The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left In America.

The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left In America. By Douglas C. Rossinow (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. 498pp. $32.50).

Throughout the long, dark years of the Cold War, before anyone ever imagined that hundreds of thousands of black and white college students would soon initiate a broad, mass-based political movement, the city of Austin, Texas was a tough place for liberals. When University of Texas president Homer Rainey acted in defense of the values of freedom of speech and thought on his campus in the 1940s, for example, he was simply fired. In response, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) "blacklisted" the university, and students boycotted their classes. At one point, as many as eight thousand students even rallied before the state capitol, carrying a black coffin that bore the words: "academic freedom." But in the end, these protests mattered little. Right-wing extremism carried the day at UT, and anyone involved in even the most minor forms of social deviance, whether by supporting labor groups, expressing a limited tolerance for homosexuality, or reading such "obscene" works as John Dos Passos's The Big Money, was likely to face grave charges of "pinko-communism." As one journalist remembered, in the age of McCarthyism, "there was a venom in [Texas] politics." [1]

So what did liberals do? As Doug Rossinow relates in The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America, a small cadre of students found refuge from the reactionary politics of their day, as well as from the stifling conformism of the "football, beer drinking" culture at UT, in a tradition of Christian existentialism. At such outposts as the Christian Faith-and-Life Community and the University YMCA-YWCA, disaffected young people found a free space for discussion and extra-curricular education, and they drew radical inferences from their exposure to social gospel Christianity and existential philosophy. Consequently, many students began to discern a possible escape from their own alienation and estrangement in a latent ethic of "authenticity." "The sense of anxiety and the need to confront it, the preference for the concrete over the abstract, the importance of decision and personal responsibility, the attractiveness of situational ethics, the desire for a vital life, and, ab ove all, the search for a life of authenticity in touch with the 'really real'" --these were the quasi-religious values that would resonate with and help to politicize the small left enclaves of Austin.

The interest that these students expressed in "the politics of authenticity" might have come to naught, however, if the cultural ethos that these organizations helped produce did not merge, in the early l960s, with the burgeoning civil rights movement. This marked an occasion where liberals broke away from politics-as-usual in Texas, as white students began to ask searching questions about the values that lay behind American society, the priorities they wished to embrace, and the people they wished to become. Henceforth, the social and political concerns of many of these students became intertwined. Though "authenticity" sometimes seems an elusive adjective, Rossinow opines that it "lay at the heart of the new left," and his study aims to explain how a pervasive quest for the "really real" became so closely linked with a sense of social mission.

Of course, few things raise the ire of new left partisans more than the charge that the massive movement of the l960s was driven primarily by student angst; that it merely represented a plaintive cri de coeur that otherwise existed in an "ideological vacuum." [2] Frequently, activists of the era were parodied as frustrated "True Believers," who, in Eric Hoffer's formulation, used mass movements as an anodyne for their own damaged psyches and unfulfilled selves. [3] Though this is not exactly Rossinow's view, his thesis might bring some discomfort to sixties-sympathizers. These readers would do well to heed Rossinow's admonishment that the search for authenticity in no way depoliticized the new left. For although the movement "did emerge from an intersection of personal and political concerns," this is the case "with all movements." In coming to terms with this aspect of new left history, Rossinow hopes we will be better equipped to understand "how it emerged from the larger fabric of American culture and wha t it meant for the development of American political life." [4]

Local studies, of course, carry both risks and advantages; Rossinow manages them well. In focusing on the development of the new left in Austin, one gains a richer understanding of the forces that led students on conservative campuses, without any ties to the old left and far removed from the high-powered intellectual circles of New York, Berkeley, or Ann Arbor, to form a major radical constituency. Yet at the same time, Rossinow relates this story in the context of larger national developments, including the emergence of Black Power, feminism, and the freak subculture of the late 1960s. While notable personalities like Al Haber and Tom Hayden certainly played important roles in the development of the new left, this was at bottom a wide-ranging, grassroots movement. As such, institutional or SDS-centric accounts of this history are bound to be limited. [5]

For example, Rossinow shows that Greg Calvert's important theory on "the new working-class" captured the imagination of many college-educated white youths because it offered a framework where comfortable students and salaried functionaries could still understand themselves as among the alienated and exploited. Yet at the national level, leaders embraced various forms of "other-oriented" politics, and spurned the existential quest for wholeness and meaning. To many of the rank-and-file members of the new left, the endless debates that raged in the national office over who truly represented the "revolutionary vanguard" must have seemed unearthly. The great bulk of new leftists had already come to understand themselves as radical agents, and when the Weather Underground issued their manifesto, "You Don't Need A Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows," Austinites ridiculed their agenda with the counter- slogan: "You Don't Need A Rectal Thermometer to Know Who the Assholes Are."

Rossinow further explains that "the end of SDS did not mean, at least not immediately, the end of the new left." [6] This is particularly true with regard to the feminist left, which actually saw an opportunity to escape the macho gender politics that permeated the organization. Between roughly 1969 and 1973, radical feminists spent as much time promoting "anti-war, anti-imperialist, environmentalist, antiracist, prolabor, and general leftist activities as ... specifically gender-related issues," and like the new left generally, they saw an inextricable connection between social problems and their personal quest for authenticity. Along with the rest of the movement, these women "were determined to alter their own minds, their own values and personal ideals, as well as to change institutional and social structures." [7]

It is also refreshing to finally see an investigation of new left history from the perspective of someone with no clear axe to grind (and who in fact is too young to even remember the movement). Given the contested nature of the sixties and the heavy implications of work in this field for the political present, too many of the recent studies in this area seem fraught with a lack of balance. As Maurice Isserman lamented in a provocative essay nearly ten years ago, "the history of the New Left has been told almost exclusively from the perspective of those who had direct experience in the movement and continue to share at least some of its original assumptions." [8] But unlike many of these writers, Rossinow actually gathered a great deal of new research for his book, exploring manuscript and oral history collections, university archives, underground newspapers, and interviewing nearly 60 activists. As such, one senses that his distance from the field has helped him to sharped a sense of critical detachment and --although most people are afraid to even use the word nowadays--a measure of "objectivity" that helps to promote good history.

Finally, as Rossinow well understands, it could hardly be more ironic that the notion of writing "history from below" has almost completely eluded those who actually write about the era from whence this ethos came. The pioneering, bottom-up approach of this book not only complicates our understanding of the new left's emergence in conservative enclaves like Austin, but also helps to explain the course of the movement after it took its radical turn in about 1965. In drawing such complex links between the political energy of the new left and the larger cultural politics that helped to spawn this movement, Rossinow's study is largely unprecedented. Even readers who quibble with some of his generalizations will benefit from his formidable research, and the rigor and keen analytic power that Rossinow brings to his study are impressive. As the shelf of literature exploring the history of the 1960s expands in the coming years, one suspects that The Politics of Authenticity will go a long way towards earning a wider acceptance of this field as a suitable arena for serious academic inquiry.

ENDNOTES

(1.) Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York, 1998), p. 28.

(2.) Hal Draper, "In Defense of the 'New Radicals,'" "New Politics 4 (Summer, 1965): 7.

(3.) Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (New York, 1951); For a direct response to this argument from a new left perspective, see Paul Brienes, "Would You Believe ...? An Introductory Critique to The True Believer," (Radical Education Project, Ann Arbor, Ml), available in the SDS Papers on Microfilm, Reel 36, 4B:34.

(4.) Rossinow, p. 8.

(5.) It is nice to note, however, that local and comparative studies are beginning to emerge that are likely to complicate these perspectives. Paul Buhle and I are presently preparing a volume of revisionist essays on the new left, which will highlight the research of younger writers. For a trenchant account of some of the generational politics that lay behind the latest writings on the sixties, see Rick Perlsrein, "Who Owns the Sixties?: The Opening of a Scholarly Generation Gap," Lingua Franca (May/June, 1996), pp. 30-37. Some outstanding examples of this new scholarship are Jennifer Frost, "Identity Politics": Community Organizing, Gender, and the New Left in the 1960s, (New York, 1999); David Gerwin, "The End of Coalition: The Failure of Community Organizing in Newark in the 1960s," (Ph.D. diss, Columbia University, 1998); Andrew Hunt, "Rethinking the Sixties: Searching for New Directions," Journal of Social History, vol. 33 #1 (September, 1999): 147-161; and The Turning: A History of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (New York, 1999): David McBride, "On the Fault Lines of Mass Culture and Counterculture: A Social History of Hippie Counterculture in 1960s America," (Ph.D. diss, University of California at Los Angeles, 1998); Gregg Laurence Michel, "We'll Take Our Stand: The Southern Student Organizing Committee and the Radicalization of White Southern Students, 1964-1969," (Ph.D. diss, University of Virginia, 1999); Jeremy Varon, "Shadowboxing the Apocalypse: New Left Violence in the United States and West Germany," (Ph.D. diss, Cornell University, 1998). In addition, my friend Jeff Janowick is currently writing a promising dissertation on the considerable student protest movement that emerged at Michigan State University.

(6.) Rossinow, p.312.

(7.) Ibid., p.313 and 318.

(8.) Maurice Isserman, "The Not-So-Dark and Bloody Ground: New Works on the 1960s," American Historical Review vol. 94 (October, 1989): 991.