New Wave Sixties Historiography

Over the last ten years (1988–1998) several books that began as dissertations have been published on “The Sixties”—a period, like the Jacksonian Era, with no dates certain. These books have begun to develop a historiography, as well as fill in a history. Not surprisingly, given both memory (especially the memory of many a dissertation committee member) and mass media representation, one of the most vital of the new historiographical debates focuses on the development and character of the protest movements that animated the era. Despite the call of some older historians for a Sixties history that de-centers white, leftist student activists, the New Left, in particular, has captured the interest of some of the best young scholars. ¹ The book at hand, Doug Rossinow’s The Politics of Authenticity (based on his Johns Hopkins dissertation) is among the best scholarly accounts yet written on the development of the New Left.

Looking back at some of the early histories of the New Left it is obvious to see why post-Cold War era graduate students find the need for a new historical accounting. As a way to set the historiographic stage, I’ll pick on one of those older works that is still referenced in most U.S. history survey textbooks, The Movement: A History of the New Left, 1959–1972 (1974), by the eminent historian Irwin Unger, with the assistance of Debi Unger.

As a first crack at making history out of the Sixties New Left, Unger’s book was a tour de force. Based on a bare handful of sources, notably the national publications of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and a few surveys, and focusing on the Bay area (mainly the Berkeley campus) and New York City (mainly Columbia University), Unger sets out a number of claims in clear and engaging prose. First is the claim advanced by the book’s very title, that “the Movement” is the same singular thing as “the New Left.” The New Left—the “movement”—is then identified as “young men and women who felt more intensely than most the subtle existential oppression imposed by modern America. . . . They felt that they had learned to see through the shiny surface of life in an advanced industrial society to the ugly gray underbelly.” ² In addition, Unger notes that the New Left was “composed predominately of well-educated, middle class youth . . . only middle class college students could afford radicalism.” ³ Further, he emphasizes that the group was white and that the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement “helped shape the New Left” but that “racial injustice in America . . . was—along with philistinism, cultural conformity, sexual puritanism, social hypocrisy, economic inequality, and international opportunism—one of those social deficiencies that always exist in varying degrees and can always be used to indict existing society.” ⁴ In other words, racial injustice and African American activism played no special role in the development of the New Left. Finally, Unger makes almost no mention of religious motives (nor does he mention the large percentage of Jews in the early New Left), and his two pages on the role of women and the development of the women’s movement is highlighted by this attention grabbing claim: “Many Movement women, in fact, were little more than camp followers of the sort that always tag along after men engaged in a dangerous or glamorous calling.” ⁵ Ouch.

Rossinow’s case study of a “‘new’ political left” in Austin, Texas contests key aspects of Unger’s frame. It also compliments, while complicating some of his major claims. In some ways Rossinow’s work simply speaks to different issues and suggests altogether different ways to think about the historical trajectory of leftist politics in Cold War America. Finally, comparing Rossinow’s 1998 dissertation book—written in the era when epistemologically, “there was no King in Israel”—and the eminent Unger’s 1974 publication, written by an advocate (if...