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Botnst · #1 06-21-2008, 11:46 PM

LEGACIES OF THE 60s
Will the Left Ever Learn to Communicate Across Generations?
By MAURICE ISSERMAN

When 32-year-old Michael Harrington, a veteran socialist activist, first met 20-year-old Tom Hayden at a student conference on civil rights in Ann Arbor, Mich., in the spring of 1960, he found him "unprepossessing, a nondescript youth of no great presence," yet burning with "an intense leftist commitment." Harrington tried without success to recruit Hayden, a University of Michigan undergraduate, into the Young People's Socialist League, the youth affiliate of the Socialist Party that was Harrington's political home at the time. Hayden declined. "Socialism" seemed a needlessly esoteric word to the younger man, Harrington recalled: "He wanted to speak American."

Hayden would go on two years later to do just that by writing the Port Huron Statement, the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society. Harrington had mixed feelings about that document, approving of its moral passion for change, its support of civil rights, and its call for the creation of a "participatory democracy" in the United States, but disapproving of Hayden's apparent lack of anti-Soviet zeal. At the conference that adopted the manifesto, Harrington wound up alienating SDS leaders by attacking them in a famously intemperate political diatribe.

When 28-year-old Tom Hayden, by then a veteran New Left activist, first met 20-year-old Mark Rudd in the midst of the Columbia University student strike in the spring of 1968, he found him "a new type of campus leader," who could be "disarmingly personal, a young boy," but at the same time possessed by "an embryo of fanaticism." Rudd, leader of the so-called "action faction" of Columbia's SDS chapter, "considered SDS intellectuals impediments to action," according to Hayden. Hayden felt "slightly irrelevant in his presence."

I wish Harrington and Hayden had found a better way to sort out their differences at Port Huron in 1962. I also wish Rudd had been less impatient with his SDS elders in 1968. When Rudd first arrived at Columbia three years earlier, he had read the Port Huron Statement admiringly, but at the time of the Columbia strike he had abandoned the belief expressed in the statement, and central to the early SDS's political vision, that the American New Left "must be, in large measure, a left with real intellectual skills, committed to deliberativeness, honesty, reflection as working tools."

Some of the history of the 1960s might have worked out differently, and for the better, if the politics of the American left had been less marked by such striking generational discontinuities. As another SDS leader, Todd Gitlin, would write in his look back at the decade, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987), in the early years of the decade Harrington was key to the future of the New Left "because he was the one person who might have mediated across the generational divide." At a moment when a new generation of young radicals is gathering strength on some college campuses — sometimes grouped under the banner of a revived SDS — there may be value in reviewing this cautionary tale of miscommunication.

more at: http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i41/41b00601.htm

mgburg · #2 06-22-2008, 12:03 PM

Hey Bot!

I'm thinking it was more an "ego gap" than a generation gap...within the ten years of time you had 3 different versions of "left" trying to form "their" one version and the best they could do was use Hayden as the conduit toward togetherness...

But, as with anything political...one piece of crap has to float to the top. I guess the left is still trying to figure out who stinks the best in their cesspool...

Botnst · #3 06-22-2008, 02:24 PM

Eeeew!