NEW DEAL TO NEW MAJORITY: SDS’S FAILURE TO REALIGN THE LARGEST POLITICAL COALITION IN THE 20TH CENTURY Michael T. Hale A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY December 2015 Committee: Clayton Rosati, Advisor Francisco Cabanillas Graduate Faculty Representative Ellen Berry Oliver Boyd-Barret Bill Mullen ii ABSTRACT Clayton Rosati, Advisor Many historical accounts of the failure of the New Left and the ascendency of the New Right blame either the former’s militancy and violence for its lack of success—particularly after 1968—or the latter’s natural majority among essentially conservative American voters. Additionally, most scholarship on the 1960s fails to see the New Right as a social movement. In the struggles over how we understand the 1960s, this narrative, and the memoirs of New Leftists which continue that framework, miss a much more important intellectual and cultural legacy that helps explain the movement’s internal weakness. Rather than blame “evil militants” or a fixed conservative climate that encircled the New Left with both sanctioned and unsanctioned violence and brutality––like the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) counter intelligence program COINTELPRO that provide the conditions for a unstoppable tidal wave “with the election of Richard M. Nixon in 1968 and reached its crescendo in the Moral Majority, the New Right, the Reagan administration, and neo-conservatism” (Breines “Whose New Left” 528)––the key to this legacy and its afterlives, I will argue, is the implicit (and explicit) essentialism bound to narratives of the “unwinnability” of especially the white working class. In this dissertation, I demonstrate that a Gramscian analysis resists this essentialism and fatalism, and is better suited for an historical analysis of competing social movements vying for hegemony in the 1960s. iii Dedicated to all those who fight for a better and more beautiful world. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to make a special thanks to Dr. Clayton Rosati for not giving up on me as I worked on this project. I also want to thank my entire committee for their guidance and patience. You have all provide such a wonderful model of how to mentor students. Lastly, I want to thank my family, my friends, and every activist I have ever had the pleasure of working with throughout the last two decades because you have all given me the inspiration, motivation, and love I needed to write this dissertation. All of my adult life, I have known the joys and pains of being an activist for social justice. I have lived to see the limitless possibility in the eyes of countless workers on strike and countless people marching for justice. As we entered the 21st century, I participated in the largest anti-war demonstrations in world history and the largest general strike in American history and felt their liminal energy. I have also known the pain of defeat and failure—the continuing imperialist wars, the continuing insanity of anti-immigrant hysteria and deportation, the continuing oppression of poor people, women, and people of color. The list could continue. On top of my course work, on top of my research, I write my dissertation carrying all of these experiences inside of me, and they help focus me on the goal of helping the left in the United State rebuild itself for the 21st century. I hope my dissertation contributes to that goal, and I thank everyone who helped me along the way. I also wish to thank libraries and librarians in general for providing me a space all of my life to think, research, write, and grow as a human being. I want to give special thanks to the following libraries who granted me access to their archives for my dissertation research: Joseph A. Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University, Southern California Library for Social Studies and v Research, Charles E Young Research Library at the University of California Los Angeles, and the Nixon Presidential Library. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................. 1 Who Will Listen To ‘The Sad Silent Song’ Of The Working Class? ....................... 1 How Gramsci Can Help: The Fatal Problem of Foregone Conclusions ................... 12 Intervening in the Historiography, Towards a Cultural and Intellectual History of Failure: The New Left and Fatal Foundations ......................................... 13 SDS and the Labor Question .................................................................................... 24 Republicanism as the Language of Leadership ........................................................ 29 Isn’t Gramsci Dead? ................................................................................................. 34 Outline of Chapters ................................................................................................... 38 CHAPTER I. MILLS AND BUCKLEY CHAT ABOUT THE NEW DEAL OVER COFFEE ............................................................................................................ 41 The Common Enemy, Liberalism: Fighting Against ‘the Failure of Nerve’ in the 1950s ............................................................................................................ 43 The Fear of Bureaucracy and Subservience Verses Decentralization and Autonomy: The Agrarian and Artisan Ideal ................................................................................ 48 A Brief Typology of American Liberalism .............................................................. 55 Republican Common Sense and the Battle Ground of American Liberalism ........... 65 CHAPTER II. THE AMERICAN RISORGIMENTO: THE CREATION OF A BASTARD STATE ............................................................................................................ 68 Liberalism and ‘Unsatisfied Hopes’ ......................................................................... 70 Gramsci’s View of Liberalism ................................................................................... 73 Civil War to the New Deal: Organic Crisis, Opportunity, and vii Revolution-Restoration .............................................................................................. 76 Liberalism in the United States: The Re-Emergence of Republicanism and the Politics of the Passive Revolution ........................................................................ 83 Reform Liberalism and the Politics of the Passive Revolution ................................. 90 How does fragmentation effect organization ............................................................. 91 The Construction of Reform Liberalism in America ................................................. 95 The Alliance of Reform and Laissez Faire Liberals Out Organize the Radicals ....... 98 The Politics of Failure: Disunity, Fragmentation, Subalternality, and the ‘Administrative Mandate’ .......................................................................................... 101 CHAPTER III. LEADERSHIP AND THE PASSIVE REVOLUTION IN THE NEW DEAL ERA ............................................................................................................ 107 Towards a ‘National Popular/Collective Will’: The ‘Organizational and Connective’ Function of Intellectuals ............................................................................................ 108 Roosevelt and the Language of Republicanism ........................................................ 116 Roosevelt and the ‘Administrative Mandate’ ............................................................ 118 The CPUSA and the Popular Front: ‘Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism’ ............................................................................................................ 122 From ‘Social Fascist’ to ‘Friend of the Working Man’ ............................................. 123 The Problem with the Popular Front .......................................................................... 128 Fragmentation Instead of Organization ..................................................................... 131 Re-Thinking the New Deal as an Unstable Equilibrium Rather than a Stable Consensus ....................................................................................................... 137 CHAPTER IV. AN INSTITUTIONAL, INTELLECTUAL, AND CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE EARLY NEW LEFT ..................................................................................................... 141 viii Before SDS, There Was SLID, and Before SLID, There Was ISS ........................... 145 Comparisons between SDS and SLID ....................................................................... 149 SDS and Republicanism ............................................................................................ 153 John Dewey, SDS, and Republicanism ...................................................................... 155 From ‘Masterless Men’ to ‘Cheerful Robots’: 19th Century Liberalism vs Mid-20th Century Liberalism .................................................................................... 161 Jack Kerouac: How His Hatred for Bureaucracy and His Romantic View of the Poor and Third World Affected SDS ......................................................................... 168 CHAPTER V. C. WRIGHT MILLS’ DRIFT FROM POLITICS .......................................