Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)

Return to Contents»

Rebels with a Cause, a Collective Memoir of the hopes, rebellions and repression of the 1960s. Edited by Helen Garvy. Shire Press, 2007, 254pp, US$18 (softcover)

<1> A fine documentary film of the same name, minus the subtitle, appeared in 2000 and I've been using clips of it in my survey history of the 1960s at Brown University ever since. Helen Garvy, the film's creator, was one of the salt-of-the-earth staff members of Students for a Democratic Society for much of the 1960s, the people who took low wages when they got any at all, little public credit for their intensive labors, but kept things moving, publications coming out, memberships recorded, organizers on the road, conventions planned and so on. SDS fell apart in 1969 but it was the denizens of the thankless task who had kept it together until the final calamity.

<2> This is the book version, and like the film, it is a collage of interviews with various people who were prominent in SDS. At my own first glance at the film, I was critical of what any chapter activist was likely to see as the flaw of a leadership-centered perspective. We rarely get a chance, in that film, to grasp how much local chapters operated on their own, how skeptical their members often felt toward the steadily-changing national leadership, and how badly we resented the freak-out of the final two years in which leaders essentially ran away from the members, proclaiming themselves the heart of any radical movement (and convincing almost no one). But this view, my view, was not entirely fair, for several reasons. Before 1965, SDS was mostly a little crew of idealists who circulated in and out of national leadership; even after 1965, the people interviewed are not far from ordinary SDSers in their passions and mistakes, just an extreme version. Every New Left fell apart, across the planet, and for the same reasons: we could not take our politics much beyond the campus, and the Empire was recuperating its strength even as the end of the Vietnam misadventure approached.

<3> The book builds upon the strengths of the film, and with abundant illustrations (photos of interviewees, covers of underground newspapers, FBI documents, etc) manages as successfully as any volume so far in capturing the spirit of the time, exemplified in SDS itself. Before the ideological hardening and even during that downward process, there was lots of the fun that might be expected among young people, lifestyle experimentation alongside long hours of activism, high hopes and utopian expectations at a premium even as the revelations about the US invasion of Vietnam grew steadily more ghastly. SDSers were like others of their generation, but more so, and usually in the best sense.

<4> It is difficult for me, as a veteran of SDS (and editor-publisher of the SDS journal RADICAL AMERICA, from Madison, Wisconsin) to read again the Weatherman rhetoric, without critical asides on how destructive it really was. Not that a return to Maoism, something former Maoists seem unwilling to even imagine, would be more pleasant. And yet, the tone is part of the documentary quality of Rebels With a Cause. I recommend it as a counterpart of the film, but this is a volume that can be put to good use in any high school or college class on the 1960s.

Paul Buhle
Brown University

Return to Top»