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Chapter 1 The Old Left and the 1960s 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 ofMoscow-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 Shachtman, also an ex-Communist, whose Independent Socialist League sought to become a third force for democratic socialism between the capitalist USA and the Stalinist USSR.2 Several groups of Philadelphians-radical Quakers, Shachtmanites, ex-Communists, Trotskyists-showed interest in the several meetings that took place in New York City in 1957-58. But deeply rooted sectarian suspicions, particularly by Max Shachtman and his followers, subverted such bridgebuilding efforts.3 There was to be no post-Hungary revitalized and reconstructed Old Left. The shift from an Old to a New Left occurred in this context and within the developing historical realities of the postwar period: the emergence of a postcolonial Third World distinguishable from U.S. and Soviet interests; the remarkable performance of the mixed economies of the welfare states of the West; the growing sense that the Weberian "iron cage" of rationalization and bureaucracy seemed to make alienation a more salient social phenomenon than exploitation; and the anxiety generated by Hiroshima, what SDS would soon pinpoint in terms of its own historical moment as "the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living."4 The "oldness" ofthe Old Left rested on the ways it seemed frozen in Cold War polarities and what C. Wright Mills called "the labor metaphysic." By contrast , the New Left generation's coming of age during the 1950s and 1960s coincided with the success of "corporate liberalism": the inte- The Old Left and the 1960s 19 gration of previously antagonistic forces, specifically organized labor, into the Democratic Party coalition that had originally been formed during FDR's New Deal. Indeed, the long-awaited merger of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1955 highlighted what many Leftists perceived as the integration of organized labor as a junior partner to corporate America.5 At least as important was the way deeply felt, often traumatic experiences of betrayal and apostasy polluted the waters of any dialogue, not to speak of reconciliation or ideological flexibility, between the Old Left of the Depression and immediate postwar generations. Being Old Left meant that one experienced the present through the prism of battles over Stalinism, Spain, sectarian labor conflicts, and rival claims to being the vanguard ofthe proletariat. Older Leftists were marked by deep and abiding wounds, which never seemed to heal and in fact were re-ignited as every moment in the present ripped apart the scabs ofinflamed memory. In this period of McCarthyism and weakened labor radicalism, there were small but significant civil rights rallies in Washington, inspired by the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision regarding school integration and the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56. The Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom took place in 1957, and the Youth Marches for Integrated Schools in 1958 and 1959. These marches were organized within Mrican American communities, chiefly by prominent ministers like the Rev. Leon Sullivan, with white allies in both the liberal and radical communities responding to the call. At the 1957 pilgrimage, which included possibly 5,000 Philadelphians, A. Philip Randolph, a veteran of the sectarian wars among Marxists, "warned Negroes against accepting Communist help in their civil rights struggle." Nevertheless, the Philadelphia Bulletin warned, "The Communist Party had been making a big campaign to inject its followers into the pilgrimage." The article conceded that, although Communists had been spotted in the crowd, they had been excluded from the platform. At the time of these marches, in fact, Philadelphia Communism was in total disarray, with ex-members vastly outnumbering members and the former seeking to reconstruct their lives, find jobs, return to school, and reconnect with their families.6 The Trotskyists, organized as the Socialist Workers Party, had a small Philadelphia presence, but hardly the weight or numbers to make a significant difference. The...

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