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James W. Russell: The Origins Of New Left Notes
Source: Next Left Notes (3-2-11)
[James W. Russell is professor of sociology at Connecticut State University.]
In the summer of 1965, Jeff Shero, the newly elected Vice President of SDS,
joined the national office staff in Chicago. He had a special project in mind:
to build up the sporadically published SDS Bulletin into a regular monthly
source of news for members. That summer, membership was climbing rapidly, in
large part because of the SDS-organized April 17 March on Washington, the first
national march against the War in Vietnam.
He put together several editions in the fall but then ran into problems because
of the very labor intensive production process that overwhelmed the capacity of
the office staff. In offset printing, the first step was to write the copy with
an electric typewriter, manually correcting all typos and other errors. The
copy and photos were pasted up and then sent out to be burned onto offset
plates. The plates were put on a printing press in the office that produced the
pages individually, often breaking down along the way. Then the pages had to be
manually collated and stapled.
The final step involved running the Bulletins through a bothersome machine
called an Addressograph. It had its own multistep production process, the first
step being typing addresses onto 2 X 3 mimeograph cardboard plates that looked
like photo slides. In theory once all the plates were stacked in the
Addressograph, the addresses would be rapidly printed; in practice, it was an
exceptionally delicate machine that kept jamming and took a long time to get
working again.
We grew to dread the production of each Bulletin. Nearly all other work had to
stop and long extra hours had to be put in. Finally, Jeff realized that
expanding the Bulletin into a good publication for members was a hopeless
cause. Defeated by the antiquated technology, he returned to Texas. He would
later use a much better technology to produce The Rat, the very successful
underground newspaper in New York.
Several months went by without any direct communication between the overworked
office staff and members. Membership was now growing even more rapidly in the
aftermath of the October 15, 1965 March on Washington. The media thought that
the national office was the epicenter of what was happening and showered
coverage on it, which in turn led to the formation of new chapters and more
members.
I had two jobs at the time in the office: chapter correspondent and bookkeeper.
I had become a member in 1963 at the University of Oklahoma and joined the
national office staff in June 1965. Each morning I collected the mail,
separating that which had money and bills from that which was from members
seeking information. I entered the money in a ledger, deposited it in the bank,
and then answered the letters along with one or two others. On a typical day we
would answer about thirty letters.
Members wanted to know what was going on. There needed to be a national
publication. But how? The problem hovered over the office for months.
D. Gorton, the staff photographer, one morning brought in several union and
small organization newsprint newspapers. Maybe we could change the technology.
Instead of producing the Bulletin in the office via offset, we could paste up
copy and send it out to be printed as a newspaper. But how much would it cost?
How would we get the copy justified so that the columns would be straight?
I was given the task of finding out how much it would cost. It turned out to be
less than what we were spending on the Bulletin and, more importantly, by
sending it out to be printed, its production would not paralyze the office’s
other work.
Jeff Segal, the National Secretary during the summer of 1965, had been student
body president at Roosevelt University in Chicago and managing editor of its
student newspaper, the Torch. He set up an under the table deal where the
student newspaper staff would use their justifying machine to prepare the copy
for paste up.
I now had a new job as editor of the paper. My experience? Not much beyond
having been a sports writer for my high school newspaper and having edited an
agitational SDS chapter newsletter.
What would we call it? Everyone agreed that we didn’t want to call it the
Bulletin, but no one could agree on a new name. Clark Kissinger, a former
National Secretary then in charge of fundraising, had a book of names of
American socialist newspapers. But we couldn’t find anything there that
appealed. In a pre-hippie moment, someone suggested The Red Balloon after a
1956 French avant-garde film that was popular at the time. The indecision went
on for a long time until everyone gave up on arriving at a collective
agreement. I was told to come up with a name on my own with the promise that no
one would complain about what I chose.
I thought that SDS more than any other organization had a right to the mantle
of New Left. But new left what? Review was already taken. I was reading
Dostoevsky at the time, so it became New Left Notes, after Notes from the
Underground. The unassuming title Notes resonated with a type of new left
ideology at the time, especially espoused by SNCC’s Bob Moses, about the need
for organizers to have humility. That was the reason why many people called it
sds rather than SDS. We were small d democrats. And we fancied ourselves as
being at least intellectually and a bit romantically aligned with the notion of
underground organizations.
Thus started the weekly New Left Notes, with the first issue coming out on
January 21, 1966. The word Surprise! was in a box at the top because it had
been months since members had received anything from the national office. It
contained SDS President Carl Oglesby’s “Liberalism and the Corporate State.”
Unknown to me was that he had written it as a speech to be delivered during a
coming campus tour. He was miffed because I had released it to members before
he had had a chance to deliver it. Now he had to face audiences, some of whom
had already read what he was about to say or write an entirely new speech.
My routine was to gather and type copy, give it to Jeff Segal, who had it
justified at Roosevelt. Then I would deliver it via the El to the print shop
over an hour away at the furthest northern stop. I would pick up the copies,
again by El, a couple of days later. Then we would mail them out from the
office.
One day the office received a leaflet in Spanish from California, titled La
Gran Huelga de las Uvas. Paul Booth, the National Secretary, said that it was
important and someone needed to translate it. I was given the job since I had
taken one semester of Spanish, which was one semester more than anyone else in
the office. The word huelga for some reason had not been on any of the
vocabulary lists that I had learned in class nor was uvas. I found a
Spanish-English dictionary somewhere and translated it literally as the great
strike of the grapes. It didn’t make sense. How could grapes go on strike?
Eventually I figured it out, more or less. That was my first introduction to
César Chávez’s National Farm Workers Union and the grape boycott. The second
issue of NLN ran a letter from Chávez calling for support to which a lot of SDS
chapters responded.
After six issues, the authorities at Roosevelt caught wind of the surreptitious
use of their equipment by a radical organization and put a stop to it. This was
a crisis since I was committed to a weekly schedule. There was only one thing
to do: type out all the copy in columns to be pasted up. Later we made an
arrangement to use the equipment of The Woodlawn Organization, which Saul
Alinsky had organized.
In all, I edited the first twelve copies of New Left Notes. It was time
consuming, taking up 70 hours a week, with me having to write a lot of the
stories and, at the least, type all of them. It didn’t help that during that
time we lost our staff apartment after a robbery in which a gun was held to my
head with the trigger pulled back and I was pistol whipped. The apartment, it
turned out, was next door to a prostitution business. I then spent a couple of
weeks sleeping in the office as I put out the paper.
At the time I considered New Left Notes to be a temporary solution to an office
problem. I had no idea that it would continue as the organization’s newspaper
with a number of different editors over the years, much less be reincarnated as
Next Left Notes three and a half decades later.
There was also a counterfeit version of the paper opportunistically published
by the Progressive Labor Party for a couple of years after the 1970 collapse of
SDS. I was approached randomly by a PL member to buy a copy in 1972 at San
Francisco State University. Instead of a sale, she got a flood of angry words
about their destructive sectarianism and opportunism. She had approached the
wrong person.
New Left Notes is now a valuable resource for historians of the 1960s new left.
It was rough and fragmentary, being put together by activists rather than
professional journalists, but always close to what was happening.
Posted on Friday, March 4, 2011 at 1:08 PM
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