New Left

I

Introduction

New Left, a loosely organized political movement in the United States during the 1960s. The goal of the New Leftists was to create what they saw as a more democratic American society, in which political and economic equality were fundamental rights. The means for accomplishing this goal was participatory democracy in which all citizens shared in solving national problems.

Supporters of the New Left rejected the U.S. system of representative democracy, in which citizens elected officials to govern them. They believed this system could not effectively address the problems that plagued the nation—economic inequality, racism, a nuclear arms race, and widespread political apathy. The New Leftists believed that these problems could be solved through direct, or participatory, democracy, in which all Americans, not just their elected representatives, decided major economic, political, and social questions.

In participatory democracy, citizens would join together and work directly to achieve change at the local level. For example, one of the first major political programs of the New Left was undertaken in 1964 by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). It was called the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). Students moved into poor city neighborhoods throughout the Midwest and East and worked with local residents to help them find ways to combat police brutality and improve their living conditions. The young New Leftists hoped to empower the poor so that they could fight for their own rights and for political and economic changes.

The New Left was new in contrast to the Old Left, represented by Soviet-style Communism. In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the government directed most aspects of society, making decisions and imposing them on the citizens. The New Left scorned Soviet-style Communism because of the government control. They also disparaged American liberals, accusing them of being little different from conservatives in protecting and promoting the interests of the wealthy.

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II

Origins

The New Left was born out of the political and cultural turmoil of the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was created by young people, mainly on college campuses. These young people were influenced by the civil rights movement, particularly by the sit-ins that began in 1960. In the sit-in campaign, young black students in the South protested segregation, or the separation of blacks and whites, by sitting in places that were reserved for whites only. A small number of white students around the United States were inspired by black Southerners’ efforts to change an unjust society through the actions of ordinary people. They wondered if they, too, could make history rather than just study it.

Contributing to this political awakening was a cultural rebellion led by members of the Beat Generation, including writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, sociologist C. Wright Mills, and philosopher Herbert Marcuse. In quite different ways these writers and thinkers challenged the status quo by rejecting what they viewed as America’s preoccupation with material goods and by questioning the morality of American domestic and foreign policy.

On some of America’s best-known college campuses, students in the early 1960s began to seek their own answers to society’s hardest questions, including why poverty exists alongside wealth in the United States. These students would be the core of the American New Left.

Although the New Left was never embodied in a single organization, one of the main New Left organizations was the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), founded by students at the University of Michigan in 1960. The SDS believed that Americans should practice direct democracy, not representative democracy. SDS activists, including Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, and Bernardine Dohrn, played major roles in organizing student protests against the Vietnam War (1959-1975), racism, and economic inequality.

III

Student Movement

New Left advocates were a vital part of the student movement that developed on U.S. campuses in the 1960s. Students at many institutions were dissatisfied with the large, impersonal university that seemed to control every aspect of their lives—from what they could study to when they had to be home at night. Students believed that they were simply numbers in a large system, and they wanted to have more control over their university years. They questioned the faculty’s right to control all aspects of the curriculum, and they challenged the university’s power in other areas as well. Students protested when administrators at the University of California, Berkeley, told students that they could not pass out political pamphlets on university grounds. During this protest, known as the Free Speech Movement, students demanded the right to an active political life and the right to have a voice in running the university of which they were members.

New Leftists were also key participants in the anti-Vietnam War movement. While never dominating this multi-faceted movement, New Leftists were vocal critics of American policy in Vietnam. They viewed this policy as unjustifiable interference in the affairs of a Third World country, in which the United States was propping up an undemocratic government in the name of thwarting Communism. Most New Leftists were also firm supporters of the Black Power movement that had grown out of the civil rights struggles of the early and mid-1960s. When Black Power activists argued that black people should have the right to run their own communities, most of the New Left agreed. They saw Black Power as a necessary means for blacks to regain control over their own destinies.

The New Left was most influential in the late 1960s. New Left organizations existed on almost every American campus. However, even as the New Left played a role in many of the important social movements of the 1960s, grave problems plagued it. The most obvious was that the group lacked a method by which individual citizens working at the grassroots level could solve economic problems. How would they go about making the U.S. economy more equitable? A second problem was the group’s lack of support among the American people. Most Americans rejected the New Leftists’ outspoken critique of American anti-Communism and their attack on the Vietnam War. If a majority of Americans disapproved of the New Left’s policies despite its stated dedication to participatory democracy, then something, the young radicals knew, had gone wrong.

For these reasons, some New Leftists lost faith in their fellow Americans. Frustrated by the Vietnam War, some became more radical in their beliefs: They gave up on participatory democracy and began to look to repressive Communist countries like China and Korea for models of the good society. Some announced their support for the Communist forces in Vietnam, and others called for a revolution in the United States. Extremist groups, like the Weathermen, began to grow out of the New Left.

Many more New Leftists, however, maintained their faith in the core principles, even as experience made them more realistic. They became activists in the environmental movement, the women’s movement, the consumer protection movement, and in local political organizations. Tom Hayden, cofounder of the SDS, eventually became a member of the California State Assembly. Many others became professors who challenged the traditional curriculum by introducing courses that studied race, gender, and class relations. Even as the New Left faded away, its influence on American society remained strong.

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