The New Left was the name attached to the radical student groups in the 1960s that sought to change the political culture and create a more participatory democratic system.
In 1960, students at the University of Michigan formed Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), an organization intended to encourage and support student political involvement. Two years later, Tom Hayden, an early organizer, issued the Port Huron Statement, a manifesto for SDS members and a program for action. In the statement, Hayden deplored the contradictions present in American society. Although the United States was a wealthy nation, he argued, many of its citizens lived in poverty. The nation gave lip service to equality, yet angry, violent racism was rampant throughout the country, and despite official protestations that the United States yearned for peace, its leaders advocated ever-deeper involvement in a distant conflict in Vietnam. To counter these contradictions, SDS called for equal opportunity, civil rights, and individual human rights. They called themselves members of a New Left, student-based and more vigorous than the old Left of the 1930s that had fragmented in the 1950s. They believed that students could make a difference, that idealistic, activist youth could change the system and bring about participatory democracy. SDS not only saw itself as a vanguard for a better society, it was also convinced that the general public, once aware of what changes could be accomplished through the democratic process, would follow its lead to a more egalitarian and just society.
The New Left’s adherents were usually young students who came from families with affluent white parents. Their members were centered in the universities and often focused their attention on problems close to home. Criticizing the impersonal quality of education, the restriction on political activity, outdated requirements, and the absence of relevant courses, the New Left denounced the association of universities and the government in the development of weapons systems and counterinsurgency plans. In its view, existing scholarship was committed to maintaining the status quo, and followers of the New Left, sometimes drawing on the critique of radical sociologist C. Wright Mills, called for scholarship directed at changing things for the better.
In order to accomplish their goal, New Left activists urged students on the nation’s campuses to put aside their apathy and become involved in making the world a better place in which to live. Despite radical students’ zeal at pursuing their objectives, the New Left did make a difference but only on a minority of college and university campuses, and it failed to motivate the nation as a whole. At best, members of the traditional political establishment turned a deaf ear to the students’ manifesto; at worst, they condemned the movement’s agenda and its followers for failing to conform. Frustrated, many of the original leaders of the New Left became increasingly radicalized. As the United States became openly involved in the Vietnam War and radicals realized that the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson was escalating, rather than ending, the war, the New Left became a strident voice of the antiwar movement.
By 1969, the movement sought new ways to fight the establishment. The Weathermen, a radical offshoot of SDS, resorted to violence in attacking the police and the public in Chicago as a way to disrupt American society. Members of the Weathermen descended on Chicago to, in their words, “tear pig city apart.” Dressed in protective clothing and chanting, “pick up, pick up, pick up the gun,” they ran through the city smashing shop windows. Later, the group adopted terrorist tactics and used bombs to gain attention to its cause. When three Weathermen building a bomb in a Greenwich Village building blew themselves up, the New Left’s radicalism became associated with social disorder. Middle-class Americans, never sympathetic to violent protest, insisted that order be brought back to the streets.
The violent activities of the New Left became intertwined with the counterculture. Some activists found themselves drawn to the freedom of “flower children,” garbed in tie-dyed costumes, “hippie communes” that mocked the traditional American family, and rebels who grew long hair and celebrated a drug culture. Some hippies ended up supporting political causes as they became more widespread. Both the New Left and the counterculture counseled: “Never trust anyone over 30!”
Following riots at the Democratic National Convention in 1968, the New Left was anathema to mainstream America. In 1969, newly inaugurated President Richard M. Nixon felt he had a mandate to turn the force of the federal government against student protesters and criminalized activists. Nixon courted what he called the “Silent Majority” to support both “law and order” and his Vietnam War policy.
Further reading: Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987); James Miller, “Democracy
Is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).
—Gisela Ables
World History
