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The New Left Wasn￢ﾀﾙt So View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Repository@Nottingham 7KH1HZ/HIW:DVQ·W6R1HZ &KULVWRSKHU3KHOSV 'LVVHQW9ROXPH1XPEHU)DOOSS $UWLFOH 3XEOLVKHGE\8QLYHUVLW\RI3HQQV\OYDQLD3UHVV '2,GVV )RUDGGLWLRQDOLQIRUPDWLRQDERXWWKLVDUWLFOH KWWSVPXVHMKXHGXDUWLFOH Access provided by University of Nottingham (10 May 2016 09:19 GMT) ARTICLES The New Left Wasn’t So New CHRISTOPHER PHELPS essential song of the sixties, that is only through the erasure of its origins in a much earlier left. The song first appeared as sheet Now so familiar as to risk seeming clichéd, music in 1947 in People’s Songs, a periodical “We Shall Overcome” was the paramount Pete Seeger founded after the demise of the song of the civil rights movement. “Deep in Almanac Singers that he and Woody Guthrie my heart, I do believe that we shall overcome had created to arouse anti-fascist spirits on the some day”: the song spoke to a generation’s eve of the Second World War. One of Seeger’s idealism, solidarity, and optimism in the tran- associates, Zilphia Horton, had set down the scendence of injustice. words and music as “We Will Overcome” It is now practically lost to memory that the in 1947 after she heard it sung by black song enjoyed an equal vitality within the early women in the Food and Tobacco Workers, a New Left. We Shall Overcome was the official Communist-led union out on strike against songbook title of the Student Nonviolent the American Tobacco Company. Those Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a group women, in turn, had adapted it from the old more important than the better-known gospel hymn “I’ll Overcome Someday.” Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in The song became a staple at rallies generating sixties New Left radicalism. When for Henry Wallace, whose independent Tom Hayden, at age eighteen, traveled south Progressive Party campaign in 1948 against from Michigan in 1961 to observe SNCC’s Harry Truman protested the Cold War and efforts to register black voters in Mississippi, racial segregation. There the song sustained he returned to write the SDS pamphlet wishful thinking, since far from overcoming, Revolution in Mississippi, which, issued in the the Wallace campaign was the last gasp of same year as The Port Huron Statement, repro- a Popular Front left soon to be suppressed duced all the words to “We Shall Overcome” by McCarthyism. Around 1955, the year on its title page. Joan Baez, twenty-two, sang when Seeger was called before the House “We Shall Overcome” at the 1963 March Un-American Activities Committee, the singer, on Washington, and Pete Seeger sang “We in an inspired move, substituted “Shall” for Shall Overcome” together with SNCC staff in “Will,” transforming “We Will Overcome” Mississippi during Freedom Summer in 1964. into “We Shall Overcome.” In that iteration So popular was the song that President the song was taught at the civil rights lead- Lyndon Baines Johnson mouthed the words ership training at Highlander Folk School “We Shall Overcome” in a nationally televised in Monteagle, Tennessee. There, Rosa Parks, address in 1965 to advocate the Voting Rights Septima Clark, and Martin Luther King Act, a striking instance of that curious alchemy learned the song and transformed it into a by which the radical becomes mainstream. Yet movement anthem as the civil rights tempo when SNCC’s Bob Moses, historian Staughton quickened with the Montgomery Bus Boycott Lynd, and radical pacifist David Dellinger led of 1955–56. a march on the White House later in 1965 to What, then, was “We Shall Overcome”? signal the transformation of the civil rights Many things at once: a song of the 1940s, movement into a movement against Johnson’s a song of the 1960s; a song of the Popular own war in Vietnam, they still sang “We Shall Front, a song of the New Left; a black spiritual Overcome.” adaptation, a folk rendition; a protest song, a If “We Shall Overcome” seems the quint- crossover hit; a song for the picket line, a song FALL 2013 DISSENT 85 THE NEW LEFT WASN’T NEW for civil rights marches; a song with a history something not often recognized: it created and a song that seemed, by the early sixties, to the Old Left. That category functioned to be entirely of the moment. emphasize discontinuity in the history of radi- calism at the expense of understanding the ways in which, as with “We Shall Overcome,” “We Shall Overcome” is emblematic of the that history was actually an overlaid one. 1960s, whose movements radiated newness Because social movements achieve widest and youth even as they drew strength from success when they forge solidarity across deeper and older currents. This nuanced generations, one of the less-appreciated self- reality, however, has been occluded by the imposed limits of the sixties upsurge was its story sixties radicals told themselves. framing bias toward youth. Young radicals in the 1960s, seeking to “Old Left” was a retroactive appellation, demarcate themselves, adopted a narrative popular among sixties youth, that evoked of progression from what they called the an image that was at best partial. Certainly, Old Left to what they called the New Left. nobody at People’s Songs in 1947 thought of Their story went something like this: In themselves as Old Left. They were young, the 1930s and ’40s, there was an Old Left. too—so young, in fact, that Pete Seeger is still Centered on the Communist Party, it included with us today. But into the Old Left’s maw Trotskyists, Socialists, and others. Shaped by all of the left’s faults and foibles could be the Great Depression, the Old Left was orga- tossed. That left was reductionist, mechanistic, nized in political parties, typically vanguard dogmatic. It was not radical enough because it parties. It saw workers as its constituency, was subordinate to the liberalism of the Henry pursued common ownership of production, Wallaces and Eleanor Roosevelts. It disguised and espoused economic radicalism first and itself behind terms like “the people” because foremost. Then came 1956, Khrushchev’s Seeger and others had failed to be forthright revelations about Stalin’s atrocities, the Soviet about their Communist Party memberships. In invasion of Hungary, and the collapse of the a word, it was passé. American Communist Party. The Old Left’s For reasons both explicit and tacit, the credibility lay in ruins. A New Left kaleido- vision of a New Left proved attractive. scope arose in its place. Movement, not Party, Newness was a prominent value in a society was its focal point, affluence, not hard times, forever trying to move commodities off the its context. The New Left sought to transcend shelf, evoking positive associations even in Cold War categories with a radicalism focused the subconscious of those youth alienated on moral and cultural issues—race and war, from the shallowness of consumerism and later sexuality and gender—all of which the conformity. Red-diaper babies sought to Old Left had compromised on by promising to address them “after the revolution.” The New Left, by contrast, sought participatory democracy in the here and now. This account held undeniable power. Radical youth perceived their cause as new in part because any left would be new after the fifties. The interruption imposed by McCarthyism in the history of American radi- calism had been severe. In calling themselves the New Left, sixties youth sought to conjure up a new sensibility as well, one that reflected political necessity since the revealed record of Stalinism required American radicals, if they hoped to retain moral credibility, to distin- Joan Baez sings “We Shall Overcome” at the 1963 Civil guish themselves from the Soviet Union. Rights March on Washington (Rowland Scherman, U.S. In the process, however, the New Left did Information Agency, Wikimedia Commons) 86 DISSENT FALL 2013 THE NEW LEFT WASN’T NEW succeed where their deflated parents had your liberator!’” Such would-be “Marxists,” not, while southern students influenced by says the writer, believe “sexuality is a petit- existentialist Christianity and northern left- bourgeois invention. It is the economic factors liberals each had their own reasons to be that count.” This is not Abbie Hoffman, but suspicious of the Communist left as well as Wilhelm Reich in Listen, Little Man, 1948. Cold War anti-Communism. Or what of the writer dismayed to find And there was something genuinely radicalism in America “scattered, demoralized, new and attractive about the New Left. The and numerically insignificant”? Because “the widespread embrace during the 1960s of an present high school and college generation open-ended radicalism, one as much about does not remember the depression,” a revival democracy as political power, about values as will require “new foundations”: much as victory, did represent a break from Radicalism in America must be recruited the Old Left, as was evident when social from radicals, from strong and independent democrats such as Michael Harrington and spirits willing to stand on their own Irving Howe chastised New Left youth whom choices....A disciplined, maneuverable army they saw as naïve, both in an approach to of the left is, in this country, an absurd politics that tended toward utopianism and dream. There is no reason for anybody to in their willingness to overlook or downplay join it; those who easily accept orders are in Communist malevolence. When socialist quite different armies already. Communism elders had the locks changed in New York has failed completely in the United States shortly after the Port Huron convention, partly because its adherents have not played barring SDSers from their own office, it a truly radical role. underscored the apparent gulf between Old and New.
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