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Roots of Radicalism Revisited
| Article
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13724 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1988 |
7,755 Words |
| Author
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Stanley Rothman
Stanley Rothman is Mary Huggins Gamble Professor of
Government and director of the Center for the Study of Social
and Political Change at Smith College. |
The 1960s New Left seemed to emerge from nowhere. In the United States, during the late 1950s, church attendance was on the rise and the conservative Young Americans for Freedom was the most rapidly growing student organization on many college campuses. In the early sixties, conservative, liberal, and radical social theorists agreed that American students were basically conservative and supportive of the American social and political system (even if, in the eyes of radicals, they were being seriously injured by it). No one predicted the rise of a radical student movement.
With the advantage of hindsight we can now point to changes in American society that foreshadowed the emergence of the New Left, changes that both brought about and were encouraged by the civil rights revolution and, perhaps more importantly, by the Vietnam War.
In any event, beginning with the Port Huron Statement of 1962, at the founding of students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and escalating dramatically at the University of California in 1964, the student movement (i.e., the New Left) of the sixties came into existence and seemed, for a while, to represent the beginnings of a major new social and political force.
From the beginning the leaders of the New Left considered themselves to be radical, even revolutionary; but the revolution they claimed to envision was a democratic revolution brought about by peaceful civil disobedience and appeals to conscience. By the late sixties, however, violence against things (and even persons) had become viable options for at least some, though terrorist groups comparable to those that flourished in Germany and Italy never developed in the United States.
In many ways the New Left was a first for America. It was the first time ever that a radical movement had achieved any significant support among students in the United States. In addition, while the ideology that permeated it resembled that of the Parisian Left Bank of the twenties and thirties, the combination developed by the New Left was unique.
Almost from the start the New Left hurled a dizzying array of challenges at the American social and political system. The anti-Establishment temper encompassed rejection of "politics as usual," of political and social institutions, of social tradition and sexual mores, and even of Western culture itself. It contained within itself, as one sympathetic commentator noted, elements of anarchism, socialism, pacifism,
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