> But there have been relatively few mass movements in u.s. history -- in
> the last 80 years 3: the CIO, the Black Liberation Movement, the
> Anti-War movement, maybe, almost, the women's movement of the '60s &
> '70s would make a fourth.
Why "maybe, almost" the women's movement? It seems to me that the deepest and most enduring change in American society coming out of the 60s has to do with the status of women. Not that that is a completed revolution, of course.
According to Ellen Schrecker, the pre-McCarthy CPUSA was probably a majority-female organization. It could also be said that the CPUSA in its internal practices virtually invented "affirmative action" for both women and blacks. Some of the "second wave" feminist leaders emerged from leftish backgrounds. It is a matter of delicacy to some, for example, just what shade of red Betty Friedan was in the late 40s, but she clearly came from a leftish milieu.
I am struck as well by the parallels one finds in American history. First wave feminism came to focus almost exclusively on suffrage, but at its origin was more radical. The issue of suffrage started as kind of a synecdoche for the broader question of women's equality, and became an end in itself. Abolitionism and first wave feminism were closely intertwined. Many people were active in both movements, and many later became active in early socialist organizations, e.g., the International Workingman's Association. Second wave feminism and the Black Liberation Movement can be seen as furthering "revolutions" begun more than a hundred years ealier--in the case of the latter, completing Reconstruction (which Eric Foner has called "America's unfinished revolution).
The received wisdom in the historical literature is that the history of the American "left" (boadly defined) is one of discontinuity, and that's certainly true if one looks only at organizations. Yet the same issues keep coming up, and coming up together (note that the Seneca Falls Convention occurred at a time of excited agitation over the Mexican War, and amid the first stirrings of an American labor movement in the textile mills of New England). I wonder if there isn't a deeper cultural continuity that's obscured by the turbulent organizational history? I wonder if ensuring a future for the American left (broadly defined) might not depend in part on reconstructing its pedigree?
Jacob Conrad