Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for Professor and ex-SDS leader (early 1960s) Todd Gitlin.
BOOK REVIEW
THE SIXTIES: YEARS OF HOPE-DAYS OF RAGE, TODD GITLIN, BANTAM BOOKS, NEW YORK, 1987
Over the last several months this writer has alluded several times to the 1960’s movements for social change –the defense of the Cuban Revolution, the fight for nuclear disarmament, the centrally important black civil rights fight, the struggle against the Vietnam War and the emerging struggles for women’s and gay rights. And ultimately, for a few (too few) of us, the necessary struggle to change the social organization of the American society-the fight for socialism. In short, all the signposts for that part of a political generation, my generation, which in shorthand I will call the Generation of ’68. Let us be clear, nostalgia and the ravages of time on the memory on the part of this writer aside, this was a short but intense period that he believes requires serious study. Militant leftists today face many, if not all, of the social problems that confronted the generation of ’68. Thus, reading the book under review written by a literate participant in many of those struggles, although then, as today, a political opponent of the reviewer, can help today’s militant leftists learn the lessons of that experience.
While it is entirely possible for today’s militant leftist youth to start fresh and ignore what for all of them is, at best, a mythical experience, that stance would be short-sighted. I agree, due to the lack of a critical mass of militant leftists who could have assimilated and transmitted those experiences , that a militant movement today could get along very well without knowing anything about the 1960’s. However, at some point the issues, the conflicts, the struggle for a victorious strategy to fight the monster (otherwise known as American imperialism) will be replayed. Believe me it is never fruitless to learn something from the past.
Professor Gitlin has written, in the currently reviewed volume, what is probably the definitive general survey of the central events that roiled American (and eventually, much of Western society) in the 1960’s. Let us be clear, we are not talking about the working class 1960’s, we are not talking about the 1960’s of the mainly middle class parents of the generation of ’68. We are most definitely not talking about the Vietnamese 1960’s. In fact we are not talking about an experience that most of the people during that period experienced, except as media events or at the margins. What we are talking about is the youth explosions of the 1960’s, their repercussions, effects and legacies. This is the area of Professor Gitlin’s intimate personal experience and therefore is a good place to start.
In the usual case this writer spends his book reviewing time describing and analyzing events that occurred before his time. Things like the American, French and Russian Revolutions. It is therefore with certain amount of pleasant, if not nostalgia, that he can review a book that deals with events that made up not only the author’s but the reviewer's youth. All the signposts of my youth are described and analyzed here from the ‘beats’ through Cuba to the civil rights movement and eventually through the struggle against the Vietnam War. That said, the author and this reviewer have very different interpretations of the meaning of the events at the time and the inevitable lessons to be drawn from then.
A part of that difference is personal. It may be that I am just a few years younger than the author but I believe that that difference in age explains a little the difference between the author’s approach to politics and organization and the reviewer’s. That is not a small difference- the difference today between Professor Gitlin’s apparent embrace of the ‘virtues’ of a patriotic attitiude to American imperialism as exemplified in his initial support for the current Iraq War and his latest book and my militant leftist position. I may have come later to radical leftist politics but over thirty years later nothing on the political landscape, including 9/11, has forced me to change my resolve.
There is also, frankly, a class issue Gitlin’s parents were respectable teachers and therefore middle class or striving to be middle class in a time when such an aspiration was attainable and not deemed a worthless goal. This reviewer on the other hand grew up at the margins of the bottom of the working class-his father was from the Kentucky coal mines and he grew up in a white housing project. In short, the promise of the 1950’s with which Professor Gitlin begins his book escaped my family. While most working class people have desperately tried to get out of the class or, at least, deny their class position this reviewer has stayed with his class. Professor Gitlin, on the other hand, went on to his academic pursuits and Socialist Scholars conferences in exotic locales.
Professor Gitlin takes us through the necessary influences which formed the basis for the 1960’s revolt. It is always problematic whether the general cultural climate or particular prior events had much influence on what followed later. It is easier to see both types of influences in hindsight and to over-analyze their importance. Nevertheless he takes us through the trials and tribulations of the ‘beats’, the rise and mainstream commercialization of the original rock and roll movement and the initial youth culture rebellion through such figures as James Dean, Marlon Brando, the work of Tennessee’s Williams and other cultural figures. It strikes me that such figures rather than, let us say Che, acted as a catalyst to move away from the mainstream society and not change it. The rise of the counerculture movement bears witness to that effect. It is easy enough to challenge the orthodoxy of the 1950’s it is another to have seen a way out. None of these phenomena that explode don the scene pretended to, or sought, to do so.
Professor Gitlin gets closer to the core of the influence when he discusses the Kennedy Administration, particularly after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Two issues galvanized youth- the struggle against nuclear war and the struggle for black civil rights. The pretensions of the Kennedy administration in attempting to form a liberal consensus were the legitimate and logical target for the increasing numbers of young who wanted to take the Kennedys at their word- the need to roll up your sleeves and change society. However, they did not expect that change to start with them as the targets. The early 60's movement started with that love/hate relationship with the liberals-it never really got resolved then (and still hasn’t today).
The central organizational expression of the student/youth rebellion and the key to Professor Gitlin’s political perspective then, especially on the campuses, was Students for Democratic Society (SDS). Professor Gitlin was an early president of that organization and therefore can and generally does present the political and organizational ups and downs of SDS accurately and with a certain amount of insight. A couple of caveats though- he is very wedded to the notion that early SDS and its ‘old politicos’ network was something of 'Golden Age' tarnished by the later craziness of Progressive Labor and Weatherman interventions that brought about the demise of the organization in 1969. In short, he takes a fundamentally social democratic side on the 'reformist vs. revolutionary' question.
Professor Gitlin also suffers from a belief that the student movement by itself could have then led the fight for social change as some kind of ‘new class’ to lead a new society. If nothing else the history of the last forty years of campus life has cruelly placed that theory in the shade. Nevertheless read this book and learn why we would both agree to be 'young in that time was very heaven'.
BOOK REVIEW
THE SIXTIES: YEARS OF HOPE-DAYS OF RAGE, TODD GITLIN, BANTAM BOOKS, NEW YORK, 1987
Over the last several months this writer has alluded several times to the 1960’s movements for social change –the defense of the Cuban Revolution, the fight for nuclear disarmament, the centrally important black civil rights fight, the struggle against the Vietnam War and the emerging struggles for women’s and gay rights. And ultimately, for a few (too few) of us, the necessary struggle to change the social organization of the American society-the fight for socialism. In short, all the signposts for that part of a political generation, my generation, which in shorthand I will call the Generation of ’68. Let us be clear, nostalgia and the ravages of time on the memory on the part of this writer aside, this was a short but intense period that he believes requires serious study. Militant leftists today face many, if not all, of the social problems that confronted the generation of ’68. Thus, reading the book under review written by a literate participant in many of those struggles, although then, as today, a political opponent of the reviewer, can help today’s militant leftists learn the lessons of that experience.
While it is entirely possible for today’s militant leftist youth to start fresh and ignore what for all of them is, at best, a mythical experience, that stance would be short-sighted. I agree, due to the lack of a critical mass of militant leftists who could have assimilated and transmitted those experiences , that a militant movement today could get along very well without knowing anything about the 1960’s. However, at some point the issues, the conflicts, the struggle for a victorious strategy to fight the monster (otherwise known as American imperialism) will be replayed. Believe me it is never fruitless to learn something from the past.
Professor Gitlin has written, in the currently reviewed volume, what is probably the definitive general survey of the central events that roiled American (and eventually, much of Western society) in the 1960’s. Let us be clear, we are not talking about the working class 1960’s, we are not talking about the 1960’s of the mainly middle class parents of the generation of ’68. We are most definitely not talking about the Vietnamese 1960’s. In fact we are not talking about an experience that most of the people during that period experienced, except as media events or at the margins. What we are talking about is the youth explosions of the 1960’s, their repercussions, effects and legacies. This is the area of Professor Gitlin’s intimate personal experience and therefore is a good place to start.
In the usual case this writer spends his book reviewing time describing and analyzing events that occurred before his time. Things like the American, French and Russian Revolutions. It is therefore with certain amount of pleasant, if not nostalgia, that he can review a book that deals with events that made up not only the author’s but the reviewer's youth. All the signposts of my youth are described and analyzed here from the ‘beats’ through Cuba to the civil rights movement and eventually through the struggle against the Vietnam War. That said, the author and this reviewer have very different interpretations of the meaning of the events at the time and the inevitable lessons to be drawn from then.
A part of that difference is personal. It may be that I am just a few years younger than the author but I believe that that difference in age explains a little the difference between the author’s approach to politics and organization and the reviewer’s. That is not a small difference- the difference today between Professor Gitlin’s apparent embrace of the ‘virtues’ of a patriotic attitiude to American imperialism as exemplified in his initial support for the current Iraq War and his latest book and my militant leftist position. I may have come later to radical leftist politics but over thirty years later nothing on the political landscape, including 9/11, has forced me to change my resolve.
There is also, frankly, a class issue Gitlin’s parents were respectable teachers and therefore middle class or striving to be middle class in a time when such an aspiration was attainable and not deemed a worthless goal. This reviewer on the other hand grew up at the margins of the bottom of the working class-his father was from the Kentucky coal mines and he grew up in a white housing project. In short, the promise of the 1950’s with which Professor Gitlin begins his book escaped my family. While most working class people have desperately tried to get out of the class or, at least, deny their class position this reviewer has stayed with his class. Professor Gitlin, on the other hand, went on to his academic pursuits and Socialist Scholars conferences in exotic locales.
Professor Gitlin takes us through the necessary influences which formed the basis for the 1960’s revolt. It is always problematic whether the general cultural climate or particular prior events had much influence on what followed later. It is easier to see both types of influences in hindsight and to over-analyze their importance. Nevertheless he takes us through the trials and tribulations of the ‘beats’, the rise and mainstream commercialization of the original rock and roll movement and the initial youth culture rebellion through such figures as James Dean, Marlon Brando, the work of Tennessee’s Williams and other cultural figures. It strikes me that such figures rather than, let us say Che, acted as a catalyst to move away from the mainstream society and not change it. The rise of the counerculture movement bears witness to that effect. It is easy enough to challenge the orthodoxy of the 1950’s it is another to have seen a way out. None of these phenomena that explode don the scene pretended to, or sought, to do so.
Professor Gitlin gets closer to the core of the influence when he discusses the Kennedy Administration, particularly after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Two issues galvanized youth- the struggle against nuclear war and the struggle for black civil rights. The pretensions of the Kennedy administration in attempting to form a liberal consensus were the legitimate and logical target for the increasing numbers of young who wanted to take the Kennedys at their word- the need to roll up your sleeves and change society. However, they did not expect that change to start with them as the targets. The early 60's movement started with that love/hate relationship with the liberals-it never really got resolved then (and still hasn’t today).
The central organizational expression of the student/youth rebellion and the key to Professor Gitlin’s political perspective then, especially on the campuses, was Students for Democratic Society (SDS). Professor Gitlin was an early president of that organization and therefore can and generally does present the political and organizational ups and downs of SDS accurately and with a certain amount of insight. A couple of caveats though- he is very wedded to the notion that early SDS and its ‘old politicos’ network was something of 'Golden Age' tarnished by the later craziness of Progressive Labor and Weatherman interventions that brought about the demise of the organization in 1969. In short, he takes a fundamentally social democratic side on the 'reformist vs. revolutionary' question.
Professor Gitlin also suffers from a belief that the student movement by itself could have then led the fight for social change as some kind of ‘new class’ to lead a new society. If nothing else the history of the last forty years of campus life has cruelly placed that theory in the shade. Nevertheless read this book and learn why we would both agree to be 'young in that time was very heaven'.
