Yesterday's Rebels
PARMET, HERBERT
Yesterday's Rebels The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage By Todd Gitlin Bantam. 513 pp. $19.95. In the New World: Growing Up in America, 1960-1984 By Lawrence Wright Knopf. 352 pp....
...This "political education" caused a rift to develop between Lawrence and his father...
...It came to represent him, and his way of life, his values-his as opposed to theirs...
...Färber reports Hayden's exhortation: "If gas is going to be used, let that gas come down all over Chicago and not just all over us in the park...
...The authors make an interesting contrast...
...For example, he argues that Chicago's police were acting uncharacteristically when they struck out against the kids in Grant Park and at the Conrad Hilton...
...Still, Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and many of their Yippie confrères were originals...
...Ultimately Lawrence Wright found himself among those estranged from the radical "elitists" who had briefly claimed his half-hearted allegiance...
...Significantly, Gitlin's book about the '60s has little time for the blue-collar types...
...John Donald Wright had risen from a one-room school-house background in central Kansas to become prominent in Dallas financial circles...
...That Dallas could be the site of his hero's assassination was too terrible for Wright to bear...
...There are certain people in the United States who feel that all you have to do is riot and you can get your way...
...His parents were New York City high school teachers whose liberalism was as instinctive as rooting for the Giants before they left the Polo Grounds for Candlestick Park in San Francisco...
...Arrests also were minimal...
...Yet when he reached his Finland Station, Chicago-appropriately with a variety of disguises to foil the police-he saw himself as "storming" the "Winter Palace...
...Lee Harvey Oswald "murdered my faith in God," he tells us...
...Anti-interventionism, still necessary politics, can no longer be innocent," he writes, "it must be an antiinterventionism without illusions...
...from America," he writes, "but I had understood with something other than bitterness that I carried them inside me...
...To people like Wright's father, what Mayor Richard J. Daley's men in blue did on the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention was necessary to preserve decency from being fouled by bands of renegades...
...Eugene McCarthy, the antiwar candidate, refused to testify against the police who had charged wildly into various suites at the Conrad Hilton...
...And theirs was not a minority view...
...18.95...
...The organization that was to show the U.S...
...Under pressure from the Yippies and other anarchical forces-the Diggers, the Progressive Laborites and the Weathermen-the SDS' Rousseauist ideals went by the board...
...To love Dallas is to celebrate the thrill of the new, to smile at the building cranes on the horizon and the bulldozers clearing the pasture beyond the latest development...
...Guns were to be fired only as a last possible resort and, overwhelmingly, the police obeyed that order...
...Returning to the city "made famous by hate, "he learned to appreciate the once alienating creed of his father...
...Reviewed by Herbert Parmet Professor of history, Graduate Center, City University of New York...
...To Gitlin, Hayden functioned less as an intellectual force than as the movement's Lenin...
...Had Hoffman and company realized this at the time, however, it probably would have made little difference in their behavior...
...For years I had been running away from Dallas...
...He was a "connoisseur of driving will" caught up in an incipient revolution-exactly what kind he was not sure...
...The Yippies, by hook or by crook, got the image they set out to establish...
...If we are going to be disrupted and violated, let this whole stinking city be disrupted and violated...
...Chicago '68 By David Färber Chicago...
...From the vantage point of Reagan's America, the self-destructive excesses of the old student activism appear to him to have been "the '60s' version of the fraternity-sorority culture of the '50s...
...In estranging itself from the working class, the segment of U.S...
...The movement truly "collaborated in its own demise...
...Born in Abilene, Texas, the son of a banker, he grew up in Dallas-not the relatively cosmopolitan city of today, but the moneyed cowtown exemplified by its reactionary Congressman Bruce Alger and his infamous "Mink Coat Mob" of "angry Right-wing women...
...He thought of himself as liberal and fair-minded, democratic, tolerant and decent-qualities befitting a Christian gentleman...
...I was Dallas...
...Compared with their counterparts in other cities-e.g...
...Detroit, where 43 blacks died in the 1967 riots-Chicago's law-enforcers "were a model of coolness and compassion...
...Gitlin's radicalism came to him naturally...
...In Chicago '68 David Färber reexamines the by now familiar events surrounding that turbulent convention...
...Leaving his hometown to wander around the United States and Europe, Wright learned, to his astonishment, that he was the product "of a political culture widely regarded as evil-the Dallas of 1963, and the United States of 1968...
...Farber's account is not much livelier than the Walker Report, but he does have a few novel points to make...
...But Gitlin points out that "As unpopular as the war had become, the antiwar movement was detested still more -the most hated political group in America, disliked even by most of the people who supported immediate withdrawal from Vietnam...
...After it was all over Hubert H. Humphrey himself said, "The city of Chicago and the people of Chicago didn't do a thing that was wrong...
...America "is the oldest revolutionary country, and it is still a radicalizing influence in the world, " he writes...
...author, "Eisenhower and the American Crusades, " "JFK" Todd GITLIN, a president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during the 1960s, has now given us a detailed first-hand account of the tragic search for a new utopia which took place during that decade...
...society it most needed to cultivate, the New Left ran aground on the same shoals as the Old...
...They tried to contain the riot and to stop only the most flagrant lawbreakers," Färber notes...
...He attended the Bronx High School of Science and went on to Harvard, where a speech by Barrington Moore Jr...
...Indeed, barely more than 10 per cent of those who watched the " police riot" sided with the protesters...
...It is particularly rewarding to read Gitlin's The Sixties along with Lawrence Wright's warmly written memoir of his personal Odyssey over those years and beyond, In the New World...
...Nevertheless, he admired JFK and fell in love with the Camelot legend (unaware, like most Americans, that it was all cooked up by Jackie with the help of Theodore H. White...
...Färber does a good job of detailing the preparations made by Daley and the police to avoid being caught "soft" again, particularly those undertaken by the "Red Squad," as the Chicago police department's intelligencegathering unit was known...
...To love Dallas is to be able to live without the consolations of the past...
...For Wright, radicalism was a comparatively mild flirtation...
...If workingclass youth weren't hip enough to recognize the Weathermen as their vanguard, so much the worse for them," is how Gitlin characterizes the attitude...
...Yet he has not traveled that far from the underlying philosophy of the New Left...
...His hometown took on emblematic significance: " Dallas is an urge toward the future...
...Los Angeles and Newark...
...Gitlin has caught it all, or almost all: the liberal roots of a radicalism replete with antiliberal passions...
...the outbreak of James Deanstyle rebelliousness at a moment when, to paraphrase SDS' founding "Port Huron Statement," anything seemed possible...
...Wright was conservative as a teenager, and harbored vague suspicions about the "Eastern Establishment...
...One would think that their role as part of the 57 per cent who voted for either Nixon or George Wallace in 1968 (not to mention the over 60 per cent who chose Nixon over George McGovern in 1972) was incidental to the course of the decade's politics...
...The notion, he continues, was in fact "the ideology of a middling social group caught between power and powerlessness, and soaked in ambivalence toward both...
...worse, they smelled like Communists...
...Instead, Gitlin's central player is Tom Hayden, the principal author of the SDS manifesto, "The Port Huron Statement...
...at the time of the Cuban missile crisis galvanized him into becoming an activist and joining the nascent SDS...
...the insecurities of secure bourgeois youth...
...Wright rediscovered his faith in the "young country," the land that "equals change...
...the way to "participatory democracy" ended up a Hobbesian nightmare where every man was an enemy to every other man...
...Nixon's War," the son tells us, "Nixon also made it my father's war...
...As Färber observes, they were surprisingly skilled, too, at media manipulation: "Certainly the Yippies succeeded in one of their central purposes: They helped turn Chicago '68 in the eyes of both the movement and the establishment into a mythic battle between the young who wanted change NOW...
...So much so, in fact, that they and the Mayor were blamed for being permissive and, in the words of the Chicago Tribune, emulating the "spineless and indecisive mayors who muffed early riot control in...
...A few months earlier, during the rioting in the black ghetto triggered by Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, they had remained thoroughly professional...
...296 pp...
...The older Wright "resonated to the angry vibrations of the Nixon Administration, which shook the media, the high-class liberals, and the Ivy League academics of the Eastern Establishment...
...I have no time for that...
...President Richard M. Nixon's "silent majority" speech of November 3, 1969, was for him a reaffirmation of his own faith...
...Gitlin explains that the "radical vision of a participatory democracy with small-scale units and client-centered services presupposed a society, a community of values...
...By making Vietnam Mr...
...I was America...
...and the old establishment who stood for law and order above all else...
...Abby Hoffman insists that the Chicago melee helped shorten the Vietnam War...
...The radical leadership, shedding its illusions of inspiring the unwashed masses" to join The Revolution, came to scorn them...
...Its "principal property" was its "knowledge credentials...
...But the New Left program was a nonstarter for reasons that ran deeper than internal divisions...
...Plain crazy, that's all these would-be revolutionaries were to their contemporaries who didn't have campuses or tribes...
...But burning its bridges "to the multitudes whose lives were dominated by scarcity" proved to be the New Left's fatal mistake...
...that simply did not exist...
...Though Gitlin's narration of the rise and fall of the New Left is less intimate than the one James Milleranother former SDSer-provided in his excellent Democracy Is in the Streets, it is much grander in scope, as its sweeping title suggests...
...Whether or not you concur with Gitlin's only slightly reconstructed outlook, you will be hard-pressed to find a summing up of politics in the Age of Aquarius that is more informative than his...
...He discovered sex along with protest...
...Todd Gitlin could never make his home in Dallas: 25 years after Port Huron he is a professor of sociology at Berkeley...
Vol. 71 • March 1988 • No. 4
