A Eulogy for Carl Oglesby, the Man Who Inspired the New Left and Was Then
Tossed Overboard
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/95047/carl-oglesby-new-left-sds
•
Todd Gitlin
Todd Gitlin
view bio
•
Reading Deeply
•
Still the Spymaster
•
The Uses of Half-True Alarms
• September 17, 2011
In 1965, when Carl Oglesby threw himself into the New Left—“the movement” was
the more intimate term, meaning life-force, energy, motion—he was a 30-year-old
paterfamilias with a wife and three small children, living in a nice little Ann
Arbor house on (he relished the memory) Sunnyside Street, making a solid living
as a technical editor-writer for a military-industrial think-tank called
Bendix. He golfed, drove a snappy little sports car, wrote plays, and smoked
good dope—a damn fine life for the son of an Akron rubber worker and the
grandson of a coal miner. He’d been a champion debater in high school and at
Kent State University, and for a time an actor. Pretty much an autodidact, he
was reading Cold War revisionist scholarship in an effort to figure out why
America, the only country on earth he could ever have hailed from, was burning
up peasants on the other side of the world.
At high velocity, as people did then, he “went through changes.” One minute he
was writing against the Vietnam war for a Democratic congressional candidate
(who refused to deliver the speech); the next, he was writing it up for the
University of Michigan literary magazine; the next, he was turning it into a
pamphlet for Students for a Democratic Society, which was organizing a national
demonstration against the war but didn’t yet have any antiwar “literature” on
offer. In June 1965, Oglesby, the evident talent of the hour, was elected
president of the organization, and as the antiwar movement burgeoned, he was
much in demand. Whirlwind tours ensued. In November, as SDS president, he was
the token radical at a Washington Monument rally, placed late in a program of
moderates. Many had drifted away when he stole the show with the finest piece
of oratory ever to emerge from the white New Left.
It was a dream moment for an unabashed moralist skilled in the dramaturgical
arts. The moral stakes of the moment, he insisted, rested on both an
intellectual and an existential choice between “two quite different
liberalisms: one authentically humanist; the other not so human at all.” The
bad one was “illiberal” and “corporate.” The alternative, “in the name of
simple human decency and democracy,” was nothing less than “a humanist
reformation.” “We radicals,” he said, asked liberals to “risk a leap. … Help us
build. Help us shape the future in the name of plain human hope.” Can you
imagine a time when a radical orator spoke like this?
Idealistic he was, but not naive: “Revolutions do not take place in velvet
boxes. … It is only the poets who make them lovely. What the National
Liberation Front is fighting in Vietnam is a complex and vicious war.” He was
all-American, Midwestern, and original: “We have lost that mysterious social
desire for human equity that from time to time has given us genuine moral
drive. We have become a nation of young, bright-eyed, hard-hearted,
slim-waisted, bullet-headed make-out artists.” Was Soviet Communist not a
rotten system? Of course. But “my anger only rises to hear some say that sorrow
cancels sorrow, or that this one’s shame deposits in that one’s account the
right to shamefulness. And others will make of it that I sound mighty
anti-American. To these, I say: Don’t blame me for that! Blame those who
mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart.”
People heard this intense American voice rising in indignation, and patriotic
disgust, and “plain human hope,” and felt spoken for. They joined SDS.
Thousands of young people, on fire, imagined that they could change the world.
Here was a man old enough to be their older brother, a man of neither their
generation nor their parents’, an accomplished man who had thrown in his lot
with the big new thing that was happening—who had picked himself up and
transformed his own life. His passion and persuasive power were infused with
the sense that he poured his whole self into the new possibilities that the
movement stood for. He was at stake. He wasn’t playing a role; he was living a
life.
He had found a world where words mattered, drama mattered, and intellectual
life was neither arid nor necessarily credentialed. Words counted. Whether from
the podium, or face to face, or over the kitchen table, he loved putting words
together. He spoke in whole sentences, often enough in great rolling cadences,
accelerating with Faulknerian momentum. (When I was working on my first book,
which would consist mostly of narratives from Southern
whites—“hillbillies”—living in Chicago, he told me to read As I Lay Dying. ) He
was pungent, not showy. To say he was a master of rhetoric would be to cheapen
his achievement, now that we live in an age when the word connotes windy
clichés and the art of communicating in 140-character bursts is more highly
prized. On paper, he dazzled. SDS reprinted the text of his Washington speech
in many thousands of copies.
A lot of restless, estranged, disgusted young people who read him or heard him
speak felt—still feel—that he changed their lives. Years later, Newsweek wrote
about one Wellesley student in particular who subscribed to a Methodist student
magazine called Motive, where she had read a piece of his—or anyway, Newsweek
reported in 1994, “a Methodist theologian, Carl Oglesby.” “It was the first
thing I had ever read that challenged the Vietnam war,” she said years later.
The student was named Hillary Rodham, and the misattribution wasn’t far off.
Oglesby preached. His theology was an improvised search for a political faith,
riddled with doubt as it had to be, offering something deeper—more spiritual,
indeed—than either liberal or Marxist clichés about the inevitability of
progress.
At the time, his high art was the art of intellectual dismantling. He delivered
to the crackpot Cold War theories of the time—especially the one about dominoes
flopping over, ostensibly at the behest of China, which in fact had been
Vietnam’s enemy , not leader, for a thousand years—the scathing demolition they
deserved, and helped make it respectable to unearth the imperialism that formed
the unspeakable part of America’s Cold War self-righteousness. But his analytic
equipment wasn’t capable of laying a new intellectual foundation. (No one’s
was.) Sometimes the drama he conjured was too bare, stripped down to
caricature. Corporate liberalism was too shaky a concept to hold the
intellectual weight he wanted to place on it.
“Why the New Left? Why not the current Left?” he asked, trying to find out.
Well, the political generation that followed him, two or three years on, under
pressure of war and revolutionary delusions and their own shallowness, decided
it no longer wanted to be a New Left at all. They wanted to be The Left,
meaning an all-or-nothing, go-for-broke, Leninist-based left. Carl was in shock
when they accused him of having “bad politics.” How could he have bad politics,
he asked, when he didn’t really have politics at all—or rather, when he was
trying to find what an actual American left-wing politics would be? He flirted
with libertarians and they flirted with him. He flirted with liberal
businessmen. But clarity didn’t take shape, neither for him nor his most
trusted colleagues, and in the meantime, the cocky revolutionists were in a
hurry. Self-infatuated revolutionists with no talent for clear thinking but
plenty of melodramatic impulse drummed him out of the movement that had become
his whole life. At 35, he was dumped on the ash-heap of history.
The implosion of the New Left hit Oglesby especially hard—inner Pascalian that
he was, he had wagered everything on a movement that had now gone berserk.
Nothing could follow but burn-out. Having entered the movement as l’homme
revolté, in Camus’ sense, he was now equally revolted by the revolutionary
“solution” that had become, itself, part of the problem. His flair for both
high and low drama led him down the path of conspiracy theories. His best work
after the ’60s was lyrical. Even when melancholy, he smoldered, ever
unreconciled to conquerors of all stripes. You catch a whiff of his force in
these brief PBS interview excerpts. There’s a fit trace of his lyrical
melancholy in this song from his second folk album . (A vinyl of the first,
Carl Oglesby , is hard to find but deeply worth the effort.) “No more illusions
could begin,” he sang. One song, “Cherokee Queen,” he wrote upon discovering
that he had a Cherokee grandmother.
No one I ever met loved America so much as to feel such anguish at what it was
becoming. We shall not look upon his like again.
--
Todd Gitlin is a professor at Columbia, a former president of SDS, and the
author, most recently, of Undying, a novel.
.
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