New Left

NEW LEFT. Based initially on the experience of the civil rights movement, the polyglot radicalism known as the New Left flourished for a few years, mainly on the major private and state campuses and in nearby neighborhoods. New Left politics, definitely outside the norms of communist, socialist, or other past Left movements, stressed peace, human rights and cultural change over the familiar Left struggles of labor and peace with the Soviet Union. At high tide, in 1969–1970, the New Left numbered 150,000 or more steady participants, and a supportive milieu of millions. Unable to expand its popular support beyond young people, it could not attain its goal of revolutionizing campus life through the disengagement of colleges and universities from the military-industrial complex. Nor could it command campus resources to the tasks of a large social transformation, or yet reverse the bipartisan national politics and economics committed to the Cold War. Severely pressed by government infiltration and a massive, hostile propaganda media campaign, the New Left collapsed into fragments of competing sects and a disillusioned, inactive former following.

The final significance of these developments remains uncertain. Clearly, however, the New Left managed to dramatize a wide spectrum of issues, from counterinsurgency wars to environmental damage, issues which have grown from flagrant cases of oppression into evident threats to the survival of the planet. No other constituency of similar size and importance rose to replace the New Left, although the size and influence of Democratic Socialists of America and of the resurrected African American movements during the second decade in the twenty-first century, bid fair to continue and broaden the familiar struggles within the existing political system.

Surviving Old Left individuals and institutions played an avuncular role in the beginnings of the New Left. The sweeping repression of McCarthyism, refined by Cold War-oriented college administrators and senior professors, had missed relatively little in its search for victims. Not only were jobs lost, but intellectual careers destroyed and stern warnings issued against dissent that defied the Cold War consensus. Nevertheless, schools such as the University of Wisconsin, which refused to install loyalty oaths, became meccas for dissenters of all kinds. As McCarthyism eased in the later 1950s, a small-scale renewal of campus activism quickly resumed, promising greater things. In larger cities or community-campus centers of various Old Lefts, such as Berkeley, California, certain bookstores or cafes provided hangouts where political conversations had never ceased and where bohemian tastes could be indulged. Eating cooperatives and other such institutions carried over from previous generations likewise offered practical networks for political integration.
The “New Left” sobriquet itself came directly out of contemporary British experience, where the emergence of the “Ban the Bomb” Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and the breakaway of distinguished Marxist intellectuals from the British Communist Party, offered a fresh beginning of sorts. “New Left Clubs” sprang up on British campuses, and two journals, the New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review, merged in 1960 into the New Left Review, intended to be the intellectual expression of the New Left Clubs. Back in the United States, the lively magazine American Socialist, formed by a group of activists who had broken from the Socialist Workers Party, took up the cause for an American counterpart.

At this early date, little could be accomplished nationally of an openly New Left character. At the local level, sympathy for southern civil rights efforts merged with the political-intellectual evolution of former members of Labor Youth League (LYL), a Communist offshoot. LYL “graduates,” politically independent after the Russian invasion of Hungary, possessed a sophistication in Marxist ideas and shared the desire to break loose from the old Stalin-Trotsky-Social Democracy debates. They also had a strong interest in cultural matters. They played an especially important role in the formation of local folk music groups on the campuses in the later 1950s; in the earliest “antimilitary balls,” posed against the “military balls” of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps then in vogue; and in avant-garde cultural/theatrical movements growing more popular on and off the campus. From these activities can be traced the formation of Studies on the Left (1959–1967) at the University of Wisconsin, the first sustained intellectual journal calling for a new movement. A myriad of existing Old Left groups, but especially the Socialist Workers Party, meanwhile took a leading role in the Fair Play for Cuba campaign, along with other former youth Communists.

If these tendencies touched only a handful of campuses, and a brief Ban the Bomb movement of 1960–1961 affected only a few more, they still helped to shape the early 1960s liberal-radical drift. The new Students for a Democratic Society’s (SDS) Port Huron Statement (1962), reflecting experience in the civil rights movement and the tones of English New Left manifestoes, was drafted by Catholic moralist Tom Hayden, but bore the stamp of some Marxist sophistication. It successfully appealed for student awareness and for political activity against the dominant ideologies of the Cold War age.

This fresh perspective had a solid basis in the facts of changing campus life. The omnipresent college and university expansion suddenly made the “student,” by the early 1960s, a significant demographic segment of the population. The pervasive alienation from bureaucratized US society, well documented already during the 1950s, had found its first critics in the faculties, and soon would find its militant opponents among the students. But SDS, the lineal successor to the Intercollegiate Socialist Society of the 1910s and the subsequent Student League for Industrial Democracy, initially lacked the opportunity and perhaps also the inclination to turn the key. For a few years more, campus restiveness remained locked into local, often symbolic issues from dormitory food to censorship.
In a negative sense, the failure of any national Left organization to establish the kind of campus bases suited to seize the Left political hegemony also proved decisive. The Young Socialist Alliance, which narrowed from an early attempt at coalition to a strict youth component of the Socialist Workers Party, had only very scattered support. The Communist-led W. E. B. Du Bois Clubs, founded in 1965, had even less success between the two coasts, reflecting the slow and troubled reemergence of the Communist Party from the 1950s repression and internal divisions. The Young People’s Socialist League, small and perennially faction-ridden, had neither the capacity nor motive for organizing students against Cold War policies. The localism and anti-institutionalism of the nascent New Left reflected an instinctive rejection of these alternatives, reflecting a rejection of all the efforts of political authorities committed to one kind of bureaucracy or another.

Meanwhile, as SDS turned to community projects in lieu of campus organizing, it sought to carry out a distinctly New Left program. Like other activists operating independently, SDSers aimed at the very poor rather than at the fabled proletariat. Its Education and Research Action Program and especially the Newark Community Union Project and Chicago-based Jobs or Income Now highlighted the effort to alert the poor to their own potential power, as the southern civil rights movement had done with considerable success. University of Michigan SDSers coined the phrase “participatory democracy,” meaning an advance beyond the parliamentary democracy of electing representatives to office. Most ERAP projects failed within months. Only the welfare rights movement, with its discrete constituency and demands, succeeded in community coalition-building among the poor. A Northern Student Movement, essentially a campus support group for southern struggles, had more success with enrolling dedicated reformers to help the less fortunate elsewhere to free themselves.

A small but sometime influential kernel of self-avowed revolutionaries had meanwhile emerged in Third World–oriented causes of the early 1960s, principally in support of Cuba against the United States but also of China against the Soviet Union. Within a few years, veterans of these causes, and younger devotees would enter New Left movements with great impact, both positive and negative. The heroic struggles of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) gave radical anti-racism a rallying center, while the self-distancing of liberals from SNCC demonstrated for many the untrustworthiness of Democratic Party politicians. Here and there, a precocious student radicalism emerged. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, march in Detroit attracted more than 100,000 and set off high school strikes and political currents within the city in which white youth joined blacks urging drastic changes in society. Another early indication of national campus interest in more radical views was the rousing campus reception given black nationalist Malcolm X just prior to his assassination. Rarely could students see social change as coming through their own actions. But they responded with notable warmth to the promise (or threat) of African American challenges to the American status quo. In this respect, they further distanced themselves from virtually the entire Old Left spectrum, whose leaders had articulated for decades the promise of racial integration and peaceful change through coalitions with liberal and centrist Democrats.

The Berkeley, California, free speech movement of 1964, ostensibly nonpolitical, was the first major campus movement to actually succeed in shutting down a prestigious institution. By pitting students of all kinds against the bureaucratic institution of the university, the FSM drew the most radical lessons of the civil rights movement and applied them to campus life at large. Shocking many liberal academics with the directness of their demands, which is to say their insistence upon making their own decisions rather than deferring to authority, Berkeley students raised the level of New Left dialogue to a national plane. Hereafter, campus politics took on a new direction and a new importance.

The escalating US invasion of Vietnam, from 1965 onward, placed students in direct conflict with the civilian authorities who implemented the guiding military-industrial demands made upon the universities. Confronted with selective service and its implications, many young people on campus and off came to see the contemporary uprisings of blacks in Harlem, Watts, and Detroit as movements aimed at the same opponent.

The Selective Service System also played a large role in this alienation. Its class and race bias notoriously had favored white college students in general. But many who graduated, and more who dropped out, found themselves in uniforms, if rarely on the front lines of jungle warfare. Fear also stirred specific resentments in a generational sense. Old men (political and military leaders) sent young men to die and condemned young women as well as their mothers and sisters to suffer the fears and consequences of loss. The older generations, seemingly loyal to the imperatives of imperial war as the price of consumer society, appeared in the eyes of the young as corrupted by age and by power. The forces of age and death seemed, then, counterposed to the forces of life, epitomized by the young. In supporting Lyndon Johnson against Barry Goldwater for the 1964 presidential election, New Leftists (notably, SDS) for the last time assumed a stance on the respectable left edge of liberalism. From 1965 to 1967, with the spreading protest against the Vietnam War, ever larger demonstrations confronted civil authorities and offered right-wing (but also liberal, Cold War) demagoguery a convenient target.

The 1965 Bay Area Vietnam Day Committee arranged one of the largest of the early protests aimed at halting the war process or at least constraining active conscription. It was characteristically free of any particular organizational domination, although local SDS, the Young Socialist Alliance, and others participated. That same year, a national demonstration in Washington, D.C., saw radical civil rights, students, and veteran Left leaders denounce the war and trace its origins to the social system. Once again, this demonstration notably lacked any overarching organizational affiliation or ideological inclination.

As SDS began to attract more campus anti-war activists, a national “teach-in” movement on many campuses lifted faculty members to the apex of their influence on the burgeoning protest. By making protest respectable, the teach-ins gave anti-war students and their supporters new national visibility. A handful of varied intellectuals, including Noam Chomsky, Herbert Marcuse, William Appleman Williams and Staughton Lynd, acquired a national constituency for their speeches, their social theories, and their personalities in some cases as campus firebrands. The teaching of Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, and Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man added intellectual ballast to New Left activism.

In a contrary sense, the teach-ins also provided the final episode in which dialogue served as the major component of New Left activity. Soon, as campus leaders confirmed their institutions’ practical involvement in a war that many privately opposed, words alone would be considered insufficient. SDS, joined by many local groups, coalitions, and spontaneous formations, swiftly became the chief political beneficiary of the new radical enthusiasm on most it not all campuses.

Unlike the Free Speech Movement, whose tenets became embedded in student movements but whose goals became lost amid other protests, the Vietnam protest spread to dozens and then hundreds of liberal schools and major universities. Media remained, for the most part, locked into events at the prestige schools such as Columbia and a small handful of public universities. Often scarcely noticed beyond the local scene, the more traditionally conservative campuses such as the southern black campus, hitherto reliant on upper-class white tolerance, likewise state schools of the conservative South and Southwest, belatedly took up the issues of the War. By 1969–1970, some of the most violent and sustained campus confrontations happened in exactly these locations. Campus and off-campus authorities, unlike those in the liberal universities, responded to students with blunt force, sometimes resulting in the loss of lire.

At moments between 1966 and 1969, the popular sentiment in hundreds of campuses turned decisively against the war, against the government determined to prosecute it, and mainly against the threats of the Selective Service System. Dozens and then hundreds of “underground newspapers,” local tabloids made possible by a technological revolution in the use of newsprint, effectively dramatized the issues and put rebellious intellectual concepts into cultural forms. Their combined readership certainly reached the millions. In effect, these sheets. along with previously sedate campus dailies, created an alternative information system to the hostile reports of the commercial dailies and news-weeklies. The radical papers and their staffs became crucial in mobilizing and interpreting campus discontent.

Economic abundance, the sexualization of leisure, and the introduction of “recreational” drugs also had important roles. The youth of the 1960s had not known economic depression, and the majority had not experienced anything resembling a hard personal upward climb to the middle classes. In their society of peers, leisure had largely taken the place of an earlier generation’s long hours of work, and since the early 1960s, their leisure had been flooded with the sexualization of advertising for products aimed at the “youth market” for consumer goods. Moreover, birth control technologies had drastically improved. If the 1950s coed already wore blue jeans and discreetly engaged in sexual relations prior to marriage, her 1960s equivalent could talk openly about orgasms. The popularization of marijuana and LSD loosened for a while the grip of advanced society’s promise of material benefits, substituting something more amorphous but also more fascinating. Drug guru Timothy Leary, Yippie Abbie Hoffman, and even the legacy of the Beat generation writers continually publicized by traveling poet Allen Ginsberg, found new audiences. Asked in a 1970 poll what they most sought in life, a majority of students answered “self-fulfillment,” and put material success well down the list. Only a minority believed money meant happiness, and fewer still that opting out meant dire poverty.

Not surprisingly, then, the militant Stop the Draft Week of October 1967 coincided with a year of “be-ins” and a generalized spread of “Youth Culture” from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury section to little zones adjoining many campus towns. The two constituencies did not necessarily coincide. Yet politicos in large numbers also smoked marijuana, and “hippies” notoriously appeared in large numbers at political demonstrations. The two types joined in rejecting the view of “democracy” as being limited to the two-party system and of wage or salaried labor as being a worthy personal goal. On the local level, massive political meetings seemed more freewheeling, more leaderless, more spontaneous in generating networks of practical activity, than at any time afterward.

Students who participated in these activities often found themselves simultaneously engaged in militant protests against university functions, and in hard study and classroom participation that many professors and teaching assistants would later recall as the most intense in their lengthy careers. Paradoxically, during those semesters frequently interrupted by protest and strike, an eagerness for real learning was widely observed. Classes taught by radical professors and deemed especially relevant, ranging from European or American history to black or women’s studies to “California culture,” drew large enrollments and intense classroom discussions. “Free Universities” with extra classes off campus in a wide range of subjects, took in students outside normal class hours. In this sense, the New Left proved, if not as book-oriented as its predecessors on the Left, far more intellectually motivated than generally considered at the time.

Perhaps for that very reason, the tensions within the campus community now flared as never previously. Professors openly hostile to student movements complained bitterly at what Edward Shils called “temporizing, halfhearted authority,” the unwillingness of universities to use more severe repressive measures against protesters. Indignant liberals and conservatives alike, including moderate socialists such as Irving Howe, raged more furiously as the dream of American victory in Vietnam faded, and as students made fun of their professorial pomposity. Some of the senior professors took out their rage at junior faculty member sympathetic to student causes. An uncounted number of young scholars suffered a denial of tenure or even an end to a promising career. The saga of Black History scholar Robert Starobin, a 1971 suicide, dramatized the less well known tragedies of many.

The New Left suffered its own deep internal difficulties at the moment of its apparent triumphs. Student strikes, even supported by teaching assistants, tended to peter out after a few days or a week. The functions of the campus involvement in the war machine continued on with the war itself, bringing ever more frantic visions of America’s approaching social crisis.

Years of “hot summers” in the streets of major cities, the 1968 assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and the hostile response of lawful authorities to even peaceful protest heightened the frustration. The Black Panthers’ Fred Hampton spoke on numerous campuses only months (or weeks) before his assassination by the Chicago police and the FBI. Clearly, the empowered section of American society desired no major changes and was perfectly willing to endorse the use of military firepower, public deceit, conspiracy, invasion of privacy, and even plans for any measures to restore order. SDS ideology swerved from Left-liberal to Leninist in a desperate effort to express opposition to American capitalism and affirm solidarity with the Third World and with black revolutionary movements in the United States.

Student feelings of rage and helplessness redoubled with the political resilience of the two-party system. The unsuccessful peace-candidacy of Senator Eugene McCarthy followed by the assassination of Robert Kennedy ensured the Democratic Party nomination for hawkish Senator Hubert Humphrey. The“Battle of Chicago” highlighted the brutal behavior of Mayor Richard Daley’s police and Daley’s own power to turn away reformers in the Democratic Party.

The Cambodia bombing of 1970 stirred the last and biggest student uprising of all, highlighted by the authorities’ killing of students at Jackson State College and Kent State University. Strikes spread almost universally on campuses. At the same time, student anger seemed impotent to actually halt the carnage half-way across the world and turned toward “trashing” (throwing rocks at) nearby windows, toward escapist use of drugs, and toward sexual promiscuity in the place of sexual emancipation. SDS, almost fanatically non-ideological and decentralist as recently as 1967, had by 1969 divided between opposing Maoist factions each claiming rather than representing any large number of campus activists.

Stirred by rage at the inability to stop the War, a minority of student activists turned to attempted acts of sabotage, almost uniformly unsuccessful. These efforts permitted variegated opponents of the New Left, liberal and conservative, to lock arms in denouncing the movement at large and, where acts had been committed, to unleash and legitimize a pattern of police provocations, disruptions, grand jury intimidations, and related actions. As later demonstrated in Freedom of Information Act inquiries, only at the height of the Cold War or the 1919–1921 wake of the Russian Revolution had government harassment been so widespread or so flagrantly in violation of constitutional rights.

The collapse of other contemporary movements framed the eclipse of the New Left. SNCC, for example, merged in 1970 with the Black Panther Party, and both disappeared in repression, defeat, disillusionment, and political confusion. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers, which had for a moment offered a serious threat to United Auto Workers leadership, likewise dissipated amid splits and ideological confusion. Other, more hopeful outcomes of the New Left could still be glimpsed. In Mexican American and Asian American communities, young radicals served as community spokespeople.

On campuses and beyond, activism lingered and took new forms, sometimes with groups that continued to call themselves “SDS” for another year or two past 1969, while declaring independence from any faction, more often in new and shifting forms clearly rooted in New Left experience. The efforts by supporters of the Progressive Labor Party to create a Worker Student Alliance, seeking to aid unions and other agencies of blue collar life, may have jump-started other local support committees for strikes and a flourishing of new tabloids, mostly short lived but rooted in groups (or regroupings) of former campus activists in factory-heavy cities and regions. Groups of former students moving closer to the Communist Party, or fervently devoted to one or another of the Maoist groups, had more staying power than others, and all faced the same factory shut-downs. Through much of the 1970s, small scale activities continued. In general and in terms of larger numbers of participants, the “burnout” had become evident and, for a generation of student activists, final.

Only the appearance of the women’s liberation movement, and to a lesser extent, the gay and lesbian movements, brightened a dark picture of campus activism. Not a small number of women broke off from New Left activism, viewing the associated movements as male-dominated and dismissive of all feminist issues, and organized into a separate, vibrant women’s movement that set its own political agenda. As political tendencies, the women’s liberation movement and gay movement were also notably cultural, as concerned with the “sexual politics” of process and everyday life as with political elections. Movements new in their demands upon society, they offered fresh promise. As banners of the women’s and gay liberation movements appeared at the last major demonstrations, and as consciousness-raising groups, in a sense taking the place of political meetings, now confronted male Left leaders, already fumbling, over their handling of the “woman question,” an inner purpose of the 1960s student movement had been nearly realized. These stunning developments had come, tragically, too late to count for much in the great upheavals.

The legacy of the New Left was certainly the most curious of any social movement in the twentieth century. Regarded neither as hopelessly old-fashioned and insufficiently revolutionary, as most Communists had regarded the old Socialist Party, nor as terribly compromised by support of a foreign tyranny, as the New Left often regarded the 1920s–1940s Communist Party, the New Left became more a part of American folklore. The disappearance of a revolutionary or transformational democratic option in the United States, Europe, and the developing world gave the New Left years, even for former participants, an almost dreamlike quality.

Liberals themselves had much to do with this near-instant suppression of memory. The Democratic Party, in its brief leftward turn under George McGovern, distanced itself as much as possible from campus protests and ghetto uprisings. The search for a moderate coalition in the Carter years and beyond redoubled the need for such distance, so that future president Bill Clinton could be realistically presented as an opponent of the Vietnam war but never a wild-eyed New Leftist.

Thirty years later, an aged Joseph Biden, Jr., made his way to the presidency in 2020 with a milder claim: as a young man, he had supported civil rights, although not very actively, and he had not been drawn into the encompassing debate over the War. But in the new era, he had an apparent need, at least and on some issues, for allies such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who called themselves Democratic Socialists and whose followers emphatically included with a new generation of socialists, many thousands of aging, former New Leftists.
The meteoric rise of the Democratic Socialists of America offered a related, equally uncertain example of the New Left outcome. Emerging in 1982 from a merger of the very New Leftish New American Movement and the somewhat old line liberal-labor Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, DSA held in place a contradictory mixture of political conclusions drawn from the 1960s. Its slim membership of a few thousand, largely carryovers from the past, was overwhelmed in 1016-17 by the infusion of new members, overwhelmingly young enough to be the literal grandchildren of the New Left.

These new members largely shared a New Leftish opposition to war and empire, and a deep identification with the Black Lives Matter movement. DSAers also had, especially in Chicago and New York, an apparently firm attachment to working in the campaigns of progressive Democrats. The electoral success of DSA branches may have been the dream of the 1960s Near Left long postponed, and even more the dream of the first officers of the Students for a Democratic Society. Most ironically, the DSA surge of 2016-2017 grew out of support for the Bernie Sanders campaigns conducted against a Hillary Clinton campaign supported by such prominent former New Leftists as Tom Hayden and Paul Booth. The Sanders campaign of 2019-2020 once again rallied young people to DSA, albeit reconciled in the end to Joseph Biden.

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