MEMORIES OF THE STUDENT MOVEMENT

AND THE NEW LEFT IN THE UNITED STATES

1960–1969

Jim O’Brien

Good books exist on the New Left, most of them written by or about people who were heavyweights in the movement. My own perspective is that of a local New Left activist who was in touch with events at the national level but not really part of them. I was one of the movement’s unofficial historians at the time, and I wrote a PhD dissertation on its origins. In the end I was too close to the events to come up with a real analysis of where we fit into the flow of history. I’m still not sure I can do that, but in this manuscript I’ve tried to step back a little and look at the times of great excitement that I lived through in the 1960s.

July 1996

Contents:
Making a Difference: Early Stirrings of the New Left, 1960–1963
In the Shadow of Vietnam, 1963–1967
A Movement Adrift, 1967–1968
A View from the Whirlwind: SDS and the Campus Revolt, 1968–1969
Two Views of the New Left: Then and Now

MAKING A DIFFERENCE:
EARLY STIRRINGS OF THE NEW LEFT, 1960–1963

“The nineteen-sixties,” both literally and symbolically — meaning a decade of political insurgency — began February 1, 1960, during my freshman year in college. That day, four young students at the all-black North Carolina A & T College sat down at a department-store lunch counter in downtown Greensboro. They refused to leave. Impeccably dressed in coats and ties, they stayed patiently until the police came to arrest them. Their challenge to segregation fell like a spark in dry tinder. Over the next few months, thousands of black students throughout the South defied Jim Crow practices in the same way. The “sit-ins” were an extraordinary mass movement.

I lived in Minnesota, not the South. (If I needed a reminder, I could look at the ice sheet on the inside of my dormitory window, where the radiator’s heat met the outside cold.) But I was halfway through my first year at Carleton College, a small, academically strong co-ed liberal arts college. I was a liberal Republican, an idealist who thought that certain things were right and others — segregation above all — were wrong. In the spring of 1960 I took part in my first demonstration: a big symbolic picket in downtown Minneapolis by maybe a hundred students from Carleton and from St. Olaf College, across town. We picketed at a Woolworth’s store because black students across the South were being arrested at Woolworth lunch counters.

I didn’t feel a part of history. I participated because some older students on the soccer team told me about it — a black African soccer player from St. Olaf had recruited them. To me at that time, “politics” simply meant choosing individuals for office (Richard Nixon for president, for example, though I couldn’t vote for him because I wasn’t yet twenty-one). Picketing was new to me, and it felt strange.

What I couldn’t have known was that the Woolworth pickets (they were happening nationally) had cracked the dam of 1950s apathy on northern college campuses. The circumstances were right. First, racial segregation — at least in its overt, official southern form — was a clear-cut issue of right vs. wrong. Second, national ideals and U.S. government policy were opposed to segregation (the armed forces were integrated, for example). Third, it was black college students who had taken the initiative in the sit-ins; these were our counterparts.

The pickets were a form of issue-oriented politics. The idea was to advance a “cause,” rather than a political candidate. It was a way of asserting direct personal responsibility for what happened in society. Over the next couple of years, other issues joined segregation as “causes” for left-of-center activism, on our campus and others.[1] These issues included the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), a relic of cold-war witch hunting; nuclear testing in the atmosphere; and U.S. attempts to overthrow the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro in Cuba. The Woolworth pickets launched the 1960s student movement in the North, and indirectly they launched the New Left.

My sophomore year, 1960–61, was the real turning point, both for me and for the campus. Two older students who later became academic historians, John Miller and Jim Gilbert, helped to shake things up. Miller, after a year out of school editing a small-town weekly in Georgia, became editor of the student weekly, the Carletonian. He wrote in his first editorial that the function of a college paper “is to make people mad” and started by printing two articles by Jim Gilbert on his Christmastime trip to Cuba. The articles gave a radically different picture of life in Cuba than did the mainstream media, and provoked an endless stream of letters pro and con. Miller happily encouraged more controversy in the paper through a range of personal-opinion columns.

The Cuba debate intrigued (and threatened) me because it put American foreign policy on the table for discussion. I had always assumed the government was making the best of whatever bad situations it was confronted with. American policies were moral almost by definition. Cuba shook me up — not because I instantly agreed with the critics of US policy, but because the debate offered a new, disturbing perspective on America’s role in world affairs. The Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 made the new viewpoint seem all the more plausible.

Issues that centered on free speech and civil rights felt most comfortable to me. Those issues seemed open-and-shut. But with Cuba as a wedge, I looked into broader issues with more radical implications. I listened to socialists and pacifists (as well as liberals and conservatives) who spoke as part of the student government’s Challenge program. I started to read some left-wing authors: a little Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and, more influentially, the angry American sociologist C. Wright Mills, who died young in 1961. Mills argued that key decisions in the US are made by an interlocking “power elite” of higher-ups in the bureaucracy, the military, and the corporations. Unlike Marx and Engels, Mills had no clear notion of how things could change. He basically appealed to the consciences of intellectuals, and in my case he did a great job. His writings helped convince me that ideals I had grown up with, ideals such as fair play, honesty, equality, and democracy, were being betrayed by the realities of twentieth-century America.

Left-of-center political activism involved a medley of radicals, liberals, and people like me who didn’t know exactly what they were. Halfway through my junior year, still nominally a Republican, I ran for chairman of the liberal-radical Action Party and was elected — mainly because the party had just done badly in the Student Senate elections and I promised to make us more respectable. In fact, while I was chairman we elected every candidate we ran.

In addition to Action Party, the college had a chapter of the Student Peace Union, the biggest radical campus group nationally in the early sixties. And often an ad hoc group would spring up around a particular cause. Taken all together, we really didn’t do much. Sometimes we circulated petitions; less often, we demonstrated, usually in Minneapolis. Sometimes we brought in outside speakers for the student government’s Challenge program. Sometimes we raised funds through a “sacrifice meal”: for every student who agreed to skip dinner in the college dining rooms that evening, the Food Service would give a dollar to whatever cause the organizers specified. And sometimes the Student Senate (whose other functions are a blur in my mind) would be asked to pass a resolution on one or another national issue.

The milieu of a good liberal arts college encouraged “global” ideas about changing society, and I think the class composition of the student body helped nourish this kind of political interest. Nearly everyone came from families in which the parents had also gone to college. We took college — and the careers that college made possible — for granted. In this we were like the activist students at the other schools that were the seedbed of the early-sixties student movement in the North. Our backgrounds gave us, from the start, a readiness to believe that we could make a difference.[2] When you add the heady liberal-arts atmosphere to the class backgrounds that most of us came from, it’s easy to understand how some of us picked up the idea of working to change the entire society.

The best teachers I had at Carleton both encouraged and discouraged political activism — probably without intending either one. They fostered it in the sense that they had one foot outside American culture. Both the smug placidity of the Eisenhower years and the go-get-‘em boosterism of the Kennedy administration left them uncommitted. I remember in one class a student used the word Life, meaning Life magazine, and the teacher said in near-pain, “That’s not what all of us necessarily mean by `life.’“ They provided a kind of shelter for us against having to be 100 percent Americans. At the same time, they tended to see ironies where the politically committed students saw injustices. I never heard any of these teachers recommend doing anything politically. The one radical social-science teacher I had, an economist, hid his politics behind a veil of sarcasm and allusion. Only in private did his bitterness against capitalism come across directly.

The political students overlapped a little with the culturally alienated set who clustered around the campus drama group. Those people were part neo-Bohemian, part proto-hippie — though long hair for men at that time meant shoulder-length, and I never heard of their using drugs. They saw a stifling air of conformity at the college, embodied in such policies as “women’s hours” and the college’s vestigial rule that students had to attend a religious service or religion-related speaker’s program most weeks. Few of them were politically active, but we saw them all as a reliable voting bloc for our Action Party candidates in student elections.

The deans of men and women were used to a family-type atmosphere in which college authorities had wide leeway to preserve the tranquility and good name of the school. Yet the admissions policy had put them on the horns of a dilemma. In seeking the brightest students it could attract from around the country, the admissions office was bringing in a growing number of skeptical nonconformists. The gamble was that these men and women, as distinguished graduates, would enhance the college’s academic reputation, without upsetting the applecart too much on their way through. The classic model — and warning — was the great maverick sociologist Thorstein Veblen, who had graced the college briefly in the late nineteenth century before running off with the president’s niece. Nobody did that while I was there, but the student body was becoming a hotbed of individualism.

Most students were neither rebellious nor rah-rah. Carleton was noted, above all, for intense concern with courses and grades. A Conservative Party sometimes ran in Student Senate elections, but defensively: they wanted the student government to ignore off-campus issues. I don’t think most students cared what the student government did. Only the election for student government president every February stirred excitement, mainly because it offered an escape from the midwinter Minnesota blahs. (Even then, I remember a second-hand quote from Walt Alvarez, now a well-known geologist. He reportedly told a candidate, “John, I hear that you’re a totally wishy-washy person who if elected will do absolutely nothing.” The candidate started to protest, but Alvarez continued, “and on that basis I’m going to vote for you.”) Starting in my sophomore year, the more liberal candidates always won — I think because they offered the chance of some vicarious excitement.

John F. Kennedy became president halfway through my sophomore year. Decades after his death, I still can’t judge his impact on the student activism of the early sixties. In my memory, he always seemed to be part of the problem, not part of the solution. The youthful, militant Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee constantly chided his failure to protect civil rights workers in the Deep South. He sent the military budget soaring out of sight. He invaded Cuba and risked nuclear war to keep Soviet missiles out of Cuba. He resumed nuclear testing in the atmosphere and tried to scare Americans into spending big money on fallout shelters. And so on. We always found Kennedy on the wrong side of our “causes” or, at best, dragging his feet.

Yet that’s only true as far as it goes. It ignores something that springs to my mind when I think about him: his eagerness to shape the world. A self-consciously young president whose predecessor was (literally and figuratively) a grandfather, he radiated impatience. “Let’s get America moving again,” he trumpeted. He took America’s post–World War Two pre-eminence for granted, and foresaw the full achievement of greatness for his country in all areas. His very dynamism was infectious. I think his short presidency gave everyone — left, right, and center — permission to “think big.”

A Place in History

From the start, my radicalized civic conscience intertwined with my interest in history. I identified myself and my fellow activists with a tradition of struggling for social justice. My favorite American history book in college was probably Eric Goldman’s Rendezvous with Destiny. It brought to life the American reform impulses that began in the late nineteenth century and gathered steam until the New Deal embodied many of them in law. I sometimes envied those who lived at a time in the past when issues seemed to have been so clear.

At the same time that I looked for people in the past to identify with, I had a vague, strongly idealistic feeling that we were making history. Issue-oriented politics seemed to be the wave of the future somehow — if enough people would really care. A National Student Association congress I went to in 1962, as a delegate from Carleton, brought that sense out most vividly. We met at Ohio State University in Columbus. We sat at long tables in a giant ballroom and deliberated in the name of “American students” on issues like nuclear testing, civil rights, and academic freedom. It was heady. “The eyes of the international student community are on us,” one of the NSA leaders thundered in an early-morning debate over nuclear testing.[3]

Part of the feeling that we were making history — both at that NSA congress and in the student movement generally — came from the borrowed glory of the southern civil rights movement. Leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, some of whom showed up for the congress, had immense prestige among activist students everywhere. SNCC and the civil rights movement radiated energy. Here were the front-line troops battling our society’s most visible evil. They seemed to be bringing the nation to a historic crossroads: in one direction, a historic righting of wrongs; in the other, a tragic evasion.

The NSA convention introduced me to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a loose collection of some of the most thoughtful left-of-center student activists — not much of a membership organization except at the University of Michigan. SDS’s newly written and mimeographed “Port Huron Statement” seemed too long and imposing to read, but I met some of the SDS people such as Rennie Davis, Sharon Jeffrey, Bob Ross, Tom Hayden, and Steve Max. They were part of the NSA’s large grouping of liberal delegates. The campus activism of the early sixties couldn’t be carried by a single organization. It was held together more by a mood than by an agenda. We had an optimistic sense of new possibilities. We saw years of political inertia giving way to a crusade for humane values in American politics. We owed this sense of possibilities above all to the civil rights movement, which had shown the way starting with the sit-ins of the spring of 1960. Civil rights became a metaphor standing for the whole range of issues that concerned us. All sorts of things seemed to be on the table in the Kennedy years. We had our own rendezvous with destiny.

On our campus, push came to shove, by the standards of the early sixties, during my senior year, 1962–63. That year, several episodes concerning freshman traditions, the Cuban missile crisis, National Defense Education Act scholarships, use of the student union building, and open houses brought a new level of divisiveness to student politics. They presaged the far more freewheeling, confrontational years of campus strife in the late sixties.

Freshman traditions, unquestioned my freshman year, required first-year students to wear beanies with their first names sewn in. (“Find a girl and ask her to sew your name on,” we were told during Freshman Orientation). We also had to do various silly things at the whim of sophomores, who in truth seldom bothered. It never occurred to me that anything was wrong in this. The next year’s entering class included the mule-headed John McAuliff, a tall, ungainly devotee of John Stuart Mill and classic English liberalism, who came to Carleton from suburban Indianapolis ready to defend his ideals. He posted on a bulletin board in the student union an angry protest at freshman traditions. Over the next two years, more and more students came to see the traditions as part of a homogenizing pressure at the college, an infringement on individual rights. By my senior year the new freshmen got mixed messages: they learned about the traditions, but they learned quickly enough that some students hated traditions. Despite the pettiness of the issue, feelings ran high. My co–sports editor on the student weekly, Dave Beckwith (who later held the hardest job in Washington as press secretary to Vice President Dan Quayle) quit in protest after the paper ran an editorial urging freshmen not to comply with traditions.

The Cuban missile crisis came at the end of October, in the form of cryptic radio news. The only thing that seemed clear was that the US and the Soviet Union were talking about going to war, which meant nuclear war. Feelings ran the gamut of fright and confusion to a feeling that things would work out somehow. On my dormitory floor John McAuliff played a Pete Seeger song full blast: “Last night I had the strangest dream/I ever dreamed before/I dreamed the world had all agreed/To put an end to war.” A Trotskyist friend sneered, “McAuliff thinks world peace will come by leaders talking with each other. Peace comes through social change.”

The scariest moment in the missile crisis — one that I missed — affected a handful of students who went up to Minneapolis to join a peace rally at “the U.” The protesters were surrounded by a much larger number of hecklers, fraternity types who howled chants such as “Gimme a W, Gimme an A, gimme an R.” People were afraid of being beaten up. It was the first time in Minnesota in the early sixties that a student demonstration had been threatened by violence. But on our campus, not much happened. The Student Peace Union chapter got up a petition against the US blockade of Cuba, but most students either viscerally supported the American government or figured that “we don’t have the facts.” I think we got no more than eighty signatures in a student body of thirteen hundred.

The National Defense Education Act fight, also that autumn, began after the Trustees decided to participate in the NDEA scholarship program. The scholarships had a catch: applicants had to sign an affadavit saying they didn’t belong to any “Communist” organizations. It was a compromise of civil liberties, and an insult to students — farmers didn’t have to sign affidavits to collect their subsidies. The Student Senate, with some of the independents joining our Action Party delegates, voted to ask the college to withdraw. That vote — which would have cost some students their scholarships — aroused a storm of protest. We backtracked as best we could; the Senate passed an amended resolution which merely asked the Trustees to leave the program if they could find equally good alternative sources of scholarships. It seemed like a good way to save face, but a special all-school meeting overruled us by about ten to one. I felt humiliated.

The next controversy took a different turn. Trivial though it may have been, it gave me my first glimpse at the kind of generational solidarity that became so important in the late sixties. By my senior year, the first-floor lounge of the student union building had become the headquarters for what the dean of men called “those bearded, shoeless, long-haired guitar playing characters.” Nobody’s hair was really all that long; they did look scruffier than the average student, but other people used the lounge too, and everybody seemed to get along. The dean was mainly worried about what visitors would think.

One day a faculty-student committee that included the dean suddenly announced plans to rearrange furniture in the union. The obvious though unstated purpose was to consign the scruffy set to the second-floor lounge. A group of us decided to put out a leaflet in protest. It was a bizarre production. We had an old mimeograph machine but no paper — and the stores were closed. In desperation, we took rolls of paper towels from dormitory bathrooms, forming an assembly line to pass the towels through the mimeo and cut them up into individual leaflets. We put a copy in everyone’s campus mailbox, then posted a sign-up list for our “Ad Hoc Committee on Tolerance” on a bulletin board. Hundreds of people signed up. A few days later we put a paper ballot in everyone’s box, asking them to vote “yes” or “no” on rescinding the changes in the union. The vote was overwhelmingly in our favor — twenty to one, if I remember rightly — and that was the last we heard of the plan for rearranging the union.

The last controversy didn’t resolve so neatly, but it augured the future even more. It had to do with the college’s zealous social regulations. During all my years there, nobody made a public issue of “women’s hours” as a form of discrimination against women, which obviously they were. Pressure for change focused instead on open houses (monthly occasions when students in some dormitories could entertain members of the other sex for a few hours). Most students wanted more of them. The proposal was usually stated in terms of easing the artificial separation of the sexes, an argument which the administration tended to interpret as simply “sex.” Toward the end of my senior year, the school paper came out with a front-page headline to the effect that “Fear of More Pregnancies Bars More Open Houses.” This sophomoric challenge to authority freaked out the administration; starting with that issue, the college stopped mailing copies of the paper to prospective students. It was the death knell for the deans’ old idea of the college as a family.

A common thread ran through these divisive issues, or rather, two common threads. One was an idealistic assertion of “principle” regardless of the costs (which in the case of the NDEA scholarships would have been considerable). The other was a restiveness in the college atmosphere, a rejection of the idea that the college should act as a substitute parent (in loco parentis was the Latin phrase that was bandied about). Some students were simply in rebellion. They hated the midwestern conformity that surrounded them, and regretted they had gone to Carleton. Others like me tried to fit it all together — liked the college but tried to find in the college/student relationship a set of civil liberties issues that ran parallel to our idealistic views of national politics.

Looking back, the early 1960s were a strange time to be in college. We were on the edge of a historical divide. In 1969, I read an article by a Wall Street Journal reporter who went back to Carleton for his tenth reunion. His class graduated just before mine got there. It startled him to find how conservative most of his old classmates were — how little they had been moved by the ferment of the sixties. I think those people got established in their post-college lives before the civil rights movement blossomed and before the Vietnam war heated up. (The men didn’t need to worry about the draft.)

For my class, the Class of 1963, even many people who stayed away from liberal/radical politics in college were hit by all the turmoil within a few years of graduating. I think of the football quarterback who became a radical Catholic; the conservative treasurer of the student government who was later arrested many times in anti-war and anti-nuclear protests; others who became radical teachers or filmmakers or tenant organizers. I think of one classmate who used to write conservative opinion pieces for the student paper and who came back to speak at a Carleton convocation in 1988. He described a lawsuit he was working on to stop the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service from spying on churches. A student told me that his talk ended more or less like this: “It was at Carleton that I first learned to see injustice in the world. I know that’s happening to a lot of you too. I hope that wherever you find it in your later lives you’ll fight it, and if you do I’ll see you in the trenches.”

IN THE SHADOW OF VIETNAM, 1963–1967

At the start of my senior year at Carleton I told a faculty member that I was quite radical. He said it probably wouldn’t last: “That’ll probably straighten out after you get some facts under your belt.” There was truth in what he said. For all the political controversies of my senior year — and for all my eagerness to jump into them — I was more and more impressed with how complex the world was. The high point of my radicalism in college was actually the summer between my junior and senior years, 1962, when I had a lot of time to read. The National Student Association congress at the end of that summer showed me what seemed to be a dynamic liberalism embracing the causes that I cared about most. Reform seemed much more practical than revolution. I pulled back from any kind of full-blown radical view of the world. Taking one issue at a time seemed easier to defend, because I would usually have liberal as well as radical arguments at my disposal.

Graduate school in history at the University of Wisconsin in Madison reinforced that caution: complex, in-depth historical research seemed to underline how complicated everything is. And I didn’t find a home with the community of political activists in Madison. In my first year, I went to one or two meetings each of several different groups (Student Civil Rights Council, Friends of SNCC, Socialist Club, Campus ADA). In the early fall of 1963, I went to my first demonstration against the Vietnam war. But I didn’t feel at ease in an atmosphere where everyone else seemed to know each other. I quickly let myself be defined entirely as a history grad student. My fondest political memories of that time are actually of a bizarre character named Captain Bollenbeck, a World War I veteran and former statewide commander of the American Legion. He used to show up at political lectures on campus and wait for the chance to ask embarrassing questions about communism. If the speaker was actually an anti-communist, the distinction was lost on the Captain. Still, he made the programs more interesting.

My second year on campus, 1964–65, felt a little different. Though I still didn’t get involved, I vicariously identified myself with the activist movements that were growing in size and militancy, especially around civil rights. I wore a SNCC button: “One Man One Vote.” I gave different explanations for it (sometimes calling it a declaration against women’s suffrage); looking back, I can see that I wore it because I had a friend working with SNCC in Mississippi. That helped to personalize the issue for me. I saw civil rights as the major issue separating Lyndon Johnson from the conservative Republican Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election, and Johnson’s landslide victory elated me.

The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the fall of 1964 moved me. It involved the two causes that I cared most about: civil liberties (“Free Speech”) and civil rights — because the original issue was whether students could use campus facilities to recruit for off-campus civil rights activities. Mario Savio of the Berkeley Friends of SNCC, who’d spent the summer in Mississippi and became the media-anointed spokesman for the Berkeley students, seemed like a hero to me. In the years to come I would often read the words he spoke from the roof of a police car during a critical point in the struggle:

There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even tacitly take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from running at all.[4]

When the Vietnam war heated up in February 1965 — that’s when the daily American bombing of North Vietnam started — it caught my attention. There was something obscene about the American military throwing its weight around on the other side of the globe, trying to make one country into two. South Vietnam had a “government” only because the US had blocked nationwide elections in 1956, two years after the independence movement led by Ho Chi Minh defeated the French colonial forces. American strategists had installed the autocratic Ngo Dinh Diem as president in the mid-fifties, then helped to overthrow him in 1963 when his unpopularity made him too much of a liability in the face of a growing guerrilla movement. After Diem came a succession of ciphers, pliant tools of the American insistence on seeking victory in the war. (Only in mid-1965, when the autocratic Gen. Nguyen Cao Ky took power, saying his only hero was Adolf Hitler, did the US-backed Saigon regime have a touch of stability — if nothing else.) It was a war waged very heavily against civilians.

The war made me angry, but I was also in the throes of writing my master’s thesis. I couldn’t spare the time to march in the first national Vietnam demonstration, led by the Students for a Democratic Society in Washington in mid-April. Not until the late spring did I actually take part in an anti-war rally, outside the student union building in Madison. That was a combined protest against the Vietnam war and against the US invasion of the Dominican Republic in mid-April. Someone passed out signs: you could choose “U.S. Out of Vietnam” or “U.S. Out of Santo Domingo.” I forget which I took, but I discovered after the rally that I’d been holding it upside down. It seemed an appropriate comment on my degree of political involvement.

For all my own passivity, my growing alienation from the American status quo wasn’t just a personal quirk. It was spreading fast on campuses across the country by mid-1965. Unknowingly, and without doing much about it, I was part of a distinctly new radicalism in the US, a New Left. Its chief ingredients were impatience at the pace of progress in racial equality and anger at the bloodshed in Vietnam. As the Free Speech Movement showed, the new mood could also fasten onto the colleges and universities themselves. This was a growth era in higher education as the post-1945 “baby boomers” reached college age — enrollment was to nearly double over the course of the 1960s. Nobody knew it yet, but the mixture of war, racism, and proliferating students was explosive.

A Year in New York

At some other time, I might well have settled in — might have accepted the complexity of history and sought to claim a small corner of it to explore. But this was 1965. My year in New York starting at the end of that summer got me actively involved in the New Left. It coincided with a steady buildup of American troops in Vietnam (from 23,000 at the start of 1965 to 180,000 at the end) and with the first big demonstrations against the war. I joined an exciting march down Fifth Avenue in mid-October with tens of thousands of people. The giant papier-mache figures of the Bread and Puppet theater, then located in New York, made the march seem bigger than life. I had never been part of a demonstration that drew much more than a hundred people, and this one had more than twenty thousand even by the police estimate.

That autumn, a backlash developed against the demonstrators — angry speeches denouncing us as traitors, threats of prosecution. Because of my knowledge of past waves of repression in American history, the outcry scared me. I thought of the prosecutions and mob violence during World War One. I got a kind of apocalyptic feeling that a giant war machine that would destroy Vietnam and, at the same time, enforce conformity at home. When I contributed money to SANE for an anti- war demonstration, I made the contribution anonymously in cash.

At the same time, I felt a loneliness in New York that came mainly from its sheer size. That feeling led me to read and re- read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which I think expressed the same thing — it’s striking how many abstract categories of people he lists in his poems, and how few individuals. It also led me to identify a kind of make-believe community of my own, consisting of all people opposed to the Vietnam war. I remember writing to a friend in the fall of 1965 something like this: that I hoped like-minded people in the future could look back at us and conclude that we’d acted honorably and done the best we could.

The closest thing to an actual community I found was at a place that was so bizarre it is hard to write about. I first knew it as the Free University of New York, but the state of New York forced it to change “University” to “School.” It had a set of rooms above a coffee shop on 14th Street, a half-block west of Union Square, and it provided “alternative” classes on a range of subjects. The most popular was always “Krassner Views the Press,” taught by the iconoclastic humorist Paul Krassner (sometimes it was “Krassner and Guindon View the Press” with the cartoonist Dick Guindon). The most ultimately destructive was a course in economics taught by Lyndon LaRouche. In 1966 he seemed nothing more than a stereotypically sallow-faced Marxist intellectual — the last person on earth who seemed likely to start a personality cult. But his class at the Free University may have been one of his starting points for building what started as an eccentric left-wing sect and then, in the early 1970, became the violent right-wing cult that it remains to this day.

The two classes that I took at the Free School were both solid history courses: James Weinstein on American socialism (he was a leading authority on it) and Staughton Lynd on the life of W. E. B. Du Bois. Jim Weinstein I had met earlier, while working on my master’s thesis, but this was my first introduction to Staughton, son of the famous sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd (authors of Middletown). He taught history at Yale but had also become a leading figure in the anti-war movement and his job at Yale was soon to slip out from under him. He radiated a quiet, almost spiritual strength.

I tried teaching at the Free School myself — on the history of American civil liberties — but regular attendance never rose above two. Toward the end of my stay in New York, though, I got involved in the weekly meetings that set policy for the school. None of the teachers I’ve mentioned earlier came to these meetings, but a range of unusual characters did take part. The one who’s made a name for himself was Len Ragozin, a genial old-line Stalinist and talented folk singer. A couple of years ago, long after losing sight of him, I picked up a copy of the New Yorker and found that the feature article was about Len. It described his lucrative career advising racetrack bettors about horses.

The predominant political drift at those meetings was third-worldism. The idea was that, whatever class divisions might exist in the US, they were less important than the mistreatment of poor third-world countries by Western (especially American) imperialism.[5] A lot of people identified strongly with third-world liberation movements, including especially the National Liberation Front in Vietnam. This kind of politics could lead to a generalized hostility to American society. I remember one very glum student and hanger-on who interrupted a discussion to say, “I advocate the extermination of the entire population of Arkansas” (I could sort of guess where he was from). When, after I left, the core group at the Free School started a magazine, they called it Treason.

But I don’t want to make it seem too bizarre. The one issue of Treason I saw was pretty thoughtful. Third-worldism was an attempt to get outside the normal framework of respectable debate over American foreign policy. At that time there was a lot of pressure on (and within) the anti-war movement to confine itself to “constructive” proposals about the war, such as urging negotiations. The Free University people were saying that the framework itself — the idea that somehow the US had a “right” to a voice in deciding Vietnam’s destiny — was part of the problem. They were right. But these people took themselves over-seriously in a way that anticipated Students for a Democratic Society at the end of the decade. (In fact, several of them showed up in the “Weatherman” faction of SDS in 1969.) At one meeting, on a visit to New York at the end of 1966, I heard an extraordinary argument over the need to take detailed minutes at the weekly meetings. One woman said that after a revolution in the US, people would want to know, not just what decisions the Free School made, but what everyone had said at the meetings — to see whose arguments had been vindicated by history.[6]

The Student Movement as a Sleeping Giant

When I returned to Madison in the fall of 1966, I was ready to throw off the political caution of my first two years of graduate school. The campus Students for a Democratic Society chapter seemed like the way to do it. SDS was the biggest radical student group nationally, and it had an ideological looseness that I found appealing. I was already nominally a member, in fact, having sent dues to the national office in the winter of 1965–66 even though I never met any other members in New York. I was introduced to the Madison chapter by Jack Kittredge, a college friend who’d worked for SDS for a year and now was helping to start a community organizing project in Madison’s mainly working-class East Side. He had written me exuberantly the year before, describing a student sit-in protesting the university’s cooperation with the Selective Service System.

When I got back to Madison, most of the grad students I’d known during my first two years there had scattered — they had either dropped out or else they were off somewhere teaching while they worked slowly on their dissertations. (I had a job grading correspondence lessons for the University’s extension division, which gave me more than enough income to meet the very modest living expenses of an unmarried grad student in the mid-1960s.) My only real friend in the history department was Ken Acrea, a short, methodical, very funny grad student who had lived next door in the high-rise dormitory where I lived in 1963–64. He shunned radical politics, but at least he shared my jaundiced view of mainstream politics as well. We stayed good friends until he went off to teach in St. Cloud, Minnesota in 1967 and stayed in touch by correspondence off and on afterwards. He dropped out of teaching in the late seventies to work in a factory because he found it more comfortable.

Madison was no hotbed. My political memories from that fall are mostly disheartening: small SDS meetings; tiny attendance at a campus anti-war rally; a very popular student petition apologizing to Senator Ted Kennedy after some anti-war students heckled him; a taunting editorial in the campus newspaper, the Daily Cardinal, on the decline of the left. Meanwhile, the Vietnam war plodded on. For all I could tell, the massive American firepower was inexorably grinding the Vietnamese “enemy” into submission. It felt like a time of political futility.

But my perspective was limited. The 1966–67 school year as a whole shows, not inertia, but the remarkable volatility of the campus atmosphere. Even in the autumn, I should have noticed what was going on beneath the surface. The outward haplessness of the campus left was less important than changes in the campus culture.

Central to what happened later in Madison was a change in the lifestyle and mood of a critical mass of students, mainly those who lived off campus in what became known as the “Mifflin Street area,” a few blocks southeast of the campus. Once a family neighborhood with students in scattered apartments, these blocks were now becoming a center of a nonconformist youth culture. On some blocks, the older residents who stayed were the elderly, now stranded in an alien environment. (I myself lived near the Mifflin Street area but not in it. I lived in a three-room house by the railroad switching yard with a black family on one side and a white cabdriver’s large family on the other.) The student tenants in the Mifflin Street area were free from parents and from dormitory regulations. In some of the apartments (though not yet many) men and women were living together.

Drugs. Marijuana was coming into vogue and there was a kind of humorous mystique about LSD. That was still an innocent time: soft drugs hadn’t led to hard drugs, theft wasn’t a problem. I remember driving away from Madison for a two-week vacation in December of 1966 and realizing I’d forgotten to lock the outside door of my apartment. I kept driving, correctly figuring that nothing would be taken. I didn’t even have a key to the apartment where I lived in 1967–68, in the same near-campus area. (Soon afterwards, though, locked doors were the general rule. Hard drugs had established their foothold.)

Rock music. Tracy Nelson had just emerged from Madison’s off-campus culture to make it big nationally. Recorded rock music by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and Janis Joplin among others became part of a generation’s identity. It expressed the defiant, nonconformist values that were most common in the off-campus apartments — freedom, self-expression, and the glorification of youth. A bit at a time, the Mifflin Street area came to rival (and would soon surpass) the “fraternity row” of Langdon Street as a prestigious part of Madison for young people to live.

The music scene in Madison was very different from what I’d known in college. At Carleton people sat around and sang folk songs. In Madison it was much more passive. Even the live music was amplified. You watched and listened to performers, you didn’t take part yourself. But the music was much more expressive — vicariously it expressed sexuality, exaltation, anger, defiance, egotism, individualism.

The military draft hung like a thundercloud over the heads of most male students. The draft meant Vietnam. A source of both fear and resentment, it kept people in school who didn’t want to be there. Even as college deferments widened the gulf between working-class and middle-class young people, the draft itself led to a smoldering anger on the campuses. It brought Vietnam home even more than television did. In Madison, it helped to cement an off-campus community that defined itself partly by its alienation from American society.[7]

Liberal arts students dominated the evolving community. Students could set their own pace in liberal arts courses — let term papers and readings pile up till the end of the semester if they wanted. Liberal arts students, especially in the humanities and social sciences, also tended to come from more affluent, better educated families than students in the vocational fields like engineering and teacher education. To them, college felt more like an inalienable right than a precarious foothold on the ladder of social mobility. And (as at Carleton) the liberal arts courses exposed students to grand overviews of society.

There were several favorite restaurants and bars, Lorenzo’s and the 602 Club especially, plus an eating co-op that brought politically involved people together. But in the daytime the center of life for the growing off-campus student community was, ironically, the student union building. Its cafeteria and Rathskeller (selling diluted beer with 3.2 percent alcohol) were the favorite hangouts except in the warm-weather months, when the union’s outdoor terrace afforded a beautiful view of Lake Mendota.

A sizeable alternative community was growing up in and near the campus. It was only ambiguously political. Nearly everyone opposed the Vietnam war, but people drifted in and out of direct political involvement. Meetings meant work, and not always productive work. As it happened, our SDS chapter had a creatively anarchist chairman, Hank Haslach, whose style of leadership was to encourage small groups of people to work on projects that interested them. Actual chapter meetings were a sideshow for him. For the most part, though, neither SDS nor other groups on the left tapped more than a small portion of the energies of the emerging community.

Still, initiatives were underway in the autumn that would help to shake up the campus later in the school year. One was a series of meetings (at first including men and women, then just men) to plan a “We Won’t Go” statement of draft refusal as a way of dramatizing the protest against the Vietnam war. The statement would appear in February as a full-page ad in the campus Daily Cardinal, signed by forty-two male students. Another group, sponsored by our SDS chapter, was readying a Madison production of Barbara Garson’s fierce comedy MacBird, updating Shakespeare to link President Johnson to the Kennedy assassination. Two newcomers from Ann Arbor, Ira and Susan Shor, were floating the idea of a radical campus political party to contest the Greek societies’ dominance of student government. All of these projects bore fruit in the winter and spring.

Breaking Through

One of the best things written from within the 1960s student movement was a book called The Radical Probe, by Michael Miles. I don’t remember which campuses he based it on, but UW-Madison might as well have been one of them. His basic idea was that campus protests started small, as a core group of activists initiated something, and then they either caught on and became very big or fizzled out. Nobody could really predict exactly what chain of events an action might set off. Under the circumstances of early 1967, an SDS demonstration against the Dow Chemical Company in February brought a radical change to student politics on the Madison campus.

The idea of blocking the Dow recruiters came up in our SDS chapter because Dow made napalm for use in Vietnam. Napalm attaches to human flesh and burns it horribly. It made a peculiarly striking symbol of the war, and Dow Chemical had already provoked a small-scale consumer boycott of its products. Several other SDS chapters around the country had blocked the recruiters. We approved the proposal casually and floated the idea to other groups on the left. It snowballed. Meetings of progressively larger size (considered to be SDS meetings just because the original idea had been ours) voted to go ahead with the disruption. We met considerable flak on campus, based on the notion that everyone had a right to recruit and be recruited. I didn’t agree with that argument, but the controversy convinced me, for one, that we should back off).

After all the votes, the actual march to the site of Dow recruiting foundered in disarray. Not surprisingly, the site had been changed. The demonstrators with the loudest voices then persuaded most of us to head for the administrative offices at Bascom Hall. A few people, on their own, found the Dow interviews and were arrested trying to enter them; a few others were then arrested for trying to block the police cars, for a total of fourteen arrests.

The university chancellor, Robben Flemming, defused an emotional situation by writing a personal check for the bail. But a storm of protest still arose — directed against the demonstrators. Campus conservatives, calling themselves the “We Want No Berkeley Here Committee,” drew a big crowd (much bigger than we could have mustered) for a rally later in the week denouncing the protesters. The student government and the student-faculty-administration Student Life and Interests Committee began proceedings to have SDS kicked off campus.

By now you may be getting the picture that this demonstration was a fiasco. Actually, it wasn’t. It shook up the university more than anyone could have imagined. It helped gain attention for the “We Won’t Go” draft resistance statement that appeared in the Daily Cardinal during that same week. It galvanized the left for the student government elections soon afterwards — and the new party finished a close second with thousands of votes.[8] The student paper picked up the broader issues raised by the Dow Chemical recruitment and ran an editorial complaining that the University had become an amoral “filling station” for the dominant institutions of American society.

Even the attack on SDS backfired. The law-school Student Court, which normally handled parking tickets, ruled that the Student Life and Interests Committee was illegal and therefore couldn’t kick SDS off campus or do anything else for that matter. This court ruling, in turn, emboldened the student government to issue a list of sweeping demands on the administration under the rubric of “student power.” The lid had come off.

In some way that I don’t understand, our bumbling effort to thwart Dow Chemical had struck a spark in the dissident off-campus community. Maybe it was the arrests — seeing people facing jail because they acted on things that most of us believed in. Maybe it was seeing how thoroughly the powers-that-be on campus were upset at the demonstration. Whatever the cause, the mood changed that spring. Always in the student movement there was a back-and-forth motion between feelings of futility and feelings that something could be accomplished if enough people tried. At those moments we used each other for leverage — everyone’s efforts were part of a “movement.” There was a kind of suspension of disbelief at those times.[9]

Our ebullience was further affirmed by the launching of an underground newspaper, Connections, in the spring, and by the spread of the “hippie” concept to Madison. That was the time of the anticipated “summer of love” in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, and before anyone knew how fragile and vulnerable the “love” was.[10] Finally, the convergence of the first really big demonstration against the Vietnam war — a crowd in New York variously reported as two hundred thousand and a half-million — encouraged even those of us who hadn’t gone. I remember the date: April 15, 1967.

In retrospect, the Vietnam war strikes me as a magnificently mad adventure. It’s unthinkable today that a half-million American troops could be sent into battle to maintain the artificial division of a country halfway around the world. The war — swallowing almost sixty thousand American lives and overheating the domestic economy — required an extraordinary pride and stubbornness on the part of American policymakers. It was the violent, vain expression of America’s preeminent place in the post-World War Two international order. Maybe the sixties youth culture and New Left were a kind of equivalent of the war. We thought big just as the rulers thought big. Just as they thought they could enforce a worldwide status quo, we thought we could bring a whole new world into existence through the sheer force of our will.

SDS itself was a balloon. Of the hundreds of people who came to what were nominally considered SDS meetings during the Dow episode, almost nobody stayed. Within a month, we were back to meetings of little more (or no more) than a dozen. But that was the nature of the campus left: organizations were less important than mood. And in the spring of ‘67 the mood was ebullient. The Dow protest had succeeded in galvanizing the dissidents on campus, and it revealed a nascent kind of generational solidarity that went well beyond the normal ranks of the left. In the words of one of Bob Dylan’s most popular songs, “the times” were “a-changin’,” and we were part of that change. We were part of the flow of history.

A MOVEMENT ADRIFT, 1967–1968

The national SDS convention at the University of Michigan in June of 1967 was my first glimpse of the student New Left on a national scale. I honestly can’t re-create my feelings toward it: exasperation stands out in my mind, but there must have been other feelings I can’t retrieve. My clearest memories have to do with the loose and irrelevant (for the most part) plenary sessions. Old-time SDS’ers Steve Max and Mike Zweig, who alternated in chairing them, had a thankless job. The “Kissinger quorum,” named after a witty former national secretary of SDS, Clark Kissinger, was talked about though never resorted to. It defined a quorum as “one half of those present.”

Snapshot: TV lights, by prior arrangement, have bathed the auditorium for an hour while delegates discuss the pros and cons of draft resistance in the most solemn terms, doing justice to both the moral and the strategic implications. The hour elapses, and the kleig lights go off. In a split second, the auditorium erupts in shouting, laughter, paper airplanes, water pistols, and the sheer joy of living irresponsibly.

Snapshot: An evening plenary is about to start, perhaps an hour late, as the chair has finally outwaited the hijinks. All is quiet. From a door behind the rostrum, Paul Buhle (of whom more later) walks in with a large paper bag. He announces dramatically, “Does anyone really need potato chips? I’ve got ten bags.” He walks slowly up one of the aisles throwing them right and left as knots of people stand up all over the auditorium laughing and shouting, “Me!” and “Over here!” and “Please!” (Paul hates to have that story told, but it lives in my mind, both as a vignette of that SDS convention and of his genius for bringing out the absurdity of a scene.)

Snapshot: It is late at night on the first floor of an off-campus living co-op, packed with SDS delegates. I am with a woman friend from college, who has come up to visit for a day during the SDS convention. We are with a cluster of men whom I’ve just met. Each of them seems determined to impress upon her the importance of his work in SDS. The most horrifying is a man from Colorado who says he and his wife have just had a baby and his organizing is so important that he doesn’t know if he can stick around to help out. (It was never clear to me just what he was organizing.)

I’m sorry my college friend wasn’t around for the one substantive discussion that stands out in my mind. A women’s caucus brought to the majority-male plenary a resolution which (they told us) could be discussed but not amended. The resolution struck the varied themes of the emerging women’s liberation movement, from job discrimination to anti-abortion laws. Beyond the details, it forcefully asserted women’s right to make policy for SDS. A couple of diametrically opposite reactions from male delegates stick with me. Toward the end of the debate, Thorne Dreyer from the University of Texas, a tall, imposing figure in jeans and a cowboy hat, went up to the rostrum and said with affected shyness that he didn’t usually speak at those meetings. But: “I just wanted to say that where I come from, the main way that women come into SDS is by sleeping with some cat.” For his part, Steve Max, who chaired the session, ended it by gently underlining how hard it was for most men in SDS to grasp the resolution. It went something like this: “This session reminds me of the time my girl friend informed me she was moving to New Jersey and going to law school. First I was angry, then I thought it was funny, then finally I realized she was going to do it.”

I saw no clear-cut factional lines at that convention. The overriding tone, especially among the men, was a kind of romantic individualism. Greg Calvert, a young psychologist who was retiring as SDS national secretary, expressed it in his official report to the members. He said something along the lines of, “Whatever else the movement did, some people’s lives were changed.” Self-expression seemed as important as any more narrowly political goals. There was a kind of restlessness in the air — a fear of being hemmed in by discipline from whatever source. In that respect, SDS felt like a barometer of the student movement, not a leader of it.

The one disciplined organization with much of a presence in SDS, the Progressive Labor Party, was biding its time. PL was a small far-left party whose leaders had left the Communist Party USA in 1961, taking the side of China in the Sino-Soviet quarrel that split world communism. China accused the Soviet leaders of “revisionism,” of abandoning the goal of world revolution. Student-age PL members had joined SDS in 1966, after SDS repealed a clause in its constitution that barred “Communists” from membership. They had won support on a few campuses, including Harvard, through their businesslike approach and through their cut-and-dried analysis of society. The working class was central, in their view. Radicalized students, while seeking to attract as much support on campus as possible (“base-building”), should reach out to blue-collar workers, who held the key to any real change in American society.

Like other Leninist groups, Progressive Labor claimed the mantle of the Russian Revolution of 1917. It took revolution in the United States as a goal, based on the model of what happened in 1917. It evangelized on two levels. To the already initiated, it offered a full revolutionary program; to the casual recruit, a common-sense program organized around immediate demands. PL’s thoughtful politicking contrasted with SDS’s general aimlessness. If PL members caucused after the Ann Arbor convention, I suspect they decided that the chaotic SDS milieu was ripe for their simple political formulas. They would show up in force at the next SDS convention, and the one after that.

From Protest to Resistance

Storm clouds in the summer of 1967 portended a deepening crisis in American society. A string of riots erupted in dozens of urban ghettoes, most spectacularly in Detroit and Newark. Police and National Guardsmen killed scores of people in the riots, which seemed to show that liberal reforms had scarcely touched the underlying problems of American racism. Not since the Civil War had Americans killed each other on that scale. Alongside the exploding racial tensions, anger about the Vietnam war grew steadily. The April 15 anti-war march in New York had been the biggest by far; another one was planned for October to the Pentagon. Draft resistance grew apace. Martin Luther King called America “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” President Lyndon Johnson still pledged victory in Vietnam, but he had a fight at home too.

That was my first summer living in Madison. I shared an apartment with a man and a woman who lived together, and I hoped she would never answer the phone when my parents called. (It did happen once, and she was thoughtful enough to say they had the wrong number.) We lived a few blocks from campus in one segment of an old wooden building that once served as railroad-worker housing; across the street was the switching yard, where trains came together with deafening booms that I somehow got used to. The youthful Wisconsin Draft Resistance Union (an outgrowth of the “We Won’t Go” statement) shared the basement with a small printing press, bought by our SDS chapter using proceeds from MacBird. (Later in the summer, Madison’s liberal evening newspaper ran a sympathetic article on the draft resisters, giving our address. The landlord evicted them.) The glass on our front door had stickers with slogans such as “Mississippi, Vietnam--Freedom is the Same All Over” and “Let the People Decide” along with (my own favorite) “These Premises Protected by Giant Frogs.”

Madison is too hot in the summer, but in Wisconsin too hot is better than too cold. I spent the summer mostly studying for preliminary exams (the last step toward a PhD before writing a dissertation), often with the Beatles’ new Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band playing in the background. My social life came mainly from a twice-weekly pickup softball game behind a nearby student dormitory. The game included a mixture of political and cultural radicals (the jazz critic Ben Sidran played, as did Paul Soglin, who went on to serve multiple terms as mayor of Madison). I’d look back at the games fondly, except that in mid-summer, when one of the women in the Draft Resistance Union started coming, we adopted a rule that women couldn’t play. There was no controversy, and she didn’t make an issue of it. But it’s a shameful memory in my mind. Two years later, my friend Ann Gordon played in the game regularly, and was surprised when I told her that women had once been excluded.

Madison was a mellow place, but not an island. The war was always in the background. Nearly a half-million American troops were in Vietnam by mid-1967. Every Thursday the radio news gave the toll of American soldiers killed during the week. A bit at a time, the figures climbed toward the eventual total of 58,000. (The toll on Vietnamese civilians was many times higher, but no one seemed to keep track.) President Johnson could only speak of “the light at the end of the tunnel” so many times before the promise of an easy victory seemed to fade. Opposition was starting to crop up in unexpected places. On the Fourth of July, the retired US Army general who keynoted Madison’s annual celebration stunned the crowd by denouncing the war.

America was getting tired of Vietnam. As for the radicals, we were tired, but we were also angry. For us, the war wasn’t just a tragedy but the evil concoction of America’s evil rulers. We saw Vietnam as part of a pattern of a bipartisan American foreign policy. We saw no hope within either political party for ending the war. It was a liberal Democratic president, in fact — Lyndon Johnson — who was acting as the Captain Ahab of the Vietnam war. We felt a growing desperation to act against the war however we could.

The return of Dow Chemical recruiters in October defined the fall of 1967 on the Madison campus. The mood among radicals had continued to shift. This time the debate centered, not on whether to obstruct the recruiters, but whether to also have a picket line. In the name of moving “from protest to resistance,” some activists opposed a picket line — they wanted to force everyone to choose between sitting-in and staying away. But they were outvoted in an ad hoc mass meeting a few days before the demonstration.

If the last Dow demonstration had suggested a comedy of errors, this one suggested no comedy at all — even with the visiting San Francisco Mime Troupe leading the march up Bascom Hill. There was no question about the site (the Commerce Building, behind Bascom Hall) and none about what to do. As picketers chanted outside, hundreds of us filtered into the hallway where the interviews were scheduled, blocking all access. The bumbly campus police chief, Ralph Hanson, spoke through a megaphone, seeming to endorse a vague compromise. The university administrators chose force. A contingent of riot-equipped city police showed up with orders to clear the building and clear it fast. They used the club-and-grab method, which got the job done. I can be philosophical about it because I happened to be carrying a thick notebook which I placed over my head just before the club came down. Still, it stung a lot.[11]

From the policemen’s point of view, the problem was that they had deposited their newly made enemies (only some of whom had to leave for medical attention) outside the building in front of hundreds of horrified bystanders. Hundreds swelled to thousands. The police used tear gas repeatedly during an hours-long cat and mouse game as angry students taunted them and tried to get back into the building. (The next day somebody climbed the Abraham Lincoln statue that commanded Bascom Hill and put a gas mask on Lincoln’s face.)

The Dow protest was big news in Wisconsin. Statewide, the issue was law and order; the police were seen as heroes staving off anarchy. On campus, the issue was violence by the police. A mass rally in front of the library that evening drew thousands of students. A faculty member got emotional applause when he announced that some two hundred outraged faculty were present and would stand between the students and police (a safe enough offer since the police were nowhere in sight). A protest strike swept the liberal arts college. Over two thousand students signed a petition claiming “responsibility” for the Dow protest, to avert the scapegoating of a few students. The ripples of activism had clearly gone far beyond the initial splash.[12]

Connections, the underground newspaper edited by Bob Gabriner, a history grad student, published its best issue in the aftermath of the Dow affair. It eloquently assailed the university’s unleashing of the police, and it reprinted a bitter tract by Jerry Farber called “The Student as Nigger.” The back cover (later a nationally distributed poster) featured a quote from Lyndon Johnson — more or less “Let our foreign policy be guided by a desire to do in the rest of the world that which we do at home” — superimposed on a photograph of a Madison policemen swinging a club at a fallen student.

The sad truth was, however, that at that juncture indignation was all New Left radicals had to offer. We had a negative critique of the university, and of the society which it served, but we had nothing to offer by way of a positive program. Our SDS chapter floundered. Dave Goldman, an undergraduate who was nominally SDS president, made a cool and defiant witness before an investigating commission headed by the Republican lieutenant governor, but he rarely came to chapter meetings. After a month-long flurry of well-attended meetings, SDS settled into being little more than a symbol. We had “the franchise” as the local embodiment of national SDS, but we did little. Connections, the underground paper, became the main activity for several of us, while others helped to expand the off-campus Wisconsin Draft Resistance Union. The WDRU had a core of full-time organizers, mostly dropouts from the university, who lived on a pittance. They worked mainly with high school students to build a base for draft resistance. They also mustered support when any anti-war activist was summoned to Milwaukee for his Selective Service exams. Connections’s second-best issue, published in the winter (and edited by another history grad student, Ann Gordon) featured a barrage of articles on all aspects of draft resistance.

Given our belief that liberalism was bankrupt, it galled the student radicals no end that Senator Eugene McCarthy’s campaign for president became the political highlight of early 1968 in Madison. McCarthy announced his challenge to Lyndon Johnson’s renomination in the autumn, saying he hoped to bring alienated young people back to mainstream politics. Wisconsin had an early, important Democratic primary (the first one after New Hampshire) and Wisconsin liberals flocked to McCarthy. To no avail, we radicals on campus labeled him an ineffectual loser who didn’t even pledge to stop the war. Around Madison, his campaign took on the atmosphere of a crusade, fueled by countless student volunteers. Statewide, the anti-LBJ spirit fed on the Tet Offensive in February. The Vietnamese rebels not only had survived a three-year American onslaught but suddenly were seizing towns and military outposts all over South Vietnam. It belied the administration’s repeated assurances of American victory. Two days before the Wisconsin primary, facing his first defeat and an overwhelming one at that, Johnson announced he would not run for re-election.

We stood on the sidelines. I guess what it came down to was that we and the liberals made two different assessments of the times we were living through. We thought in apocalyptic terms. Vietnam and the urban riots bespoke a spiraling crisis that called for a decisive break with the status quo. The only alternative seemed to be the untrammeled triumph of the most violent, reactionary aspects of American society, represented by the war. Paul Buhle frequently quoted the Afro-Caribbean Marxist C.L.R. James as saying the world had to choose “socialism or barbarism.” Liberals, for their part, had far more limited expectations of what kinds of departures from the status quo might be possible or desirable.

For all the futility of our SDS chapter, in the spring of 1968 we still felt we were part of history. That was a time of upheaval. For a time, the Tet Offensive led many of us to expect the war to end in a glorious rout (i.e., that what happened in 1975 would happen in 1968). LBJ’s abdication also showed us a new volatility in mainstream American politics. Martin Luther King’s assassination in early April 1968 sharpened our sense of social fragility. Riots tore up numerous big-city ghetto areas after King’s murder. On the Madison campus, black students (a small but now growing minority) drew close to half the student body to Bascom Hill to hear black speakers vent their anger at American society. It was the first appearance by blacks as a political force on the Madison campus. Later that spring, black members of the football team boycotted the team’s annual banquet charging unequal treatment by the white coaches. Nationally as well, black anger was finding outlets — not only in the riots but in the rise to national prominence of the armed Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, started by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland. The Panthers quickly came to symbolize the militant edge of black discontent. All in all, the American political framework seemed less stable than ever before in our lifetimes.

Other events made students themselves appear to have the power to affect history — more than we had ever dreamed of. In West Germany the shooting and wounding of a radical student leader, “Red Rudi” Dutschke, sparked mass student protests. A student uprising in Paris ignited a general strike that briefly paralyzed all of France. “Be realistic, demand the impossible,” ran a French student slogan (which our Madison SDS chapter later made into a political button). In this country the counterpart of these events was the revolt at Columbia University, where black students seized a building and white radicals led by the SDS chapter occupied several others. Following a bloody police raid and mass arrests, a student strike crippled the Columbia campus for the rest of the spring semester. Columbia seemed all the more portentous because it involved both black and white students and because they acted partly in behalf of the nearby Harlem community. The Columbia revolt raised the stakes of radical student politics. Unique though it may have been, we all shone in its reflected glory.[13]

Another SDS Convention

My second SDS convention — this one was at Michigan State University in June 1968 — showed me how much more serious-minded the movement had become. The convention was bigger, first of all, or at least the plenaries were bigger. The water pistols and the paper airplanes were gone. Student members of the Progressive Labor Party came in force, along with plentiful allies in a “Worker-Student Alliance Caucus.” Their clean-cut appearance and short haircuts were like a badge — the other delegates, though hardly hippies, looked much more raggedy than the PL partisans.

The Progressive Labor line was simple: that America needed a communist revolution and that only the working class could achieve it. “Youth” as a category meant nothing in the PL analysis, and students were important chiefly as potential carriers of the gospel to blue-collar workers.[14] PL’s continuing growth spread panic in the rest of SDS. Many felt a chilling fear of what a disciplined cadre could do in a loosely structured organization. Most felt that PL was devaluing the student movement — denying it the historic importance most of us thought it had — and that PL’s prescriptions would stifle the movement’s natural growth. It was a tricky situation. PL had every right to be in SDS: the 1966 convention in Clear Lake, Iowa, had done away with an anti-communist clause in the SDS constitution. Yet the New Left leaders of the organization felt growing tension as they looked into the future. It was horrifying to think that PL might someday control the flagship organization of the student left.

At the opposite pole from PL, providing a certain comic relief, was a small knot of flamboyant ex-student rebels from New York’s Lower East Side who called themselves Up Against the Wall Motherfucker. They mimeographed and distributed cryptic poetry. Underneath their carefully cultivated tough-but-clever image, they were a mystery. They nominated a wastebasket for national secretary of SDS during the election for officers. Only one human candidate ran, and the wastebasket did pretty well. The Motherfuckers (as they were called) seemed to represent an angry version of cultural revolution, minus the soft edge of hippie-dom. They glorified the act of dropping out. Later that summer I asked one of them, an ex-Amherst or Williams College student with a cowboy hat, what relation dropouts had to the means of production; he answered, “A very important relation — none.” Still later, leafing through a magazine, I found a photograph of Marlon Brando’s stylized motorcycle gang in his 1950s movie The Wild Ones. I clipped it out because it reminded me of the Motherfuckers. This same magazine (Life, I think) had a picture that reminded me just as strongly of Progressive Labor. It was a photo of the ultra-clean choral group Up With People.

Most delegates stood outside of PL’s Worker-Student Alliance Caucus, and the Motherfuckers weren’t seeking to recruit. Most of us came simply because we wanted to feel part of a national movement and wanted to share experiences. But that wasn’t good enough for the loosely defined national leadership of SDS. They felt a need to point the radical student movement forward, and to do it in a way that would deflect the challenge from Progressive Labor. The problem was that they didn’t know what the way forward should be, or how best to deflect the challenge.

Two directions offered themselves. One was a version of the “new working class” theory that had floated around SDS for the past year and a half. Its promoters claimed that capitalist production was coming to depend more on college-educated technical workers and less on the traditional blue-collar work force. The theory sought to “translate” the campus revolt into some semblance of the Marxist belief that workers are central to social change. But nothing indicated that the “new working class” was ready even to unionize, much less to embrace socialist ideology. A version of the new working class theory came up in a complex document offered to the convention, but delegates had various reasons to vote against it, and it lost badly.

The other direction was to adopt hyper-radical rhetoric. Progressive Labor was as far to the left as anyone could reasonably hope to be, but nobody wanted to admit that. It was as if there were a premium on being the furthest left — on being the most resolutely opposed to the status quo. I remember someone saying, “We’re the real communists, not PL.” That idea was certainly in the air. Two of the three national officers elected in East Lansing, Mike Klonsky and Bernadine Dohrn, called themselves “revolutionary communists.” However satisfying that rhetoric may have been, in practical terms it was a way of buying time in order to figure out what to do.[15]

The intensity of the East Lansing convention had the effect of pushing women’s concerns to the margins. A women’s caucus did meet, but this time it had no presence at the plenaries. That was part of the new atmosphere. Throughout the sixties student movement, “serious” always meant something other than women’s issues. Once in my dissertation research I found a newspaper article on a civil rights demonstration of Harvard students in 1960; the article quoted an organizer as saying that in order to discourage any appearance of “frivolity,” women would not be invited to take part. Women were welcome at the SDS conventions I went to, but never on their own terms. Women’s liberation, a term that some women were already starting to use, was considered a distraction. It wasn’t what male radicals meant when we talked about transforming society. At that time, we didn’t think of gender relations as part of what defined society.[16]

It’s easier to describe the SDS convention than to convey a sense of how the convention represented the radical student movement in mid-1968. We heard little nuts-and-bolts talk about how the local SDS chapters (other than Columbia’s) were actually organized and what they were doing. Many chapters, I’m sure, had memberships that rose and fell precipitously just as ours did in Madison. Of the half-dozen Madison people I remember being at East Lansing, three of us were active in the Madison SDS chapter and the others weren’t. The chapters with the PL-dominated Worker-Student Alliance caucuses were probably the best-defined in terms of who was a member and who wasn’t. As for PL’s opponents, they were for the most part a collection of assertive individuals from around the country — people who knew each other from national meetings but who didn’t necessarily speak for large SDS chapters. This was an ironic return to the leadership style of SDS in the early 1960s, when the organization had almost no chapters at all. Given SDS’s size and prominence in 1968, it was a formula for instability.

As for the new catchword “revolution,” in retrospect it reflected two things besides refusing to be outflanked on the left by PL. First, it dramatized our revulsion at the status quo. Liberalism, as we saw it, had gotten the US ever deeper into Vietnam under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and was utterly incapable of solving the crisis of the black ghettoes. Reforming the system didn’t seem to work. Second, by calling ourselves “revolutionaries” we flattered ourselves by placing ourselves at the center of history. We believed that all of society could change — that work relations could be egalitarian instead of top-down, that human needs could replace profit as the basis for decisionmaking, that races and nations could be equal. An apocalyptic vision of almost-sudden change was taking on a greater and greater appeal within the radical student movement. And we saw ourselves, in one way or another, as the catalysts for this change.

The Leninist variant of revolution — which called for a disciplined “vanguard” party, as in the Russian and Chinese revolutions — made the role of revolutionaries even more central. The Leninist world-view which PL brought into SDS posited that a few people, by gauging their opportunities and by marshalling the sheer force of their united energies, could alter the course of world history. Leninism wasn’t common in SDS in mid-1968, but in the factional maneuverings of the following year, the New Left leadership would resort to it more and more.

There were two moments of unity at the East Lansing convention. One came at the start of a plenary when journalists were asked to identify themselves. A man sitting next to me gave his name and said he was from the Detroit News. Somebody in the back yelled, “Wait a minute! Isn’t the Detroit News on strike?” and other people yelled, “Yeah!” The chant of “Out, out” started and almost instantly, the PL student leader, Jared Israel, and the most prominent Motherfucker, Ben Morea, materialized in front of the man asking him to leave. He did. The instinctive pro-labor sympathies were nice to see, but I never knew how the man would have explained his presence if he’d been allowed to.

The other moment of unity I remember with unmixed warmth. To vote for national officers we filed singly past the front desk, where we marked our ballots. It took forever. I don’t know who started it, but clusters of delegates started to gather around the microphones dotted about the hall and, in turn, shared songs that they knew. The highlight came when Tim McCarthy, the chair, and Neil Buckley of Penn State stood at two different microphones and joined in a hauntingly beautiful version of the Irish revolutionary song “Kelly the Boy from Killarn.” There was an unabashed innocence about all the music. Looking back, it was like being in the peaceful eye of a storm. The next year’s events were to tear SDS apart and, for all practical purposes, destroy it.

A VIEW FROM THE WHIRLWIND:
SDS AND THE CAMPUS REVOLT, 1968–1969

Chicago, 1968

Between the East Lansing convention and the start of the 1968–69 school year, something happened that hurled SDS at the future like a hand grenade. That something was the Democratic National Convention held in Chicago at the end of August.

The Democratic Party in mid-1968 stood on the verge of being torn apart by the Vietnam war. Lyndon Johnson had left the presidential race and Bobby Kennedy was dead — shot in a Los Angeles hotel the night he won the California primary in early June. That left only one candidate who had faced the voters in the primaries: the aloof, mistrusted maverick Eugene McCarthy. Senator George McGovern of South Dakota put himself forward as a surrogate for the Kennedy delegates who shunned McCarthy. But most delegates had been chosen by party leaders in their states, not by presidential primaries. Their votes, for the most part, were locked up for Vice President Hubert Humphrey, whose loyalty to LBJ had never wavered. The man who once called the Vietnam war “a glorious adventure” was about to win the Democratic nomination for president. In the meantime, the former Democratic governor of Alabama, George Wallace, was running as an conservative independent with populist rhetoric. With Wallace and Richard Nixon already in the field (the Republicans chose Nixon at their July convention), the likely choice in November was among three zealous supporters of the Vietnam war.

That the Democrats were meeting in Chicago was symbolic. Chicago was the fiefdom of Mayor Richard Daley, the quintessential big-city white political boss and a stalwart of the regular party forces that were set to impose Hubert Humphrey’s nomination on the party. His police force seemed to be spoiling for a fight — in April, Chicago police had violently broken up a Vietnam demonstration. The Democratic convention promised to be a magnet for protest.

Three different groups announced demonstrations. The McCarthy campaign hoped to rally its young volunteers for one last stand in Chicago. But when city authorities refused a permit, the McCarthy leaders backed down and called off the demonstration. Less easily deterred was an anti-war coalition sparked by Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden, SDS leaders of the early sixties, who saw a chance to dramatize the depth of opposition to the Vietnam war. Finally, the “Youth International Party” (“Yippies”) of media celebrities Abbie Hoffmann and Jerry Rubin called for a festival in Chicago. Its leaders set forth a tongue-in-cheek list of promises that included putting LSD in the Chicago water supply.

That summer I was living in Madison in a house with five other people. It was known informally as “the SDS house” because several of us were members and we kept the chapter’s supply of pamphlets and periodicals there. It bespoke changing times that we rented from a fraternity, which didn’t have enough members to need it. Occasionally the fraternity’s business agent would come to inspect, and for those occasions there was a well-practiced drill for getting women’s clothing out of sight. (It was nominally rented only to men, but a mixed group always lived there.) Summertime was special in Madison, and life was good at our house. Two of the residents had especially good voices, and we all liked to sing, so we often sat around after dinner and sang together.

We had room for visitors, and we got a lot of them. One was Tom Hayden, who came to proselytize for the Chicago protests and was brimming with aimless energy. I’ll never forget his visit. He’d just read that some hippies had been arrested in New York for using obscenity on the educational TV station to ridicule American culture. That night, as it happened, Madison’s educational TV channel had scheduled a panel discussion on current issues. Tom decided we ought to disrupt it in order to show solidarity with the people in New York. He tried to recruit helpers. None of us felt like doing it, but some high school students visiting at the same time jumped at the chance to go on TV. They all went. Tom did get in a couple of swear words that the station’s blip machine operator was too slow to catch, but then he joined the panel discussion. Back at our house, he led an impromptu practice for Japanese-style snake dancing, which he said would be part of the Chicago protests.

The demonstrations outside the 1968 Democratic convention caught national SDS off guard. SDS needed time to catch its breath after the exhausting rhetoric of the East Lansing convention in June. The national office in Chicago, fearing Mayor Daley’s police, at first counseled SDS members to stay home. Finally, SDS leaders decided that some people should come for the purpose of talking with disillusioned young McCarthy supporters and trying to radicalize them. The SDS office arranged for an SDS “movement center” in a church basement, where people could gather to discuss issues.

The events of convention week, August 25 to 29, are a blur in my mind. I was in and out of town, retreating to Madison when I could see no reason for being in Chicago. I first went to Chicago to work on a wallposter-format daily newspaper sponsored by Ramparts magazine. A friend from Connections, the Madison underground paper, had gone a few weeks earlier to help set it up. When the Ramparts editors themselves arrived, the project turned out to have a steep hierarchy; my friend’s immediate superiors turned on him just prior to being frozen out themselves. I left when he did. Later I returned for a day or two to help at the SDS movement center. Then I left again. On August 28, a beaming Hubert Humphrey won the presidential nomination. Outside the convention, in front of the Chicago Hilton, Chicago police beat demonstrators, reporters, photographers, and bystanders. That night I was in Madison watching it on TV.

My sharpest memory of the SDS movement center is of a mid-day strategy session. It was no summit meeting but just a gathering of SDS members from different parts of the country who’d ended up in Chicago. The talk of converting the “McCarthy kids” was gone. Now the discussion focused on how SDS could give leadership during the nightly battles between police and demonstrators in the Lincoln Park area of the near north side. It was an aimless discussion (I doubt that most people in that room did any of the fighting), but it portended the ultra-militant direction that SDS would soon take.

Events in Chicago — the “street fighting,” the police rampage at the convention, and the Democratic delegates’ refusal to disown the Vietnam war — sealed a consensus in national SDS. They seemed to prove the bankruptcy of electoral politics as a way to bring real change. Whether Hubert Humphrey or Richard Nixon won the presidency (George Wallace was hardly a threat to win) mattered little. (That’s the way I felt about it. My mother wrote me a cogent letter giving reasons why she felt Humphrey would be better, but they fell on deaf ears. It would have turned my stomach to vote for Humphrey.) That fall, the SDS National Council meeting urged ever more militant street actions. The meeting was at the University of Colorado, and the proposal was entitled “Boulder and Boulder.”

SDS in its new posture tried to react creatively to the shock that Chicago’s police violence had produced among anti-war young people around the country. SDS’s idea was that these people were looking for a channel for their alienation and despair, and were ready to join a movement that promised action. But that was tricky. Throughout the sixties, campus activism had tended to ebb during the autumn of election years. The one real exception had been the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the fall of 1964. Our experience in Madison during the Nixon-Humphrey-Wallace campaign seemed to show that the overall pattern hadn’t really changed.

At first, our SDS chapter swelled dramatically. Activists from the off-campus Wisconsin Draft Resistance Union who’d stayed in Madison decided that the campus was the place to organize, and they brought new energy into the chapter. They organized an introductory meeting, just after the Democratic convention, that drew some 800 people.[17] The new leaders floated a two-part plan for election-night: first a protest march to the state capitol and back, then the seizure of a campus building (on the Columbia model) to protest recruitment by the ubiquitous Dow Chemical Company. It was a daring gamble with the campus mood. Usually on Election Night people wait passively for the returns. How many would decide to raise the ante of student protest on that very night was an open question.

Part of the strategy for the building seizure was to work up to it by a series of votes at progressively larger meetings, to be climaxed by a mass meeting on Election Night. The proposal won support at the first two meetings — attended by about fifty and four hundred respectively — but the thousand or more who met in the Memorial Union on Election Night voted no overwhelmingly. I felt relief. I had chaired the first two meetings, so hadn’t had to take a stand; my wishy-washiness, in fact, was part of what made me an effective chair. This time I voted yes out of loyalty to the earlier votes, but I was glad to go home. There, I listened to the returns on the radio, regretting Nixon’s win but not feeling it would make a big difference.

The Election Night fizzle showed two things. First, the student left was unable to shake the spectatorship that marks every presidential election. In fact, despite the “Boulder and Boulder” SDS resolution, I don’t think that big student protests happened anywhere that fall. Second, our organizations were fragile. In the wake of the mass meetings, Madison SDS subsided into routine meetings with a shrinking attendance. Before long, the only stable activity carried out in the name of SDS was a twice-weekly “literature table” in the basement of the student union building. There we sold pamphlets (from national SDS, from our own chapter, and from the Radical Education Project in Ann Arbor) as well as periodicals like The Guardian and Monthly Review. They sold like hotcakes. But we could never stir the kinds of loud arguments in front of our table that the Young Socialist Alliance and a Palestinian student group attracted in front of theirs.

After the summer of 1968, SDS spoke to only parts of what was becoming mass discontent on American campuses. Nationally and locally, SDS offered actions that were purely political and that increasingly used militancy as the yardstick to measure effectiveness. But the strains of discontent were much more varied. There were two overriding themes to the campus radicalization of the late sixties. One was a political moralism: idealistic students moved to the left as they kept discovering fresh outrages about American society. The other theme was something that can be broadly called cultural alienation — a growing distaste for what many considered the boring, conformist life prospects facing even middle-class young people. A generation that had grown up amid prosperity took it for granted, saw no pleasure in working hard to get where their parents had already been. The political moralism and the cultural alienation often fed each other: if America seemed morally bankrupt because of war and racism, there was no point in trying to “succeed” in the normal terms of American society. In any case, the malaise was broad enough that it could not easily be harnessed to anyone’s specific political program.

One person who realized that was Paul Buhle, and I have to single him out as a hero during this period. He was putting out Radical America virtually alone, and he used the magazine to explore a host of possibilities opened up by the movement. Among the themes treated extensively in RA at the end of the sixties were black history and culture (including writings by the great Afro- Caribbean intellectual C. L. R. James), youth culture (including a special underground-comic issue edited by Gilbert Shelton), working-class history, women’s liberation, French “new working class” theories, present-day poetry of rebellion, and I don’t remember what else. Paul had dropped out of direct involvement in SDS by then, but RA carried the subtitle “An SDS Journal of American Radicalism.”

Despite this backdrop, my own RA articles on the history of the New Left were narrowly focused on political organizations. I was mesmerized above all by the growing size of the movement, and I took demonstrations as a convenient measuring rod. I thought I saw a trajectory by which “the system” was becoming more and more openly reactionary and “the movement” would continue to grow in opposition. With embarrassment I remember a conversation I had in mid-winter of 1968–69 with Jeff Shero, a Texan who had once been vice president of national SDS and now was editor of an underground newspaper, The Rat, in New York. We sat in his office and idly talked about the state of strategic thinking within the radical student movement. I remember a fragment of the conversation:

Shero: To begin with, it seems to me that revolution in this country is going to be a slow process.

Me: That’s for sure.

Shero: I’m talking about maybe twenty-five years.

Me: That sounds about right.

In seeing this trajectory, I drew the wrong lessons from the 1968 elections, and in particular Nixon’s victory. Mainstream American politics proved far more flexible than I could ever have imagined. First, as the Democrats went into opposition, the party’s complexion changed to incorporate the anti-war impulses far more than it had when LBJ ran the White House. Second, the reform impulses of the sixties proved to have a momentum of their own. Despite Nixon’s “southern strategy” of appealing to white racism, civil rights actually advanced under his presidency through affirmative action, mandated by new laws, by court decisions, and by administrative rulings as well. Both environmentalism and the new women’s liberation movement reached their most explosive growth in the early Nixon years, and he rolled with the punches — proclaiming the 1970s the “environmental decade” and endorsing the proposed Equal Rights Amendment.

The Escalation of Protest

I spent most of the winter and spring of 1968–69 on research trips, with only scattered intervals in Madison. As I got more deeply into my research on the New Left’s origins, I became more and more beguiled by the most obvious difference between the early and late sixties: the scale of discontent and the scale of protest. The spring semester saw major confrontations at San Francisco State, Harvard, Cornell, Madison, Berkeley, and scores of other campuses as well. I remember reading an issue of the New York Times that spring and suddenly thinking, “This issue has more news about the student movement than a whole year’s worth of issues in the early sixties.” I saw two of the biggest protests first-hand. Looking back, they show the volatility of the late-sixties American campus, but they also show the limited duration of most of the bursts of radical energy.

Militancy came to the University of Wisconsin campus in February 1968, in a student strike called by a small number of black and white activists on behalf of the growing black minority on campus. Of the fourteen demands, the central one called for the creation of a full-scale Black Studies program. The strike took the campus by surprise[18] but quickly snowballed. The organizers first leafleted on a Friday morning. By Tuesday (with support from the student government as well as every left-of-center group) it seemed to have pulled a majority of liberal arts students out of their classes. The governor added to the drama by calling out the National Guard. The strike remained strong for days.

The Black Studies strike (that’s how I remember it, though the demands were more varied) had the best tactical leadership I’ve ever seen. Entrances to buildings were obstructed, but never all the entrances. Black activists led groups of demonstrators, not just in chants, but in songs, including “America the Beautiful.” At times we blocked traffic on the major drive going through the campus. (That felt good — one of the nicest feelings I ever had in the sixties student movement was of walking in the middle of that road and realizing that I didn’t have to watch out for traffic.) On Thursday night we marched to the state capitol; the Madison papers said there were ten thousand of us and that sounded right to me. It was exhilarating. Tom Hayden was in town that night. I remember him telling me that the National Guard was the “last trump card” of the ruling class.

Perhaps everything that goes up must come down. The morning after the big march, I drove past campus and was thunderstruck to see how many students were walking along on their way to classes. The strike ended early the following week, and the denouement was discouraging. Organizers tried to raise money to pay legal costs for the forty-odd students arrested during the strike. A dollar from everyone who’d taken part in the big Thursday night march was all they needed, but almost nothing came in. Finally, Pete Seeger saved the day by donating his talents for a special fundraising concert. Still, the strike proved a good investment of time in the long run — black students won new respect on the Madison campus and some of their demands were granted in watered-down form.

I also saw the “People’s Park” struggle in Berkeley. I spent the month of May doing research in the Bay Area, staying with friends in San Francisco. One of the first things I heard about in Berkeley was a vacant lot which the University of California owned and wanted to develop. But off-campus activists, claiming it in the name of “the people,” had now turned it into an unsupervised outdoor community center. When I visited the park, a block off Telegraph Avenue, it was filled with young people inoffensively having a good time. It reminded me of New York’s Central Park on a Sunday, without the mixture of ages. The University administration stewed while student organizations (including traditionally conservative ones) rallied to the defense of the park. It became an issue of generational solidarity.

One Wednesday in mid-May I spent all day at the University library reading through back issues of the student Daily Californian. As it happened, my research that day covered the last great eruption on the Berkeley campus, the Free Speech Movement of 1964. At the end of the day I wandered through People’s Park and thought about the past and present. A dozen or so people were holding a desultory meeting, pondering what could be done if the University took action to reclaim the park. Nobody seemed to know. The next day I drove in late from San Francisco and I found sheer chaos. Police cars were careening up and down Telegraph Avenue spewing tear gas while long-haired teenagers (I think) threw rocks at them and at store windows. Early that morning, I learned, the University had fenced the park. Thousands of students rallied in protest and marched to the site, only to be driven back by police. Police and highway patrolmen had fired guns, wounding one bystander, James Rector, so seriously that he died a week later. That night, Governor Ronald Reagan would send in the National Guard and vow to restore order to Berkeley at any cost.

At the edge of the campus itself, spectators watched the Telegraph Avenue scene from a distance. Now and again a rain of tear gas drove the crowds farther back into the campus. Here I ran into a friend from Madison SDS, Bill Sokol, now a first-year graduate student in history at Berkeley. He was shaken, not so much by the police as by the other members of his graduate seminar. He said they seemed to have no human feelings but were reacting like detached cultural critics. Sure enough, we ran into one of them, who shook his head and said something like “This is confusing. There should be more of a separation between life and art.” But not everyone on campus felt so distant. In the aftermath, thousands of students joined repeated protest marches into downtown Berkeley, one of which resulted in over four hundred arrests. The death of James Rector kept indignation at a high level. So did the itchy fingers the police kept on their tear gas canisters.

On Memorial Day, a rally drew tens of thousands of students from around the state. I had returned to Madison by then, so I missed it. At a smaller rally a few days earlier, I heard Art Goldberg, once a leader of the Free Speech Movement, warn against letting the protest subside after the big rally. “Don’t sit around saying, `Wasn’t Friday groovy.’“ Afterward the movement did subside, just as the Black Studies strike in Madison had after the massive Thursday night march.

The Breakup of SDS

One lesson my New Left seemed to show was that self-appointed leaders had never been able to predict or control the impulses of radicalization in the sixties. And what I had seen at my two SDS conventions made me look at SDS fondly but with great skepticism. Still, I was a member, and my travels put me in contact with some of the actors in national SDS, who were heading for a collision with one another.

First two, then three factions struggled for control of national SDS. At first the fight was between PL and its New Left opponents, who won momentary advantage over PL by passing a call for a “Revolutionary Youth Movement” at the mid-winter SDS national council meeting in Ann Arbor. Mike Klonsky called it “the road to the working class.” But as it came time for specifics, the road reached a fork. One faction, including Klonsky, wanted SDS to call for reforms in the schools — although usually in such extreme form that they could never be granted. Somebody put forward the slogan of “Open ‘em up [that is, support open admissions to universities for minority and working-class students] and shut ‘em down [that is, close the same universities as tools of imperialism].”

Other SDS leaders, including Bernardine Dohrn, eschewed reforms of any sort and sought the pure solidarity of whites with third-world revolutionaries. For the summer SDS convention they prepared a proposal called the “Weatherman document,” after a Bob Dylan lyric: “You don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.” They argued that blacks could make a revolution by themselves if need be, and that white radicals were worthless unless they got on the bandwagon of solidarity with the blacks.

For both of the New Left factions, though, the main enemy wasn’t each other but Progressive Labor. PL’s leaders responded to the new campus militancy by raising an ideological drawbridge. They decreed a sharp struggle against “nationalism” among blacks or other minorities, on the grounds that only a united working class could overthrow capitalism. This change in policy isolated PL from the struggles that so many black students were waging for a recognition of their special history and culture. PL leaders’ Marxist-Leninist purity also led them to scorn the Vietnamese Communists for negotiating with the US government, as they had been doing since 1968. “We struggle, struggle, struggle and then those guys let us down,” a PL leader was quoted as saying when negotiations began.

Still, PL was winning. There was no contest between the makeshift revolutionism of the New Left factions and Progressive Labor’s sober discipline. By the time of the spring 1969 National Council meeting at the University of Kentucky, PL’s Worker-Student Alliance Caucus was on its way to a voting majority in SDS. A PL resolution against drugs, aimed at distancing SDS from youth culture, passed handily. The showdown would come at the national convention, to be held in June in Chicago.

Everywhere I went — Berkeley, San Francisco, Stanford, Rochester, Boston, New York, Ann Arbor, Chicago, and of course Madison — I found clusters of people who shivered at the goings-on in national SDS, many of them offering less frenetic alternatives. But none of the clusters had the same ideas. In a normal situation this would have been healthy. It showed the kind of experimentation that could take place in a creative, democratic, loosely organized social movement. Yet the leadership somehow assumed that the campus base was waiting for a clear national strategy — a “line” — which it would then duly implement. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

It was a chilling experience to enter the Chicago convention in June 1969. We met in the ancient, dark Chicago Coliseum in a rundown area south of downtown. On the sidewalk outside (and from windows across the street) policemen snapped photographs. Inside, we were patted by SDS “security” people in a pretentious search for weapons. The cavernous meeting room just fitted the vast number of delegates and other members, who reportedly added up to about fifteen hundred people. Rumors floated as to whether PL had a majority of actual voting delegates. Nobody I talked to seemed to know.

The content of the political debate is profoundly blurred in my mind. What I remember is frenzied chanting: the New Left factions’ “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF [National Liberation Front] is gonna win!” countered by PL’s “Power to the workers!” and “Mao, Mao, Mao Tse Tung!” Both sides claimed Mao, and on both sides people waved copies of his “little red book” of quotations. A speaker from the Black Panther Party, brought in by the New Left leaders to bolster their cause, said at one point, “You want to know who’s the vanguard in this country? Just pick up your telephone and call Chairman Mao Tse Tung and ask him who’s the vanguard in this country. He’ll tell you it’s the Black Panther Party.” The other chant commonly heard at the convention, one that needs no special political explanation, was “Bullshit!”

Unhappily, the Panthers provided the closest thing to a moment of unity. Two of their lesser Chicago operatives were hissed off the stage for crudely sexist remarks. (The one I remember was, “What I’m saying is, if any of you ladies, your boyfriend isn’t giving you satisfaction, I’m the guy to see”). A higher-up Panther smoothed over the situation, but it seemed to be a moment when honest outrage overcame factional calculations. The very fact that those men had been given the stage showed how frantically the SDS leaders were improvising. In effect, in trying to save the organization, they were destroying it.

For the most part, women’s issues surfaced at the convention simply as weapons in the factional intrigue. At a panel discussion, the New Left representatives spoke earnestly of combating “male supremacy” and the PL speaker talked of combating “male chauvinism.” But it didn’t matter. An independent feminist movement was already being created outside of SDS. Most women at the convention seemed to belong to one or another faction defined along lines other than women’s issues. Because the most committed feminists had already voted with their feet, they were not part of the final fracturing of SDS.

I missed the climactic moment of the split in the convention. I came back from eating dinner with my college friend John McAuliff, who had returned from the Peace Corps and had helped organize the Committee of Returned Volunteers, an assiduous and important part of the anti-war movement. We came back to a half-empty hall. We learned that the Panthers and two small Hispanic groups, the Brown Berets and the Young Lords, had been given the stage to demand that SDS expel Progressive Labor. Bernadine Dohrn had then proclaimed that “The people of the third world have spoken” (or something like that) and announced that the SDS convention would be reconvened in a large empty room off to the side, minus the PL delegates. She then led hundreds of delegates out of the hall. My own loyalties were fairly clear: in however skewed a fashion, the New Left tendencies in SDS seemed to be heirs to the creative instincts of the New Left itself. I went off to the side room.

Two speeches come back to me from the rump meeting. One was by Jackie DiSalvo, a grad student from Madison whose politics mingled anarchism with Leninism. She was the best speaker I ever knew in the student movement. Now she was angry that the New Left factions seemed to be writing off the traditional working class, which was her background. She spoke eloquently about her father and his lifetime of low-wage jobs. She paused and said in a rising voice, “I’m saying that if he sold out, he sold out damn cheap.” It was a touch of reality that drew a burst of emotional applause. Unfortunately, it was irrelevant to the dominant mood there. Of the other speech, I only remember a fragment. Jeff Jones, a New York SDS organizer who’d gone to Antioch College, said, “This is the most important meeting in this country in the last [I remember “thirty” but some people remember him saying “two hundred”] years.” That says it all. It was the quintessential, grotesquely exaggerated statement of the New Left belief that we were making history.

TWO VIEWS OF THE NEW LEFT: THEN AND NOW

For SDS as an organization, the denouement of its 1969 convention is quickly told. The delegates who’d stayed in the main hall elected a slate of national officers loyal to the PL program and prepared to set up their own national office in Boston, the PL stronghold within the student movement. The breakaway convention carried over an extra day and elected a slate of candidates from the “Weathermen” faction. The other major New Left faction, under the name Revolutionary Youth Movement-II, prepared to go into opposition within what most people assumed would be a framework of business as usual (minus Progressive Labor) in SDS. All three groups offered leadership to the burgeoning protest movement on American campuses, an offer that was never to be accepted.

The “Weathermen” took their election as a catapult into the unknown. Ignoring the traditional coordinating role of the national office, they forged themselves into a cult of a few hundred seeking to catalyze a revolution by sheer boldness of example. They tried to show their toughness by provoking fights in working-class neighborhoods, whether running through high-school corridors yelling “Jailbreak” or parading National Liberation Front flags on beaches. After a few months they abandoned the SDS national office altogether and became the “Weather Underground.”[19]

The opposition Revolutionary Youth Movement-II faction held together for only a few months before splitting apart into small sub-factions that sought to form classical Leninist parties. The main groups were the Revolutionary Union, later the Revolutionary Communist Party, then and now led by Bob Avakian; and the October League, which became the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) and then dissolved.

The Progressive Labor version of SDS kept the trappings of a national student organization, with officers and conventions, but had nothing relevant to say to the student movement. Their program was to take the “Worker-Student Alliance” one step further and seek an alliance between students and campus workers. It was an arranged marriage sought by neither partner. My own experience with it came one day in Madison when I was given a leaflet by a friend who belonged to the tiny local Worker-Student Alliance Caucus. It announced a rally to support parking benefits for campus workers. According to the leaflet, the rally should have started a half-hour earlier on the very site where we were standing by ourselves talking.

A couple dozen Madison people had come to Chicago for part or all of the convention. Most of us were shocked. Back in Madison, we called a special SDS meeting to consider the situation. Adam Schesch, a sociology grad student who’d never been in SDS but had prestige as a Vietnam expert, offered a motion refusing to recognize either national SDS office. At one point, for the benefit of those who hadn’t gone to Chicago, people began chanting different slogans from the convention. It was a graphic way to convey the atmosphere. About a hundred people were at the meeting, and they voted two-to-one in favor of the motion. (I say “they” because I was chairing the meeting and didn’t vote; I would have voted “no” on the mistaken theory that the Chicago office might not be totally hopeless.)

I was away doing research for most of that summer. But I have warm memories of the time I did spend in Madison. In the off-campus area where I stayed, there was a lingering sense of community from the riots that had taken place on Mifflin Street in early May, when police broke up a block party. People were proud to have stood up to the police, and proud that the head of the local firefighters union had given them a moral victory by hosting a party for them in his backyard. Youth culture was alive and well. The Mifflin Street Food Co-op functioned as an informal center of community life, and a new underground newspaper, Kaleidoscope, had emerged to replace the now-defunct Connections. Student film societies were starting to show classic movies for fifty cents a throw; I went to see the Errol Flynn Robin Hood and wrote a whimsical review for Kaleidoscope attacking the “Robin Hood–Little John–Will Scarlet clique” for failing to build “an outlaw-serf alliance.”

My own activism in SDS ended when I began writing my dissertation at the start of the fall semester. I chaired a two-day series of strategy meetings in September, then pulled out. It wasn’t a matter of disagreeing politically with the local chapter, but of feeling older. I was tired of trying to make history. I wanted to concentrate on writing it.

Looking at History from Up Close

By the fall of 1969 I thought I had a carefully-arrived-at view of the New Left. I could see that it had spread chiefly by example, fueled by political moralism and cultural alienation. I could see that national organizations had never exerted control over it.

That perspective helped me in writing my dissertation on origins of the New Left, completed in 1971. Rather than focusing on national groups like SDS, I constructed a synthesized chronology of what had happened on the most active campuses. However long and boring, the dissertation was is a sensible account of the student movement of the early sixties that gave birth to the New Left. But the other linchpin of my thinking on the New Left was less helpful: I thought it was still in its infancy. I thought I saw a generalized young people’s revolt that was spreading and would keep spreading. In writing a history of the New Left’s origins from 1960 to 1965, I thought I was describing the birth of a social movement that had a long and tumultuous future ahead of it.

Both elements of my thinking seemed to be confirmed by events during the time I spent writing the dissertation. The absence of national leadership didn’t seem to slow down the momentum of revolt. In Madison, the spring of 1970 was the peak of disruption on campus: first in a teaching assistants’ strike that effectively closed much of the liberal arts college for part of April, then a massive reaction to the invasion of Cambodia at the end of that month. For almost a week, nightly marches of five or six thousand people expressed unbridled fury at the war. The marchers seemed to me a cross-section of the campus, including fraternity and sorority members. Despite efforts to start more genteel and more political chants, the only one that ever caught on was “One, two, three, four, We don’t want your fucking war.” Many windows were broken on businesses in the campus area. Late one night, someone set fire to the biggest supermarket near the campus and it burned to the ground.

Even the ebb and flow of militancy seemed not to change the overall picture. After a bomb wrecked the campus building that housed the Army Math Research Center (and killed a physics researcher working very late hours in the building), the 1970–71 school year went much more quietly. But memory and research seemed to tell me that ebbs and flows were part of the big picture — the long-term growth of the movement.

At the same time, activists were attempting to create alternative, cooperative institutions. There were two food co-ops with storefronts, a bicycle co-op, a proliferation of film societies, and I don’t remember what else. People were seeking to create new, more cooperative ways of getting society’s work done. (The limitations of these new ways weren’t nearly as clear to me then as they were to become during eight years of working in a cooperative printshop in the 1970s.) In a history of the New Left that I wrote in 1970 for the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science I ended hopefully by talking about this kind of development and concluding: “A revolution of the classical Marxist-Leninist model has never occurred in an advanced capitalist society, and it may well be that a Socialist revolution in this country will be simply an extension of the student movement that began in 1960.”

The fate of national SDS, in other words, seemed unimportant, either as a blow to the student movement or as a portent of the movement’s future. As I saw it, we were in the midst of a social revolution that would survive its vanguards.

Keeping the Faith

My own trajectory during much of the 1970s reflected this belief in the continued vitality of “the movement.” My vantage point for the whole decade was my work in a cooperative workplace called the New England Free Press, in Boston. The Free Press was a printshop and also published over 200 pamphlets that were distributed across the country. Its apex, I have to admit, was at about the time I arrived. In our varied catalog, a number of the women’s liberation pamphlets sold in the tens of thousands of copies. The biggest seller was Our Bodies, Ourselves, published first by the Free Press and later by Simon & Schuster. Our prices were astonishingly low — usually 10 cents for a sixteen-page pamphlet. In our last printing of Our Bodies, Ourselves, before the authors turned it over to a commercial publisher in 1973, we priced the book at 30 cents.

Aside from the women’s pamphlets, we had sections on Vietnam and on American imperialism, on education, on the working class, on China, on the economy, on “movement history and perspectives,” and so on. We prided ourselves on a nonsectarian policy of offering a variety of left-wing and/or feminist points of view. For the most part, our pamphlets excelled at saying what was wrong with the status quo — “consciousness raising,” as the women’s movement called it. But as the decade wore on, consciousness-raising became less important than figuring out what to do — something for which “the movement” had a multiplicity of answers, none of them entirely convincing. Even though we gradually sharpened our printing and design skills, and produced better-looking pamphlets, the Free Press became less relevant politically. We sold fewer pamphlets, and more of them went to college classes (required reading) rather than to curious individuals or to political groups that could use the pamphlets for outreach.

The structure of the Free Press also became an anachronism over the decade. Our ultra-democratic philosophy played down the importance of expertise. We bent over backwards to avoid a too-rigid division of labor. We rotated among such disparate jobs as running a press, photography, running the folding machine, filling pamphlet orders, and scheduling. In the name of making printing skills available to more people, we also declined to put a premium on past experience in hiring people. The inevitable result was inefficiency, which (together with our low prices) meant low pay and high turnover of staff.[20] The one respect in which we successfully applied our politics to the running of the enterprise was our policy that at least half the staff members had to be women. That didn’t hurt our printing skills in the slightest and it made us better-attuned to the range of political issues in the present-day United States.

I wrote articles for Radical America on the recent history of the Left, and I also did some writing on American history, a blend of dabbling and an earnest quest for the big picture. My most engrossing project was a comic-book history of the US with Nick Thorkelson, a gifted cartoonist whom I’d met while writing for an underground newspaper in Madison. Starting in the spring of 1972, we worked on our “Underhanded History of the USA” for two years. In 1973, it appeared in black-and-white as a special issue of Radical America. The next year, the New England Free Press published it in color. About 21,000 copies were distributed altogether, which makes it the closest I’ve come to writing for a wide audience. In the comic, a stuffy conservative lecturer mouths various cliches about American history which other characters then rebut. The comic ends on a note of populist chaos, with a mob (meant to look like a cross-section of everyone who is oppressed) chasing the professor. At the end of the decade, when we went to revise the book for a new printing, it was the last section that gave us the most trouble. It could no longer climax in the 1960s, but we didn’t have a new climax. We abandoned the project.

The recession of 1974–75, and the relative passivity of American workers in the face of it, helped undercut the idea that many of us had started the decade with — that the radical impulses of the student movement would spread gradually through the society. Instead, the forces of capital turned out to be far stronger than those of labor, and the economic contraction made the disparity even worse. It was a sobering time. In the arena of national politics, the early 1970s had seen great advances in environmental protection, in women’s equality, in affirmative action against race discrimination, and in restrictions on presidential authority to make war. But the late ‘70s were a time of political stalemate, broken with the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980.

I left the New England Free Press in 1980, returning briefly to help close it down a year later. I still wrote for Radical America for a few years, but left in 1984. Starting in 1983 I became active in a large, locally based group working against the Reagan Administration’s policies in Central America, especially the contra war in Nicaragua. It took up great amounts of my time over several years, but the feel was very different from the late ‘60s. I was happy to be focused on one fairly simple issue rather than trying to change the society as a whole.

Looking Back at the New Left

As I try to make sense of the New Left from a perspective of later years, it looks different to me. I don’t mean that I necessarily make different moral judgments about it. The things that seemed pompous or excessive or funny to me at the time still seem that way. The desperation from which they sprang still seems valid given the conditions of the time; in fact, if I have one regret about my own participation in the movement it’s that I wasn’t angry enough, especially at the Vietnam war. Still, the movement looks different to me now. That’s likely to happen with anything in the past. As it recedes, it seems to shrink in size and you can see more of its surroundings.

The starting point for my assessment of the New Left today is that it was part of the ferment of the 1960s, a ferment which helped bring healthy reforms to a society which we thought was beyond reform. The anti-war movement, which we were a part of, helped erect a barrier to future adventures like the Vietnam war. Ronald Reagan, in fact, for all his cruelty in Central America and all the money he spent on military hardware, treaded very softly when it came to sending American troops overseas. The draft is gone. Likewise, for all the persistence of American racism, the position of black people in the US is far different than it was in the early sixties; idealistic white young people were important auxiliaries to the blacks who fought for their rights in that era.

The position of women in society is different now than it was two decades ago.[21] It is worse in some ways — chiefly because declining real wages have sent millions of married women into the marketplace without drastically reducing their “duties” at home. But the rise of two-income families is something that would have happened anyway; we can only speculate what society would be like if it had happened without (a) the opening of many better-paying traditionally male jobs to women, (b) the legal right of women to control their reproduction, and (c) at least the expectation that men would take a share of childraising and housework. American society today pays lip service to the idea that women are full human beings, in a way that it did not twenty years ago. On the whole, I consider America a much better, much more inclusive society than the one I grew up in.

Still, the movement looks different to me now. That’s likely to happen with anything in the past. As it recedes, it seems to shrink in size and you can see more of its surroundings. I now see the New Left as an episode in the growth of a much larger and longer-term social phenomenon, something which I call bureaucratic individualism. Obviously that label doesn’t mean anything by itself, but I’d like to try to make sense of it by relating it to some of the things I saw and experienced during the sixties.

I think back, first of all, to an argument I had with Casey Jarchow, the dean of men at Carleton College, when I was a dormitory proctor (and a student activist) my senior year. The proctors were senior men who enforced rules on their dormitory floors and who, as a body, had the power to suspend students from school on the dean’s recommendation. At our first meeting of the year, Dean Jarchow told us that a student had written a bad check to a Northfield store. He said we had to impose at least a mild punishment: local merchants expected the college to guard the collective reputation of its students. I argued that the college itself had no rule against writing bad checks in town — that if the Northfield authorities wanted to act, that was their business, not ours. I said we could only step in when somebody violated specific rules of the college.

As it happened, nobody agreed with me, and I don’t think I agree with me, looking back. But my argument was part of the changing times at our small liberal arts college. The Latin term for this controversy was in loco parentis, “in place of the parent.” This was a term I heard a lot at the National Student Association convention I went to in 1962. NSA denied that colleges and universities had the right to act in loco parentis. Students were to be treated as citizens capable of making their own decisions and regulating their own lives. Nobody at that time was thinking of radical measures such as co-ed dormitories, but the principle would soon lead there. NSA thought that a college should have only limited powers to regulate students’ lives outside the classroom — should not be able to act for the students’ “own good” or to reassure anxious parents.

During the late sixties, when most campus protests were directed against symbols of the Vietnam war and American racism, the most far-reaching change that actually occurred on campus was the wholesale abandonment of in loco parentis. Even academic requirements were loosened at many schools, giving students a wider choice of courses from the start. The universities narrowed their role: they provided a range of courses but took no overall responsibility for the upbringing of the post-adolescents who came to their doors.

Given the expansion of higher education in the sixties, it may have been an inevitable trend. But it was immeasurably hastened by the student revolt. Students were just “too hard to handle” in the context of the sixties. Moreover, these kinds of demands were the easiest to grant. In the spring of 1968 I went to a trustees’ meeting at the University of Wisconsin. Two student-government requests were on the table: one to liberalize the rules that prevented some undergraduates from living in off-campus apartments; the other to divest University stock from companies doing business in South Africa. The trustees readily granted the first and just as readily denied the second.

The student movement and the New Left reflected a larger trend in society, encapsulated by a catch phrase that was common around 1967, “Do your own thing.” The ideal was of a society in which autonomous individuals do what they wish, without interference from others. It was an attitude that went well beyond the ranks of the movement and the counterculture. It powerfully reinforced the reluctance of middle-class young men to go into the armed forces, and swelled the ranks of those who evaded the draft by whatever means was available to them. (Draft resistance was a far more political and risky option, and only a small number of people really took it.) In the new atmosphere, a whole range of restrictions on individual behavior suddenly became suspect.

Many aspects of the “youth culture” of the sixties — including long hair and what was previously considered strange dress — had to do with trying to assert individualism. (I said trying to assert: if you see a dozen people together, all looking “different” in more or less the same way, that’s ... well, you fill in the rest.) At first, shaggy hair and beards were a badge of rebellion; fairly rapidly, they became just another style. Even so, they represented a breakdown of what might be called “intermediate authority”: the power of communities (or of families) to dictate how individuals would present themselves to the society around them. The college campus offered one of the primary battlegrounds in this struggle, and it was one where the conditions were most favorable to the forces of change.

Thus, we in the New Left were part of a social trend that was much bigger than we were. But that’s not how we saw it. We saw ourselves as being in the vanguard of a social transformation that we saw primarily in political terms. We saw ourselves, along with black militants and third-world revolutionaries, as part of a challenge to the top-down control which American corporations and the American government exercised over the lives of people around the world. Along with that challenge, we saw ourselves as offering more democratic forms of social organization. Even in the late sixties there were echoes of the idealistic promises made in SDS’s Port Huron Statement of 1962, about building genuine community among people. But I think it’s clear that we failed. The organization I was closest to, SDS, drew people for a time but could never keep more than a few. For one thing, only at times of crisis were meetings interesting — people had other things to occupy their time. In general, the life-span of cooperative institutions around Madison was short: either they became dependent on the heroic work of a few people, or they evolved into something akin to normal small businesses with paid labor, or they disintegrated. This was true nationally, and it wasn’t limited to “politicos.” Many cooperatives have survived, and even thrived, but they have had to adjust to capitalism even as they have sought to challenge it.

So traditional forms of social control were being eroded at the same time that efforts to form new types of community were failing. The ironic result, I think, was twofold: to strengthen immeasurably the forces of individualism in society, and to strengthen the power of large impersonal bureaucracies. The epitome of social relations in the present era may be, in fact, the lawsuit. It is the assertion of individual rights within a maze of formal legal rules. The judicial system constitutes an agreed-upon bureaucratic means for resolving the dispute. At times it may be stunningly effective in making companies accountable, but it also symbolizes a loss of faith in more collective ways of resolving social issues. It symbolizes what I mean by bureaucratic individualism.

In the sixties, all sorts of things seemed possible — not just to a radical fringe, but to people at the top of society as well. Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs and his “war on poverty” held out a goal of equality and social justice that today seems awesome in its ambition. The sending of troops to Vietnam (a half-million at the peak) likewise bespoke a supreme confidence in the ability of the United States to shape history. In reaching far beyond our grasp, the student radicals were not alone.

A final note: I used the term “bureaucratic individualism,” but have said much more about individualism than about bureaucracy. In fact, I don’t so much mean “bureaucracy” in the sense of the cold, gray, unresponsive institution that Republicans love in the private sector while hating in the public. I mean it as a way of characterizing a society in which individuals occupy impersonal niches that are detached from membership in genuine communities. (I think of something my alderman said before voting to abolish rent control in Somerville, Massachusetts, where I live. To the argument that higher rents would drive a lot of low- and moderate-income tenants out of the city he said, “Well, it’s a good location. Somebody’s going to live here.” Now he’s the mayor.) Outside of the family at least, our rights and responsibilities are codified and computerized — which is not necessarily a bad thing but it is only an incidental part of what the New Left thought it was trying to do. Karl Marx once said something like this: that people make history, but they do it under circumstances that are not of their choosing.

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[1]. Carleton was one of the predominantly white schools that were most affected by the left-of-center activism of the early 1960s. The most important were probably Berkeley, Michigan, Cornell, and Swarthmore. Others, besides Carleton, included Oberlin, Harvard, Yale, Antioch, Johns Hopkins, Haverford, City College of New York, and the Universities of Wisconsin, Chicago, Minnesota, and Texas. Other schools could easily be added. An important common denominator was that “the movement” attracted almost exclusively liberal arts students.

[2]. The Vietnam war is a good example — the civilian anti-war movement was overwhelmingly middle-class, even while opinion polls showed that blacks and working-class whites were most strongly opposed to the war.

[3]. The leadership wanted to condemn all nuclear testing in the atmosphere, while conservatives plus a few liberals such as Barney Frank of Harvard wanted to condemn Soviet testing but deplore the “need” for American testing. I was elated when the leadership’s position won. Nothing is ever simple, though. The NSA’s international operations, it later turned out, were being coordinated with the CIA. Looking back, it’s obvious that the NSA leadership needed the more radical‑sounding resolution in order to keep the NSA’s credibility in international student politics. It was four years later that Ramparts magazine broke the CIA‑NSA connection. Like countless other things I’ve heard about American foreign policy over the years, it made sense when it came out but I never would have guessed it on my own.

[4]. Quoted in Massimo Teodori, ed., The New Left: A Documentary History (Indianapolis: Bobbs‑Merrill, 1969), p. 156. Mario Savio was the only person who refused to be interviewed for my dissertation on the origins of the New Left. On a research trip to the Bay Area in 1969 I went to the off‑campus bookstore where he worked and asked if I could interview him. He politely said no and added something like this: “That was in the past. I’d be glad to talk with you about the work I’m doing on the Middle East, but I don’t want to be a historical character talking about what happened back then.”

[5]. Minorities within the US were considered to be part of the Third World in this viewpoint. The year 1966 was the year when Black Power arose as a slogan within the civil rights movement, promulgated especially by angry young black militants within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It accentuated the estrangement of black militants from the society, and it helped radicalize the white New Left. Black Power constituted an indictment of the whole society. (Of course, it also had its far more accommodationist aspects — it could be used by any group of black people who wanted to use it to give themselves a share of power.)

[6]. This was also the meeting where I heard one of my favorite political sputterings. Somebody had been criticized for giving some of the school’s mimeograph paper to leaders of a student sit‑in at New York University nearby. The critic said the sit‑ in was “reformist.” The man who was criticized said in a near‑ shout, “At least those people were off their asses and sitting‑in!”

[7]. At Carleton, the alienated students had been alienated mainly from what they considered the stifling midwestern small-town atmosphere of the college. In Madison, the alienation was more general. It was a revulsion at American society as a whole, symbolized by the war and the draft. To the extent that student anger later turned against the university itself, it was because the university was seen to reflect the shortcomings of the wider society.

[8]. This doesn’t mean that the new party fully embraced the tactics of the Dow protest. In fact it was funny to see conventional political wisdom at work. I attended an open meeting at which the party had to decide on a statement about the protest. The members voted to approve the most radical version — a fiery polemic by Jeff Herf, later a neo-conservative scholar, who said it was necessary to take a stand against evil, as represented by Dow. Later I asked a party leader what had become of the statement and he said, “We’re only showing it in certain districts, and only to people who seem sympathetic.”

[9]. For all our optimism, one conversation stands out for me especially clearly. It was with Marty Tandler, an intense fifth-year senior who’d been president of our SDS chapter the year before, acted now as a regional organizer in Wisconsin, and had been one of the forty-two signers of the “We Won’t Go” statement. The signers had gotten invitations to speak in a number of dormitories from students who were curious as to why anyone would take such a strong stand. He told me that after giving one of those talks he’d felt terrible — that it was easy enough to convince people that the war was bad, but he hadn’t been able to answer the question “What can we do?” Marty wasn’t satisfied with any of the fatalistic half-answers that satisfied me. Today he runs a small but lucrative company in New York City that imports textiles.

[10]. The saddest book I’ve read about the 1960s was Don McNeill’s Moving Through Here, all the sadder because it was a posthumous book — the author, a brilliant young writer for the Village Voice, drowned at age twenty-two. The book describes the futile efforts to restless, alienated young people to build a community on the Lower East Side. Their presence hastened social disintegration rather than alleviating it. The same thing happened in Haight-Ashbury.

[11]. Fairness demands that I mention an argument later in the week with an engineering student who claimed that he had lost a chance to interview with the Dow recruiters. We went back and forth on the issues for a while, then he finally asked, “Did you get hit on the head?” When I said yes he replied, “Well, it didn’t seem to do you much good.”

[12]. Milt Mankoff, a sociology grad student at the time, surveyed the people who signed the “complicity statement.” He divided the respondents into those who were new to activism and the “veterans” who had been involved for a while. The newcomers were more likely to be from Wisconsin rather than out of state, came from families with lower incomes, and in general were closer to being typical University of Wisconsin students.

[13]. I remember getting either a phone message or a telegram during the Columbia building occupation, addressed to our SDS chapter. It was from one of the occupied buildings, and whoever sent it said students everywhere should emulate the Columbia actions. “Two, three, many Columbias!” it said, alluding to Che Guevara’s bold slogan “Two, three, many Vietnams!” I did nothing with the message except report it to friends as a curiosity.

[14]. During several summers, PL recruited student radicals for “work-ins.” That meant getting blue-collar jobs, making a good impression on the workers, and raising political issues. In the summer of 1969 I saw a bulletin distributed by a statewide employers’ group in Wisconsin which warned against this kind of infiltration. The profile of the infiltrator as described by the bulletin was a little puzzling: employers were warned to be suspicious of young employees who were well-groomed, prompt, and scrupulous in their work habits.

[15]. “What to do.” J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI made this particular SDS convention famous by pointing out that it included a workshop on “Sabotage and Explosives.” Mike Klonsky, the SDS national secretary, replied that the workshop was scheduled in order to draw police infiltrators away from the regular meetings. I believe him. I happened to be on a committee responsible for scheduling workshops, and I remember that when this title came up a woman on the committee said, “I know why it’s there. We have to schedule it.” I typed that day’s schedule for posting and, out of whimsy, put “Ka‑boom” in parentheses after the name of that workshop.

[16]. Again, I can’t excuse myself. I didn’t take the convention very seriously but that included the women’s caucus. It really wasn’t till the 1970s, when I worked in a cooperative printshop that was mainly composed of women, that I came to feel really angry about society’s discrimination against women. I think I’m probably typical of a lot of men in the New Left in this delayed reaction to the women’s movement. It’s one thing to accept something intellectually, and another thing entirely to feel it.

[17]. As usual, rapid attrition quickly solved the too‑many‑people problem. The second meeting was almost as big as the first. We tried to deal with the numbers by electing a “Take Care of Business Committee” (“TCBC”) to make small decisions and refer bigger ones to the whole group. But there were so many nominees, and we were running so late, that we finally decided to declare all nominees elected. With membership in the committee thus devalued, the practice quickly evolved of giving everyone who came to its meetings (usually a few dozen) a vote. In effect, these meetings became the SDS meetings.

[18]. On Thursday evening I presided over an SDS chapter meeting of maybe thirty or forty people. Nobody said a word about black demands or the possibility of a strike. I first heard about it the next morning when I was given a leaflet by somebody who’d been at the meeting the night before.

[19]. One of the more sensible “Weatherpeople” tipped off the State Historical Society of Wisconsin that the office was being abandoned. I was part of an emergency expedition from the Society that arrived there before the Chicago police and rescued the archives for future researchers.

[20]. None of these problems were inherent in our being a “radical” printshop. Red Sun Press, another Boston-area printing cooperative which started out in the mid‑seventies, much smaller than the Free Press at the time, gradually built itself up by stressing expertise and experience and is still flourishing today without sacrificing its identity as part of “the movement.” Priscilla Long, a poet and amateur historian, played a very influential role in shaping Red Sun’s careful blend of radical politics and common‑sense organization. In contrast, I was usually on the side of ultra‑democracy in the Free Press’s internal discussions.

[21]. It’s tricky to talk about the New Left in relation to the women’s liberation movement. The youthful wing of the women’s movement grew in part from a revolt against women’s treatment within the civil rights movement and the New Left. But another way of looking at it is that the civil rights movement and New Left raised issues of equality and respect which enabled feminists within them to rebel.