I HAVE BEEN asked to write a memoir that would give a sense of the old left/new left realities of the 1950s and ‘60s. That seems quite odd to me (why would I be writing such a thing?), until I look in the mirror and see this old guy looking back at me. As I reflect, it does seem to me that I went through a lot of experience, met a lot of people, and perhaps learned from all that…So I will share some of my story.

This fragment can make sense, I think, only by placing it in a larger context. Aspects of that context I have attempted to sketch out myself in different writings, and others have done likewise (one of the best recent efforts is Van Gosse’s compact 2005 study Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretative Essay). And there are the memoirs of others whose journeys through this era can open up a rich variety of “universes” that intersect with this one.

I grew up in a rural area outside of Clearfield, Pennsylvania (population 10,000). My parents moved there in 1950, when I was three years old because my father was the Director of District 2 of a small industrial union, the United Stone and Allied Products Workers of America, affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

Clearfield was in the middle of District 2, with some very large plants of the Harbison-Walker Corporation (then a Fortune 500 outfit), which made firebrick for the kilns of the steel industry. Many of these plants were organized by the Stoneworkers (which began many years before as a union of quarry workers in granite-rich Vermont, under the leadership of an old-time Socialist, and Scottish immigrant, John Lawson — who remained Secretary-Treasurer for many years).

When John L. Lewis led those committed to industrial unionism in a break away from the de-radicalized and bureaucratized American Federation of Labor (AFL) to form the CIO amidst the big strikes and organizing drives of the 1930s, the Stoneworkers followed Lewis. The main thing, in the CIO ethos, was to organize workers — all workers. Hence the quarry workers union diversified into “stone and allied products workers,” drawing in those who labored in many different occupational categories.

This also helps explain why among my earliest memories was being at meetings and on picketlines of workers of the Clearfield Cheese Company, who fought a militant battle for the right to organize. When asked why the Stoneworkers union was trying to organize cheese workers, my father quipped: “Well, they make brick cheese, don’t they?” (The workers were defeated — but some years later my father helped organizers of the Amalgamated Meatcutters and Butcher Workmen to unionize that plant.)
The labor movement was like a religion to my parents. “Union” was a holy word: the workers coming together to help each other, to protect each other, and to make things better for themselves and their families (all of them) — in necessary and inevitable struggle with the powerful bosses who sought to enrich themselves by exploiting the workers.

This was not an abstraction for us. Often there were meetings that filled our small house with cigarette smoke (both my parents were smokers, as were most of the union members who met there), there were larger meetings in union halls, there were picnics and sometimes picket lines, there were intense discussions during and after negotiating sessions around union contracts. There were Labor Day events that my parents helped to organize in Clearfield County, there were trips the family took — often related to union work — in which we sometimes whiled away the boring stretches of road by playing “Twenty Questions” but also by singing union songs (my favorites being “Solidarity Forever” and, especially, “Union Maid”).

Among my favorite relatives were those, in Massachusetts and New York, who seemed to embrace the same warm and glowing ideals of a better world for all the workers. There were Eve and Adrian, an aunt and uncle (my father’s brother) who had once been involved with the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), for which my mother had also briefly worked before becoming pregnant with me.

On my mother’s side of the family there were George and Rose, an uncle and aunt of hers (he working in the printing trades, but also a veteran of something important called the Spanish Civil War, she a pioneer in the field of social work), and my great-grandpa Harry Brodsky, a retired garment worker who long ago had helped organize and lead an early local of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

There were some things in my house and my family that seemed not to be in the houses and families of my other friends in Clearfield. The art work, on the walls and in some books, was different — Rembrandt, Goya, Van Gogh, various impressionists, more modern folks — especially Picasso and Mexican muralists such as Rivera and Siqueros and Orozco. The music included a few Broadway musicals, but also union songs from the Almanac Singers, the Weavers, as well as a lot of classical music, and some jazz. And of course there was the rich and wonderful voice of Paul Robeson.

One of the biggest differences was that there were so many books (including, I later learned, some that were kept relatively hidden, and even some that were quietly destroyed). Among my mother’s favorite novelists were Russians, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but perhaps her favorite American writer was Howard Fast. His compellingly written and profoundly idealistic novels — Spartacus, Conceived in Liberty, Freedom Road, Citizen Tom Paine, The American — were precious items, which I was to devour during my teenage years.

There were many attitudes in my home that were different from some that I found outside. In school, I ran into a lot of anti-union sentiment, of course, and as time went on I found myself arguing with teachers and some students who expressed such sentiments. But there were other things. My parents were very clearly opposed to racism, for example — my mother wouldn’t let my older sister Patty participate in the regular high school Minstrel Show; she pulled me out of a third-grade puppet show, “Little Black Sambo.”

My father refused to join a number of working-class social clubs (the Loyal Order of Moose, the Sons of Italy, etc.) because they excluded Blacks. There weren’t many Black families in Clearfield, but my mom’s best friend in town, Esther, was African American and very beautiful, very clever and funny, and a very strong personality, with four kids who were very much a part of my growing-up years. Such friendships were not the norm in towns like Clearfield in the 1950s.

The term “feminism” was not commonly used in my home — but the reality of it permeated my early years. There wasn’t much feminist literature available then — though I remember books by Eve Merriam and Elizabeth Hawes, creative and strong-minded women who, I later learned, had been around the Communist Party. There was also reverence for Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House (my younger sister Nora was named after the play’s heroine) and delight over the strong women in the plays of George Bernard Shaw.

My mother was obviously very intellectual, very much on a par with my father, though each brought different qualities to grappling with issues and realities that they faced. They talked and worked as equals, which was something that my father obviously valued. When at home (he was on the road a lot), he helped with the housework — as did my two sisters and me. The discussion and implementation of strategy and tactics to advance positive developments, in the local labor movement and within the Stoneworkers union nationally, was very often something jointly done by my parents.

A woman’s place was very definitely not in the home — and when my mother found herself, at times, predominantly in the “housewife” role, her profound depression was absolutely palpable. Her getting jobs outside the home — helping with odd tasks for one or another union, then working as a full-time secretary — was probably, as I look back, to help her keep her sanity as much as to bring in much-needed additional income. She finally “found herself,” by the early 1960s, in working as a caseworker in the Department of Public Assistance, and (with my father’s full support) ended up going back to graduate school for a master’s degree in social work.

Another big difference was around religion. My father was an angry ex-Catholic, my mother a secular Jew, and, as my mother put it, “We don’t believe in God — we believe in the Brotherhood of Man.” This obviously wouldn’t fly among my playmates and their parents, and initially I came up with an excellent solution. My dad being Catholic and my mom Jewish, that must make me a Protestant, like many of my friends!

Later I tended to identify as half-Jewish, or plain old Jewish, but without any clear religious sense. In my mid-to-late teens (partly influenced by Tolstoy’s War and Peace), I worked out my own theology which I called “pantheist-humanist.” Since that made little sense to most people, I later switched to calling myself an atheist (though I’ve stopped doing that now, since I’ve never lost the sense of God roughly equivalent to my teenage reflections).

There’s something else that occurs to me — something that my family shared, to a large extent, with many, many others in the United States — and worth reflecting on. We saw ourselves as basically “middle class.” This is an incredibly fuzzy term but whatever it might mean, in the 1950s and early 1960s, we felt it defined us.

My father had been a worker, working for wages under one or another employer in the 1920s and 1930s (including as a WPA worker, where he was involved in the left-wing Workers’ Alliance) — but now he got a salary, working as a union staff member. My mother had come from an extended family that had been mostly working class — but her father, in fact, was a small businessman, her parents enjoyed an increasingly upscale standard of living, she herself (unlike my father) had gone to, and graduated from, college.

We owned a home, one and then two cars, a TV set, and enjoyed summer vacations. This was not seen as the traditional working-class lifestyle. It was assumed that my sisters and I would go to college and end up as some kind of “white collar” professionals. Throughout the 1950s our finances were tight, our debts sometimes high, our circumstances relatively impoverished. But my father’s rising salary and my mother’s finally secure employment, first as secretary and then as case worker, truly placed us at a “middle income” level by the ‘60s. Like growing numbers of others in the U.S. working class, we didn’t apply Karl Marx’s definition of working class to ourselves: those who make their living by selling their ability to work (labor-power) to an employer. No, although we identified fiercely with the labor movement and with the working class, in our consciousness we ourselves were “middle class.”

 Discovering the Old Left

One of my parents’ finest qualities was that they did not force their own ideas on me. I could see the example of who and what they were, and they would certainly tell me (for the most part) what they believed and why, but they encouraged me to develop my own understanding of things and to find my own way. I certainly felt a need to do that, given how jarring the difference sometimes was between some of the ideas in my own home and the ideas in the larger community.

In many homes, and also in school, President Eisenhower was seen in a very positive light — but not in my home. Vice-President Richard Nixon and the fierce Cold War Secretary of State John Foster Dulles were even worse, though lower yet was Senator Joseph McCarthy who claimed to be leading a crusade against the insidious evils of Communism. I remember my parents being glued to the black and white TV in our home in 1954 watching what seemed to me never-ending “hearings” (in which, I later learned, McCarthy was finally being politically cut down).

On the other hand, some things that were clearly seen as bad elsewhere seemed to have the glow of goodness in my home. People like Alger Hiss, indicted for espionage, or the executed “atom spies” Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (the photos of their sons, little boys like me, were burned into my young mind), were presumed innocent by my parents. Those who refused to cooperate with Congressional investigating committees that sought to root out “un-American activities” were seen as heroes.

Nor were the Soviet Union and Red China seen as evil. In 1956, when there was an anti-Communist uprising in Hungary, my parents’ attitude also seemed inconsistent with the positive outpourings that were the norm all around us. They seemed subdued, distrustful, critical. Yet I remember watching newsreels, then and a bit later, of intense clusters of Hungarians, some seeming close to my own age, students and working-class kids — intense, determined, turning to look into the camera, right into my own eyes, holding guns that they were preparing to use on some unseen enemy associated with inhuman, armored tanks — and I felt a profound sense of identification with them.

I vaguely remember, in the same period, my parents’ intense engagement with some revelations from Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev published in the New York Times. (According to Khruschev, the highly revered leader of the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1953, Joseph Stalin, had actually been a murderous tyrant.) They also poured over an issue of a small cultural magazine I didn’t commonly see in our home — it was called Mainstream, and it contained an important article by our beloved Howard Fast explaining that he had changed his mind about something important and wouldn’t write for that magazine anymore. My parents were very disappointed and discussed this, and related matters, with friends who lived in another Pennsylvania town.

When I turned 13 my parents sat me down to tell me something important. They believed in socialism, and so did all of my favorite relatives. This made me very uneasy, because I had a sense that this was seen as something “bad” in the larger culture. They explained that instead of everyone competing to make a living, and instead of a few people privately owning the economy that all of us were dependent on (for jobs, food, clothing, shelter, all necessities and luxuries), the economy should be owned together by everyone, working together to provide the things they would all need and want.

This sounded very nice — similar to their conception of unions, but on a bigger scale and more thoroughgoing. It also sounded impossible to me, given the world that I knew around me. But when I asked critical questions, they had what seemed to me reasonable-sounding answers, so I concluded that this was something worth thinking about.

A more shocking revelation followed not long after. They sat me down again. Both of them had once been members of the Communist Party. Some of my favorite relatives had been members of the Communist Party. They were not sorry that they had been members — they still believed in the things that had caused them to be Communists. Those things had to do with the Brotherhood of Man, fighting for unions and the dignity of workers, opposing all forms of racism and oppression, and believing in the socialist vision.

Some bad developments had been occurring in the Communist Party that had caused them to leave quietly around the time we moved to Clearfield, and some bad developments had obviously taken place in the Soviet Union and in the larger Communist movement. But there was also a lot of good in these entities, they felt, and they did not reject any of them in their entirety.

The kicker was that I was absolutely prohibited from sharing any of this information with anyone at all, even my friends. In an atmosphere pervaded by intense Cold War anti-Communism, such exposure would be used by hostile people to destroy all of the good things my parents had been working for. They would very likely lose their jobs, many people (including friends) would turn against us or be afraid to associate with us, and we would have to leave Clearfield. This had happened to other people, other friends, even to Uncle Adrian.

The weight of this terrible burden of secrecy was a difficult and damaging thing. Especially given the larger culture’s seemingly unremitting assault on my own particular “family values,” on my roots, on each and everyone one of my favorite relatives, I think it made me at least a little crazy. Especially when my ninth-grade history teacher urged anyone in class who wanted to know about the dangers of Communism in the United States to get the true facts from Masters of Deceit by J. Edgar Hoover.

I immediately bought a brand new copy for only 50 cents, popular paperbacks being incredibly inexpensive back then. This vicious little book by the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation horrified me — and helped to propel me into an intensive, almost obsessive search for the real truth. More than ever, I became a voracious reader and, in some ways, a compulsive “searcher.”

 Truth-Seeking

My guiding principle, initially, was that “the truth is somewhere in-between.” That is, it was in-between the Communism of my parents and the right-wing anti-Communism, reflected in what J. Edgar Hoover had to say, that permeated so much of the world around me. And for me, this happy medium quickly came to be defined by what I read in the centrist-liberal New York Times and in a good left-liberal magazine (safely, though not viciously, anti-Communist) that came into our home each month, The Progressive.

Yet there were other influences as well. Also coming into our home were two important left-wing periodicals. One was the very readable “independent socialist” Monthly Review, edited by Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman (which, combined with a number of Monthly Review Press pamphlets and books, would play a key role in my education as a socialist). The other was the “progressive newsweekly,” the National Guardian — in which was blended a somewhat diluted Communist Party influence with various other, more independent, sometimes more critical-minded, radical elements.

Not long after, I also discovered I.F. Stone’s Weekly, and also stumbled across Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker, both of which further expanded my political horizons. My seeking “the truth somewhere in-between” caused me to read the well-written but hostile The American Communist Party, A Critical History by “moderate socialists” Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, on the one hand, and at least portions of the more turgid “official” account by Communist leader William Z. Foster, History of the Communist Party of the United States.

More alive than either were the “insider” essays of The God That Failed, a copy of which was among my parents’ books. I was especially impressed by the passionate essay of Ignazio Silone, whose story was sadder and murkier than he felt able to admit (the fascists had broken him, he had informed) — but whose novel of the 1930s, Bread and Wine, seeming to blend Marxism with Christianity, helped me decide, at the age of 16, that I was, indeed, a socialist.

No less important were the writings of the acidly anti-Stalinist but staunchly socialist George Orwell, whose satirical jab at Stalinist Russia, Animal Farm, and devastating vision of totalitarianism in 1984 were topics of intense conversation among my closest high school friends and me. A high school classmate introduced me to Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, about an Old Bolshevik revolutionary destroyed by (but perhaps partly responsible for) Stalin’s purges in 1930s Russia, which was incredibly disturbing.

More to my liking was Albert Camus’ The Plague, an allegory in which — it seemed to me — ex-Communists remain true to the struggle for humanity’s future.

I was also fortunate to stumble upon two gems in unlikely places. In the upper-middle-class home of my mother’s parents in Brooklyn, New York, I found a rare copy of Victor Serge’s 1937 classic, Russia Twenty Years After, purchased by the eager teenager that my mother was when she got it, only to be quickly abandoned after a Stalinist lecture by her beloved Uncle George (who explained that Serge was a phony, a “Trotskyite,” an enemy of the Soviet Union).

Permeated by the spirit of revolutionary socialism, this neglected book eloquently explained many things — clearly distinguishing the heroic Communism of Lenin, Trotsky, and the early Bolsheviks from the bureaucratic and murderous realities associated with the Stalin regime — that have stayed with me ever since. (Many years later, I was pleased to facilitate the republication of this book in the Revolutionary Studies series I edited for Humanities Press.)

The other gem, for some reason, had been acquired by my high school library — the short, readable, amazingly affirmative Story of an American Communist by John Gates, a Spanish Civil War veteran like my Uncle George, former editor of the Daily Worker, who seemed proud of much that he and the U.S. Communist Party had stood for and done, but was sharply critical of its failure to break with old Stalinist norms and its defense of the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary.

The John Gates of 1958 (not yet a bitter anti-communist) and the Victor Serge of 1937 offered accounts that inspired hope for the future. I would later discover similar qualities in the revolutionary pacifist memoir by A. J. Muste, an amazing leader of labor, anti-racist and antiwar struggles for many decades, in The Writings of A. J. Muste, and also the fascinating reminiscences of another old-timer, Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon, in The First Ten Years of American Communism.) It seemed to me, as I read the books by Serge and Gates (and, later, by Muste and Cannon), that one could learn from the positive as well as the negative lessons from the past, in a way that would not try to duplicate what had gone before. Rather, one could build on that experience toward something better.

In 1962, another important book appeared, The Marxists, by C. Wright Mills, which included a clearly-written and critical yet relatively sympathetic presentation of Marxism (including selections from the writings of Marx and others) by this wonderful, independent-minded sociologist who had just died. It was available in Clearfield as a cheap popular paperback — only 25 cents more than Masters of Deceit, and worth every penny! I learned from it, and through it discovered Isaac Deutscher, whose informative writings on the history of revolutionary Russia and the bureaucratized Soviet Union I also began to read.

From an ad in The Progressive, I learned about a magazine (I can’t recall the name) briefly published by the Young People’s Socialist League, which led me to some Socialist Party publications, but also to the magazine New Politics, to which I became an early subscriber. There I became more acquainted with left-wing polemics often associated, later, with the “Old Left” — with a flourishing anti-Stalinism that came in a variety of flavors, reformist Social-Democrats jostling with still-revolutionary “third camp” socialists, and other elements that fit into neither category.

I forget when I first became aware of Eugene V. Debs, the wonderful and inspiring working-class socialist leader of the 20^th century’s first two decades, when the Socialist Party which he led had a mass base throughout much of the labor movement, throughout our cultural life, and in communities throughout the United States. Its membership was in the hundreds of thousands, it inspired millions, it had powerful impact. But when I went looking for the writings of Debs in the early 1960s, I discovered that none were in print.

A visit to the small national office of the Socialist Party/Social-Democratic Federation in New York City brought me face-to-face with a young secretary who told me that Debs’ writings were old and out-of-date, and she sent me to the Tamiment Library, where a kindly librarian gave me a pleasant, rather innocuous little pamphlet about Debs by an old Social-Democrat named August Classens.

Going through boxes of files, pamphlets, magazines, and other materials that were rotting away near our house in an abandoned chicken coop, where my parents had “stored” all of that stuff, I first became aware of the immense and pervasive influence of the Communist Party and its periphery in the 1930s and ‘40s (whose last gasp seemed to be the hopeful crusade and disastrous defeat of the Henry Wallace Progressive Party campaign of 1948) — it was all there. During the Depression Decade of the mid-to-late ‘30s, the CP had been a mass movement, with a dubious Popular Front ethos (tied so closely into the pro-capitalist Democratic Party) that, nonetheless, had a powerful residual radicalism and that, again, had inspired and influenced millions, briefly given a special push in the 1940s by the World War II alliance of the United States and the Soviet Union against Hitler.

Hoping to find something of that earlier magic by going to the biggest bookstore of the Communist Party in the United States — the Jefferson Bookstore in (again) New York City — I found myself face to face with portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, lots of old books and magazines, some shiny new things from the Soviet Union, and some less shiny new things published in and for our own country, but seeming flat, inward-looking, and unimpressive compared to what had existed in those earlier decades.

In my final years of high school, I longed for something akin to Divine Intervention that might somehow bring back those Glory Days of mass radicalism — challenging the status quo of seemingly “affluent,” culturally conformist, politically repressed Cold War America, and opening up pathways for creating, in fact, the kind of world that my parents and favorite relatives, and so many other good people, had dreamed about.

 Stirrings Beyond the Printed Page

But at this time there were, in fact, radical stirrings impacting on the lives and consciousness of millions. First and foremost were musical influences. I am afraid that the often subversive and liberating elements that many found, at the time, in a variety of important genres (whether jazz, rhythm-and-blues, rock-n-roll, soul, country-and-western), were at that time beyond me. Others can give firsthand accounts of their importance.

What did grab me was the so-called “folk music revival,” which professional anti-Communist Herbert Romerstein warned against as a pernicious Communist-inspired plot, in a small book Communism and Your Child (1962), also available in my high school library. There were old union songs and even older work songs, spirituals, the left-wing songs of Woody Guthrie, songs of the Spanish Civil War, amazing and haunting old ballads going back for many generations, clever new protest tunes, humorous and often a-political folk tunes, and more — from the Weavers, Harry Belafonte (and the Belafonte Folk Singers), the Kingston Trio, Theodore Bikel, Pete Seeger, Malvina Reynolds, Joan Baez, Odetta, Dave Van Ronk, and many others.

For a small youthful clutch of us in Clearfield (as in so many other places in the early 1960s), especially important were the wonderful compositions, records, and even the persona, of the early Bob Dylan. More than such musical stirrings were the underlying realities that were helping to generate a response to such music among many who seemed to have no left-wing connections in their family backgrounds.

This went far beyond the stultifying superficiality and creeping boredom associated with the cultural conformism of the ‘50s and early ‘60s, against which there was the cultural rebellion of the so-called “beatniks” (Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, Dianne Di Prima, etc.) — but also an amazing proliferation of stand-up comics that we could watch on our black and white TVs, such as Jonathan Winters, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Dick Gregory, Mort Sahl, Godfrey Cambridge (and even Lenny Bruce, fleetingly) — not to mention the slyly subversive cartoons of the “Rocky and Bullwinkle” show.

For that matter, there was an accumulation of movies that seemed to challenge the status quo. (Off the top of my head, I remember: “On the Beach,” “The World, the Flesh and the Devil,” “The Defiant Ones,” “Spartacus,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “Raisin in the Sun,” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”)

This status quo seemed dominated by realities that disturbed more and more of us, and a growing number of struggles against these things increasingly attracted our attention and inspired more and more of us. We were all keenly aware of “the Bomb,” the nuclear weapons systems being built up by both sides in the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union, that could destroy all life on our planet several times over (there was even a word for this — “overkill”), and nuclear tests that were polluting our atmosphere with radioactive particles and something called strontium 90.

There was also the obvious fact that the United States, in its Cold War crusade that was presumably for “freedom,” willingly supported a large number of vicious and unpopular dictatorships, just so long as they were anti-Communist. It also became evident that various popular struggles against such right-wing dictatorships were being fought against by the government of the United States in the name of “anti-Communism.”

There were growing criticisms and protests — not in Clearfield, Pennsylvania, but we got word of mass protests in Britain led by the aged philosopher Bertrand Russell and other prominent intellectuals, and also the U.S. formation of other groups that organized smaller but no less important protests — Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy, Women Strike for Peace, the Student Peace Union.

Even earlier, and in many ways going far deeper, there was the amazing emergence of the civil rights movement. My earliest recollections of the proliferating images of this movement blur together: the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision that declared racial segregation in public schools to be un-Constitutional; the howling white mobs, replete with Confederate flags, in the streets of Little Rock, Arkansas, being subdued by Federal troops there to protect young black students; a jailed Rosa Parks in Montgomery Alabama, sparking a bus boycott led by a young minister named Martin Luther King, Jr.; Southern white policemen with snarling dogs, fire hoses being turned on peaceful marches, the politely worded bigotry of the White Citizens Councils and the burning crosses of the Ku Klux Klan; the howling mobs again, with Black and white Freedom Riders who challenged segregation on Greyhound buses going South, being beaten and the buses burned; many hundreds, then thousands, of dignified African Americans, along with a growing number of white allies, picketing and rallying and sometimes going to jail for committing non-violent civil disobedience against racist segregation laws; and in 1963 hundreds of thousands converging on Washington, DC in an interracial protest for “Jobs and Freedom,” a gathering once again bathed in the eloquence of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Growing numbers of us, in high schools throughout much of the country, individually and in small handfuls were powerfully inspired by what was happening. We vowed to ourselves that as soon as we could, we would join in. I deeply regretted that I had been born a couple of years too late to be able to go South in 1964, in response to the call of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), and others to join in the Freedom Summer campaign.

For me, the next best thing was what I actually did in the summers of 1964 and 1965 — got a summer job as a counselor at Camp Henry, an interracial camp run by the Henry Street Settlement of New York City, bringing out into the countryside of upper-state New York waves of young boys (ages 6 to 16) from impoverished neighborhoods of New York City’s Lower East Side. It was an experience from which I learned much — including much that I had not expected.

The kids were largely African American and Puerto Rican, and for the most part they had a great time. The counselors were largely white, but with significant numbers of Blacks, and a couple of Puerto Ricans. The top administrators were white. Those of us working there were almost all very, very liberal — with one or two open-minded conservatives, and a few who were much more left-wing than liberal (although there was a vague kind of socialist or left-wing sensibility and background that seemed to permeate the liberalism even at the top administrative levels).

It seemed to me that working with these kids was truly important work (I still think so), and that it was truly a manifestation of the wonderful and inspiring changes that, I thought, would be transforming the United States more and more through the Black-led but interracial “freedom struggle,” personified by Martin Luther King. But I discovered that life was more complicated than that.
In the summer of 1964, I think there were powerful elements at Camp Henry that reflected the spirit of the interracial “beloved community” that seemed to characterize the civil rights movement at that particular historical moment. Yet beneath the surface — and by 1965 very much coming to the surface — I was able to see growing racial tensions. Aspects of these involved cultural differences that were poorly understood on the part of some of the whites, and also some resentments among some African Americans around white/Black status and power differentials.

Even more obvious to me by 1965 was an unconscious paternalism and elitism among the top white administrators — a belief that a primary responsibility of Camp Henry was to introduce these kids to superior forms of culture, as reflected in the tastes and sensibilities of these white, urban, liberal-Democrat, largely Jewish public school teachers from New York City, proud members of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). When the disastrous confrontation erupted, during the 1968 strike of the UFT, led by its “moderate socialist” President Albert Shanker against local control of the schools by the Black and Puerto Rican communities, I vividly recalled the escalating tensions that had rattled my naïve notions while working at Camp Henry three years before.

 A More Radical Edge

In a sense, the truth I sought was not somewhere “in-between” the Communist left and the reactionary right, and certainly not in the left-liberal zone in which I sought intellectual-political comfort. It could be far more complex and unsettling than I had imagined.

One of the most unexpected influences on me, in this period, was the sharp, absolutely uncompromising Black nationalism associated with Malcolm X. He was portrayed in the media as a powerful Black racist who advocated a hatred of whites among increasingly receptive numbers of African Americans, in stark contrast to the interracial harmony represented by Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. This horrified me, and yet I saw how aspects of Malcolm X’s ideology resonated among some of the people I knew at Camp Henry — which disturbed me, but which also now made a certain kind of sense.

More than this, when I actually read some of what Malcolm X had to say, in interviews that found their way into one or another “mainstream” outlet, I was powerfully impressed by the quality of his thinking. In the same period I discovered James Baldwin’s novel Another Country, which beautifully revealed many of the sharp edges and complex dimensions of racial and sexual politics of which I had not been fully aware.

I also read positive discussions of Black nationalism in the pages of Monthly Review, and not long after his death read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Malcolm X Speaks. This opened new realms of thought and understanding. It seemed to me, more and more, that powerful historical and contemporary realities pointed to the necessity of the core principle in Malcolm X’s outlook: Black self-determination, that is, Black control of the Black struggle, and Black control of the Black community.

I was, in these years, becoming increasingly disenchanted with the profound limitations of the mainstream liberalism with which so much of the organized “Old Left” (particularly those in and around the Socialist Party and those in and around the Communist Party) had come to identify. Liberalism’s incompatibility with powerful insights represented by Malcolm X was only one reason why. Another had to do with foreign policy.

The pillars of Democratic Party liberalism, it had seemed to me, were Eleanor Roosevelt and her own favorite candidate (since the 1945 death of her husband, President Franklin D. Roosevelt), the two-time loser of 1952 and 1956, Adlai Stevenson. Of course, in 1960 Stevenson was shunted aside by the youthful John F. Kennedy — whose shining liberal luster had beguiled me into becoming one of his most ardent 13-year old campaigners. And in rapid succession, President Kennedy — defended by his administration’s representative to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson (with Mrs. Roosevelt sitting right there as part of the U.S. delegation!) — proved himself to represent something very different from what I believed in, around policies regarding Cuba and Vietnam.

The young revolutionaries who swept into Havana in 1959, amid the jubilation of huge crowds throughout Cuba, initially had an aura of heroes even in Clearfield. Although the mass media quickly turned hostile as the Cuban Revolution radicalized, I had more information that prevented such an easy turn-around in my own consciousness. There were the glowing accounts, of course, in the National Guardian and Monthly Review, and debates revealing complexities in New Politics.

I.F. Stone’s Weekly and The Progressive also provided important information that challenged the common notion that the island had fallen into the grip of a Communist tyranny. And C. Wright Mill’s essay entitled “Listen, Yankee!” had a powerful impact on me — appearing in Harper’s Magazine, and soon to come out in expanded form as a cheap, popular paperback. I could not see Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as villains, and it seemed obvious to me that the Cuban people themselves should be allowed to determine the direction of their Revolution and the fate of their country.

The Kennedy administration’s 1961 decision to invade Cuba, foiled at the Bay of Pigs, seemed to reveal a fatal flaw in the liberalism that had once seemed so attractive to me. And then there was the decision by Kennedy and so many other shining liberals to help keep Vietnam divided in violation of the 1956 Geneva Peace Accords, and to support a vicious and unpopular anti-Communist dictatorship in South Vietnam.

Thanks to reading material available in my home, I knew all about this in the early 1960s, well before the big escalation of 1965, and it seemed clear to me that there remained a crying need to go beyond mainstream liberalism — and beyond the failure of most of the “old left” to do just that.

* From Against the Current, May/June 2008, No. 134.

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 Reluctant Memoir, Part 2

I THINK IT was in 1963 that I first became aware of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). My older sister Patty had married a very nice guy named Earl Brecher, with whom she went to Liberia as one of the first Peace Corps volunteers, in a program, sending idealistic college graduates to “help” downtrodden areas in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, launched by the Kennedy administration.

Earl’s youngest brother, Jeremy, was a couple of years older than me and was involved in this new group, SDS. I read a mimeographed document called The Port Huron Statement and many other materials he sent me. During a visit to the wonderful home of Patty’s in-laws, in a woodsy Connecticut paradise called Yelping Hill, Jeremy and I talked about folk music, politics, and more.
Jeremy explained to me that, in his opinion, the Communists of the 1930s had been an incredibly impressive force, had accomplished great things, but had also engaged in irresponsible, stupid, self-destructive behavior and policies. It was now incapable of providing a pathway to the future, especially in the new times in which we were living. The rest of the traditional left was also caught in old ideological ruts and political dead-ends that would prevent it from doing the things that needed to be done.

There was a need for a fresh start, for something new — and something new was now coming into being, through movements for peace, for civil rights, etc. SDS was part of that. I should think about joining.

The truth in what Jeremy was suggesting is reflected in this summary (from my recent book Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary Experience) of what happened in the 1960s spilling over into the 1970s:

"There was an explosion of mass action and creative smaller-group efforts, an inspiring, exhilarating commitment to transforming society — a massive upsurge of youthful idealism and action for civil rights of oppressed races and nationalities, against the threat of nuclear war, for civil liberties, against poverty, for campus reform and academic freedom, against the Vietnam war, for women’s liberation, against anti-gay prejudice, for cultural freedom and revitalization, against the destruction of the earth’s ecology, for the elementary and revolutionary democratic demand to “let the people decide.”

Increasing numbers of people decided to speak truth to power, question authority, move from protest to resistance, finally to be realistic by demanding the “impossible.” The radicalization process helped to show that through collective action people can more effectively deal with their common problems, that if enough people commit themselves to struggles that make sense, it is possible to transform the political climate, change minorities into majorities, and win meaningful victories. Some also learned that electoralism and reformist politics are traps, that ultra-leftism is a dead-end, and that society will not be fundamentally transformed unless the working class (society’s majority) becomes conscious of the need for this to be so. In 1968 many became especially aware of the power of workers, thanks to the May-June events in France. That year also illustrated that the struggle for liberation is global, with the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the resistance to bureaucratic rule and Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the worker-student upsurge throughout Western and Southern Europe, the brutally repressed student demonstrations in Mexico, the intensified battles for peace and justice in our own land.

In the 1964 presidential election, in the face of the right-wing Republican threat represented by Barry Goldwater, who seemed likely to do things like escalate the Vietnam conflict into a full-scale war, SDS adopted a policy of critical support for the re-election of liberal Texan Lyndon Baines Johnson, advancing a slogan I liked — “Part of the Way With LBJ” (though I openly campaigned “all the way” for him in Clearfield). Of course, after Johnson won by a landslide, he himself began the escalation of the Vietnam war, and SDS organized the earliest mass march against the war in April 1965.

By the time I was a senior in high school, I was identifying with SDS enough to decide to send a filled-out membership application form, a long letter explaining who I was and what I thought, and dues money. I received a heartening response from someone named Carolyn Craven welcoming me. But in addition to wolfing down large quantities of SDS literature, I was connecting with much more.

One of the most important influences on me, by this time, was the stimulating radical-pacifist magazine, Liberation, with a proliferation of thoughtful reports, opinion-pieces, discussions, and debates about civil rights and peace movements among such experienced activists and theorists as A. J. Muste, Dave Dellinger, Bayard Rustin, David McReynolds, Brad Lyttle, Staughton Lynd, Paul Goodman, and others. Also important for me was a weighty, and initially more academic Studies on the Left, in which a variety of left-wing scholars and intellectuals (William Appleman Williams, James Weinstein, Stanley Aronowitz, Eugene Genovese, and others) self-consciously sought to map out new pathways of radical thought.

All this seemed particularly vibrant because it was connected with a rising tide of youthful radical activism definitely not dominated by any of the old left tendencies. A valuable 1962 survey of how such activism had, since the late 1950s, become manifest at the University of California-Berkeley was offered in another inexpensive popular paperback that I was able to purchase in Clearfield, titled Student, by a young David Horowitz (two decades before he swerved so severely and destructively to the right).

In the pages of the liberal weekly New Republic, available in my high school library, I could read updated, hip, incredibly exciting reports by Andrew Kopkind on SNCC, Freedom Summer, the New Left, and the momentous Berkeley Free Speech Movement. I was able to supplement this with important articles and essays in New Politics — especially thanks to materials from Hal Draper.

Draper’s earlier essay “The Two Souls of Socialism” (counterposing revolutionary-democratic socialism “from the bottom-up” to the top-down elitism of Social-Democratic “moderate socialist” reformers and Stalinist authoritarians) was to influence me for years to come. But his on-the-spot coverage of the Berkeley struggles gave some issues of New Politics a “must-read” quality and culminated in his 1966 classic, yet another cheap paperback, Berkeley: The New Student Revolt.

 Old Left/New Left Interplay

Of course the sharp and pugnacious Draper, like other New Politics editors, was very much a product of the “old left.” Nor were they the only ones reaching out to connect with, and to influence, those of us who were crystallizing into this vibrant new left. After all, the parent group of SDS was itself a preeminently old left formation going back to 1905, the “moderate socialist” League for Industrial Democracy (LID). More or less a front-group for the Socialist Party, the LID could boast of two leading personalities, both energetic thinkers and doers, Michael Harrington (in his late 30s) and Tom Kahn (in his late 20s).

Harrington, author of the best-selling (inexpensive paperback) classic on poverty in the United States, The Other America (1962), was the LID’s charismatic Chairman. Kahn, LID Executive Secretary, was a close associate of the brilliant civil rights strategist Bayard Rustin (himself an aide to famous Black trade-union Socialist A. Philip Randolph, and at times to Martin Luther King). Kahn had substantial civil rights experience and had authored an LID pamphlet that offered an incisive radical analysis of what it would take to end racial oppression, The Economics of Equality.

Much later I would learn that Harrington and Kahn were protégés of Max Shachtman, who started off in the Communist movement of the early 1920s, then along with James P. Cannon had led the U.S. Trotskyist movement. But there was a sharp break with Trotsky and Cannon in 1940, after which Shachtman led a revolutionary socialist group that by the mid-1950s was evolving in the direction of “moderate socialism” (in the process losing the allegiance of some comrades, like Hal Draper), merging into what was left of the old Socialist Party led by “the grand old man of Socialism,” Norman Thomas.

Harrington and Kahn seemed to have absorbed all of what Shachtman represented, and seemed incredibly coherent, capable, razor-sharp — intellectually, organizationally, polemically, factionally. Despite their relative youth, here was the Old Left par excellence!

When one heard Shachtman explain himself (as I did a couple of years later), one heard passionately revolutionary syllables forming stolidly reformist words. Uncompromising notions of class struggle became inseparable from a commitment to the far from radical officialdom of the AFL-CIO and to its place in the Democratic Party, and the defense of socialism from Stalinist betrayal added up to an alignment with the U.S. government in the cause of Cold War anti-Communism — all with a Marxist flourish.

On the other hand, as Kahn later reminisced, Shachtman had driven home, over and over again, this essential idea: “Democracy was not merely the icing on the socialist cake. It was the cake — or there was no socialism worth fighting for.”* Of course, this key insight, so alien to ideologies infected by Stalinism, was not unique to Shachtman but can be found, expressed with strikingly similar words, in Rosa Luxemburg and others, including Cannon, Trotsky, and Lenin.

There were other spinoffs from Trotskyism (but with no “moderate socialist” admixture) that sought to have an impact within the new left milieu — I saw one sign of this in the easy availability, through SDS literature lists, of such booklets by C. L. R. James and his co-thinkers as Facing Reality (of which I couldn’t make sense at the time). More accessible was a “Marxist-Humanist” pamphlet by Raya Dunayevskaya, of the small News and Letters group, which seemed incredibly innovative in connecting the civil rights struggle, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and the growing movement against the Vietnam war with ideas of Karl Marx, especially his youthful 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.

There was also the interminable factional fault-finding Spartacist League, and what struck me as the shrill super-leftist stridency of the Workers World Party and its affiliate Youth Against War and Fascism. Somewhat more interesting to me, but seemingly two or three steps removed from the new left milieu (and dismissed by many within that milieu), was the more “orthodox” Trotskyism offered by the Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialist Alliance.

“Old Left” influences were hardly confined to elements that had associated with defending or breaking away from the perspectives of Leon Trotsky! As already emphasized, the weight and influence of the Communist Party could by no means be discounted — there were still a few thousand Communist Party members (more than all the Trotskyist and ex-Trotskyist groups combined), many with significant political experience and skills developed in earlier decades in the labor, anti-racist and other struggles, drawing on still significant resources, and backed by the greatly tarnished and yet still considerable prestige of “actually existing socialism” in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

In order to reach out to radicalizing youth, the CP established the W. E. B. DuBois Clubs, which had some appeal in certain areas. Its ideological influences continued to be felt in more independent publications such as the National Guardian and Monthly Review — although the “leftist” challenge of Maoism (as the Chinese Communist Party increasingly challenged the policies of the Soviet Communist Party in world affairs) soon found influential reflection in their pages. The primary organizational form that Maoism took at that time, however, was in a recent splitoff from the Communist Party — the vibrant and active Progressive Labor Movement, which soon renamed itself the Progressive Labor Party and not long after would intervene heavily into SDS itself.

All this helps us to see important aspects of the context within which the new left grew. But the new left of the early-to-mid-1960s does not come into focus until we shift our view to its actual organizations. The perception of that time was that SNCC and SDS together constituted the heart and soul of the vibrant new movement. SNCC had been playing a central role in the civil rights struggle, and SDS — rapidly growing from a couple hundred in 1962 to about 5000 in 1966 — had been playing a visible role in anti-apartheid protests, in pressing for “an interracial movement of the poor,” in organizing the first major march against the Vietnam war in the spring of 1965, and in articulating a radical vision of social change.

 Heart and Soul

A full-scale history of the organization I joined can be found in Kirkpatrick Sale’s unsurpassed book SDS. For my own SDS experience, I would need to give attention to where I tried to help build it on a local level once I left Clearfield and went to the University of Pittsburgh. The complex history of SDS in Pittsburgh, inseparable from the richer history of more broadly-defined new left and protest currents, will have to be explored another time. But perhaps a few snapshots can give some sense of how its “heart and soul” were perceived by one young member in 1965 and ’66.

One of the snapshots is a button and a pamphlet that SDS produced, which many of us embraced as our own. The button proclaimed the simple slogan “let the people decide,” and The Port Huron Statement explained its meaning — the need for “participatory democracy.” The Statement charged that much vaunted U.S. commitments to freedom and peace “rang hollow before the facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities of the North” and were “contradicted by its economic and military investments in the Cold War status quo.”

Claims that the U.S. stood for social justice were thrown into doubt, since “while two-thirds of mankind suffers undernourishment, our own upper classes revel amidst superfluous abundance.” U.S. politics “rests in national stalemate, its goals ambiguous and tradition-bound instead of informed and clear, its democratic system apathetic and manipulated rather than being truly “of, by, and for the people.” It asserted:

"In a participatory democracy, the political life would be based in several root principles:

"that decision-making of basic social consequence be carried on by public groupings;

"that politics be seen positively, as the art of collectively creating an acceptable pattern of social relations;

"that politics has the function of bringing people out of isolation and into community, thus being a necessary, though not sufficient, means of finding meaning in personal life;

"that the political order should serve to clarify problems in a way instrumental to their solution; it should provide outlets for the expression of personal grievance and aspiration; opposing views should be organized so as to illuminate choices and facilitate the attainment of goals; channels should be commonly available to relate men [i.e., people] to knowledge and to power so that private problems — from bad recreation facilities to personal alienation — are formulated as general issues.

“The economic sphere would have as its basis the principles:”that work should involve incentives worthier than money or survival. It should be educative, not stultifying; creative, not mechanical; selfdirect, not manipulated, encouraging independence; a respect for others, a sense of dignity and a willingness to accept social responsibility, since it is this experience that has crucial influence on habits, perceptions and individual ethics;

"that the economic experience is so personally decisive that the individual must share in its full determination;

“that the economy itself is of such social importance that its major resources and means of production should be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation.”

For some of us in SDS, this added up to a genuine socialism. Not all were willing to embrace that tainted word, but we all felt fine with the word “radical,” which literally meant going to the root of things and implied that need for fundamental social change.

Another snapshot involves the November 27, 1965 March against the Vietnam War organized by SANE in Washington, DC. A bearded Carl Oglesby, the eloquent president of SDS, takes the podium and explains the pattern of U.S. foreign policy — numerous foreign interventions led by a government committed to the profits of U.S. businesses overseas. He claimed that he no longer considered himself a liberal, but was a radical instead.

Oglesby noted that the liberalism then prevailing in U.S. politics had two very different components — a corporate liberalism that dominated the economy and the government, and a humanist liberalism which shared many of the same values with the radicals of the new left but was entangled with a Democratic Party that was deeply committed to the “bi-partisan” foreign policy that he had been describing and that had led us into Vietnam. He concluded:

“We are dealing now with a colossus that does not want to be changed. It will not change itself. It will not cooperate with those who want to change it. Those allies of ours in the Government — are they really our allies? If they are, then they don’t need advice, they need constituencies; they don’t need study groups, they need a movement. And it they are not, then all the more reason for building that movement with the most relentless conviction.”There are people in this country today who are trying to build that movement, who aim at nothing less than a humanist reformation. And the humanist liberals must understand that it is this movement with which their own best hopes are most in tune. We radicals know the same history that you liberals know, and we can understand your occasional cynicism, exasperation, and even distrust. But we ask you to put these aside and help us risk a leap. Help us find enough time for the enormous work that needs doing here. Help us build. Help us shape the future in the name of plain human hope."

Yet at a national antiwar conference held in Washington that same weekend, as a factional war erupted (the “Trots” of the SWP and YSA had called for a demand of “bring the troops home now,” which was denounced as too radical and divisive by many others there), SDS as a national organization held itself aloof. An SDS position paper by Paul Booth and Lee Webb was circulated explaining that it would not be possible to build an antiwar movement in the U.S. that could actually stop an ongoing war — history showed that such a thing could not be done. Instead, we must patiently and persistently build grassroots movements that could bring about fundamental social change — to prevent “the seventh war from now.”

Another snapshot from two months later. I am at a national SDS conference in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. Jeremy takes me under his wing at one point. He has explained to me that there are very different political currents in SDS. The “right-wing” had closer ties to aspects of the “old left,” especially the LID. Led by Steve Max (whose father had been part of the Gates faction that left the Communist Party in the 1950s), it favored forging a broad coalition of the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the churches, the peace movement, and the new left building for broad reforms and working in the Democratic Party.

The “left-wing,” dominated by Tom Hayden, was inclined to reject all that, and to insist that the only serious path was to do community organizing, to build a powerful network of “community unions” that would create genuine participatory democracy at the local level, forging an “interracial movement of the poor” that would actually be able to challenge the corporate elite and put power in then hands of the people. In-between was a more diverse grouping, whose leading personalities included Paul Booth, Clark Kissinger and Lee Webb, that wanted SDS to encompass both of the other currents, but also to engage in a broader range of work — campus reform efforts, antiwar activity and more.

Another issue was that the formal tie between SDS and the LID was moving toward termination, but the question remained as to what the relationship would be.

Jeremy and a friend of his, Doug Ireland, who were somewhat inclined toward the coalitionist wing and felt that relations with the LID were important, invited me to an informal “bull session” taking place in a room shared by Tom Kahn and Paul Feldman, editor of the Socialist Party paper New America. Also present was a young member of the party’s Young People’s Socialist League but more importantly a seasoned activist from SNCC, Ivanhoe Donaldson. I simply sat, watched, listened. In fact, Kahn and Donaldson did most of the talking, with Feldman chiming in occasionally to agree with one or another thing Kahn said.

It was a fascinating verbal dance. Donaldson and Kahn obviously knew each other well, comparing notes and sharing thoughts, as old friends, on recent and current specifics of the civil rights movement in the South. But the pattern of discussion shifted, with Kahn questioning, then needling, then pulling into a positive mode to explain what he meant. After some positive give-and-take, his considerable humor and sharp criticism would merge into a harder jab, from which he then backed off with a friendly word only to create a balance for a yet harder push to drive his point home. Much of the time, it began to seem, he listened to Donaldson only for the purpose of advancing his own agenda.

Kahn was challenging what did seem like a nebulous idealism of what he termed “mystical militants” whom he saw as all too prevalent in SNCC and SDS. (“We need to deal with the real world, real world!” he would admonish.) Against a naively emotional militancy, he emphasized the necessity of analysis, program, strategy, tactics. One must, he emphasized (employing what was clearly a Marxist perspective, well argued), understand the necessary interplay between the struggles for racial and economic justice, and the fact that it is the working class (with all of its diversity and contradictions) that is central to this combined struggle. This made essential the development of closer and broader ties between the civil rights movement and the labor movement. This, in turn, meant that SNCC and others working for civil rights in the South must be connecting seriously with AFL-CIO unions there. (This sounded right to me.)

Yeah, Donaldson responded, but those unions are all-white and racist, if they’re there at all. Where are these representatives of “progressive” unionism you’re talking about? Kahn ticked off the names of AFL-CIO officials in one or another Southern city. Donaldson pointed out the limitations of each — but Kahn would not concede the point.

The discussion then took a more disturbing turn — Kahn’s angry, sneering attack on “Stalinist influence” and “Stalinoid” operatives in the civil rights movement. (Inwardly I bristled — it reminded me of J. Edgar Hoover’s hateful book that had attacked my own roots.) “What are you talking about?” Donaldson challenged. Kahn named names — this and that “movement lawyer,” this and that advisor and financial donor, this and that staff member, and when he refused to consider the SNCC activist’s responses and kept on the attack, Donaldson finally walked out.

Then Kahn turned his attention to my SDS comrades. “Was I too hard?” he mused — but this turned out to be the prelude to a repetition of a similar dance, with substantially the same themes adapted to SDS specifics, and ultimately building up to the same end-result.

When we three SDSers were once more by ourselves, Doug furiously employed curses I had never heard before, Jeremy voiced a despairing commentary over how rigid and destructive Kahn could be, and I passionately concluded that I much preferred the openness of the new left to the smug and dogmatic certainties of the old.

 Summer of ‘66

The summer of 1966 was the twilight year of the “old SDS” to which I had been recruited — a little moment in history in which it seemed to me the coherence of the new left began to unravel, almost as if in fulfillment of Tom Kahn’s unpleasant prophecies.

I have had the honor of making a very brief appearance in Kirkpatrick Sale’s substantial history and also in Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History, produced by Harvey Pekar, Paul Buhle and Gary Dumm, portrayed as a hardworking young bookkeeper vainly trying to help make sense of the organization’s finances.

It is true that for about $30 a week (worth more then than it is now — but still not much), in the summer of 1966, I worked in the SDS national office. I helped go through the mail, helped fill literature requests, and — with substantial tutoring from Clark Kissinger — I kept the organization’s books and made bank deposits.

While there were certainly financial problems, it seemed to me that the primary problem of SDS involved the organization not having a sufficient infrastructure to draw together the SDS chapters proliferating throughout the country into a cohesive whole. There was no means, organizationally, to carry out a serious political discussion of “what was to be done,” to make serious, democratic decisions on that matter, and to carry out those decisions in a meaningful way throughout the United States. Our structure and infrastructure may have been okay for a group of about 1000 — but not for one of 5000 and rising.

It was a summer of intense experiences and discussions with many others in and around the SDS national office. I remember outgoing national secretary Paul Booth, whose apartment I moved into, who was writing a long position paper that attempted to map out a coherent and multi-faceted strategic and organizational perspective for SDS (“I showed it to Heather [his future wife], and she thought it was very good,” he said proudly), and I especially liked its effort to show that we were part of a mass radical tradition in line with the Populist movement of the 1890s and the early 1900s Socialist Party of Debs — but all this was pretty much ignored by a rapidly growing and radicalizing membership when it was published in New Left Notes.

Booth and I stayed up late one night talking about the relationship of the old left and the new — agreeing that it was complex. He understood when I explained how people coming from the Communist Party experience had been so important to what I was (and to what we as new leftists were, even as we rejected the dogmas and horrors reaching down from the time of Stalin). He added with conviction that the same was the case with some of the “social-dems,” who had not “sold out” en masse to the U.S. State Department. But such things were not seen or accepted, we felt, by many of our SDS comrades.

Well-known Berkeley radical Jerry Rubin came through town for a few days, staying at Booth’s and my apartment, to check out SDS and engage in searching discussions — though not long after he would join with Abbie Hoffman to create the Yippies. During his visit, he certainly seemed to have nothing to do with the “turn on, tune in, drop out” ethos of the growing hippie-influenced alternative culture into which he would soon infuse radical politics with outrageous and often hilarious antics.

But drugs were not completely foreign to our own slightly more staid political scene. I remember the outgoing SDS Vice-President, a young Texan named Jeff Shero, who asked me if it would be okay to store his marijuana in the huge, heavy safe in the SDS national office. (Shocked, I told him no.) “Grass” was proliferating through the youth culture by that time, but it was by no means a staple of the average SDSer, at least in 1966, when it was common for the police to “bust” activists for possession of this illegal substance.

Thus, when Judy Kissinger and I drove the famous protest singer/ songwriter Phil Ochs through Chicago one night after he did a big fund-raising concert for SDS, and from the back seat of the car he offered each of us a joint (in my case, the first time anyone ever did that), both Judy and I (again) “just said no.”

There were many remarkable people I recall from that summer. I vividly remember a wild yet down-to-earth Bob Speck (another Texan), bushy-haired and bespectacled, who worked very hard in the national office, was highly opinionated and often disagreed with what I thought (though he liked Howard Fast novels), who believed in socialism but was inclined to call himself an anarchist because he felt that it would always be necessary to fight against those in authority, no matter what. I remember Art Goldberg, a strange, very tall and thin, simple, warm-hearted, very capable printer, who had been saved as a child from the Holocaust, growing up in a sectarian Christian-communist community, which he left in order to apply the teachings of Jesus in the real world (which he judged with a harsh fundamentalist moralism).

I remember working with a number of young staffers and volunteers who were helping to prepare a mailing of New Left Notes, and listening with fascination to an extended and passionate debate between the warm, earnest and eloquent radical-pacifist Paul Lauter and the no-less warm, though funnier and almost cuddly left-wing socialist Tom Condit, about the importance and possibilities, for revolutionaries, of such things as “trust” — with Lauter insisting on its necessity among revolutionaries, and Condit insisting that this is too fragile a reed on which to build serious politics.

I remember the nascent feminism (though we were not using that word) of dark-haired Arlen Weissman, speaking quietly with thoughtful blue eyes peering from behind wire- rimmed spectacles, and especially of the diligent organizer, a sandy-haired, sturdy young mom, Judy Kissinger, who organized my favorite fundraiser — showings of the wonderful “old left” black-and-white film that had been blacklisted in the 1950s, “Salt of the Earth,” which beautifully interwove issues of class, race, and gender into the story of a heroic strike in New Mexico. She thought it was about time that women started becoming national officers of SDS, and she was thinking about running for one of those positions.

I drank plenty of beer while talking with other SDS friends working in the national office about the nature of U.S. society, the realities of U.S. radicalism, the possibilities of the future, and the problems of SDS. Eric Chester and I agreed that there was no coherence in SDS — organizationally, politically or otherwise — and that no actual or potential leaders seemed geared toward confronting this problem.

Even if the organization grew far more dramatically than it was growing at the time (and in fact that is precisely what happened), under the present circumstances these problems — far from being solved — would just become worse. And the organizational mess that SDS was becoming would not be in a position to win a majority of the American people to the perspectives of “participatory democracy” or to pose a serious challenge to the oppressive power of the corporate capitalist system.

At Clear Lake, Iowa that summer, there were more SDSers gathered at a national convention than ever before. I listened with rapt attention to the eloquent, outgoing president Carl Oglesby, in a keynote talk discussing the fact that there was, indeed, a sense of growing crisis in SDS, despite the fact, and in some sense because of that fact, that it was on the verge of runaway growth. I was relieved that this insightful spokesman understood the vital importance of coming up with a solution to the crisis but wondered what he meant when he prefaced his explanation of what the solution would be with a stress on the need for us to “return to basics.”

There were two fundamental elements of new-left wisdom that must guide us in the days ahead. (Good, I thought. We need new left wisdom — but what could it be?) What must guide us as we move forward into the future, Oglesby explained, are these principles: “experience teaches,” and “let the people decide.”

That was it? “We’re screwed!” I thought to myself.

The discussions at the convention were all over the lot. Some people were putting forward some ideas that made sense to me, but these were mixed in and on an equal par with (and therefore cancelled out by) all kinds of other notions that were going in a variety of different directions. In the elections for new officers, all of the more experienced members of SDS were shunted aside. Swept into the leadership was a new and less experienced layer — expressing “openness” and a heightened but ill-defined radicalism.

Jane Adams, whom I knew as a sincere, hard-working organizer, but with no clear perspectives of which I was aware, became president (our first female national officer), with the vice-president a tall, mustachioed Carl Davidson who appealed to the old traditions of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) but said that instead of workers, we should focus on students as the agent for social change — with what he called “student syndicalism.” The new national secretary was Greg Calvert, a slight, clean-shaven, curly-headed radical teacher influenced by the theories of someone named Herbert Marcuse, whose soon-to-be influential book One Dimensional Man had recently appeared.

In discussions back in the national office in Chicago, I was astonished when Calvert explained (in line with Marcuse), that the working class could no longer be a revolutionary force. We new leftists must recognize ourselves as the primary force that must challenge the U.S. power structure. We must move “from protest to resistance,” directly and with increasing militancy challenging our death-dealing social system with our own lives and bodies — even if we were destroyed in the process.

I was beside myself with anger. All the union people who I had grown up with in Clearfield were being dismissed. These good people had joined together to fight the good fight for a more decent life. Even though most of them weren’t socialists, it seemed to me that socialism or “participatory democracy” or any worthwhile radical change could not be possible unless it made sense to such people as these and unless they became part of the struggle to bring it about.
I was further enraged by what struck me as a blasé “radical” elitism in regard to a majority of the people in our country. It seemed to me, as I thought about how I saw things and how Calvert and other new SDS leaders saw things, that there were two ways of viewing radical politics. One involved a politics of communication, clearly communicating radical ideas to more and more people, and on the basis of those ideas winning them to the struggles against war, against racism, against poverty, for social justice, for “participatory democracy.” That is what I identified with. It drew from the best that was in the radical traditions which had inspired me, and it pointed the way to the creation of a positive future.

The other way to go — and it appeared to be the trajectory into which much of SDS was now being drawn — involved a politics of self-expression. There seemed to be little respect for the struggles and radical traditions of the past, and certainly no respect for most people in the present who were seen as merely corrupted by the affluence of consumer-capitalism and going along with the present-day power structures. To me, this added up to no practical hope for the future. Instead there was the “now” of one’s own radical beliefs — resulting in an activism seen simply as an expression of one’s own rejection of the status quo. If what you did seemed bizarre or threatening or destructive to the working class, the majority of the people, that was not a problem. The whole point was simply to express yourself as someone who rejected the status quo — even if this was done in a manner that was suicidal.

Words, gestures, postures and actions that struck me as dramatic stupidities, however, made good theater. They certainly attracted the entrepreneurial empires associated with the news media and popular culture, which projected such stuff throughout the nation in ways that helped to influence swelling numbers of radicalizing youth, many of whom came to identify precisely with such words, gestures, postures, and actions. For many, the styles and fashions of “new leftism” became far more important than the political substance — which fatally undercut our hopes for creating a society permeated by “participatory democracy.”

While Greg Calvert was absolutely sincere in his passionate call for us to escalate our actions “from protest to resistance,” it was to prove a resistance that was not able to dislodge “the system.” In a sense, however, I was wrong and Calvert was right. This particular trajectory did not isolate the “new left.” Instead it captured imaginations, making an aging leftist philosopher like Marcuse, for example, into a cultural icon, and therefore into a highly valued commodity.

More than this, the new “new left” postures and rhetoric blended far more easily with the burgeoning counter-culture associated with bohemian “hippies” and more the political, if often outrageous, “Yippies” led by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. In some ways this opened up marvelous opportunities for capitalist enterprise. Indeed, there was a lucrative proliferation of cultural commodities made available to the exploding market of radicalizing young people (even as many others — including the bulk of the working-class majority — turned away with incomprehension, disgust, or hostility). New high-powered careers and huge profits were made.

On the more radical side of the ledger, there were also immense and liberatory shifts in perceptions, attitudes, values and life-styles that have permeated U.S. culture, setting the stage for the later “culture wars,” but also expanding a potential base on which future radicals can build. And yet “the system” has adapted and, so far, remains very much in place.

In the course of the summer of ’66, “my number came up” within the Selective Service System. I was about to be drafted — but not into the military that was being thrown into the horror of Vietnam. I had earlier filed for status as a Conscientious Objector, and this had been granted by my draft board back in Clearfield. I now arranged for my alternative service to be carried out through employment with the American Friends Service Committee, which opened up a new phase of my life and drew me out of Chicago.

Working in the SDS national office, I had been in a position to see, up close and personal, the utter inadequacy of SDS’s national organizational structure — fragmented and all-too-amateur — and its lack of political cohesion. Taken together, these would result, given the tidal-wave of new members, in a small but promising organization turning into an utterly chaotic national disorganization incapable of doing much more than spinning out of control while being swept along by turbulent events.

SDS ballooned into perhaps 100,000 people claiming to be members, with a succession of national leaderships incapable of maintaining much meaningful connection with all of that. It finally exploded into a mess of warring factions, most of them infected by a more or less superficial Maoism, and it fell apart after a disastrous 1969 national convention. The Progressive Labor Party vainly attempted to maintain its own SDS for a short while, and most of the other fragments formed, respectively, the Weather Underground, the October League and the Revolutionary Communist Party. Many of us didn’t identify with any of that.

I continued to identify with the new left for three years after that (ending up briefly in an entity called the New American Movement), before shifting in a decidedly “old left” direction — but all of that adds up to stories that take us beyond this one. I have never regretted these experiences nor my engagement with the many people of that time whose lives impacted mine. I learned so much, and there remains much to be learned — positive lessons as well as negative — from the things that happened so many decades back.
Historian Van Gosse correctly insists that the new left must be seen as something more than SDS and the white student radicals, that it includes the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King and SNCC and others, the movements of other racially and nationally oppressed groups, and the anti-war struggle, the women’s liberation movement, struggles for gay and lesbian rights, etc.

“Taken together, these movements represent the essence of those years we call, somewhat inaccurately, ‘the 1960s,’” Gosse comments. “And collectively, they built a new democratic order, based on the legally enforceable civil equality of all people, which has survived and extended itself since the sixties — even as the New Right born during those same years mounted its own massive ‘movement of movements’ that surged to power in the 1980s and 1990s.” (Gosse, 4)

It seems to me that Gosse overstates one aspect of his argument. The “movement of movements” that was the new left certainly helped to push the U.S., in many positive ways, into being a more democratic order — but the persisting elitism, authoritarianism and oppression inherent in corporate capitalism remain, as does the task of replacing this with a truly “new democratic order.”

* From Against the Current, July/August 2008, No. 135.