Essay: THE NEW RADICALS

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The movement has spawned some dozen magazines and newspapers, including the sensationalist Ramparts and the more intellectual Studies on the Left. The lesser publications appear erratically, when the editors happen to have the money, and tend to be studded by advertisements for psychedelic happenings and underground movies and interviews with Allen Ginsberg or Timothy Leary. They also offer lots of free verse on the joys of copulation, distinguished from John Donne's comparable rhapsodies by a self-conscious injection of four-letter words doggedly intended to shock. The movement's bard is Bob Dylan (when in doubt, New Leftists always sing). But on the whole the New Left distrusts the hippies and the beats, who want to drop out of society.

The New Left label is applied to various organizations that do not necessarily accept it. While most New Leftists still embrace S.N.C.C. and CORE, the embrace is one-sided; the leaders of those organizations, with their new drive for black power, have frozen whites out. Most New Leftists claim as their spiritual ancestors Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman rather than Marx or Lenin. Thus they are distinct from the various Communist and socialist groups descended from the old, pre-World War II left, though they share many of their aims and indiscriminately welcome their presence in any sit-in, teach-in or bein. Chief among these Marxist-oriented groups are the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs (membership 3,000), who still chatter about the class struggle and, unlike S.D.S., believe in working through coalitions with liberal forces to achieve their aims. A sympathetic historian of the New Left, Author Jack Newfield, declares sweepingly: "DuBois members are just not hung-up by the same things S.D.S.ers are. They don't make embarrassing speeches about how we must love each other. They are not viscerally outraged by the moral deceits of society in the way S.D.S. members are; they are not in total rebellion. The key difference is that the DuBois Club members don't hate their fathers; S.D.S.ers do."

The New Left is determined not to cooperate with groups that have even slightly bowed to the status quo. When Civil Rights Leader Bayard Rustin suggested that the New Left shift from protest to coalition politics and work with labor and liberals, he was berated as a cop-out who was threatening its moral purity. Michael Harrington, who put poverty on the map in his book The Other America, is now similarly denounced; he calls the New Leftists "mystical militants."

The New Left's chief enemy, so declared, is not the far right but rather what it calls "the liberal Establishment" or "corporate liberalism." Hayden argues that the social legislation of the New Deal has enslaved the poor and left them worse off than they were before. Demands Parrel Broslawsky, professor of history at Los Angeles Valley College and recent candidate for the state legislature: "Who are the judges who participate in legal lynchings? The appointees of flaming liberals like President Kennedy. Who perpetuates racism? The unions. Who votes for war? The good liberal Congressmen. Who perpetuates alienation? The liberal administrators like Clark Kerr. The liberals are gutless, pusillanimous and totally lacking in sincerity." He adds: "Listening to them is like being beaten to death with a warm sponge."