The New Left and Participatory Democracy
Like its predecessors, the New Left emerged at a critical turning point in American history. Viewed from the standpoint of geopolitics, it was the beginning of the end of “the American century,” which prefigured a long period of decline or repositioning. Like its predecessors, too, the New Left tried to bend the resulting society in the direction of deepening equality. It did so by intervening in the great social movements that arose during “the long 1960s”: civil rights, the antiwar movement, and women’s and gay liberation. In each case, the New Left constituted the radical wing of the movement, pushing liberal solutions to their limits and beyond, and attempting to connect the movements to one another, so they formed a coherent challenge to the unraveling order. Of all three lefts, the New Left was at once the most short-lived and the most enduring. If it seemed like an explosive burst of rebellious energy that burnt itself out by the early 1970s, it also set the contours for what remains the left of our day.
The years between World War Two and the 1960s were the high point of American hegemony. At the end of the war the US possessed two-thirds of the world’s gold reserves, produced half of the world’s manufacturing output, half of its ships, and was by far the world’s largest exporter.1 The men who built the postwar order – almost all of them bankers and Wall Street lawyers – believed that the Depression “had been due largely to the breakdown of the global trading and financial system, and the consequent fragmentation of the world into would-be autarchic national economies or empires.” They sought to build an international order centered on a hegemonic nation with the moral authority and military might to enforce stability.2 As it developed, this order included an international trade and monetary system, but also access to oil and other commodity resources at stable prices. The result was the huge defense spending known as “military Keynesianism,” the “invisible government” of the CIA, and a series of wars and interventions mostly aimed at blocking state-centered development in the Third World.3
American hegemony over what was then known as “the free world” was the product of the postwar Soviet-American settlement, which created a bipolar world. Beginning in the late fifties this settlement began to crumble. On the one hand, the European recovery – signaled by the creation of the Common Market in 1957 – meant that Western European economies were gaining independence from the US. Japan, similarly, was emerging from US tutelage and becoming an economic rival. On the other hand, following Stalin’s death in 1953 the Communist world began to lose its coherence. The Sino-Soviet split and the rise of neutralism, especially in Yugoslavia, were symptoms. Most importantly, a whole host of third world countries, including Egypt, Indonesia, Ghana, the Congo, Guatemala, and Iran, challenged America’s global supremacy without becoming Communist; the 1955 Bandung Conference of neutrals offered an alternative to the bipolar settlement. The New Left emerged at this juncture, its very name signaling that it too was moving beyond the Cold War framework.
The New Left also emerged at a turning point in American economic history. Military Keynesianism was industrially based. The US used its global reach to secure markets and raw materials, and to prop up weak trading partners, but the gains of empire were returned to America’s domestic economy where they were used to moderate the business cycle, insure relatively high employment, and sustain a social wage through infrastructural spending, provision of services, and income support. The years in which the New Left emerged and flourished, however, saw the beginnings of the shift away from industry and toward finance, consumerism and marketization. The great megaliths of the Keynesian era – automobiles, consumer durables, steel, oil, and electricity – turned into multinational corporations, and began to invest abroad. An economy based on goods production aimed at the masses gave way to one oriented to services tailored to the individual. The end of colonial empires and the rising importance of global trade brought racial, ethnic, and national differences into new prominence. Higher education expanded, just as market forces helped consolidate a generationally specific youth identity, creating the social basis for a new kind of left.
The New Left can scarcely be said to have self-consciously understood the shift that the US went through in the 1960s, since the greater part of the change was not manifest until the following decade, the era of “deindustrialization” when the US went off the gold standard, and neoliberalism began its ascent. But the radical youth of the sixties did grasp that the country was at a turning point. With the benefit of hindsight we can see that the centralized mass production economy of the postwar years was going to develop spontaneous, decentralized forms of self-organization, whether marketized or not. We can also see that the relative global position of the US was going to decline, as the world became increasingly polycentric, if not Asia-centered. But the meaning of these changes remained to be decided. Would they deepen the project of bringing “equality to people of subordinate status” or would they serve “as a way of disguising exploitation.” As in the previous crises over slavery and industrialization, it fell to the left to articulate the egalitarian alternative.
Let us consider this more carefully. To begin, there were two different ways in which the United States could deal with its declining suzerainty. One was denial, reactive self-assertion and a hollow insistence on an increasingly imaginary moral superiority, all underpinned by a vast expansion of the nation’s military capacity. The other possibility – the one urged by the New Left – was that the country would support, albeit critically, the newly emerging and democratizing forces of Asia, Africa and Latin America, which, at that point, often took a revolutionary turn. Domestically, too, there were two possibilities latent in the disintegration of centralized, state-centered Keynesianism and the emergence of new, decentralized forms of self-organization. On the one hand, self-organization could mean marketization and finance-driven neoliberal growth; on the other, it could mean nonmarket forms of local, spontaneous, democratic coordination, such as those championed by the New Left. In the latter case, the country would search for new participatory forms of self-organization, guided by principles of equality and the search for a common good.
Largely originating with students in the universities, including the universities of the Deep South, the New Left was in a good position to shape which direction the country would take, if only because, as noted by Clark Kerr, Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, the universities had replaced the automobile as the driving force in the economy. In fact, however, if the New Left can be considered a student movement, it was one that rejected meritocratic competitiveness and technocratic specialization in favor of a larger conception of equality and an extra-academic tradition of critical thought. The most important characteristic of the students was not their role in what some called “the new working class,” but rather their ability to identify with those whom Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.” This was important because if the world was going to move to higher and more democratic forms of global organization, the most critical ties that needed to be forged were those between peoples, and not between governments.
Writing of France, Kristin Ross called the New Left’s distinctive characteristic “dis-identification,” meaning freedom from the imposition of any social roles. May ’68, Ross writes,
had little to do with the social group – students or “youth” – who were its instigators. It had much more to do with the flight from social determinants, with displacements that took people out of their location in society, with a disjunction, that is, between political subjectivity and the social group. What is forgotten when May ’68 is forgotten seemed to have less to do with the lost habits of this or that social group, than it did with a shattering of social identity that allowed politics to take place.4
This shattering, a phenomenon entirely at odds with the identity politics that erupted in the seventies, underlay the hopes for global solidarity and exchange that animated the New Left. Of course, this capacity for dis-identification was itself grounded in particular social conditions: widespread access to higher education, distance from poverty and material want, and the “wonderful feeling,” which followed from the destruction of fascism, “that one was entitled to no less than anyone else, that one could do anything and could be excluded from nothing.”5
The shattering of social roles, the rejection of externally defined limitations and identities, also underlay the New Left’s profound anti-authoritarianism. In the words of Samuel Huntington, who was by no means a supporter,
the essence of the democratic surge of the 1960s was a general challenge to existing systems of authority, public and private…. People no longer felt the same compulsion to obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves in age, rank, status, expertise, character, or talents. Within most organizations, discipline eased and differences in status became blurred…. More precisely, in American society, authority had been commonly based on organizational position, economic wealth, specialized expertise, legal competence, or electoral representativeness. Authority based on hierarchy, expertise, and wealth all, obviously, ran counter to the democratic and egalitarian temper of the times.6
Here, too, the left was struggling to give meaning to a social transformation. Would the anti-authoritarian spirit of the sixties give way to the antinomian consumerism of “flexible network capitalism”? Or would it lead to more egalitarian and more participatory forms of democratic self-organization.
As the radical, political wing of a broad surge of democratic energies, the New Left of the sixties sought to drive events in the direction of a larger and deeper sense of equality, one that spoke to the deep identity of the American people, and not merely to their immediate or short-term concerns. In this regard, the student movement was building on both the errors and the successes of the first two lefts. The first American left, the abolitionists, failed to anticipate how the ideal of racial equality would wither in the absence of a post-emancipation struggle for its social and economic prerequisites. The second left, the socialists and Communists, corrected the first left’s error, but failed to anticipate that a people could win social equality and still remain the passive objects of an all-powerful state. The New Left corrected for the second left’s error with its idea of participatory democracy, which presupposed an underlying desire for freedom. The great discoveries of the New Left, such as sexism and homophobia, arose from participatory experiences in the demonstrations, meetings or communes of the decade, and from the creation of new subjectivities fostered by those events. These experiences underlay the theoretical achievements of the New Left, which moved toward the insight that capitalism and imperialism were not merely objective structures, but rather were also means of organizing culture and subjectivity. That, at any rate, is the story I will tell here.
My story divides into four parts. The first part describes the crisis that the liberal order faced in the 1950s. The heart of the crisis was another metamorphosis of liberalism. A doctrine of individual freedom, liberalism was originally associated with limits on the state, and then with an activist state intended to pursue the general welfare. After World War Two, however, liberalism was being turned into the instrument of hegemonic control and empire. Fearful of democratic “excesses,” whether of the right or left, liberals sought to redefine politics in the apolitical terms of pluralism, modernization and economic growth. The “New Right” mobilized against Cold War liberals by insisting on the priority of individual responsibility and moral content. The New Left emerged from this matrix. While sharing some of the right’s critique of the bureaucratic state, it nonetheless linked that critique to the struggle for equality. Thus, the New Left embraced the ideals of racial and social equality advanced by the previous two lefts, while inventing new understandings of equality all its own.
The second stage, which stretches from 1959 to 1965, is the stage of civil rights and its radicalization, a process both hastened and shaped by the Cold War. In this stage, we see the characteristically tense and productive exchange between liberal Presidents and a left that we saw in the cases of Lincoln and the abolitionists, and Roosevelt and the Popular Front. On the one hand, radical students within the civil rights movement drew on long-standing traditions of nonviolent action to create a new kind of protest movement. On the other hand, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson responded to the growing radicalization by attempting to reorient the country in a new, more progressive direction. The death of Kennedy led to perhaps the greatest wave of reform in American history, including civil rights, Medicare and the war on poverty.
The third stage, which began in 1965, was dominated by the war in Vietnam. In this stage the relationship between liberalism and the left ruptured. While the 1960s liberal establishment was willing to move toward racial equality, it was not willing to give up its aspirations to empire. Those aspirations, which were distinct from continental expansion, had begun in 1898 when the American suppression of the Philippine Revolution anticipated the US attempt to suppress the Vietnamese. After the Chinese Communist revolution (1949), the Korean War (1950–3), and the so-called “reverse course” in Japan (the enlistment of Japan into the Cold War), the US reoriented many of its priorities from Europe to Asia. There it stood not just against Communism but also against a whole wave of decolonizing revolutions. As we shall see, the American defeat in Vietnam was the third great turning point in American history, shattering the self-confidence and pride that had followed World War Two, toppling one President (Lyndon Johnson) and, arguably, a second (Richard Nixon), ending the détente with the Soviet Union which had begun in 1962, leaving a long-term residue of mistrust in government, wrecking the Keynesian compromise, and opening the path toward global finance and debt.
The final stage of the New Left comprises the period from 1968 to the mid-1970s. Many historians describe the New Left as coming to an end with the 1968 Democratic Convention, the Weatherman debacle, and the implosion of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In fact, the period from 1968 to the mid-1970s was a period of enormous growth and maturation on the left. The period saw the broadening and deepening of the later antiwar movement (the “Mobe”), the flourishing of neo-Marxist social theory and journalism, the development of new and unexpected forms of social protest such as ecology (the first Earth Day took place in 1970), the shift from students to faculty in the university movements (New University Conference was founded in 1968), and the birth of Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Native American liberation movements. Although both feminism and gay rights antedate the sixties, leftism created a revolutionary current in both movements, those of “women’s liberation” and “gay liberation.”7 Then, too, the early seventies witnessed the attempt to broaden the New Left from a movement of students and racial minorities to a movement that included rank and file workers, many of whom were women and/or racial minorities who had shared in the anti-authoritarian upheavals of the sixties and were opposed to the war in Vietnam.
At each stage, the New Left was confronted with a social movement much larger than itself, and at each stage it sought to push that movement in a radical-democratic and egalitarian direction. This was the case for the civil rights movement, which faced a choice. On the one hand, it could pursue a “realistic” strategy oriented to achieving de jure formal rights. On the other hand, it could target the underlying power structures and the informal codes that sustained inequality, even after the dismantling of legal apartheid. The antiwar movement faced an analogous choice. On the one hand, it could argue that Vietnam was a “mistake,” while failing to challenge the underlying assumptions of US Cold War anti-Communism. On the other hand, it could challenge the liberal Cold War order, seeking to bring the United States into a friendlier relation with a revolutionizing world. Finally, feminism could pursue women’s rights in a way that dovetailed with a competitive, individualistic, market-based meritocracy. Or it could mount a comprehensive challenge to the overall division of labor, both paid and unpaid. In each case the New Left sought to push the larger movement in the radical direction. Had it succeeded, it might have created an enduring radical presence in American politics. In the event, however, the New Left did not succeed and the country began to abandon the ideal of equality, and with that much of its moral standing. As a result, the great crisis both in the place of the United States in the world, and in the US economy, that opened up in the 1960s was never resolved, and still awaits resolution today.
In August 1945, a few months after Franklin Roosevelt’s death, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even as the dawning of the atomic age brought World War Two’s unprecedented human pain and misery to a fiery end, it ushered in new threats.8 Norman Cousins described “a primitive fear, the fear of the unknown [which] has burst out of the subconscious and into the conscious, filling the mind with primordial apprehensions.”9 H. Stuart Hughes sensed “that the world had suddenly stood still and that life would never be the same again.”10 In the few years that followed, the terrible fate of Bolshevism – purges, famines, gulags – was instrumentalized and politicized through the still little understood outburst of McCarthyism. Rightists excoriated the New Deal’s “social planners, and new order advocates” who had undermined “the American way of life.”11 Images of commissars, forced labor, secret police, purge, and sabotage infused the collective unconscious, and perhaps hundreds of thousands lost their jobs.
The traumatic explosion of McCarthyism accompanied the creation of what Daniel Yergin has called the “national security state,” “a unified pattern of attitudes, policies and institutions” designed for permanent international conflict of a life and death sort. Even if a postwar conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States was inevitable given the vacuum created by the destruction of the Third Reich, America’s Cold War outlook exceeded all rational proportions, assuming the guise of an ideological global crusade combined with severe domestic repression. For many of McCarthy’s followers, America’s establishment was not a plutocratic oligarchy, but “a liberal elite composed of professors, editors, labor leaders, politicians and, for some, Jews.”12 Fearing a repeat of the anti-intellectual upsurge that characterized the McCarthy period, Cold War liberals such as Louis Hartz, Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, and Reinhold Niebuhr sought, in quite varying ways, to de-ideologize the American liberal tradition, eventually laying the basis for the “pragmatic,” technocratic politics against which the New Left rebelled.
The Cold War liberalism that took shape in the fifties condemned “extremism” of both left and right. Both left and right supposedly mobilized “conflicts that involve ultimate schemes of values and that bring fundamental fears and hatreds, rather than negotiable interests into political action.”13 In place of extremism, Cold War liberals espoused the politics of growth and pluralism. The aim of growth was to defuse divisiveness and conflict; economics, so went the theory, was “transpolitical.”14 Pluralist political theorists also condemned the intrusion of morality into politics. Democracy, they argued, required compromise, negotiation and bargaining between groups.15 President Harry Truman affirmed the new orientation, complaining that many of the people around Roosevelt had been “crackpots and the lunatic fringe.” “I want to keep my feet on the ground,” Truman opined, “I don’t want experiments. The American people have been through a lot of experiments and they want a rest from experiments.”16
The turn of liberals away from the Popular Front created an opening for a New Right, whose insistence on the individual and moral dimension in politics the New Left shared. The New Right’s first step was to repudiate the New Deal. According to Whittaker Chambers, the New Deal was a “revolution by bookkeeping and lawmaking” that replaced “reverence and awe” with “man’s monkeylike amazement at the cleverness of his own inventive brain.”17
Against “social tinkering” the right sought to capture the drama of the individual search for salvation by redeeming such neglected figures as Melville, Dostoevsky, and Faulkner, elaborators of the Augustinian vision of original sin.18 Ironically, anti-Communist rightists associated the United States, often considered the most superficial of cultures, with renovated ideals of depth and personal freedom, freed of their Christian integument by American democracy, and thereby made available to Jews, who played a leading role among neoconservative intellectuals. As a Partisan Review symposium of 1952 put it, “more and more writers have ceased to think of themselves as rebels and exiles. They now believe that their values, if they are to be realized at all, must be realized in America and in relation to the actuality of American life.” In the editor’s words, “There is a recognition that the kind of democracy which exists in America has an intrinsic and positive value; it is not merely a capitalist myth, but a reality which must be defended against Russian totalitarianism.”19
Like the New Right, the New Left began with a critique of the New Deal but turned it in an egalitarian and critical direction.20 An epochal shift in politics and culture underlay this possibility. New Deal politics had been industrial politics; the family had been part of a relatively integrated, work-centered way of life that included the ethnic neighborhood, the church, the ward boss, and even the factory. Oriented toward a deepened commitment to the family, the postwar generation had lowered the age of marriage for both sexes, reduced the divorce rate, and increased the number of children. Between 1945 and 1946 the birth rate in the US leapt by 20 percent and continued to rise until 1957, when over 4 million babies were born in a single year. The baby boomers, as they later came to be called, were the product of a new generation whose attention had shifted to sexuality, the family, and personal life. This made a new politics possible.
As much as any figure of the fifties, C. Wright Mills grasped the magnitude of the shift. Calling what was left of the Popular Front “the remnants of a vast defeat,” rejecting the old left’s “labor metaphysic,” Mills’s first book, The New Men of Power: America’s Labor Leaders (1948), argued that the New Deal had rationalized the conditions of production by introducing bureaucratic controls, rather than socializing them by enhancing workers’ autonomy.21 Behind Mills’s critique lay the disfiguring example of the Soviet Union, and the leftist debates over whether 1917 had produced a “degenerated workers’ state” or a “bureaucratic collectivist state.” In either case, there was broad agreement that statist solutions had failed. By the early sixties, such works as Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of the Great American Cities (1961), Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), and Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at any Speed (1965) were also criticizing corporate-inspired regimentation on behalf of freer, more spontaneous, decentralized forms of self-organization.
Rejecting the “labor metaphysic” meant shifting attention from economics to psychology or, in socialist terms, from exploitation to alienation, a perspective evoked in Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, first translated into English in 1959. According to Mills, if leftists were to understand the reasons for their prior failures, they had to focus on the soul-destroying world of the postindustrial office, the barbiturate- and alcohol-drugged suburbs, the empty, destructive rebellion of the teenager, the fear of doomsday machines, fail-safe devices, and nuclear meltdowns, the omnipresent anxiety concerning world destruction. The theme of alienation also prefigured the clockwork vision of Stanley Kubrick and the paranoid, postmodern worldview of authors like Thomas Pynchon.22
Along with the idea of alienation, the fifties witnessed other signs of the coming of the New Left. The rejection of the work ethic, for example by the Beatniks, was especially important. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), with the “intense, out-of-focus hurtling across America, the absolute lack of social pretensions, the seeking of something somehow important, somewhere, the experimentation with life and the gobbling of books, the betrayals and loyalties, the tenderness, the raw sincerity, all these showed an American youth different from any before.”23 Another harbinger lay in identification with black “hipsters” as expressed in jazz, the use of drugs, especially marijuana, and clothing styles. The “hipster’s laissez-faire attitude toward work and privileging of leisure and pleasure” was prophetic.24 In Morris Dickstein’s words, “The White Negro” (1957), Norman Mailer’s psychopathic hero, was “a bomb that explodes beneath the bland surface of the fifties, constructed out of all its repressed violence and rebelliousness, composed of longings for personal autonomy and extreme experience that could not be satisfied by respectability, domesticity, maturity and competitive success.”25
It was especially in popular music, beginning in 1952 when Alan Freed hosted the first rock and roll concert, that the demotic and antinomian currents out of which the New Left grew, and against which it contended, first erupted. The reason is not only that music appeals directly to the emotions, but also that it was the language of Black America, the only place the Negro has been able to tell his story, according to James Baldwin. Previously African-American music – spirituals, blues and gospel – had been kept separate from pop music. This changed in the fifties, culminating in 1960 when Berry Gordy released “Bad Girl” by the Miracles, the first record with the Motown label. By the early sixties, rhythm and blues was being combined with other traditions, for example, folk music, still then a living bridge between the old left and the new.26 The explosive entry of rhythm and blues created a new intimacy between the performer and the audience, and a new expression of sexuality in the pre-teen and largely female audiences.
Alongside the gathering energies of mass culture, artistic and intellectual vanguards anticipated the new era. Herbert Marcuse’s psychoanalytic Eros and Civilization (1955) and Norman O. Brown’s Life against Death (1959) criticized the “pseudo-individuation” of the Cold War liberal “maturity ethic,” and portrayed the artist, the mystic and the homosexual as the charismatic dramatis personae of a new society. The new art was postindividualist, antihierarchical and participatory. In Bebop, no single instrumentalist or harmonic structure established dominance; in postmodern dance no part of the body was privileged; in 1953 Robert Rauschenberg erased a Willem de Kooning drawing, thus dethroning the modernist artwork; in postmodern literature, conversation was taken as the model for democratic participation (“We thought of ourselves as in the spirit of the true left,” remarked avant-garde novelist Ron Sukenick).27 The experimental theater, happenings, and street theater of the late fifties were all democratic, participatory and antihierarchical, anticipating the sit-ins, teach-ins, and marches against the war that were soon to erupt.
John F. Kennedy, elected in 1960, the youngest American President ever, evinced the rising optimism. On the surface, Kennedy’s administration marked the triumph of that “muscular,” “pragmatic” Keynesianism that would ramp up the Cold War and “get the country moving again.” Underneath the surface, however, a generational revolution was gathering force. Fueled by Sputnik era anxiety, Kennedy symbolized youth, brains and sex appeal: a political leader who might release the underground energies of the fifties. As one reporter wrote “We seemed about to enter an Olympian age in this country, brains and intellect harnessed to great force, the better to define a common good.”28
Several factors gave the young people coming of age during the Kennedy Presidency their strong generational sense. To begin with the idea of a generational revolt – New Left, New Right – was in the air, in part reflecting the Freudian influence. In addition, the fifties saw the launching of a Cold War fueled revolution in higher education. Student enrollments went from 2.8 million in 1955 to 9 million in 1970, and for the first time university students circulated internationally. Advertisers also tapped the vast purchasing power of the student cohort, beginning in the early 1950s with the Davy Crockett fad, followed by blue jeans, rock music, and recreational drugs. Finally, the acceleration of technological change precipitated and deepened the “generation gap,” giving the young a sense of their difference from their seemingly slow-witted predecessors.
Kennedy came to power on a Cold War program, but the world was moving in a different direction. As we saw, after the death of Stalin in 1953 Communism began to “thaw.” In 1956 Palmiro Togliatti coined the term “polycentrism” to describe the increasing independence of Communist parties. The biggest change occurred in Western Europe, where by the late fifties a substantial domestic opposition “believed that the Cold War had ended with Stalin’s death, that defense spending could be substantially reduced, and that the Cold War was a convenient myth dreamed up by the military-industrial complex.” The changed mood in France, where the term “nouvelle gauche” originated, was symptomatic. In the immediate aftermath of World War Two “everything seemed destined for failure in a country torn and disoriented, convinced that its future did not depend on itself.” By 1958 in contrast, when De Gaulle returned to power with the promise of ending the war in Algeria, there was hope everywhere.29
The Sino-Soviet split, which began in the late fifties, hastened the thaw, even as it encouraged third world militancy. Earlier Khrushchev had heard Stalin warn that his successors “wouldn’t be able to stand up to the imperialists, that the first time we came into personal contact with them we wouldn’t be able to defend our interests, and they would simply smash us.” After 1957 he heard the same warnings from the Chinese.30 As Khrushchev toyed with the possibilities of a rapprochement with the United States, tens of thousands marched against nuclear weapons in Turkey, Japan, South Korea, and Aldermaston, England, where the British use of the term “New Left” originated in 1959. In March 1960 the Sharpeville Massacre led to armed resistance to apartheid in South Africa. Following the Greensboro, North Carolina sit-ins by one month, the decision of the African National Congress to engage in armed struggle suggested the global character of the struggle against racism.
Once again C. Wright Mills was prescient. His 1960 “Letter to the New Left” emphasized the importance of new, largely third world, insurgencies.31 Cuba was especially important. H. L. Matthews, the New York Times reporter who had covered the Spanish Civil War, interviewed Castro in 1957. Two years later the Cuban revolution broke out, based not on working classes but on peasants. As Castro barnstormed the United States in 1960, black militants created Fair Play for Cuba.32 Boxing champion Joe Louis asked, “where else can an American Negro go for a winter vacation,” referencing the segregated South.33
In September 1960 while attending a United Nations General Assembly session, Castro and the Cuban delegation left midtown Manhattan and moved to Harlem’s Theresa Hotel where Malcolm X greeted them. The highly publicized discussions that followed concerned the status of the embattled Congolese prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, whose country supplied 95 percent of all US uranium. In the same year, C. Wright Mills’s Listen, Yankee sold 400,000 copies, more than any of his other books. In 1960 Mills was set to participate in a televised debate over Cuba with Adolf Berle, a Cold War liberal who later served in the Kennedy administration. Mills’s preparation for this debate, and the anxiety surrounding it, led to the heart attack that would impair him until his death in 1962.
In general, then, the background milieu from which the New Left emerged was pregnant with possibilities. An avant-garde consciousness, a burgeoning mass culture, and a generational consciousness were converging, all within an opening, fluid international order. Nonetheless, the precipitating event giving birth to the New Left came from the civil rights movement, to which we now turn.
In the United States, political theorist Judith N. Shklar has written, “the struggle between master and slave [has been] not a meta-historical Hegelian image, but a daily fact.” The overwhelming importance of slavery, Shklar continued, has given the American liberal tradition its distinctive character: an emphasis on rights guaranteed by a powerful Supreme Court and protected by government.34 After World War Two, this tradition found expression in the demand for an end to racial segregation and discrimination, both de jure and de facto, a demand that helped launch what was later termed the “rights revolution.”
Although the demand for equal rights began with the abolition of slavery, it took on new meaning during the Cold War. Equal rights played the same role for the US global empire that antislavery played for the post-Napoleonic British Empire; it allowed the US to occupy the high moral ground. Even during World War Two, at the newly dug graves at the Battle of Iwo Jima, Rabbi Roland B. Gittelsohn delivered the following eulogy: “Here lie officers and men, Negroes and whites, rich and poor together. Here no man prefers another because of his faith, or despises him because of his color … Among these men there is no discrimination, no prejudice, no hatred. Theirs is the highest and purest democracy.”35 The revelations concerning the Holocaust at the end of the war gave added force to the idea that the war was fought to abolish discrimination and prejudice, and not to secure a global trading system.
The powerful wave of decolonization that followed World War Two insured that racial equality would become fundamental to US Cold War policy. When Secretary of State James F. Byrnes protested the Soviet denial of voting rights in the Balkans, the Soviets responded that Negroes in Byrnes’s own state of South Carolina were denied the same right. Robert Cushman, a member of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, wrote in 1948, “It is unpleasant to have the Russians publicize our continuing lynchings, our Jim Crow statutes and customs, our anti-Semitic discriminations and our witch-hunts, but is it undeserved?” By 1956, the
Voice of America was sending Louis Armstrong to the Gold Coast and Dizzy Gillespie, with an interracial orchestra, to the Middle East. “We are expected to be the model,” Secretary of State Dean Rusk later explained. Decolonization, Rusk continued, is
one of the epochal developments of our time. The vast majority of these newly independent peoples are nonwhite, and they are determined to eradicate every vestige of the notion that the white race is superior … In their efforts to enhance their influence among the nonwhite peoples and to alienate them from us, the Communists clearly regard racial discrimination in the United States as one of their most valuable assets.36
In supporting civil rights, of course, the government was not merely responding to international pressures. Membership in the NAACP had grown ninefold between 1940 and 1946.37 In 1944 the Supreme Court banned the white primary; in 1946 it ruled against segregated public interstate transportation; in 1948 it banned racially prescriptive property covenants. In the same year President Truman called for the desegregation of the armed forces. In 1948 the Democratic Party adopted a civil rights plank, precipitating the “Dixiecrat” revolt. Chester Bowles wrote to Hubert Humphrey:
I think the Civil Rights [plank] is the single most important victory that has been won in a Democratic Convention in many years. In the past, the Democratic Party has been more or less of a hodge-podge of big-city organizations, southern reactionaries, and northern liberals held together by the leadership of a Wilson or Roosevelt. At Philadelphia … we laid the groundwork for a Democratic Party based on liberal principles.38
In the growing impetus toward civil rights during the 1950s we have an example of the liberal tradition pushed to its highest and finest potentiality. Alongside its emphasis on material security, the New Deal had generated a “second Bill of Rights,” a series of judicial decisions promoted by New Deal lawyers that made most of the original Bill of Rights enforceable against state laws. As a result, the nature of jurisprudence had shifted from an emphasis on the relative jurisdiction of state and federal governments to an emphasis on the obligations of government to guarantee the rights of individuals. This “rights revolution” culminated in Brown v Board of Education (1954). In that and other cases, the Warren Court advanced the view that individuals could claim rights against the state as a mode of social change, thus effectively nationalizing the Bill of Rights.39
Considered historically, ending racial discrimination seems inevitable, just as the abolition of slavery seems inevitable, and the creation of a modern administrative state seems inevitable. As in the previous cases, however, the meaning of the reform was indeterminate. Segregation could have ended in an impersonal, administrative (top-down), and formal or meritocratic way, or it could have ended with the profound interactions between the races pioneered by the abolitionists, with the extension of civil rights to social and economic rights, as pioneered by the socialists, and with the participation of the poor in their own liberation, as pioneered by the New Left. Because of this indeterminacy, America has needed a left.
The indeterminacy of desegregation reflected the multiple meanings of rights. Before the Civil War the slave-owners had insisted on their right to do what they wanted with their slaves. Later, the same rights that empowered blacks to sue for racial integration could empower whites who called for the integrity of neighborhood schools, or for the protection of private, though discriminatory, housing markets. Thus the struggle for rights involved more than an effort to gain and implement them. It also entailed a struggle over their meaning. Would rights signify equality, or would they be bent to defend privilege? Equally important, the struggle for rights was a struggle to change the moral consciousness, both of the activist and of the wider society. This had been clear in all indigenous radical traditions, such as those of the nonviolent conscientious objector and the moral witness, and it came to the fore again in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to vacate her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, leading to the spread of direct action throughout the South. The four students from the Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina who ordered coffee at the segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter on February 1, 1960 went still further. Their sit-ins uncovered and began to crack the family-based racial and sexual code that had governed the American struggle for rights since the emergence of the second party system. The effect was to push the meaning of the civil rights revolution in the direction of deepening equality.
Recall that the structure governing the expression of protest in America had emerged to keep the slavery issue out of politics. Resting on a distinction between public and private, this structure had profound but differing implications for blacks and for white women, the two great social groups whose condition would be revolutionized during the sixties. Whereas blacks were degraded and associated with the profane, white women had been desexualized and placed on a pedestal, but in a way that denied them full citizenship, and infantilized them psychologically. Black culture, including the black family, was degraded all the more to idealize the “American,” that is, white, family, and above all to purify the white woman. The abolitionists had grappled with this version of the public/private division in the form of the cult of true womanhood and the socialists grappled with it in their rejection of “uplift.” In the civil rights struggles of the late fifties the same code governing protest reemerged. This code regulated not only black/ white relations, but protest in general. Especially in the South, grievances had to be expressed in such a way that “complaints” affirmed the dominant code even as they seemed to question it.
The great African-American writers of the fifties, such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, had struggled to develop a way to express protest that did not affirm the preexisting codes of power. Growing up in the South, Wright consciously negated every message that society directed at him.40 “In what other way had the South allowed me to be natural, to be real, to be myself except in rejection, rebellion, and aggression?” he asked in his path-breaking autobiography Black Boy.41 The students who sat in in 1960 found an answer to this question. Greensboro had always been a center of racial progress. Nonetheless, white leaders “exerted ultimate control by shaping the pattern of dialogue between the races, dictating the terms of exchange,” the “ground rules for racial interaction.” The key, in the mind of North Carolina progressives of both races, was “that conflict is inherently bad, that disagreement means personal dislike, and that consensus offers the only way to preserve a genteel and civilized way of life.”42 Known as “the Gateway City” and embodying North Carolina’s “progressive mystique,” Greensboro developed a response to the 1954 school desegregation decision that offered both black and white “moderates” voluntary segregation. This response governed the whole range of desegregation questions. “Justice for blacks would remain contingent upon prior consensus among whites.”
According to historian William Chafe,
As long as the amenities were observed and Negroes conducted themselves appropriately, it was assumed by whites that an equitable solution could be found to any dilemma. Yet the boundaries set by correct behavior or the “amenities” ruled out the possibility that white leaders could hear the full depth of black disaffection. Conversely, devotion to proper social forms caused whites to reject as unrepresentative any black who failed to obey the ground rules of “correct” behavior … The fundamental contribution of the sit-ins was to provide a new form through which protest could be expressed. The very act of sitting-in circumvented those forms of fraudulent communication and self-deception through which whites had historically denied black self-assertion. The sit-ins represented a new language … In an almost visceral way, the sit-ins expressed the dissatisfaction and anger of the black community toward white indifference.43
Here was the true birth of the New Left. “I probably felt better that day than I’ve ever felt in my life. I felt as though I had gained my manhood … and not only gained it, but … developed quite a lot of respect for it,” wrote one black student. “When you start growing up your environment expands and you start observing what’s going on. Then you talk about it at home,” said another. After the sit-ins young blacks began to insist that blacks seize control of their own lives, define their own rules, compose their own agendas, shape their own culture, language and institutions. The vehicle for achieving this power was community organization. Although similar ideas pervaded the New Left’s commitment to participatory democracy, there was a crucial difference. The civil rights movement was not simply a movement for rights, but also aimed at destroying a racially organized state, namely the Jim Crow South. Thus the civil rights movement was “the expression of a group struggling collectively for its rights as a people and not merely as individual Christian believers or American citizens.”44 This gave black power a different valence than the other movements of the sixties such as the student movement, the antiwar movement, and the women’s movement. Creating a base of operations independent of white control, what would soon be called “black power” was an expression of the specific situation of American blacks, and not the forerunner of identity politics, as it is often described.
The role of Martin Luther King, who struggled to bridge the gap between the liberal mainstream and the student radicals, can be understood if we consider three aspects of the civil rights movement, which correspond to three moments in the history of the left. In its first aspect, the civil rights movement was an anti-racist revolution in the sense pioneered by the abolitionists, one centered on political equality in the context of the nation. The many references to the Hebrew Bible, as in the spirituals, and to the prophetic tradition reflect King’s vision that a nation can have a moral destiny.45 In its second aspect the civil rights movement was a struggle for social equality in the sense pioneered by the socialists. Since the decline of the New Left the knowledge that King was a man of the Popular Front, a committed socialist since his student days, and a fan of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), which argued that the unequal distribution of wealth was the root of social injustice, has been forgotten. Yet King’s first book, Stride toward Freedom (1958), outlined the hope for a labor–Negro alliance.46 “The gospel of Jesus is a social gospel,” King had preached at Montgomery, adding that the black community should emulate the workers of the thirties who, even though “trampled over by capitalist power,” nonetheless resisted. In that sense King was in the tradition of the second American left. But the civil rights movement had a third aspect: it was a struggle for equal participation in democratic self-activity. It was in regard to this aspect that King found himself at odds with an unfolding movement.
The black student movement, signaled by the sit-ins, was a critique of King from the New Left perspective.47 The issue was the deepening of participation. To Ella Baker, one of the founders of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, King’s cultivation of a charismatic public image far from the fields of grassroots direct action seemed plain wrong. As a child in rural North Carolina, Baker had been deeply impressed with how local people shared their labor, their food, and their lives, thereby discovering “their own value, and their strengths.” In 1930s Harlem she learned from a wide “spectrum of radical thinking [that] the dense, impersonal, and obscenely unequal city desperately needed community institutions dedicated to the wider brotherhood.” In the April 1960 Raleigh, North Carolina conference at which SNCC was launched she praised students for their determination to avoid “struggles for personal leadership,” instead rotating leadership within small groups, so that the movement would not stagnate “when the prophetic leader turns out to have heavy feet of clay.”48
Participation implied a deepening not only of the ideal of equality, but also of the meaning of freedom. The idea that emancipation was not the endpoint of the struggle for freedom but rather its start was central to the Exodus story to which the Prophetic tradition regularly referred. Thus, SNCC activists Charles Sherrod and Bob Moses “stressed the importance of eliminating black fears that had resulted from a history of enduring violent racial oppression.” According to Moses, “You dig into yourself and the community to wage psychological warfare … you combat your own fears about beatings, shootings and possible mob violence.”49 SNCC was suf-fused with the view that freedom was a struggle, not something given, and that freedom required participation with others, and could not be reduced to individual “choice.”
Reflecting the struggle to achieve self-determination collectively, SNCC workers criticized the headline-catching but episodic protests centered on King, and strove passionately to retain control of SNCC’s media image. SNCC communications secretary Mary King wrote, “SNCC workers have learned that if our story is to be told, we will have to write it and photograph it and disseminate it ourselves,” especially given that its protests “went largely unwitnessed by those outside of the communities in which they took place.” It was not enough to overcome what SNCC leader James Forman called the national press “whiteout” of movement activities. The stress on self-determination was evident in the first SNCC recruiting and fund-raising photo, of three students, two male, one female, in a posture of prayer, but without any sense of submission or religiosity. The photograph radiated SNCC’s new sense of leadership, not that of a charismatic figure, but that of ordinary people gaining control of their lives.50
The radical wing of the Southern civil rights movement had an explosive effect on students and young people throughout the country. The almost mystical appeal of early SNCC is suggested by a communication from Bob Moses in 1961: “This is Mississippi, the middle of the iceberg. Hollis is leading off with his tenor, ‘Michael row the boat ashore, Alleluia … Mississippi is the next to go, Alleluia.’ This is a tremor in the middle of the iceberg.”51 The existential confrontation with what was perceived as evil was central to the new politics. Casey Hayden, who came out of Texas Christian activism, said, “I cannot say to a person who suffers injustice, ‘Wait.’ Perhaps you can. I can’t. And having decided that I cannot urge caution, I must stand with him. If I had known that not a single lunch counter would open as a result of my action, I could not have done differently.” Nonviolence, Hayden explained, also affected the activist:
[It] took one out of the role of victim and put her in total command of her life. By acting in this clear, pure way, in which the act itself was of equal value to its outcome, and by risking all for it, we were broken open, released from old and lesser definitions of ourselves in terms of race, sex, class, into the larger self of the Beloved Community. This was freedom as an inside job, not as external to myself, but as created, on the spot and in the moment, by our actions. This was ideology turned inside out.52
Similar testimonials run through the early New Left. The early student heroes were “Robert Moses walking alone in Mississippi, Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra Mountains … and Mills, the lonely rebel fighting complacency in academe.”53 For Sue Thrasher, it was at a Nashville civil rights meeting that she first “heard black people speak about themselves.”54 Civil rights demonstrations were the “first time I got any real inkling about the costs and the pain of segregation.” For Bob Zellner, a Southern white civil rights worker, SNCC workers
lived on a fuller level of feeling than any people I’d ever seen, partly because they were making modern history in a very personal way, and partly because by risking death they came to know the value of living each moment to the fullest…. Here were the models of charismatic commitment I was seeking – I wanted to live like them.55
Student activist Mario Savio explained, “My reasons were selfish. I wasn’t really alive. My life, my middle class life, had no place in society, nor it in me … I needed some way to pinch myself, to assure myself that I was alive.”56 “Last summer I went to Mississippi to join the struggle there for civil rights. This fall I am engaged in another phase of the same struggle, this time in Berkeley.”57
Northern students who had participated and supported SNCC founded Students for a Democratic Society in 1962. The goal of the organization, the Port Huron statement explained, was “to democratize the structure of modern society,” to create “a society in which everyone vitally affected by a social decision, regardless of its sphere, would have voice in that decision and a hand in its administration.” This idea, participatory democracy, was the third American left’s reformulation of the ideal of equality.58 In the early years of SDS, according to Tom Hayden, “spontaneity and local initiative were invested with such mystical significance that any sign of bureaucracy, or delegating of authority to older groups, was profoundly suspect.”59 Later, women and others complained of being unheard at meetings. Yet, according to Barbara Haber, “much care was expended to encourage reticent members to express their views. Ideas and questions were responded to without condescension or acrimony.”60 By the fall of 1962 SDS had twenty chapters, and was sending out 10,000 copies of its newspaper. SDSers were convinced in a way that seems foreign today that change had to come from the poor and the excluded.
As a student movement formed, civil rights became the object of countless demonstrations, sit-ins and marches. As these mushroomed, liberals, university presidents, politicians and social scientists complained that “the students would not play by the rules.” By this they meant the pluralist mechanisms and procedures of protest, such as the formulation of clear “demands,” compromise and bargaining. Some blamed the students’ unrealistic idealism on what Edward Shils called their desire for a “totality of undifferentiated perfection,” while others claimed the students were manipulative. In fact, as the sit-in protesters intuitively recognized, liberal proceduralism was organized to maintain the status quo and only a continuous, activist challenge to authority could change society. A critically important part of this recognition was that the process of questioning and examination had to be directed inwardly, against hierarchy in the radical movement itself.61 Another part was what Wini Breines has called the “prefigurative politics” of participatory democracy. In Breines’s summary,
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 action while working toward the ultimate goal of a free and democratic society were among the [New Left’s] most important contributions.62
The combination of a powerful liberal, rights-centered tradition and a boundary-breaking radical movement set in motion the dramatic breakthrough we call the Civil Rights Revolution. To be sure, this relationship was fraught. Democratic Party political operatives were impatient with the exploding new student forces. Al Lowenstein
could not understand why a group of SNCC leaders in the room couldn’t decide right then and there what to do … But people said we’ve got to talk about it … The people who are suffering, the people on the bottom, have something to say … not as a lawyer, not as an expert economist, but they do know what they need.63
In fact, SNCC militancy forced the confrontation between Southern segregationists and the Kennedy administration. “In a federal system,” Burke Marshall, the head of the Civil Rights Division, explained, rights are “individual and personal, to be asserted by private citizens as they choose, in court, speaking through their chosen counsel.”64 Nonviolent direct action and community mobilization transgressed this understanding of rights. The Birmingham, Alabama direct action campaign that began in the spring of 1963 inspired 758 demonstrations in 11 Southern states and 13,786 arrests, amounting to an insurgency. The freedom struggle, Herbert Hill wrote, seemed to be “taking a revolutionary turn.” “We do not shrink from the use of the term ‘revolution,’ ” editorialized the normally moderate Afro-American in June 1963, “for how else can the social upheaval that has shaken our nation be honestly described.”65
Ending segregation was one moment in this larger revolution. In 1962 Michael Harrington had published The Other America. The book came to President Kennedy’s attention through a review by Dwight MacDonald in the New Yorker. In it Harrington demonstrated that the New Deal had not fully succeeded in creating an employed, housed, educated and healthy working class. Not just blacks, but many whites, not just in Appalachia or the Deep South but in the Northern cities, lived as an “invisible nation” of the poor, according to Harrington.
Harrington’s book planted the seeds for the War on Poverty. At the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, with 250,000 people attending, King announced that the nation’s founders had offered a “promissory note.” “We refuse to believe there are insufficient funds in the great vaults” of this nation, he added.66 The next month SDS founded the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP), which had SDS organizers moving into urban slums in an attempt to build “an interracial movement of the poor.” According to Andrew Kopkind, ERAP workers “are not down there for a visit … They are part of the slums, a kind of lay brotherhood, worker-priests, except that they have no dogma to sell.”67
Civil rights implied a social revolution, not simply a rights revolution. For blacks, the point of gaining the right to vote, to demonstrate, and to have access to the state was to use their power to transform their conditions. Breaking the back of the white segregationist Democratic Party was only a first step. The explosive militancy of the movement made Kennedy fear he would lose the Democratic vote in the Deep South and his ill-fated 1963 trip to Texas was an attempt to repair some of the damage. His assassination was the occasion for deepening the nation’s commitment to equality. “No memorial or oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long,” Johnson stated.68 Mississippi Freedom Summer, with 800 volunteers from throughout the country, brought the light of the national media, and of the federal government, into Mississippi. Medicare, the Voting Rights Act, and the War on Poverty followed.69
The eighteen months that followed Kennedy’s assassination proved to be the apotheosis of liberal idealism. Johnson announced the goal of the Great Society in 1964. According to historian Robert Dallek, Johnson’s “idea of the presidency was picking up where FDR’s New Deal left off.”70 “Whereas FDR had been preoccupied with material security LBJ was focused … on social empowerment.” Thus the War on Poverty called for “maximum feasible participation” of the poor.71 According to SDSer Richard Flacks, participatory democracy was not just “another code word for socialism, it meant redefining the socialist tradition in terms of the democratic content in it. It meant extending principles of democracy from the political sphere into other institutions, like industry, like the university.”72 Now this had become government policy as well.
“These are the most hopeful times since Christ was born,” Johnson stated as he lit the White House Christmas tree in December 1964. Working closely with Senate Minority Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen, Johnson appeared before Congress on March 15, 1965 to appeal for a Voting Rights Bill. “Should we defeat every enemy,” he told a cheering Congress, “should we double our wealth and conquer the stars” and still deny equal rights to Negro Americans, “we will have failed as a people and as a nation.” Not just Negroes but all of us, he exhorted, must work to “overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And … We shall … overcome.” Three months later in a speech at Howard University, Johnson called for the “next and more profound stage of civil rights … not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and as a result.” Asked how the country could afford it, Johnson responded, “We’re the richest country in the world, the most powerful. We can do it all.”
Why did the country fail to carry through on this hopeful moment? One explanation is that Americans will support equality before the law, as in the Civil Rights Act, but not redistribution, as in the Great Society. Argued most cogently in Thomas and Mary Edsall’s Chain Reaction, the heart of the explanation is the phenomenon of “white flight” and “white backlash.” According to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Watts uprising, which took place five days after the signing of the Voting Rights Act, shattered the “image of non-violent suffering.” The immigrant Jewish glove manufacturer in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral expressed the deep antagonism that some Americans experienced in response to the uprisings: “I built this with my hands! With my blood! They think somebody gave it to me? Who? Who gave it to me? Who gave me anything, ever? Nobody!”73
There is much evidence to support the Edsalls’ explanation. The three years after Watts witnessed regular summer uprisings, leaving 225 people dead, 4,000 wounded, and $112 billion property damage. According to Doris Kearns, “after the riots, the media described America in very different terms. It was as if overnight an innocent child had become a middle aged man, as if within months the soul of America had passed from childlike mirth and unreasoning optimism to deep dejection.” In 1964 “only 34% of the American people believed Negroes were trying to move too fast,” by 1966 the figure had risen to 85%.74 In September 1966 an open housing bill was killed in Congress. Soon, “virtually every important element of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society … had come to seem part of a program of aid and comfort for the black minority, rather than an effort to lift Americans of every race onto a higher social and economic plane.”75 In 1966 the Republicans gained forty-seven House seats and three Senate seats, and elected eight new governors, including Ronald Reagan. Kevin Phillips described the election as the “repudiation visited upon the Democratic Party for its ambitious social programming, and inability to handle the urban and Negro revolutions.”
It is certainly the case that moving in the direction of substantive equality would have entailed intense internal struggle, conflict and upheaval. It is also the case that some civil rights reforms, such as busing, seem to many today to have been misguided. Nevertheless, the country had moved toward substantive equality twice before: during the Civil War, when the largest source of capital stock in the country was abolished without compensation, and during the New Deal, when wealth and political power were again redistributed, and liberalism redefined in egalitarian terms. In both cases, the entire country benefited from a reorientation based on egalitarian principles. Why not this time? The answer is no doubt complicated, but the growing strength of the right during the sixties, culminating in the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, was not simply, and probably not even primarily, a response to “riots” and other excesses. What lay behind the Democratic Party’s collapse, and prevented the country from moving in a genuinely progressive direction, was the war in Vietnam. To say that, however, is not to point simply to an event, but rather to a proclivity toward violence that runs very deep in the American liberal tradition, and that underlies the third great crisis in American history, following those of slavery and industrial capitalism, the one we are living through today.
The second stage in the evolution of the New Left came with its participation in the antiwar movement. Emerging in the context of the civil rights explosion and helping to precipitate feminism and gay liberation, the Vietnam War was America’s third transformative moment. Politically, the war was “the point at which trust in government ended and skepticism began,” leading more or less directly to Watergate but also pointing toward the anti-government ideology that wrecked the welfare state and degraded much subsequent politics. Economically, the Vietnam War ended the “golden age of capitalism,” sparked the economic crisis that took the country off the gold standard, precipitated its turn from industry to finance, and created the inflation that helped discredit Keynesianism. Above all, the war set off the long-term decline of the American liberal tradition, ravaging “popular faith in government, and scorch[ing] the earth from which the liberal agenda had sprung.”76
Just as the Civil War is best understood as the tipping point in a long-standing structural crisis, namely slavery, and just as the Great Depression was the tipping point in the conflict between capital and labor, so Vietnam was the tipping point in the conflict between the nation’s republican character and its role as an empire. Ancient Rome supplied the cautionary example. Having begun as a republic, Rome increasingly turned to imperial methods, eviscerating its own freedoms, turning its forums over to bread and circus, concentrating power and wealth in private villas and latifundia, while public agorae, temples and monuments languished. In the eighteenth century the American nation had been founded on the premise that, because of its “free land,” America could avoid the fate of Rome. But in 1898 when the United States became a formal empire through the acquisition of the Philippines, Senator Carl Schurz, a refugee from the German democratic revolution of 1848, warned that a democracy cannot “play the king over subject populations without creating in itself dangerous ways of thinking and habits of action.” As Schurz spoke, he was watching American troops introduce surveillance, torture, extraconstitutional prisons and other police-state tactics into the Philippines, where the population had risen up against the American invasion.
The war in Vietnam was no accident. The 1898 Open Door notes, which laid the foundation of twentieth-century American foreign policy, were written in response to the collapse of China. Likewise, the National Security Council’s NSC-68 (1950), one of the most pivotal policy documents in American history, situated the need for a military buildup in the context of the disintegration of the European empires. The American intervention supporting French rule over Indochina began in the same year. After his humiliating 1961 confrontation with Khrushchev, Kennedy told James Reston, “now we have a problem in trying to make our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place.”77 As McGeorge Bundy explained in a crucial memo of March 21, 1965, the “cardinal” principle of the Vietnamese intervention was for the United States
not to be a Paper Tiger. Not to have it thought that when we commit ourselves we really mean no major risk. This means essentially a willingness to fight China if necessary…. The conclusion I draw from this is that it is to our advantage to frame our posture toward our military program so that we have a right to go anywhere (and will if sufficiently provoked).78
The decision to intervene exemplified the Cold War liberal mentality in that every effort was made to exclude democratic participation. As Lyndon Johnson explained to Doris Kearns, “The biggest danger to American stability is the politics of principle, which brings out the masses in irrational fights for unlimited goals, for once the masses begin to move, then the whole thing begins to explode.”79 Dean Rusk elaborated, “We made a deliberate decision not to stir up war fever among the American people [over Vietnam] … We felt that in a nuclear world its just too dangerous for an entire people to become too angry. That might push the situation beyond the point of no return.”80 The supposedly hard-edged technology and science encouraged killing at a distance. General William Westmoreland, the US Army commander between 1964 and 1968, foresaw “an entirely new battlefield concept, the automated battlefield.”81 Nor did a technocratic war machine exclude idealism, as captured in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American:
Perhaps only ten days ago he had been walking back across the Commons in Boston, his arms full of the books he had been reading in advance on the Far East and the problems of China. He didn’t even hear what I said: he was absorbed already in the dilemmas of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West: he was determined … to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world.
The sensibility of the sixties was formed in direct opposition to that of Rusk, Westmoreland, and Greene’s protagonist. It supposed that behind the cold and rationalistic facade of the liberal’s war machine lay not only the interests of capital, nor only those of an American power elite, but also powerful human passions, such as sexuality, aggression and greed. This sensibility expressed itself in a variety of ways, many of which were only half-formed, including anti-technological manifestos like Charles Reich’s The Greening of America, rejections of rational and technological modernity, as in the hippie lifestyle, and powerful outbursts against the technological imperviousness of the system, as in Mario Savio’s “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.” Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man was centered on the problem of locating an oppositional moment in a positivistic, technological society. Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove portrayed the catastrophic consequences of totalizing reason. Savio’s outburst, Marcuse’s book, and Kubrick’s film all date from 1964, the same year as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which made possible the vast, seemingly inevitable expansion of the war in Vietnam.
The antiwar movement was based on the same sixties sensibility but like the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement was not itself a left. It included a great range of positions, including pacifist objections to all wars, calls for negotiations, halts to the bombing, or immediate withdrawal, and hopes for a Vietminh (NLF) victory. Like the civil rights movement, too, the antiwar movement had its roots in preexisting traditions of nonviolence, such as the War Resistors League, a pacifist organization formed in 1923. But there clearly was a left within the antiwar movement, just as there had been a left within the civil rights movement. Indeed, it is impossible to understand the antiwar movement without recognizing the role of the left.
The first contribution of the left to the antiwar movement came from its rejection of anti-Communism. Anti-Communism – the core of the liberal faith – had little or nothing to do with the merits or demerits of Communist regimes, but rather was a worldview that justified American interventions, on the one hand, and worked to suppress criticism of American institutions, on the other. The New Left’s challenge to anti-Communism was analogous to the Greensboro student sit-ins: it was a refusal to accept the dominant code, which governed what and how one should protest, characterizing any “excess” as “Communist.” The historian H. Stuart Hughes grasped the significance of this issue in a 1960 article. McCarthyism, Hughes wrote, had destroyed not just the Communist Party, but civil society in general.
For a whole decade, school teachers and college professors denied their students the long-sanctioned right of the young to seek their own path and learn from their own errors…. Suddenly in the spring of 1960, I realized with a shock that a new student generation had sprung into life. In the widespread demonstrations against racial segregation a new age group had won its spurs…. The fact that its energies turned toward activities on behalf of peace suggested that its concern for racial equality formed part of a wider protest … Impatient with ideological rhetoric, [the students] find almost incomprehensible the pro-Communist and anti-Communist polemics that shook the American Left in the decades from 1917 to 1948. Basically, I think this is a good thing. I shall be quite happy to see the young people take leadership from us and direct the new radicalism of America into courses we would never have imagined.
Hughes called his article “Why We Had No Dreyfus Case.” Referring to the ease with which American liberals had scuttled their commitment to civil liberties during the McCarthy era, Hughes voiced the hope “that when [the New Leftists] are confronted with their Dreyfus case they will rise to the challenge better than we did in the years of our country’s supreme moral crisis.”82
The question of anti-Communism threatened to derail the first national march against the war, called by SDS in April 1965. Imposing liberal figures, such as Bayard Rustin, Irving Howe and Michael Harrington, insisted that Communists be banned from participating. In what would prove to be a historically consequential decision, SDS refused. Thus, Communists marched under their own banners for the first time since the McCarthy era. An unprecedented 25,000 people came to the march. For economist Douglas Dowd, who lived through the absence of protest during the Korean War, “it was as though spring had arrived after a very, very long fucking winter.”83
At that march and the following one, SDS supplied the beginnings of an analysis of the war; in two speeches given by two SDS presidents the war was presented as the product of liberalism. In April 1965, Paul Potter asked, “What kind of system is it that allows good men to make those kinds of decisions? … We must name that system. We must name it, describe it, analyze it, understand it and change it.” In November 1965 Carl Oglesby stated, “The original commitment in Vietnam was made by President Truman, a mainstream liberal. It was seconded by President Eisenhower, a moderate liberal. It was intensified by the late President Kennedy, a flaming liberal…. They are not moral monsters. They are all honorable men. They are all liberals.”
The liberals who created the war, “the best and the brightest,” mostly students of management and engineering, were the products of McCarthyism. Their great fear was populism, with its supposedly emotive character. As an alternative to all forms of mass politics, including Communism, they subscribed to a technocratic modernization theory, according to which inevitable laws of development would bring unenlightened people toward pluralism and the politics of growth. Inequality was central to their outlook. Just as nineteenth-century imperialism was based on a social Darwinian vision according to which colonialism would help “prepare” “backward peoples” for freedom, so modernization theory was premised on the belief that the “stages of economic growth” would turn peasantries into modern consumer societies. Communism, the theory held, was a disease of development.
Against the modernization paradigm, the students who flocked to the antiwar movement were taught by a new, post–New Deal generation of professors, for the most part the children of immigrants, often Jewish, though not yet female, or black, in large numbers. Probably no discipline was more important in presenting an alternative to the modernization outlook than American history. According to the younger historians, Reconstruction was not, as the historical mainstream had portrayed it, a “tragic era,” but rather the high point of nineteenth-century democracy. The abolitionists were not neurotic malcontents but heroes. The age of the democratic revolutions was an age of emancipation, beginning with the slave revolt in Haiti. The United States had always been an expansionist nation, preying on its weaker neighbors, whether the Native Americans or the decrepit European empires on its borders. Rather than a succession of expanding new opportunities, each American frontier was a new evasion of the responsibility to refound the nation. Antibusiness populism, not technocratic liberalism, should be seen as the heart of the American democratic tradition. Leftism, not liberalism, was the proper response to the turning point of the sixties.
In contrast to the administration’s insistence on “expertise” and secret, backstage knowledge, the academic antiwar movement created a new public sphere, beginning with the first teach-in, held at an all-night session at the University of Michigan in March, 1965. According to anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, “Facts were demanded and assumptions were exposed … On that night, people who really cared talked of things that really mattered.”84 “The stroke of genius in Michigan put the teach-in on the agenda in the whole academic community,” wrote Carl Oglesby. The grandest was at the University of California, Berkeley; it lasted forty-six hours, 30,000 people participated. Isaac Deutscher, who visited the school later, compared the atmosphere to ancient Greece. Quite possibly, the teach-ins, in which participation was not restricted by race, gender or supposed expertise, were the largest and most probing public democratic debate in the whole of American history.
Through the teach-ins, many professors and students came to reject the view of the university as an ivory tower, the sacrosanct guardian of knowledge. Normally hierarchical relations between students and professors shifted, as students challenged their teachers, and teachers challenged administrators. The radicals attacked the collaboration with the military of the anthropology, economics, political science, and natural science disciplines. They exposed Project Camelot, an attempt by the US Army to explain the causes of “violent social action,” that is, revolution. Chile was intended to be the first case study but protests led to the program’s cancellation. The anthropologist Eric Wolf blew the whistle on counter-insurgency research in Thailand. Perhaps the army didn’t really need the university, however, as it relied on the Rand Corporation for research on the NLF in Vietnam, and Rand consistently told the army what it wanted to hear, namely that the NLF was on the verge of cracking.
After the teach-ins and antiwar demonstrations began, the atmosphere of the country shifted. According to Tom Wicker, “no one writing in the press or speaking on campus escaped challenge, argument, confrontation – not only about the war itself but about American institutions and assumptions generally.”85 “Objectivity,” the ideal of both academics and journalists, became a term of scorn. According to Michael Schudson, “objectivity in journalism, regarded as an antidote to bias, came to be looked on as the most insidious bias of all. For ‘objective’ reporting reproduced a vision of social reality which refused to examine the basic structures of power and privilege.” The critique of objectivity rested on the view that knowledge was situated, and that the decontextualized character of modern reporting and of social science prevented the true situation from being revealed.
The critique of objectivity was part of the New Left’s deepening conception of equality. Against modernization theorists, New Leftists argued that urban planning was not in the interest of the poor, that psychiatrists invented many forms of mental illness, that the courts promoted injustice, and that the schools were the training grounds for the corporations. Intellectuals were dubbed “the new mandarins,” unless they “spoke truth to power.” The idea of a “culture of poverty,” whether in the American slums or in third world countries, came under attack. What Lionel Trilling called “adversary culture,” having the “clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and vantage point from which to judge and condemn,” became more general. Even John Dewey, the originator of participatory democracy, lost his sacrosanct status because of his uncritical (“pragmatic”) support for America’s entry into World War One.
The critique of objectivity extended into the war zone itself. According to Michael Herr, “Nothing so horrible ever happened upcountry that it was beyond language fix and press relations.” False numbers of “kills,” fabricated battle-reports, and media self-censorship combined to create an “Orwellian language of euphemism and disguise.”86 Because of what Wicker called the “powerful impulse” provided by the students, the army lost control of this language. As early as September 5, 1965 the New York Times described “a woman who has both arms burned off by napalm and her eyelids so badly burned that she cannot close them. When it is time for her to sleep her family puts a blanket over head. The woman had two of her children killed in the air-strike that maimed her.”87 A turning point occurred in 1966 when Harrison Salisbury visited Hanoi and reported the bombing of civilians, which the Pentagon had denied. In 1971 The New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, an encyclopedic internal history of the American involvement, prepared by a Department of Defense task force, which demonstrated that the administration had, according to the paper, “systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance.”
Just as the abolitionists had tried to make Americans feel the reality of slavery, and just as the Popular Front activists had tried to make the lives of sharecroppers and unemployed workers vivid, so the antiwar activists sought to make Americans feel the horrors they were inflicting on the people of Vietnam. Here they followed the pioneering example of the philosopher William James, who passionately opposed the American war against the Filipinos, while insisting that the very scale and anonymity of the modern corporate-state made it difficult to penetrate to the vital human dimension.88 In the case of Vietnam, science-based “expertise” created an illusion of logic and inevitability. The antiwar movement sought to puncture that illusion and release what James called “the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual.”89 Thus the New Yorker published a report by Gloria Emerson of a nineteen-year-old soldier with bloody, bent legs. The nurse and orderly began “to prepare him for surgery. They worked very hard, but something went wrong. The boy tried to rise up and push them away, making a noise I had never heard from a man: a long and hoarse shriek.” The doctors took off both legs above the knees. Emerson had desperately tried to gain some time for him, to get a second opinion, but there were no second opinions. Later she saw the doctor who had performed the surgery, drinking a Coca-Cola. She asked if the boy had been in shock and why they had not waited. “He wasn’t in shock, he was just frightened to death,” the doctor explained.90
One result of the effort to communicate the incommunicable was the “new journalism,” which sought “to break the glass between the reader and the world he lives in.”91 Nonfiction novels about killings (Truman Capote), hippies (Joan Didion), and political marches (Norman Mailer) are examples of works that reported “events from the inside out.”92 Meanwhile, as in Camus’s The Plague, “Americans were going about business as usual while denying the persistence of pervasive and threatening evils.” For Gloria Emerson, “Getting back [from Vietnam] was not good.” One “woman asked me what I had worn to officer’s dances; the question did not make me smile.”TV host Barbara Walters gave advice on how to talk to the veterans: “Keep the discussion generalized … Ask about the heat, the dampness, the housing.” “What is your methodology,” a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology demanded when Emerson said she was writing a book on what the war had done to Americans. “You will never regret the experience,” a lady said to Emerson, as they both waited to have their hair cut at a shop on 62nd Street. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance.” 93
A turning point in the fight to “bring the war home” was Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation. The event was later described by Judith Thurman in an article concerning the visual artist Marina Abramovic:
Half a world away, on a street in Saigon, Thich Quang Duc, a sixty-six year old monk, folded his legs in the lotus position and immolated himself to protest the persecution of Buddhists by the Diem regime. His death was photographed by Malcolm Browne, and reported by David Halberstam, who was, he wrote, “too shocked to cry” as the flames consumed the body. Self-martyrdom as a public spectacle had precedents in Asian culture, but Thich’s composure, as he lit the match and sat serenely for ten minutes of agony, rocked the West and burrowed into its collective dream life.
“No news picture in history has generated as much emotion around the world,” President Kennedy said. Abramovic never forgot that “terrible image of devotion to a cause,” which created the art of ordeal, she explained.94 The next year draft card burning began, followed by the burning of draft records, and other forms of symbolic immolation. In November 1965, Norman Morrison, a thirty-two year old Quaker, burnt himself alive just outside of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s office. McNamara called it a personal tragedy for himself, while the North Vietnamese greeted American visitors with a song to Morrison, who became a national hero in Vietnam. In 1968 Philip and Daniel Berrigan, two Catholic priests, poured home-made napalm over a draft board’s records, explaining they were burning paper instead of children.
Eventually eight American antiwar activists burnt themselves alive to protest the war. In addition to Norman Morrison, they were Alice Herz, Roger A. LaPorte, Hiroko Hayaski, Florence Beaumont, Erik Thoen, Ronald Brazee, and George Winne. The general idea was that Americans would not be “good Germans.” According to Steven Cohen, “I cared so deeply about Vietnam because I am Jewish and I cannot forget the Holocaust … If your country is doing something wrong, you’ve got to try to change it.”95 People became obsessed. They kept files of clippings. They kept mimeograph machines in their downstairs halls near their kitchens. Relationships broke up because one or the other person was so overcome by the war.96 High school students started underground newspapers. Everywhere people flashed the V peace sign. Rabbis intoned, “in every generation, every human being must look upon herself, himself, as if we ourselves had gone forth from Vietnam.” The idea of the “movement,” far transcending SDS, captured the imagination of a generation: antiwar activists could go anywhere in the United States, find a place to stay, food to eat, and actions to join. Protest, one activist recalled, “was like breathing or like feeding your children. We didn’t think there was any alternative.”97
In some cases, protest turned to resistance, leading formerly sympathetic observers like Hannah Arendt to condemn the New Left.98 In December 1965 Tom Hayden, Herbert Aptheker and Staughton Lynd visited Hanoi, proclaiming, “We are all Viet Cong.” Draft resistance mushroomed; elasticized armbands supported “The Presidio Twenty Seven, the Chicago Seven, the Boston Five, the Harrisburg Seven, the Camden Twenty Eight.”99
In October 1967 3,000 protesters surrounded the induction center in Oakland, California, urging draftees not to register.100 After 1968 dozens if not hundreds of collectives committed bombings, arson, and other destructions of military and war-related property. Historian Kirkpatrick Sale estimates 2,800 such attacks at the high point, between January 1969 and April 1970. The Department of Defense acknowledges 503,926 incidents of desertion between 1966 and 1973.101 Deserters in foreign countries became politically active there. In 1975 the American Civil Liberties Union reported that 750,000 Americans were in need of amnesty because they had gone into exile or otherwise avoided the war.102
The most profound rebellion occurred within the military. According to the Armed Forces Journal in 1971,
the morale, discipline and battle-worthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at anytime in this century and possibly in the history of the United States. By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous.
Among the evidence: 109 “fragging” incidents in 1970, soldier slang for the murder of officers and NCOs; some 144 underground newspapers published on or aimed at US military bases; at least 14 GI antiwar organizations; a semi-underground network of lawyers “which tries to coordinate seditious antimilitary activities throughout the country”; “a community of turbulent priests and clergymen,” which visits “military posts, infiltrates brigs and stockades in the guise of spiritual counseling,” works to recruit military chaplains, and consecrates draft-dodging; and at least eleven off-base antiwar coffee houses with rock music, antiwar literature, and how-to-do-it tips on desertion, the best-known being The Shelter Half (Ft Lewis, Wash.), Home Front (Ft Carson, Colo.), and Oleo Strut (Ft Hood, Tex.). The Movement for a Democratic Military specialized in theft of weapons from military bases in California.103 In Vietnam, wrote one military paper, “the Lifers, the Brass, are the true Enemy, not the enemy.” “Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units.”
In this atmosphere, the New Left – the left wing of the antiwar movement – sought to expose the relations between American racism and the war. Once again, whites were confronted with a darker, weaker, poorer people.104 “They were dinks, you know, subhuman.” “They all hold fucking hands. I hated that.”105 Even
the racial epithet the Americans used for the Vietnamese – “gook” – had been invented during the American occupation of Haiti. Slavery and imperialism were two moments in the development of capitalism. Taken along with the regular confrontations between black youths and police, the growth of black power, the understanding of the war in Vietnam as a “war of national liberation,” and the fact that US spending for Vietnam made “the war on poverty” unaffordable, antiwar sentiment drove the civil rights movement to the left.
The emergence of the issue of armed self-defense in the black community, as shown by the Black Panther Party and the Revolutionary League of Black Workers, exemplified this. Robert F. Williams, who advocated black self-defense as against King’s nonviolence in 1960, and fled the country the following year to avoid the FBI, became an international figure in the antiwar context. As an eleven-year-old in Monroe, North Carolina, Williams had witnessed the beating and dragging of a black woman by a white policeman.106 According to his biographer, “Williams revisited the bitter memory on platforms that he shared with Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Zedong. He told it over Radio Free Dixie, his regular program on Radio Havana from 1962 to 1965, and retold it from Hanoi in broadcasts directed to African-American soldiers in Vietnam. It echoed from transistor radios in Watts in 1965 and from gigantic speakers in Tiananmen Square in 1966.” His autobiography, “While God Lay Sleeping,” which he completed just before his death in1996, also opens with the story. “I don’t consider myself American; I am a Black Muslim man of African heritage,” said Williams, echoing Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X.107
The antiwar struggle fueled the New Left’s interest in the vast body of critical social thought described by C. Wright Mills as “to the left of [John] Dewey.” In part this meant Marxism, because the war only seemed explicable once the centrality of imperialism – “the last stage of capitalism” – had been granted. But it also meant Freudo-Marxism, Frankfurt School critical theory, Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Situationism – all expressions of the New Left’s desire to place subjectivity, albeit thwarted subjectivity, at the center of its conception of capitalism. Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution, which advanced a view of history as a project of self-realization, had been written in 1941 but now found its audience. Beginning in 1960 New Left Review began translating and publishing the long-ignored works of dissident or Hegelian Marxists like Karl Korsch, Lucio Colletti, Jean-Paul Sartre, Georg Lukacs, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Antonio Gramsci, works that emphasized the struggle for position in civil society rather than the state. A global theory of revolution also began to emerge in the works of Régis Debray, based on the Cuban and other Latin American experiences, and Immanuel Wallerstein, who formulated a theory of the capitalist world-system. In all of these works, New Leftists were searching for that structure of unreason that lay behind an otherwise inexplicable war, as well as behind a superficially rational technocapitalist facade.
For many Americans, the turning point – the moment when the war’s irrationality became palpable – occurred on March 16, 1968 when a company of American infantrymen landed in the village of My Lai by helicopter.
Many were firing as they spread out, killing both people and animals. There was no sign of the rumored Vietcong battalion and no shot was fired at Charlie Company all day, but they carried on. They burnt down every house. They raped women and girls and then killed them. They disemboweled some villagers or cut off their hands or scalps. There were gang rapes and killings by shooting or with bayonets. There were mass executions. Dozens of people at a time, including old men, women, and children, were machine-gunned in a ditch. In four hours, nearly 500 villagers were killed.108
The massacre, the New York Times noted, “struck a blow against one of our fondest illusions, the American fighting man as G.I. Joe … slogging through Europe with a wisecrack on his lips, a wink in his eye, and a chocolate bar in his hand for the orphaned Paisano kids.”109 The Nation observed that the “pseudo-moral discussion” that followed the My Lai revelations “would be a good thing if it resulted in a lasting change of heart, but it is as ephemeral as the frontier evangelism from which it is derived.”110
Historians describe the United States as a divided nation in the late sixties, but this is misleading. There was intense loyalty to slain Americans, and to the nation in general, but support for the war, as opposed to the troops, was a distinctly minority view. In particular, all polls demonstrate that manual workers were consistently more opposed to the war, and more in favor of withdrawal, than the college educated, who did not have to fight.111 Nevertheless, after My Lai the nation’s outlook truly darkened. Westerns and war movies no longer were shown. In some cases, families were torn apart. He loved America, Philip Roth wrote of his hero in American Pastoral, “loved being an American. But … he hadn’t dared begin to explain to [his Weatherman daughter] why he did, for fear of unleashing the demon, insult.”112 An indication of the darkening mood lay in music: “There’s something happening here./ What it is ain’t exactly clear./ There’s a man with a gun over there,/ Telling me I got to beware./ I think it’s time we stopped, children, what’s that sound?/ Everybody look what’s going down.” The cult of failure spread. Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate listened to the Paul Simon song: “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?/ A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.” And of course Dylan: “He said his name was Columbus/ And I just said good luck.”
By 1968 the continued escalation of the war, My Lai, the ghetto uprisings, the demonstrations and sit-ins in the universities, all meant that the United States was in a profound crisis of authority – what Jürgen Habermas was soon to call a “legitimation crisis” – comparable in depth, if not long-term impact, to those Lincoln and Roosevelt faced when they took office. What has only become clear with hindsight is that the crisis of authority corresponded to a structural crisis. Two possible paths lay ahead. The first maintained a militarist posture and military spending as the basis for an increasingly dysfunctional, finance and debt-driven neoliberal economy. The second would divert military spending toward domestic needs, beginning with the ghettos, and would shift out of the Cold War mode toward an international order based on equality between peoples. Faced with similar turning points, both of Lyndon Johnson’s two great predecessors, Lincoln and Roosevelt, had moved toward refoundings, using the ideal of equality as their lodestar. Tragically, Lyndon Johnson did not follow in their footsteps.
Since the Tet offensive in January 1968 Johnson’s administration had lost nearly every base of its support except for the older nomenklatura of party politicians and labor officials. “The major threat we face is from the doves,” Johnson explained. “I felt I was being forced over the edge by rioting blacks, demonstrating students, marching welfare mothers, squawking professors, and hysterical reporters.”113 “Just like FDR and Hitler, just like Wilson and the Kaiser,” he insisted, “it’s just perverted history to claim that [the war in Vietnam is a] civil war, just pure bad history manufactured by the Harvards and the [John Kenneth] Galbraiths.”114 Those pushing for negotiations with the North Vietnamese, he added, were “fuzzy folks … happy [go] lucky fellows that smoke a little marijuana.”115 Nor was Johnson the only person in the White House so deluded in his perceptions. When Robert Lowell refused to participate in a White House Festival of the Arts and when Eartha Kitt protested the war at an administration event, Johnson’s assistant Jack Valenti denounced the “tawdry lengths that some people would go to in impoliteness and incivility.” When Richard Helms, head of CIA, told the administration there was no evidence that Communists were manipulating the demonstrators, Dean Rusk refused to believe him.116
Given Johnson’s isolation, Democrats began to look for an alternative candidate for the 1968 election. Allard Lowenstein, who was seeking to convince leftists that they could “work within the system,” persuaded Senator Eugene McCarthy to run. McCarthy got 42.4 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary. As the economy began to tank, the so-called “wise men,” including Dean Acheson, led by the senior Democratic advisor, Clark Clifford, told Johnson “that major elements of the national constituency – the business community, the press, the churches, professional groups, college presidents, students, and most of all the intellectual community – have turned against this war.” “What the President needs is not a war speech but a peace speech,” Clifford added.117 Walter Lippmann warned that Johnson’s reelection “will not arrest but will force the disintegration of the [Democratic] party.”118 In March 1968, Johnson announced that he would neither seek nor accept reelection. On April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated. On June 5, Robert Kennedy was slain, just after winning the California Presidential primary. April brought the uprising in Prague, and May the general strike in Paris. In Mexico City left-wing students were massacred at the university. Soon after in Chile, Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, New Left activists were “disappeared,” in some cases thrown alive from military airplanes.
In June, Richard Nixon won the Republican nomination. In August, meeting in Chicago, the Democrats nominated Hubert Humphrey, the prowar candidate of the party bosses and labor officials, even as the party was falling apart both inside and outside the convention hall. Walt Rostow, the White House’s “expert” on the demonstrators, denounced the “put-up job between the TV people and the demonstrators. It was all mounted … just the way the Buddhist thing was mounted in Hue … They made sure the cameras were there when these guys set fire to themselves.”119 After the convention, there was a widespread “sense that American society was degenerating into an uncontrolled disorder which authority could not halt.”120 Lippmann warned gravely that it had become necessary to repress “irreconcilable revolutionary dissent.” The country, he wrote, “has entered a period of revolutionary change of which no one can foresee the end or the consequences. For we are living in a time when the central institutions of the traditional life of man are increasingly unable to command his allegiance or his obedience.”121
The election of Nixon in November ended the sense of immediate crisis, but without turning the country in a direction that could resolve the crisis on the basis of America’s core egalitarian values. On the contrary, Nixon’s chief ally, Henry Kissinger, seemed to many to despise those values. Even after Nixon’s landslide reelection in 1972, his Presidency lacked legitimacy, as was shown by the Watergate events the following year. Some hold that the election of Reagan in 1980 resolved the tear in the American fabric that the war had opened, but this view cannot be sustained by historical analysis. A new, neoliberal order did follow the sixties, but based on sharpening, not resolving, the divide between rich and poor, it has arguably never become hegemonic. In any event, “the decisive realignment election that political observers anticipated all through the [post-sixties] period, waiting for the Republican party to sweep aside its rivals as the Democratic party had so dramatically done in 1932, failed to take place.”122 Instead, in the words of John Lewis, a founder of SNCC and currently a Congressman,
Something died in America in 1968. It was that sense of hope, that sense of optimism, a sense of what could be. The sense of possibility died in all of us. I’m not so sure as a nation, as a people, those of us who came through that period have been able to get over that, really. It was the worst of times to see two young leaders cut down like they were cut down …123
Even Newt Gingrich has written, “in a real sense we have not regained [our bearings] … If you go back to ’67, you’d find a kind of generalized broad optimism which disappeared sometime during the crucible of ’68 and from which we have not to this day fully recovered.”124
The scholarly literature assumes that 1968 also saw the end of the New Left. Among the prevailing explanations one reads that the New Left failed because it did not support the Democrats in the election of 1968 and because its participants turned (a) to Marxism or (b) violence or (c) against traditional American values and spat on returning soldiers (Todd Gitlin); because it was a generational uprising, a student movement, an expression of the baby boomers, which naturally ended as people reached thirty (many popular accounts, Edgar Morin); because it turned its back on women’s liberation, leaving women no recourse but to form their own all-female organizations, thus depriving New Left men of sexual services (Alice Echols, Ruth Rosen, many Hollywood movies such as Forrest Gump); because it was really a cultural revolution, not political at all, and in that sense was a big success as shown by the huge wave of narcissism and desire that it unleashed (Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Judith Butler); because it was actually moral rather than political, and so transformed our habits and lifestyle, though not our laws (Richard Rorty); because it was a shock troop subtly introducing a new phase in the history of capitalism, namely post-Fordist network capitalism, either through its critique of bureaucracy (Richard Sennett), the family wage (Nancy Fraser), or through the cooptation of its “artistic” critique (Luc Boltanski, Ève Chiapello, Thomas Frank), and thus its fate demonstrated “the ruse of capitalism” or “the cunning of history” (Régis Debray); and finally because “the New Left was nothing at all, only Prague 68 was important because it led to the end of Communism” (Wolf Lepenies).
Was an alternative possible? Could a refounding have occurred? Was there a possibility of uniting the working class, which was sacrificing its sons, with the passionate, irreconcilable hatred of the war that animated the antiwar movement, hatred comparable to that of the abolitionists toward slavery? In both previous cases, those of slavery and of the Great Depression, the country had been faced with seemingly irreconcilable internal divisions. Yet, in both cases it found a way through based on the convergence of liberals (or republicans) and leftists on the principles of equality and social justice. Why did the crisis of Vietnam turn out to be different? The historian’s task, as Walter Benjamin argued, is to fan the spark of hope in the past, to find those moments which indicate that history could have gone differently, to refuse the trope of inevitability on which triumphalist narratives rely.125 In the 1960s, the spark lay in the working class.
Before 1968 the New Left was unable to offer a credible alternative to the administration because as a student movement it was largely cut off from the material processes – economic necessity, labor, the family – that had given rise to the crisis in the first place. After 1968, however, many sought to ground the New Left in the new, technologically and scientifically transformed working class that emerged in the sixties. In this project, two efforts were especially important. First, the cultural revolution – the prefigurative politics, the anti-authoritarianism, the psychology of disidentification and expanded solidarity – had to be reinterpreted in terms of the transformation of capitalism, especially the transition from a form of family life directly grounded in the economy to new forms of personal emancipation. In this regard, as we shall see, women’s liberation, its place in the New Left, and in later struggles over abortion, would prove crucial. Second, it was necessary to understand the changing character of the working class, its diversity, its decentralized, even centripetal character, and its global dimensions.
In the 1968 conjuncture, the politics of organized labor, made strongly anti-Communist in the McCarthy period, was fateful. Labor leaders opposed the student risings, supported the war in Vietnam, and rejected busing, affirmative action, and housing integration. Figures like Gus Tyler of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union complained in 1968 that the “new politics” represented by Al Lowenstein, Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy was changing the whole point of the liberal tradition, “away from economics to ethics and aesthetics, to morality and culture,” thus abandoning workers “to the Republican wolves.”126 Figures like Lowenstein responded that the demography of the country was shifting to the young, and that a new politics could not be based on economics alone. In this regard the war, and the violence associated with the war, was crucial.
Working-class sentiments were not prowar, but many workers and their families hated the antiwar movement as a symbol of elitism and as a challenge to their patriotism. Perhaps even more important, as Alan Brinkley has argued, “the violence that was unleashed [especially after King’s slaying] came to be seen by many people as the vision of America’s future, and gave salience to law and order as an issue.”127 A fireman who lost his son Ralph in Vietnam, and who was interviewed by Robert Coles, exemplified a widespread sentiment:
I’m bitter. You bet your goddam dollar I’m bitter. It’s people like us who give up our sons for the country…. Let’s face it: if you have a lot of money, or if you have the right connections, you don’t end up on a firing line in the jungle over there, not unless you want to. Ralph had no choice. He didn’t want to die. He wanted to live. They just took him – to ‘defend democracy,’ that’s what they keep on saying. Hell, I wonder.
Why didn’t this man see the antiwar movement as trying to save the life of his son? A few years later a young black man warned then Presidential candidate George McGovern, “This election is going to break your heart. People aren’t as decent as you think they are. They don’t like black people; they’re resentful of the kids, and they want to forget about the poor. They don’t care about peace and human rights and the Constitution. Every guy is just trying to make it for himself.”128 Was this man expressing an eternal truth about American politics or, as I believe, was he dispensing the new, neoliberal wisdom that would emerge in the 1970s?
Two figures seemed at the time to understand the possibility of a broad left-liberal response to the crisis, a response that was simultaneously antiwar and pro-working class. These were Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, both assassinated in 1968. Before he died, King had reinvigorated his Popular Front roots, increasingly focusing on economic issues, and arguing that the return to order had to be based on social justice. Commenting on the urban uprisings, he said, “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos, without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.”129 Kennedy too was genuinely transformed by the events of the sixties. Touring Spanish Harlem, he explained his decision to run for office to the boxer José Torres: “I found out something I never knew. I found out that my world was not the real world.” Entering the Democratic primaries after Gene McCarthy had demonstrated the strength of the antiwar sentiment, and boasting strong Catholic law-and-order credentials, Kennedy told David Frost,
I think there has to be a new kind of coalition to keep the Democratic Party going, and to keep the country together. We have to write off the unions and the South now. And to replace them with Negroes, blue-collar whites, and the kids. We have to convince the Negroes and the poor whites that they have common interests. If we can reconcile those hostile groups, and then add the kids, you can really turn this country around.130
The polls and voting records show that this was not unreasonable. Until the election of Reagan in 1980, the industrial working class vacillated between some mix of old and New Leftism, on the one hand, and Nixon’s “Silent Majority” on the other. A crucial factor was the ongoing transformation of the US economy, including its industrial sector. With the emergence of a transnational division of labor, the working class was increasingly composed of young, cheap, immigrant and female labor, often responsive to New Left appeals. The year 1970 witnessed the second largest strike wave in American history (after that of 1946) as 2.4 million workers joined strikes, wildcats, slowdowns and other labor conflicts. Newsweek described the 1970 Lordstown strike, as follows: “With all the shoulder-length hair, beards, Afros and mod clothing along the line” it looks like an “industrial Woodstock.” The case of Dewey Burton, a white Detroit autoworker born in 1946, and regularly interviewed by the New York Times, demonstrates the lost possibilities. In 1970, Burton, a New Deal Democrat with a strong sense of entitlement, had long sideburns, slicked-back hair and mod striped pants, but was livid over his son being bussed away from his neighborhood school. By 1980 he had become a Reagan Democrat, his sense of entitlement gone, largely because his job had become so insecure that he was grateful to his employer for whatever he could get.131 It took much of the seventies to fully destroy the hope for a broad, multidimensional left-liberal solution to the crisis posed by the new economy, the hope in other words for a third refounding. The politics of the family, to which we now turn, was critical in shaping the ultimate outcome.
The New Left, as we have seen, was intervening in a series of upheavals that it had not created: first civil rights, and then the antiwar movement. In the late sixties it responded to the third great upheaval of the epoch: feminism. Like civil rights, and like the decline in American global supremacy, the dismantling of the family wage and the large-scale entry of women into the workforce seems in retrospect to have been inevitable. However, the meaning of this change was ambiguous. On the one hand, feminism could strengthen the tendency toward an individualistic, meritocratic society, which valorized “empowerment” and “achievement” in the context of an increasingly unequal society. Or feminism could point toward a more deeply egalitarian society, one in which the organization of work was not based on status hierarchies. The latter possibility, which required connecting feminism with civil rights and the antiwar movement, would have sought to destroy invidious racial and gender hierarchies, both at home and abroad. That was the possibility articulated within the New Left.
As with civil rights and the antiwar movement, the New Left did not invent the issue of women’s rights. On the contrary, “liberal feminism,” as it was later called to distinguish it from radical feminism and socialist feminism, was a powerful force throughout the sixties, focused on expanded possibilities for women, especially working-class women, in employment and public life. As a result of the structural transformation of American capitalism, large-scale changes in the gender order were underway. “Between 1950 and 1998 the proportion of women working outside the home in America rose from 33.9 to 59.8 percent…. The number of married women with young children at work rose from 12 percent in 1950 to 40 percent in 1990.”132 The increase reflected the incipient decline of heavy industry, the rise of services, finance and marketing, and the expansion of a consumer economy. While women had worked outside the home before, they had mostly done so as a response to national emergencies, especially wars. The changes of the sixties, however, were structural: they entailed the end of the family wage and the creation of the two-earner family.
The pre-New Left liberal feminism of the 1960s was enormously effective. The contraceptive pill, which had become available in 1957, helped spark women’s liberation. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbade discrimination on the basis of race, also forbade discrimination on the basis of sex, as an accidental result of a ploy by opponents of the bill. The National Organization for Women was founded in 1966. The National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws was founded in 1967. Between 1965 and 1969 the entire apparatus of protective legislation aimed at women was dismantled. In 1972 Congress enacted Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act, which banned discrimination in any education program receiving federal aid, leading to a revolution in women’s sports. 1973 saw Roe v Wade, legalizing abortion on the basis of the “right to privacy,” a right established by the courts which were outlawing anticontraception legislation. Second wave feminism, then, was well launched in the sixties, its ideology largely drawing on the New Deal and Popular Front tradition, on the rights revolution, as well as on the legacy of American feminism, among the strongest feminist traditions in the world.
Yet the feminism of the sixties was feminism without a left. Just as the New Left changed the meaning of civil rights and of the antiwar movement, so it changed the meaning of feminism. While the structural, institutional and legal revolution associated with feminism was well underway in the sixties, it was not until its encounter with the New Left that “equal rights for women” became “women’s liberation” and “radical feminism.” Not surprisingly, women’s experience in the mixed left afforded a deeper insight into patriarchal structures and psychology than was available in the more practical, less process-oriented or participatory organizations of mainstream feminism.
The early SNCC and SDS memos on women’s liberation demonstrate the process by which the regulatory ideal of participatory democracy was turned inward, against hierarchy in the radical movement itself. One of the earliest SNCC memos, that of Mary King and Casey Hayden, asked, “Who sweeps the office floor?” and “Who takes the minutes?” “The average white person,” Hayden and King added, “finds it difficult to understand why the Negro resents being called ‘boy’ … because the average white person doesn’t realize that he assumes he is superior. So too the average SNCC worker finds it difficult to discuss the woman problem because of the assumptions of male superiority.”133 In 1967 women in SDS passed the following resolution:
As we analyze the position of women in capitalist society and especially in the United States we find that women are in a colonial relationship to men and we recognize ourselves as part of the Third World. Women, because of their colonial relationship to men, have to fight for their own independence…. Only the independent woman can be truly effective in the larger revolutionary struggle.
These and similar statements reflect the way in which women’s liberation moved beyond mainstream feminism.
Just as the antiwar movement had built on the civil rights movement, so early proponents of women’s liberation built on the antiwar movement. They saw women’s subordination as another in the series of wrongs that men and women of the New Left would address together. The 1967 SDS resolution exclaimed, “the struggle for liberation of women must be part of the larger fight for human freedom. We recognize the difficulty our brothers will have in dealing with male chauvinism and we will assume our full responsibility in helping to resolve the contradictions. Freedom now! We love you!”134 A 1968 memo by Naomi Jaffe and Bernardine Dohrn, both of whom later became Weathermen, stated,
We realize that women are organized into the Movement by men and continue to relate to it through men … the difficulty women have in taking initiative and in acting and speaking in a political context is the consequence of internalizing the view that men define reality and women are defined in terms of men. We are coming together not in a defensive posture to rage at our exploited status vis-à-vis men, but rather in the process of developing our own autonomy.135
Here, too, the implication was that the same struggles for self-definition that had inspired men and women in Mississippi, and that had turned Vietnamese peasants into revolutionaries, also underlay women’s struggles in the American heartland.
The early women’s liberation writings were fragmentary and exploratory, symbolized by the well-worn, mimeographed articles that for several years were the movement’s basic texts. Notes from the First Year began publication in 1968. In 1970 two powerful works appeared, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. Both of them took the psychoanalytic worldview, which was founded on sexuality, and replaced sexuality with power. According to Millett, coitus “appears a biological and physical activity” but in fact it is “a charged microcosm” of “power-structured relationships … whereby one group of persons is controlled by another.” Therefore, politics needed to be extended from the spheres of the state, and the economy, to include power relations of “personal contact and interaction between members of well-defined and coherent groups.” Firestone, in turn, sought “the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all historic events” in the “biological family,” which has given rise to a “power psychology,” a “psychological pattern of dominance-submission.” What Freud called penis envy was in fact power envy. Firestone also distinguished radical feminists, who attacked the “sexual class system,” from “conservative feminists,” “politicos,” and “Ladies Auxiliaries of the Left.”
Distinct though they were, women’s liberation and liberal feminism converged with explosive immediacy around 1968–9. Intense feelings of solidarity between women produced the convergence. The year 1968 witnessed the iconic protest against the Miss America ceremony at Atlantic City, when women burnt high-heeled shoes, girdles, bras, and curlers. The next year, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Suffrage Amendment, 50,000 women strode down Fifth Avenue. Influential female journalists like Susan Brownmiller, Gloria Steinem, Nora Ephron, and Ellen Goodman brought the women’s issue into the mass media. In 1970 forty-six women at Newsweek filed a sex discrimination suit against their employer; two days later, their colleagues at Ladies Home Journal staged a sit-in, soon followed by the women at Time Inc. “It was as if the standard of rebellion had been raised in the corridors of the emperor’s seraglio,” wrote Geoffrey Hodgson.136
The discovery of women’s liberation was accompanied by tremendous feelings of joy, the lifting of a repression. Kathy Amatniek, one of the inventors of “consciousness-raising,” wrote that “when those meetings began … Suddenly everyone had a story about the negative response of the man she lived with.” For Nancy Hawley, one of the originators of Our Bodies, Ourselves, “The flood broke loose gradually and then more swiftly. We talked about our families, our mothers, our fathers, our siblings; we talked about our men; we talked about school; we talked about ‘the movement’ (which meant New Left men). For hours we talked and unburdened our souls and left feeling high.” Carol Hanish, who popularized the phrase “the personal is political,” wrote, “the last eight months have been a personal revolution.”137 Joanne Cook, a feminist economist, recalled that “not one woman apologized for complaints about her lot … Every woman was a sister.”138 The euphoria of sisterhood also brought intense expectations of loyalty and unity, which found expression in pressures to leave heterosexual relationships, and enter lesbian ones.
Even though women’s liberation took on a mainstream character almost immediately, its deepest insights were part of the New Left’s attempt to extend the ideal of equality into everyday life. Women and men, women’s liberationists argued, are made into sexes as we know them by the social requirements of heterosexuality, which institutionalizes male dominance and female sexual submission. Sexuality is the lynchpin of gender inequality, the analogue to labor in the Marxist worldview.139 Sex is “something men do to women.” “Domination, penile penetration, possession, constitute the male definition of sex.”140 “A woman is a being who identifies and is identified as one whose sexuality exists for someone else, who is socially male.”141 There is at least a touch of rape in all heterosexuality; even when they appear voluntary, sexual relations between men and women are eroticized forms of dominance and submission. “So many distinctive features of women’s status as second class – the restriction and constraint and contortion, the servility and the display, the self-mutilation and requisite presentation of self as a beautiful thing, the enforced passivity, the humiliation – are made into the content of sex for women. Being a thing for sexual use is fundamental to it.”142 Not all women agreed with these formulations, but none failed to be affected by them.
From a very early period, men were considered irrelevant to the powerful ties that formed among women. Instead, the valorization of the “woman-identified woman” gave rise to what was soon to be called identity politics. Identity politics differed fundamentally from the “shattering of social roles” that had characterized the New Left. Cathy Cade, a lesbian documentary photographer, explained that “in the black movement I had been fighting [to end] someone else’s oppression and now there was a way that I could fight for my own freedom.” For Mimi Feingold, “women couldn’t burn draft cards and couldn’t go to jail so all they could do was to relate through their men and that seemed to me the most really demeaning kind of thing.” Another feminist collective proclaimed that “the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.”143 The importance of what women’s liberation called the woman-identified woman found theoretical expression in Nancy Chodorow’s 1978 The Reproduction of Mothering and historian Carol Smith-Rosenberg’s 1975 “Female World of Love and Ritual.” Adrienne Rich summarized: “women are talking to each other, recovering an oral culture, telling our life-stories, reading aloud to one another the books that have moved and healed us, analyzing the language that has lied about us, reading our own words aloud and to each other.”
A similarly rapid evolution occurred within Gay Liberation, generally dated from the Stonewall uprising, June 27, 1969. Earlier, Gay Liberation had been part of the antiwar movement, sporting such slogans as “No Vietnamese ever called me queer” and insisting, “We will not help to perpetuate a society that oppresses us and discriminates against us, nor will we fight in its army.” In 1969 an activist explained: alienation from one’s body is “the first imperialism. For this reason we gay (powerless) males must of necessity of our condition be antiwar and anti-imperialist. We are already a conquered country.”144 In 1970 the Gay Liberation Front was formed, describing itself as “a nation-wide coalition of revolutionary homosexual organizations creating a radical counter culture … Politically it’s part of the radical ‘Movement’ working to suppress and eliminate discrimination and oppression”145 By the early to mid-seventies, however, homosexuals began to think of themselves less as members of a radical movement than as persons with a distinct way of life, persons who belonged to a historically specific community. Homosexuality, then, became an identity, something that was based on membership in a community, and to which radical politics was essentially irrelevant.146
With the development of identity politics, the issue of “leaving the left” arose within women’s liberation. We can get a sense of what “leaving the left” meant by examining the relations of Barbara Deming and David McReynolds, both lifelong pacifist activists, close friends in the civil rights and antiwar movements, and both gay. When Deming became a feminist separatist, McReynolds told her he refused to “read a book written by someone who won’t attend planning meetings with men, someone who insists on separate demonstrations, separate book stores, separate bars.” He also wanted her to know that his support for her separatist feminism was not unconditional. “When women tell me they know all about men or that men are such and such, I know they speak part of the truth,” he explained, but only part. For some time now she’d talked of “waiting, of silence, of hoping men would change and see patriarchy as the enemy,” yet in his view “the attack on the patriarchy is possible only because it is, in a sense, already over.” He remained puzzled about the degree to which the women’s movement was concerned about political issues other than feminism. Barbara’s pain, McReynolds tried to convince her, was “a human condition, not a female one” and he believed she was edging away “from the overarching humanity, which is at the core of nonviolence.” “We need one another,” he wrote, “our common humanity being more urgent in this short life than our blackness, whiteness, or elseness. That is a truth you once knew and I sense you have lost or are losing it somewhere along the way.”
But Deming felt that “our lives, women’s lives, are not real to you (and to men generally) – except in so far as they support the lives of men.” Those who called themselves “anti-imperialists,” she added, needed to recognize “that women are treated as a colonized people – here and everywhere.” There was only one man on the left, David Dellinger, she claimed, who had read the extraordinary books that feminists had written over the last few years. “The bond is still there,” she added in a note to herself, but she wasn’t sure that men and women could “any longer struggle side by side … It is going to take non-cooperation with [men] to make them change.” To the end Deming insisted that feminists saw the connections “between the liberation of women as women and the elimination of capitalism, racism, and imperialism,” and she did agree with her friend, Weatherman Susan Saxe, that “the split between the left and feminists [is] a tragedy.”147
Some white women and most black women rejected the idea of a separate women’s movement. Barbara Epstein, a radical historian and feminist, wrote, “There is an emotional reason why I feel uncomfortable calling myself a socialist-feminist,” a term which implied two separate movements, one aimed at socialism, the other at feminism.
I was very much involved in the peace movement when I was in high school. I joined the Communist Party when I was in my first year in college, and so the left really became my history, my identification, my family. I experienced the women’s movement as telling me that I was no longer allowed to belong to the left. I really felt the women’s movement tore apart the home that I had made for myself.148
Furthermore, “the issue that was being raised was why didn’t women get listened to in meetings. Women were saying we are the wives and girlfriends; we do the shit-work and we don’t play a leadership role. I didn’t fit into those categories. I really was taken seriously and was not regarded as an appendage to some man.” This echoed an earlier remark of black SNCC worker Ruby Doris Smith Robinson that the charge that women’s role was limited to office work “didn’t make sense to me because at the time I had my own project in Bolivar County, Mississippi.”149
Other women also felt uncomfortable by the gap opening between feminists and the left. Gloria Emerson, covering the war in Vietnam, wrote,
There were people who were exasperated and puzzled by my indifference to the women’s liberation movement, which I had first known and admired in England when I lived there. I knew the immense value of the movement but I could not bear the posters SAVE OUR SISTERS IN DANANG or the women who would not join the antiwar movement because they felt it did not sufficiently stress rape as a crime, although, of course, it did … Perhaps the interest in the women’s movement, the early excitement over its huge importance, ended that night in Saigon in 1971 when Germaine Greer was there on a brief visit … What really provoked her, she said, was seeing a group of Vietnamese women filling sandbags near Long Binh, the biggest US Army base in Vietnam, the ugliest of places. What she resented was a sign in English, near the Vietnamese women, that said MEN AT WORK.
“I had always known how women were leashed, confined, made so small, and uncertain,” Emerson reflected. “But in Vietnam, among the most helpless and humiliated were the soldiers themselves.”150
This was also the period in which the New Left was changing from an inchoate mass of spontaneous upheavals into an organized social movement. Marxian theory was evolving, some of it responding creatively to the feminist critique of gender hierarchy. Here I can speak from personal experience. My book Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life began as a review of Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex and was published in 1972 in the neo-Marxist journal Socialist Revolution. In it I argued that what Marx called the social relations of production – “the total ensemble of social relations entered into in the social production of existence” – necessarily included the family, and that mass consumption and the technological-scientific revolution had made a new, “post-economic” consciousness possible. The rise of industrial capitalism, I explained, for the first time, created the modern division between the public and the private.151
Meanwhile, the waning of the “Golden Age of Capitalism” also directed attention to socialist ideas. Beginning around 1968, signs of a crisis of capital accumulation (i.e., profitability) appeared everywhere. Nixon’s response was a huge wave of regulatory reform, including wage and price controls, income maintenance, tax reform, environmental controls, and consumer protection.152 Radical unions flourished, organizing hospital workers, hotel workers, waitresses, and farmworkers. Third world cultural radicalism flourished in such forms as the Young Lords, Third World Newsreel, and the LA Rebellion. Efforts were made to begin leftist political parties, for example by Arthur Kinoy and James Weinstein.
The strongest example of the maturation of the New Left was Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), founded in 1973 and later merged with the New American Movement (NAM). According to Harrington, “The Democratic Socialists envision a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning … and racial equality. I share an immediate program with liberals in this country because the best liberalism leads toward socialism.” “I want to be on the left wing of the possible,” he added. Like NAM, DSOC was explicitly feminist; Gloria Steinem was a founding member. Working in alliance with major labor unions, DSOC became a powerful presence within the Democratic Party. The goal, Harrington argued, was to join the New Left of the 1960s with the old left and the labor movement in a “united political movement of the liberal-left” that would operate within the Democratic Party not to rally it once more as the “party of Roosevelt,” but to “look beyond the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society.”153
In spite of such efforts, the sense of a burgeoning, diverse radical movement was gone by the mid-seventies. For many, there was a wrenching emotional aftermath. Survivors held on to the ephemera accumulated over the years, as if it were vital to conserve tracts, posters, journals, brochures, bulletins, even scraps of paper.154 Luisa Passerini, who interviewed survivors of both the Popular Front and the New Left in Italy, wrote, “My interviews with the elderly about their memories of Fascism had absorbed and moved me, but they weren’t so weighty, so unresolved, so enigmatic” as those of the 1968 generation.155 Later students asked, “Why did there seem to be so little guidance available to those who were only then coming to a critical outlook on their society? Why were the connections to the past severed so cleanly?”156 A new generation of singers emerged to ask “Remember when everyone was doing the ban-the bomb songs?” adding “the minute you preach, you’re interfering with somebody else’s life.”157 Radical Chic, explained Thomas Wolfe, writing about a Panther-support party, “is only radical in style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions.”158
The war in Vietnam passed into the realm of the apolitical. Barbara Tuchman called it a “march of folly.” Michael Herr underwent psychoanalysis to produce his feverish, free-associational work Dispatches, which offers no politics, no morality, “no clear outline of history.”159 Tim O’Brien wrote, “They did not know even the simple things: a sense of victory, or satisfaction, or necessary sacrifice…. They did not have targets. They did not have a cause. They did not know if it was a war of ideology or economics or hegemony or spite.”160 According to Oliver Stone’s Platoon, “we did not fight the enemy, we fought ourselves.” When the war finally ended on May 11, 1975, 60,000 people came to Central Park to hear Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and Odetta sing, but there was a sense of anticlimax: “People sat on the hard ground in Sheep Meadow, a large area in Central Park where there are deep, bald patches in the grass.”161
Order returned slowly. What Tom Wicker called Nixon’s “repressed, introverted, driven” personality, his identification with losers, his resentment of privilege, facilitated the transformation of the Republicans into the party of protest and discontent.162 The resulting alliance of wealth and ressentiment produced “a French Revolution in reverse – one in which the sans-culottes pour down the streets demanding more power for the aristocracy.”163 All the way down to the Tea Party, the strength of the Republicans lay in their ability to capture and transform the New Left’s anti-elitism.
Even as leftist energies waned, “the Sixties” came to dominate American politics just as the Civil War and the New Deal had dominated the political landscapes that followed them. Indeed, the effects of the New Left on American society and culture have been almost incalculable. An entirely new consciousness of both race and gender has transformed language, lifestyle and institutions. There is a persistent skepticism toward American intervention abroad. Academic life has been transformed, not only by the entry of minorities and women, but also by the creation of whole new subfields and by the transformation of canonical knowledge. The press owes whatever willingness it has to challenge authority to the New Left. A host of new political issues including abortion, gay marriage and ecology occupy center stage. A moral revolution in the treatment of prisoners, the mentally ill, patients, and immigrants occurred. The churches, perhaps especially the Catholic Church, developed liberation theologies. The election of a black President in 2008, whatever his politics, testifies to the impact of the civil rights movement. We are only at the beginning of understanding the full implications of the attack on patriarchy and on “compulsory heterosexuality,” and of the questions of “identity” that opened up in the early seventies.
Yet the New Left is widely considered a failure today, and this must be directly addressed. Two different senses of “failure” need to be distinguished. In one sense the left will always “fail,” because it stands for sometimes utopian ideals that cannot and will not be realized in the immediate present. This “failure” is actually a form of success, because it means that the left is guided by the long-term project of deepening equality, in a society understandably preoccupied with immediate gain and loss. In another sense, however, the left may fail by committing remediable errors, errors that need to be corrected if future lefts are to flourish. It is my view that the end of a mixed left in the early to mid-seventies was one such remediable failure. Beginning in the early seventies, unprecedented resources went into building the neoliberal order but the New Left could never have been destroyed from the outside. To the extent that the New Left’s achievements have been forgotten, the “forgetting” was generated by “third way” theorists, advocates of the “cultural turn,” Kantians, Freudians, Foucauldians, sexual emancipators, historical revisionists, subaltern postcolonialists, “progressive” social scientists and, especially, by second wave feminists, in other words by the left itself. Nevertheless, rather than speaking in terms of success or failure, it is preferable to ask today what legacy the New Left left behind. A concluding chapter addresses this question.
In the sixties, then, the country faced, for the third time in its history, simultaneous crises in its structure and its identity. In this case, however, the two crises had different resolutions, at least in the short run. The structural crisis, the transition from state-guided industry and global hegemony to neoliberal financialization and nonhegemonic militarization, proceeded relatively smoothly for a while. But the country did not deepen its core commitment to equality. On the contrary, it rejected its egalitarian traditions, suppressed much of the memory of the three lefts that had been so closely tied to those traditions, and embraced a culture of meritocracy, class division, and inequality that was fundamentally alien to its history. The result was not refounding but long-term decline. As of this writing, the structural crisis and the identity crisis seem to be converging once again. What is called the economic crisis that began in 2007 cannot be solved without a renewed left/liberal politics centered on social justice and equality. That brings us to our final subject: the prospects for the left today.