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  • Locating the New Left
  • John McMillian (bio)
Van Gosse. Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretive History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. xi + 240 pp. Bibliography and index. $23.95.

To many Americans, the social protests of the 1960s seemed almost nova-like, flaring up without warning and exposing cracks and blemishes in the American Dream that previous generations had turned away from with blithe indifference. True, a few farsighted thinkers predicted that the 1960s would be tumultuous—Norman Mailer and C. Wright Mills come to mind—but even they could not have imagined the tidal shifts in American culture and politics that the New Left helped to create.1 Since then, Americans have engaged in a seemingly inexhaustible debate over the 1960s. Whereas some see the decade as a time of increasing social equality and democratic activity, others lament the ways the 1960s eroded time-tested values. In 2003, Bill Clinton observed that the decade functions as a kind of litmus test. "If you look back on the '60's and think there was more good than harm, you're probably a Democrat," he said. "If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."2

So long as we live in the 1960s broad wake, the New Left is likely to remain a topic of robust historical inquiry. In the late 1980s, two penetrating and beautifully written works—James Miller's "Democracy is in the Streets": From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (1987), and Todd Gitlin's The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987)—helped to establish the reigning narrative explaining the intellectual and socio-cultural forces that account for the movement's rapid rise and precipitous decline.However, both studies focus heavily upon the institutional history of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)—especially in its early years—when in fact, much of the decade's political energy arose from the grassroots, and it wasn't until the mid- to late 1960s that the New Left became a mass movement.3 As a result, these books shaped the research designs of many newer studies, which collectively present a fuller accounting of the youth rebellion by de-centering SDS, examining the movement at the local level, and exploring other groups of white radicals within the organized Left.

However, this exciting scholarship strikes only a minor chord in Van Gosse's Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretive History, a compact and capably written [End Page 551] overview of American radicalism during the Cold War. Although historians have traditionally defined the New Left as a campus-based youth movement, Gosse argues that the student insurgency was a mere component of the real New Left, which he says was a broad-based, multicultural "movement of movements," featuring young and old alike, that stretched from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s (p. 5).4 In his view, the "paradigmatic New Leftist," is not an impassioned student intellectual like Tom Hayden or Mario Savio, or even a politicized hippie like Abbie Hoffman; it is Martin Luther King, Jr., whose photograph graces this book's cover (p. 36).Elsewhere, he says pacifists were "at the New Left's moral and organizational center," and in a previous work he has called Dorothy Day "a quintessential 'New' Leftist leader" (p. 28).5 One way to judge this book, then, is to assess whether this attempt at redefining the New Left is persuasive and helpful. To this question, we shall return.

First, it is important to note that Rethinking the New Left has much to offer even for those who are not persuaded by its core argument. No one has before attempted a synthesis of this kind, and whether describing the Marxist, African American, or pacifist groups that grew out of the Old Left, or the very last remnants of the New Left, Gosse's knowledge of postwar American radicalism is broad and deep. Throughout the book, he also dismantles some durable popular misunderstandings. For instance, he explains that the upheavals that we commonly associate with "the Sixties" can actually be best understood as two distinct periods, from 1955–1965 (when the nation awoke from its political somnambulism) and...

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