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31. New Left-Brinkley The New Left ! From American History: A Survey (10th ed.), by Alan Brinkley Important Note: Take notes by writing down complete answers to the questions below; don’t settle! for the first, obvious response. I wrote the footnotes. 1. Do you have any questions about the reading? 2. Did you look up words you do not know? 3. What made youth culture a significant force in the 1960s? 4. What was the New Left, and why was it an important element of 1960s politics? !5 Why did many American young people turn against the Vietnam War? THE YOUTH CULTURE Perhaps most alarming to conservative Americans in the 1960s and 1970s was a pattern of social and cultural protest that was emerging from younger Americans, who were giving vent to two related impulses. One was the impulse, originating with the political left, to create a great new community of “the people,” which would rise up to break the power of elites and force the nation to end the [Vietnam] war, pursue racial and economic justice, and transform its political life. The other at least equally powerful impulse was related to, but not entirely compatible with the first: the vision of “liberation.” It found expression, in part, through the efforts of particular groups— African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, women, gays and lesbians, and others—to define and assert themselves and make demands on the larger society.1 It also found expression through the efforts of individuals to create a new culture—one that would allow them to escape from what they considered the dehumanizing pressures of what some called the modern !“technocracy.” The New Left In retrospect, it seems unsurprising that young Americans became so assertive and powerful in American culture and politics in the 1960s. The postwar baby-boom generation, the unprecedented number of people born in a few years just after World War II, was growing up. By 1970, more than half the American population was under thirty years old;2 more than 8 million Americans—eight times the number in 1950—were attending college. This was the largest generation of youth in American history, and it was coming to maturity in a time of unprecedented affluence, opportunity, and—for many—frustration. Relatively few of these young people embraced radical political causes or rebelled in any fundamental way against their culture. But those who did were numerous enough, and assertive enough, to have a disproportionate impact on both the cultural and the political climate. 1 The idea that different groups in society were beginning to demand for themselves the rights they felt that white men had always enjoyed is usually referred to as “rights consciousness.” 2 By contrast, the median age (that is, the age at which half the population is older and half is younger) in the US as of the 2010 census was 36.8 years. That reflects falling birth rates in the 1960s and 1970s and the aging of the baby boomers. Page !1 One of the most visible results of the increasingly assertive youth movement was a radicalization of many American college... students, who in the course of the 1960s formed what became known as the New Left—a large, diverse group of men and women energized by the polarizing developments of their time to challenge the political system. The New Left embraced the cause of African Americans and other minorities, but its own ranks consisted overwhelmingly of white people. Black and minorities formed political movements of their own. The New Left drew from many sources. Some of its members were the children of radical parents (members of the so-called Old Left of the 1930s and 1940s), and had grown up with a critical view of society and politics. Indeed, the New Left drew considerable support, and guidance, from groups and individuals from the Old Left; it was not as entirely “new” as its champions liked to claim. The New Left drew as well from the writings of some of the important social critics of the 1950s—among them C. Wright Mills, a sociologist at Columbia University who wrote a series of scathing and brilliant critiques of modern bureaucracies. Relatively few members of the New Left were communists, but many were drawn to the writings of Karl Marx and of contemporary Marxist theorists. Some came to revere Third World Marxists such as Che Guevara, the South American revolutionary and guerrilla leader; Mao Zedong; and Ho Chi Minh. For a while, left-leaning figures in the labor movement helped nurture the New Left—although relations between the two movements soon deteriorated beyond repair over the New Left’s unwillingness to embrace the anticommunism of the AFL-CIO.3 The New Left drew its inspiration above all from the civil rights movement, in which many idealistic young white Americans had become involved in the early 1960s. Racism, oppression, and violence were nothing new to the many African Americans fighting for civil rights. But to white college students from middle-class backgrounds, the exposure to social injustice (and, for some, personal danger) in the South was shocking and disillusioning, and it led many of them to question their assumptions about the basic values... of American life. Within a few years, some white civil rights activists were beginning to consider broader political commitments. In 1962, a group of students, most of them from prestigious universities, gathered in Michigan... to form an organization to give voice to their demands: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Their declaration of beliefs, the Port Huron Statement, expressed their disillusionment with the society they had inherited and their determination to build a new politics. “Many of us began maturing in complacency,” the statement... declared. “As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss.” In the following years, SDS became the principal organization of student radicalism. Some members of SDS moved into inner-city neighborhoods and tried for a time, without notable success, to mobilize poor, working-class people politically. But most members of the New Left were students, and their radicalism centered for a time on issues related to the modern university. A 1964 dispute at the University of California at Berkeley over the rights of students to engage in political activities on campus gained national attention. The Free Speech Movement, as it called itself, created turmoil at Berkeley as students challenged campus police, occupied administrative offices, and produced a strike in which nearly three quarters of the Berkeley 3 The AFL-CIO was created by a combination of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The merger created the largest labor organization in the United States. Page !2 students participated. The immediate issue was the right of students to pass out literature and recruit volunteers for political causes on campus. But the protest quickly became as well an expression of a more basic critique of the university, and the society it seemed to represent. Mario Savio, a Berkeley graduate student and one of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement, captured something of the political anguish in a famous speech on campus, in which he said: There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; ...and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, 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 working at all. The revolt at Berkeley was the first outburst of what was to be nearly a decade of campus turmoil. Students at Berkeley and elsewhere protested the impersonal character of the modern university, and they denounced the role of educational institutions in sustaining what they considered corrupt or immoral public policies. The antiwar movement greatly inflamed and expanded the challenge to the universities; and beginning in 1968, campus demonstrations, riots, and building seizures became almost commonplace. At Columbia University in New York, students seized the offices of the president and other members of the administration and occupied them for days until local police forcibly ejected them. Harvard University had a similar, and even more violent, experience a year later.... Most campus radicals were rarely if ever violent (except at times in their rhetoric). But the image of student radicalism in mainstream culture was one of chaos and disorder, based in part on the disruptive actions of relatively small groups of militants. As time went on, moreover, the student fringe groups became increasingly militant. Small numbers of especially dogmatic radicals—among them the “Weathermen,” a violent offshoot of SDS—were responsible for a few cases of arson and bombing that destroyed campus buildings and claimed several lives. Not many people, not even many students, ever accepted the radical political views that lay at the heart of the New Left. But many supported the position of SDS and other groups on particular issues, and above all on the Vietnam War. Student activists tried to drive out training programs for military officers (ROTC) and bar military recruiters from college campuses. They attacked the laboratories and corporations that were producing weapons for the war. And between 1967 and 1969, they organized some of the largest political demonstrations in American history. The October 1967 march on the Pentagon, where demonstrators were met by a solid line of armed troops; the “spring mobilization” of April 1968, which attracted hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in cities around the country; the Vietnam “moratorium” of the fall of 1969, during which millions of opponents of the war gathered in major rallies across the nation; and countless other demonstrations, large and small—all helped thrust the issue of the war into the center of American politics.
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