The Roots of Rage

SDS PROCLAIMED its self-destruction on March 6, 1970, when a luxurious Greenwich Village townhouse exploded in a serious swirl of stone, glass, and human bodies. Left dead and mutilated were three young bomb-makers, one of whom had mistakenly ignited a cache of 100 sticks of dynamite intended for some unsuspecting organ of the Establishment. The preeminent leftist campus group of the Sixties. SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) had first emerged 10 years earlier, boasting a provocative dissent from the ideals of liberal America. But by the time the organization had deteriorated into the underground Weatherman network, it had become associated chiefly with wrecked college administration buildings and pointless casualties in a perverse revolution.

SDS, continues to make headlines on occasion: Former members may, for example, sell themselves as born-again Wall Street brokers, or shoot up armored bank trucks and their passengers. With time, it becomes increasingly easy, and even fashionable, to dismiss the unusual attitudes and-actions of the Sixties as merely the source of this ludicrous legacy.

Political scientists Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter have written a new book in which they retrace some of the most significant events of the Sixties, presumably to remind readers of the genuine political transformations spurred by that amalgam of civil rights, anti-war, and university reform groups collectively known as the New Left. After asserting the fundamental importance of the leftist thrust, the authors launch a complex critique of its Jewish leadership on predominantly white campuses, combining a variety of psychological and sociological assessments with an unsubtle desire to expose the "real" motives behind the rhetoric.

Roots of Radicalism is dominated by lengthy excerpts form the authors' esoteric empirical studies of student protesters, conducted largely in the early 1970s. The book's conclusions about the unique role of Jewish neuroses in fomenting unrest range from the some-what obvious to the highly suspect. Yet more important is the factual material sprinkled liberally amid the Rorschach blots and data tables: tidbits of information that will compel the curious to investigate further the New Left's strange and unfortunate metamorphosis.

ROTHMAN AND LICHTER gamely confront the historiographical school which catalogues the New Left as merely the peak of some relentless sine curve on a cycle of generational conflict or reformist sentiment. The authors emphasize the restraints on radicalism in America, invoking historian Louis Hartz's conception of a culture which assumes liberalism as a civic religion from the outset. Struggling against the strong currents of moderation, the New Left formulated a coherent criticism of the very premises of the nation's liberal tradition; it thus attracted a massive following of skeptics where earlier 20th century movements on the Left never got beyond sectarian battles over how best to attack the conservative beast.

Racial discrimination was the loose thread, which, when repeatedly yanked by Southern Black civil rights workers, began to unravel the myth of a just society for thousands of white students in the North. This revelation, not Vietnam, inspired SDS to pull away from its democratic-socialist parent organization. Starting with a few hundred members scattered from Harvard to Berkeley, the group gradually constructed a platform which linked the students' own impatience with mainstream Democratic politics to the suffering of the non-white and the destitute. In its 1962 manifesto, The Port Huron Statement, SDS zeroed in on the links between the corporate world, the government and the university which were blamed for blocking fundamental deviation from the status quo. Faced with the opportunity to channel its energy into opposition to the quietly growing U.S. commitment in Southeast Asia, SDS consciously opted to maintain a multi-issue stance.

As Rothman and Lichter note in passing, the group put its theory to work in the form of community organizing squads dispatched to galvanize the urban poor. The Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) sponsored outposts in as many as 10 major cities at its peak and, with its hundreds of volunteers, dominated the SDS agenda through the summer of 1965.

IN THE SMALL BODY of scholarship that bothers to examine the student movement's early years with any care, most commentary treats the SDS leadership with a degree of respect verging on reverence. "Ideological contamination," the authors of Roots call it, and they argue a convincing case for the generalization. The most-often cited secondary sources on SDS were written by people who openly proclaim their sympathy for, if not actual participation in, some aspect of the New Left. Kirkpatrick Sale, author of the meticulously detailed SDS, describes the group's charter members as "a remarkable group of people... committed, energetic, perceptive, political, warm... charismatic, articulate, and (many) good-looking."

Rothman and Lichter take the opposite approach, searching for self-interest even in the halcyon formative stages of SDS. Their initial quantitative ethnic survey of group members finds that over half of the initial SDS leadership was Jewish, rather than the more commonly accepted estimate in Sale's book of "perhaps a third." Operating with that in mind, the authors offer a complicated two-pronged assessment: 1) Jewish psychological defense mechanisms, not radical idealism, sparked what turned out to be a valuable new critique of American society and 2) when the original leadership gave way to a largely non-Jewish contingent, a different and more pernicious set of selfish motives drove SDS toward a hollow and violent revolutionary doctrine. Startling at first, these conclusions seem less remarkable after separating out the social science jargon and comparing the actual reasoning to existing theories.

The authors argue that the Jews who joined Tom Hayden and other gentiles in shaping SDS carried with them an urge to overcome a form of ethnic alienation generally referred to as "marginality." Though that analysis has been used for decades to explain Jews' affinity for progressive politics in this country, as well as in Europe. Rothman and Lichter customize the proposition by divining from their charts and graphs that this particular group of Jews subconsciously strove to destroy the essentially "Christian institutions which helped keep them on the "margin" of American society. Compounding this psychological maelstrom, say the authors, was a tendency toward authoritarianism within SDS. They depict the Jewish (male) activists as victims of savage domineering mother-weakling father complexes--a group of insecure intellectuals who saw "the oppressed" as an army which could be marshalled for a macho confrontation with established authority.

Rothman and Lichter call this phenomenon the "protean form of psycho-political rebellion" because the (Jewish) rebels sought out "change, flux, and fluidity... [aiming] at the continual destruction of social institutions, insofar as they interfere[d] with individual experimentation."

The proteans, as the authors awkwardly refer to them, steered SDS for four years, eventually fading from prominence when their theories failed to translate into long-term success with projects such as ERAP. A new, non-Jewish psychological type grabbed the reins and evolved into what the authors call the rigid authoritarian rebel": all of the protean's hang-ups, minus his respect for intellectual matters and his adherence to non-violent tactics. Total immersion in anti-war protest became inevitable after the huge U.S. troop deployments of 1965 and intensification of the draft, say Rothman and Lichter, and the New Left became a "carrier movement" for "irrationalism, spontaneous action [and] social disruption." In their view, style came to dominate content, and "the dynamic of escalating protest forced [young people] either to embrace all-out revolution by 'any means necessary' or to withdraw from the field of battle."

ASPECTS of this analysis seem quite reasonable, in fact, because they are in large part ornate restatements of previous studies. Born and raised in a world of intellectual East Coast progressivism and schooled at the nation's finest private universities, the early SDSers were reacting on one level to perceived shortcomings in the world that nurtured them. In a sense it was selfish--Ivy League ruminations about political alienation, glorified as an answer for the poor man and the Black. The students were grandiloquent on paper and naive in the ghetto; certainly personal guilt over their own relative security in the face of hardship elsewhere helped inspire some student leaders. As both fans and critics of the New Left have noted the Jewish tradition of leadership in American and European radical movements, in addition to the Jews' unusual concern for other groups separated from the mainstream, must be prominent elements of any thorough portrait of the early SDS.

By piling the sociological data to new heights. Rothman and Lichter do not add much to these conclusions. Moreover, when the authors take the Jewish theme to its extreme, intertwining it with their SDS caricatures of various "rebel" types, they settle into some dubious armchair psychoanalysis.

Most of the more sophisticated statistical results prominently showcased in Roots are simply unintelligible to the non-expert. The reader must assume that the authors' use of tools such as the Semantic Differential and Thematic Apperception Tests is legitimate. What can be gleaned is that these methods rely on questionable interpretations of highly subjective data. The Thematic Apperception technique, for instance, consists of a set of vague pictures about which subjects are asked or write fictional stories. From that, Rothman and Lichter apparently quantify the myriad characteristics of protean versus rigid authoritarian.

Given this entire strategy, the authors provoke sharp skepticism by repeatedly citing in the book's narrative section examples of Jewish rebel-speak from the mouths of a handful of the more clownish, and often more violent SDSers. Jerry Rubin: "I know [being Jewish] made me feel like a minority or outsider in America (sic.) from my birth and helped me become a revolutionary." And Abbie Hoffman (presumably on radical Jewish impotence): "Fidel [Castro] sits on the side of a tank rumbling into Havana on New Year's day... The tank stops in the city square. Fidel lets the gun drop to the ground, slaps his thigh and stands erect. He is like a mighty penis coming to life..." Insight into the confused thinking of men such as Rubin and Hoffman is valuable, but the authors do not adequately prove that Rubin's excesses were attributable to religion, merely because he once said as much. Nor do they convince the suspicious reader that radicalism was tied into an unusual version of the Oedipal complex fostered exclusively in New York City synagogues.

SDS and much of the New Left did disintegrate into an unimaginative revolutionary mindset in the late Sixties. The Rothman-Lichter "authoritarian" model seems fairly appropriate when applied to the post-1967 years and the devolution of the Weathermen. The authors set out to explain what powered a movement, and their effort has the positive effect of prompting curiosity about the variety of factors involved. But the book quickly becomes an indictment and fails because its charges are too often obscure and exaggerated. Regardless of its pathetic demise, the SDS-led New Left deserves serious consideration of its major accomplishment, forcing this country to at least reconsider its ideals, if not actually abandon them for those of a more equalitarian society.