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"Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible": Staughton Lynd, Jesse Lemisch, and a Committed History

In the spring of 1968, a time of tumult on many American campuses, several hundred intellectuals, mostly younger faculty and graduate students, gathered at the University of Chicago for the founding meeting of the New University Conference (NUC). The Chicago meeting reflected all the ambivalence of people who were, for the most part, in an institution (the academy) that they saw as part of a corrupt American society. The two sides of this ambivalence were expressed most starkly by two New Left historians who had much in common but had drawn different lessons from their experiences. Staughton Lynd, in a keynote speech, argued that commitment to a university career and its “upward scramble” inevitably compromised a commitment to political activism. “You cannot work at a university as a factory worker labors at the bench. . . . Whatever we may think, or think we think, university life requires us to act as if our radicalism were episodic and of secondary importance.”1 Lynd acknowledged that not all left intellectuals should become activists, and he quoted approvingly Noam Chomsky’s claim that the intellectual’s first responsibility is “ ‘to insist upon the truth,’ ‘to speak the truth and to expose lies.’ ” But he argued that “that portion of the truth to which we will be led, the truth which seems