Substance, Style, and Cold War Liberalism

Kevin Mattson’s reply to my provocations (I and II) was fantastic. I concede to Mattson on several points. For instance, I agree about the centrality of McCarthyism to postwar conservatism, which is particularly apropos given that Irving Kristol, the “father of neoconservatism,” made a halfhearted defense of McCarthy on the grounds that liberals could not be trusted to wage the Cold War. 

Yet, I stand by many of my original arguments, especially over the centrality of neoconservatism to the culture wars. This argument rests on my belief that the sixties represent a significant break, that the New Left is crucial to understanding the later culture wars, and that neoconservatism took form precisely in opposition to the New Left. In their reaction to the New Left and in their full-throated attack on those intellectuals who comprised, in Lionel Trilling’s words, an “adversary culture,” neoconservatives helped draw up the very terms of the culture wars. But since I have made that argument on this blog several times and would like to save some of my material for my book, I will let this debate go for now.

The one point of contention that I would like to return to, however, is the ongoing discussion about style and substance. Bill Fine’s many comments on this topic, as well as LD Burnett’s posts (here and here), have inspired me to think through where I stand on the style-substance spectrum in relation to Cold War liberalism. Both Mattson and LD claim that the New Left and the New Right evinced similar styles, implying that this fact is more important to our historical understanding of these two ideological trajectories than any political differences they might have had. I disagree.

In Rebels All!, Mattson argues that American conservatives are the true heirs to sixties radicals. Conservatives are the ones who carried on their legacy of anti-establishment utopianism. In this elocution, style matters. Such rebellious sensibilities stood in marked contrast to the political style that Mattson holds dear, the style of Cold War liberalism. Mattson appreciates the insights offered by postwar liberalism: “That irony and humility are necessary guards against self-assured expansion of American power. That style, the way you hold your ideas and worldview, often guide the way you do things in the world.”

Similarly, in her recent post—“Common Ground for the Culture Wars”—LD contends that William Buckley’s God and Man at Yale and Tom Hayden’s "Port Huron Statement" evinced strikingly similar sensibilities, particularly in their notions about the moral and political centrality of the university. Both Buckley and Hayden believed the university was worth fighting for, and in this fight they both saw themselves as doing battle with a corrupt system otherwise known as Cold War liberalism. That their critiques arose from divergent political views is less important than understanding their shared sensibilities.

Mattson points out that perhaps our main difference is over politics. Mattson writes: “He appears much more of a leftist; I’m a liberal. Some of his criticisms seem less about the substance of my own argument and getting things wrong and more with my own political conclusions.” Mattson is half correct here. Indeed, we do disagree about politics. He correctly mentions that we have different takes on historian-activist Howard Zinn, which seems to be a Rorschach test for left-leaning historians these days. Fair enough. (If you want my opinion on this matter, see my reading of Michael Kazin, who is chief among Zinn’s left-leaning critics.)

But I would argue that Mattson and my political differences do not merely lead me to dislike the conclusions he draws from history. I think it leads him to get the history wrong. This is particularly the case with his conflation of the sixties left with the post-sixties right, which seems to stem from his defense of Cold War liberalism. In this, Mattson repeats the Cold War liberal move, made most famously by Schlesinger in The Vital Center: he concludes that political ideas to the left and right of liberalism are non-sensible. Whereas Schlesinger and the consensus thinkers of the 1950s misapplied psychoanalytic theory to argue that non-liberal political views were crazy, Mattson argues that the rebellious style, whether a fashion of the left or the right, is antithetical to the good democratic society.

As far as I can tell, LD’s analysis of postwar sensibilities does not originate from any such political passion. And yet, in her historiographic commitments, she prioritizes the wrong thing. The point that Buckley and Hayden both opposed aspects of the university establishment, and in doing so were part of a larger counter-zeitgeist, is banal. Given that the university was central to the Cold War liberal project, and given that Cold War liberalism was hegemonic (there’s a reason it was called the consensus), all critics, left or right, might seem like “rebels all.” They were rebelling against powerful institutions, undergirded by powerful ideas. But their differences are more important to our historical understanding.

Buckley saw the university as an anti-traditionalist, anti-religious, secularizing institution. As such, his critique nicely anticipated the Christian Right’s war for the soul of America that took on added valence in the 1970s and after. Hayden, in contrast, saw the university as the soulless representation of a technocratic capitalism. Both critiques were compelling. Both spoke to the various weaknesses of Cold War liberalism. And both had later consequences. But they were substantially different. 

That both left and right offered withering criticisms of Cold War liberalism might say a lot about Cold War liberalism. But only by analyzing the specific substance of the respective criticisms do we learn about left and right and, consequently, about the culture wars that resulted from the crumbling of Cold War liberalism.

Common Ground for the Culture Wars

Lately I have been keeping company with the post-war intellectuals -- Trilling, Macdonald, Rosenberg, Riesman, Baldwin, Buckley.  Of that last, most formidable fulminator, I had this to say yesterday on Twitter:

Today: reading Buckley, _God and Man at Yale_, wondering exactly how often he rolls over in his grave. Ideas have consequences, dude. #USIH
— LD Burnett (@LDBurnett) August 16, 2012

I spent the rest of the day alternately laughing, rolling my eyes, and -- dare I admit it? -- occasionally nodding in agreement with the old chap.  At the end of the day, I wrote a long-ish two-page precis to map out some future avenues of inquiry for this particular text, which will be making an appearance in my (new and improved!) dissertation. 

So I was very intrigued and gratified to see Kevin Schultz's comment go up earlier today on Andrew's recent blog post on the culture wars and sectarian conflict.  Kevin wrote:

It's funny how a post about the decline of Protestant essentialism (the transformation of David Sehat's Moral Establishment?) has rolled into a debate about the New Left and its role in creating the New Right. But as someone who is writing a book about Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley, Jr., one thing I have been struck by is by how much their critiques of Eisenhower's America overlapped. They both hated the mainstream liberalism of the 1950s, and if you look at the early editions of Buckley's National Review and of Mailer and friend's Village Voice (begun within weeks of each other in 1955), their starting sentiments are identical: mid-century liberalism was sapping people of their individualism and their freedoms, it was a sanitary culture where "every child had his own social worker" (that, by the way, is the Village Voice, not the National Review), it was a muted America that had no voice, no expression, nothing interesting to say or do.

Where the two guys went from there is of course the rest of the story (here perhaps Hunter's distinctions help, and also one's Catholicism versus the others Judaism), but it's shocking at how much the starting critiques were the same.

This is an astute observation, and I'm sure that Kevin is on to something. 

For my part, what I find surprising is Kevin's very surprise at the notion that thinkers as seemingly divergent as Mailer and Buckley would share a common sensibility.  That I find Kevin's surprise surprising is, in its turn, evidence of the contrarian nature of (some of) my training by (and, therefore, to a limited extent, as) a historian of sensibilities. (But don't you know that its very contrariety is part of its appeal! If practically everybody is going to zig, then I'm perfectly happy to zag...most of the time.)

But in all seriousness (and what are intellectual historians, anyway, if not Suitably Serious People):  it seems perfectly natural to me that Mailer and Buckley would share a common sensibility.  In fact, having just finished reading Buckley's God and Man at Yale yesterday -- that Ur text of disaffected idealistic undergrads scolding their professors for failing in their moral duty -- I would even up the ante and say that Buckley shared a common sensibility with Tom Hayden and the other authors of the Port Huron Statement.[1]

Buckley's indignation before the inaction and/or alleged conspiratorial silence of the profs sympathetic to his views, along with his insistence that, because the older generation were entrenched in their establishment niceties, it was up to him to sound the alarm -- all this is a sensibility he shares with the authors of the Port Huron Statement.  Indeed, it would not be unreasonable, I think, to argue that Buckley in some sense paved the way for the student activism of the New Left, specifically in identifying the university as the worthy site and center of cultural conflict.  Buckley called higher education "the nerve center of civilization," and he argued that "the guardians...of this sustaining core of civilization...have, in so many cases, abdicated their responsibility to mankind."[2]

With these assertions, at least, Tom Hayden and friends seemed to be in agreement.  In the closing salvo of their manifesto, the SDS affirmed that "the university is located in a permanent position of social influence."[3]  Further, though the authors of the Port Huron Statement no doubt disagreed quite strongly with Buckley that the role of the university is to inculcate and preserve Christian values, they certainly agreed that the university was to be a center and site of moral influence, and that it was badly failing at its task.  "Tragically," they wrote, "the university could serve as a significant source of social criticism and an initiator of new modes and molders of attitudes.  But the actual intellectual effect of the college experience is hardly distinguishable from that of any other communications channel -- say, a television set -- passing on the stock truths of the day."[4]  Though Buckley wanted those old stock truths protected and preserved, and the SDS wanted those truths challenged, both alike viewed the moral influence of the professoriate as vital to their divergent visions of the good society.

That these young visionaries with practically antithetical visions should alike look to the university as a place in need of and in command of ideological transformation suggests that they are both drawing upon the same underlying sense of the role and reach of (higher) education in public life.  Of course, the call of the SDS to focus on the university might be characterized as a move to counter the New Conservatives' bid for influence there.  However, even for the New Left -- indeed, especially for the New Left -- the university remained the single institution that might still provide a safe haven for ideals and idealists.  To be sure, even in this tenuous, provisional faith in the ivory tower, they differed markedly from Buckley, who looked to the Church as the repository of changeless truth in a changing world and who sought to (re)align the university with its ecclesiastical origins.  But as secular a document as the Port Huron Statement is -- and it is, it seems to me, quite secular by design -- there yet remains the sense that the university, the professoriate, has a sacred trust to keep.

I would venture to say that this sensibility, shared by Buckley and Tom Hayden alike, has not been without its adherents in the decades since.  Further, I would surmise -- though I will defer (for now!) to the judgment of others here -- that it is this shared ideal that, more than anything else, made American university campuses ground zero for many a conflict in the culture wars. I wonder, though, if Buckley's ideas have not finally overcome his ideals.  He wanted the university to champion religion over secularism, and individualism over collectivism, but he based his defense of these ideals on the notion that alumni and parents are "customers" or "consumers" of education, and that it is the job of the university to meet market demand.[5]  That seemingly hyper-individualist idea, such as it is, seems to have carried the day, dislodging humanistic inquiry, along with the search for both meaningful individual existence and enduring or effective social value, from the center of a university education. This result, it seems to me, is something that both Buckley and the signatories of the Port Huron Statement might alike deplore. 

Or am I cutting that cantankerous old Eli too much slack?

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[1]It's quite possible that someone else has already made this argument far more convincingly than I have in this post -- but, for the time being, if it ain't on my reading list, it ain't on my radar screen.  If you know of a scholar who has drawn this particular connection, please pardon my (temporary) ignorance, and please give me a link in the comments.  This would be helpful for my dissertation research.  Added 9:15 PM:  On the more general idea of the university as a guardian and purveyor of moral values, see Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).  

[2] William F. Buckley, Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of "Academic Freedom," 50th anniversary edition (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1986), 172-173.\

[3] Tom Hayden, The Port Huron Statement: The Visionary Call of the 1960s Revolution (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2005), 165.

[4] Hayden, 60.

[5]This idea, a major theme of Buckley's work, is highlighted in John Chamberlain's 1951 foreword.  See especially p. lx, where Chamberlain puts the matter in the plainest terms:  "The autonomy of the customer should hold whether he is buying toothpaste, tennis rackets -- or education for his children." 

Some Thoughts on the Port Huron Statement and U.S. Intellectual History

The Port Huron Statement used us to write itself, not the other way around….There’s no fucking way that I could have written it. It’s not possible if you read it.  And there’s sections of it I don’t remember at all. And I don’t know who wrote them.  So, it was fifty people at the crest of a great movement, having gone through the experience of jail in Mississippi and Georgia…There’s a way in which the words just came gushing forth….Something takes you over; it’s not that you are in charge.

-- Tom Hayden, "The Port Huron Statement at 50," Madison, Wisconsin, May 4, 2012 

MAUDE (Julianne Moore): Tell me a little about yourself, Jeffrey.
DUDE (Jeff Bridges):  Well, uh. . . Not much to tell.  I was, uh, one of the authors of the Port Huron Statement.--The original Port Huron Statement.
MAUDE:  Uh-huh.
DUDE: Not the compromised second draft. 

-- from The Big Lebowski (1998)

What’s gone on in the last 18 months is, to me, a fulfillment of virtually every dimension of participatory democracy, which was the dream at Port Huron fifty years ago, as outlined in the statement. And I hope to convince you that it’s a perspective and a framework that has a recurring life, independent of its authors, independent of its publication, because it always arises where people suffer too much and the institutions are too slow in making a response. 

-- Tom Hayden, "The Port Huron Statement at 50"

I

June 15, 2012, marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Port Huron Statement. This year has already seen a large number of academic events reflecting on the document's golden anniversary, including a conference at UC Santa Barbara in February, a dialogue on the Port Huron Statement between Noam Chomsky and Tom Hayden at MIT in April, and a short series of lectures at the Havens Center for the Study of Social Structure and Social Change at UW Madison in May.  Many reflections on it have also appeared in print.  One of the constants at these events has been the participation of Tom Hayden, who is usually credited with writing the Statement.

Although any reflection on the Statement is historical, the concerns of the various fora on its fiftieth anniversary have not principally been historical, which is fair enough.  Hayden, and many others, see the Statement as a living text. And much of the discussion of it has involved its relationship to our current political situation.

Nonetheless, the Port Huron Statement is an historical text. Given the interests of this blog, I think it's worth briefly reflecting on its significance for U.S. intellectual history.

II

There is no question in my mind that the Port Huron Statement is a significant--and canonical--text in American intellectual history. Indeed, I'd argue that, now that Lester Frank Ward's "Mind as a Social Factor" has been restored, the single most significant omission from Hollinger and Capper's American Intellectual Tradition reader is the Statement.

Its historical significance lies in at least three things:  First, it richly reflects a number of important strands in twentieth-century American thought. Deweyite pragmatism, C. Wright Mills's analysis of the power elite, existentialism, as well as the ideas swirling around the ongoing Black freedom struggle, are perhaps most clearly reflected in the text. But it is also in creative dialog with the mainstream of post-war liberalism and, at least implicitly, the Marxism of the Old Left.

Second, it captures a very particular, important, and brief moment in American history and thought.  The Statement truly could not have been written three years earlier and would not have been written three years later.  It emerged most directly from then very recent experiences of the civil rights movement in the South. Both Tom Hayden and Paul Potter had been beaten while working for civil rights in Mississippi earlier in 1962.  The point of view of Port Huron is very much that of people of relative privilege already bound up in others' struggles for justice.

Though it emerged from these social struggles and a sense of the failures of the status quo, the Statement also reflects the optimism of the early Sixties. One of the first things that Tom Hayden did when the Port Huron Statement was drafted was to travel to Washington, D.C. in the hopes of presenting it to President Kennedy.  They managed to get a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who apparently did get a copy of the Statement to the President.

Within three years of the Statement's writing, however, LBJ had begun to escalate the War in Vietnam and the black freedom struggle had begun to split over questions of goals and tactics. The War would come to dominate the politics of the New Left in the second half of the decade. And the relationship of SDS to both those in power and to the Marxist legacy of the Old Left began to change dramatically and rapidly.  By the end of the decade, a younger generation of SDS leaders had largely repudiated Port Huron as too "reformist."

The third historical significance of the Port Huron Statement is related to the second: the text became almost instantly canonical.  SDS had come into existence when, two years earlier, the Student League for Industrial Democracy, the youth wing of the old, socialist League for Industrial Democracy, had changed its name. But SDS really as an organization in its own right with the framing of the Statement, which, in its movement away from anticommunism, also drove a wedge between SDS and its erstwhile sponsor, the LID.  The Port Huron Statement thus initially defined what SDS stood for.  And as SDS, along with SNCC, defined what the emerging New Left stood for, academics and public intellectuals turned to the Statement to understand what was going on politically on campus.  Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau's The New Radicals: A Report with Documents (1966) included a long excerpt from the Statement.*

But even as the Statement became an object of journalistic and academic analysis in the mid-to-late 1960s, its significance within the movement began to wane, as noted above.  By the late Sixties, those writing about it frequently noted that it had fallen into disfavor among the current leadership of SDS.  But the declining importance of the Statement for the movement only served to highlight its historical significance...and thus its canonicity.

III

In a sense the first two quotations with which I started this post reflect the extent to which the Statement is a generational marker, the first in a serious mode, the second in a humorous one.  In Hayden's account, the statement wrote itself...which is very close to saying that it was written by its historical moment (though not quite...and I'll get back to how below).  The Coen Brothers' use of the Statement as an important piece of backstory for Jeff Bridge's Dude in The Big Lebowski presents it as a different sort of generational marker.  Once, it would appear, the Dude was politically involved; now, we know, he's the ultimate slacker, more concerned about White Russians and the fate of his erstwhile rug ("it really tied the room together!") than anything else.  The absurdity of the former political commitments of Baby Boomers like the Dude have been a frequent object of humor in turn-of-the-millenium U.S. culture. And the cult popularity of The Big Lebowski apparently has led some young people today to associate the Port Huron Statement with the Dude.

But although the statement is often (correctly) seen as a product of its particular moment, Hayden and others of his generation frequently treat it as strangely timeless.  Much of Hayden's talk in Madison in May, from which the above quotations are taken, revolves around his presenting participatory democracy as a truly eternal idea. This is reflected in the last of the three quotes with which I started this blog post.  Participatory democracy, says Hayden, is "a perspective and a framework that has a recurring life, independent of its authors, independent of its publication, because it always arises where people suffer too much and the institutions are too slow in making a response."

This sense of the timelessness of the ideas of the Statement also appears in the comic entitled "The Port Huron Statement Today" that the historian Paul Buhle and the cartoonist Gary Dumm recently created for New York high school students.  Today's social struggles, the comic suggests, are exactly the same struggles that SDS addressed in 1962 and they admit of the same solutions.  This view is most immediately captured in this panel from the comic (which, incidentally incorporates an image from the late '60s rather than the period in which the Statement was actually framed):

I have no problem whatsoever with the desire to treat the Port Huron Statement as a living document. I think, in many ways, it is.  But I also think that, both politically and historically, treating its message as entirely eternal is inadequate.  Most obviously, the Statement is a document that is absolutely of its time, from its highly gendered language to its very existentialist assumptions. Anyone who tries teaching the document today will, for example, immediately recognize that this is a text written by and for people who have read Camus...and young people today by and large have not.  Understand this text entails, among other things, having a rich understanding of its moment.

But the vision of an eternal Port Huron Statement has another, equally important downside.  Put simply, the vision of the Port Huron Statement failed.  It did not even sustain the organization that produced it for half a decade. It did not transform the U.S. as its authors hoped it would. That does not, of course, mean that there is nothing of value in the Statement or that many of its ideas might not succeed in the future. Far from it. But grappling with the historical failures of the Port Huron Statement is a necessary part of understanding it historically...and, I'd argue, renewing a version of its politics (if one wants to do so).

This point is also poignantly illustrated by the third of the quotes with which I began this post.  Writing in the midst of the ongoing battle to recall Gov. Scott Walker, Hayden sounded an optimistic note in early May:  "What’s gone on in the last 18 months is, to me, a fulfillment of virtually every dimension of participatory democracy, which was the dream at Port Huron fifty years ago, as outlined in the statement."  But of course, that effort ultimately failed on June 5. Ever since, the internet has been overrun with a variety of postmortems trying to figure out what went wrong.  Though the left, like any political tradition, can and should find sustenance in its history, it will be better served if it treats that history in a slightly more hardheaded fashion.  The Port Huron Statement was a watershed of early New Left thought. But it didn't--and doesn't--provide all the answers.

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* The Port Huron Statement is a very long document and it is frequently reprinted in edited form without that fact being made clear.  Nowhere in Jacobs and Landau's book do they indicate that they were reprinted merely an excerpt (though the ellipses in the text would have informed the careful reader).  Similarly the link to the "full text of the statement" on the Wikipedia page on the Port Huron Statement currently leads until recently led to a different, long excerpt that appears on the University of Virginia's Sixties Project site, again without noting that the document has been severely edited (I just changed the link myself so that it now leads to an actual copy of the full text).

Tim's Odds And Ends

No, this is not a new menu item at my fictional BBQ shack---or some kind of new junk book store. Rather, I'm using today's post as a dumping ground for intellectual history items that don't fit my usual, ironically titled "Light Reading" series---though these items truly are light USIH reading.

1. If my schedule were free February 2-3, 2012, and I happened to be on the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, I'd attend this gathering in a heartbeat: "The Port Huron Statement at 50."

I confess that I had never really done the obvious in thinking about the Port Huron Statement as an object of intellectual history until I read Cotkin's Existential America (pp. 241-249---even Howard Brick only gives it a few mentions in his better-than-survey assessment of the decade's thought). Indeed, I hadn't thought of Tom Hayden as an actor in America's intellectual history until I pondered, courtesy of George, Hayden's relationship with Camus. There's a whole post I "chould" (should and could) write about the Port Huron Statement, Hayden, and the Occupy movement. But I need to work on my own project for a while (even if I get an extension on the last--fingers crossed).

2. Like Ben, I intend on putting page updates here for the near term to hold myself accountable and get motivated. Here goes: I only wrote about 50 words this past week as I cleared my desk of the task of creating my spring term syllabi. But after I put up this post, my day is clear for writing.

3. Happy 48th birthday to our current "FLOTUS." I predict that someday she'll be the object of an intellectual historian's work.

4. I appreciated the following passages from Jennifer Howard's post-AHA interview with Anthony Grafton, appearing in the Jan. 9 Chronicle (bolds mine):

The Chronicle sat down with Mr. Grafton in Chicago to talk about his presidential year, scholarly directions in the field, the push to rethink graduate education and history careers, and the work that remains to be done.

"The association only matters insofar as it's vital to the profession and to the discipline—two separate things," he says. "Nobody's sure the annual meetings have much of a future." He would like to see the group become more of a communication hub for members, "a place of virtual discussion and dialogue."

In a back-and-forth about new directions in scholarship, Mr. Grafton mentioned intellectual history as a trend "which really delights my soul."

Intellectual history was counted out in the 1970s in favor of cultural history, but it now is clearly a very strong presence, he said.

As some examples, he mentioned recent work on the history of intellectual networks done by scholars like Daniela Bleichmar, an assistant professor of art history and history at the University of Southern California, and Harold J. Cook, a professor of history at Brown University.

Such approaches are "not the way we did intellectual history in the past," he said. "It's not intellectual history in its traditional sense, but it's informed by it, and it's in dialogue with it. It's intellectual history plus a social history of ideas. ... All of these are fields that are transformed by digital-humanities methods and digital archives."

...I'd say that some of that "strong presence" is a direct reflection of the work we've done creating the USIH conference and S-USIH. ...Pat yourselves on the back.

5. Check out the returns on this 1963 survey conducted by a 16-year old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister. Here are the opening three paragraphs of McAllister's story as told recently in the Paris Review:

In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did they consciously plant symbols in their work? he asked. Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind?

McAllister had just published his first story, “The Faces Outside,” in both IF magazine and Simon and Schuster’s 1964 roundup of the best science fiction of the year. Confident, if not downright cocky, he thought the surveys could settle a conflict with his English teacher by proving that symbols weren’t lying beneath the texts they read like buried treasure awaiting discovery.

His project involved substantial labor—this before the Internet, before e-mail—but was not impossible: many authors and their representatives were listed in the Twentieth-Century American Literature series found in the local library. More impressive is that seventy-five writers replied—most of them, in earnest. Sixty-five of those responses survive (McAllister lost ten to “a kleptomaniacal friend”). Answers ranged from the secretarial blow off to a thick packet of single-spaced typescript in reply.

Read the rest here.

6. What's on your mind? If nothing above excites your imagination, leave your topic of choice in the comments. - TL