What was the "New Left" of the 1960s?

Back cover of Radical America May-June 1968

I've been using the journal Radical America as a contemporaneous source for commenting on some aspects of "the 60s", which in its meaning as a cultural unit really means more like 1960-1973. The fact that Brown University has an online archive of the journal greatly facilitates such research.

The banners in that back-cover graphic by Walter Crane (1845-1915) read, clockwise from bottom left:

No people can be free while dependent for their bread
No wage slavery
No child toilers
Production for use not for profit
Solidarity of labor
The cause of labor is the hope of the world
Socialism mean the most helpful and happy life for all
A commonwealth where wealth is common
Art and enjoyment for all
Hope in work & joy in leisure
Cooperation and emulation not competition
Shorten working day and lengthen life
Socialism is internationalism
Equal opportunity
Freedom

That issue contains an article called "The New Left's Early Years" by James P. O'Brien, which covered the years up until 1965 in the United States. His summary at the end describes the New Left as follows:

Roughly since 1960 there has been a social movement, composed mainly of students, which has threatened the equilibrium of American society. This threat was not, at first, unambiguously radical: it was liberal in the nature of its surface demands (such as racial integration, an end to nuclear testing, and free speech) but radical in its distrust of compromise and in its proclivity for direct action. Over a period of years form and content merged, and the result was something that could legitimately be called a Hew Left. The concept of participatory democracy, as evolved by SDS and SNCC, offered both a mode of operation and a critique of welfare-state liberalism. Moreover, it furnished the basis for a revolt against the university environment in which most New Leftists found themselves. The idea that the "normal channels" are instruments of manipulation, and that people must be motivated to make decisions for themselves, was clearly applicable to the university as well as to other areas of society; this is what made student radicals realize that they no longer had simply to fight other people's battles.

Since 1965, the New Left had undergone a number of changes, both in its conception of society and in its strategic thinking. Draft resistance, underground newspapers, guerilla theatre, and above all black power, are terms that would have evoked few signs of recognition three short years ago. But none of them should be surprising in the light of what the New Left had become by 1965. For they are all variations on a theme: the recognition that American liberalism was not enough, that the good society was one in which people shaped their own institutions to meet their own needs. (my emphasis)

That's a good capsule description of how the New Left distinguished itself from the prevailing form of Establishment liberalism in those days.

Neither that summary nor the article focuses on women's liberation as part of the Movement. That may partially be due to O'Brien's own limitations of understanding. Women certainly played a major role in the organizations he discusses in the article.

But my understanding is that the New Left in the United States didn't start highlighting women's issues as such until the year 1968. Clearly, women's experiences in the civil rights and student movement and other forms of political activism were a major stimulus to the women's movement. And they certainly learned a lot about political activism in those experiences. But - and I hope I'm not stepping into some sensitive classification dispute without being aware of it - I tend to see the women's movement as overlapping the "New Left" of this period rather than being identified with it.

O'Brien's article discusses various key moments in the development of what came to be called the New Left, such as:

• The civil rights movement of the 1950s (the Montgomery bus boycott started in 1955)

• Martin Luther King, Jr.'s rise to prominence in the civil rights movement along with his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)

• The desegregation sit-in movement that began in 1960 and which the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) promoted

• A sit-in demonstration by Berkeley students in 1960 at the San Francisco City Hall against the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) which was holding one of its witch-hunt hearings there. This is a little-remembered event, it seems, though it was featured in the documentary film Berkeley in the Sixties (1990). The police reacted ham-handedly, turning fire hoses on the students. This generated enough publicity that the anti-HUAC protests became more widespread.

• The formation of the Student Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (Student SANE) and the Student Peace Union (SPU) to protest the nuclear arms race, with events like the Berlin crisis culminating in the building of the Berlin Wall in 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the spectacularly ill-advised fallout shelter program during the Kennedy administration

• The formation of activist campus political parties like SLATE in Berkeley and VOICE at the University of Michigan

• Tom Hayden and Al Haber became leaders of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1961. SDS had until 1960 been called the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the near-invisible student group of a social-democratic group called the League for Industrial Democracy. SDS split with the latter because SDS under Hayden and Haber wanted a more activist orientation, and SDS started becoming more influential on campuses nationally.

• The Freedom Rides organized by SNCC in the South

• Continuing demonstrations against segregation and for stronger civil rights legislation, including the still-famous March on Washington in 1963, where King gave his "I Have A Dream" speech

• SNCC's formation of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) which organized the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964 to register voters there, in which hundreds of young Northern activists participated

• The ERAP (Economic Research and Action) project sponsored by SDS which sent participants to do local studies of conditions in poor, mostly white urban areas, though Tom Hayden wound up going to the African-American ghetto in Newark (he later wrote a long article made into a book on the 1967 Newark riots)

• The formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and its unsuccessful attempt to be seated as the state's official delegation at the 1964 Democratic convention. O'Brien writes, "More than any other single event, this dramatized the readiness of militants in the civil rights movement to break away from the liberal coalition of the Johnson administration."

• The Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964

• Public protests against the Vietnam War as the 1965 escalation and bombing of North Vietnam got under way

• The May 2nd Movement (M-2-M), which was heavily influenced by the sectarian Progressive Labor Party (PLP), which stressed explicitly anti-imperialist themes to the extent of identifying with Vietnamese and Cuban revolutionaries and actively encouraging draft resistance

Articles like these give a perspective that's hard to get in even well-done retrospectives, let alone the ones that are tailored to the press consensus of 2008 about the world and the "culture war". These articles were written by people who identified with the Movement and written for people who were part of or interested in it.

The early issues of Radical America definitely have an "underground press" feel to them, as well. The Brown digital collection consists of PDF files, one for each issue. And because they are images, I haven't figured out a way even with the Adobe software to copy text. But because they are images, you get more of that low-budget production sense.

Tags: 1968, civil rights movement, sds, students for a democratic society, tom hayden, vietnam war