The embryonic youth movement hoped that Kennedy might prove to be that leader. The Peace Corps, and later VISTA, drew volunteers from the same wellspring of youthful activism. The University of California at Berkeley—the home of the first campus revolt of the 1960s—provided “the single most important source of volunteers for the Peace Corps in the early 1960s.” When the Student Peace Union, or SPU, protested in front of the White House in February 1962, Kennedy ordered his kitchen to send the picketers coffee while the SPU proudly distributed copies of a New York Times article which claimed that the president was “listening” to them.
And then there was the quest for community. The Red Diaper Babies of the 1960s inherited from their parents the same drive to create a new community organized around political aspirations. According to Todd Gitlin, the former president of the SDS, “There was a longing to ‘unite the fragmented parts of personal history,’ as The Port Huron Statement put it—to transcend the multiplicity and confusion of roles that become normal in a rationalized society: the rifts between work and family, between public and private, between strategic, calculating reason and spontaneous, expressive emotion.” Gitlin continues, “At least for some of us, the circle evoked a more primitive fantasy of fusion with a symbolic, all-enfolding mother: the movement, the beloved community itself, where we might be able to find in Yale psychologist Kenneth Keniston’s words, ‘the qualities of warmth, communion, acceptedness, dependence and intimacy which existed in childhood.’” Mark Rudd likewise reminisced about the glories of the “communes” set up at Columbia: “For many it was the first communal experience of their lives—a far cry from the traditional lifestyle of Morningside Heights [at Columbia], that of individuals retiring into their rooms or apartments. One brother remarked to me, The communes are a better high than grass.’ ”
The SDS’s original mission wasn’t radical; it was humane: community outreach. The first significant project the group undertook was the Economic Research and Action Project, begun in 1963. SDS members fanned out like knights from the roundtable in search of the grail of self-fulfillment by moving into inner-city ghettos in an earnest effort to politicize the poor, the oppressed, and the criminal underclass. It should tell us something that the most compelling catchphrase for liberals and leftists alike in the 1960s was “community”: “community action,” “community outreach,” “communities of mutual respect.”
As Alan Brinkley has noted, most of the protests and conflagrations of the 1960s had their roots in a desire to preserve or create communities. The ostensible issue that launched the takeover of Columbia University in 1968 was the encroachment of the campus into the black community The administration’s appeasement of Black Nationalists was done in the name of welcoming blacks to the Cornell community, and the Black Nationalists took up arms because they felt that assimilation into the Cornell community, or the white community generally, amounted to a negation of their own community—that is, “cultural genocide.”
The Berkeley uprising was sparked in large part by the school’s expansion into a tiny park that, at the end of the day, was just a place for hippies to hang out and feel comfortable in their own little community. Hippies may call themselves nonconformists, but as anyone who’s spent time with them understands, they prize conformity above most things. The clothes and hair are ways of fitting in, of expressing shared values. Peace signs may symbolize something very different from the swastika, but both are a kind of insignia instantly recognizable to friend and foe alike. Regardless, the Berkeley protesters felt that their world, their folk community, was being destroyed by a cold, impersonal institution in the form of the university and, perhaps, modernity itself. “You’ve pushed us to the end of your civilization here, against the sea in Berkeley,” shouted one of the leaders of the People’s Park uprising. “Then you pushed us into a square-block area called People’s Park. It was the last thing we had to defend, this square block of sanity amid all your madness...We are now homeless in your civilized world. We have become the great American gypsies, with only our mythology for a culture.” This is precisely the sort of diatribe one might have heard from a bohemian Berliner in the 1920s.
There is no disputing that Nazism was an evil ideology from the first spark of its inception. But that does not mean that every adherent of Nazism was motivated by evil intent. Germans did not collectively decide to be Hollywood villains for all eternity. For millions of Germans the Nazis seemed to offer hope for community and meaning and authenticity, too. As Walter Laqueur wrote in Commentary shortly after the Cornell uprising:
Most of the basic beliefs and even the outward fashions of the present world-youth movements can be traced back to the period in Europe just before and after the First World Wan The German Neue Schar of 1919 were the original hippies: longhaired, sandaled, unwashed, they castigated urban civilization, read Hermann Hesse and Indian philosophy, practiced free-love, and distributed in their meetings thousands of asters and chrysanthemums. They danced, sang to the music of the guitar, and attended lectures on the “Revolution of the Soul.” The modern happening was born in 1910 in Trieste, Parma, Milan, and other Italian cities where the Futurists arranged public meetings to recite their poems, read their manifestos, and exhibit their ultra-modern paintings. No one over thirty, they demanded, should in future be active in politics...
For the historian of ideas, the back issues of the periodicals of the youth movements, turned yellow with age, make fascinating reading...It is indeed uncanny how despite all the historical differences, the German movement preempted so many of the issues agitating the American movement of today, as well as its literary fashions.
Let us return to the example of Horst Wessel, the most famous “youth leader” of the early Nazi movement, “martyred” in his battle against the “Red Front and reactionaries” as immortalized in the Nazi “Horst Wessel Lied” (”Horst Wessel Song”). Wessel fit the 1960s ideal of a youth leader “from the streets” fighting for social justice. The son of a Lutheran pastor, he rebelled against his middle-class upbringing by dropping out of law school at twenty-one and enlisting in the Nazi storm troopers. He moved into a shady working-class part of town and. with his comrades, joined in bloody street battles against the communists. But Wessel also earned a reputation as an idealistic and sensitive proselytizer for the “revolution from below,” which would usher in a united racial community transcending class differences. He walked the walk, living among criminals and the struggling proletariat:
Whoever is convinced that the Germany of today is not worthy of guarding the gates of true German culture must leave the theatre...the salons...the studies...their parents’ houses...literature...the concert halls. He must take to the streets, he must really go to the people...in their tenements of desperation and woe, of criminality...where the SA is protecting German culture...Every beer hall brawl is a step forward for German culture, the head of every SA man bashed in by the communists is another victory for the people, for the Reich, for the house of German culture.
An amateur poet, Wessel wrote a small tribute to the cause, “Die Fahne hoch” (”Raise High the Flag”), which promised, “The day breaks for freedom and for bread” and “Slavery will last only a short time longer.” Around the same time, he fell in love with Erna Jaenicke, a prostitute whom he first met when she was being beaten up by pimps at a neighborhood bar. The two soon moved into a rundown boardinghouse together, over the protests of his mother. There’s some evidence that Wessel grew increasingly disenchanted with the Nazis, realizing that the communists shared many of the same aspirations. He certainly became less active in the ranks of the Brownshirts. But whether he would have broken with them is unknowable because he died at the hands of the communists in 1930.
And that was all that really mattered to Joseph Goebbels, who translated Wessel’s death into a propaganda coup. Overnight, Wessel was transfigured into a martyr to the Nazi cause, a Sorelian religious myth aimed at the idealistic and perplexed youth of the interwar years. G
oebbels described him as a “Socialist Christ” and unleashed a relentless torrent of hagiography about Wessel’s work with the poor. By the beginning of World War II, the places of his life and death in Berlin had been made into stations of the cross, and shrines had been erected at his birthplace in Vienna as well as his various homes in Berlin. His little poem was set to music and became the official Nazi anthem.
In the German feature film Hans Westmar: One of Many, the young protagonist, based on Wessel, peers from his fraternity window and declares to his privileged comrades: “The real battle is out there, not here with us. The enemy is on the march...I tell you, all of Germany will be won down there, on the street. And that’s where we must be—with our people. We can no longer live in our ivory towers. We must join our hands in battle with the workers. There can’t be classes anymore. We are workers too, workers of the mind, and our place now is next to those who work with their hands.”
Even if the propagandized Wessel were a complete fabrication—though it was not—the mythologized version illustrates the more interesting, and important, truth. Germany was filled with millions of young men who were receptive to the shining ideal that Wessel represented. Of course, the virulent anti-Semitism of the Nazis makes it difficult to see (and impossible to forgive), but the dream of a unified, classless Germany was deeply heartfelt by many Nazi joiners; and if reduced to that alone, it was not an evil dream at all.
But just as the line between “good” totalitarianism and bad is easily crossed, dreams can quickly become nightmares. Indeed, some dreams, given their nature, must eventually become nightmares. And for the Horst Wessels of the American New Left, whatever admirable idealism they might have had quickly and unavoidably degenerated into fascist thuggery.
The most famous of these figures was Tom Hay den. The son of middle-class parents in the Detroit suburb of Oak Park (near Father Coughlirfs parish) and the chief author of The Port Huron Statement, Hay den played an admirable role in the early civil rights struggle in the South. He certainly believed himself to be a young democrat, but the seeds of a totalitarian bent were evident from his earliest days at the University of Michigan. In a speech delivered to the Michigan Union in 1962—which became a manifesto titled Student Social Action—Hayden proclaimed that the youth must wrest control of society from their elders. To this end the universities had to become incubators of revolutionary “social action.” Richard Flacks, a young academic who would join Hayden in the new crusade along with his wife, Mickey, was thunderstruck. He went home and told his wife (an activist in a group called Women Strike for Peace), “Mickey, I’ve just seen the next Lenin!”
By the end of the decade, Hayden had indeed become a forthright advocate of “Leninist” violence and mayhem, glorifying crime as political rebellion and openly supporting Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and, of course, the murderous Black Panthers. He helped write the “Berkeley Liberation Program.” Among the highlights: “destroy the university unless it serves the people”; “all oppressed people in jail are political prisoners and must be set free”; “create a soulful socialism”; “students must destroy the senile dictatorship of adult teachers.” His “community outreach” in the slums of Newark preceded and in part fomented the horrific race riots there. “I had been fascinated by the simplicity and power of the Molotov cocktail during those days in Newark.” he writes in his autobiography. Hayden hoped that with the use of violence, the New Left could create “liberated territories” in the ghettos and campus enclaves and use them to export revolution to the rest of the United States. At a 1967 panel discussion with leading New York intellectuals, Hannah Arendt lectured Hayden about his defense of bloody insurrection. He snapped in response, “You may put me in the position of a leper, but I say a case can be made for violence in the peace movement.” At the Columbia occupation, Hayden explained that the protests were just the start of “bringing the war home.” Echoing Che Guevara’s chant of “two, three, many Vietnams,” Hayden called for “two, three, many Columbias.”
One of the most illuminating symptoms of left-wing revolutionary movements is their tendency to blur the difference between common crime and political rebellion. The Brownshirts beat up storekeepers, shook down businessmen, and vandalized property, rationalizing all of it in the name of the “movement.” Left-wing activists still refer to the L.A. riots as an “uprising” or “rebellion.” A similar moral obtuseness plagued the movement in the 1960s. “The future of our struggle is the future of crime in the streets,” declared Hayden. The only way to “revolutionize youth,” he explained, was to have “a series of sharp and dangerous conflicts, life and death conflicts” in the streets. Hayden was no doubt inspired by (and inspiring to) the Black Panthers, who regularly staged ambushes of police in the streets. At the 1968 Democratic National Convention demonstrations in Chicago his co-organizer Rennie Davis implored the crowd, “Don’t vote...join us in the streets of America...Build a National Liberation Front for America.” Hayden was put on trial for his incitement of violence in Chicago. In June 1969 he pronounced on the “need to expand our struggle to include a total attack on the courts.”
Hayden was a moderate, according to Mark Rudd, the leader of the so-called action faction of the SDS. Rudd. who organized the Columbia “rebellion,” was born to a middle-class Jewish family in New Jersey, and his parents hardly encouraged his behavior. When he called his father to explain that he “took a building” from the president of Columbia University, his father replied. “Then give it back to him.” Rudd’s preferred rallying cry at the time was “Up against the wall, motherfucker!” which he used on teachers and administrators with abandon. “Perhaps nothing upsets our enemies more than this slogan,” he explained. “To them it seemed to show the extent to which we had broken with their norms, how far we had sunk to brutality, hatred and obscenity. Great!” The term, he explained, clarified that the administrators, faculty, and police who opposed the radicals were “our enemies.” “Liberal solutions, restructuring, partial understandings, compromise are not allowed anymore. The essence of the matter is that we are out for social and political revolution, nothing less.”
Rudd eventually joined the Weathermen, who, out of deference to the female terrorists in the group, soon changed their name to the Weather Underground (though they sometimes went by the moniker “The Revolutionary Youth Movement”). In 1970 the group declared a “state of war” against the United States of America and commenced a campaign of terrorist attacks. Rudd took the position that the best way to foment revolution was to target military installations, banks, and policemen. One of their first bombings was intended to target a dance for noncommissioned officers at Fort Dix, New Jersey (though another version says that the bomb, wrapped in roofing nails, was intended for Columbia). In any event, the inexperienced bomb makers famously blew themselves up in a Greenwich Village town house, killing three members and leaving the survivors fugitives for life. The explosion was one of the reasons Rudd had to go underground. He did not surface again for several years, eventually turning himself in after technical violations of wiretapping laws made the federal case against him difficult to prosecute. Today he is a math teacher at a community college in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rudd has expressed remorse for his violent youthful activities, but he is still a passionate opponent of American (and Israeli) foreign policy.
Many of us forget that the Weather Underground bombing campaign was not a matter of a few isolated incidents. From September 1969 to May 1970. Rudd and his co-revolutionaries on the white radical left committed about 250 attacks, or almost one terrorist bombing a day (government estimates put that number much higher). During the summer of 1970, there were twenty bombings a week in California. The bombings were the backbeat to the symphony of violence, much of it rhetorical, that set the score for the New Left in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rudd captured the tone perfectly: “It’s a wonderful feeling to hit a pig. It must be a really wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building.” “The real division is no
t between people who support bombings and people who don’t,” explained a secret member of a “bombing collective,” but “between people who will do them and people who are too hung up on their own privileges and security to take those risks .”
Bourgeois self-loathing lay at the very heart of the New Left’s hatred of liberalism, its love affair with violence, and its willingness to take a sledgehammer to Western civilization. “We’re against everything that’s ‘good and decent’ in honky America,” declared one rebel “We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother’s worst nightmare.” The Weathermen became the storm troopers of the New Left, horrifying even those who agreed with their cause. Convinced that all whites were born tainted with the original sin of “skin privilege,” the lighting brigade of the New Left internalized racialist thinking as hatred of their own whiteness. “All white babies are pigs,” declared one Weatherman. On one occasion the feminist poet Robin Morgan was breast-feeding her son at the offices of the radical journal Rat. A Weatherwoman saw this and told her, “You have no right to have that pig male baby.” “How can you say that?” Morgan asked. “What should I do?” “Put it in the garbage,” the Weatherwoman answered.
Bernardine Dohrn, an acid-loving University of Chicago law student turned revolutionary’, reflected the widespread New Left fascination with the serial-killing hippie Ubennensch Charles Man son. “Dig It! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!” In appreciation, her Weather Underground cell made a three-fingered “fork” gesture its official salute.
Of course, there was a great deal of playacting among the revolutionaries as well. Abbie Hoffman, the co-founder of the yippies (the Youth International Party) along with Jerry Rubin, was the son of prosperous Jewish parents in Worcester, Massachusetts. The product of private schools—where he was a troublemaker from the start, no doubt due in part to his bipolar disorder—Hoffman attended Brandeis University, where he studied under the New Left intellectual icon Herbert Marcuse. Hoffman bought into Marcuse’s view that bourgeois America was “radically evil” and that it had to be radically challenged as a result. But Hoffman had something over Marcuse, Rudd, Hayden, and the rest: he could be legitimately funny about his mission (though not nearly as funny as he thought he was). His was a funny fascism, a naughty nihilism. His book titles alone give a good flavor of his approach: Steal This Book, Fuck the System, and Revolution for the Hell of It. “Personally. I always held my flower in a clenched fist,” he wrote in his autobiography. He mastered the art of calling anybody he disliked or opposed a “fascist,” dubbing Ronald Reagan “the fascist gun in the West.” Hoffman, another member of the Chicago Seven, was a fugitive from justice for most of the 1970s, eluding charges that he was a cocaine dealer.