Review

General Books

In this brief volume, William L. O'Neill delivers a biting examination of the American New Left. In the process, O'Neill returns to a subject he had previously explored in a well-received 1971 work, Coming Apart. As was true thirty years earlier, the author again delivers a blistering indictment of the largely young rebels and radicals who grabbed their nation's attention during the 1960s. This time around, he devotes his attention to one of the leading New Left organizations Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), to proponents of a counter culture like the hippies and the Yippies, and to the so-called Academic Left. O'Neill begins and closes his book with its central premise: the decade of the sixties ushered in considerable social and cultural change, some positive, some not, that the New Left was responsible for. While the history of the New Left, in O'Neill's estimation, was "genuinely tragic," the story of the Academic Left, when radicals no longer sought "to change the world" but had come "to rule the roost" in higher education, was merely "ironic" (p. 109).	1
A book that would obviously serve well in any number of university or high school classes, including those covering post-World War II America or the 1960s, The New Left succinctly points to generally accepted reasons both for the Movement's appearance and for its decline. The stage for a rebirth of American radicalism was set by the waning of McCarthyism, the unfolding of the civil rights movement, the advent of the Beats, the rekindling of political liberalism, and demographic bulges. The SDS envisioned transforming America both by filling a political vacuum and following in the footsteps of civil rights activists from such organizations as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality. Its early seminal document, the Port Huron Statement (1962) was both moderate and utopian in nature. A steady drift away from liberalism soon transpired, however, as SDS came to view democratic, anti-Communists with distrust, while extolling the likes of Cuba's Fidel Castro. An increasing number of New Leftists were radicalized as segregationists wreaked murder in the American South, urban riots proliferated, and the United States intensified military operations in Vietnam. More and more young radicals spoke of the need to move beyond reform to resistance, while cries of revolution cropped up as well. But perhaps most tellingly, Marxist-Leninist ideas, particularly notions regarding the need for an American vanguard, began filtering through New Left circles. Ironically, a portion of the New Left revisited the sectarianism of the Old Left of the 1930s and 1940s. Sadder still, some in the New Left came to identify with dictatorial regimes and practices, just as many Old Leftists, during the Popular Front phase of the Depression decade, had extolled democratic ideals.	2
Produced by one of the finest American historians, The New Left has much to offer students of the subject. O'Neill challenges the self-aggrandizing chronicling by former New Leftists that has characterized useful autobiographical works such as Tom Hayden's Reunion: A Memoir (1988) and Todd Gitlin's The Sixties: Years of Hope Days of Rage (1993). Even Kirkpatrick Sale's monumental SDS (1973) and James Miller's "Democracy Is in the Streets": From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (1987), despite being critical studies, are seen as glorifying and glamorizing the New Left. On the other hand, O'Neill too easily slips into the dismissive and altogether damning mode adopted by a couple of other one-time New Leftists, Peter Collier and David Horowitz, in Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties (1989). At its best, The New Left: A History is more in keeping with Irwin Unger's The Movement (1974) and John Diggins's The Rise and Fall of the American Left. Unger too saw a hopeful side to the early New Left, but condemned the sectarianism and anti-American rhetoric characteristic of a portion of its most militant members by the close of the 1960s. Diggins thoughtfully examines the long slow march of New Leftists into the professiorate and O'Neill's exploration of the Academic Left clearly draws from his predecessor's study. But like Unger, O'Neill is sometimes too quick to stereotype the young radicals of the sixties, while similar to Diggins, his examination of the New Left's passage into university careers is at times a little too neat. A fuller, more multi-textured analysis of New Left developments, rather than the dismissive treatment too readily apparent in O'Neill's study, would have been welcomed.	3
California State University, Chico Robert C. Cottrell

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