Maurice Isserman versus the new SDS

Maurice Isserman

Maurice Isserman is an important historian of the American left. His 1982 “Which Side Were You On?: The American Communist Party During the Second World War ” also distinguishes him as a “revisionist” historian of the CPUSA, a tendency that recognizes the grass roots success of the party. So his recent article in Chronicle of Higher Education on the rebirth of SDS (a project that my friend Paul Buhle is very involved with) deserves some attention. Basically, the article takes the position that it is foolish to try to recreate any kind of project that existed in the past since history is always moving forward:

And, speaking of elders, it seems appropriate to close with the radical granddaddy of them all, Karl Marx, who suggested in 1852 in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that his contemporaries on the European left needed to abandon their obsession with rhetoric and strategies associated with the French Revolution of 1789: “The social revolution of the 19th century cannot derive its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has shed superstitious belief in the past. The revolution of the 19th century must let the dead bury the dead in order to arrive at its own content.”

Oddly enough, Isserman seems to have ignored his own advice when it came to the launching of DSA in 1983, a group that he joined with some enthusiasm. In an article on the history of the American left, he referred to DSOC and the New American Movement (NAM), which fused to produce the DSA, as seeking to “recreate the broad and tolerant spirit of the Debsian Socialist Party, while absorbing also the new lessons, causes, and constituencies over which the left had stumbled in the intervening decades.” Doesn’t this sound a whole lot like deriving poetry from the past? I think that Isserman’s problem revolves around which poetry to recite.

Isserman would have been better served if he had focused on his obvious political misgivings about the attempt to create a New Left of any sort. With his commitment to the DSA and perhaps a tendency to idealize the CPUSA/New Deal coalition, is it possible that anything too far to the left of the Democratic Party upsets him? If he had focused on these sorts of questions rather than striking a questionable pose of neutral advice-proffering scholar, he would have contributed more to the necessary debate about how the left in general should move forward.

Perhaps the first warning sign that something is amiss is the invocation of Todd Gitlin as some kind of authority on SDS. This is like bringing in Judith Miller as an outside consultant on the war in Iraq.

I asked Todd Gitlin — a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, who was SDS president in 1963-64 and who chronicled the group’s rise and fall in The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage — what he thought of the idea of recreating SDS. He, too, was struck by the ironies involved. “I don’t imagine Al Haber, Tom Hayden, & Co. would have gotten very far had they proclaimed in 1962 that they were re-founding a student organization taking its name and manifesto from a powerhouse student group of the 1920s,” he told me in an e-mail message.

This is disingenuous in the extreme. The simple truth is that Gitlin hated the New Left for refusing to vote for Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and has never gotten over it. Far from worrying about whether an attempt to launch a new SDS will result in failure, he is certainly much more concerned about possible success. Since Gitlin froths at the mouth at anything to the left of conventional Democratic Party liberalism (as evidenced by his billious commentary in the new documentary on Ralph Nader), he is the last person to check with when it comes to a project of this sort.

Isserman makes much of the new SDS’s refusal to go through some kind of ritual denunciation of the Weatherman, a point he shares with the permanently irascible Jesse Lemisch. In an article on the Weathermen that appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of “New Politics”, Lemisch wagged his finger at ex-Weatherman Bernadine Dohrn’s refusal to confess her sins at the first Northeast regional meeting of the new SDS:

One of the keynote speakers was Bob Ross, an old SDSer and a founding member, now Professor of Sociology at Clark University and an activist in the anti-sweatshop movement. He made points critical of Weather, violence, and bombing. Dohrn, speaking next, addressed none of this.

I am not sure what the point is here. There is about as much likelihood of the new SDS going underground in order to set off bombs as Venezuela invading the USA and installing a Bolivarian government in Washington. It would seem that Lemisch is far more interested in the kind of Maoist self-criticism that the New Left practiced as it began to spin out of control in 1968. Who needs that? Certainly not the new SDS.

What concerns Isserman is the behavior of some East Coast SDSers at last month’s antiwar march in Washington: “Black-shirted and masked, they left the ranks of the peaceful majority gathered on the Mall below to charge up Capitol Hill and skirmish with police.” Although I have criticized this kind of activity in the past, it doesn’t seem that we are dealing with the kind of knuckleheaded adventurism that characterized SDS in the late 60’s, at least on the basis of this report from the SDS website:

To conclude with a point I made above, Isserman has a different idea about what kind of left we need today. Along with other “revisionist” historians of the CP like Ellen Schrecker, there is an obvious predilection toward the glory days of the party when the Democratic Party was implementing a progressive agenda, at least in their eyes. Isserman is practically misty-eyed when it comes to the period:

And during the “Popular Front” era of the later 1930s, when Communists sought to build a broad-based American movement not so explicitly tied to the Soviet model, the Communists developed a considerable political base and measure of influence within the Democratic Party in such states as Washington, Minnesota, and California, and in the American Labor Party in New York. The Thirties did not usher in “the Revolution,” contrary to the expectations of many at the start of the decade. Nevertheless, much had changed for the better in American politics in the space of a few years. While Franklin Roosevelt’s administration was never the hotbed of radicalism it was portrayed as in right-wing propaganda, it is certainly true that radicals helped play midwife at the birth of the liberal-labor “New Deal coalition” that would shape the contours of Democratic Party politics over the next three decades.

In 2003, Isserman co-authored “America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s” with Michael Kazin, an obnoxious member of the editorial board of Dissent Magazine who wrote a stinging attack on Howard Zinn in that publication for violations of Dissent Magazine’s Eustonian guidelines. Eric Alterman sized up Kazin and Isserman’s politics fairly well in the Nation Magazine:

The fortunes of left movements in the United States, as historians Michael Kazin and Maurice Isserman pointed out in these pages six years ago, have always been closely linked with those of liberals in general, and liberal Presidents in particular–from the Progressive Era to the Popular Front radicalism of the thirties through the civil rights and antiwar and feminist activism of the sixties and early seventies. “In each of these periods,” they wrote, “the left found legitimacy as part of a continuum of reform-to-radical sentiment, contributing to the widespread belief of the day that social change was both possible and positive.”

But it is up to the aforementioned Bernadine Dohrn to really hone in on their failings, which boil down to a kind of knee-jerk reaction against anything too “extreme”. In her generous (probably too generous) review of “America Divided” in the December 2001 Monthly Review, she writes:

We cut our teeth on liberals. It was the Kennedys and LBJ who revealed the essential unanimity of power, despite some relevant and real differences. This critical edge is obscured by Isserman and Kazin who—while they point out that Kennedy was a liberal in style rather than substance—seem to write without irony, “Americans had long cherished the belief that they had a special role to play in determining the future of Asia,” or, “The early days of American involvement in Vietnam were almost like an adventure story.” Graham Greene, writing in 1955, saw the U.S. role and rationale more clearly.

Bernadine Dohrn really had nothing to apologize for at the regional SDS conference. It is Isserman who needs to apologize for writing this kind of nonsense. I forgive him in advance.