In mid-September of 1960, about a hundred young conservatives met at William Buckley’s estate in Sharon, Connecticut, and formed the Young Americans for Freedom. They were inspired by a sense that not enough was being done to roll back Communism and that the principles of free-market capitalist economics needed to be more forcefully promulgated and defended. The Republican Party of the time was dominated by moderates. Dwight Eisenhower, while he was willing to order the murder of a Patrice Lumumba, the Prime Minister of the newly independent Congo who defied Washington and became too cozy with Moscow, was not willing to risk nuclear war to turn back the Soviet Union. The Republican candidate for President was Richard Nixon, a man who had made his career out of red-baiting, but still a moderate in economic and political matters. Like Ike, he was willing to negotiate with the Russians and willing to accept the fundamental premises of the liberal New Deal state. The only alternative to Nixon was Nelson Rockefeller, a man repugnant to the new young conservatives for his liberal views on social issues. The “Eastern Establishment” would be rocked four years later by the ascendancy of the new conservative movement within the Republican Party and the candidacy of Barry Goldwater for President, but in 1960, conservatives were still a small minority within the party and within American political life. They were widely perceived to be extremists out of step with mainstream American assumptions about society. But they had passion and commitment on their side, passion inspired in many instances by photographs and novels. The photographs were of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 being suppressed by Soviet tanks, and the novels were the works of Ayn Rand–Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. That the shaping influences on their ideology were plastic images rather than conceptual abstractions suggests something about what Russell Kirk called “the conservative mind,” a mind that does not know how to conceptualize society or to imagine the larger maps of history because it is so anchored in empirical immediacy. The principal guide for behavior, therefore, is the self and its interests, and self urges are not mediated by higher level cognitive processes. The result is avid greed conjoined with intemperate violence, a tendency toward a release of uncontrolled urges in favor of oneself and against others. All the passion of the young conservatives of 1960 was distilled into the Sharon Statement which conjoined a strong call to destroy communism with a fervent espousal of economic individualism and self-interest. And that passion worked itself out throughout the next two decades, supporting violence against others in Vietnam and on the streets of America and laboring to elect a conservative leader who would impose their principles on the nation. Ronald Reagan answered that need in 1980, and his election owes much to the meeting that occured in 1960.
That same year another group met in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and fored the Students for a Democratic Society. Their manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, published in 1962, laid out a very different picture of American life and of the world. It called for a more humane economy devoid of poverty, expressed faith in the infinite improvability of human nature, and called for peaceful coexistence with, not violent rollback of, socialism. These young leftists were of a very different sort than the young conservatives at Sharon. They were not committed to self-interest as a guiding principle of life. Rather, they wanted to work to end poverty, erase racial injustice, and make a better world for everyone, not just themselves. They were, not surprisingly, a more educated and intelligent bunch than the young conservatives. Many already had advanced degrees, but more importantly, they knew how to conceptualize the world and to make abstract maps of society and of history. They had had good teachers like C. Wright Mills and William Appleman Williams, teachers who were capable of describing American history and society in ways that made it clear that the simplistic empirical evidence of the conservatives deserved closer scrutiny and more penetrating thought. They too were marginal in relation to mainstream party politics. The Democratic Party hardly noticed them, but by 1972, the politics they represented would more or less have taken over the party. By campaigning for Eugene McCarthy in 1968, they helped dislodge Lyndon Johnson, and in the McGovern campaign of 1972, they came as close as they every would to political power. While the YAFers of 1960 went on to become Reagan administration staffers, the SDS leftists became teachers or left think tank activists. They never had their day of power, although they certainly had their days in the news.
Rebecca Klatch’s A Generation Divided does something quite unique; it talks to both sides and asks each to tell their story. She constructed a sample group of YAFers and another of SDSers, and conducted interviews with each. Then, she compared what they had to say. Surprisingly, perhaps, given the opposed nature of their world views, she finds commonalities and overlaps, especially in regard to libertarianism, a strain of thought that emphasizes individual liberty against the state which found a nesting place on both sides of the political divide in the 1960s. But Klatch’s stories undermine her very optimistic sense that there were real commonalities. While many rightwing libertarians did oppose the war in Vietnam (“first they take your taxes, then they take your body,” as one put it), they did not really share the core conservative beliefs of the YAFers, and in 1969, they were kicked out of the organization. Most of the YAFers were traditional conservatives, and they spent most of the sixties organizing pro-war demonstrations and attacking the leftists of SDS.
Klatch argues that members of both movements opposed submission to authority and favored a populist realignment of power in a downward direction. Many on both sides were decentralizers who opposed state power, bureaucracy, and large-scale organization. But many differences inhabit even these seemingly common grounds. SDS favored participatory democracy, while the YAF favored a more or less authoritarian structure of government. If it opposed large organization, it was the welfare state with its “tax and spend” liberalism. SDS opposed the state power that sent boys to war to die for an unjust cause, while YAF favored a police state that otherwise left capitalist businessmen alone to accummulate as much wealth as they could at the expense of society. The SDS version of decentralization was anarchist inspired; it tended toward communal ideals that idealized a redistribution of wealth. YAF merely wanted men to be left alone to do things however they pleased. Finally, for YAF those men needed women at home to cook and look after the kids, while the women of SDS were more inclined toward feminist liberation from those dumb ideals.
Klatch’s book works best when it is not trying to cross the divide that separated the two groups and when it simply attends to the specific qualities of each. The parents of SDS members, for example, tended to be educated professionals or teachers, those of the YAF lower level managers, small business operators, or marginally employed technicians. The SDS parents also tended to be secular, to oppose wealth, and to sympathize with poverty, while YAF parents were overwhelmingly religious (“preferring the order and hierarchy of Catholicism more than the gospel,” as one put it), and were more interested a strong military than in poverty, yet SDS parents were more likely to reject materialism. Many on both sides were influenced to become political by teachers and schools; others by books and political events like the Godwater campaign, which activated many conservatives. For SDS, the crucial experiences were the Civil Rights Movement in which many participated actively and the anti-Vietnam War movement. Klatch at moments seems intensely naive as she recounts some of these differences. YAFers, she notes, were not inclined to get involved with the Civil Rights Movement (perhaps because they were actively opposed to it?), and SDS members were more likely than YAFers to pay a price for their activies by being brutalized by the police, arrested, and in general harassed by the government (wonder why?).
Klatch revisits terrain, such as the break-up of SDS, that has been covered by other historians like Sale and Gitlin, but she adds a new ingredient–insider interviews with people like Bernardine Dohrn, who spend many years underground as a member of the Weathermen–that greatly expands our sense of what went on in the late sixties and early seventies. Yet she, like Gitlin and Sale, implicitly takes sides by spending much more space on those who lamented the PL takeover, especially Carl Oglesby. She should in all fairness have sought out someone who was on that side in the debate. She does seek out Weatherpeople, which certainly marks an advance over Gitlin and Sale, and their voices add an eloquent and at times painful dimension to the public account of those events.
To her credit, Klatch is not content to treat her subject matter as history. She tells the stories of her activists all the way down to the present. Many are still active, although many have also dropped by the wayside, either to lick wounds or to pursue other dimensions of their lives. It is dismaying how many of the YAFers remain active in Republican politics. One comes away from the book realizing that the Right has been much more successful than the Left in nurturing new generations of activist and assuring that they have careers that allow them to proselytize in favor of conservative values and ideals. Those on the Left who still pursue political lives like Bernardine Dohrn have to do so marginally and without much support from the Democratic party.
Rebecca E. Klatch, A Generation Divided: The New
In mid-September of 1960, about a hundred young conservatives met at William Buckley’s estate in Sharon, Connecticut, and formed the Young Americans for Freedom. They were inspired by a sense that not enough was being done to roll back Communism and that the principles of free-market capitalist economics needed to be more forcefully promulgated and defended. The Republican Party of the time was dominated by moderates. Dwight Eisenhower, while he was willing to order the murder of a Patrice Lumumba, the Prime Minister of the newly independent Congo who defied Washington and became too cozy with Moscow, was not willing to risk nuclear war to turn back the Soviet Union. The Republican candidate for President was Richard Nixon, a man who had made his career out of red-baiting, but still a moderate in economic and political matters. Like Ike, he was willing to negotiate with the Russians and willing to accept the fundamental premises of the liberal New Deal state. The only alternative to Nixon was Nelson Rockefeller, a man repugnant to the new young conservatives for his liberal views on social issues. The “Eastern Establishment” would be rocked four years later by the ascendancy of the new conservative movement within the Republican Party and the candidacy of Barry Goldwater for President, but in 1960, conservatives were still a small minority within the party and within American political life. They were widely perceived to be extremists out of step with mainstream American assumptions about society. But they had passion and commitment on their side, passion inspired in many instances by photographs and novels. The photographs were of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 being suppressed by Soviet tanks, and the novels were the works of Ayn Rand–Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. That the shaping influences on their ideology were plastic images rather than conceptual abstractions suggests something about what Russell Kirk called “the conservative mind,” a mind that does not know how to conceptualize society or to imagine the larger maps of history because it is so anchored in empirical immediacy. The principal guide for behavior, therefore, is the self and its interests, and self urges are not mediated by higher level cognitive processes. The result is avid greed conjoined with intemperate violence, a tendency toward a release of uncontrolled urges in favor of oneself and against others. All the passion of the young conservatives of 1960 was distilled into the Sharon Statement which conjoined a strong call to destroy communism with a fervent espousal of economic individualism and self-interest. And that passion worked itself out throughout the next two decades, supporting violence against others in Vietnam and on the streets of America and laboring to elect a conservative leader who would impose their principles on the nation. Ronald Reagan answered that need in 1980, and his election owes much to the meeting that occured in 1960.
That same year another group met in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and fored the Students for a Democratic Society. Their manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, published in 1962, laid out a very different picture of American life and of the world. It called for a more humane economy devoid of poverty, expressed faith in the infinite improvability of human nature, and called for peaceful coexistence with, not violent rollback of, socialism. These young leftists were of a very different sort than the young conservatives at Sharon. They were not committed to self-interest as a guiding principle of life. Rather, they wanted to work to end poverty, erase racial injustice, and make a better world for everyone, not just themselves. They were, not surprisingly, a more educated and intelligent bunch than the young conservatives. Many already had advanced degrees, but more importantly, they knew how to conceptualize the world and to make abstract maps of society and of history. They had had good teachers like C. Wright Mills and William Appleman Williams, teachers who were capable of describing American history and society in ways that made it clear that the simplistic empirical evidence of the conservatives deserved closer scrutiny and more penetrating thought. They too were marginal in relation to mainstream party politics. The Democratic Party hardly noticed them, but by 1972, the politics they represented would more or less have taken over the party. By campaigning for Eugene McCarthy in 1968, they helped dislodge Lyndon Johnson, and in the McGovern campaign of 1972, they came as close as they every would to political power. While the YAFers of 1960 went on to become Reagan administration staffers, the SDS leftists became teachers or left think tank activists. They never had their day of power, although they certainly had their days in the news.
Rebecca Klatch’s A Generation Divided does something quite unique; it talks to both sides and asks each to tell their story. She constructed a sample group of YAFers and another of SDSers, and conducted interviews with each. Then, she compared what they had to say. Surprisingly, perhaps, given the opposed nature of their world views, she finds commonalities and overlaps, especially in regard to libertarianism, a strain of thought that emphasizes individual liberty against the state which found a nesting place on both sides of the political divide in the 1960s. But Klatch’s stories undermine her very optimistic sense that there were real commonalities. While many rightwing libertarians did oppose the war in Vietnam (“first they take your taxes, then they take your body,” as one put it), they did not really share the core conservative beliefs of the YAFers, and in 1969, they were kicked out of the organization. Most of the YAFers were traditional conservatives, and they spent most of the sixties organizing pro-war demonstrations and attacking the leftists of SDS.
Klatch argues that members of both movements opposed submission to authority and favored a populist realignment of power in a downward direction. Many on both sides were decentralizers who opposed state power, bureaucracy, and large-scale organization. But many differences inhabit even these seemingly common grounds. SDS favored participatory democracy, while the YAF favored a more or less authoritarian structure of government. If it opposed large organization, it was the welfare state with its “tax and spend” liberalism. SDS opposed the state power that sent boys to war to die for an unjust cause, while YAF favored a police state that otherwise left capitalist businessmen alone to accummulate as much wealth as they could at the expense of society. The SDS version of decentralization was anarchist inspired; it tended toward communal ideals that idealized a redistribution of wealth. YAF merely wanted men to be left alone to do things however they pleased. Finally, for YAF those men needed women at home to cook and look after the kids, while the women of SDS were more inclined toward feminist liberation from those dumb ideals.
Klatch’s book works best when it is not trying to cross the divide that separated the two groups and when it simply attends to the specific qualities of each. The parents of SDS members, for example, tended to be educated professionals or teachers, those of the YAF lower level managers, small business operators, or marginally employed technicians. The SDS parents also tended to be secular, to oppose wealth, and to sympathize with poverty, while YAF parents were overwhelmingly religious (“preferring the order and hierarchy of Catholicism more than the gospel,” as one put it), and were more interested a strong military than in poverty, yet SDS parents were more likely to reject materialism. Many on both sides were influenced to become political by teachers and schools; others by books and political events like the Godwater campaign, which activated many conservatives. For SDS, the crucial experiences were the Civil Rights Movement in which many participated actively and the anti-Vietnam War movement. Klatch at moments seems intensely naive as she recounts some of these differences. YAFers, she notes, were not inclined to get involved with the Civil Rights Movement (perhaps because they were actively opposed to it?), and SDS members were more likely than YAFers to pay a price for their activies by being brutalized by the police, arrested, and in general harassed by the government (wonder why?).
Klatch revisits terrain, such as the break-up of SDS, that has been covered by other historians like Sale and Gitlin, but she adds a new ingredient–insider interviews with people like Bernardine Dohrn, who spend many years underground as a member of the Weathermen–that greatly expands our sense of what went on in the late sixties and early seventies. Yet she, like Gitlin and Sale, implicitly takes sides by spending much more space on those who lamented the PL takeover, especially Carl Oglesby. She should in all fairness have sought out someone who was on that side in the debate. She does seek out Weatherpeople, which certainly marks an advance over Gitlin and Sale, and their voices add an eloquent and at times painful dimension to the public account of those events.
To her credit, Klatch is not content to treat her subject matter as history. She tells the stories of her activists all the way down to the present. Many are still active, although many have also dropped by the wayside, either to lick wounds or to pursue other dimensions of their lives. It is dismaying how many of the YAFers remain active in Republican politics. One comes away from the book realizing that the Right has been much more successful than the Left in nurturing new generations of activist and assuring that they have careers that allow them to proselytize in favor of conservative values and ideals. Those on the Left who still pursue political lives like Bernardine Dohrn have to do so marginally and without much support from the Democratic party.
Reviewed by Martine Henzel