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The People of This Generation
The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia
Paul Lyons
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The People of This Generation
The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia
Paul Lyons
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About This Book
At the heart of the tumult that marked the 1960s was the unprecedented scale of student protest on university campuses around the world. Identifying themselves as the New Left, as distinguished from the Old Left socialists who engineered the historic labor protests of the 1930s, these young idealists quickly became the voice and conscience of their generation. The People of This Generation is the first comprehensive case study of the history of the New Left in a Northeast urban environment. Paul Lyons examines how campus and community activists interacted with the urban political environment, especially the pacifist Quaker tradition and the rising ethnic populism of police chief and later mayor Frank Rizzo. Moving away from the memoirs and overviews that have dominated histories of the period, Lyons uses this detailed metropolitan study as a prism for revealing the New Left's successes and failures and for gauging how the energy generated by local activism cultivated the allegiance of countless citizens.Lyons explores why groups dominated by the Old Left had limited success in offering inspiration to a new generation driven by the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War. The number and diversity of colleges in this unique metropolitan area allow for rich comparisons of distinctly different campus cultures, and Lyons shows how both student demographics and institutional philosophies determined the pace and trajectory of radicalization. Turning his attention off campus, Lyons highlights the significance of the antiwar Philadelphia Resistance and the antiracist People for Human RightsâPhiladelphia's most significant New Left organizationsârevealing that the New Left was influenced by both its urban and campus milieus.Combining in-depth archival research, rich personal anecdote, insightful treatment of the ideals that propelled student radicalism, and careful attention to the varied groups that nurtured it, The People of This Generation offers a moving history of urban America during what was perhaps the most turbulent decade in living memory.
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Chapter 1
The Old Left and the 1960s
The watershed moment in the origins of the new Left in America was the virtual collapse of the Communist Party in the United States following the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow and the subsequent Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Within several years Party membership and associated networks precipitously declined and rival left-wing organizations sought to fill the vacuum left by the demoralization of Moscow-driven Communism.1 The foremost efforts in this direction were undertaken by A. J. Muste, an independent radical and former Communist, who had moved toward a direct action model of pacifism by the 1950s, and by Max Shachtman, also an ex-Communist, whose Independent Socialist League sought to become a third force for democratic socialism between the capitalist USA and the Stalinist USSR.2 Several groups of Philadelphiansâradical Quakers, Shachtmanites, ex-Communists, Trotskyistsâshowed interest in the several meetings that took place in New York City in 1957â58. But deeply rooted sectarian suspicions, particularly by Max Shachtman and his followers, subverted such bridgebuilding efforts.3 There was to be no post-Hungary revitalized and reconstructed Old Left.
The shift from an Old to a New Left occurred in this context and within the developing historical realities of the postwar period: the emergence of a postcolonial Third World distinguishable from U.S. and Soviet interests; the remarkable performance of the mixed economies of the welfare states of the West; the growing sense that the Weberian âiron cageâ of rationalization and bureaucracy seemed to make alienation a more salient social phenomenon than exploitation; and the anxiety generated by Hiroshima, what SDS would soon pinpoint in terms of its own historical moment as âthe sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living.â4 The âoldnessâ of the Old Left rested on the ways it seemed frozen in Cold War polarities and what C. Wright Mills called âthe labor metaphysic.â By contrast, the New Left generationâs coming of age during the 1950s and 1960s coincided with the success of âcorporate liberalismâ: the integration of previously antagonistic forces, specifically organized labor, into the Democratic Party coalition that had originally been formed during FDRâs New Deal. Indeed, the long-awaited merger of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1955 highlighted what many Leftists perceived as the integration of organized labor as a junior partner to corporate America.5
At least as important was the way deeply felt, often traumatic experiences of betrayal and apostasy polluted the waters of any dialogue, not to speak of reconciliation or ideological flexibility, between the Old Left of the Depression and immediate postwar generations. Being Old Left meant that one experienced the present through the prism of battles over Stalinism, Spain, sectarian labor conflicts, and rival claims to being the vanguard of the proletariat. Older Leftists were marked by deep and abiding wounds, which never seemed to heal and in fact were re-ignited as every moment in the present ripped apart the scabs of inflamed memory.
In this period of McCarthyism and weakened labor radicalism, there were small but significant civil rights rallies in Washington, inspired by the Supreme Courtâs 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision regarding school integration and the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955â56. The Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom took place in 1957, and the Youth Marches for Integrated Schools in 1958 and 1959. These marches were organized within African American communities, chiefly by prominent ministers like the Rev. Leon Sullivan, with white allies in both the liberal and radical communities responding to the call. At the 1957 pilgrimage, which included possibly 5,000 Philadelphians, A. Philip Randolph, a veteran of the sectarian wars among Marxists, âwarned Negroes against accepting Communist help in their civil rights struggle.â Nevertheless, the Philadelphia Bulletin warned, âThe Communist Party had been making a big campaign to inject its followers into the pilgrimage.â The article conceded that, although Communists had been spotted in the crowd, they had been excluded from the platform.
At the time of these marches, in fact, Philadelphia Communism was in total disarray, with ex-members vastly outnumbering members and the former seeking to reconstruct their lives, find jobs, return to school, and reconnect with their families.6 The Trotskyists, organized as the Socialist Workers Party, had a small Philadelphia presence, but hardly the weight or numbers to make a significant difference.
The Shachtmanites seemed the most energetic and influential of these Marxist-Leninist groups, in part because of their reputation as principled defenders of democracy, in part because of their ability to attract, at least for a time, a brilliant group of radical intellectuals including Irving Howe and the young Michael Harrington.7 In Philadelphia, the Shachtmanites were entering their most promising period as they merged in 1958 with the Socialist Party and came to dominate its youth affiliate, the Young Peopleâs Socialist League (YPSL, or the âYipselsâ as they were usually called). In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Yipsel youth leaders Martin Oppenheimer, a graduate student in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, Tom Barton, a conscientious objector from the midwest working for the Friends Peace Committee (FPC), and Leo Kormis, a lab technician at the University of Pennsylvania who would play a significant role in influencing a new generation of campus activists, were able to recruit a number of campus idealists into their circle of radical activities, which included the early years of the Philadelphia chapter of CORE and the promising development of the Student Peace Union (SPU).8
The Yipsels are of interest in part because they produced dedicated organizers during the 1950s and early 1960s. Oppenheimer, Barton, and Kormis were children of the 1950s, and those they recruited were of the World War II generation. Such activists, neither Depression generation nor baby boomers, sometimes served as a bridge between the two, but alternatively, as ideological Marxists in an inhospitable period, they could feel a particular impatience with developing New Left sensibilities. Barton, for example, was thoroughly unimpressed in the early 1960s with members of the fledgling Swarthmore chapter of SDS as the latter made connections with the Chester black community, which would help inspire the decidedly New Left Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). To the ideologically sophisticated Barton, the Swarthmore SDSers were naive, speaking a language he neither respected nor understood. He recalls that he could always engage in ideological banter with his sectarian rivals in the Communist or Trotskyist or social democratic youth groupsââWe all spoke the same language,â he says, despite hating one another. But with Paul Booth, the young Swarthmore SDSer, he found himself perplexed and bewildered by a rhetoric that seemed to have nothing to do with the familiar Marxist categories of analysis that Barton privileged. âWhat is he talking about?â Barton recalls. Indeed, Booth, himself a World War II baby, was among the most electorally oriented, most analytic of the Swarthmore SDS activists, characteristically at odds with those envisioning the Chester ERAP as a model for the New Left. But he wasnât a Marxist, at least to Tom Bartonâs already experienced and ideologically sensitive antennae.
Oppenheimer and Kormis, in contrast, seem to have felt more of a tug of war over their loyalties between Old Left class analysis and the developing New Left emphasis on alienation, direct action, and participatory democracy. Oppenheimer would play a significant role in articulating and teaching the direct action approach of SNCC and CORE; Kormis was respected most of all for the consistency of his deep and abiding commitment to a humanistic socialism based on notions of participatory democracy.9
Up until 1963 or 1964, the Yipsel-dominated SPU was positioned to become the dominant and successful progressive student voice on foreign policy issues. It began as a coalition of radical, liberal, and pacifist organizations in Chicago and drew sustenance from the developing criticisms of atmospheric nuclear testing in the late 1950s. This seemed to be a fruitful strategy for radicals seeking to find some wiggle room for a progressive politics in what seemed to most to be monolithic Cold War posturings on both sides. By 1963 it was the largest student-based peace organization in the country, with more than 3,000 members and more than 200 campus chapters. In Philadelphia, SPU claimed 200 members at Temple, Penn, Swarthmore, Haverford, and Bryn Mawr. But the combination of sectarianism, mostly coming from internal struggles within YPSL, and the inevitable loss of focus following the signing of the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty in fall 1963, led to the collapse of SPU. Once again, the sectarian dogmatism of the Old Left prevented the birth of a promising new coalition.10
Philadelphia SANE
Serving as a catalyst to the rise of SPU in 1960 was the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy, quickly called SANE, which had emerged as the most successful organization within an admittedly weak early peace movement. The spark leading to the formation of SANE in 1957 was the accidental scattering of radioactive dust on twenty-three Japanese fishermen in March 1954.11 The stir over the potential destructive effects of radiation led Lawrence Scott, an AFSC staffer in Chicago, to bring together A. J. Muste, Bayard Rustin, and Robert Gilmore, also of the AFSC, to a meeting in Philadelphia in April 1957. From this meeting came two organizationsâone, SANE, created to be a broad-based public education organization, and the other, the Committee for Non-Violent Action (CNVA) to provide more radical pacifists with a smaller, direct-action instrument.12
SANE rapidly grew beyond the expectations and the organizational framework of its founders. By summer 1958 there were already 130 chapters and approximately 25,000 members. A Student SANE structure quickly formed as well.13 Clearly, the call for a halt to nuclear testing had struck a powerful chord among the seemingly disorganized and demoralized progressives frightened by the McCarthyist Red Scare and frustrated by the moral placidity of the popular president Dwight David Eisenhower. In the context of the essential collapse of the Communist Party and the failure of any other organizational effort to offer opportunities to the thousands of former Communists left without institutional support, SANE proved to be an attractive option for activists concerned with Cold War irrationalities. As such, innumerable individuals with organizational skills, practical political experience, and a bruised, sometimes humbled, but nevertheless still passionate set of ideals joined SANE. Most were not former Communists; instead, the âorganizational baseâ of early SANE remained pacifist, especially under the influence of the AFSC. There was a concentration of membership and chapters in New York, New Jersey, California, Connecticut, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. Many who flocked to SANEâs banner were nuclear pacifists, that is, those who came to believe that the threat of nuclear confrontation made world peace a moral imperative, as well as veterans of world government efforts, such as the United World Federalists.14
In Philadelphia, there was a call for a meeting on May 17, 1960 to consider the formation of a chapter of SANE. This preliminary meeting, at which national SANE representative Sandy Gottlieb spoke, was called by Joe Miller and several others, most of whom were veterans or allies of the Communist Old Left. At a following meeting in June, considered the first official meeting of a Philadelphia SANE chapter, Abe Egnal, a veteran of the Old Left, was chosen temporary chair. The twenty-five who attended the preliminary meeting were now up to more than fifty. In a reflection of his initial enthusiasm, Egnal exclaimed, âThis crowd attests to the fact that millions want peace.â15 Perhaps more modestly, the gathering suggested that an opportunity now existed for a coalition of Old Left, pacifist, and liberal activists to stake a claim to speak for those willing to take a stand against nuclear terror.
The Executive Board of the Greater Philadelphia Council of SANE included thirteen members, nine from the Old Left, the remainder either Quaker or liberal. The board included Barrows Dunham, the Marxist philosopher fired from Temple University in the early 1950s, Ike Freedman of the left-leaning Furrier Workers Union, and such liberals as Spencer Coxe of ACLU, Norval Reece of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), and the well-born Quaker attorney Henry Sawyer. Two, Abe Egnal and Isadore Reivich, were among the twentysix Philadelphia public school teachers fired in 1953 for refusing to discuss their political loyalties, past and present.16
Egnal, who would become chairman of both the Main Line-West Philadelphia branch and the Greater Philadelphia chapter, was born in 1908. He was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. and an M.A. in economics, and had been an activist in the Teachers Union of Philadelphia as a social studies teacher at John Bartram High School until fired. He and his wife Leah joined five othersâWilliam and Ethel Taylor, Joe and Eleanor Miller, and Harry Levitanâin signing the charter for the Main Line-West Philadelphia branch of the chapter.17
Ethel Taylor, who remained involved with SANE, would also be the long-time leader of the local Women Strike for Peace (WSP) chapter as well as a national leader of that organization. Taylor, who often described herself as âa middle-aged Main Line matron,â had previously been active in the Womenâs International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).18
Joe Miller, whose brother had been a local Communist Party leader, was a mortgage banker and devoted much of his time and financial networking skills to the peace, civil rights, and social justice movements of Philadelphia from the mid-1950s until his death in 1996. Joe, once described as âa little white-haired man who is creative, warm and filled with hope and energy,â and his wife Eleanor, a sculptor, hosted virtually every important progressive fund-raising cocktail party over the next decades at their Center City apartment.19 The Millers, Harry and Elsie Levitan, Isadore and Elizabeth Reivich, Ethel Taylor, Abe Egnal, and several other veterans of the Old Left would remain mainstays of the Philadelphia chapter of SANE over the next several decades. Some, such as Taylor, would be the key leaders in WSP and WILPF during those same years.
The Greater Philadelphia SANE chapter consisted of Main Line-West Philadelphia, Bucks County, Delaware County, Northwest, Northeast, Center City, and Student SANE branches. Some branches involved larger proportions of liberals and nuclear pacifists, including Quakers and other church-inspired idealists, but the leadership in all instances came from the veterans of the Old Left Communist movement, most of whom were second-generation Jewish Americans. SANE in Philadelphia became an outlet for the remarkable energies and idealism, the organizational skill and experience, of Old Leftists who had been without an ideological home following the virtual collapse of the Communist Party and its front operations, a phenomenon that also occurred in other cities on both coasts where ex-Communists resided.
Just prior to the creation of the Philadelphia SANE chapter, the national organization held a successful rally at Madison Square Garden to coincide with the summit conference planned by President Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. On the eve of the rally, Senator Thomas Dodd, a ferociously anti-Communist Democrat from Connecticut, criticized the rally, pointing to organizers with suspect ideological backgrounds and calling on SANE to purge its ranks of Communists. National SANE had recognized from its initial successes that a variety of radicals, including for...