic and cultural expressions of the movement reminds us that even the most dedicated leadership may be unable to recognize the genuine contribution self-directed local movement activity can make to social change. It also reminds us that in order to be faithful to a social movement, social history and sociology must incorporate the multiplicity of participants' voices. These books, which seem almost to have been written in defiance of Reaganism or in anticipation of its demise, signal the beginning of a new and necessary reappraisal of the 1960s. Their authors' political passions (and the passions of the reviewers and the media) reveal how powerful the sixties remain in American consciousness. The hope, disappointment, and rage are still with us, articulated in books and politics, obliquely informing us we still have much work to do.

Notes

1. James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York, 1987), 17.

2. For exceptions to this celebration, see a hostile review of The Sixties by Todd Gitlin, Democracy Is in the Streets, by James Miller, and If I Had a Hammer by Maurice Isserman—Scott McConnell, “Resurrecting the New Left,” Commentary, 84 (Oct. 1987), 31-38. Its argument may well become a familiar theme of the neoconservatives as the rehabilitation of the sixties proceeds. See also Paul Berman, “Don't Follow Leaders,” New Republic, Aug. 10/17, 1987, pp. 28-35.

3. In fact, 1965, only halfway through the decade and certainly early when considering the development of the mass movements, seems the more critical year for both Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). It was after the first antiwar demonstration called by SDS in 1965 and after the Mississippi Summer in 1964 and the Selma March in 1965 that both organizations experienced the centrifugal pull away from original members and visions.

4. George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Boston, 1987), 21.

5. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York, 1987), 343-44.

6. For reviews, see, for example, Berman, “Don't Follow Leaders”; James Miller, review of The Sixties by Todd Gitlin, New York Times Book Review, Nov. 8, 1987, pp. 13-14; Hendrik Hertzberg, review of Democracy Is in the Streets by James Miller, ibid., June 21, 1987, pp. 1, 31, 33; Sean Wilentz, review of If I Had a Hammer by Maurice Isserman, Nation, Nov. 14, 1987, pp. 565-68; Stanley Aronowitz, review of The Sixties by Todd Gitlin, The Imagination of the New Left by George Katsiaficas, and Democracy Is in the Streets by James Miller, Zeta Magazine, 1 (Jan. 1988), 57-59.

7. Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, 16, 13.

8. Ibid., 326.

9. Gitlin, Sixties, 127, 173. The rediscovery of social democracy by former new leftists is widespread. For a particularly vituperative version, see Berman, “Don't Follow Leaders,” 28-35.

10. Mary King, Freedom Song: A Personal Song of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement (New York, 1987), 7. Although Mary King raised the issue of the status of women in SNCC, she aggressively defends SNCC's record on women, citing large numbers of female SNCC workers and leaders who were supported by SNCC men. She credits SNCC with building concern for the rights of women in the United States. The development of feminism in SNCC and SDS and the importance of black southern women as role models for young women is discussed in Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York, 1979). See Wini Breines, review of Personal Politics by Sara Evans, Feminist Studies, 5 (Fall 1979), 496-506.

11. On the continuities between political generations in the 1950s, see Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York, 1987).

12. Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York, 1987), 219, 207.

13. For alternative interpretations that downplay the New Left's idealism and stress instead material conditions, particularly the formation of students into a new working class or professional managerial class, which was protesting its own proletarianization in the 1960s, see Michael W. Miles, The Radical Probe: The Logic of Student Rebellion (New York, 1971); Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich, “The Professional-Managerial Class,” in Between Labor and Capital, ed. Pat Walker (Boston, 1979); Alvin W. Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class: A Frame of Reference, Theses, Conjectures, Arguments, and an Historical Perspective on the Role of Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in the International Class Contest of the Modern Era (New York, 1979); and Cyril Levitt, Children of Privilege: Student Revolt in the Sixties: A Study of Student Movements in Canada, the United States, and West Germany (Toronto, 1984). For an explanation of new leftism based on the psychic ambivalences of participants, particularly Jews, see Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, Roots of Radicalism: Jews, Christians, and the New Left (New York, 1982). See Wini Breines, review of Children of Privilege by Cyril Leavitt, and Roots of Radicalism by Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, Theory and Society, 14 (July 1985), 511-23.

14. For a study of the impulses and tensions in the early New Left, see Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left: The Great Refusal (South Hadley, 1982). For Oglesby's statement, see ibid., 22. The book will be reissued by Rutgers University Press in early 1989.

15. A number of reviewers have raised the communism question again. Berman, “Don't Follow Leaders,” and McConnell, “Resurrecting the New Left,” revive redbaiting by suggesting the infiltration of communism into the New Left in the persons of former red diaper babies who were more influential than has been earlier acknowledged. Wilentz's review of If I Had a Hammer by Isserman (like the books by Gitlin and Isserman) proposes that the anti-anticommunism of the early New Left made the New Left susceptible to Communist infiltration and sympathies, with dire consequences. The revival of accusations of significant Communist influence in the New Left ignores a number of factors. First, there was a left critique of communism and Stalinism shared by many new leftists and ignored by recent writers. Second, such accusations focus on a small group who were unimportant in the larger context of the movement. Third, there is something arid and constricting about allegations of Communist influence that squeeze the sixties and the New Left into the old categories of Stalinism, Trotskyism, and social democracy and thus exempt those making the allegations from contending with much of the novelty and breadth of the sixties. McConnell's and Berman's arguments are reminiscent of accusations against the New Left made twenty-five years ago by an older generation. In fact, they reproduce a debate that misses the significance of the sixties.

16. See a recent version in Berman, “Don't Follow Leaders,” announced on the cover of the magazine containing it as, “Who Killed the Sixties? The Self-Destruction of American Radicalism.” Alan Brinkley's review of Jim Miller's book suggests that from the very beginning there was a fatal weakness at the heart of the New Left in the form of a yearning for personal fulfillment and gratification, which in the shape of the “seductive appeal of the counter-culture” ultimately undermined the New Left. Alan Brinkley, “Dreams of the Sixties,” New York Review of Books, Oct. 22, 1987, pp. 10, 12-16, esp. 16.

17. King, Freedom Song, 530.

18. Isserman, If I Had a Hammer, 169. Inexplicably, Wilentz chastizes Isserman for not finding more of a connection between pacifism and the radicalism of the 1960s. See Wilentz, review of If I Had a Hammer, by Isserman.

19. Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left, 148, 23; Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, 59, 269.

20. Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left, 1-6.

21. King, Freedom Song, 557.

22. See Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (New York, 1987), on a transformation of American culture consisting of a rejection of materialism and ethnocentrism and an openness to other cultures, religions, and feelings. It is expressed in new ways of living and of relating to people, and an interest in mysticism, internationalism, conservation, and peace—an apolitical American version of the West German Greens.