In late February 1970, Southern Illinois University’s Carbondale campus was in an uproar. More than a thousand students were engaged in a campaign of civil disobedience, and the dean of students responded by suspending six leaders of the student government, including Dwight Campbell, the first African American president of the student body in SIU’s history, and student body vice president Richard Wallace. Student leaders reacted by calling for a boycott of classes, while Campbell proclaimed, “Students are niggers and it’s time to break the chains.”¹

On the surface, these events appear fairly typical of the student movement of the late...

Historians traditionally study the New Left as a succession of movements that combated a variety of injustices during the tumultuous decade of the 1960s, but rarely as an episode in intellectual history, even though it clearly was this. Many New Left leaders thought of themselves as intellectuals. They did politics largely in the realm of ideas, where we can best see what legacy they have left for those who came after them.¹

They were, of course, indebted to some “big-name” intellectuals, who provided much of the scaffolding for their ideas, for example, C. Wright Mills, Paul Goodman, William Appleman Williams,...

Speaking at the first conference of the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC), historian Howard Zinn remarked, “This is an historic moment. Someday historians will write about it.”¹ Zinn was only half right; while this was the first major conference of southern white student activists in the 1960s, neither the conference nor the sponsoring organization itself has received much attention from historians. This is both curious and unfortunate, since the SSOC was the most important organization of activist white students in the South during the decade. Born in Nashville in 1964, during the heyday of the civil rights movement, SSOC initially...

Fresh from his triumphant trip to Europe, where he delivered hisIch bin ein Berlinerspeech, visited his ancestral homeland, and enjoyed an audience with the new pope, President John F. Kennedy held his first press conference in months on 13 July 1963. Addressing an audience of reporters and more than four hundred reverent students, JFK confidently answered a broad array of questions. Regarding relations with the Soviet Union and the domestic economy, Kennedy observed that both were in excellent shape. After responding to an inquiry about the Peace Corps, the president turned to the subject of civil rights. During...

In 1964–65 Lillian Craig, a white welfare recipient and resident of Cleveland’s Near West Side, and Dovie Thurman, an African American welfare recipient and resident of Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, joined community organizing projects in their neighborhoods. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had recently begun community organizing under the auspices of its Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). Inspired by the civil rights movement, especially by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), SDS aimed to build “an interracial movement of the poor” to abolish poverty, end racial injustice, and expand democracy in America.¹ Over the next few years, SDS...

In 1964 Art Kunkin, a former New York machinist and longtime member of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), launched theLos Angeles Free Pressfrom offices located in the heart of the city’s coalescing hippie bohemia, Sunset Strip. Partly because of its location, theFree Press—which later became the most widely circulated underground paper in the nation—devoted extensive coverage to “freak” and bohemian issues from its inception. In 1965, however, the paper’s coverage of the Watts riots was better than any other local paper’s, including that of theLos Angeles Times.¹ In retrospect, Kunkin claimed that the...

In 1983 Americans flocked to seeThe Big Chill, directed by Lawrence Kasdan. Many critics and audiences praised the film as sophisticated and witty. Pauline Kael called it an “amiable, slick comedy with some very well-directed repartee and skillful performances,” but also noted that “it isn’t really political.”¹ In the film, set in South Carolina during the early 1980s, a group of seven old friends from the University of Michigan gather at the funeral of their friend Alex, who has slashed his wrists out of disillusionment. Erstwhile campus radicals, the seven friends have become paunchy and prosperous. They drink wine,...

In 1965 twenty-eight-year-old Norm Fruchter, an editor atStudies on the Left, returned from a trip to Mississippi to herald profound changes in the civil rights movement. Black Mississippians and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activists they worked with had “abandoned the goal of eventual integration into existing Mississippi society as both unrealistic and undesirable,” he wrote. Rejecting the “totemic demands” of the Left—for federal housing and employment programs, national health insurance, and the like—they were working instead to create counter-institutions and relationships “based on assumptions about identity, personality, work, meaning, and aspirations not accepted in the...

Of all the movements huddled under the New Left umbrella, draft resistance has long been perceived as the most exclusively male and one of the most sexist. And so, when I first began research for a history of the draft resistance movement in Boston during the Vietnam War, I was not surprised to find that in the course of compiling a database of 575 activists’ names, only 72 belonged to women. In a movement that emphasized open defiance of Selective Service laws—laws that applied only to men—the small number of women’s names in movement documents reflected the masculine...

The scene: Chicago, Illinois, December 1969. The stage: Judge Julius Hoffman’s courtroom in the new downtown federal building on Dearborn Street, between Adams and Morgan. The so-called Chicago Seven—pacifist David Dellinger, New Left organizers Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis, Yippies Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and activist academics John Froines and Lee Weiner—faced charges of conspiracy to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, held in the Windy City. The judge had already severed the case of Bobby Seale, cofounder of the Black Panther Party, from that of the remaining seven white defendants. The courtroom drama...

The passion, promise, dynamism, naiveté, idealism, audacity, vanity, nihilism, tragedy, and mythology of the 1960s all combine in a word that served as the animating spirit of much of the decade in the United States and large parts of the world:revolution. To Kirkpatrick Sale, charting in the early 1970s the seemingly inexorable transformation of the American New Left from a strategy of “protest to resistance” and beyond, revolution was the “pattern woven by all the threads of the sixties.”¹ This sense of the evolution of the era’s protest movements is hardly the retrospective imposition of a narrative on reality,...

How did the New Left end? This may, at first glance, seem a trivial question. Surely it is more important that we explore the main concerns and activities of this radical movement during its heyday. Indeed, this is exactly what the past twenty years’ worth of writing on the subject has done. In addition, historians in the 1980s and 1990s have focused a great deal of attention on the question of the New Left’s beginnings. It seems that the “silent generation” of the 1950s was not so silent or complacent after all, and several writers have combed that decade carefully...