Sixties' Radicalism Revisited

...Despite the recruitment efforts of a few talented individuals, the organization seemed destined to spend its existence talking to itself about the nebulous concept of participatory democracy...

...That avenue, too, has been closed in recent years...

...Gillon's will not be the last word on the topic...

...foreign policy...

...I didn't want to cross that line," he later explained...

...Similarly, Keynesian economics was critical to Cold War liberals happy to have their cake and eat it by spending their way to full employment through higher defense budgets...

...The difficulty was generational...

...In addition, the doctrine of moral equivalence between the superpowers, fostered by the '60s radicals, is a corruption of thought and perspective that still distorts foreign policy discussions...

...To his associates, Hayden was "the archetypal new radical, the representative of a 'new, natural party' arising innocently from the ashes of the Old Left...

...Chapters on Richard Flacks, an intellectual, Sharon Jeffrey, an organizer, and Paul Booth, a national secretary, give him the chance to examine in turn the group's programs, community activities and internal structure...

...In the process, he has provided us with an insightful look at some critical and ongoing political debates that raise questions about the definition of the American Left and the direction of U.S...

...Vietnam was not the only thing that did in the kind of liberal orthodoxy represented by ADA...

...China's emergence was destroying the idea of a Communist monolith...

...In 1969 its husk was taken over by the totalitarian Progressive Labor Party, a tiny band of disciplined Marxist-Leninist fanatics, while members with terrorist proclivities broke away to form the even more egregious Weathermen...

...The contrasting experiences produced contrasting outlooks—and not merely l'or a few Leftists trying to hammer out a plan of action 25 years ago...

...Today, some of its best friends believe it should give up the ghost...

...Today, nothing about the New Left seems quite so outdated as this hopelessly Utopian notion...

...His radicalism was grounded less in theory than in a simple desire for action...

...Miller's technique is biographical...

...Miller's fourth subject is Tom Hayden, whose passage from reform to revolution paralleled the arc of SDS as a whole...

...His theme is the conflict between long-range ideals and short-term practicality, a dilemma that allows him to display more horns than a Serengeti game warden...

...Less familiar is the vigorous campaign to push ADA into a forthright anti-Vietnam position waged in the '60s by the president of Campus ADA, a fellow by the name of Elliott Abrams...

...Democracy Is in the Streets" will not provide anyone with answers to our most pressing foreign policy issues...

...Dissatisfaction with the Reagan era's mythologizing of the '60s led him to this reconsideration of hisyouth, where he has tried, inhis words, "to settle accounts with my past more directly...

...As an offshoot of the union-sponsored LID, SDS was obliged to pay obeisance to the labor movement, but its heart wasn't in it because, in the young radicals' view, students were going to replace labor as the spearheads of the revolution...

...By contrast, many of SDS' "red-diaper baby" founders, born to an awareness of the Left's arcane internecine feuds, were more willing than Hayden and the later arrivals to work within the system, and more understanding of their elders' anti-Communist concerns...

...As one SDS leader put it: "America's best liberals were on the lip of Redbaiting us out of existence...

...Reading the accusations of the LID, though, one cannot help feeling a sense of misdirection...

...But it can undoubtedly help to deepen the terms of the debate...

...Hayden concluded the decade addressing the Weathermen prior to their "Days of Rage," but stopped short of falling off the edge...

...Gillon duly notes Ronald Reagan's well-known advocacy of liberal causes in the postwar period...

...Vietcong flags often flew over its antiwar parades...

...Throughout the 1950s and '60s, ADA served as a bulwark of liberal thinking in the U. S., but it was torn apart by Vietnam and never recovered...

...At first glance there would appear to be little of substance here for anyone except '60s nostomaniacs, yet out of such unpromising material James Miller has fashioned an outstanding work...

...Among the century's major personages, he most recalls André Malraux, who, it has been noted, might just as easily have chosen Fascism as Communism before finding an ideological home in Gaullism...

...Repeatedly, the organization called on the U.S...

...and the CPUSA in the 1960s was a bad joke, more to be pitied than feared...

...The character in Man's Fate who says "Marxism isn't a doctrine, it's a form of will power, " could have been speaking for Hayden...

...Although "Democracy Is in the Streets" does not dispute this, it suggests that these people were often voices of moderation once the movement started to spin out of control...

...Originally ayouth arm of the little-known League for Industrial Democracy (LID), it started the decade with 250 members nationwide and small hope of anything better...

...Anti-intellectual by inclination and ideologically committed to a loose, decentralized, semi-anarchic structure, SDS made a shortcoming of its virtues and ultimately imploded under the weight of unanticipated power and inadvertent responsibility...

...Democracy Is in the Streets": From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Simon and Schuster, 431 pp., $ 19.95) is instructive, authoritative and resonant...

...It is widely believed the New Left originated among the children of former Old Leftists...

...Nonetheless, it is equally true that since the 1960s something has gone drastically wrong with the American trade union movement, and that as the manufacturing work force continues to decline, thevitalityoftheU.S...

...Every group engaged in ideological politics faces the same problem—cf...

...The New Left, trying to be ecumenical, welcomed everyone into its fold...

...The youngsters' environmenl was completely different: Stalin was dead and the battlefield of the Cold War had shifted from Central Europe to the Third World...

...To the right of SDS resided a second organization that had a considerable impact on the '60s, the reformist Americans for Democratic Action (ADA...

...The Old Left, represented by such spokesmen as Michael Harrington, accused the SDSers of "united frontism" and worse...

...Expansion, however, brought new problems and aggravated old ones...

...students everywhere flocked to join—by 1968 as many as 100,000 of them...

...Though scrupulously fair, it is impassioned history by a former SDSer who left his radicalism behind him to produce academic volumes on Rousseau and existentialism, and to pursue a career in mainstream journalism...

...More important than the difference over labor was the argument about Communism...

...Echoes of the SDS/L1D quarrel can be heard down to the present day, resounding through the halls of Congress, university classrooms, and everywhere else international affairs are discussed...

...Then came Vietnam, and SDS quickly grew into one of the most visible and energetic antiwar groups in the country...

...That out no longer exists now that the UN has lost its luster...

...The choices have gotten a lot more complicated since 1953, when ADA's National Board declared that the "overriding issue before the American people today is whether the nalional defense is to be determined by the demands of the world situation or sacrificed to the worship of tax reductions and a balanced budget...

...to turn to the United Nations on difficult questions...

...Tensions emerged almost immediately, centering around two profound issues—the role of organized labor, and the problem of Communism...

...SDS died a grim death, vanishing without a trace and scarcely a lamentation...

...He has written a pedestrian work with the excitement and aroma of a PhD dissertation...

...A child of its time, ADA was formed in the 1940s by New Dealers unhappy about what they saw as Harry Truman's Rightward drift and worried about Communist influences to their Left, especially within Henry Wallace's Progressive Party camp...

...His father was an admirer of the Rightwing priest Father Coughlin...

...His magnetism notwithstanding, he was more naive than the others, essentially rudderless, ahistorical, and therefore capable of going off in wild directions with nothing to hold him back...

...We knew we weren't Communists, but the idea that our parent organization thought we were was Kafkaesque...

...the Realos and the Fundis in Germany's Green Party—and either learns to live with it or doesn't...

...After tracing the origins and philosophy—such as it is—of SDS, he follows the organization's fortunes through the lives of four key figures, weaving particular experiences and broad trends into an elegantly seamless web...

...The elders had grown up with Stalin and a powerful CPUSA...

...Itisthesubjectof Steven M. Gillon's Politics and Vision: The ADA and American Liberalism 1947-1985 (Oxford, 289 pp., $24.95...

...Enough already...

...It is amusing to watch liberals tripping over themselves to create a "Draft Eisenhower" boomlet in 1948, and depressing to realize that not even a group with ADA's antiCommunist credentials escaped Republican Redbaiting in the 1950s, when Richard M. Nixon identified one senator as the candidate of " the Communist Daily Worker and the equally Red ADA...

...No sections of Miller's book have greater contemporary significance than those dealing with the divisions between the New and the Old Left...

...Left overall will depend on labor's ability to build bridges to the whitecollar and service workers who are older versions of the constituency SDS defined for itself...

...Unquestionably, they were naïve, and in their deliberate neglect of recent history downright stupid...

...As Miller observes, they paid the price for their ignorance in 1969...

...Strikingly, Hayden was the only one of the four, and among the few early SDS leaders, who did not come out of a Left or liberal background...

...Politics and Vision is most profitably read for its historical curiosities...