One-time Rebels
Albert, Judith Clavir and Stewart Edward
One-time Rebels THE SIXTIES PAPERS: DOCUMENTS OF A REBELLIOUS DECADE edited by Judith Clavir and Stewart Edward Albert Praeger. 549 pp. $32.95 hardcover, $16.95 paperback. The history of...
...Marty Jezer (Marty Jezer wrote "The Dark Ages: Life in the United States, 1945-1960...
...So, for example, a memo to the movement by two civil rights activists, Casey Hayden and Mary King, indicates the beginnings of feminist consciousness within the civil rights movement...
...The history of radicalism in the United States is not easily transmitted from one generation to the next...
...The Alberts contribute a critically balanced overview that touches upon virtually all the important issues and events...
...The editors treat "The Movement" as the sum of varied parts...
...Students for a Democratic Society (SDS...
...From the vantage point of the Reagan years, it may seem that much of the writing in The Sixties Papers is strident and simplistic...
...The first mention of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), for instance, is footnoted, "Pronounced Snick,"—a small point, but characteristic of the care with which the anthology was assembled...
...But history is useful for the lessons it can teach...
...Other selections show the civil rights movement grappling with the Vietnam war and the antiwar movement dealing with problems of racism...
...The Alberts—both movement veterans—have edited the volume with attention to detail...
...And, as the documents attest, activists took risks and made sacrifices to advance their cause...
...This quibble becomes a quarrel with regard to some of their document selections...
...True, the editors are faithful to the combative mood of the late 1960s...
...But such models as Vietnam Summer would seem to be the stuff of the Left's revival...
...young people, especially, will find it accessible...
...The Sixties Papers is a useful anthology that records the triumphs, defeats, and difficulties of "the movement" in that decade...
...Otherwise the material is solid...
...The collected speeches, manifestos, polemics, poems, position papers, and firsthand accounts of radical activity call attention to the breadth of the movement's agenda and the audacity of its protest tactics...
...There were no Forties or Fifties Papers to instruct radicals of the 1960s...
...the antiwar movement...
...Everything was up for debate—from foreign policy to sex," the editors remind us...
...There is a definite bias toward militant, self-defined "revolutionary" actions...
...The documents are divided into six sections: prophetic voices of the 1950s...
...He is writing a book on the bohemian Left...
...The editors are sensitive to the fact that the issues were never so clearly limned...
...They do, however, give short shrift to the draft resistance movement...
...the black movement...
...The Sixties Papers is a learning resource for the 1980s as well as a valuable reference guide...
...Revolutionary fantasy did overwhelm solid efforts of education and outreach...
...the counterculture, and the women's rebellion, which was just beginning as the decade ended...
...Three entries on the Weathermen (who believed fighting police would inspire white teenagers to join their anti-imperialist, anti-racist urban guerrilla army) are at least two too many, especially when there is nothing on The Resistance, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and such grassroots organizing efforts as Vietnam Summer...
...Excerpts from the Port Huron Statement, the Triple Revolution, and the Conspiracy Trial, position papers of the Black Panthers, SNCC and SDS, Yippie broadsides, and speeches and writings by C. Wright Mills, Malcolm X, Tom Hayden, Sergeant Don Duncan, Carl Oglesby, Diane di-Prima, Gary Snyder, Abbie Hoffman, Robin Morgan, Kate Millett, and Norman Mailer are among the entries...
...So pervasive is anti-radical ideology that even activists who were part of the historic experience are likely to disparage or forget their achievements...
Vol. 49 • October 1985 • No. 10
