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Access provided by University of Nottingham (10 May 2016 09:19 GMT) ARTICLES

The 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 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 , 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 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 , 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 , 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 and spirits willing to stand on their own 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. Surely this was produced after 1956? But no, it’s Henry F. May, “The End of American Radicalism,” in American Quarterly in 1950, Fifty years on, however, the distinction examining the rubble left after the Henry between Old Left and New Left is of Wallace campaign. distinctly limited value. Its categories simply Other examples abound of an alternative dissolve and disintegrate if put to the test— left consciousness sprouting from the cracks as exemplified by the journey of “We Shall of the 1940s. Dwight Macdonald spoke Overcome.” openly of “a new left.” The Congress of Racial Consider the following criticism of Equality pioneered sit-ins and freedom American politics. Speaking of “the unbe- rides. C. Wright Mills developed a criticism lievable degree of apathy and uninterest on of bureaucracy that owed much to the oppo- the part of the American people,” the passage sition to “bureaucratic collectivism,” East and reads as if it were taken from the Port Huron West, in ’s circle of Trotskyist- Statement: “Unless the American people are derived heretical socialists. , aroused to a higher degree of participation, the New Left’s most noted intellectual by the democracy will die at its roots.” But this was mid-1960s and himself a product of the early penned by in Reveille for Radicals, postwar years, once called these 1940s trends written in 1946. That book drew on what “the first New Left.” would later be called “Old Left” lexicon in Or was it the actual New Left? After all, in speaking of “People’s Organizations.” His was the 1940s such ideas were truly new. By the a new leftism emerging within the Popular 1960s they were long in gestation. Front of the 1940s. Or consider, from an entirely different sector of the left, the sardonic writer who Not only was the New Left old, but the Old mocks the “professional revolutionary”: “The Left was new. The Old Left generation was not deceived masses run away from you and you simply erased by McCarthyism and Stalinism. run after them, yelling ‘Stop, stop, stop, you The Communist Party was discredited, to be proletarian masses! You just can’t see that I am sure, but this freed a generation of radicals to

FALL 2013 DISSENT 87 THE NEW LEFT WASN’T NEW chart more independent courses after 1956, edited by George Breitman, a member of the making the 1960s left far more intergenera- Socialist Workers Party, which was practi- tional than is often acknowledged. It’s not cally the only organization to give the black just that Pete Seeger records spun on many a militant a platform in the last year of his life. New Left turntable. Everywhere one looks in It was issued by Grove Press, where Harry the 1960s, one finds an adult left in its middle Braverman, another Trotskyist veteran, was years, interacting with youth, contributing to editor. Would Malcolm’s views have been as sixties radicalism, and collapsing distinctions between Old Left and New. In in 1951, for example, four Old Leftists, still young in heart but rejected “Old Left” was a retroactive appellation, by the Communist Party, formed the first sustained American homophile organization: popular among sixties youth, that evoked the Mattachine Society. By the early 1960s, the an image that was at best partial. homophile movement had made a significant contribution to the sexual revolution so often credited to the New Left at the expense of the supposedly economistic Old Left. influential had not older revolutionaries— Those in Britain who hatched the very term Jewish, in this case—arranged for their New Left—including historian E.P. Thompson, dissemination? whose Making of the English Working Class of National demonstrations against the 1963 pioneered a “new” labor history engaged , although initiated by SDS in with class and culture—were Communists 1965, were mostly organized by a coalition who quit in 1956. It was in their New Left of older radicals in the National Mobilization Review that C. Wright Mills published his Committee to End the War in Vietnam, headed “Letter to the New Left,” saying that students, by radical pacifist A. J. Muste, whose rather than a “labor metaphysic,” were the dated back to the First World War. Prominent agents of radical renewal. intellectual opponents of the Vietnam War Many putatively New Left strategies were included , , spawned by Old Left seers. , Howard Zinn, and Sidney Lens, all of whom Ella Baker, Stanley Levison, and other Old came of age on the 1940s left. Left veterans advised Martin Luther King Even Black Power fits the template. Stokely and younger radicals in the southern freedom Carmichael, who popularized that slogan movement. Social democrats at the United more than anyone else, was a Trinidadian Auto Workers helped arrange the Port Huron immigrant whose initiation into radical camp for SDS in 1962 and donated money politics came through his close friendship at to make its Economic and Research Action the Bronx High School of Science with Eugene Programs possible. Hal Draper, a 1930s Dennis, son and namesake of the American Trotskyist, gave sage counsel to Communist Party leader. Black Power radicals and other student radicals during the Free James and Grace Lee Boggs came out of Speech Movement in Berkeley in 1964. Detroit’s labor left of the 1930s and ’40s, while What periodicals did New Leftists read? Harold Cruse, who did so much to promote , the National Guardian, and I.F. black nationalism and stigmatize the Old Left, Stone’s Weekly, all launched in the 1940s and had once been a Communist. In England, the 1950s by remnants of the Popular Front left. Trinidadian C.L.R. James, a Trotskyist since Or New Politics, edited by left socialist veterans the 1930s, counseled black militant pan-Afri- of the 1940s and 1950s. Perhaps even the canists of the 1960s. Dissent of Irving Howe, onetime Shachtmanite, Or take the women’s movement. It was who clashed with the New Left but published indubitably new in scale, innovation, and Tom Hayden, Staughton Lynd, and other new independence in the 1960s, and the left in the radicals. 1930s and ’40s did subsume gender within Malcolm X Speaks, published in 1965, was class when discussing “the Woman Question,”

88 DISSENT FALL 2013 THE NEW LEFT WASN’T NEW but New Left men responded with even less Ideas bracketed as “Old Left,” moreover, comprehension when women began to assert remained live options throughout the 1960s, the need for sexual equality in the 1960s. Old which hardly saw all of the older folkways Left women, moreover, helped spawn the dispelled. One is found in the later New Left’s new feminism in ways direct and indirect. attempt, in a decade of war and revolution, Although McCarthyism buried the memory of to “name the system,” as SDSer Paul Potter initiatives such as the Congress of American put it. That process led many to see “capi- Women, which in the late 1940s pushed for talism” and “imperialism” not as stale, musty child care, equal pay, and other demands words but as accurate descriptors at that very that would later be called feminist, CAW moment, when the American business class veterans in the 1960s such as Eleanor Flexner was reclaiming the word “capitalism” and and Gerda Lerner pioneered the writing of investing it with positive connotations. women’s history while Women Strike for Once capitalism and imperialism came Peace, formed by Old Left women, contributed into sight again for the left, as to a rebirth of women’s political action. observed, it was certain that young radicals When the young white civil rights orga- would work their way back to Marx and nizers and Mary King wrote Lenin. In this there was plenty of insight, two memos in SNCC and SDS that were the not only tragedy, for the turn to theory and first serious documents on women in the history signaled recognition of social systems New Left, objecting to sexism within those and structures that would not be displaced organizations, they read older women who by moral symbolic action alone. It is also were making themselves anew: Simone the case, however, that a good part of the de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), Doris New Left in the end succumbed to the Old Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962), and Left’s worst errors and deficiencies: scriptural Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). fundamentalism, bureaucratic centralisms, Friedan masked her background in the left-led and simplistic versions of internationalism electrical workers’ union, UE, with a fable of revolving around a single sun, whether China, middle-class suburban life, and her Popular Cuba, Algeria, or, worse, Albania or North Front ethos was too tame for women’s libera- Korea. tionists, but her criticism of rigid Cold War Here again the sunny contrast between gender norms sewed seeds of radical women’s New Left innocence and Old Left bankruptcy consciousness. is shown to be overdrawn. Newness and Many recent histories of American youth did not guarantee purity. Some errors Communism fail to register how gravely of the New Left, such as its Weatherman-style Stalinism distorted the left of the 1930s and adventurism, were catastrophic beyond any ’40s, a factor just as important as McCarthyism faults committed by the once-disdained Old in necessitating the disguises adopted by the Left. At the same time, the later New Left Seegers and Friedans of the time. Democratic fostered new liberations in culture, sexuality, radicals and revolutionary socialists observed and gender beyond those the early New Left those failings at the time, the fundamental had wrested, and much of it came to under- differences among rival camps of radicalism stand, however belatedly, that working-class being another reason why “Old Left” holds majorities are the crux of lasting transforma- little value as an all-encompassing term. tions. Even as the New Left suffered fissures There is, however, ample evidence that even and crises by the 1970s, it showed greater the Communist left was hardly contemptible humility toward its older counterparts on the on every issue, as historians have charted the left, recasting them as long-distance runners many positive contributions of 1930s and ’40s who faced similar predicaments and chal- radicals on labor, fascism, empire, and espe- lenges. cially race—which the Old Left cannot now be said to have waited until “after the revolution” to address. When talking to millennials, anyone above the age of forty will hit a moment when a vast

FALL 2013 DISSENT 89 THE NEW LEFT WASN’T NEW sinkhole seems to open up, with all points of past year when the fiftieth anniversary of the cultural reference dropping through. Perhaps Port Huron Statement was marked at a spurt of you find yourself at a seminar table of twenty- events across the country while the hundredth somethings rambling on about punk’s halcyon anniversary of the 1912 campaign of Socialist days and refer to Patti Smith’s variation of Eugene Victor Debs passed entirely unob- “Gloria,” only to realize that no one knows served. what you are talking about. They don’t know Debs was part of what might be called, Patti Smith. They don’t even know “Gloria.” to adapt Lynd’s phrase, the first Old Left, winning a higher percentage of the presi- dential vote in 1912 than any American socialist before or since. Many of the assump- The sunny contrast between New Left tions of American in its heyday now seem naïve, if not retrograde. It was largely, innocence and Old Left bankruptcy is though not exclusively, male-dominated at shown to be overdrawn. Newness and a time before women were guaranteed the youth did not guarantee purity. ballot; it was prone to talk of class unity alone at a time when black Americans were being lynched and stripped of voting rights. Electoral socialism does not resonate so well with a contemporary left steeped more in They certainly don’t know its origins in Van than . In these respects Morrison’s early garage band Them. Finally, the New Left may still present a fresher you blurt something out about “Brown-Eyed model. Other aspects of the Debsian vision, Girl,” a recognition flickers, and Van Morrison though, surely speak as well, if not better, to allows the regaining of a precarious toehold in our era: its imagining of a fighting left, one cultural history. opposed to war and exploitation, inclusive Should this surprise us? The 1960s are now of revolutionary visions and social reform two decades farther from our time than they alike; its multigenerational combinations; its were from the 1930s, and the New Left is old commitment to effective organization; its bent in a new way. The times, they have a-passed. toward economic democracy against immense The next generation inevitably has its own inequality. In some respects its old credo is points of reference. They do take interest in neglected (or is the word impermissible?) the flurry of fiftieth-anniversary commemora- not for its faults and archaisms but because it tions now erupting, since the epochal shift of remains so radical and relevant. the sixties continues to exert an attraction, but That lineage may revive in trace form we are witnessing the final draining of the in future lefts, now that Occupy, however wash of ’68, and any future will fleeting, has put class and inequality again on have different contours and identities. a new generation’s radar. It informed even the For decades unprecedented in the history New Left, however, which for all its affluent of American radicalism, a single generation’s context cannot be understood without its myths and legends have held sway over roots in a Debsian vision of equality. SDS in others. Boomer dominance prevailed even as, its earliest years focused on poverty in the from South African divestment in the 1980s Economic and Research Action Programs, and to AIDS resistance to the global justice Battle various New Left voices—James Weinstein at of Seattle in 1999, outbursts tossed up newly Studies on the Left and Socialist Revolution, Paul radicalized youth. No subsequent cohort Buhle’s Radical America—sought a socialism emerged with numbers or ideas sufficient rooted in American realities, imbued with to surpass the New Left generation, whose the cumulative insights of subsequent liber- glory days, cautionary tales, and balance of atory radicalisms. Such is perhaps the vein left leadership power held sway over the of radical thought and action now being radical, or once-radical, imagination. The reclaimed by those seeking alternatives to the consequences for memory were illustrated this bubble-and-bust capitalism of our new Gilded

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Age. and the abolitionists. Always the left has If the New Left was old, and the Old Left had continuities and ruptures, innovations was new, if neither were faultless and neither and borrowings, solidarities and betrayals, irredeemable, if both remain attractive but legacies to draw upon, errors to discard. If neither can be transferred tout court to our future lefts synthesize the best of the old, present, if their evaluation and appraisal was experiment anew, draw upon the verve of never made easier by seeking to box them youth and the perspective of age, and succeed up tightly in neat chronologically divided in speaking to their present, casting the left’s compartments, then perhaps this leaves us ideals in a parlance and fashion suited to their with a story of a common left, a long left, a moment, then perhaps someday we might left that stretches far back in time all the way well overcome. up to our present, one subject to tragic flaws but animated, at its best, by the enduring Christopher Phelps teaches American studies at the ideals of democracy, freedom, and equality. University of Nottingham. He is at work on a history of Contingents of radicals to come will generate American radicalism, co-authored with Howard Brick, to be their own fables of newness while staking published by Cambridge University Press. claims to this heritage that arcs back to 1776

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