Liberation

LIBERATION. The monthly magazine Liberation embodied the radical pacifist commitment to rebuild the Cold War-devastated American Left by developing a Third Camp political position. The stance included an international posture scrupulously independent of both American and Soviet foreign policy, and a domestic focus critical of the cautiousness then shared by liberalism and social democracy alike. This commitment, combined with an openness toward the counterculture, allowed the publication’s editors to provide much of the national leadership for the anti-war movement, as well as to become the only group of older radicals to significantly influence the younger generation of the 1960s New Left.

The magazine was founded in 1956 by an editorial board that included David Dellinger, Bayard Rustin, and A. J. Muste. Its founding statement, “Tract for the Times,” labeled Marxism and liberalism “empty patter and jargon” because both helped justify political timidity and statist oppression. The manifesto, however, went beyond state politics. The founding editorial called for decentralization and for each individual to have “direct participation” in decisions affecting work and leisure. The stance rested in part on an anarchistic critique of the Marxist emphasis on “capturing the state.” Liberation’s founders were also sympathetic enough to cultural politics to list boredom, along with war, poverty, and authoritarianism, as one of the “great evils” to be overcome.

The new magazine quickly became one of the most important voices of the emerging New Left. The editorial board grew to include such figures as Barbara Deming, Paul Goodman, Sidney Lens, and Staughton Lynd. The list of authors in the first decade included James Baldwin, Daniel Berrigan, Kenneth Boulding, Vera Brittain, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Todd Gitlin, Michael Harrington, Nat Hentoff, Martin Luther King, Lewis Mumford, Diana di Prima, David McReynolds, Theodore Roszak, and Bertrand Russell. Between summer 1965 and spring 1966 alone, the magazine published Carl Oglesby’s November speech to a national anti-war demonstration castigating American liberalism, “Let Us Shape the Future”; “Sex and Caste,” a memorandum by Casey Hayden and Mary King, staffers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, about sexism in the New Left; and Staughton Lynd’s “Coalition Politics or Nonviolent Revolution,” a cogent criticism of attempts to ally the Left with Democratic Party liberalism. Such talent won mid-decade endorsements from Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag, designating Liberation required reading for radical intellectuals as circulation peaked at almost ten thousand.

The editors of Liberation were particularly important in steering the anti-war movement toward a full critique of American liberalism. In this, its main opponents within the movement were social democratic backers of the realignment, a strategy that supposed the Democratic Party could be shorn of its southern racists and then transformed by labor into a majoritarian social democratic party. Pacifist critics like Staughton Lynd wrote that realignment required acceptance of President Johnson’s foreign policy, and thus constituted a “coalition with the marines.” On the other hand, one of the strongest backers of realignment was Liberation editor Bayard Rustin. The debate grew bitter until Rustin left the board in 1965 as part of his eventual transformation into a leading figure of a type of Cold War liberalism that often allied with the neoconservative movement.

Liberation’s editors believed pacifist principles and nonviolent tactics could allow the Left to refuse to choose sides in the Cold War and simultaneously build a new radical movement. This domestic version of Third Camp politics promoted a middle ground between the caution of electoral liberalism and social democracy, and the growing fascination with revolutionary violence and Leninist party building. The ideal could not survive the late 1960s.

The magazine’s decline was partially one of leadership. Muste died in 1967, while Lynd and Dellinger left active involvement with the editorial board shortly thereafter. Lynd exited frustrated with the failure of radical change. Dellinger departed first for his trial as part of the Chicago Eight, and then for a failed attempt to create Seven Days, a radical newsweekly. At the same time, pacifism’s popularity declined as fewer people were willing to claim violence might never be appropriate, particularly after Nixon won the presidency and continued the war in Vietnam. Liberation limped into the new decade with a revolving group of editors, managing to survive until 1976 with little of the previous decade’s originality or vitality

DeBenedetti, Charles, and Charles Chatfield, assisting author. An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990.

Goodman, Paul, ed. Seeds of Liberation. New York: George Braziller, 1964.

Scatamacchia, Cristina. “Politics, Liberation, and Intellectual Radicalism.” Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, 1990.