Week Four

Something I found interesting about the reading selections for this week is that both works had somewhat sweeping theses that were supposed to apply on the national level, and yet the vast majority of the evidence presented in both was drawn from a single location--Chicago in the Reagan book, University of Texas - Austin in the Rossinow book.

The jump from a single location to conclusions about the entire nation seems less problematic in the Reagan book. Chicago was a huge and diverse city and while practices surely varied somewhat from city to city, it stretched the bounds of credibility to suggest that Chicago was some crazy anomaly in which abortion was viewed and treated totally differently than in all other places--and indeed Reagan presents some limited evidence that it was not in the form of letters from people in other cities claiming that things were much the same for them. Granted, what applies to cities likely does not apply to rural areas, but Reagan acknowledges this and doesn't claim that her conclusions are fully applicable to those areas.

In the Rossinow book, by contrast, this methodology seems very problematic. By Rossinow's own admission, UT - Austin was a progressive oasis in the midst of right-wing Texas, and I can see no reason to assume that what holds for that school would hold for the New Left elsewhere. Rossinow convincingly demonstrates that UTA differed greatly from the stereotype of SDS based on the SDS chapters in NYC and Chicago and Berkeley and so on (the 'northern rim' of the country), and less convincingly demonstrates that a number of other schools had New Left cultures more like Austin than NYC, but he falls well short of fully defending his thesis that this alternative culture was really the dominant one for most members of the New Left. Actually, based on the first two chapters (and a quick flip through of the others), I would say that he has written a fine (if somewhat repetitive) book that defends a somewhat different thesis from the one he claims to defend. And in fact, after a few initial overstatements of his thesis, he doesn't really seem to even be trying to demonstrate anything more than that there was an alternative culture in the New Left that differs from the one we typically think of.

I should note that I had objections to Rossinow's thesis from the beginning, as I happen to know quite a few veterans of the original SDS (and other New Left groups like SNCC) who tell a different story from Rossinow--and not all of them were in big northern cities. The story of the left as I've always heard (and experienced) it is that, at least during the post-World War II era and likely long before, there have always been two radically different cultures existing side by side in a somewhat awkward truce: one grounded in a long and intellectual tradition going back to Marx and the First International and usually oriented toward labor, the other a very counter-cultural, freespirited group who often identify as anarchists. The former tend to be exasperated by the latter, and the latter tend to think the former are outdated and overly academic. Undoubtedly, geographical location is a major factor in the numbers of people by which each of these traditions is represented, but it's a mistake (and one that Rossinow seems to make) not to recognize that members of both groups are usually present on any given campus and in any given city, and thus that looking for one single historical narrative to explain "New Left culture" is a project bound to fail because there are at least two very different cultures in any given left movement.