In the early 1960s a new generation’s voice would emerge across the nation, responding to the kinds of themes highlighted in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) Port Huron Statement of 1962: the threat of nuclear confrontation, the contradictions between American affluence and minority and Third World poverty, the contradictions between American commitments to equality and inclusion and the ugly realities of racism and segregation, and the sense that suburban affluence rested on a mix of hypocrisy, alienation, and meaninglessness. In Philadelphia, that New Left voice would face a number of challenges, some held in common with movement activists nationwide,...

The watershed moment in the origins of the new Left in America was the virtual collapse of the Communist Party in the United States following the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow and the subsequent Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Within several years Party membership and associated networks precipitously declined and rival leftwing organizations sought to fill the vacuum left by the demoralization of Moscow-driven Communism.¹ The foremost efforts in this direction were undertaken by A. J. Muste, an independent radical and former Communist, who had moved toward a direct action model of pacifism by the 1950s, and by Max...

The campuses of Swarthmore, Haverford, and Bryn Mawr Colleges are about as far away from the gritty neighborhoods of Philadelphia as one can possibly get. Two of these liberal arts colleges—Haverford and Bryn Mawr—tended to coordinate their student activism; one of them—Swarthmore—was more within the urban orbit of the city of Chester in Delaware County. All three played critical roles in the emergence and development of the white New Left Movement in greater Philadelphia. Swarthmore, for example, was in the vanguard of what became the New Left’s early community organizing strategy, the SDS Economic Research and...

Virtually none of the literature addressing student opposition to the Vietnam War or, more broadly, the emergence of the New Left movement, considers the experience of Roman Catholic colleges and universities. There is a marginalized literature addressing Catholic movements for social justice and peace, especially those associated with the Berrigan brothers, Philip and Daniel, and their anti-draft activities. But even the contemporary trend toward shifting attention away from the hothouse environments of Berkeley, Madison, and Cambridge has focused on larger state universities in this period.¹

In Philadelphia, three Roman Catholic institutions that were shaped by the Vietnam War—LaSalle, St....

Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia’s dominant Center City campuses, illustrate an important juxtaposition of New Left experience. Temple, though considered by many the Philadelphia equivalent of the City University of New York, only stumbled into 1960s New Left activism, essentially ignoring the growing voices of dissent prior to the Americanization of the Vietnam War in spring 1965. At that time, it had no SDS chapter, and most of the left leadership came from figures like Carl Gilbert, chair of the Student Peace Union (SPU), who maintained affiliations with Old Left issues and styles. In stark contrast, it...

In the early 1960s, prior to the Americanization of the Vietnam War, the peace movement in Philadelphia focused attention on the struggle to eliminate or at least reduce nuclear testing. The participants in this effort were mostly a hardy band of pacifists, Old Leftists, and liberals. They included what Greater Philadelphia Magazine called “the peace-mongers,” living in the city with a claim, based on its Quaker institutions, of holding “the title of America’s peace capital.”¹ The article described the “religious pacifists,” with a specifically Quaker motivation, as well as the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR); “the emotional pacifists,” a sexist category...

Although the Philadelphia Resistance concentrated most of its attention on the war in Indochina, it also worked with other activist groups who were focusing on domestic social issues. Of these groups, People for Human Rights (PHR) emerged as the most vocal. In its effort to join the New Left and Black Power movements, PHR also was perhaps the most divisive. By virtually all accounts, the inspiration for the emergence of the social movements of the 1960s was the civil rights revolution. Rebels without a cause watched—often on television—dignified, courageous African Americans assert their rights to the vote, to...

To examine the history of the New Left movements on college campuses in the late 1960s and early 1970s is to enter a minefield of interpretative brawls and extraordinarily contradictory developments. First of all, there is the ideological battlefield on which conservatives and some liberals see utopian dreams descending into a nihilistic nightmare, the “dark side” of illiberal egalitarianism. Opposing this assault are several versions of left-of-center reconstruction: first, an argument that affirms the early democratic promise of the New Left but regrets the degeneration of idealism as organizations like SDS embraced Third World versions of Marxism-Leninism and, at worst,...