Old Left, New Left, Nothing Left

Some years ago, I heard through the family grapevine that a young relative had renounced everything, including the religion of his fathers, for an obscure New Age sect. Despite myself I felt annoyed. You want to join a cult, fine--why not a useful one like the Communist Party?

The most seductive secular faith of the short 20th century was communism (in all its poignant, savage and self-deluded permutations). The appeal was not solely utopian. Communism promised to enlist its enthusiasts in a movement that had been ordained to make history--although, in the cases of the American Old and New Lefts, it could be said that the formula was reversed. It was history (the Great Depression, the Vietnam War) that made the movement.

The most militant American radicals of the 1930s put their lives on the line, and if those of the 1960s staked mainly their lifestyles, they were no less committed to the notion that the enlightened individual was capable of participating in a vast, transfiguring human drama. But history, so we have been told, ended with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and now, in the 1990s, the survivors--not just of their individual epochs but of this grandiose project--attempt to remake it, in the post-historical fashion, by writing their memoirs.

Crusty octogenarian William Herrick recalls his life in the Communist Party and his disillusioning tour of duty fighting what he believed would be the good fight in the Spanish Civil War; ex-hippies Peter Coyote and Leslie Brody recount their adventures in the communes and crash pads of Vietnam-era Amerikkka; ‘60s tummler Abbie Hoffman, no longer here to regale us with his own story, is evoked by some 200 witnesses in Larry Sloman’s hefty oral history.

Hoffman, Coyote and Brody were all participants in what was called the counterculture. But as is made clear in Paul Buhle and Edmund B. Sullivan’s lovingly assembled “Images of American Radicalism,” the Old Left was a counterculture as well--devoted to organizing against fascism and for the Congress of Industrial Organizations, confronting the so-called Jewish and Negro Questions and (above all) protecting the Soviet Union. In its totality, this working-class response to the Great Depression was based in the Communist Party--with its summer camps, individual cause committees and theater groups--but its world-view was supported by Popular Front fellow-travelers and even supplemented by a variety of splinter parties and dissidents.

Prophecy in reverse, Herrick’s “Jumping the Line” belongs to the familiar genre of Communist disillusionment: “I lived in Spain some nine months . . . under the eyes of commissars and Party strong arms. . . . I might very well have been living in what later became an Eastern European Communist dictatorship.” And yet, the memoir is not exactly a repudiation. Herrick laments the wasted “talent and energy” as well as the ideological failure of American communism. “If we had been an indigenous democratic American party instead of a Russian party parading as American, I wonder how far we could have gone in changing our society.”

Proudly unsentimental, Herrick renders the Spanish Civil War as a sinister, chaotic tragedy: Those “remaining in the trenches were protected by the heaped dead bodies of the Bronx Young Communist League.” The sardonic, assertively vernacular, workingman tone is a recognizable Old Left voice, and for archeologists, his book is a repository of Red gossip. While in Spain, Herrick has an affair with a beautiful older woman whom he discovers to be the first wife of the Hungarian Communist hero (and later martyr) Laszlo Rajk. The 22-year-old American received something more than amorous instruction when, after he casually questioned Soviet housing priorities (how’s that for politically correct pillow talk?), his lover reported him to the chief of security. He received nothing stronger than a warning, but it was memorable. “One of the first lessons you learned when you joined a Party unit was the necessity for informing your organizer if one of your comrades uttered a critical word about the Party or the Soviet Union.”

Herrick’s heart of darkness is the tale, obliquely and painfully recounted, of three Lincoln comrades who fragged their disastrously inept commander during the bloody Brunete offensive. This visceral instance of the confusion and terror within the Republican forces is compounded by the additional irony that the incompetent commander was a black man. The story is a revelation that, as described by Paul Berman in his informative introduction, prompted a minor scandal and outraged denials among the surviving Old Leftists once Herrick broke his long silence in a 1986 interview that Berman published in the Village Voice.

Given his experience of revolution as hell, one can only imagine Herrick’s contempt for Hoffman’s catchy slogan: revolution for the hell of it. Where Herrick took action, Hoffman acted. “There was no dour quality to Abbie’s revolutionary spirit,” Sloman writes in his introduction to “Steal This Dream.” Hoffman, who had spent a number of years as a civil rights organizer in his hometown of Worcester, Mass., moved to the youth culture’s epicenter in New York’s East Village in 1966. Rendered redundant by black power, Hoffman sought a new constituency, readdressing himself to disaffected white youth through the media of street theater and the nightly news. Sloman calls Hoffman, famous for owning one of the neighborhood’s few color TVs, the “father of the electronic sound bite.”

Hoffman was the original Groucho Marxist, a master of political symbolism. Where the Old Left would have railed against Wall Street, Hoffman preferred to mock it by disrupting the New York Stock Exchange with a shower of dollar bills. He was the first person arrested under a federal flag desecration statute and was largely responsible for the media event that was Chicago 1968. Ten thousand demonstrators were amplified by TV to look like a replay of the 1905 Russian Revolution. The ensuing conspiracy trial provided the acme of Hoffman’s public career; he confounded his humorless co-defendant Tom Hayden by transforming the proceedings into a show business travesty. As his admiring disciple Jerry Rubin recalled, Hoffman “charmed the judge, he charmed the jury, he charmed everybody. . . . Hayden gives the jury the clenched fist. Abbie blows a kiss to the jury.”

The Old Left was predicated on poverty, fascism, Stalin’s utopia, so-called objective reality. The New Left had Vietnam, racism, rock’n’roll--and delirium. It would be impossible to overestimate the influence on the counterculture exerted by the consciousness-expanding, reality-warping LSD, a drug that made everything seem relative and anything appear possible. Thanks in part to the widespread use of this not-yet-illegal psychedelic, the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco to which Coyote moved in 1965 was Montmartre on Mars.

Coyote, who has since graduated to a Hollywood acting career, was a part of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, whose most radical members developed the concept of “life acting” and reconstituted themselves as the Diggers. More political than Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, though less organized than Amsterdam’s Provos, the Diggers consciously theatricalized everyday life, casting themselves as hip liberators who would dispense free food, operate free stores, organize free pageants and otherwise engage in all manner of enigmatic, mind-blowing behavior. Although the Diggers prided themselves on their anonymity, their strategies were popularized, largely by Hoffman and Rubin. (Hoffman’s associates were uniformly impressed both by the amount of acid he ingested--”LSD was like cornflakes to him in the morning”--and his capacity to continue functioning under its influence, not the least in Judge Julius Hoffman’s court.)

By then, Coyote and his friends had left San Francisco for a network of communes in rural Northern California, Nevada and New Mexico. They were a tribe called the Free Family, living off the detritus of the Great Society. (One house supported 30 people on three California welfare checks.) Despite such vivid accounts of communal mishigas as Ed Sander’s “The Family,” Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” and Charles Perry’s “The Haight Ashbury,” the ‘60s have yet to receive their Dostoevskyan due, a history illuminating the hubris that allowed militants to wishfully proclaim “The War Is Over” or insist that we “Live As Though the Day Were Here.” Coyote recalls a communal morning with the poet Lew Welch drinking wine, smoking pot and watching “the world’s most voluptuous 17-year-old mother” dance half-naked. “The . . . worst . . . Persian . . . voluptuary . . . could . . . not . . . imagine . . . our . . . most . . . ordinary day,” Welch managed to say, then pitched over unconscious.

There is a progression from Coyote and the Diggers to Hoffman and Rubin to Brody, whose sense of herself as a Baby Boom foot soldier in the great psychedelic social revolution is vividly recounted in “Red Star Sister.” Hoffman was a showman, Coyote an artiste, and Brody--like Herrick--was a kid who ran away to join the political circus. Her memoir attests to the degree to which radical politics permeated adolescence during the 1960s. As during the Great Depression, social chaos was the norm. Brody and her friends accepted the truth that “high school was a warehouse for soldiers.” Her only reason for going to college, she writes, was “to go on strike.” In fact, she drops out before she even begins; attending an alternative media conference the summer before she was to matriculate, the 17-year-old firebrand is invited to join a youth delegation to Havana and phones home to inform her father, “Daddy, I have better things to do. I’m a revolutionary now.”

Not too surprisingly, Brody doesn’t make it to Cuba either. She is diverted to Chicago, where she joins a White Panther commune. Indeed, she is made the commune’s minister of education. The White Panthers--founded by John Sinclair, a militant who had his mind blown by Hoffman’s Woodstock Nation analysis (suddenly youth was a class!)--drew their support mainly from white male rock’n’rollers. As the commune’s lone female, Brody’s role was clear. In Chicago and later in Ann Arbor, she was to be “the in-house authority on everything regarding the women’s movement.” In a sense, Brody was the debased modern equivalent of the Delphic Sybil, offering her prophesies through the fumes of burning poppies. “The endless succession of joints we smoked produced a general laziness that superseded all righteous exertion,” she writes. Still, Herrick would recognize a grotesque vestige of communist discipline in their collective life. “Criticism was the only job we enjoyed, denunciation was entertainment.” Everything was Now. “It surprised me to hear her speak of the future,” Brody recalls of a friend who passes through one of her communes. “After just two months with the White Panthers, I’d begun to think that life everywhere was as timeless and doomed as ours.”

Brody eventually moves on to Berkeley, renames herself Buckwheat Groats and becomes a columnist for the underground weekly the Berkeley Tribe. “More and more my life seemed to possess the made-up quality of an adventure serial.” Her trip reaches critical mass when, after rehearsing in the hash dens of Amsterdam for her eventual breakdown, she decides to visit the North Vietnamese in Paris as a representative of revolutionary American youth. “I couldn’t say I’d suffered a mental collapse. I didn’t know I had.” (The same might be said of Hoffman, who had a family history of mental instability but whose manic temperament was magically in accord with the national mood from 1967 to 1970.)

Like Herrick, Brody lost her revolutionary faith long before she opted out of the movement’s disorganized religion. But also like Herrick (who by his own account had--even as an ex-Communist--”worked like a dog to help organize” the Federation of Shorthand Reporters), she hasn’t lost a certain sense of identity--”the old immigrant socialist traditions of brotherhood and sisterhood and equality now and peace and justice and solidarity forever. . . .” Is it a coincidence that Herrick, Brody, Hoffman and Coyote are all descendants of the downtrodden Russian Jews who immigrated to America during what Buhle and Sullivan call the Golden Age of Radicalism? (Or that, as Herrick notes, the Lincoln battalion--like the International Brigades as a whole--was half composed of Jews?) I think not. Zionism is only one secular Jewish ideology that sought redemption on the stage of history.

The CETA federal jobs program of the mid-1970s enabled Coyote to go quasi-respectable as Jerry Brown’s chairman of the California Arts Council while, driven underground after a 1973 drug bust, Hoffman reinvented himself as Barry Freed, an activist organizing against winter navigation on the St. Lawrence Seaway in upstate New York. Hoffman was so successful in his new persona that, after addressing a local audience primed and shouting to “save the river,” he had the satisfaction of hearing New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan proclaim that “the ‘60s aren’t dead. They are alive in Barry Freed.” And not just in him.

As an illustrated counter-history, Buhle and Sullivan’s dense, celebratory “Images of American Radicalism” would have been a sacred text in the communes described by Coyote and Brody. (Or maybe not: “Books were too rational; they didn’t make sense any more,” Brody writes of her life among the White Panthers.) Buhle and Sullivan create a coherent view of radicalism in American life--as well as an indigenous tradition in which both Old and New Lefts are but episodes in the fulfillment of America’s particular historical destiny.

Just as the radicals of the 1930s can claim a number of victories--even if Social Security and industrial trade unionism no longer seem as impregnable as they once did--so the radicals of the 1960s can take credit for the racial, gender and environmental sensitivity that characterizes contemporary American life, as well as for the re-orientation of the national culture toward an inflated generational solipsism and narcissistic concern with individual identity. As a noninhaling hippie fellow-traveler occupies the White House, his libertarian lifestyle preoccupies the media. The personal really has become the political.

Old Left, New Left: Today, in a nasty turn of the dialectic, we have the Nothing Left. With the long discredited Soviet model collapsed into its own dustbin, the lone alternative to market capitalism would seem to be Islamic militancy--and how is a Marxist to deal with that? Che Guevara is revived once more as a youth-cult trademark, somewhere between James Dean and Kurt Cobain, but hippie communes have been superseded by survivalist bunkers, and even the preeminent scary black nationalist Louis Farrakhan is a reactionary (at least as compared to the Black Panthers).

The millennial paranoia, conspiracy theorizing, armed love, countercultural secession and outlaw terrorism of the lunatic New Left are these days the province of the militant right. America may still be the world’s great social laboratory, but rather than dreaming of making history, its citizens would seem to be engaged in the flight from it.