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The New Left Revisited: A Look at Recent Literature

The New Left in the United States spanned little more than a decade. It came into being in 1960 when a handful of young idealists in the Student League for Industrial Democracy began rejecting their social democratic roots and renamed themselves the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), whose activities, at the time of the occupation of Columbia University, are vividly described by Eleanor Ruskin in the present number of this journal. SDS died between 1969, when it splintered amid a chaos of sectarian conflict, and 1972, when an odd coalition of liberals, Trotskyists and exhausted radical leaders staged the last giant anti-war marches. In that short period the New Left came to represent hope or threat for millions of Americans. It imputed many of the traditional premises on which America based its optimism and its assurance of moral superiority. It left a lasting mark on the lives of its advocates and its opponents. Even while it existed the New Left encouraged a remarkable volume of publication from the very system it was attacking. A host of analysts stumbled over each other in a rush to explain the new movement and predict its future. The words of twenty-year-olds were carefully recorded and reproduced as profound revelation. Psychiatrists probed the radicals' minds, and sociologists studied their families. Political scientists examined their organizations and tactics, while historians made analogies between the young dissidents and the radicals of the past. A striking characteristic of these works was their immediacy. The first studies of the New Left appeared before 1965. By 1970, when the movement was already in its death throes, the publishing floodgates were thrown wide, spewing forth all manner of treatise and tract. Understandably the quality of the published products varied greatly. A respected historian such as Daniel Boorstin hardly enhanced his reputation in 1969 when he took time off from serious work to villify the radicals as the "New Barbarians" in a fiercely partisan essay.1 The less said the better about such contemporary classics as radical Jerry Rubin's Do It!.2