The sixties: liberals, the left and the civil rights movement

Historian Howard Zinn, one of the most influential intellectuals among the New Left in the United States, wrote in Postwar America: 1945-1971 about how the position of the liberals was far more frustrating to civil rights activists and African-Americans than most people today probably realize, or would even find it hard to imagine. There still were actual liberal Republicans in the 1960s, so we're talking about liberals in both parties. But it also didn't mean they thought conservatives in either Party were somehow more supportive of civil rights. They very obviously weren't.

Zinn makes an interesting point about the Brown v. Board of Education decison of 1954 that was a landmark legal blow to the segregation system in the South:

Supreme Court decisions, however, are not self-enforcing. Moreover, the year after the Brown decision, the Court retreated on the question of how soon segregation must end. It said that once school districts had made "a prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance" with the 1954 decision, the lower courts, which it charged with the responsibility of applying the desegregation decision, might "find that additional time is necessary." It urged lower courts to enter "such orders and decrees ... as are necessary and proper to admit to public schools on a racially non-discriminatory basis with all deliberate speed the parties to these cases."

The Court's approach to the enforcement of the Constitution on the issue of segregation was unusual. It could hardly be imagined that the discovery of slavery in, say, a town in Nevada in 1954 would lead it to decide that though the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery the town should be allowed to make a "prompt and reasonable start" toward its gradual elimination. Or that any violation of federal law by, say, a national syndicate for fraud through the mails would lead it to decide that the guilty parties must gradually desist from their activities. As black constitutional lawyer Loren Miller wrote with some bitterness in The Petitioners: "No American lawyer anywhere had ever supposed that the Supreme Court or any other organ of government could suspend the exercise of a peacetime constitutional right for a single day." By 1965, ten years after the "all deliberate speed" guideline of the Court, more than 75 per cent of the school districts in the South were still segregated. (my emphasis)

The civil rights movement in the South found itself constantly having to push even the liberal Kennedy and Johnson administrations to enforce the law protecting peaceful civil rights demonstrators and activists. Here's an example Zinn gives:

In the sit-ins of 1960 and the Freedom Rides of 1961, hundreds of persons were arrested, most of them black students, for asserting their constitutional rights; yet the federal government did not interfere with those arrests. Indeed, in the Freedom Ride of May, 1961, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, instead of using the power of the federal government to protect the riders, asked the riders to desist in a "cooling-off period" - an executive branch version of the Supreme Court's suggestion that blacks' constitutional rights be granted "with all deliberate speed." Kennedy did send marshals into Alabama after riders had been beaten in Anniston and Birmingham. As for those who rode into Mississippi, the attorney general entrusted their safety to state officials in a compromise agreement under which they would be protected from beatings, but would be arrested on arriving at Jackson. That the federal government had the constitutional power to prevent those arrests was admitted by the man who was Kennedy's assistant in charge of civil rights at that time, Burke Marshall. Marshall argued, however, that this power should not be exercised because "the result would have been chaotic and more destructive of the federal system than what happened in Mississippi." He wrote later: "It would be possible to devise authority for the federal courts to enjoin such arrests. There is no constitutional or doctrinal difficulty involved. But the consequences would be to destroy the means by which Mississippi maintained order." (my emphasis in bold)

To African-Americans and civil rights activists, "the means by which Mississippi maintained order" were a major part of what needed to be altered.

Tags: civil rights movement, howard zinn, sixties

The sixties: Political perspective of the New Left of the 1960s

Sociologist C. Wright Mills

The New Left was a term that covered a diverse group of organizations and movements. Broadly speaking, the New Left refers to the popular reform movements of the 1960s, particularly the civil rights and antiwar movements. In organizational terms, the New Left would be generally understood to include the Students for Democratic Society (SDS), the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), the Black Panther Party, SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, later Student National Coordinating Committee), and a variety of smaller groups and grouplets that grew out of the popular movements of those days, from the Freedom Rides to campus occupations like that at Columbia in 1968.

In The Annals (382) March 1969 special issue on Protest in the Sixties, the prominent leftist historian Staughton Lynd contributed an article called "The New Left". His article focuses on the intellectual aspects of New Left in the United States. Which is more than a small paradox, since a distinct characteristic of the American New Left was its eclecticism and orientation toward action, often with an overt scorn of theorizing. The European New Left had a more coherent theoretical framework because European democracies had a strong left tradition in the divergent forms of the Social Democratic and Communist Parties. But part of the reason a general term like New Left became a useful term for these movements is that in the US and elsewhere, there were no distinct parties identified with these activist tendencies established themselves as significant electoral forces, although there were smaller parties and sects like the Weather Underground and the Revolutionary Communist Party that emerged from the movement that was known as the New Left in the US.

Lynd uses a quotation from historian Howard Zinn to illustrate the action-oriented, theory-skeptical sensibility of New Left activists:

There has been much talk about a Christian-Marxist dialogue, but if such a dialogue is to be useful perhaps it should begin with the idea that God is dead and Marx is dead, but Yossarian [a character in Joseph Heller's antiwar novel Catch-22] lives - which is only a way of saying: let's not spend our time arguing whether God exists or what Marx really meant, because while we argue, the world moves, while we publish, others perish, and the best use of our energy is to resist those who would send us - after so many missions of murder - on still one more.

Despite this skepticism, or just general ignorance, of theoretical constructs, the New Left did have plenty of ideas, including Martin Luther King's Christian/Ghandian pacifism and black nationalism. Lynd uses Howard Zinn and radical sociologist C. Wright Mills to illustrate the anti-authoritarian, activist, radical-democratic orientation of the New Left groups. Lynd says, "Mills was the theorist who most influenced early SDS". And, "Zinn was the only white person to be elected an adviser by the early SNCC". Lynd also found an "existential" element in New Left thinking, which he defines as "the knowledge that the consequences of action can never be fully predicted". In fact, he claims that "is the single most characteristic element in the thought-world of the New Left."

He mentions various other thinkers who had influence on or at least strong affinities with the New Left, including historian William Appleman Williams, gay writer Paul Goodman and psychologist Erich Fromm. He also mentions the Freudian-Marxist Herbert Marcuse as being particularly representative of New Left thinking, at least to the extent that such an eclectic movement can be represented by a particular body of theory or a single book:

The single, most comprehensive, scholarly statement supporting the New Left analysis of corporate liberalism is undoubtedly Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man. Marcuse's pessimistic thesis in this influential work is that contemporary industrial society "seems to be capable of containing social change," indeed, that traditional forms of protest are "perhaps even dangerous because they preserve the illusion of popular sovereignty."

That concept of "corporate liberalism" is an important one. As Lynd describes it with particular reference to SDS, the New Left saw their main opponent as corporate liberalism, which at the time was perceived to be the dominant Establishment thinking in both the Democratic and Republican Parties. That wasn't as unrealistic as it may seem today, after 40 years of the Age of Cheney. In 1964, Barry Goldwater's brand of militant conservatism was bitterly contested within the Republican Party, and lost in the general election by a landslide to a liberal Democratic candidate, Lyndon Johnson. Lynd's terms of analysis are different from those used by the talking heads on Meet the Press, but he makes a valuable observation about the New Left perspective on the power of corporate liberalism:

The [New Left] theorists of corporate liberalism believed their main enemy to be, not the reactionary Right, but the liberal Center. Their attitude may be compared to that of the German Communist party in the early 1930's, which directed more hostility toward its Social Democratic competitor than toward the Nazis. American New Left theory made the implicit assumption that capitalism in the United States would not turn to overt authoritarianism. It overlooked the possibility that the very success of the New Left in unmasking corporate liberalism, the very growth of a serious internal opposition, would change the character of the situation and force upon the governing class a felt need for more rigorous controls. The young radicals' assessment of the American reality has been, in this sense, not too negative but too hopeful. (my emphasis)

Tags: 1968, herbert marcuse, howard zinn, new left, sixties, staughton lynd