daily ncbrasken
In 1967, many of today's college seniors were in their
last year at another school-grade school. But it was the
dawn of a movement. Where are those who helped start
that movement today?
Op
b.
Wednesday, august 24, 1977
EOT) S
By Lance Morrow
Time Magazine Staff Writer
Nothing can last in America more than ten years.
. -Philip Rahv
In 1967V the New Left was just starting to harvest its
biggest crops of the newly radicalized. Draft cards and
American flags went up m smoke. The Spring Mobiliza
tion to End the War in Viet Nam brought together
hundreds of thousands of protesters in San Francisco
and New York. Dow Chemical's recruiters were , driven
off campus. Ahead for the movement lay Woodstock,
Chicago, Kent State, the Days of Rage.
Now, ten years later, the children's revolution of the
'60s comes straggling back, startling to recognize in the
summer of 1977. As if they had been flash-frozen in
1970, demonstrators at Kent State have been trying to
prevent construction of a gym near the spot where four
students died. Sometimes the '60s reappear as a waxworks
item of nostalgia: four young men each night take the
stage of Manhattan's Winter Garden to impersonate the
Beatles of long ago. Or else a splendid fable of arrogance
brought low; those who Warned "Never trust anyone over
30" are now losing their hair. The wife of Troubadour
Bob Dylan ("something is happening here but you don't
know what it is do you Mister Jones?") divorced him be
cause she said that, among other things, he was a wife
beater. Ex-Yippie Jerry Rubin, 39 now, lives in a sleek
Manhattan high-rise, complete with uniformed doorman.
"We are not into sacrifice, martyrdom," h has written.
Rubin and his roommate, Mimi Leonard, plan to get
married in December. The most startling news is about
Rennie Davis, who helped organize the Chicago Seven's
convention mischief in 1968 and laster blissed out on the
Perfect Master Maharaj Ji. Davis, it turns out, now sells
life insurance for John Hancock in Denver, wearing
contact lenses and what looks like a blow-dry hairdo. He
is living, he says, a sweet, useful life: Brighten the Corner
Where You Are.
It all proves once again that passions and issues are
ephemeral and that, as the late Philip Rahv, an editor and
longtime student of the American left, knew, radical
movements in the U.S. are cyclical.' Once, the generation
of the New Left and counterculture believed that its
youth, like the war in Viet Nam, would go on forever. It
is tempting today to throw cherry bombs into the ruins
of that delusion: the period seems prime for revisionism
and ridicule. But to see that generation contemptuously as
merely the screaming, Spock-coddled army of Consious
ness III ignores the great changes it helped to cause' in
American life. Says Tom Hayden, one of the founders of
the Students for a Democratic Society, who last year ran
against John Tunney in the California senatorial race: "We
ended a war, toppled two Presidents, desegregated the
South, broke other barriers of discrimination." That is
hyperbolic, such changes did not occur until a broader
nonradical public became disillusioned. But the energies
of the young during the '60s made Americans begin to
think about their environment, about the poor, about
the purposes of progress. One of the most enduring
products of the decade could be women's liberation. Be
cause of the '60s, the '70s are quite different from the
50s-despite some similarities of quiet and self -absorption.
The problem-and the charm-was that nobody in the
'60s planned anything. And so Hayden is left to wonder
ruefully: "How could we accomplish so much and have
so little at the end?" Part of the answer lies in an epigram
of the social theorist Ernest Becker: "A protest without
a program is little more than sentimentalism-this is the
epitaph of many of the great idealisms." The first genera
tion raised by the pale blue light of the tube grew up on
the sweet simplicities of Leave It to Beaver; it had an out
rageous inclination to think that all of life's injustices
could be straightened out in time for the station break.
The young of the '60s were raised to believe that
America was a splendidly virtuous country. When they
found -through the Bay of Pigs, Selma, the assassinations,
Viet Nam-that it was something more ambiguous, they
rose up in horror that now seems touching in its spon
tataneity. They joined in immense numbers-the baby
boom's demographic bulge-and without philosophy or
program. That was the strength and ultimate weakness of
the movement: it arose out of moral outrage and indigna
tion, and grew larger precisely because it ran out of moral
energy, it collapsed like a small dying star.
Repression did its part, of course; the Black Panthers
had much of their leadership wiped out by the police. But
there were other reasons. The war ended. Time passed.
Metabolisms changed. Manson and Altamont-a California
rock festival where a young man was knifed to death
took the innocence out of being a freak. In a post-mortem
on the "tired radicals" of the First World War era, author
Walter Weyl wrote, "Adolescence is the true day of re
volt the day when obscure forces, as mysterious as
growth, push us, trembling out of our narrow iiyes, into
the wide throbbing life beyond self." ,
The New Left operated in a cavaiier-and ultimately
fatal-ignorance of the past. It should have known, should
have remembered, that the American left has always been
its own worst enemy, that, as Historian Christopher Lasch
wrote "the history of American radicalism. . as largely a
history of failure. Radicalism in the United States has no
great triumphs to record."
V
7
The kids who made up the New Left and counter
culture are men and women now. They did not merely
step onto the centrifuge of the '60s and pinwheel them
selves out in the direction of Aquarius, to vanish forever.
Many simply settled down. Says David Dellinger, 60, an
elder, statesman of the movement: "A lot of people had
been leading emergency lives for a long time. They had
put off schooling, babies, their own lives."
As" always, the U.S. has demonstrated an infuriating (to
radicals) talent for absorbing and accommodating even
those who began by wanting to tear the whole place
down. Smoking marijuana is practically legal; the draft
has been abolished. But the radical impulse is still there.
A few weeks ago in Denver, the Third Annual Conference
on Alternative State and Local Public Policies attracted
some 400 electoral strategists, leftist policy intellectuals,
would-be officeholders and labor organizers. The old
New Left now expresses itself in a number of local forms.
A man named David Olsen founded the San Francisco
based New School for Democratic Management, where
workers are taught how to run their own businesses.
People from the movement have revived interest in such
unglamorous electoral jobs as county assessor, state trea
surer and tax commissioner. Sam Brown, an antiwar
leader who became state treasurer of Colorado, is now the
director of ACTION, the federal agency encompassing
VISTA and the Peace Corps. v "
A number of American corporations are feeling the
presence of executives in their thirties who, having been
schooled in '60s virtues, want more openness and
disclosure in business, more debate before making
decisions, more flexibility in personal and professional
styles. Says Stephen McLin, 30, a vice president for the
Bank of America (an outfit some incendiary radicals kept
trying to burn down about seven years ago). "The impact
of this generation will be felt. But the time isn't now. It's
coming in about four or five years."
. It, may be a delusion to think that the country is
finished with what used to be called Woodstock Nation.
Pierre Joseph Proudhon warned about "the fecundity of
the unexpected." The present comparative quiet probably
will not last. Issues such as nuclear energy, the arms race
(the neutron bomb), the environment, the economy,
unemployment and the urban underclass all lie in wait
for anyone who approaches the future complacently. It
would of course be difficult for history to duplicate the
long, wild hallucination of the '60s. But Rahv's ten-year
rule applies to historical pauses as well as upheavals. The
cycle will surely come around again. J:
Copyright 1977. Time, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
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