> http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i40/40a01701.htm
Another interesting take on the origins of the new left is Doug Rossinow, _The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity and the New Left in America_ (Columbia U. Press, 1998). Rossinow, like the author of the Chronicle article, is a younger scholar, without firsthand personal experience of the 60s. The focus of his study is the University of Texas at Austin.
Excerpt:
"The initial elite of the new left exerted a shaping force on the development of SDS, whose national headquarters was in New York City until 1965. These young people, many of them Jewish, were the most deeply involved in the new left's complex relation to the old left; indeed, many had old left parents." ... "There were great differences...between the group that got SDS off the ground and the larger, provincial cohort that entered the new left later. A large majority of those who at one time or another got involved in new left activism came from cultural and political backgrounds quite different...from those of the early metropolitan elite... Histories of the new left that emphasize the influence of old left connections and place the new left in a self-contained "history of the American left," for all the valuable insights they offer, simply cannot explain the new left's appearance in most of the country, yet the new left existed all over the United States."
(pp. 10-11)
Rossinow aims to point out the importance, especially for activists outside of the major urban centers, of "strands such as social gospel liberalism and Christian evangelicalism, cold war liberalism and Western libertarianism, liberal feminism and the search for authenticity," and thus to provide "an alternative genealogy for the new left." Protestant Christianity was an important formative influence for the Texas radicals he studies. Where I grew up, in the upper midwest, the "Catholic left" was probably equally significant for many leftists of the period.
Jacob Conrad