The Emergence of "The New Left"

Daniel J. Flynn writes in his book A Conservative History of the American Left that "The New Left emerged with the 1962 manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)." One of the facts I think is interesting about the 1960s is that it was a time of "Left vs. Left, Left vs. liberal, but rarely left vs. Right - until that decade passed into history, when it became almost entirely Left vs. Right." The New Left was a product of its times: the civil rights movement, the Great Society's anti-poverty programs, and the Vietnam War.

Students who joined SDS took their stand on race. An attempt to integrate the Albany, Georgia train station landed Michigander Tom Hayden in the Albany jail. "This one here is a nigger lover, boys," Hayden's jailer told the inmates in lockup, "take good care of him for us." Hayden had gone south to work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). "Getting jailed, beaten up, or otherwise abused radicalized blacks like SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael just as it radicalized whites such as Hayden," writes Flynn. "By 1966 SNCC banned whites from its organization and openly advocated violence. Carmichael traded the labels "colored" and "Negro" for black. He popularized the catchphrase "black power," and SNCC adopted a Black Panther as its symbol."

"That uncompromising spitit manifested itself in campus disputes between students and administrators." Activism became an end in itself. Berkeley's so-called Free Speech Movement was made up mainly of young, privileged, affluent young adults, who began to see themselves as an oppressed class. Borrowing more than rhetoric from the civil rights movement, on December 2, 1964 more than a thousand people, singing "We Shall Overcome," invaded the university's administration building, and staged a sit-in. The faculty and administration acquiesced to the Free Speech Movement's demands. Flynn writes, "The template sketched at Berkeley made its way to hundreds of campuses."

"By the end of the decade Communists devoted to Chairman Mao captured SDS from Communists devoted to Ho Chi Minh, and the organization was driven into obscurity."