The New Left: A Political Happening

...Newfield gives a run-down of the principal sds projects in Northern cities, but this reads like a college yearbook review of the Charity Club's activities...

...If they have given themselves over to creating legends' they have given up...

...The young activists were intriguing and rather unusual among 20th century radicals, for they found inspiration less in the General Will than in the Noble Savage...

...Nor does he analyze the question of whether organizing Northern slums is as hopeless as sds's failure to date suggests, or whether new techniques, more money, or more personnel might make a difference...

...To be sure, the young radicals endured privation, frustration, and mortal peril...

...A Prophetic Minority never confronts the basic suspicion that nags many sympathetic liberals, the feeling that the New Left has actually been just one long "pseudo-event...

...The Students Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (sncc) and the Students for a Democratic Society (sds) have both begun to fade...

...Deploring our traditional distrust of power politics, a far-sighted political scientisr looks ahead for almost fifty years, ventures some educated guesses about the probable development of foreign affairs, and maps out a brilliant long range foreign policy in which we would openly maintain a global balance of power...

...Meanwhile, the heroes of the New Left have made a respectable record as political outsiders...

...Worried that his New Left friends might appear as insignificant as they were ephemeral, Village Voice reporter Jack Newfield wrote a book about them...

...His sources do not go much beyond his clipping file and bull sessions with his acquaintances in the Movement...

...Although the author's judgments are sensible, his arguments are often thin and his perspective is frequently parochial...

...The liberals see Central Park, and we see sharecropper shacks...

...The liberals could learn from the Left about how to operate when protest is the only realistic path open...

...But the news-which cannot be news to many-that Bob Parris and Tom Hayden learned nonviolence through Albert Camus and are now unlearning it through Frantz Fanon simply fails to answer the central questions about the Movement...

...As Newfield points out, their neo-Popu-list critique of American institutions has not been lost on their many contemporaries who are themselves unwilling to embrace the banal slogans of the New Left or its commitment to a world without neckties...

...Such facts may belie the New Left's professed alienation, its profound dissatisfaction with a system in which the governing elite and distant masses communicate only through the kaleidoscoping images fabricated by the media...

...so what if Mario Savio seems as innocuous without a microphone as the Rolling Stones might...

...Often he reminds us of the purity of the New Left lifestyle: "The sds national headquarters . . . shares a debris-littered street with a beauty parlor, a check-cashing service, a fried chicken joint, and a record shop that continuously blares the soulful blues of Ray Charles...

...so what if the Freedom Democratic Party is not especially democratic and is more potent as a symbol in Washington than as a political force in Mississippi...

...Indeed, it is not clear that he has convinced himself...

...How short-sighted can a super nuclear power afford to be...

...The young radicals remain powerless in terms of money, votes and institutional ties-the textbook prerequisites for political success...

...Finally, the radicals' vision may not be as moribund as it seems...

...Newfield slides over such qualms -mostly by parroting, and sometimes italicizing, the turgid rhapsodies of the New Left Sound...

...He never tells us, for example, when and where progress is being or has been made in the South...

...Of course, a talent for creating news is not a secure base for power, as even Senator McCarthy eventually discovered...

...Demonstrators with no financial or electoral strength are now often taken seriously by political leaders, or at least by liberal officials who find it amusing and convenient to do so...

...Newfield will convince few skeptics that the New Left is substantially more than a political curiosity...

...Unfortunately, Newfield has given this worthwhile project little more care than a Voice feature...

...If Stokely has enough patience, he just might collect...

...By muting the pseudo-event aspect of the New Left, by slighting its methodology, Newfield glosses over the Movement's most substantial contribution to the style and direction of contemporary American politics...

...Stokely Carmichael quips: "Man, every cat's politics comes from what he sees when he gets up in the morning...

...Nevertheless, they have devised other levers which often serve quite well...

...But already, in two short years, the adventure seems to be over...

...Reviewed by SIMON LAZARUS Writer and editor, Yale "Law Journal" Almost two years have passed since the press discovered a New Left in the student wing of the civil rights movement...

...This feeling of dehumanization by an unfeeling bureaucracy is something that the Hooks and Feuers cannot make a leap of faith to understand," he explains...

...Some of these careerists may in the future borrow ideas from today's radicals...

...Yet is that what they were really about...

...Newfield's book is virtually silent on these maters, which are crucial to measuring the political growth of the New Left...

...Although the New Left may be pitifully far from changing the system, it has proved remarkably ingenious at manipulation...

...After all, it is something to induce a Presidential hopeful to venture even a rhetorical opening to a Left which may not really exist, or to share in its brash iconoclasm through his coiffure...

...The resentments building in the ghettos and the South will redound to someone's political benefit sometime in the next decade...

...The final verdict rests on the question: Did the New Left push America as far forward as it had the power to push it...

...They sought to be engineers of social change, and they must be judged in that role...

...They have too often held their tongue out of team loyalty and a persistent desire to keep their place on the bench...

...People can always turn off their tv sets, and lately they have been doing just that...

...He would have us take the New Left seriously...

...As a result, A Prophetic Minority is a reassuring primer for the liberal senator puzzling over The Young or for the Wellesley freshman hesitating to accept a date with an sds-nik...

...Only the New Left has wholly avoided the stigma of this fate...

...They sought to organize the unorganized, to mobilize the weak, to give power to the poor, even to understand them...

...And the radicals may still be around...

...Most readers will want to know what lies behind the recent spate of discouraging reports from the South and from the Northern slums...

...In describing the New Left's ideological peculiarities, he does do more than simply touch all the bases that a feature-writer should...

...Newfield only hints at his conclusions on the actual impact of the New Left...

...Sit-ins, Marches on Washington, Mississippi Crusades, Trips to Hanoi surely get a better cost-effectiveness rating than any of the Defense Department's news management techniques...

...And what appears to be his final assessment gives the young activists little credit-less, I believe, than they deserve...

...That last, incidentally, seems to date Newfield's visit to sds national headquarters in the vicinity of 1963...

...However inflated the label, it caught on...

...But they mark an achievement no political biographer should overlook...

...The New Left has been little more than a footnote to the history of 1965-67, and its immediate prospects are bleak at best...

...but other likely readers will find little in the book they do not already know...

...So what, he might profitably have argued, if the radicals have proved better at shaming their parents than at wooing the masses...

...But surely the New Leftists started out with greater expectations than to ornament their middle-age with glamorous memories...

...His aim was to explain their beliefs, record their history, and thereby justify them...

...He does not shed any light on why the Voting Rights Act has brought so little change (Is the Movement or Washington at fault...

...The Times reports that sncc field workers have all but vanished from the Black Belt, and sds no longer unnerves big city mayors with its dream of organizing the Northern ghettos, or at least monopolizing war against poverty grants...

...Their practice was also more arresting than their theory...

...Unlike beatniks and sane college professors, they seemed bent on counting for something in the real world...

...Signing advertisements in the New York Times was not enough for them...

...Perhaps RFK will play the role of reluctant catalyst that FDR played for cio leaders during the '30s...

...But did sncc ever succeed in doing more...

...Stokely's blend of piety and glibness so charms Newfield that he quotes the line twice-though cynics will point out that Stokely's message has reached many more Central Park West apartments than sharecropper shacks, sncc castigated De Lawd for staging tv morality plays to stir white support for Federal legislation, and then leaving the black people of Selma unprepared for political action on their own...

...Yet liberal critics have no cause to mock its failures, or to chorus Bayard Rustin's criticism that the radicals do not know how to compromise when they move from protest to politics...

...He says they have created the "legend" of this generation, they are to the '60s what the expatriates were to the '20s, the Marxist radicals to the '30s, the beats to the '50s...

...For the converse is also true...