The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.
The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, by Todd Gitlin. New York: Bantam Books, 1987. 438pp. $19.95.The founding and developmentof thc New Left in the 1960s expresses historically many ofthe contradictions which progressives, radicals, and leftists must grapple with in the United States. James Miller and Todd Gitlin have each given us, in their respective historical treatments of the student movement in the 1960s, a piece of these contradictions to consider.
To understand one of these contradictions, we may look at the historic interaction between Leo Huberman and Dick and Mickey Flacks following the conflicts which surrounded the founding of Students for a Democratic Society and the construction and publishing ofthe Port Huron Statement. The interaction between Huberman and the Flacks is reported in both the Miller and the Gitlin book. Although this incident should not be read as having overwhelming significance by itself or in its particular details, it serves to illustrate the contradictions of the New Left and the Old. It also may serve to demonstrate the partial overcoming of these contradictions in the 1960s by the student antiwar movement.
The Port Huron Statement was drafted at a meeting which took place at a United Auto Workers camp at Port Huron, Michigan, in June 1962. Largely authored by Tom Hayden, the statement was rooted in the concept of participatory democracy, a concept many have thought was central to the theory ofthe entire New Left. This concept argued that those who were affected by a decision ought to havc authority and ability in thc making ofthe decision, whether it be a decision in personal or public/political life. This document, so important in the intellectual life of the New Left and discussed at length in Miller's Democracy Is in the Streets, was also combined with a refusal to mouth the required anticommunism of the liberal Left in the 1950s.
Following the McCarthy witchhunts, the murder by the judiciary of the Rosenbergs, the expulsion of radicals and others from the labor movement and all the other horrors of this era, it became almost a catechism for anyone working from a left perspective to testify to their rigid anticommunism. The Port Huron Statement refused to do so and came under the wrath ofthe fledgling SDS's parent organization, the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). LID threatened to drum the new organization out of the self-style "democratic Left" and cut off its funds and support if SDS did not follow its anticommunist lead. In 1962, SDS managed to resist these urgings to follow the lead o"democratic Left" into anticommunism. Had it followed the anticommunism of the "democratic Left," there would have been severe limitations on its ability to consider and debate a wide range of approaches and opinions concerning the crisis in which the United States was embroiled.
Following this confrontation with LID, which included a faceto-face conflict with Michael Harrington over anticommunism, SDS leader Dick Flacks attempted to interest both the radical paper The National Guardian and the progressive journal Monthly Review in the new movement, both publications being seen as continuing the best of the Old Left with which the New Left wanted to unite. In the former case, the Guardian simply refused to write an article concerning the meetings at Port Huron. The interaction between Huberman and Flacks, however, is extensively reported in both Miller's and Gitlin's books.
Flacks "met Huberman shortly after the Port Huron conference" (Miller, p. 162) and was excited to tell him about the new organization. He was met with what Miller describes as a "lukewarm response"; Gitlin describes the encounter as offensive to Flacks. Evidently, Huberman asked if the new SDS was a socialist organization and what type of practice it intended to employ if it was. He was met with a series of Socratic replies asking what socialism was and why it would interest U.S. youth. Huberman then answered that the important concern was Castro's Cuba, its ability to defend itself, and the likelihood of nuclear war in the next decade.
The interview, so replete with historic implications and possibilities, expresses the tension between building a domestic and homegrown revolutionary movement, which the SDSers wanted desperately to do and were to attempt over the rest ofthe decade, and the Old Left's recognition of the major contradiction of our time, between U.S. imperialism and the Third World. The student radical movement would, throughout the early sixties, attempt to find in students, blacks, and poor whites the agency for social change which it so desired in the United States. It would fail in this effort.
The decade produced a synthesis, however, between Huberman's desire for a consciously socialist movement supporting the Third World and its revolutions, and the mass domestic radical movement which the early SDSers wanted. The synthesis, this transcendence of a contradiction, would be created by the Vietnam War. After its first demonstration against that war in the Spring of 1965, SDS became permanently involved and eventually engulfed in opposition to the war. Huberman's desire for a conscious socialist movement developed from the demystification and delegitimation processes which the Vietnam War helped create and carry to fruition. The mass nature of the movement developed because of the length of the war, the numbers affected, the tenacity and eventual victory ofthe Vietnamese people, and the incredible stupidity and brutality of the U.S. government.
However, in that confrontation between one of the earliest founders of SDS and both Huberman and the National Guardian, and inherent in the deep desire of the New Left to create a new U.S. radicalism, was expressed part ofthe eventual contradiction that was to cost the New Left so dearly. The New Left denied or refused to recognize history, the history of the Left both internationally and domestically. The confrontation between Flacks and Huberman, and the earlier confrontation between Flacks, Tom Hayden, and Michael Harrington concerning the lack of explicit anticommunism in the Port Huron Statement confirmed the new student Left in its rejection of the Old Left and its understandings. Instead of modifying the experience of the Old left, understanding and adapting it, the New Left insisted on rejection in response to perceived rejection by leaders of the Old Left.
In that rejection of experience was a rejection of history, which cost the student movement in the sixties dearly. Frustrated by a system that was unresponsive and unwilling to change, left extremism and individualistic terrorism emerged. Knowledge of historic experience with such approaches would have helped. Insistent upon building a mass organization that did not restrict membership and was open to all, SDS became the captive of a small disciplined cadre, only to decline and dissolve as a result. Unable to find an agent with the power to produce fundamental social change, the student Left variously and mistakenly assigned itself the task, looked to the black movement, sought to imitate national liberation movements, and finally collapsed inwards, never fully investigating nor learning the historic lessons concerning radical and revolutionary change.
The effort is not lost, however. Gitlin and Miller have, in their individual ways, given us historic analysis of the sixties which will hopefully serve the next generation of radical movements. Miller's portrait of Tom Hayden is fascinating and important reading. The contradictions between democracy and leadership begin to appear, in particularly acute form since Hayden was not only a leader but also an originator of the concept of participatory democracy itself. Miller's over-concentration on the concept of participatory democracy is, however, a move into idealist analysis of history. The result of this method of analysis is a certain abstractness in the book, a tendency to deal more with ideas and their trajectories rather than material causes and events.
There is little doubt that Gitlin's book is the most encyclopedic of the two, however, and evokes images by word collages that call to mind many of the feelings and events of this era. (Who would remember that there was a time when the inside of banana peels was scraped, dried, and smoked for its supposed hallucinogenic properties?) Gitlin sometimes falls into a pessimistic tone, however, and borders often on a social democratic perspective which, while understandable, is regrettable.
These two authors have given various views of the period, its events, and personages. The New Left was both robbed of U.S. left history by the repression ofthe U.S. government, and itself denied the usefulness of this history. With the contribution of these books, plus the many other valuable attempts to pass on to the next generations of radicals the true history of the 1960s free from the media distortions and lies ofthe establishment press, future movements in the United States and elsewhere will benefit from the history ofthe sixties and its movements for social change.
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| Author: | Hunt, Charles W. |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Monthly Review |
| Article Type: | Book Review |
| Date: | Sep 1, 1989 |
| Words: | 1463 |
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