Todd Gitlin and the Student Movement

“The issues are interrelated.” – SDS Slogan

During the 1960s, the post-war consensus was shattered as movements against injustice spread throughout the nation. The Civil Rights Movement was in full force and would bring radical changes to society with early-in-the-decade victories such as Brown v Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was against this hopeful and exciting backdrop that students began to organize. These students, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, fought for participatory democracy on the national scale, and often against the campus bureaucracy a little closer to home. The first organizational document of the students was the Port Huron Statement, the political manifesto for the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Other groups soon followed; on the west coast, Mario Savio and others founded the Free Speech movement at Berkley while on the East coast Harvard students created TOCSIN, the first student protest group at that university. To understand the lasting impact and actual actions of the student protests during the 1960s, it is important to find an individual who represents as many aspects as possible of the movement. This person was Todd Gitlin. Founding member and early president of both TOCSIN and the SDS, Todd Gitlin helped steer the early student movement. However, what makes him unique is both the variety of leadership and organizational roles he took and his subtle sidelining in the SDS after he was accused of being too moderate. Indeed, his disillusionment can be seen in his later writings, where he often complains about the lack of unity in the left, and the need to focus on the real issue (the conservatives) rather than to dissolve into petty interideological debate. The life of Todd Gitlin provides a fascinating cross-section of the 1960s, revealing the evolution of the student movement from the old left and its ultimate fracture and descent into extremism.

Todd Gitlin and the Early Movement

Todd Gitlin was born to middle-class white parents and considered himself a liberal for most of his pre-college life. He was introduced to the left by a friend and son of one-time communists, David. These “red-diaper babies” = had been raised in “left-wing air” and thus inherited the protest tradition from the old left, and a desire to criticize the liberal American government. Gitlin would later philosophically agree with the left, but during his pre-college life, all that attracted him was simply the avant-garde nature of the left. It held an “irresistible taboo” according to Gitlin.[1]

There was never a moment, one singular point in time, where Gitlin became a left-wing activist. Rather the process was rapid, unexpected, and uncontrolled; he attended a few socialist rallies in high school after doing a school project on a socialist. Always afraid of nuclear weapons, he attended a seminar on the topic at Harvard. Wearing the button from the seminar the next day, he was invited to join TOCSIN. He planned rallies like what he had experienced in high school. The success of those rallies saw him rise in the ranks in TOCSIN: soon he was the president.

Gitlin’s transition from a normal high school student to a left-wing activist reflects the larger experience of student activists at the time- there was no plan or central organization to the early student movement. The students were simply driven, as a result of social and historical factors surrounding them, to protest. Most were like Gitlin, “born in at least modern comfort,” with liberal parents, and red-diaper baby friends, or even friends from the Civil Rights Movement, who introduced them to the taboo concept of protest.[2] Gitlin’s life allows us to look at the student as a result of certain trends in an entire generation, rather than some isolated pockets of activism on the West Coast that eventually grew into a larger movement.

Moreover, even the early student groups were not radical nor immediately leftist. TOCSIN, according to its founder, was apolitical. It wanted to work through the existing system; educate and mobilize the younger generation to give Kennedy the leverage he needed to end the arms race. However, TOCSIN radicalized as the president continued to do nothing. They began to think of themselves no longer as liberals, but in opposition of Kennedy, trying to force change through protest, rather than through educating the already in-power government officials. Here, TOCSIN is representative of the student movement, as it slowly radicalized as the students became disillusioned after failing to work within the liberal system.

Gitlin began to move away from pure nuclear advocacy in TOCSIN when he realized, as many others did, that a plethora of small, single-interest leftist groups could not accomplish anything, as their political clout was minimal. For Gitlin, this realization came on the heels of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Even after he had been working with TOCSIN for more than two years, talking to mid-level bureaucrats and Congresspeople in Washington, the world came closer than it had ever been to nuclear annihilation. One month after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Gitlin (unofficially) joined the SDS.

The early student movement essentially was born out of failed liberal promises, using those promises as a club to beat the liberal majority.

Todd Gitlin During the Pride of the SDS

At the 1963 SDS national meeting, no one wanted to be the president. The three top candidates all discussed whose life it would disrupt least, and they agreed that Todd Gitlin was the best choice (supposedly because he didn’t have a girlfriend at the time).[3] This rather suspect way of choosing leadership reflected one of the main issues that the SDS would face during the 60s- no one wanted to be the leader. The issue with an organization that is fighting back against power structures with an ideology like the SDS is that sometimes the revolution is applied to the leadership of the organization. In the words of Gitlin, “we didn’t believe in leadership.”[4] He “stepped forwards onto the gangplank” by becoming the president.[5]

During Gitlin’s presidency, there was a debate in the SDS between the students who wanted to organize the poor and those that wanted to educate and radicalize more college students. As president, Gitlin determined that SDS would leave the colleges and try to organize and radicalize the lower classes of America, leaving theory on the campuses in favor of action in the ghettos. To Gitlin, “the University… [began] to feel like a cage.”[6] In this way, the SDS represented the “new insurgency.”[7] These insurgents went to the nation’s poor areas, and tried to mobilize non-unionized workers, teach the masses, and focus the dissatisfaction of the poor into a political force. As Gitlin later stated, “[t]he poor know they are poor and don’t like it; hence they can be organized so as to demand an end to poverty and the construction of a decent social order.”[8]

However, the national SDS led by Gitlin did not always dictate the strategies of the local chapters. In many of the local chapters, members traveled to support the Civil Rights Movement, and in some, they still focused mainly on educating and radicalizing other students. Despite the national organization’s clear rejection of the leadership of the anti-Vietnam war movement, the local chapters began to lead protests and resistance to the war. Their increased radicalism was a direct result of the escalation of the war in Vietnam. As one activist stated decades later, the students “literally couldn’t believe” that the United States was murdering millions of Vietnamese.[9] Increasing numbers of students believed that they needed to do anything they could to stop the war, even if that meant bringing the war home.

Todd Gitlin, the Rejected Liberal

As he spent more time in the SDS, Gitlin became more and more critical of the organization. He called out the idealist leadership of the SDS and criticized their lack of pragmatism (i.e., there had never been a discussion concerning fundraising by SDS leadership, leading to an alarming state of finances in 1965).[10] While he did have idealist tendencies, Todd Gitlin was pragmatic, and because of this, he had always felt alienated from the other leaders of the SDS.[11] It was not only the lack of pragmatism that frustrated Gitlin, but the organization’s own ideology. He called out its “natural laziness” and “dislike of formal occasions” particularly, which made organizing and educating college students difficult.[12] He also spoke out against the revolution against the concept of authority, which crippled the SDS’s leadership. The opposition to Gitlin is best exemplified by Al Haber. He argued that the organizing of the poor programs was neither successful nor directed towards “radical goals,” lacked “clarity of goals,” and lacked “significant differentiation from liberal reform.”[13] In a biting critique in the newspaper of the SDS, Haber spewed that “[t]he cult of the ghetto has diverted SDS from its primary and most difficult task of educating radicals.”[14] Todd Gitlin’s moderate and pragmatic position was becoming more rejected by the SDS as the organization became more radicalized.

The disagreement between Al Haber and Todd Gitlin was fundamental, as they both accepted the other side’s criticism without opposition. Because of this sharp divide, the SDS did not have any real central strategy for the next few years. The organization had started to attract communists and socialists from other leftist organizations, which further divided the organization. With the escalation of the Vietnam war in 1967, there was a large uptick in violence. Local chapter leaders led militant opposition to the war, as more and more students accepted non-violent protest within the liberal system as ineffective. These disaffected radicals spawned the revolutionary Youth Movement, committed to stopping the war in Vietnam at all costs.[15] One of their rallying cries was “Bring the War Home.”

By late 1968, the SDS was completely paralyzed. It had a huge influx of membership which rapidly changed the ideology of the organization. In particular, Maoists from the May 2nd Movement pushed the organization further left.[16] The SDS still protested, as at the Democratic National Convention of 1968 in Chicago. However, the views of the different factions of the organization finally became too large. This would all come to a head in the June 1969 National Convention. Thanks to ideological bickering, the SDS split into three groups: the PL, Weathermen, and RYM II. The RYM II, the most moderate of the three, collapsed quickly due to its inability to create a coherent plan. The PL became simply an offshoot of the progressive labor party, but many SDS members flocked to the Weathermen. Commenting on this change, Gitlin said in an interview that “I sat in a state of horror watching the Weathermen run away with the student left.”[17] To Gitlin, and many of the moderates in the SDS, the Weathermen were nothing more than terrorists. With the weathermen taking power, Gitlin, like the majority of pre-1969 SDS members left the organization completely. It would be several years until the weathermen underground finally turned themselves in, but the majority of the student left was over. In this way, Gitlin offers us also a window into how the activism of the 60s ended.

Conclusion

Gitlin is representative of the whole student movement. Born to a middle-class family, Gitlin initially worked within the system because of his fear of nuclear weapons. When this failed, Gitlin realized that he had to work within a larger organization, so he joined the SDS. After the SDS failed to achieve any great milestone, it began to splinter and radicalize even further. This left Gitlin, always an uncertain liberal, increasingly isolated. This ultimately was put on full display when Gitlin left the SDS during the failed convention of 1969. Gitlin provides the best overall view of the 1960’s student moving, showing everything from how the movement began to the extremism and radicalism that ultimately destroyed the organization.

Bibliography

Cohen, Mitchell, and Dennis Hale. The New Student Left: An Anthology. Boston, 1966.

Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope: Days of Rage. Toronto etc.: Bantam Books, 1993.

Gross, Terry, and Todd Gitlin. Remembering activist Todd Gitlin, who helped lead the '60s antiwar movement. Other. NPR, February 11, 2022. https://www.npr.org/2022/02/11/1080086898/remembering-activist-todd-gitlin-who-helped-lead-the-60s-antiwar-movement.

Kissinger, Clark, Jeremy Brecher, Shelley Blum, Steve Max, Jim Williams, Paul Booth, Todd Gitlin, et al. “(SDS) SDS Bulletin.” Jstor, November 1964. https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28044410.

McELDOWNEY, CAROL, TODD GITLIN, JIM WILLIAMS, STEVE MAX, BOSTON SDS, DICK MAGIDOFF, and AL HABER. “(SDS) SDS Bulletin.” Jstor, February 1965. https://jstor.org/stable/community.28044414.

Sale, Kirkpatrick. SDS. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.

“Students for a Democratic Society Papers. 1958-1970.” Glen Rock: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1977.

The Weatherman Underground. YouTube, 2002. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znOutAi_fOg&pp=sAQB.

[1] Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope: Days of Rage (Toronto etc.: Bantam Books, 1993), 67.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 105.

[4] NPR, NPR, February 11, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/02/11/1080086898/remembering-activist-todd-gitlin-who-helped-lead-the-60s-antiwar-movement.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 64.

[7] Ibid., 59.

[8] Mitchell Cohen and Dennis Hale, The New Student Left: An Anthology (Boston, 1966), 126.

[9] The Weatherman Underground, YouTube, 2002, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znOutAi_fOg&pp=sAQB.

[10] Clark Kissinger et al., accessed October 11, 2022, https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28044410, 32.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] SUMNER ROSEN et al., accessed October 8, 2022, https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28044409, 23.

[14] Ibid., 24.

[15] “Students for a Democratic Society Papers. 1958-1970” (Glen Rock, 1977), 4.

[16] Ibid.

[17] The Weatherman Underground, YouTube, 2002, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znOutAi_fOg&pp=sAQB.