Peter B. Levy's The New Left and Labor in the 1960s
Isserman, Maurice
THE NEW LEFT AND LABOR IN THE 1960s, by Peter B. Levy. University of Illinois Press, 1994. 291 pp. $49.95, cloth; $16.95, paper. In May 1970, as a college student in Portland, Oregon, I took...
...Reuther argued that the UAW could not afford to break with the Johnson administration while preparing for contract negotiations with the auto companies...
...Unions like the west coast longshoremen, the United Electrical Workers, and Local 1199 had opposed the war from the beginning...
...Nevertheless, the LID connection made early SDS the beneficiary of significant union patronage...
...When mainstream institutions like the Democratic party and the labor movement failed to respond (or to respond quickly enough) to the morally charged expectations of the civil rights and antiwar movements, it proved all too easy for 570 • DISSENT some in those movements to switch from redemptive idealism ("Join us...
...The relations between SDS and LID were, rather famously, fraught with tensions (SDSers tending to be insufficiently anticommunist for their elders' taste...
...Some, like George Meany, remained hard-line hawks throughout the conflict, and lambasted critics of the war as cowards and traitors...
...As I recall, many more dockworkers flashed us V-signs (and even a few fists clenched in solidarity) than gave us the finger...
...Walter Reuther, who hoped that the New Left would prove an ally in nudging the Democratic party leftward, soon afterward anointed SDS "the vanguard student organization dedicated to the forces of progress in America...
...SDS itself was the organizational child of the labor movement, the youth affiliate of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), a group with strong ties to the social democratic tradition and needle trade unionism...
...But Levy argues that the disputes between labor and the New Left, for all the bitterness they engendered, were still in a sense family fights...
...Some were literally the children of the labor movement...
...SDS's founding manifesto, the "Port Huron Statement," was written at a UAW retreat center on Lake Michigan...
...To say that things went drastically wrong between the New Left and labor in the 1960s is to recognize the possibility that things could have gone right...
...We knew that Harry Bridges's ILWU was a "good union," which was to say antiwar...
...Levy notes drily that "those who continued to probe the labor question . . . shared a certain unrealistic view of their times with the most starry-eyed radicals of SDS...
...to punitive nihilism ("Fuck you 'Joe' !") But inclination is not inevitability...
...at the same time, it might have enjoyed a better chance of finding "a path to a democratic radicalism suitable to the American temper...
...LID leaders cast a jaundiced eye on the Port Huron Statement, but it didn't seem to trouble others in the labor movement...
...One morning our march took a different route, out to the port of Portland to bring our antiwar message to the longshoremen who worked on the waterfront...
...Intellectually such ideas FALL • 1994 • 569 drew on the "corporate liberal" interpretation of American history promoted by such New Left historians as Ronald Radosh, who cast liberal reformers and labor leaders in the pure-and-simple role of loyal defenders of the status quo...
...Peter B. Levy's The New Left and Labor in the 1960s allows us to address that question with greater assurance...
...Levy concludes that the 1960s were thus not simply an era characterized by a move from the idealism of the Port Huron Statement to the madness of the Weathermen...
...Some did but many others did not, as demonstrated by the willingness of large segments of the New Left to reconcile their differences with segments of labor in the 1960s and early 1970s...
...thus sharecroppers were always more likely than steelworkers to engage their sympathies...
...As Irving Howe once mused, in a speculative passage cited by Levy, had there been no war in Vietnam the New Left would have certainly grown at a slower rate...
...In a thoughtful appendix, he argues that historians of the 1960s need to pay more attention to both human agency and historical accident...
...In a pointed contribution to the evening's ceremony, Levy recounts, "Barry Bluestone and Leslie Woodcock, the children of Irving Bluestone and Leonard Woodcock . . . read speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr., and anti-war poetry from the World War I era...
...The proworkingclass sentiment of the late New Left was shot through with revolutionary romanticism...
...Nonetheless, at the start of the decade New Leftists were tied by family tradition, conviction, and shared political interest to the labor movement...
...Although I'm sympathetic to that position, I'm not as convinced as Levy that the emergence of such divisive issues as the counterculture and black power were, like Vietnam, a chance throw of the historical dice...
...Needless to say, the revolution didn't start that day in Portland...
...With high hopes, good spirits, and vaguely insurrectionary intentions, we set off to link up with our brothers on the docks...
...Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) founder Al Haber was the son of a professional labor arbitrator with close ties to the Michigan labor movement...
...Passing a building site, we suddenly found ourselves the target of a group of construction workers who jeered and tossed chunks of concrete at our ranks—perhaps provoked by the Viet Cong flags that some of us carried...
...Levy's thesis has broad historical implications, beyond the specialized focus of his book...
...readers will find them a source of instruction and delight...
...It was not one in which the New Left and labor, or students and middle class America, were solely confrontational...
...though few of us qualified as knowledgeable students of labor history, leftist folklore in Portland had preserved some memory of the dramatic events of the 1934 waterfront strike...
...Why, then, were construction workers a half dozen years later pelting me with concrete— and why was I, at least verbally, responding in kind...
...Two moments in the history of the New Left, two conflicting realities: which more accurately represented the relations between protesting students and American workers in the sixties and early seventies...
...The war and the generational conflict came home to UAW leaders in the spring of 1967 when the Reuther, Bluestone, and Woodcock families gathered together for a Passover seder...
...OF NOTE Our readers will be interested to know that Irving Howe's A Critic's Notebook, edited and with an introduction by Nicholas Howe, has just been published by Harcourt Brace...
...In some ways," as Levy provocatively notes, "the New Left was a child of organized labor...
...Levy argues that there was nothing foreordained about that outcome...
...FALL • 1994 • 571...
...Reuther asked what she meant...
...Of course, most New Left activists, especially in the early 1960s, were middle-class students attending good colleges and universities...
...invasion of CamboFALL • 1994 • 567 dia and the killing of four students at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard...
...SDSers willing to go "part of the way with LBJ" in 1964 parted company decisively with the administration in early 1965 in response to Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam War...
...The book is a collection of short essays on diverse literary subjects, many of which have never before appeared in print...
...Throughout the decade young white and black activists, inspired by a sense of generational mission, also shared a mood of cultural disaffection...
...For fifty cents an hour extra in the pay envelope," she exploded, "you'll let thousands of Vietnamese and Americans die in the war...
...One of the most enduring images of the 1960s," Levy notes in his preface, "is that of construction workers assaulting anti-war demonstrators...
...In May 1970, as a college student in Portland, Oregon, I took part in the national campus strike protesting the U.S...
...When flagbearing workers beat up a group of students in lower Manhattan in May 1970, the "hardhats" were instantly enshrined in political myth, symbols of unthinking authoritarianism to the left, and of rugged patriotism to the right...
...Like so many cliched images of the 1960s (for example, bare-chested protester giving the finger to police at Chicago '68 = antiwar movement), the hardhat myth obscures a more complex reality...
...several years later a UAW grant allowed SDS to launch communityorganizing projects in the slums of Newark, Chicago, Cleveland, and other northern cities...
...But much the same could be said of several generations of young socialists from the 1930s on, who grew up to become stalwart trade union leaders or pro-labor intellectuals (the founders of Dissent come to mind as prime examples...
...And some of the relatives remained on speaking terms...
...New Leftists and civil rights activists were inclined to look for constituencies on the margins of American society, people presumably uncorrupted by conformist, materialist conditioning...
...You've said it...
...The pieces range in tone from the serious to the playful...
...ILwas not to be...
...The longshoremen stayed at their jobs...
...and waving our banners...
...Had it not been for the Vietnam War, and one or two other contingent variables, the tentative New Left-labor alliance of the early 1960s might well have continued and prospered...
...We were in a grimmer mood than in the previous May, bundled against the February cold, feeling isolated, and all but despairing of stopping the endless war...
...UAW funding put Al Haber on the SDS payroll as its sole staff member in 1960...
...You've finally said it...
...Every day for a week, several thousand students set off on antiwar demonstrations through downtown Portland...
...Many in the New Left concluded that the trade unions were just another brick in the wall of the establishment...
...The countercultural life-style embraced by many young activists also deepened the divisions between the New Left and the labor movement...
...Even at the height of its antiwar fury, the New Left as a whole remained supportive of selected labor struggles, especially those fought by minority workers like the United Farm Workers' campaign in California...
...Levy is right to insist on the varying historical possibilities embedded in the 1960s...
...There was no reason to assume at the start of the decade that in six or seven years' time the elder and younger Reuthers, Bluestones, and Woodcocks would be unable to sit down to a peaceful dinner together, either literally or figuratively...
...But Levy, a young labor historian at York College of Pennsylvania, challenges the notion that "the New Left and labor, or more grossly the youth movement and 'middle America,' were adversaries and adversaries alone...
...And many other SDSers were "red diaper babies," whose parents had been involved in union organizing drives in the 1930s —and might still have been 568 • DISSENT if the labor movement hadn't purged the communists in the late 1940s...
...EDS...
...The UAW would turn against it by the end of the decade...
...And, of course, they were influenced by thinkers like C. Wright Mills, who urged young radicals to abandon the "labor metaphysic" central to the revolutionary project of "Victorian Marxism...
...A little more than a half year later a much smaller group of students set off on yet another march through downtown Portland, this time protesting the U.S.-sponsored South Vietnamese invasion of Laos...
...But they were not unfriendly as we marched past, shouting, "Join us...
...Though Walter Reuther was by no means as enthusiastic a hawk as George Meany, he felt compelled to respond to the younger generation's implied criticism...
...We also knew that the longshore union had a radical past...
...I still wince at the memory of that miserable winter day...
...Sharon Jeffrey and Barry Bluestone, significant figures in early SDS, were children of prominent United Auto Workers (UAW) leaders...
...According to Levy: Leslie Woodcock fumed as Reuther completed his astatement...
...By the early 1970s, New Leftists were turning out on picket lines to support striking auto, electrical and postal workers...
...While showing the influence of its principal author Tom Hayden's reading of C. Wright Mills, and including some criticisms of labor movement attitudes and practices, the Port Huron statement also urged students to "overcome their ignorance, and even vague hostility, for what they see as `middle class labor' bureaucrats...
...Nor was it a time when American youths came to hate their country and their fellow countrymen...
...Finally she could not rein in her anger any longer...
...And we also remembered what happened in Paris, just two years earlier, when workers had joined students in common cause and in so doing almost toppled the French government...
...The explosive issue of black power not only dampened the enthusiasm of union leaders for civil rights, it led to direct confrontations between such organizations as the all-black Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) in Detroit and the UAW...
...Meanwhile, a generation of younger labor historians cut their scholarly teeth in New Left journals like Radical America, promoting a "history from the bottom up" of working-class struggles that in time eroded the influence of the "corporate liberal" synthesis of American history...
...His book brings us another step closer to understanding the decade as the historical tragedy it really represented, rather than just a lockstep procession toward confrontation, chaos, and caricature...
...The UAW, the Packinghouse Workers, and other unions also provided important political and financial support for the southern civil rights movement, including the Freedom Summer Project of 1964, which proved a formative event for many New Left activists...
...At the same time, veterans of early SDS like Steve Max and Paul Booth remained convinced of the importance of maintaining ties with the union movement...
...Most union leaders, out of anticommunist conviction, out of support for Johnson's domestic agenda, and out of reluctance to sever useful lines to the White House, initially supported the war...
...We dodged the missiles and shouted, "Fuck you `Joe!' " in response—the insult borrowed from a popular 1970 movie in which Joe, the title character, was a beer-swilling dese-dem-anddose welder who harbored a murderous rage against hippies...
Vol. 41 • September 1994 • No. 4
