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  • Cold War University: Madison and the New Left in the Sixties by Matthew Levin
  • Alan Wald
Cold War University: Madison and the New Left in the Sixties Matthew Levin Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013; 234 pages. $26.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-299-29284-3

Pity the poor aging radical. As he or she lives through the fiftieth anniversary of the events of the 1960s that fashioned his or her life, most public attention goes to books such as Public Enemy (2013) by Bill Ayers, the “unrepentant terrorist.” Yet Ayers’ back story (see Fugitive Days, 2003) is hardly representative of those tens of thousands of ordinary people whose chief experiences were less sensational. Does one have to have rocked the world with scandalous exploits (trashing store windows, planting bombs) and verbiage (“Up against the wall motherfucker!” and “Off the pig!”) to have led a meaningful life as a committed Leftist?

Every now and then, a piece of scholarship quietly surfaces to answer this question with care and subtlety. This is surely the case with Matthew Levin’s Cold War University, an illuminating new portrait of several generations of formidable political activists at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in the 1960s and 1970s. The majority of these students and faculty aimed to build rather than spark a radical social movement, one with a distinct and lasting political culture.

The argument of Levin’s book rests in the context established. He traces the history of radicalism and repression on this Midwestern campus back to its roots in the late nineteenth century when the University’s Board of Regents defended Professor Richard T. Eley, who was under attack by the state Superintendent of Education for pro-labor activities. The crucible for the 1960s, however, was the 1950s. In his most critical chapter, Levin presents the key notion of a “Cold War University” as expressing a specific paradox. The federal government began to impart billions of dollars to American universities to encourage higher enrollments, scientific research, and studies of foreign languages and cultures. Such collaborations between the federal government and major research universities generated disquiet among politically astute students and faculty that provided the first step to the growth of radicalism that followed. [End Page 119]

Levin then maps the development of an intellectual community of students and professors who stimulated a variety of trends in left politics. The book climaxes by examining landmark events in Madison political history, especially the 1966 draft protest, the 1967 sit-in of 400 against Dow Chemical, and the 1970 Sterling Hall bombing of the Army Math Research Center. This part of the story makes for a lively, engrossing read.

In certain respects, the book is much too short and non-theoretical for the subject. How does one interweave all dimensions—the sociohistorical context, the numerous political stories—and to what extent can they be woven? The residue of the legacy of the Left of the 1930s is only marginally present—the CIO and Spanish Civil War are not in the index. Contemporaneous internationalist inspiration is on the periphery—Franz Fanon, Che Guevara, even Jean-Paul Sartre are missing, too. Although we are told a bit about the presence of one Marxist group, the pro-Communist Labor Youth League (which succeeded American Youth for Democracy and overlapped with the Socialist Club and Student Peace Center), we get only the tip of the iceberg in regard to other Left organizations or activities by women and people of color.

The mechanics of exactly how the crucial Committee to End the War in Vietnam was built and the politics of the key players are patchy; that Chairman Robin David, elected after a bitter fight with pro-Communists, was a leading Trotskyist is never even suggested. We are told that Studies on the Left split apart in 1966, but not much about the political reasons; instead, there are some footnote references for the curious reader to hunt. The identifications of key actors among students and faculty vary in the number and kind of details provided, and some are much too elliptical. Was it just Professor Harvey Goldberg’s “dramatic style” and “openly gay” socializing (166) that made him...

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