Present at the creation and other myths: The Port Huron statement and the origins of the new left

Smith, Allen

Once upon a time, historians of the Left endowed the 1960s with a stable and heroic narrative. Idealistic students created protest movements against apartheid at home and the empire abroad.

Committed to the moral ideal of participatory democracy, these young people engineered a decisive break from both the consensus of 1950s cold war America and from Old Left notions of social change. What began in peaceful idealism, however, ended in fantasies of Violent revolution. Youthful impatience with the difficulties of social change produced a chaotic rage equal to the end of a millennium instead of a mere decade.'

Numerous studies have contested this Whiggish moral it play. Historians have detailed the way that a far more diverse 1950s helped give birth to protest movements.2 Other scholars have connected the 1960s with social crusades of the ensuing decade.3 Moreover, the rise of conservatism in the supposedly radical era now appears as a concurrent mass movement deeply rooted in postwar American society.4 Notwithstanding the new scholarship, the power of the older narrative of a sixties that changed from good to bad--often called the declension school -remains strong.5

Declension's persistence is partially the result of its champions' dual authority as noted academ@ics and Important Left political figures. Additionally, liberal and conservative scholars, while obviously differing in their views on the need for reform, have concentrated on the student-based New Left.' However, the main reason the more historically accurate accounts have not generated a counternarrative is because historians have failed to challenge one of declension's central tenets-the belief that the first generation of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) created the New Left's most important declaration with the 1962 Port Huron Statement (PHS).7

The basic narrative of SDS does appear to conflate with the larger narrative of the New Left. SDS had ties to the Left. The organization was created in 1946 to serve as the youth group of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID) and was capable of tracing its lineage through LID to the youth wing of the early 1900s Debsian Socialist Party The 1962 PHS was written by youth: the draft was composed by Tom Hayden-who had earned his BA only the year before at Ann Arbor-and the document was revised by several dozen graduate and undergraduate students who attended the conference. SDS had provided a large number of dedicated activists to the Civil Rights movement, attempted to systematically organize the urban poor, -and hosted-however fortuitously-the first large protest against the Vietnam War in spring 1965. The combination spurred membership to grow from 3,000 members in summer 1965 to 15,000 members the subsequent year, exactly when many young leftists were looking for an organizational home and many reporters were looking for a way to explain the New Left to their readers. As a new generation of undergraduate students took control of the SIDS national leadership, the continued failure of either major party to end the Vietnam War or to promote racial justice combined with the optimism and hubris of youth to create an atmosphere of revolutionary hopes. Again, this mirrored the dreams of many young activists. Even when a segment of SDSs national leadership used the 1969 national convention to create the Weather Underground as a Leninist revolutionary party committed to armed struggle, the action seemingly reflected the broader violence of Vietnam, urban riots, and campus unrest. The question remains, can a closer reading of the period support the conflation of the New Left with SIDS at any period?8

This article will examine three distinct misconceptions about the early New Left. First, scholars have overestimated the PHSs ideological break with the Old Left. Second, champions of the PHS generation have inaccurately derided those who Joined SDS after 1965, as well as the social movements they championed. Third, historians have slighted pacifism's contributions to the creation of the New Left. Because the beginnings of the 1960s Left cannot be encompassed by an account of SDS and the PHS, historians need a redefinition of the New Left and new studies on the origins of post-World War II radical activism. Moreover, precisely because of the role the 1960s played-and plays-in American politics, this redefinition has wide ramifications for important issues such as the rise of a new conservatism, the fall of Democratic Party liberalism, and the growth of new social movements.

Looking Backward

An analysis of the New Left should initially include three things: (1) an assessment of the Old Left in order to develop an accurate comparison, (2) an appraisal of the broader social context of the period within which the New Left arose, and (3) a delineation of the new political ideas that marked the New Left itself

The two most Important Old Left political organizations of the postwar period, the Communist Party and the Socialist Party, had by the early 1960s some two decades of experience with a wartime America. Both developed new ideas concerning the path to socialism. First, they acknowledged the failure of earlier Left efforts to organize independently of American liberalism in some combination of third parties or militant trade unions. Lacking such independence, both adopted realignment, a strategy that proposed to transform the Democratic Party into a vehicle for social democracy by consolidating liberal support for unions and civil rights while limiting the power of conservative southern Democrats. Second, both remained convinced that the working class was the key element in any radical movement-a hypothesis that led to a largely economistic view of politics. Third, the Socialist Party and the Communist Party believed that a military Keynesianism had temporarily moderated capitalism's inherent instability As a result, both proposed to create social democracy by reducing military spending, with concurrent increases in state planning and government spending on health care, education, and other social programs. Fourth, both insisted that building a left-wing within the Democratic Party still required a centralized left political party; one that would ensure that varied social movements across the nation would adhere to the proper political strategy.9

However similar their domestic analyses, foreign policy sharply divided the Old Left. The Socialist Party, in concurrence with the dominant American view, regarded the Soviet Union as a totalitarian and expansionist nation that caused the cold war and thereby forced the enlargement of the US military. Socialist Party leaders disagreed with the US government on a variety of issues, such as alliances with specific third-world anticommunists, the wis_ dom. of overreliance on nuclear weapons, and the exact range of civil liberties the nation must surrender in order to defeat the communist menace. The Socialist Party as a whole, however, did not fundamentally oppose the cold war. By contrast, the Communist Party viewed the Soviet Union as a socialist country with a largely defensive military Posture. Communists maintained that the US leadership cynically used the threat of Soviet expansion to Conceal support for colonial and neocolonial relationships around the globe. Divergent foreign policy views caused contrasting views concerning the speed of conversion to a peace economy. The Socialist Party favored a slow conversion, to be matched by Soviet military reductions as well as communist restraint in Europe and the third world. The Communist Party favored a faster, more unilateral conversion.10

Political parties alone cannot define cold war-era dissent. The 1950s produced three important movements with varying degrees of Left particIpation: the cultural and artistic rebellion of the beats, the foreign policy protests that centered on nuclear weapons and Cuba, and the Civil Rights movement's revolt against segregation and apartheid. Each had beginnings in the first half of the decade, in events such as the Supreme Court's 1954 decision that overturned the separate but equal doctrine, the 1954 Bravo nuclear test series that irradiated Japanese fisherman and republicized the dangers of fallout, and the 1952 publication of Go by John Clellon Holmes.

These three movements were almost a decade old by the time SDS finalized the PHS in summer 1962. The alternative culture, long since grown beyond the beats, was sparking an upheaval in dance, film, and drama in New York City, while a folk music revival thrived among young dissidents nationwide. The civil rights movement had moved beyond the churches of the southern middle class to include urban residents, college students, secular critics, and white activists. The point is, the SDS manifesto was written not in a period of quietude but in a time of significant and increasing activism.11

The New Left was potentially "new" in several ways. First, the constituency of the activists and the constituency they attempted to mobilize differed from the Old Lefts. The New Left activists were primarily youth associated with the university system who did not initially hope to mobilize industrial workers facing a capitalist workplace but rather African Americans facing racism and students encountering a bureaucratic university The methods utilized to foster social change also diverged. The New Left largely eschewed both industrial unionism and its corresponding alliance with Democratic Party liberalism for community groups comprised of new constituencies who often, and at times primarily, acted outside the electoral arena. The New Lefts goals could change to include opposition to US nuclear policy, demands for a more relevant educational curriculum, an end to the war in Vietnam, or civil rights for African Americans and women. Policy goals alone cannot encompass the cultural aspects of the New Left. It also desired community, sexual liberation, creativity, and play-utopianism in its most positive aspects and democracy in its fullest definition.

The First Interpretive Wave

The first scholarly accounts on the New Left were written during the era itself by movement sympathizers. Initial chroniclers did not portray early SDS as particularly important or the PHS as especially momentous. Both were criticized in ways that subsequent works have failed to address. The greatest value of these early books is the revelation that SDS never exercised the influence historians later assigned to it.

One of the first important books was The New Radicals. A Report nith Documents, edited by Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau and published in 1966. The two authors portrayed SDS as only one of "a melange" of organizations within the New Left. The book's opinion of SDS appears at times to have been a collaboration of differences. One section called the PHS "a general broad critique suggesting guidelines for a radical polltics" but pointedly suggested that the PHS promoted "working with and through 'liberal' institutions." Another segment claimed the manifesto rejected Marxism and class analysis in favor of a radical critique of the very same corporate liberals that Marxism attacks. Confused readers would be mislead by reading the document itself, for, in a pattern soon repeated, the book excerpted only the sections of the PHS that discussed values, students, and anti-communism, not the far-longer detailed programmatic sections that espoused quite traditional left political notions.12

Without question, Jacobs and Landau located the center of the New Left outside of SDS. The authors labeled the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement the "clearest expression" of the radical student movement. One reason was the structure of the event. The Free Speech Movement was a fluid combination of coalition and crusade that was "neither controlled nor formed" by organized political groups and, as a result, became "the model for student organizations." The Free Speech Movement also better exemplified how the new radicalism went beyond traditional politics to matters of culture. The two authors made one such cultural project- a "search for identity"-particularly central to the movement.13

A second important anthology of New Left documents was The New Student Left, published in 1966 and edited by Mitchell Cohen and Dennis Hale, SDSers from Swarthmore College class of 1966. The two young students certainly stressed the importance of SDS. Moreover, the anthology's purpose as a collection of writings by students perhaps justified the decision to include Tom Hayden's "A Letter to the New (Young) Left" while excluding the far more influential epistle by C. Wright Mills. Even these SDS partisans only included three and a half pages from the PHS, excerpting the paragraphs that emphasized the importance of student political activism. The second edition of the book, published in 1967, added a longer excerpt on foreign policy, to which the two editors attached a declaration (to be examined later) about the "primacy of SDS" in the antiwar movement.14

Former SDS activist Jack Newfield wrote one of the first booklength accounts of the New Left in 1966. His A Propbetic Minority defined the New Left as including national political leaders, cultural nonconformists, and local activists, all united by a diverse ideology rooted in "anarchism, pacifism, and socialism." Even while Newfield described this "pluralistic, amorphous, and multi-layered" movement, however, he concentrated on SNCC and SDS--4he first because of the importance of the southern Civil Rights movement and the second because of Newfield's self-described "hunch" that SIDS "will be the chief repository" of the growing radicalism. However partisan, Newfield never claimed that SIDS exemplified the New Left during the first half of the 1960s. Indeed, he stressed that the SIDS that wrote the PHS in 1962 was "Just one of a dozen radical student groups."" Even in the arena of greatest student activism, foreign policy, SIDS was a minor player. The group's fall- 1962 membership of 450 was far outnumbered by the 3,500 members of the Student Peace Union, or 7,000 members of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in 1961, a majority based in student chapters. Numbers alone do not produce innovative ideas, but SDS's small size raises important questions about its relationship to these larger social movements.16

Newfield actually devoted little space to analyzing the New Left's origins. Instead, he concentrated on discussing the mid-decade ideological debate over the composition of liberalism and the possibility of realignment. Newfield declared that the PHS "support[ed] political realignment." Moreover, he stated that the document proposed that the university could be only "the catalytic agent of social change"-that is, students and intellectuals would be the spark of radical change, not the engine. Regardless of Newfield's sympathies to the realignment faction (exemplified by his choice of Michael Harrington to write his book's introduction), he admitted that, by 1965, numerous New Leftists, inside and outside of SIDS, had begun to question that strategy. Newfield's recognition of the importance of realignment forced him to locate the issue as the intellectual conclusion of the book. This debate, exemplified by the pro-realignment article by Bayard Rustin, titled "From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement," and Staughton Lynd's retort, titled "Coalition Politics or Nonviolent Revolution," rather than the PHS appears at the center of the New Lefts intellectual life.17

Two more important document collections appeared in 1969, The New Left. A Documentary History, edited by Massimo Teodori, and The New Let A Collection of Essays, edited by Priscilla Long. Three years had made a huge difference. Teodori reprinted a small section of the PHS that discussed values and students, but only as the first of 12 documents in a section titled "The Emergence of a New Left Position." Moreover, Teodori critically wrote that while the PHS "may be considered the first manifesto of the New Left," many of the PHS's conclusions "are no longer shared by a large part of the New Left." By contrast, Long's smaller but still excellent book did not bother to include any part of the PHS."

While primarily a document collection, Teodori provided a lengthy introductory overview First, he defined the New Left as a collection of social movements based on issues of civil rights, civil liberties, community organizations, peace, women, and students. These movements broke from Old Left notions of labor and class and instead included such cultural ideas as a "desire for nonconformity" and "self expression." Second, these movements largely existed outside of any national organizational framework, indeed this antistructural attitude was one key difference between the Old and New Lefts. Finally, Teodori considered the slow disillusionment with the idea of an alignment with liberalism as the maturation of the New Left."

James O'Brien summarized the first generation of New Left historical work in his 1971 University of Wisconsin dissertation "The Development of a New Left in the United States, 1960-1965." In it, he utilized a wide base of evidence, including oral interviews, collections of national political organizations, left-wing periodicals, and-most importantly -student newspapers from 11 campuses that were Important during the period 1958 to 1965. By examining the decade from the bottom up at such key places as Antioch, Berkeley, Cambridge, Ithaca, Madison, Swarthmore, and Oberlin, O'Brien proposed and confirmed an Important thesis: "The New Left was not congruent with any one organization."20

O'Brien labeled the SDS of the early decade as "an extremely small organization" that did not "play an important role in giving direction to the national student movement." O'Brien identified the PHS as the "most comprehensive critique of American society that came out of the student movement," but he did not award the document paradigmatic status. He considered the phrase "participatory democracy" an "imprecise" term that was only the "beginnings of a basic critique of the decision making processes of American society." O'Brien further identified realignment as the PHS's "only concrete notion." His understanding was that the manifesto recommended that the New Left avoid breaking with liberalism. Most crucially, he denied that the publication of the PHS greatly benefited the nascent radical student group: 'What the experience of SDS seemed to show was that even a thoughtful and well-developed political perspective was not [enough], by itself, to draw together the disparate strands of the student movement."21

O'Brien portrayed a New Left based on political moralism and culrural alienation, with strong roots in radical pacifism, as exemplified in the Civil Rights movement, as well as in beat poetry and folk music. The strength of this "nonconformist subculture" determined the power of the nascent New Left at any one campus.22

This moralism and alienation first merged not in an organization or a manifesto but in a place and a social movement: the 1964 Free Speech Movement in Berkeley The Bay Area possessed a strong tradition of political radicalism, of being the center of cultural rebellion, and a university administration uniquely committed to restricting student activism. Equally Important, the Berkeley students, and those across the nation who emulated them, fought not for solidarity but for their own rights. As O'Brien insightfully noted,

Whereas student political activism up to this point in the 1960s had engaged students as quasi-intellectuals who because of their status had a vantage point for seeing injustices in the broader society, growing numbers of students were now coming to see their own lives as bound up with the need for change.23

Unlike accounts that emphasize a disjuncture in the decade, O'Brien argued for a "basic continuity between the New Left as it emerged in 1965 and the much larger and more militant New Left in the late 1960s." One part of his assertion rests on continued doubts about SDS. In a 1971 article, O'Brien asserted that "at no time during the decade had any organization been able to maintain hegemony over the movement."

The second foundation of continuity rests on his suggestion that radicals students could oppose injustice while also acting out of selfinterest. Indeed, O'Brien suggests that the reason the Old Left failed to influence young radicals was its insistence that students were but auxiliaries in a struggle to oppose the real oppression of the working class. Consequently, he does not place such post-1968 social movements as feminism outside of the New Left.24

The Exultation

The canonization of SIDS began with the publication in 1973 of SDS by Kirkpatrick Sale. Here, the story of the entire New Left opens in 1960 with the rejuvenation of SIDS and closes in 1970 when three members of the Weather Underground died while making bombs. To Sale, SIDS not only "shaped the politics of a generation," it "rekindled the fires of American radicalism for the first time in thirty years" and served as "the major expression of the American Left in the sixties." The organization had become "the catalyst, vanguard, and personification of that decade." If SDS was the decade's politics, the direction was not toward progress. Sale asserted that with the March 2, 1970, explosion in New York City,"starkly, amid ruins, did an era come to an end."25

In regards to the PHS, Sale provided only partial adulation, He called the document "heavily derivative," full of "jargon" and "rhetoric," and noticeably that four-fifths of the doucment was "fairly reformist acknowledged that four-fifths of the document was "failry reformist politics in the traditional mold of enlightened liberalism." For him, "none of that mattered." The vision section, which comprised only 20 percent, enable the mainfesto to became.

not only a statement of principles for the few hundred students around SIDS, not only a political expression for the hundreds who were to come into the organization in the succeeding years, but even more a summary of beliefs for much of the student generation as a whole, then and for several years to come. 26

Such an argument depends on a more accurate reading of the document than Sale provides. The most important misreading concerned the all-important question of social agency-upon what base would a New Left build a movement for radical change? Sale summarized his interpretation of this crucial question as follows:

And the stategy for getting from the present to the future is rooted in the awareness that students, academics, and intellectuals can forge a new Left for America, using not the legislature or the factories or the streets but the universities as the "potential base and agency in a morement for social change."27

The last clause, quoted directly from the PHS, was taken out of context. The full sentence actually reads "Social relevance, the accessibility to knowledge, and internal openness-these together make the university a potential base and agency in a movement for social change" (emphasis added). Moreover, the section that preceded this sentence merely claimed that universities were an additional locus of political action, not a replacement for class struggle or electoral politics. The PHS was far more traditional than Sale admitted. Early SDS leaders never dreamed of awarding any self-styled new intellectual class the power to be "the" social agent in a nationwide radical movement that eschewed both unions and the Democratic Party.28

In fact, a close reading of the PHS supports the view that the document actually largely endorsed older socialist ideas. The PHS reaffirmed the working class as the central agency for social change. The PHS clearly stated that 'labor's role Is no less unique or important to the needs of the future than it was in the past. . At is the best candidate for the synthesis of the civil rights, peace, and economic reform movements." The PHS also endorsed realignment, as well as the assumption that the strategy required an alliance with liberalism. The SDS manifesto even proposed realignment as the crucial project to unite all progressive activists.

These contemporary social movements-for peace, civil rights, civil liberties, labor--have in common certain values and goals .... But these scattered movements have more in common: a need for their concerns to be expressed by a political party responsible to their interests...An imperative task for these disinherited groups, then, is to demand a Democratic Party responsible to their interests.29

One aspect of the PHS that did challenge the existing Left consensus was the concept of participatory democracy. The term called for heightened civic involvement at every level of society so that every individual could "share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life." The new concept sometimes challenged older left ideas, as when the PHS asserted that "political parties, even if realigned, would not provide adequate outlet for popular involvement." The PHS, however, only vaguely applied the utopian aspects of participatory democracy to such matters as human relationships, centralization, and bureaucracy; indeed, the conference hardly discussed the term at all. Moreover, little in the largely policy-oriented document could be seen as associated with the growing alternative culture.30

That the PHS was both new and old would not have surprised its creators at the time. They themselves directly expressed the dual nature of the document by dividing it between the need to "state a vision:' which revolved around the ambiguous ramifications of participatory democracy, and to examine the "social forces" that might be mobilized to support change -in which the authors supported quite standard Left views. The manifesto's attitude toward students exemplified this division. The PHS was to infuse the student movement with a moral vision, to generate political activism, and (the last page of the manifesto assigned this critical task) to "awaken its allies." The first generation of SIDS leaders hoped the student movement would be the spark that created the conditions for a realignment of the Democratic Party.31

Authors frequently signify their interpretative commitment to declension with a subtitle, as with James Miller's 1987 Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago. Miller stated his theme just as directly in the text itself, claiming that by 1970 the New Left had "collapsed, plummeting into cultural oblivion as if it had been some kind of political Hula-Hoop." Miller notes, however, that an ideological golden age, represented by the ideals of the PHS preceded this grand extinction. In sharp contrast with Sale, Miller saw the document as "thoughtful and plainspoken," "a cogent critique of American society" with "a freshness of vision:' and all the more remarkable for the absence of rhetoric and jargon. Throughout the book, Miller admonished the later New Left for abandoning its roots.32

Miller located the PHSs ideological foundation in two places. First, the early SDS leadership "took their central political ideas... from the tradition of civic republicanism." Unfortunately, this assertion primarily demonstrated the seemingly endless elasticity of an intellectual concept that has leapt from the English Civil War of the 1640s and 1650s to the American Revolution to the labor movement of industrializing America and finally to the shores of Lake Huron. The term republicanism itself becomes ahistorical and largely meaningless in the book. Miller himself must have understood the problem since, save for a single reference, he completely abandoned the idea of civic republicanism after his introduction.33

Miller devoted an entire chapter to the PHSs supposed second source, the writings of C. Wright Mills. These additional words, however, do not help discern early SIDS ideology. Miller would have been wise to follow up, instead of merely quoting, Hayden's 1961 comment that Mills provided "no path out of the dark." This admission would have led Miller to the question of social agency and the role of realignment. Instead, Miller labeled the traditional sections of the manifesto as mere concessions to the small Young Peoples Socialist League faction and Steve Max, and thought no further. Miller, like other scholars, has overlooked the way the PHS rejected rather than accepted the ideas of C. Wright Mills in three important areas: the importance of the working class, the role of intellectuals, and the question of tactics.34

No one who has closely read of Mills's 1960 "Letter to the New Left" and the PHS could miss the PHSs rebuff of the radical sociologist. First, Mills labeled the belief that the working class would provide a base for social change as "most ambiguous," "a labor metaphysics," "a legacy from Victorian Marxism," "quite unrealistic," "a-historical," and (three times) "collapsed." Nowhere does the PHS statement use language of this kind. Second, Mills postulated "the cultural apparatus, the intellectuals-as a possible, immediate, radical agency of change." The PHSs commitment to the politics of labor prevented any statement equally direct. Third, Mills proposed that "direct non-violent action" might be the key strategic notion of social transformation. This suggestion, however tentatively made, should be contrasted with the central role the PHS assigned to electoral politics and realignment. The three points make one issue quite clear-the "Letter to the New Left" represented the decade's future far more than the PHS.35

Miller's account of the New Left in decline is no more insightful. First, Miller suggested that adherents of participatory democracy applied the notion too strictly to an organization designed to change society at large. This lessened SDSs political effectiveness and made it susceptible to antidemocratic forces later in the decade. He largely ignored how poorly SIDS actually practiced participatory democracy, inexcusably ignoring the nascent women's movement's critique of the SDS leadership. For example, the book's index failed to include an entry for feminism, while the entry on women's liberation refers the reader to only a single paragraph. Miller located the second reason for the New Left's decline in the lure of the guerrillas, whether peasants in Vietnam or blacks in American cities. Both seduced young activists impatient with the difficulties of social change. As a result, strategic thinking gave way to "dramatic posturing." Regarding questions of tactics, Miller consistently compressed into mere revolutionary adolescent posturing such divergent notions as nonelectoral politics, direct action, civil disobedience, and the notion of creating a mass popular base outside of a liberal alliance. By refusing to engage in the intellectual debates of the decade, he forfeited the opportunity to explain the era.36

Maurice Isserman's If I Had a Hammer .. The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left, published in 1987, also belongs within the SDS-centered declension school. He stated that the PHS "spoke for a generation of activists determined to begin their political involvement without the illusions that had destroyed the Old Left." Compelled by reality to adm@it that the manifesto endorsed the Old Left notion of realignment, Isserman made the now standard-if still inaccurate--claim that the stance was a mere concession to Michael Harrington and Steve Max. He further privileged SDS as the movement's only child, avowing that during 1962 this still tiny group become "the most important" radical student group and claimed that "soon it would be regarded as virtually synonymous with the 'New Left.'"37

Isserman asserted that the seeds of decline lay in a much-discussed conflict with SDSs sponsor, the League for Industrial Democracy, over the PHS. The Young People's Socialist League faction within SDS apparently conspired to win control of the student group by provoking a confrontation with the League for Industrial Democracy by falsely reporting to Michael Harrington (the League for Industrial Democracy representative at the Port Huron convention who had left early for another engagement) that the SDS leadership had refused suggested changes concerning the PHS's criticisms of the labor movement and hostility toward anticommunism.

In one memorable salvo, the League for Industrial Democracy board met secretly, fired the SDS staff, and took possession of its office by changing the door lock. Cooler heads prevailed and the established SDS leadership survived. Isserman, however, alleged that SDS leaders falsely concluded that "liberals could not be trusted" and consequently began a search for new radical allies at home and abroad, a search that became so frenzied as to replace democracy with its opposite. In Isserman's own words, the PHS controversy caused SDS to move "steadily further away from the very radical democratic values it initially sought to champion."38

Tellingly, Isserman's single endnote for the assertion of misguided liberal estrangement was a 1986 interview with Steve Max, a leader of the realignment faction who, embittered over the organization's failure to endorse his views, left SDS in 1965 to join the League for Industrial Democracy's staff Tom Hayden discussed the controversy with much more accuracy in an interview for Newfield's 1966 book. In it, Hayden stated that the conflict "taught me that Social Democrats aren't radicals and can't be trusted in a radical movement. It taught me what Social Democrats really think about civil liberties and organizational integrity" Ultimately, the battle illuminates a historical irony that has continued in other forms-the PHS first became important not for what it said, but for what people claimed it said."

Isserman missed an important source of the New Left ideals and ideology by slighting pacifism." First, he focused on the actions of the Committee for Nonviolent Action, long after most important pacifist figures had abandoned the group. Second, Isserman awarded the radical pacifist magazine Liberation only a few scattered paragraphs while allotting a whole chapter to Dissent, hardly an accurate assessment of their relative influence on the New Left. Moreover, few could read old issues of Dissent and concur with Isserman's judgment that the journal "anticipated many of the political themes that would characterize the early New Left: an emphasis upon values, decentralization, and discovering a link between personal life and the larger political order."41

In reality, it was Liberation's 1956 founding statement that urged decentralization and called for individuals to have "direct participation" in decisions affecting work and leisure. The pacifist commitment to nonviolence, criticism of centralization, opposition to anticommunism, and openness to the counterculture, and its sense of tactics provided much of what would be labeled the New Left style. The New Left owed far more to Dorothy Day, A. J. Muste, and Liberation than to Michael Harrington, Irving Howe, and Dissent."

Indeed, when compared to the other foreign policy dissidents, pacifist and nonpacifist alike, the PHS statement's anti-anticommunism and endorsement of what has been called third-camp politics appears neither original nor wholehearted. The document did challenge SDSs social democratic adult sponsors on the role of anticommunism in American life by asserting that an "unreasoning anti-communism," shared by socialists -and liberals, had strengthened the nation's political stasis. Moreover, SIDS had allowed a member of a Communist Party youth group to observe the Port Huron proceedings, even if the delegates pointed out that the decision implied "neither approval or fraternal relations" with the Communist Party. However, pacifists affiliated with the American Forum for Socialist Education, Liberation magazine, and the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy had been arguing since the late 1950s that a New Left must filly include the generation of Old Leftists who had only recently supported the Communist Party. Activists from the nonpacifist wing of third-camp politics-exemplified by C. Wright Mills, the journal Stu&es on the Left, and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee--had also urged a similar kind of politics, years before the PHS. Only as manipulated by the Young People's Socialist League and within the context of the reified anticommunism of New York City social democrats, could the PHS appear to be a radical break from anticommunism.43

Todd Gitlin's The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, published in 1987, is the most accomplished of New Left histories. Gitlin recognized that the PHS strongly endorsed realignment and that it did so not as some concession to an imagined SDS minority. He acknowledged, but still underestimated, the importance of pacifism both as an ideology and as a movement of political activists. This former SDS president even conceded that he failed to completely read the PHS because "the programmatic particulars got tedious:' a telling admission that highlights the conspicuous failure of PHS champions to establish a wide readership for the document. Ultimately, however, Gitlin's accomplishments reveal declension's core-a proposed organizational solution to the political problems raised by realignment in the first few years of the sixties and by the rise of new social movements in the last half of the decade.44

Marxists had devised realignment as part of their unhappy acceptance of the difficulties of starting a successful third party. Realignment posed one particularly important new problem: how were radicals to direct social activism without creating a radical political party? This was no small problem. Party building had been the central Left project in both Leninist and social-democratic theory. As an alternative, proponents of realignment labored to create a partylike organization with a primarily ideological role. Members would participate in social movements outside of this Left sem1party, simultaneously building social protest and promoting their strategic view of a socialist transformation.

Gitlin clearly expressed this ideological definition of the New Left. He excluded from membership mere activism in any radical social movements. The New Left only "made its appearance in the guise of single-issue movements: civil rights, campus reform, peace." Beneath that guise were the authentic New Leftists, those who searched for an ideological language to unite these disparate social movements. For Gitlin, only those who took part in this "struggle for self-definition" actually belonged to the New Left. He never examines the assumption that these movements could, or should, have been united.45

This ideological definition of the New Left has allowed Gitlin-and others-to disregard an inconvenient fact: the first generation of SDS leaders never led any of the decade's social movements. The Student Peace Union and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee dominated campus groups interested in foreign policy dissent during the 1959 to 1962 upsurge. Obviously, SIDS did not lead a southern Civil Rights movement based in the African American Christian community. The attempt by SIDS leaders to create an urban movement against poverty, the famed midsixties Economic Research and Action Project, was a total failure. The assertion that SIDS initiated the anti-Vietnam War movement only to spurn the leadership role is absurd to any scholar familiar with the peace movement.46

The inherent bias of this narrow ideological definition of the New Left is more apparent in the comment of the declensionists on the second generation of SDS activists. Newfield discerned "appalling anti-intellectualism" in the members who joined after 1965. Miller quoted Jacobs and Landau; he agreed that the new members were "not well read in Marxism or in other radical literature." Gitlin, while more circumspect in his own book, declared support in an interview conducted by his former student Tom Wells for the notion that the new generation was "unintellectual"-"marijuana was more important to them than political theory." Only one common footnote (a mere two pages in Newfield's 1966 book based on his interviews with twenty-five young SIDS members) was used to sustain these assertions.47

Unfortunately, even a casual reading of Newfield's results disproves the accusation. Newfield denigrated the younger group because none had read crucial thinkers on the postwar American society such as Rosa Luxemberg, Max Weber, Peter Kropotkin, or John Stuart Mill. Fewer than ten had read Lenin, Trotsky, or Marx. Instead, the younger SDSers read such thinkers as C. Wright Mills, Albert Camus, Paul Goodman, and Herbert Marcuse, and the novelists Ken Kesey and Thomas Pynchon-fiction that Newfield chided for dealing with "the decadence or absurdity of life." Given that the new SIDS leaders were still college undergraduates at a time when colleges almost universally lacked radical professors, the list actually demonstrated striking intellectual interest. Indeed, a strong case could be made that the respective reading lists made it more likely that younger SDS members would understand American society better than their slightly older elders.48

The real reason for the name-calling was political. The new generation of SDSers had repudiated realignment for two rather obvious reasons. First, Democratic Party liberalism proved incapable of ending the Vietnam War or building a national consensus on civil rights, while conservatives were creating a very different kind of realignment, one of an emerging Republican majority@ Second, new members rejected the idea that the SDSs primary mission was ideological and resolved to build social movements based in notions of race, gender, sexuality, generation, foreign policy dissent, ecology, or decentralized communities. These movements, frequently hostile to liberalism and notions of class, only furthered the rejection of the founder's social democratic ideals.

This shift in activists' priorities occurred as an internal fight among SDS's national leadership and destroyed the organization, allowing declensionists to identify SDSs decline as synonymous with the Left's decomposition because of the supposed value of a national organization over mere social movements. Gitlin claimed that "once SDS imploded, there was no national organization to keep the student movement boiling" and the Left became a mere "grab bag of movements for social and cultural change." According to Sale, there was "no formal organization on the Left that could replace SIDS in the life of the Movement." In its place were "a plethora of political groups [that] continued to operate on the campuses in succeeding years-the sectlets, socialist parties, single-issue committees, ad hoc coalitions, women's groups, homosexual organizations." According to Miller, with the dissolution of SDS "the Movement collapsed, leaving behind a congeries of smaller single-issue movements, demanding peace in Vietnam, dignity for blacks, liberation for women, respect for homosexuality, reverence for the balance of nature."49

This organizational thesis has three grave weaknesses. First, one must question whether SIDS ever functioned as a coherent organization. Champions of SIDS have failed to test the assertion that the organization played a coordinating role by examining local chapters. O'Brien began such research; he insisted that SIDS was always far more of a network than an organization. Second, numerous scholars have questioned whether a centralized national organization could have ever encompassed the New Left. Instead, they suggest that a commitment to new forms of organizations based on the notion of prefigurative politics was one of the movement's most important-and largely positive--characteristics.50

Ironically, the third and biggest weakness in the narrative of decline may be the belief that progress toward the Left in the political sphere of the 1960s was actually possible. Besides ignoring the strength of a postwar conservative movement that was no mere backlash to the New Left, the assumption of progress supposes some retrospective alliance with liberalism. The project remains dubious. Even Michael Harrington, a leading backer of realignment and crucial participant in the PHS debate, distrusted the possibility in a 1987 interview He stated that the realignment coalition of liberals and radicals had been "based on a simplistic 'Marxism' that saw an easily mobilized and economistically constructed popular majority, held back only by our irrational party structures." Recent important research on the weakness of postwar liberalism's reformist potential further weakens the supposed insights of this kind of declensionist hindsight.51

Rather than asking such hard questions, declensionists have created a mythic ideological golden age. The capstone is the sharpest possible division between the PHS and the Weather Underground. One reads that SIDS imploded because of youthful impatience or righteous anger, because of the entryism of the Progressive Labor Party or the excesses of pacifism's misguided moralism, or from the rejection of participatory democracy-anything to obscure the actual ideological continuity. In fact, the PHS helped beget the Weather Underground by beginning the ever-narrowing search for a Marxist-style agency of social change, by promoting the idea that SDS should lead by formulating ideology, and by fostering elitism and intellectual arrogance toward other far-broader social movements.

Coda

When read in succession, declensionist accounts of the New Left do provide one example of decline-the quality of the works themselves. The best illustration is the 1994 book The War Within:America Battle over Vietnam by Tom Wells. The tide notwithstanding, Wells largely ignored the antiwar movement and even the broader New Left. Instead, he concentrated solely on explaining SDSs ill-fated late-1960s revolutionary turn. The book's index contained longer entries for SDS than the American Friends Service Committee, Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam, or Women Strike for Peace. Even Wells's separate entry for the SIDS offshoot Weather Underground was larger than any of the three groups, hardly an accurate assessment of the role each played in the struggle to end the Vietnam War.52

Wells claimed that the decision by SIDS to hold an antiwar demonstration on Easter weekend 1965 and then immediately abandon foreign policy work for community organizing created a 'leadership void" in the antiwar movement. Like others, Wells ignored the fact that the peace movement had been holding local, regional, and national demonstrations on Easter weekend since 1959. SIDS only 'led" the antiwar movement in spring 1965 because it had decided to promote a national antiwar rally before Johnson escalated the war in early 1965. Absent that fluke, the same coalition of peace groups that sponsored later marches would have controlled the demonstration. Moreover, while SIDS refused to allow other peace groups to share in national sponsorship, SIDS held a distinctly minor role in organizing support for the rally at the local level--sponsoring buses or sparking the spring campus teach-in movement.53

Into the supposed political vacuum in the peace movement, Wells inserted the Socialist Workers Party, which he labeled "the most divisive force" within the antiwar movement. By invariably attributing national movement divisions to Socialist Workers Party sectarian gamesmanship, Wells caricatured the political controversy that actually ties at the center of movement disputes-and at the core of the decade itself-the debate over the character of American liberalism. Wells even attributed the divisiveness of the dispute over whether one should call for the withdrawal of US troops or a negotiated settlement largely to the "hatred between the Socialist Workers Party and Communist Party." In reality, the dispute split the entire antiwar movement along the lines of the divisions about American liberalism that already existed. The wider debates of the period-the Democratic Party's reliance on racism, the corporate control of the electoral system, and the cold war's bipartisan imperialism-when present in the book at all, are placed within the context of the Socialist Workers Party's admittedly sectarian behavior.54

Wells's treatment of the post 1965 generation of SDS members was no less crude. He called them "unintellectual" and "anarchistic" while asserting that "marijuana was more important to them than political theory" (All citations are to Wells's own interview with Todd Gitlin and a section of Sale's book that actually refuted such claims.) Rather than discuss the radical analysis of American politics, he filled his book with interviews with New Left veterans who regretted the "immaturity" and "revolutionary fantasizing" of their youth. As a result, the New Lefts radical turn seems incomprehensible and thus irrational. Gitlin, Wells's dissertation advisor, presented the psychological case quite directly in the book's forward. Gitlin claimed the later radicals

elevated themselves into the only authority they would recognize-an alluring but dangerous polictical principle. They went their own cultural and political way. Because such radical self-reliance is psychologically difficult, they eventually constructed fantasies about revolutionary leaders abroad.55

Wells's book completely expunged the New Left's critique of liberalism, the very engine of the movement. With that act, declension reached its final resolution.

Conclusion

The social movements of the 1960s were far too complex to be dominated by the small group of student activists affiliated with SDSs national leadership. On all but a few campuses, viable SDS chapters existed only between 1965 and 1968. A younger student Left predated the group. An older Left, influenced by communism and pacifism, dominated most national and many local peace movement coalitions. SDS never exercised much influence in such key places as Madison and Berkeley, and, even as SDS peaked, numerous social movements like feminism and gay liberation were developing outside of the organization. Some day, hopefully soon, the view that SDS exemplified the social movements of the 1960s will produce in graduate students that same rhetorical question and worldly glance provoked by the Dunning school of reconstruction: How could historians have manufactured such unsatisfactory and timebound history?

The New Left began in the 1950s as a moral protest against the cold war order. Be they on a grand scale like the Montgomery bus boycott, or on the small scale, the private acts of deviance within the nascent counterculture, these were minority movements of conscience and civil disobedience. As Kennedy cold war liberalism gave way to johnson Great Society liberalism, the New Left shifted to the question of power and the hope that the two core movements-peace and civil rights-could merge and restructure, or even replace, liberalism. After 1968, however, the New Left largely abandoned such notions of majoritarian politics in the face of an increasingly divided Left and Republican Party conservatism. A very few explored the potential of violence. A good number retreated to a modified liberalism in a defense of the possible. Many moved from the issue of power to the issue of potential of culture; they often created new social movements outside of the issues of race and foreign policy.

Myths of declension risk transforming New Leftists into the new mugwumps, those elder statesmen of post-Civil War reform who told and retold the same anecdotes to an ever-shrinking audience of generational cohorts. Rather than trying to compress dissent into a socialdemocratic majoritarian ideal of the PHS, scholars should expand the definition of the New Left while respecting the movement's status as a prophetic minority. In this story, SDSs descent into Leninism actually paralleled wider trends, for, like the Weather Underground, the broader New Left was abandoning the pretense of organizing a majority and embracing a wide array of minority conditions. Indeed, one might argue that only after the conscious rejection of the last remnant of the Old Left notion of "The People" did the New Left become filly New."

Notes

1.Primary works in this school include Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York- Vintage Books, 1973); Todd Gitlin, The Sixties.- Year of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987); James Miller, "Democracy is in the Streets". From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); Maurice Isserman, If l Had a Hammer .. The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987); and Tom Wells, The Wlar Within: America's Battle over Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

2. On the complexities of women's politics in the 1950s, see Susan Lynn, Progessive Women in Conservative Times.- Racial justice, Peace, and Feminism, 1945-1960 (New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 1992);Joanne Meyerowitz, "Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946-1958." journal of American History 79, no. 4 (March 1993): pp. 1455-82; Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., NOT June Cleaver Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994).

3. On the women's movement, see Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad- Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). On the antinuclear movement, see Barbara Epstein, Poetical Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the 1970s and 1980s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). On the politics of food, see Craig Cox, Storefront Revolution.- Food Co-ops and the Counterculture (New Brunswick NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 1994). On the gay and lesbian movement, see John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities.The Making ofa Homosexwal Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) and the special issue of Raaical Hisfory Review (spring 1995), "The Queer Issue: New Visions of America's Lesbian and Gay Past" On the environmental movement, see Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence. Environmental Polices in the United States, 1955- 1985 (1987); Brain Balogh, Chain Reaction. Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commerial Nuclear Power, 1945-1975 (New York Cambridge University Press, 1991); Brian Balogh, Chain Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in Amencan Commercial Nuclear Power, 1945-1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Dan O'Neill, The Firecracker Boys (New York: St. Martin's, 1994).

4. Michael Kazin, "The Grass-Roots Right: New Histories of U.S. Conservatism in the Twentieth Century,"American Historical Review 97, no. 1 (Feb. 1992): pp. 136-55, and "AHR Forum on American Conservatism," American Historical Review 99, no. 2 (April 1994): pp. 409-52.

5. Van Gosse first applied the label declension to 1960s historiography in Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold WarAmerica and the Making of a New Left (London: Verso Press, 1993)@

6. For liberal accounts see Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Libera,6sm in the 1960s (New York: Harper and Row, 1984); and Terry Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in Americafmm Greensboro to Wounded Knee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). For conservative accounts see Kenneth J. Heineman, Campus Wars: The Peace Movement alAmerican State Universities in the Vietnam Era (New York. New York University Press, 1993); Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts aboutthe '60s (New York: Summit Books, 1989); and Adam Garfinkle, TeIlFale Hearts.- The Otins and Impact of the Vietnam Antiwar

pact of the Vietnam Ant (New York: St. Martin's, 1995). Movement (New York- St. Martixes, 1995).

7. For example, Winifred Breines wrote a powerful criticism of declension by highlighting the complexities of the late 1960s. However, she shares the faith regarding the importance of early SDS. See Breines, "Whose New Left?" Journal ofAmerican Histog 75, no. 2 (Sept. 1988): pp. 528-45; and Breines, Community andOrganiZation in The New Left, 1962-1968: The Great Refusal (New York: Praeger, 1982). A more recent effort by Rick Perlstein to dethrone declension failed, in part, for the same reason. Perlstein, "Who Owns the Sixties?" lingua Franca (May-June 1996), pp. 30-37 and letters to the editor lingua Franca Guly-Aug. 1996), p. 5.

8. The group was called the Student League for Industrial Democracy until 1960, when it adopted the name Students for a Democratic Society. Sale's SDS is still the best source on the details of SDS history.

9. For an introduction to the extensive literature on the Old Left, see Maurice Isserman, "Three Generations: Historians View American Communism," Labor Hislory 26, no. 4 (fall 1985): pp. 517-45; Michael E. Brown et al., eds., New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism (New York: Monthly Review, 1993): Michael Kazin, "The Agony and Romance of the American Left," American Historical Review 100, no. 5 (Dec. 1995): pp. 1488-1512. See also Marijo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Left (New York: Garland, 1990).

10. Buhle et al.

11. The literature on the Civil Rights movement and peace movement are well known. On early 1960s culture, see Sally Banes, Greennch Village 1963: Avant-Gank Performance and The Effervescent Boa (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), Robert

Cantwell, When Wle Were Good- The Falk Revival (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); and Ann Charters, The PortAble Beat Reader(New York- Penguin, 1992).

12. Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau, eds., The Nov Radicals.-A Report mith Doemmenft (New York.- Vintage Books, 1966), pp. 3, 31-32, 149.

13. Jacobs and Landau, pp. 6, 59, emphasis in original

14. Mitchell Cohen and Dennis Hale, eds., The New StudrxIL4 Boston: Beacon, 1966; rev. ed. 1967), pp. xxiv, 215-18, 291-305.

15. Jack Newfield, A PnpheAerican New Ieft (New York. Signet, 1966), pp. 30,116, 208.

16. On SDS membership, see Miller, p. 165; on SPU membership, see Isserman, p. 198; and on FPC membership, see Gosse, p. 146,

17. Newfield, A Prophetic Minoris , pp. 30, 132, respectively. Both articles were published in the radical pacifist magazine Liberation, a testament to the leading role pacifists played in the New Left.

18. Massimo Teodori, ed., The New 1--ft A Dommen" Histog (New York BobbsMerrill, 1969), pp. 40,163-72. Priscilla Long, ed., The New Left: A Collection ofEssays (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1969).

19. Teodori, pp. 1-90, 36-37. Staughton Lynd's short introduction on the history of the New Left development a similar perspective in the Long book.

20. James Putnam O'Brien, University of Wisconsin, 1971, p. 417.

21. Ibid., pp. 238-46.

22. Ibid., p. 220.

23. Ibid., p. 392.

24. Ibid., p. 425 James O'Brien, "The Development of the New Left," Annals of the American Academy of Political Science (May 1971), p. 24, as quoted in Gosse, p. 12.

25. Sale, pp. 5-8.

26 Ibid., pp. 49-51.

27. Ibid., p. 53; emphasis in original for all except "the," emphasis added.

28. Miller, p. 373.

29. All PHS quotes from the appendix of Miller. On labor, see pp. 370-71; on liberals, see pp. 355, 362, 369, and 373, realignment quote p. 372.

30. As quoted in Miller, pp. 362, 333, on the lack of discussion of participatory democracy, see p. 119.

31. Miller, pp. 333-35, 369-70, 373-74.

32. Ibid., pp. 311, 14.

33. Ibid., p. 16.

34. Miller; Mills, pp. 78-91, 90 (quote); Young People's Socialist League, p. 119; Max, p. 103.

35. Long, pp@ 14-25. Originally published in New ft Re/ew (Sept.-Oct. 1960) and republished as "On the New Left," in Sies on the Ltft 2, no. 1 (1961). On PHS and

36. Miller; on structure, see pp. 255-59, on guerrilla war, see pp. 1 (1961-62, 285 (quote). On PHS and Mills, see Miller, esp. pp.202, 78-91.

36. Miller; on structure, see pp. 255-59, on guerrilla war, see pp. 261-62, 285 (quote). 37. Issennan,pp.202,210.

38. On the factional maneuver, see Miller, p. 127, and Isserman, p. 213. On the results, see Isserman, pp. 209, 213.

39. Isserman, pp. 213, 243 n. 75; on Max, see Sale, pp. 154-57; on Hayden, see Newfield, p. 134. On SDS's awareness of Young People's Socialist League machinations, see Gitlin, p. 119.

40. Peace historians have abetted the mistake by representing pacifism as either liberal or religious or simply heroic. Sociologist Stanley Aronowitz and historian Jim O'Brien are almost alone in recognizing that Muste was one of the most important radical figures of the decade. See Charles DeBenedetti, The Peace Rorm in American Histor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); Charles DeBenedetti (Charles Chatfield, assisting ed.), An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990);Jo Ann Ooiman Robinson, Abraham Vent Out: A Biography of A j Moste (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981); Stanley Aronowitz, "When the New Left Was New," in The Sixties without Apology, ed. Sohnya Sayres, Anders Stephanson, Stanley Aronowitz, and Frederic Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 29-31, and O'Brien, p. 25.

41. Isserman, p. 118.

42. "Tract for the Times," liberation 1, no. 1 (1956). On the real pacifist movement of the period, see Allen Smith, "The Renewal Movement: The Peace Testimony and Modem Quakerism,".QuakerHislog 85, no. 2 (fall 1996). See also the entry on liberation by Allen Smith in the new Engelope& of The American Left (forthcoming).

43. Miller, p. 116. On third camp and pacifism, see Isserman, pp. 125-70; on Liberation, see Cristina Scatamacchia, "Poetics, Liberation, and Intellectual Radicalism," Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri-Columbia, 1990; on the nonpacifist left, see Gosse.

44. Githa, The Sixties, on PHS, pp. 113-14,192, on pacifism, p. 86, on reading the PHS, p. 101. SDS printed and distributed 40,000 copies through fall 1966. Sale argued that "one tattered document passed through the hands of a dozen students." Those familiar with political organizing might wonder how many sat boxed in a closet of were given to prospective members who, like Gitlin, lacked the interest to read the 66 single-spaced pages. Miller added the 20,000 excerpted copies printed in 1966 without comprehending how deleting the liberal segments fundamentally transformed the meaning of the document. Sale, p. 69; Miller, p. 153.

45. Gitlin, pp. 83-84.

46. On the supposed crucial peace role, Sale, pp. 170-74; Miller, pp. 226-34; Newfield, p. 27; Gitlin, p. 189.

47. Newfield, pp. 120; 204; Wells; Miller, p. 238.

48. Newfield, pp. 120-21.

49. Gitlin, pp. 417, 421; Sale, p. 622; Miller, p. 317.

50. For O'Brien's comment that SDS was "not a national organization," see Sale, p. 359. On prefigurative politics and the weakness of the organizational hypothesis, see Winifred Breines, "Whose New Left?" Journal ofAmerican Histog 75, no. 2 (Sept. 1988): 542; Gosse, p. 257.

51. Michael Harrington, "Port Huron: Agenda for a Generation," Socialist Ret/ew 17, no. 3-4 (May/Aug 1987): p. 156. On liberalism, see Arnold IL Hirsch, "Massive Resistance in the Urban North: Trumbull Park, Chicago, 1953-1966"; Thomas J. Sugrue, "Crabgrass-Roots Polit,-.s: Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940-1964"; Gary Gerstle, "Race and the Myth of the Liberal Consensus," all from the jommalofAmeri.-an Histoy 82, no. 2 (Sept. 1995).

52. Tom Wells The War Within.- America's Ba#lt ever Vietnam (Berkeley University of California Press, 1994). For a larger critique, see the review by Allen Smith in The Magland Histwian 25, no. 1 (spring-summer 1994): pp. 87-89.

53. Wells, pp. 14,48. On the tradition of Easter events, see Allen Smith, "The Renewal Movement,".QmakerHistonr, on SDS and national sponsorship, see Sale, pp. 179-81; on local actions in support of the April 1965 demonstration, see Allen Smith, "Converting America: Three Community Efforts to End the Cold War, 1956-1973," Ph.D. diss., American University, 1995; on the teach-ins, see DeBenedetti, pp. 107-16. The antidraft movement also owed much to pacifists and little to SDS, see Staughton Lynd and Michael Ferber, The Resistance (Boston: Beacon, 1971). Although 25 years old and out of print, the book remains the best historical treatment of the draft resistance movement.

54. Wells, pp. 3, 54.

55. Wells, pp. xvi, 45, emphasis added.

56. On the importance of the populist notion of "Mhe People" to the Left, see Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American Histoy (New York: Basic, 1995).

Allen Smith is an independent scholar who has published articles and reviews on the peace movement and the Left. He currently works for the AFL-CIO.

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