The New Radicals

...SNCC has increasingly become the voice of youth in the Black Belt and the black ghetto (less and less reflecting its student origins) . SDS has become the voice of an increasingly self-conscious student movement, organizing around its issues and discontents, heterogeneous in political perspective, almost entirely white and upper middle-class...

...They have been lumped together and labeled the "New Left" or the "New Radicalism," and summarized, analyzed, criticized, or exposed...

...This superficiality is not restricted to the mass circulation magazines...

...But the most serious trouble with this effort is that it treats the student movements as if they were the "New Left...

...The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee was the organizational expression of those young people, primarily Negro, who had decided to work full-time in the emancipation of Southern black people, and who began to see this struggle as central in determining whether America could achieve authentic democracy...

...Thus, Jacobs and Landau urge the Movement "to develop an ideology for the purpose of gaining political power, to replace both its own righteous moral posture and the traditional politics of compromise...

...This "report" by Jacobs and Landau is helpful to the general reader in getting a feel for the style and thought of the organizations involved...

...By the late Fifties, a substantial number of the more intellectual, more affluent, more sensitive students had begun to articulate a sense of disgust with the mainstream of American life...

...In a short time, the energized social consciousness of these students began to take organizational form, and to embrace a larger social mission...

...why this should be so is never explained...

...There is too little first-hand examination of the movements themselves, too little careful reading of their documents, too little direct communication with the actual participants...

...For instance, the linking together of SNCC and SDS under the label "New Left," while useful in pointing up the fact that both groups share the classical radical critique of capitalism and a radical vision of authentic democracy, blurs the fact that these organizations are affected by different dynamics...

...Carl Oglesby's brilliant speech at the Thanksgiving, 1965, March on Washington...

...For one thing, there is a lack of systematic analysis of the origins and dynamics of the new radicalism of the young...

...In this book Jacobs and Landau have attempted a sympathetic and more first-hand description of the new movements and organizations...

...What is missed is that SNCC, SDS, and the others are doing what they can where they are, but they can't create a new politics without commensurate commitment to work by disaffected liberals, troubled Christians, discontented suburbanites, principled trade unionists, and others...

...The civil rights movement was important in focusing their discontent...

...Other students, mainly Northern and mostly white, were challenged by SNCC's experience to interpret segregation as part of a system of oppression, elite rule, and inhumanity...

...But the development of each is obscured if they are lumped together, or if they are treated in isolation from the particular constituencies to which they relate...

...The nuclear arms race, the cold war, the paternal and anti-intellectual character of the universities, began to be seen as related to racism, inequality, and poverty—that is, as integral, central features of the American political system...

...The documents are generally well-chosen, and several are of critical importance —in particular, C. Wright Mills' "Letter to the New Left...

...Recently, SNCC, SDS, and the multitude of independent, locally-organized efforts which share their general perspective have received enormous coverage in the mass and highbrow media...

...Now we all have to get to work...

...The new generation is exciting and surprising...

...Brad Cleaveland's prophetic call for a revolution at Berkeley...

...The authors, like many of the rest of us, wish a new coherent politics of the left, independent of the Democratic Party establishment, would come into being, and they wish the "kids" would make this happen for them...

...and the debate on left strategy between Bayard Rustin and Staughton Lynd...

...It is remarkable that the two organizations do share a common outlook on basic issues...

...But distanced fascination with it only blunts its moral challenge...

...more important, it opened to many of them the possibilities of commitment and instructed them in the techniques of direct action...

...one grows weary reading the number of extended critiques of SNCC and SDS in the serious intellectual journals typically based on little more than press reports and the accounts of self-appointed interpreters...

...And their chapter on the "leftovers" represents one of the few places where a general reader can find an objective, non-caricatured depiction of what such groups as the DuBois Clubs, Progressive Labor Party and other youth organizations devoted to doctrinaire Marxism contribute to American political life...

...the SDS "Port Huron Statement" (which is the best introduction to the meaning of the new radicals' vision of "participatory democracy...

...The new radicals have provided the grounds for hope...

...Many of the most articulate of these students formed the Students for a Democratic Society, which soon became the main organization of the white student activities...

...The book consists of a "report" describing the organizations and main activities of the "Movement," followed by an extensive "documentary" section containing reprints of speeches, articles, leaflets, interviews, songs, and poems by and about the new radicals...

...But, disappointingly, the Jacobs-Landau effort in some ways fails to transcend the standard superficiality about the New Left...

...Their chapters on SNCC, SDS, the Free Speech and the anti-Vietnam movements point intelligently to both the promises and problems of the new student left...

...For the most part, these efforts, when they are not downright scurrilous, are superficial...

...Reviewed by Richard Flacks /~\ne of the consequences of the civil rights upsurge of the Fifties and early Sixties was its impact on significant sectors of the American youth population...