New American Movement

NEW AMERICAN MOVEMENT. The spectacular implosion of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) left tens of thousands of survivors without any viable organization to carry forward their hopes for a better collective future. The New American Movement (NAM), then, appeared to be a lifeboat rescuing them from these choppy seas.

Michael Lerner was a chief catalyst. Briefly imprisoned in 1970 for contempt of court during the trial of the “Seattle Seven,” who were charged with conspiracy to cause a riot, he worked with Rennie Davis to organize the Mayday, 1971 protest in Washington, DC as a large-scale act of civil disobedience against the Vietnam War. After Lerner proposed forming a stable national organization to go beyond protest actions, many activists responded positively.

NAM’s first national meeting, held in Davenport, Iowa, in November 1971, attracted more than 300 activists. Many had driven halfway across the country, hoping to join a vital new political movement. At the founding convention in Minneapolis the following year, participants undertook the Herculean task of creating a comprehensive political statement for NAM, virtually from scratch. Although small working groups crafted drafts of individual sections, the final document of the Committee of the Whole lacked the elegance of SDS’s famous Port Huron Statement. The new “Political Perspective” included several key principles that remained crucial for NAM throughout its history: the goal of democratic socialism attained through a mass popular movement; a broad definition of a diversified working class; an assertion that no existing “socialist” society provided a model for the USA; and strong opposition to sexism, racism and homophobia.

NAM nationally distinguished itself mainly by its commitment to socialist feminism, both in theory and in organizational practice. Rules required at least fifty percent of leadership positions be held by women. NAM was relatively open to lesbian and gay members. Blazing Star NAM, emerging from a split in the Chicago Women’s Liberation Movement, exerted an influence within NAM nationally.

NAM became defined, partly by design but more by default, as a loose association of local, structurally autonomous chapters. Nationally, it gained notice through publications founded and funded by NAM member James Weinstein: Socialist Revolution in 1978 (renamed Socialist Review); and the newspaper, later magazine, In These Times (from 1976 to the present). Weinstein helped connect NAM to its radical predecessors. A National Interim Committee had few resources beyond a Discussion Bulletin to influence the activities of the local chapters. Many NAM chapters developed a vigorous political practice of community and political organizing that went beyond political education.

Pittsburgh NAM was formally established in 1973. It benefited from a sizable cohort of some forty recent college graduates in their twenties, with a scattering of “oldsters” in their 30s. Strong female leaders like Roberta Lynch, Joni Rabinowitz and Holly Graff quickly emerged to lead the chapter. Pittsburgh NAM spawned several viable organizing projects (open to non-NAM members as well) including People’s History, Clerical Organizing, and the Peoples’ Power Project/Penna. Alliance for Jobs and Energy that anchored NAM in the general community. For several years NAM was the largest and most visible Left group in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh NAM was also an anchor of an Industrial Heartland Region, whose chapters met periodically to exchange experiences and learn from each other.

After 1980, NAM declined in numbers and influence in Pittsburgh. Several of its capable female leaders moved to Chicago to become part of NAM’s national leadership. Several other NAM members became full-time union organizers and staff, especially in the public and clerical sectors. Some academics found it necessary to focus more on their professional careers, while other members needed to refocus on family responsibilities. Despite its relatively numerous initial cadre, Pittsburgh NAM came to suffer badly from what became diagnosed as a “doughnut” or “bagel” syndrome – young activists who had originally devoted themselves to building and maintaining the organization moved on to mass political work outside NAM that demanded their own full-time commitments. And, most crucially, although a few new members trickled in from the outreach projects, there was no mass upsurge or electoral campaigns to inspire new recruits from outside the organization. This disappointment might have been taken as a glum prediction of NAM’s future.

By 1975, NAM leaders identified a need for a collective project that would bring together the disparate activities of its chapters. Holly Graff and Richard Healey turned to Italian Communist theorist Antonio Gramsci for the ideological basis for developing “socialist schools” at both national and local levels. Gramsci, from his prison cell in Fascist Italy, had concluded that sustained cultural work was necessary for the Left and that certain historical conditions required a protracted “war of position” rather than a frontal attack on capitalism. These ideas resonated with the many NAM members who, after 1975, implemented the Gramscian “Socialist School” project. Some schools, particularly those taught by notables like Stanley Aronowitz or Manning Marable, attracted a variety of attendees. Some, as in Los Angeles, persisted well after NAM dissolved.

By the late 1970s, about 40 percent of NAM’s membership was located on the Pacific Coast. If Pittsburgh NAM was only peripherally involved in electoral politics, two West Coast chapters gathered momentum from the late 1970s through the early 1980s.

The 1975 call for NAM chapters to do mass work by joining or creating local coalitions energized one important chapter. Santa Cruz NAM began on the campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz with some twenty core members and soon committed itself to off-campus community organizing. Santa Cruz NAM formed a Health Care Coalition in late 1976 and helped organize Westside Neighbors, with a majority of NAM members. Within a short time, NAM/Health Care Coalition/Westside Neighbors activists Mike Rotkin and Bruce Van Allen were elected to the City Council. Rotkin went on to serve as mayor of Santa Cruz for five terms beginning in 1981. However, following his successful election campaign, the Health Care Coalition dissolved, and Westside Neighbors was replaced by city-organized programs. The critical interpersonal ties that sustained Santa Cruz NAM were thus attenuated.

Portland NAM began relatively late in January 1977. It quickly developed a comprehensive organizing project around a Public Power Coalition and the Trojan [a nuclear power plant] Decommissioning Alliance. It worked with a national NAM Energy Task Force based in part on the organizing work of Pittsburgh NAM. Portland NAM also developed a rich cultural program featuring lots of singing and a Red Rose School. Unlike some former NAM chapters, such as Pittsburgh and Santa Cruz, it remained vibrant after becoming part of DSA in 1983.

The strong interpersonal ties and the skills that were developed within NAM chapters proved useful working in other political and mass organizations. Portland NAM leader Bev Stein won an Oregon state representative seat in 1988 and later was elected as chair of the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners. She went on to serve as county Chief Executive for eight years. NAM activist Rhys Scholes worked fulltime for progressive SEIU Local 503 in Oregon. Bob Baugh became a labor staffer responsible for the AFL-CIO’s national Blue-Green alliance and chaired its Energy and Environment Committee. However, at its peak in 1980, Portland NAM had less than thirty members.

After the merger with DSOC in 1982, other NAM chapters moved in several directions. In Los Angeles, Communist leader Dorothy Healey helped facilitate the transition from local NAM to DSA. Other notable NAM "elders" included Herman "Gabby" Rosenstein (Lincoln Brigade veteran), Mildred "Milly" Rosenstein, Donna Wilkinson, Carl Manzani, John McTernan, and Ben Margolis. LA NAM became one of the largest NAM chapters, and one of the few that included more than one generational cohort. Steve Tarzinski of LA NAM edited NAM’s Health Commission Bulletin and remained for decades a leader in the Single-Payer/Medicare for All Movement. The Socialist Community School initiated by Los Angeles NAM was well attended and also persisted for many decades.

Annual NAM Conventions were held in the Midwest. Many NAM members remember the excitement of meeting face-to-face with other members from around the country. In regions with clusters of NAM chapters, regional meetings provided similar opportunities. The Midwest and California were the strongest of these. NAM was also very active in the Rocky Mountain West, with Colorado chapters in Boulder, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo, and a Wyoming chapter in Laramie. These chapters were involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, socialist feminism, labor organizing and solidarity, and the anti-nuclear movement. NAM co-founded campaign that led to the closure of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant and the phase-out of nuclear power in Colorado.

At its apex around 1980, NAM had 1300 active chapter members and 2500 "at large” and “associate” members. Just over 20 percent of the NAM membership was associated with labor unions, mainly in the public sector. Most members had attended college. Few worked in blue collar jobs. They were overwhelmingly white and mostly between twenty-five and thirty-five years old. Merger with DSOC made sense, but did not solve systematic problems. Although NAM’s Tenth Annual Convention held in Milwaukee in 1981 proved spirited, inspirational and vibrant, the delegates voted, two to one, to follow through with the merger with DSOC into DSA. A substantial minority refused to accept the merger, and most did not join the new organization. But the majority of active national leaders supported the merger.

The new partners complemented each other in a number of ways. Demographically, DSA was strongest in New York and Washington, DC, whereas NAM was strongest on the West Coast and in the Midwest. DSA members were older, many in their forties and fifties. Most NAM chapters were actively engaged in community organizing; DSA focused on electoral politics and national coalition- building. Although compromises were reached in language, the strategic function of the new organization remained elusive.

Leo Casey was one of NAM leaders advocating merger and with Holly Graff became one of the two full-time directors in new DSA. As he reflected in 2020, “There was little question that NAM would not have survived as an independent organization, and that a merger was necessary.” Still, there were too few younger activists to replace the more experienced ones who moved into positions of influence in mass organizations.

What had gone wrong? Many former NAM members drifted away in the first few years after the merger, frustrated that the new DSA seemed too much like the former DSOC, still dominated by Michael Harrington’s national realignment strategy, and the substantial bloc of former New York DSOC members. But a number of former NAM members soon became key national organizers and staff of DSA, through the lean years of the 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century. Many were still on hand during the subsequent revival of DSA and its explosive growth.

Rhys Scholes of Portland NAM summed up the organizational history this way: “NAM maximized its potential when the window of opportunity opened, and failed when the window closed. A small cohort of people who survived the wreckage of the New Left, who wanted to be politically active in the movement while putting together their own lives and commitments, took their lifeboat as far as they could row it, docked with another boat of survivors from DSOC, and together created DSA.” DSA, offspring of DSOC and NAM, kept the democratic socialist tradition alive for three more decades as an embryo, a seed healthy and vigorous enough to sprout and grow when it could seize the new window of opportunity that opened up after 2015. The rebirth came almost, but not quite, too late for the NAM cohort, now over seventy, to bear witness and participate in some fashion.

Victor Cohen (ed.) "The New American Movement: An Oral History," Works and Days, Vol. 28, Nos. 1 and 2, whole number 55/56 (Spring/Fall 2010).

Victor Cohen, "The New American Movement and the Los Angeles Socialist Community School," Minnesota Review, No. 69 (Fall/Winter 2007).

New American Movement Records at Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University Special Collections.