Evans, Sara M. Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. New York: Knopf : distributed by Random House, 1979.
Argument
Women's experience in the Civil Rights movement as well as the New Left catalyzed and sharpened their political stance. Quickly, though, disillusionment set in as even within these groups they found themselves under-appreciated, minimized, and disregarded. Thus they were motivated to join forces and start their own cause.
Analogy: women in the 1830s-40s abolition movement were motivated to start the first wave feminism.
Evidence: extensive oral history by an insider to the movement.
Connections
Friedan, Isserman
Showing posts with label New Left. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New Left. Show all posts
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Isserman - If I Had a Hammer
Isserman, Maurice. If I Had a Hammer--: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left. New York: Basic Books, 1987.
Argument
Isserman connects the popular front of the 1930s with the New Left of the 1960s, finding a small group of radicals still operating through McCarthyism, and thus rejecting the claim that McCarthyism killed the Left off.
The short book works through 5 chapters. The first looks at the decline of the Old Left, with the last tying the middle chapters to the rise of the New Left, mainly SDS. In between, Isserman traces three lasting strains of radicalism from the Old Left through the 40s and 50s:
Yet, despite this focus on individual roles in the movement, it is striking how the historical turns of the Left in the 40s and 50s (and, as briefly noted, in the 60s) were affected by broader historic events. It seems the left never could quite get its legs to stand against various waves of history...
"Whenever SDS's growth slowed, another massive new stimulus came along, leading to still another exponential increase in SDS membership. The Cuban missile crisis, Birmingham, Neshoba County, Berkeley, Selma, Watts, the bombing of North Vietnam, Detroit, Newark, the Tet offensive, the May 1968 uprising in Paris, King's assassination - all fed a sense of outrage, a sense of moving with the tide of history... but gave no occasion for introspection..." (218)
Critique
As the JAH review by Michael Wreszin points out (http://www.jstor.org/stable/1889789), the main flaw of Isserman's attempted connection is the rejection of orthodoxies and political party lines by the Port Huron statement and the accompanying celebration of individual autonomy and demand for explicit moral values.
See also, a broader historiographic review "Whose New Left" by Winifried Breines, which considers Isserman along with Gitlin's The Sixties and 3 other books: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1887869
Place among other Books
Isserman connects the history of America's left from Denning's The Cultural Front, describing cultural evidence for who the left was in the 1930s, to Gitlin's The Whole World is Watching, which explains the demise of the New Left through an analysis of how the movement was portrayed to Americans by mass media. Isserman, a half-generation younger than Gitlin, was a member of the SDS as a freshman in 1968. Isserman, likes Gitlin, faults the amorphous leadership of SDS for the movement's inability to sustain itself beyond the late 1960s.
Argument
Isserman connects the popular front of the 1930s with the New Left of the 1960s, finding a small group of radicals still operating through McCarthyism, and thus rejecting the claim that McCarthyism killed the Left off.
The short book works through 5 chapters. The first looks at the decline of the Old Left, with the last tying the middle chapters to the rise of the New Left, mainly SDS. In between, Isserman traces three lasting strains of radicalism from the Old Left through the 40s and 50s:
- The continued tradition of political party, represented by Max Schactman, the head of the Independent Socialist League who swung first to the left, then back towards the center in an attempt to find a broader appeal.
- The continued tradition of political journal, represented by Irving Howe's Dissent. Howe was a generation younger than Schactman. He looked up to the older socialist, but pursued the spread of radical ideas through the journal, rather than through group organization.
- The much older American tradition of anarcho-pacifism (Thoreau to Gandhi, pre-existing but rejuvenated and inspired by MLK), represented by a variety of activists, notably the Golden Rule expedition - the attempt to sail a small boat into the range of a Pacific Ocean nuclear test.
Yet, despite this focus on individual roles in the movement, it is striking how the historical turns of the Left in the 40s and 50s (and, as briefly noted, in the 60s) were affected by broader historic events. It seems the left never could quite get its legs to stand against various waves of history...
- The Nazi-Soviet pact devastated American communists.
- The WWII alliance with the Soviet Union, conversely, helped communists.
- On the other hand, WWII devastated American pacifists
- The Cold War and the quick rise of McCarthyism devastated everyone on the Left.
- The Feb 1956 Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow devastated the remnant of communism in the United States for Khrushchev's attack on the "cult of personality," a veiled admission of Stalin's abuses. Stalin and the Soviet Union had been, to that point, unassailable examples to US communists.
- The Nov 1956 Hungarian revolution further eroded US communist faith in the Soviet Union. From there, American socialists took on an anti-communist tack, seeing both the Soviet Union and the United States as culpable Imperial powers.
- The pacifist movement struggled after WWII, but began to take energy and motivation from the Civil Right's movement. By the 1960s, the pacifists managed to gain some sympathy with the general public for their anti-Nuclear weapons efforts, though bolder critiques of American military were not acceptable to most Americans.
"Whenever SDS's growth slowed, another massive new stimulus came along, leading to still another exponential increase in SDS membership. The Cuban missile crisis, Birmingham, Neshoba County, Berkeley, Selma, Watts, the bombing of North Vietnam, Detroit, Newark, the Tet offensive, the May 1968 uprising in Paris, King's assassination - all fed a sense of outrage, a sense of moving with the tide of history... but gave no occasion for introspection..." (218)
Critique
As the JAH review by Michael Wreszin points out (http://www.jstor.org/stable/1889789), the main flaw of Isserman's attempted connection is the rejection of orthodoxies and political party lines by the Port Huron statement and the accompanying celebration of individual autonomy and demand for explicit moral values.
See also, a broader historiographic review "Whose New Left" by Winifried Breines, which considers Isserman along with Gitlin's The Sixties and 3 other books: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1887869
Place among other Books
Isserman connects the history of America's left from Denning's The Cultural Front, describing cultural evidence for who the left was in the 1930s, to Gitlin's The Whole World is Watching, which explains the demise of the New Left through an analysis of how the movement was portrayed to Americans by mass media. Isserman, a half-generation younger than Gitlin, was a member of the SDS as a freshman in 1968. Isserman, likes Gitlin, faults the amorphous leadership of SDS for the movement's inability to sustain itself beyond the late 1960s.
Friday, March 11, 2011
Gitlin - The Whole World is Watching
Gitlin, Todd. The Whole World Is Watching. Berkeley (Calif.): University of California press, 2003.
Argument
Gitlin explores how the portrayal of the student movement in the 1960s (mainly SDS) in mass media (he focuses on NY Times and CBS) undermined the movement's goals and eventually helped bring about its decline. Gitlin was president of SDS from June 1963 to June 1964. As he transitioned out of the movement into a career in the media he was struck by the fact that many people who had followed the rise of the student movement thought of it differently from how he thought of it as an insider. Gitlin realized this was a result of how the movement was framed by television (primarily) and newspapers. For a variety of reasons journalists inherently portrayed the New Left as a threat to the dominant ideals, and thus positioned it negatively for their average viewers.
Gitlin argues that SDS's very growth into a mass organization was its downfall. (31) As the war escalated, protestors in and out of SDS became more militant, thus positioning themselves farther left of the dominant ideology; of course, the media was all to ready to frame them as such. The media amplified and sped up the transitions of SDS after 1965.
Gitlin originally wrote this in 1980 so his communications theory has yet to be informed by post-Marxist ideas of Fiske and Hall (although he mentions Stuart Hall as, along with Raymond Williams, a key scholar to use Gramsci's ideas on popular culture). In particular, it would be interesting to see how he responds to Hall's ideas of three types of reception: dominant, negotiated, and resistant. As it is, Gitlin imagines the audience as mainly viewing the student movement through a dominant perspective. Still, his use of "framing" is persuasive, and he might argue that, if indeed most of the audience viewed the SDS from a dominant perspective, it is because the media framed the SDS largely as a threat to the dominant hegemony. On the other hand, the media focus on the SDS began with a favorable article in the New York Times. It seems to me that the student movement was seen as a threat to average American values PRECISELY because they WERE a threat to average American values!
Why did the Media do this?
Gitlin is using Gramsci to suggest the media serves to sustain, protect, and promote the dominant hegemonic ideology. Gitlin sees the media as complex industry motivated by corporate interests occasionally (though even he admits this is rarely a cause), and journalistic standards more often. However, journalistic practice requires that news meet a set of criteria for it to be newsworthy. The mere pursuit of conflict means that a journalist will use various "frames" to position a protest in conflict - in this case, because the protest was geared toward dominant ideology, the media portrayed protesters as a threat. Moreover as the New Left underwent its own transition after 1965 from the old guard to the new midwestern (non-NE) base, the media emphasized this internal conflict, helping to further drive a wedge in the movement's leadership problems.
Personal Application
This is a fascinating and encouraging study which uses the very media theory I am studying to write history. It goes back to a certain period and questions what the role of the media was in shaping an understanding of the period. If it is flawed in perhaps imagining the audience as fairly passive (typical of communications at that moment it was written), it is nonetheless persuasive as far as it goes in suggesting an important role for the media in how the student movement was perceived.
The relationship between a movement and the media (285)
Two internal factors increase a movement's dependency on mass media
1.) narrowness of social base [New Left: students and young intelligentsia]
2.) commitment to specific society-wide goals [end the war]
Two factors that produce destructive consequences of media dependency
3.) movements turn toward revolutionary desire and rhetoric in nonrevolutionary situations [following the 1965 March on Washington and as the war escalated, students began to perceive the war as less an accident than a result of American imperialism. Thus, they began to become more militant, sensing a revolution was necessary.]
4.) unacknowledged political uncertainties, particularly about legitimacy of its own leaders [lack of coherent ideology and organization coupled with inability to articulate criteria for leadership made it vulnerable. Leaders began to pursue celebrity.]
Key Words
Media frames - "persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation, of selection, emphasis, and exclusion, by which symbol-handlers routinely organize discourse, whether verbal or visual." -p7
Argument
Gitlin explores how the portrayal of the student movement in the 1960s (mainly SDS) in mass media (he focuses on NY Times and CBS) undermined the movement's goals and eventually helped bring about its decline. Gitlin was president of SDS from June 1963 to June 1964. As he transitioned out of the movement into a career in the media he was struck by the fact that many people who had followed the rise of the student movement thought of it differently from how he thought of it as an insider. Gitlin realized this was a result of how the movement was framed by television (primarily) and newspapers. For a variety of reasons journalists inherently portrayed the New Left as a threat to the dominant ideals, and thus positioned it negatively for their average viewers.
Gitlin argues that SDS's very growth into a mass organization was its downfall. (31) As the war escalated, protestors in and out of SDS became more militant, thus positioning themselves farther left of the dominant ideology; of course, the media was all to ready to frame them as such. The media amplified and sped up the transitions of SDS after 1965.
Gitlin originally wrote this in 1980 so his communications theory has yet to be informed by post-Marxist ideas of Fiske and Hall (although he mentions Stuart Hall as, along with Raymond Williams, a key scholar to use Gramsci's ideas on popular culture). In particular, it would be interesting to see how he responds to Hall's ideas of three types of reception: dominant, negotiated, and resistant. As it is, Gitlin imagines the audience as mainly viewing the student movement through a dominant perspective. Still, his use of "framing" is persuasive, and he might argue that, if indeed most of the audience viewed the SDS from a dominant perspective, it is because the media framed the SDS largely as a threat to the dominant hegemony. On the other hand, the media focus on the SDS began with a favorable article in the New York Times. It seems to me that the student movement was seen as a threat to average American values PRECISELY because they WERE a threat to average American values!
Why did the Media do this?
Gitlin is using Gramsci to suggest the media serves to sustain, protect, and promote the dominant hegemonic ideology. Gitlin sees the media as complex industry motivated by corporate interests occasionally (though even he admits this is rarely a cause), and journalistic standards more often. However, journalistic practice requires that news meet a set of criteria for it to be newsworthy. The mere pursuit of conflict means that a journalist will use various "frames" to position a protest in conflict - in this case, because the protest was geared toward dominant ideology, the media portrayed protesters as a threat. Moreover as the New Left underwent its own transition after 1965 from the old guard to the new midwestern (non-NE) base, the media emphasized this internal conflict, helping to further drive a wedge in the movement's leadership problems.
Personal Application
This is a fascinating and encouraging study which uses the very media theory I am studying to write history. It goes back to a certain period and questions what the role of the media was in shaping an understanding of the period. If it is flawed in perhaps imagining the audience as fairly passive (typical of communications at that moment it was written), it is nonetheless persuasive as far as it goes in suggesting an important role for the media in how the student movement was perceived.
The relationship between a movement and the media (285)
Two internal factors increase a movement's dependency on mass media
1.) narrowness of social base [New Left: students and young intelligentsia]
2.) commitment to specific society-wide goals [end the war]
Two factors that produce destructive consequences of media dependency
3.) movements turn toward revolutionary desire and rhetoric in nonrevolutionary situations [following the 1965 March on Washington and as the war escalated, students began to perceive the war as less an accident than a result of American imperialism. Thus, they began to become more militant, sensing a revolution was necessary.]
4.) unacknowledged political uncertainties, particularly about legitimacy of its own leaders [lack of coherent ideology and organization coupled with inability to articulate criteria for leadership made it vulnerable. Leaders began to pursue celebrity.]
Key Words
Media frames - "persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation, of selection, emphasis, and exclusion, by which symbol-handlers routinely organize discourse, whether verbal or visual." -p7
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