Ah yes, the 1960s...that was the big hinge in American society during the twentieth century. Despite all the social divisions of the time, it was also an era when the American public collectively entered puberty, lost its innocence, possibly lost its mind, and still came out of the experience being chronically naive and immature, a problem that afflicts us to this very day. Among the changes of that time was a political shift to the far left among some segments of the youth culture. Irwin Unger’s The Movement chronicles this change of direction in a way that is both sympathetic to the cause and critical at the same time.
As the book opens, we get a quick run-down of the history of left wing activism going back to the free love communes of the nineteenth century, the brief rise and decline of the American Communist Party, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s, and the bland maintenance of the status quo by liberals throughout the same time. After white students from UC Berkeley went to the American South to support the Civil Rights activists, they came back to find the Free Speech Movement, led by Mario Savio, just beginning. Then the Students For a Democratic Society entered the scene. The SDS actually had its roots in the 1930s; traditionally anti-communist and anti-authoritarian, their vaguely stated objective was to increase citizen participation in the democratic process. They were hardly radical and in fact shunned the company of activists farther to the left of them. They were also a bit boring and unpopular. By the mid-1960s, their leaders saw that agitation against the war in Vietnam was becoming a trend, so they decided to latch onto that and came to be at the center of what was dubbed the New Left. Eventually they collaborated with the Black Panthers, but then split into three separate factions, one of which became the violent terrorist group known as the Weather Underground.
Unger’s book is effective because he takes a sociological approach in the beginning to examining the root causes of student rebellion. He properly identifies the demographic of white, middle-class teenagers and young adults as the as the core group of New Left activists. He questions why these people, presumably living in relative comfort would rebel so strongly against the system that sustains them and the answer he comes up with is a plain and simple one: boredom. Too much comfort without enough conflict leads to social anomie. Too little noise in a social system doesn’t lead to more efficiency, it leads to chronic agitation. Too many young people had seen their parents go to work for corporations, buy suburban houses and cars, then sit around doing nothing but watching TV in their spare time. The kids were hungry for life and excitement.
A lot of people have criticized the New Left and the counter cultures of the 1960s for being nothing but spoiled kids. Those critics fail to take something into account. Living a comfortable life does not mean that people who do so are required to check their humanity and morality at the door. Living comfortably does not mean you have to have an inhuman tolerance for racism or war. Nor does it mean you are obligated to slavishly accept the lifestyle the dominant society says that you have to accept. When we are told we live in a free society, we ought to be allowed to make choices about what we support and how we live our lives. If having enough money to live comfortably comes at the expense of our freedom of choice, we are nothing but a totalitarian society. The youth movements had every right to challenge American society and they were right to do so.
But anyhow, Unger goes on to examine the SDS and their relations with other groups like SNCC, CORE, the hippies, the Yippies, the feminists, the gay and lesbian liberation movement, and eventually the commune movements that continued on into the 1970s. What emerges is a portrait of the SDS as a group that had no real central purpose or direction, yet somehow they operated as a central motivational force that kept all the other leftists and counter-culturalists moving in the same direction. They weren’t channeling the New Left into any definite direction, but they were the momentum and catalyst that kept the fire burning for as long as it did. Unger rightly points out that their lack of true purpose caused their disastrous splits in the end, while also maintaining the government’s change in policies towards the war in Vietnam caused the anti-war movement to fizzle out. Then finally the violence of the Weather Underground, the Kent State Massacre, and the bombing of the Army Math Research Center in Wisconsin turned activists away from hardcore radicalism and back towards a more moderate and traditional liberal progressivism.
The Movement was written in the early 70s before the war had actually ended. Some historians say that a proper amount of time and distance are needed to write an accurate and effective history of a political or social movement like this. In Irwin Unger’s case, I have to disagree. His observations are sharp, realistic, and accurate. Being so close to the history he writes about gaves him a clear picture of what was happening around him. He was also detached enough as a writer to point out the flaws in the thinking and tactics of supporters of the New Left, even though he sympathizes with their plight. This may even be one of the most engaging accounts of this subject I have read so far.
The book ends on an interesting note. The author questions whether the uprisings of the 1960s would lead to any lasting change. His answer is that, as he saw it in his time, no, they didn’t. I have to disagree with him as it might not have been so obvious at the time. The 1960s initiated a series of social changes that are still being discussed today. The drug culture has become a mainstay of American society and the hedonism of the hippies eventually turned into things like disco. Issues of feminism, free speech, the rights of ethnic minorities, and LGBTQ people are still being discussed. The rebellion of hippies morphed into punk rock and other related things. Black Power resulted in hip hop culture and the influx of African-American people into the middles class. The Sexual Revolution has led to mass tolerance for most forms of sexual expression. And despite recent attempts at censorship from people on both the right and the left, there are no longer any taboos, given the proper time and place, on what we are allowed to discuss because of the leftist Free Speech Movement. The New Left may not have solved these problems directly within the time frame of their movement, but they laid the foundation for the America we live in today. The decade of the 1960s ended, but the forces it unleashed took on new dimensions, many of which benefited us immensely.
