RADICALS BETWEEN THE HEDGES: NEW LEFT ACTIVISM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA, 1963-1975 by CHRISTOPHER A. HUFF (Under the Direction of Robert A. Pratt) ABSTRACT Despite a lack of attention by many New Left scholars, a New Left community existed at the University of Georgia for over ten years. Originally composed of political activists who formed a chapter of Students for Democratic Society in 1966, the New Left expanded quickly after 1968, pulling in adherents of the counterculture, anti-war activists, Vietnam veterans, pacifists, women’s liberation advocates and homosexual students fighting for gay liberation.
The New Left often encountered resistance from University administrators and conservative student groups but consistently managed to increase membership and win battles. The New Left managed to survive as long as it did in a deeply conservative part of the country by adopting a pragmatic approach to activism, avoiding radical language and actions as often as possible and attempting to convince fellow students of the justness of their cause through dialogue and education. INDEX WORDS: University of Georgia, Athens, New Left, New Right, Students for a Democratic Society, Young Americans for Freedom, Radicalism, Vietnam War, Vietnam Veterans, Feminism, Gay Liberation, Southern Student Organizing Committee, Student Activism RADICALS BETWEEN THE HEDGES: NEW LEFT ACTIVISM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA, 1963-1975 by CHRISTOPHER A. HUFF Bachelor of Arts, Juniata College, 1990 Master of Arts, The University of Texas at San Antonio, 2001 A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS ATHENS, GEORGIA 2005 © 2005 Christopher A.
Huff All Rights Reserved RADICALS BETWEEN THE HEDGES: NEW LEFT ACTIVISM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA, 1963-1975 by CHRISTOPHER A. HUFF Major Professor: Robert A. Pratt Committee: James C. Dyer Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia December 2005 DEDICATION This thesis is dedicated to my wife, Allison.
Compared to her, everything else seems quite meaningless. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Several people deserve thanks in helping me see this thesis to a successful conclusion. This seeds of this project were developed in Thomas Dyer’s seminar on higher education in America. His enthusiasm for the topic played an important part in the decision to turn a seminar paper into a thesis.
John Inscoe allowed me to explore the topic further in a community studies seminar supposedly dedicated to the nineteenth century. Ian Lekus helped guide me through the historiography of the 1960s and patiently listened as I fumbled my way to a better understanding of the period. Finally, Robert Pratt, despite the daily challenges of heading a lively history department, was always available for questions and helped me achieve a level of scholarship I wouldn’t have found on my own. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.v CHAPTER One Introduction .1 Two The Origins of the New Left at the University of Georgia: 1963-1968 .13 Three Radicals, Hippies, Arsonists and Antiwar Activists: The Growth of the New Left at the University of Georgia 1968-1970.46 Four From Political to Personal: The Decline of the Traditional New Left and the Rise of the New Social Movements 1970-1975 .137 vi CHAPTER ONE Introduction In 1969 country musician Merle Haggard released the single “Okie from Muskogee.” An immediate success, Haggard wrote the song as a conservative response to the sweeping changes occurring in American society, particularly among the young.
Although located in Oklahoma, Muskogee symbolized any small Southern town and the song’s lyrics criticized many of the countercultural practices that had become popular since the mid-1960s, such as the consumption of illegal drugs, men growing their hair long, and the wearing of “beads and roman sandals.” In the third verse, Haggard made reference to the political unrest then occurring at colleges around the country. While other campuses experienced violence and upheaval Haggard wrote that, in Muskogee, “Football’s still the roughest thing on campus/ And the kids here still respect the college dean.” For years, historians of the 1960s seemed to interpret these lines as truth, often dismissing outright the possibility that a significant New Left presence could exist on southern campuses. Contrary to these assumptions, by the mid-1960s New Left groups had sprung up at colleges and universities across the region and, although smaller in size and usually lacking the violence that characterized events in the North, protests and demonstrations by New Left groups took place across the South during the late 1960s and early 1970s 1 A definition of the New Left that has shifted and become more inclusive over time makes the lack of work on the Southern New Left somewhat surprising. Initially seen as consisting of white, mostly male, college students from the Upper Midwest, California, and the Northeast, sixties historians have expanded membership in the New Left to the point that in now includes groups founded by radical lesbians, anti-war homosexuals, militant Native Americans, and environmentalists.
While each of these groups espoused its own unique agenda, they all possessed an underlying belief system that marked them as part of the New Left. Most importantly, the New Left was defined by a belief that the United States owed to each of its citizens the ability to live a life free from fear, oppression, violence and the denial of basic civil rights. To achieve this goal, the New Left believed that American society needed to be fundamentally reordered in such a way as to allow those who had been formerly disenfranchised to assume a role in the nation’s decision-making process Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, New Left groups in both the North and South constantly searched for the best way to implement this radical change.1 The South’s absence from New Left history is attributable to the first generation of 1960s scholars who created a narrative of the movement that focused on universities in the Northeast, Midwest and California. These historians, often ex-members of the New Left, followed what has become known as the “New Left Consensus” or “Declension Hypothesis”.
Briefly summarized, these conceptual models argue that the New Left emerged in 1962 with the drafting of the Port Huron Statement by Students for a 1 For an expanded discussion on the definition of the New Left see Van Gosse, The Movements of the New Left, 1950-1975: A Brief History with Documents (Boston, Bedford/St. While agreeing with most of Gosse’s definition, I disagree with his choice to include the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s as part of the New Left. Consisting initially of white, Northern, middle class college students, many of them “red diaper babies” whose parents had belonged to the Old Left of the 1930s, the New Left remained a small movement until the mid 1960s when, based on their experiences working for civil rights groups in the South and their opposition to the Johnson administration’s commitment to defeating communism in Vietnam, large numbers of students swelled the ranks of SDS chapters across the North and Midwest. By 1969, however, the movement had fallen apart.
Unable to overcome internal differences, SDS split into two competing factions. At the same time, many early members of the New Left, as well as mainstream American society, reacted negatively to the countercultural elements, such as drug use and sexual experimentation, and the increased commitment to violence adopted by newer converts to the movement. Many scholars placed the final end of the New Left in 1970, when three members of the Weather Underground, a militant splinter group of SDS, accidentally exploded a homemade bomb in a New York City townhouse, resulting in their deaths.2 Beginning in the mid-1990s, younger scholars, many of them too young to have participated in the 1960s student movement, began questioning these conceptual models. Citing works from the first generation of New Left historians, such as The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage by Todd Gitlin, Maurice Isserman’s If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left, “Democracy is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago by James Miller, and Kirkpatrick Sale’s SDS, these younger scholars examined closely the New Left Consensus model and found that it 2 For a more detailed description of the New Left Consensus and Declension Hypothesis see John McMillian, “’You Didn’t Have to Be There’: Revisiting the New Left Consensus,” in The New Left Revisited, edited by John McMillian and Paul Buhle (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 3-4 and Rick Perlstein, “Who Owns the Sixties?”, in Lingua Franca, (May-June 1996), 32-33.
3 ignored or misinterpreted important aspects of New Left history. One key criticism centered on the focus earlier historians placed on national organizations, with the majority of that focus on SDS and its leadership As historian John McMillian noted, “far too many historians dwell on the institutional history of SDS and the powerful personalities of .” This created a significant problem since, as Maurice Isserman correctly states, “so much of the political energy of the decade arose spontaneously from the bottom.”3 Activism at the grassroots level quickly became the new focus of 1960s scholars. By shifting the focus away from national SDS and placing it on activism at the grassroots level, historians were able to identify other problems with the “New Left Consensus.” Earlier writers overemphasized the importance of organizations while ignoring activists outside of New Left groups. Too often scholars saw the history of the New Left as the history of its most popular organizations, such as SDS or the Progressive Labor Party.
The second generation of New Left scholarship argued that the movement could not be contained within such clearly defined boundaries. It was instead “a messy agglomeration of national and local groups and initiatives. The New Left gleefully ignored organizational structure.”4 Winifred Breines emphasizes that, “by focusing on the fate of SDS as an organization [first generation New Left histories] diminish the mass movement: regional and local activity that did not depend on a national organization, grass-roots organizing by students and other activists, the counterculture .”5 3 John McMillian, “’You Didn’t Have to Be There’: Revisiting the New Left Consensus,” The New Left Revisited, edited by John McMillian and Paul Buhle (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 4; and Maurice Isserman, “The Not-So-Dark and Bloody Ground: New Works on the 1960s,” The American Historical Review 94:4 (Oct. 4 Doug Rossinow, “Letting Go: Revisiting the New Left’s Demise,” The New Left Revisited, edited by John McMillian and Paul Buhle (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 241-242.
5 Winifred Breines, “Whose New Left?” The Journal of American History 75 (Sep 1988), 531. 4 One of the most important issues discussed by the new generation of 1960s historians revolved around the rather difficult question of when the New Left ended. Most scholars traditionally placed the end of the movement somewhere between the riots at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 and the New York City townhouse explosion in 1970. But, once again, this conclusion equated the New Left with its national organizations.
By focusing on the New Left at the grassroots level and, more importantly, viewing the New Left as a broad, loosely-based social movement instead of an organized political one, many scholars have argued that the New Left continued well into the 1970s. As politics became personal, the New Left fostered the women’s movement, the struggle for gay rights, and environmental causes, among others. As Breines states, “the politics of the late sixties, after 1967 and 1968, were not simple signs of the deterioration of the movement. There were imaginative political experiments.
and there were the movements growing out of civil rights and the student movements that continued the drive for equality and peace in American society.”6 Andrew Hunt supports this argument by stating that, “the early seventies witnessed a change in the dynamics of resistance. Recent studies of the era suggest that protest movements were becoming decentralized and increasingly local. Most importantly, grass-roots resistance tapped into new constituencies during the early seventies.