James L. Ferguson Professor of History Maurice Isserman contributed an essay titled "Will the Left Ever Learn to Communicate Across Generations" to the Chronicle of Higher Education (6/20/08). It is featured in The Chronicle Review in the special section "The Surprising Legacies of the 60s." In the piece, Isserman, a preeminent historian of the American left and expert on reform and radical movements, recounts the meeting between social activist Michael Harrington with then 20-year-old student Tom Hayden. Harrington unsuccessfully tried to recruit Hayden into the Young People's Socialist League, the youth affiliate of the Socialist Party, of which Harrington was a leader. Hayden went on to write the Port Huron Statement, the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society.
In the Chronicle essay Isserman wrote, "Harrington had mixed feelings about that document, approving of its moral passion for change, its support of civil rights, and its call for the creation of a 'participatory democracy' in the United States, but disapproving of Hayden's apparent lack of anti-Soviet zeal. At the conference that adopted the manifesto, Harrington wound up alienating SDS leaders by attacking them in a famously intemperate political diatribe.
"When 28-year-old Tom Hayden, by then a veteran New Left activist, first met 20-year-old Mark Rudd in the midst of the Columbia University student strike in the spring of 1968, he found him 'a new type of campus leader,' who could be 'disarmingly personal, a young boy,' but at the same time possessed by 'an embryo of fanaticism,'" Isserman wrote. "Rudd, leader of the so-called 'action faction' of Columbia's SDS chapter, 'considered SDS intellectuals impediments to action,' according to Hayden. Hayden felt 'slightly irrelevant in his presence.'
"I wish Harrington and Hayden had found a better way to sort out their differences at Port Huron in 1962. I also wish Rudd had been less impatient with his SDS elders in 1968," Isserman wrote. "When Rudd first arrived at Columbia three years earlier, he had read the Port Huron Statement admiringly, but at the time of the Columbia strike he had abandoned the belief expressed in the statement, and central to the early SDS's political vision, that the American New Left 'must be, in large measure, a left with real intellectual skills, committed to deliberativeness, honesty, reflection as working tools.'
"Some of the history of the 1960s might have worked out differently, and for the better, if the politics of the American left had been less marked by such striking generational discontinuities," Isserman wrote in the Chronicle piece.
Isserman is the author of The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington (PublicAffairs, 2000), and America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (3rd, rev. ed., Oxford University Press, 2007), with Michael Kazin.
