The Americanist

Part Six

part six i The demonstrations popping up on American campuses in the 1960s and extending to the 1970s began shortly after Joseph McCarthy’s unlamented death in 1957. They excited my sympathy and my vexation . The underlying cause of student disquiet, I believed, was the war in Vietnam, but its proclaimed target was the “establishment ,” the emerging bogey of what was to become an international youth estate. Liberals like me opposed American intervention in Southeast Asia, but many of us were also piqued by student militants, with their strikes and nonnegotiable demands, and by an of‹cialdom that alternately over- and underreacted to student dissent. True believers, on both the left and the right, despised our tepid moderation. To the leftists under thirty and to some of those over thirty as well, our kind of politics and culture was out of date. Rude expletives once con‹ned to walls and fences had become commonplace in public discourse. I had spent a lot of time in the company of students in America and abroad and was probably less conscious of the age gaps that divided “them” from “us” than were most people of my generation . I felt at ease with the rebellious young and wanted no part in the looming generational fracas. I admonished myself: “Let the young implode. Don’t take sides or offer gratuitous advice.” But by the late 1960s, I lacked the patience and detachment to follow this lofty counsel. I cringed from folksinging sessions where the young and their elder gurus came to protest against the atomic – 159 – bomb, apartheid, and social discrimination or to enjoy their own theatricality, and I grew increasingly depressed by the displays of radical chic in fashion magazines and by the commercializing of causes. An older me had distanced himself from an earlier impulsive me and grown more receptive to codes and rules of behavior that I now believed made social intercourse less noisy and abrasive . Quotations in my journal circa 1968–70 leaned to the dry and the de›ationary. “Men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.” (Melville to Hawthorne) “The only thing the young people had de‹nitely in common was the attack on objectivity, intellectual responsibility, and the balanced personality.” (Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities) “This atmosphere created by ‘association’ makes those who live in it ‘devoid of responsibility and remorse,’ to quote one of Kierkegaard’s profound sayings in the dangers of shared activity.” (Ellen Key, The Younger Generation) Here was a problem: how to reconcile the generous social instincts of rebellious students with their bad manners and verbal brutalities (“Up against the wall, motherfucker!”). If I spoofed Victorian decorum, I was always startled when words and expressions that had been taboo when I was growing up were casually uttered in public discourse. Like many of my middle-aged friends and colleagues, I found myself reverting to the manners of my elders while still half convinced that the half-baked insurgents holding revivals and sit-ins on university campuses had some reason to believe, however simplistic their reasoning and violent their language, that we were bound to sell them out in the long run, hedge them in, douse their ‹res. “Every generation,” the critic and reformer John Jay Chapman wrote a century ago, “is a secret society , and has incommunicable enthusiasms, tastes, and interests which are a mystery to its predecessors and to posterity.” That the so-called New Leftists and I were talking past each other became clearer to me after I chaired a debate titled “The – 160 – Old Left and the New” in 1967 at the Ninety-second Street YMCA. It pitted Dwight Macdonald and Richard Rovere, old vintage lefties, against two reigning junior Jacobins: Tom Hayden , then “resident activist” at Antioch College; and Ivanhoe Donaldson, well known on the radical student front for his “charisma.” Neither Hayden nor Donaldson had bothered to read the list of questions put to them in advance or to spell out their positions in the debate. They used the occasion simply to scorch their opponents, whose ›ippant, but not ill-natured, animadversions (“those youngsters simply hadn’t read enough”) no doubt sounded insufferably patronizing. That Macdonald commended their idealism didn’t matter. To these new stars of the political theater, eager to preach but not to listen, whatever the old geezers had to say was irrelevant. But then what to make...