The second part—“What Is Needed”— glowed with a passion and elegance not usually found in such a long and detailed document. What was needed, according to the thirty-five or so young drafters, included both such strategic aims as consolidating the Democrats into a principled liberal party by expelling the Dixiecrats and details fine-grained enough to delight the heart of any policy analyst. To wit: “there were fewer mental hospital beds in relation to the numbers of mentally ill in 1959 than there were in 1948.”* In addition, the statement combined varieties of prose not commonly featured in one document: existential longings inspired by Albert Camus, a quote from an encyclical by Pope John XXIII, urgent descriptions of the most serious issues facing humankind (then known as “mankind”), and far-reaching proposals for how to go about the prodigious task of democratizing the nation and the world.

Remarkably, most of the activist-intellectuals who accomplished all this were still in their early twenties. Hayden, at twenty-one, was the age at which most students are preparing to graduate from college. The previous year, the Activist, an obscure magazine edited at Oberlin College, had published Hayden’s “A Letter to the New (Young) Left.” After Port Huron, that article read like a textbook example of false modesty: “It is not as though we even know what to do,” Hayden wrote in the Activist, “we have no real visionaries for our leaders, we are not much more than literate ourselves.” Somehow, he and his comrades figured it out. I cannot imagine a group of Americans, of any age, writing such a manifesto today. In our era of high anxiety and blasted visions, we could certainly use one.

But, for all its brilliance, Port Huron was not so much a break with the radical tradition as it was an artful meld of what remained fresh and stirring in the often tortured history of the American Left. Thus, “young,” the adjective Hayden had placed in parentheses, was more accurate than “new,” which remains the word nearly everyone since has affixed to the movement of which SDS played a vital part.

The statement managed to fuse two types of ideological advocacy that are often viewed as antagonists: first, the romantic desire for achieving an authentic self through crusading for individual rights and, second, the yearning for a democratic socialist order that would favor the collective good over freedom of the self. This fusion was wrapped in language whose utopian tone resembled that articulated by other messianic movements in American history—from the abolitionists and Owenite socialists to the Wobblies and Debsian Socialists to such radical feminists as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Emma Goldman.

The similarity to the language of the abolitionists was particularly strong. Consider this bold assertion from the Values section of the statement: “The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with…popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic….This kind of independence does not mean egotistic individualism—the object is not to have one’s way so much as it is to have a way that is one’s own.” Compare it to the late-life reflection by the anti-slavery crusader Theodore Weld: “The starting point and power of every great reform must be the reformer’s self,“ declared Weld. “He must first set himself apart its sacred devotee, baptized into its spirit, consecrated to its service, feeling its profound necessity, its constraining motives, impelling causes, and all [the] reasons why.” Devout Christians were a distinct minority at the conference; evangelical Protestants were entirely absent. But the SDSers were expressing the same ultra-romantic idea that a free society can be built only by individuals who define that freedom for themselves that had inspired fervently Protestant abolitionists more than a century before.

In this sense, Port Huron demonstrated how the new, young Left—in its rebellion against a managed society and its hunger for an authentic one—was beginning to turn back, if unintentionally, to similar impulses that had inspired Weld and such fellow crusaders as his wife, Angelina Grimke, as well as William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and David Walker. Both groups insisted that one had to live one’s politics as well as preach them. Both took delight in smashing taboos about interracial sex, about the proper roles of men and women, and even about dress and diet. Both experimented with styles of communal living they believed would allow individuals to realize their “true” nature and to find happiness in doing so.

Whether pious or secular, radicals before the Civil War and their counterparts during the Cold War both struggled fiercely to free their minds and bodies from an evil society and to fill the world with individuals who aspired to perfection. The passion for self-improvement in the cause of social transformation could be found nearly everywhere on the young left in the 1960s and 1970s. “I had to find out who I am and what kind of man I should be, and what I could do to become the best of which I was capable,” confessed Eldridge Cleaver, in a neglected passage of Soul on Ice. In 1970, in his Politics of Authenticity, Marshall Berman observed, “the New Left’s complaint against democratic capitalism was not that it was too individualistic, but rather that it wasn’t individualistic enough.” In 1977, the black lesbians in the Combahee River Collective asserted, “Our politics…sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s but because of our need as human persons for autonomy.” So the final American Left of the industrial age gestured back, in spirit, to the first.

AT THE same time, long stretches of the Port Huron Statement echo not just the spirit but the letter of the social democratic tradition, which these young radicals were determined to transcend. One sees this in the statement’s harsh attack on corporate power and its vision of an egalitarian society that would expand civic participation rather than restrict it, as in both capitalist and communist nations. Michael Harrington bridled at the “anti-anti-Communism” of the section on the Cold War, but he could have found little to argue with in the lengthy list of proposals for economic planning, party realignment, mobilizing black voters, and more.

Even when the statement criticized organized labor, it did so in a tone of disappointment and with hope for its renewal. “Labor continues to be the most liberal—and most frustrated—institution in mainstream America,” the SDSers commented. Then they noted that, although union members showed little enthusiasm for politics, “there are some indications…that labor might regain its missing idealism”: the threat of automation, splits among union leaders over nuclear testing, and the demand by black activists for labor to take a clear stand for equal rights and to organize interracial unions in the South and elsewhere. The statement continued, “Either labor will continue to decline as a social force, or it must constitute itself as a mass political force demanding not only that society recognize its rights to organize but also a program going beyond desired labor legislation and welfare improvements.” SDSers were not in thrall to what C. Wright Mills called “the labor metaphysic,” the idea that only the proletariat could bring to birth a new world from the ruin of the old. But of organized labor’s significance, the statement left no doubt: “a new politics must include a revitalized labor movement.” At the time, not coincidentally, that not-so-vital movement was keeping SDS in business. The United Auto Workers and other unions were the main contributors to SDS’s modest budget, and the FDR Camp, where the meeting took place, was owned by the Michigan AFL-CIO. Moreover, as Nelson Lichtenstein pointed out in his biography of Walter Reuther, most of the program outlined at Port Huron was already the “common coin of the UAW leadership strata.”

THUS, LIKE socialists from Eugene Debs and Crystal Eastman to Norman Thomas and A. Philip Randolph, Hayden and his comrades understood the need to straddle the line between imagining a radically new society and improving the lives of the people who had to live in the deeply flawed old one. So it should not be startling to read in Hayden’s memoir that ”Immediately after the Port Huron convention, [SDS president]Al Haber and I drove to Washington to take our statement to the White House. We met there for an hour with Arthur Schlesinger [the historian and Kennedy advisor]…and he agreed to bring our views to the attention of the president. For the occasion, I wore a tie.”

Of course, early SDSers did break with some hallowed traditions on the American Left: they usually eschewed the socialist label and, most important, they followed the moral lead, the north star, of the black freedom movement. This was a clear break from the labor-centered vision and strategy of a social democracy created and led by white people. But, at the time the statement was written, progressive union stalwarts like Reuther and Jerry Wurf of AFSCME were, at worst, the uneasy allies of most civil rights organizers. And at best, labor liberals and civil rights activists could rock the nation together, as they showed at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom just fourteen months after the campers had returned to their colleges and urban enclaves.

And is it even necessary to point out that close to a majority of the participants at Port Huron were secular Jews? That demographic fact also represented a continuity with both the socialist and communist Lefts over the previous four decades. The association of radicalism with opposition to the First World War and the ensuing rupture in the Socialist Party had led, fairly rapidly, to the desertion of most of the white working-class Christians who had been the majority in the People’s Party, the pre-war SP, and the Industrial Workers of the World. Few of their grandchildren rushed to join SDS.

But Jews continued to be prominent in the white New Left out of all proportion to their numbers in the American population—just as they were in Marxist parties from the 1920s through the 1950s. Tom Hayden, Paul Potter, Jane Adams, Greg Calvert, and Diana Oughton, all of whom were raised as Christians, were outnumbered by the likes of Dick Flacks, Todd Gitlin, Paul Booth, Heather Booth, Paul Berman, Mark Rudd, Bernadine Dohrn, Robin Morgan, Abbie Hoffman, Karen Nussbaum, and Mike Klonsky—not to speak of middle-aged Jewish mentors such as Arnold Kaufmann, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky. This ethnic continuity may help explain why, after SDS imploded and disappeared, its more historically minded survivors found much to praise in the Old Left tradition they had once been so keen to bury.

One aspect of the old Marxism that Port Huron mercifully interred was its twin faith in the inevitability that world capitalism would collapse and that a free and equal order would surely arise from the rubble. Carl Oglesby, in a brilliant essay published in 1969, called this faith “almost a carrion-bird politics. Distant and above it all for the moment, the revolutionary cadre circles, awaiting the hour of his predestinated dinner.” The introduction to the Port Huron Statement replaced such grim delusions with the grim realism of the nuclear age: the next global conflict would destroy the human race, not liberate it.

The statement then moved briskly to propose a fresh, utopian alternative to the old vision of state socialism that had been smashed into dust six years earlier by Khruschev’s not-so-“secret” speech and then by the bloody suppression of Hungary’s revolt that he directed a few months later. SDS’s alternative was “participatory democracy.” As Jim Miller wrote insightfully, “p.d.” was, at its creation, a profoundly ambiguous idea that did not become any more coherent over time. “It pointed toward daring personal experiments and modest social reforms,” wrote Miller. “It implied a political revolution” but with a patriotic ring, evoking New England town meetings where neighbors debated and made the key decisions that affected their communities.

What appealed to most of the young people who began to use the term was not so homespun a tradition. It was the promise of participatory democracy to utterly transform the society of over-managed, bureaucratic, formally representative institutions they believed were stifling their independence of thought and action. That is why Mario Savio’s famous speech in 1964 on the steps of UC Berkeley’s Sproul Hall with his feverish plea to “put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels” of the “odious” machine became so emblematic and why consensus decision-making turned into the process of choice for many SDS chapters and then for the growing radical feminist movement as well.

The merits of participatory democracy, as an ideal and a practice, should be obvious. Only when “the people” stand up for themselves in their neighborhoods, their workplaces, and the streets of their cities will they learn how power works and how they can use it to advance their own interests. The Port Huron Statement went further, arguing, in one of its most famous lines that, “politics has the function of bringing people out of isolation and into community, thus being a necessary, though not sufficient, means of finding meaning in personal life.” Aided by this implicit promise of psychic benefits, the white New Left, at its zenith in the late 1960s and early 1970s, convinced several million Americans to engage in modes of civic life—ranging from teach-ins to civil disobedience to consciousness-raising groups to running wild in the streets—that were educational, exhilarating, and at times almost orgasmic.

However, participatory democracy was plagued by major blind spots, too. Claimed as the path to the good society, it had no answer to the question of what happens to the vast majority of citizens who have little or no taste for politics. Only an activist aflame with the impatient desire for a revolution could believe that the apolitical masses are a bunch of alienated, sad human beings who would welcome liberation by young zealots they have never met. Most people, after all, prefer to have their orgasms in private.

IT WAS also a serious mistake to equate democracy with participation in a social movement and to view all elected officials as either ineffectual cogs or corrupt parasites in an unjust system. The history of the American Left from the abolitionists to the civil rights movement proves that only when representative and participatory forms of democracy work together do egalitarian reforms succeed and political leaders emerge who can be held accountable to the will of their constituents. Tom Hayden recognized this himself in the mid-1970s when he took to wearing a tie on a daily basis in his new career as a progressive and often successful Democratic politician.

In 2011, we witnessed protests—from Tunisia to Madrid to Madison to Tel Aviv to Cairo to Moscow to Zuccotti Park—that were reminiscent of the kind of change the Port Huronites were advocating. Notwithstanding their vast differences, all these demonstrations sought to bring people out of isolation and into politics without requiring that they abandon their individual desires for the uncertain security of a hierarchical organization. Many of the protests were either organized by or helped to gestate mass movements. In the United States, the Occupiers took up the slogan, “This is what democracy looks like.”

UNFORTUNATELY, THAT is just a partial truth and one that contains the seeds of disillusionment, if not a movement’s decline. The New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier is skeptical about nearly every mass protest, yet he did recently ask a good question: “Why do demonstrators always confuse the quality of their own experience, their mystical moments of unity, with the condition of their country, with its progress?” Later in the 1960s, I was among the SDSers who imagined that our takeovers of campus buildings and our huge demonstrations in Washington, D.C., and other cities were the tip of a popular rebellion that would not stop with ending the war in Vietnam. In the 1970s, we discovered the need to identify and campaign for peace-minded politicians too. But by the time George McGovern was nominated for president in 1972, he was unable to mobilize the dwindling energies of the antiwar movement without being held captive to its popular image as a band of scruffy, violent anti-Americans.

Since most Americans were not about to become full-time political activists, it was natural for the writers of the Port Huron Statement to pin their hopes for a truly radical, fully democratic society on the only group whose members had the time, the vigor, and the inclination to dedicate their lives to bringing it about: college students of all races with a strong intellectual bent. Academia was “an overlooked seat of influence,” they argued, because of its “social relevance, the accessibility of knowledge, and internal openness. These together make the university a potential base and agency in a movement of social change.” The statement added that, to grow, the New Left would require a partnership between liberals and socialists; the university was “a more sensible place than a political party for these two traditions to begin to discuss their differences and look for political synthesis.”

Just a few years later, that last goal sounded naïve and outmoded, when opposing the war in Vietnam consumed most SDS activists. Since liberal presidents and their appointees had planned and carried out the assault on Indochina, “humanist liberals,” as Oglesby, then the president of SDS, called them in 1965, had to denounce that legacy or else become what he called “grudging apologists for the corporate state.” Soon, on campuses from Palo Alto and Kent, Ohio to Cambridge and Manhattan, SDS members were battling liberal administrators and forcing liberal professors to choose up sides. The grand synthesis of liberalism and radicalism was stillborn.

However, by the end of the sixties, the reigning culture at universities was beginning to undergo a rapid and, for young radicals, a most salutary change. The delegates at Port Huron had not anticipated this. Ironically, they lodged a critique of academic life that was as damning as anything Allan Bloom, the idol of neoconservativism, would say a quarter-century later. “The actual intellectual effect of the college experience,” they complained, “ is hardly distinguishable from that of any other communications channel—say a television set—passing on the stock truths of the day. Students leave college more ‘tolerant’ than when they arrived, but basically unchallenged in their values and political orientations.”

While young radicals did not overthrow the System, they certainly helped alter what passed for “stock truths” in every humanities discipline and in most of the social sciences as well. Alas, the “long march through the institutions” that German SDS leader Rudi Dutschke had called for, was, in the United States at least, more successful in colleges and universities than anywhere else. Ironically, the former student activists who went on to careers in academia did more to create a refuge from the nation’s rightward drift than a mass base for progressive social change. Last December, Kalle Lasn, the editor of Adbusters magazine who helped create Occupy Wall Street, declared, “Revolutions always start at universities.” Perhaps. But they can end there too.

The emphasis at Port Huron and after on the radical potential of the young also obscured an analytical flaw beneath the undeniable excitement of a generation on the move. The fact that the New Left heralded itself as a young Left was critical to its growth—and to its ultimate demise. Radical movements everywhere depend on the zealous energies of people who need little sleep and do not have to worry about the feeding, clothing, and sleep schedules of children. The average age of the Bolshevik leaders who took power in Petrograd in 1917 was all of twenty-six. But never before had an American Left made youth itself a badge of rebellion—or prided itself on breaking away from its older predecessors. Jack Weinberg, the Berkeley radical who coined the famous line—“We don’t trust anyone over 30”—meant it as a rebuttal to the charge that subversive adults were pulling the strings. But few people, inside or outside the Movement, got the joke.

The notion of a “revolution” made almost exclusively by the young was both brilliant and absurd. On the one hand, it expressed the self-confidence of activists from a generation that was both larger and better educated than any in U.S. history. College enrollment tripled during the 1960s to nearly ten million, and few students had experienced the privations of the Great Depression. For many Americans who believed that one can always remake one’s life, the plain-spoken brashness of young radicals was often appealing, even when they disagreed with the point of their protests.

Yet age has no intrinsic political merit, and the impatience of nearly all young radicals and the arrogance of some also led them astray. Contemptuous of liberals, they came to spurn the very idea of inter-class, interracial reform coalitions that was still a live option for the authors of the Port Huron statement. Disenchanted with old formulas for remaking American society, they gave little thought to devising new ones. For the antiwar militants who flooded into SDS after 1965, “participatory democracy” seemed too hazy and abstract both in meaning and application to guide a revolution. Frustration at the lack of an alternative led an aggressive minority in the movement to take up one variety of Leninist dogma or another, while other activists sought to refashion a liberalism cleansed of cold war hypocrisies. Neither project was successful.

So Port Huron’s “agenda for a generation” devolved, perhaps inevitably, into a set of stirring principles for an activist, mostly white minority of that generation. And by the end of the sixties, the visibility of the text itself had faded. Even as a much abridged pamphlet, the statement was not high on the reading list at most SDS chapters. The radical movement had grown much larger, as well as much angrier and prone to an ideological rigidity that had been refreshingly absent at the convention camp. The New Left Reader, a popular anthology edited by Carl Oglesby in 1969, included documents by everyone from Louis Althusser and Fidel Castro to Huey Newton and Mark Rudd—but not a word of the Port Huron Statement.

AND FOR all its capaciousness, Port Huron had nothing to say about three groups that would become major factors in American politics and culture by the end of the decade: environmentalists, feminists, and the New Right. It would be unfair to criticize the Port Huronites for failing to anticipate the coming of Earth Day or the emergence of the women’s liberation movement; Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring wasn’t published until the fall of 1962, and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique did not reach bookstores until half a year later. But the conservative Young Americans for Freedom had roughly 30,000 members in 1962. That March, YAF sponsored a rally that filled Madison Square Garden. In a text that devoted thousands of words to the shortcomings of liberalism, some attention might have been paid to what, even then, was its main opposition.

Still, what was produced at Port Huron has aged better than the apocalyptic, hypermilitant pronouncements that drew so much attention forty years ago yet elicit mostly puzzlement or derision today. “I liked both the longing for a total explanation and the uncertainty as to what it might be,” Todd Gitlin recalled about his first reading of the Statement. Indeed, for radicals, a little self-doubt is a valuable thing. In the class I teach about the 1960s, I show undergraduates a film clip of Mario Savio shouting on the steps of Sproul Hall on the Berkeley campus about throwing his body on the machine. Then I ask, “What was this man so angry about?” They haven’t got a clue, although his passion is rather compelling. Huey Newton’s talk of “revolutionary suicide” has, thankfully, no appeal at all. To young Americans who worked hard to elect Barack Obama in 2008 and have sympathized or taken part in Occupy events, the idea of building a movement to restructure the system instead of blowing the whole thing up just sounds like common sense.

BUT THEY need—we need—the utopian spirit of Port Huron as much we do its attention to posing practical solutions to the outrages committed by power elites at every level of society, in the United States and around the world. Fifty years ago, that band of twenty-somethings dared to imagine the making of a more decent, more humane as well as a more democratic society. “We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity,” they declared. That one sentence captured the larger ideal that animated many civil rights organizers as well as the feminist and gay insurgencies soon to come. These movements greatly expanded the scope of individual freedom in America: to work wherever one is qualified, to live anyplace one can afford, and to love and marry anyone who loves and wants to marry you—to an extent unimaginable at the time the statement was written.

Today, the international regime of freebooting capitalism has delivered neither material abundance, nor social harmony, nor security to most of the world’s people. Failed states, religious wars, environmental disaster, austerity in the face of poverty, clashes between immigrants and the native born are common features of current history, as they were in previous eras. But the perception that there is no alternative to chronic crisis but, somehow, to muddle through only exacerbates the problems.

At the end of his book about the Port Huron Statement, Jim Miller rhapsodized that “for anyone who joined in the search for a democracy of individual participation—and certainly for anyone who remembers the happiness and holds to the hopes that the quest itself aroused—the sense of what politics can mean will never be quite the same again.”

For those who believe in and work for beneficial and enduring change, such longings should never be dismissed as merely “utopian.” They are, instead, the very soul of realism—the only way to motivate large numbers of people to join and commit themselves to the lofty purposes of left-wing social movements. As the memorable coda of the Port Huron Statement put it, “If we appear to seek the unattainable…then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.” Future writers of manifestos could do worse than to begin right there.

As police confront Occupy protesters, the history professor and co-editor of Dissent magazine looks back at US leftist movements from abolitionism to Vietnam to see where OWS came from and what it can learn from the past

As the Occupy Wall Street movement writes a new chapter in the history of American leftism, you’ve published a history of radical movements in the United States titled American Dreamers. Tell me about it.

It chronicles almost 200 years of the American left’s history, interpreting what the left did right and what it did wrong. What it did wrong is better known. The subtitle of the book is “How the Left Changed a Nation”. I emphasise the positive difference it made, focusing on a couple of themes.

One is that the left expanded the meaning of individual freedom. It made sure that people of all races, religions and sexual preferences are, at least in theory, able to enjoy the same opportunities and freedoms as everybody else. The book begins with the abolitionists and goes up until the gay and lesbian movement of the 1970s. The other theme is that the left succeeded in presenting a vision of a more egalitarian and socially responsible society. The left may have had less success in this respect but its success has been considerable nonetheless.

I highlight figures like Henry George and Edward Bellamy, both journalists. Henry George wrote a bestselling economics tract called Progress and Poverty in 1879. He was very popular among the labour unionists. Edward Bellamy was a Christian Socialist who wrote Looking Backward. Published in 1888, it ranks with Uncle Tom’s Cabin as one of the most influential political novels of the 19th century. Bellamy’s followers were important figures in the populist movement of the 1890s and the Socialist Party in the early 20th century. These figures articulated an anti-corporate platform which continues to be influential even in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.

Do you see the DNA of the abolitionists, suffragettes and other leftist forebears in today’s protest?

Yes, in many ways I do. There are different strands. Of course you have civil disobedience, which abolitionists were known for. You have nonviolence and a “beloved community”, which civil rights protesters were known for. And you have a very strong emphasis on the 99% being injured by the 1%, and a critique of American democracy as being corrupted by big money, that began in the late 19th century with people like George and Bellamy.

The Communist Manifesto might be familiar to readers but please refresh our memory.

It was a 50-page-long pamphlet, originally written in German for a small group of working class activists trying to create a socialist society who were called The Communist League. They asked Marx and Engels, who were friends and collaborators, to write a document that they could use for political education.

The manifesto is the most widely read tract Marx ever wrote. It explains capitalism, where it came from and how they see it as being in its late stage. They argue that capitalism laid the groundwork for socialism by making the world into one capitalist market and doing away with nationalist loyalties. There is one famous sentence: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” They believed that capitalism was equipping the proletariat to take control of the engine of capitalist production and turn it over to social uses. There’s a lot of critique of other socialists as well, but those sections are outmoded. The bulk of it is a very powerful statement of the nature of capitalism. It was influential all over the world and has been translated into who knows how many languages — over 200 I’m sure.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Is that the prism through which the American left sees American history?

The occupiers are making an analysis of hierarchy in the economy and in society. Almost all of those kinds of analyses go back to Marx. You can see the paradox that Marx and Engels describe in these occupations. On the one hand people have computers and iPhones. They’re using the latest technological gadgets — which of course were created by capitalist societies and entrepreneurs — to organise against capitalism and try to bring about a radical transformation of society which would at least lead to a more egalitarian capitalism, if not a different kind of society altogether.

Howard Zinn’s classic A People’s History of the United States sees other sorts of struggle roiling America and shaping the course of the country’s history. It seems to have become as sacred to the American left as the Bible is to evangelicals.

Zinn’s book has sold over two million copies. It’s probably the most popular work of nonfiction that any radical has written in American history. It’s a history of what he calls the “1%” and the “99%”. It’s an interpretation of all of American history, from the Native Americans before European settlement all the way up to 9/11 in the last edition. In his telling, workers, blacks, women, Native Americans, Chicanos and other groups struggled for higher wages, truer democracy and sometimes a different kind of society entirely, but they keep getting defeated.

Zinn’s book has been very popular with Occupy Wall Street people and among American radicals generally. I’m critical of it myself: I think it’s a simplistic propagandistic understanding of American history. Somehow the 99% always lose, even though they’re the great majority. But nevertheless it’s been an influential book among American leftists since its publication 30 years ago.

Writing in Dissent you once argued that Zinn caricatured class conflict.

The argument that America has always had an undemocratic, exploitative and oppressive system is undermined by the fact that the majority of Americans basically support the system. In Zinn there’s a kind of condescension, and a refusal to recognise the gains that the left has made. Even though Zinn was influenced by Marx he’s much more simplistic and reductionist than Marx. Marx understood that capitalism was improving living standards, for example.

In an interview Zinn said he set “quiet revolution” as his goal when writing A People’s History. What was your goal in writing American Dreamers?

My goal was to provide a balance sheet for the American left — to explain the significance of the left in US history. I think it has been significant, but a lot of scholarship is partial and emphasises socialism rather than the broader American left that I talk about in the book, which starts with the abolitionists and ends with the solidarity movements of the 1980s. The American left is broader than just socialism. It’s full of people who were successful in their aims.

Now let’s focus on the last era when the left made itself felt on US streets. Tell us about Democracy Is in the Streets by James Miller.

This is one of the best books on the New Left. It charts the ideas of the New Left through some of its most important intellectual leaders: Tom Hayden, Carl Oglesby and others in Students for a Democratic Society. The New Left was a group of young radicals who started organising in the late 1950s and early 60s. They argued that the old left — that is, the communist left — had achieved certain things in the 1930s or 40s but was trapped in a dogmatic argument about the Soviet Union, pros or cons, and so was outmoded. People on the old left came of age in the Great Depression, a time of scarcity. People on the New Left went to college — which was not true of most people on the old left — and they came of age at a time of relative prosperity, when American capitalism was operating in a more egalitarian fashion than it had before in its history. So the New Left emphasised imperfections in American democracy.

It did not, at first, want to overthrow the system — at first it wanted left liberalism. The black freedom movement influenced the New Left, and the civil rights movement and racial equality were key issues for it. The Vietnam War became the second important issue, beginning in the mid-1960s when the New Left really changed. Some people began to feel a new appreciation for communism, at least as practiced by the Cubans and the Vietnamese. Some had fantasies of becoming underground guerrillas or of joining a group called The Weathermen which I was briefly a member of, unfortunately. Miller’s book charts that transition.

What does it tell us about the roots of Occupy Wall Street?
Occupy Wall Street is a group of primarily young leftists who began, as Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] did, by making a moral critique of society, asking for enhanced democracy and relying on consensus decision-making. Eventually, SDS and the SNCC became more confrontational. Occupy Wall Street has just begun battling with police. One of my staff members just got arrested.

Democracy Is in the Streets is a very good study of the evolution of a movement of young radicals from a really small group, with little influence, into a much larger group with a lot of influence on other people. Although SDS always had a hard time convincing the majority that they were on the side of average Americans. I fear that could be a problem for Occupy Wall Street as well.

How organised was Students for a Democratic Society, compared to OWS?
SDS had fewer than 2,000 members until 1965. Most of those people were active in civil rights and community organising. In 1965 SDS sponsored the first big march against the Vietnam War in [Washington] DC. That was when SDS really took off. It became an organisation with campus chapters at hundreds of colleges and even a lot of high schools around the country. It became well known because it was doing demonstrations. Sometimes students were taking over or occupying buildings, as I did when I was with SDS at Harvard.

Next let’s turn to a book that seems to lay out the growing problems of inequality and the failure of government in an extremely galvanising way. Progressive Congressman Keith Ellison and economist Robert Shiller have both cited Winner-Take-All Politics in interviews on The Browser. Please remind us of its core argument.

It lays out the critique that Occupy Wall Street is making. It’s a critique which liberal democrats and union people have been making for a while now — that the political system [in America] works well for those who have a lot of money but poorly for most others. It lays out a theory as to why we have the tax policy we have, and why income shares have gotten more unequal over the last two decades. It’s a scholarly but well-written book by two liberal political scientists. It’s really trickled down — it gets talked about on television and written about on op-ed pages.

Can you explain its connection to the Occupy movement?

It’s a very detailed study of the lobbying techniques, think tank pressures and ideas that led to the status quo that the Occupy movement is objecting to. It includes intellectual ammunition that someone who wants to make a case against the 1% would need to have. It really backs up the slogans that you hear in Zuccotti Park and elsewhere about the system being rigged against working people.

Your next selection documents significant 20th century struggles but is more of a strategy manual for the 21st century. Written by a sociologist who was jailed for protesting against the Korean War, what can we learn from Waging Nonviolent Struggle?
This is an interesting book. It’s a primer on how to wage a nonviolent struggle. Gene Sharp has been writing manuals for nonviolent resistance to injustice since the early 1970s. He was deeply influenced by the civil rights movement and by Gandhi, and unlike a lot of pacifists he’s very smart about strategy. He talks about the arguments of people who believe in violent struggle. He shows, case-by-case, how nonviolent struggle has been successful in the Philippines, in India and in the United States.

Do you see today’s Occupy movement as putting his lessons to good use?

His lessons are really about larger movements, society-wide movements such as those in India and nonviolent strikes like those in Namibia. But the main point he makes — that nonviolence can have a moral and strategic advantage over violence in the long term — is a lesson that the occupiers clearly take to heart. In almost every case where people on the left have used violence in this country, it has set them back. It’s not always easy to remain nonviolent, especially when you feel that the police are attacking you. The civil rights movements had problems with this. But to the degree that people have read Sharp, they are emulating people like Reverend [Martin Luther] King, Mahatma Gandhi and Cesar Chavez.

Unlike with Zinn and some of the other books I’ve named, I’m not sure how many occupiers have actually read Sharp. I haven’t seen references to Sharp to the same degree that I’ve seen references to the others. But, for the most part, they are following the script that Sharp said successful nonviolent campaigns must follow. One of the things that he recommends which OWS hasn’t followed is that you be very flexible in your tactics. And by fixating so much on occupying places, the Occupy movement has put that particular tactic over a longer-term strategy for nonviolent change.

Some news reports suggest that police in certain cities are using aggressive tactics to crack down on the protesters. Are nonviolent protesters helped when their tactics are met with violence?

That depends on the context, and how the nonviolent protesters were perceived to start with. If protesters who are attacked don’t respond to violence with violence then it can be a boon. The civil rights campaign is an example of that. In the Birmingham [Alabama] campaign of 1953, police with high-pressure water hoses and German shepherd dogs attacked a march of children. It was seen on television throughout the world. From that point until the Watts riots [in Los Angeles] 12 years after, for the first time a plurality of white Americans supported the civil rights movement. The violence directed against the marchers gave them the moral high ground. King knew that would happen — that’s why they sent the schoolkids out there. They knew the kids would get attacked because they knew that the man who controlled the police force, Bull Connor, was a vicious authoritarian racist.

I’m not a reporter, but the headlines I’ve seen coming out of the protests in recent days are “Protesters Fight With Police”. That’s not a good headline because in the end, most people who are not involved in protests want order. For example, at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago there was a huge protest against the Democratic Party. Mayor Daley’s police cracked down on the demonstrators. TV cameras caught it and famously the protesters chanted, “The whole world is watching”. But the public already perceived the demonstrators as prone to violence and most Americans sided with the police.

Your book American Dreamers answers the question: What lasting differences did leftist movements of previous eras make? I know that historians are not in the business of predicting the future, but what lasting imprint do you foresee for OWS?

OWS is affirming the argument that I make in the book, that the left is often more successful at changing public opinion than forming durable institutions. The core occupiers seem to think their encampments are all they need. They don’t want to form a party or any enduring organisation. Previous leftist groups wanted to but just weren’t able to.

I think that we are now in an age of austerity that will last a while. And in an age of austerity, the critique that the Occupy movement and their allies make is going to continue to resonate. In an age of austerity, the question becomes who wins and who loses. In times like those werenre in, questions of social hierarchy and privilege become especially acute, and those are the kinds of questions that Occupy Wall Street is asking.

However, until now, despite the recession, progressive activists have been drowned out by Tea Party blather about the dangers of “a socialist, secular state.” By finally making the gulf between the wealthiest class and everyone else impossible to ignore, the occupiers, in their tenacious rage, are doing a great service to our country.

Of course, as with any new insurgency, this one will have to learn and adapt if it hopes to grow into a durable mass movement. Clever tactics must get joined to intelligent strategies, leaders will have to emerge from a leaderless throng, and protesters who now heap contempt on both political parties will have to decide if they really think the nation would be no worse off if the Republican Party controlled the White House and both houses of Congress in 2013. They will also need a name more resonant and pleasing to repeat than “Occupiers.”

Yet even if the insurgents fail to create their own institutions or revive struggling unions, they can still accomplish something grand. Leftists in U.S. history have seldom mounted a serious challenge to those who held power in either the government or the economy. But they have often helped to transform the common sense of society – how Americans understand what is just and what is unjust in the conduct of public affairs. If protesters manage to direct the anger of a portion of the “99 percent” toward the freewheeling free-marketeers who got us into this mess, they will have done their job.

And yet, except for the demonstrations and energetic recall campaigns that roiled Wisconsin this year, unionists and other stern critics of corporate power and government cutbacks have failed to organize a serious movement against the people and policies that bungled the United States into recession.

Instead, the Tea Party rebellion — led by veteran conservative activists and bankrolled by billionaires — has compelled politicians from both parties to slash federal spending and defeat proposals to tax the rich and hold financiers accountable for their misdeeds. Partly as a consequence, Barack Obama’s tenure is starting to look less like the second coming of F.D.R. and more like a re-run of Jimmy Carter — although last week the president did sound a bit Rooseveltian when he proposed that millionaires should “pay their fair share in taxes, or we’re going to have to ask seniors to pay more for Medicare.”

How do we account for the relative silence of the left? Perhaps what really matters about a movement’s strength is the years of building that came before it. In the 1930s, the growth of unions and the popularity of demands to share the wealth and establish “industrial democracy” were not simply responses to the economic debacle. In fact, unions bloomed only in the middle of the decade, when a modest recovery was under way. The liberal triumph of the 1930s was in fact rooted in decades of eloquent oratory and patient organizing by a variety of reformers and radicals against the evils of “monopoly” and “big money.”

Similarly, the current populist right originated among the articulate spokespeople and well-funded institutions that emerged in the 1970s, long before the current crisis began. The two movements would have disagreed about nearly everything, but each had aggressive proponents who, backed up by powerful social forces, established their views as the conventional wisdom of an era.

THE seeds of the 1930s left were planted back in the Gilded Age by figures like the journalist Henry George. In 1886, George, the author of a best-selling book that condemned land speculation, ran for mayor of New York City as the nominee of the new Union Labor Party. He attracted a huge following with speeches indicting the officeholders of the Tammany Hall machine for engorging themselves on bribes and special privileges while “we have hordes of citizens living in want and in vice born of want, existing under conditions that would appall a heathen.”

George also brought his audiences a message of hope: “We are building a movement for the abolition of industrial slavery, and what we do on this side of the water will send its impulse across the land and over the sea, and give courage to all men to think and act.” Running against candidates from both major parties and the opposition of nearly every local employer and church, George would probably have been elected, if the 28-year-old Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican who finished third, had not split the anti-Tammany vote.

Despite George’s defeat, the pro-labor, anti-corporate movement that coalesced around him and others kept growing. As the turn of the century neared, wage earners mounted huge strikes for union recognition on the nation’s railroads and inside its coal mines and textile mills. In the 1890s, a mostly rural insurgency spawned the People’s Party, also known as the Populists, which quickly won control of several states and elected 22 congressmen. The party soon expired, but not before the Democrats, under William Jennings Bryan, had adopted important parts of its platform — the progressive income tax, a flexible currency and support for labor organizing.

During the early 20th century, a broader progressive coalition, including immigrant workers, middle-class urban reformers, muckraking journalists and Social Gospelers established a new common sense about the need for a government that would rein in corporate power and establish a limited welfare state. The unbridled free market and the ethic of individualism, they argued, had left too many Americans at the mercy of what Theodore Roosevelt called “malefactors of great wealth.” As Jane Addams put it, “the good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”

Amid the boom years of the 1920s, conservatives rebutted this wisdom and won control of the federal government. “The chief business of the American people is business,” intoned President Calvin Coolidge. But their triumph was brief, both ideologically and electorally. When Franklin D. Roosevelt swept into the White House in 1932, most Americans were already primed to accept the economic and moral argument progressives had been making since the heyday of Henry George.

Will Rogers, the popular humorist and a loyal Democrat, put it in comfortably agrarian terms, “All the feed is going into one manger and the stock on the other side of the stall ain’t getting a thing. We got it, but we don’t know how to split it up.” The unionists of the Congress of Industrial Organizations echoed his argument, as did soak-the-rich demagogues like Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin. The architects of Social Security, the minimum wage and other landmark New Deal policies did so as well.

After years of preparation, welfare-state liberalism had finally become a mainstream faith. In 1939, John L. Lewis, the pugnacious labor leader, declared, “The millions of organized workers banded together in the C.I.O. are the main driving force of the progressive movement of workers, farmers, professional and small business people and of all other liberal elements in the community.” With such forces on his side, the politically adept F.D.R. became a great president.

But the meaning of liberalism gradually changed. The quarter century of growth and low unemployment that followed World War II understandably muted appeals for class justice on the left. Liberals focused on rights for minority groups and women more than addressing continuing inequalities of wealth. Meanwhile, conservatives began to build their own movement based on a loathing of “creeping socialism” and a growing perception that the federal government was oblivious or hostile to the interests and values of middle-class whites.

IN the late 1970s, the grass-roots right was personified by a feisty, cigar-chomping businessman-activist named Howard Jarvis. Having toiled for conservative causes since Herbert Hoover’s campaign in 1932, Jarvis had run for office on several occasions in the past, but, like Henry George, he had never been elected. Blocked at the ballot box, he became an anti-tax organizer, working on the belief that the best way to fight big government was “not to give them the money in the first place.”

In 1978 he spearheaded the Proposition 13 campaign in California to roll back property taxes and make it exceedingly hard to raise them again. That fall, Proposition 13 won almost two-thirds of the vote, and conservatives have been vigorously echoing its anti-tax argument ever since. Just as the left was once able to pin the nation’s troubles on heartless big businessmen, the right honed a straightforward critique of a big government that took Americans’ money and gave them little or nothing useful in return.

One reason for the growth of the right was that most of those in charge of the government from the mid-1960s through the 2000s — whether Democrats or Republicans — failed to carry out their biggest promises. Lyndon Johnson failed to defeat the Viet Cong or abolish poverty; Jimmy Carter was unable to tame inflation or free the hostages in Iran; George W. Bush neither accomplished his mission in Iraq nor controlled the deficit.

Like the left in the early 20th century, conservatives built an impressive set of institutions to develop and disseminate their ideas. Their think tanks, legal societies, lobbyists, talk radio and best-selling manifestos have trained, educated and financed two generations of writers and organizers. Conservative Christian colleges, both Protestant and Catholic, provide students with a more coherent worldview than do the more prestigious schools led by liberals. More recently, conservatives marshaled media outlets like Fox News and the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal to their cause.

The Tea Party is thus just the latest version of a movement that has been evolving for over half a century, longer than any comparable effort on the liberal or radical left. Conservatives have rarely celebrated a landslide win on the scale of Proposition 13, but their argument about the evils of big government has, by and large, carried the day. President Obama’s inability to solve the nation’s economic woes has only reinforced the right’s ideological advantage.

If activists on the left want to alter this reality, they will have to figure out how to redefine the old ideal of economic justice for the age of the Internet and relentless geographic mobility. During the last election, many hoped that the organizing around Barack Obama’s presidential campaign would do just that. Yet, since taking office, Mr. Obama has only rarely made an effort to move the public conversation in that direction.

Instead, the left must realize that when progressives achieved success in the past, whether at organizing unions or fighting for equal rights, they seldom bet their future on politicians. They fashioned their own institutions — unions, women’s groups, community and immigrant centers and a witty, anti-authoritarian press — in which they spoke up for themselves and for the interests of wage-earning Americans.

Today, such institutions are either absent or reeling. With unions embattled and on the decline, working people of all races lack a sturdy vehicle to articulate and fight for the vision of a more egalitarian society. Liberal universities, Web sites and non-governmental organizations cater mostly to a professional middle class and are more skillful at promoting social causes like legalizing same-sex marriage and protecting the environment than demanding millions of new jobs that pay a living wage.

A reconnection with ordinary Americans is vital not just to defeating conservatives in 2012 and in elections to come. Without it, the left will remain unable to state clearly and passionately what a better country would look like and what it will take to get there. To paraphrase the labor martyr Joe Hill, the left should stop mourning its recent past and start organizing to change the future.

The American left was once in love with the labor movement. Take, for example, the careers of this quartet of famous progressives: Margaret Sanger, John Steinbeck, Betty Friedan, and Martin Luther King Jr. All were committed to audacious reform and had the ability to turn their political passions into memorable prose. And all believed, at critical times in their lives, that a powerful union movement was essential to making their nation a more decent, more egalitarian society.

Sanger turned birth control from a furtive, underground pursuit into an international movement. But she began her activist career as a supporter of the militant Industrial Workers of the World, at one point helping to lead a temporary evacuation of IWW strikers’ children from a Massachusetts milltown so impoverished that few of the kids wore underpants. Steinbeck wrote his classic novel Grapes of Wrath after working closely with a radical union of farm and packing-house workers. California agribusinesses and their favored legislators tried, in vain, to get his book banned from public libraries. Before Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, she reported for the house organ of the United Electrical Workers, a union then led by communists, on the lack of good wages and child care for working women. After the Montgomery bus boycott, King forged a bond with such pragmatic social democrats as Bayard Rustin, A. Phillip Randolph, and Michael Harrington, who sought to build a durable alliance between the civil-rights movement and the AFL-CIO. King was murdered while aiding a strike by black sanitation workers to persuade the city fathers of Memphis to recognize their union.

There once would have been nothing surprising about the pro-labor sympathies of the famous four. From the Gilded Age into the 1960s, nearly every left-wing thinker and activist placed his or her faith for far-reaching social change on the fortunes of the union movement. Only when wage earners built strong institutions to fight for their interests would politicians take steps to markedly improve the lot of the American majority.

In the 1930s, this belief inspired intellectuals like Edmund Wilson, composers like Aaron Copland, painters like Jacob Lawrence, and photographers like Dorothea Lange to create art of sustained brilliance. It also helped gain support for mass strikes and organizing drives that eventually forced legislators to act. In 1934, labor radicals spearheaded shutdowns in Minneapolis and San Francisco that mushroomed into general strikes. A year later, Congress, alarmed that the unrest might imperil economic recovery, passed the Wagner Act—the landmark bill that, for the first time, set up an agency, the National Labor Relations Board, to protect the right of workers to have a union of their choosing. In 1938, lawmakers added the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a national minimum wage and prohibited most forms of child labor. By the mid-1950s, one third of all wage earners belonged to a union.

But gradually, many progressives and labor unionists soured on one another. The AFL-CIO leadership’s backing for the Vietnam War and the class tensions provoked by both the counterculture and the environmental movement had something to do with it. So did the shift of young leftists from fighting to remedy economic injustice to battling discrimination based on race, gender, and sexual orientation. Meanwhile, groups with lavish resources like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Atlantic Legal Foundation moved aggressively to undermine enforcement of the Wagner Act. That thousands of workers got fired every year for trying to organize unions fails to gain much attention, even in left-wing periodicals and websites.

The new breed of union activists failed to change the popular image of leftists forged in the 1960s—college-educated rebels who had little in common with ordinary Americans.

By the 1980s, hundreds of progressives did break out of the countercultural cocoon and go to work for labor—as organizers, publicists, and in-house educators. The new breed included Karen Nussbaum, a feminist whose Boston-based group Nine to Five recruited women office workers; and Bill Fletcher Jr., a black socialist hired as education director of the AFL-CIO. Andrew Stern, who became head of the Service Employees International Union, had come to college in 1968 expecting to study business but instead joined a series of radical movements.

These activists, together with rank-and-filers frustrated by the old guard’s failure to reverse labor’s dwindling power at the workplace, brought a new spirit and imagination to their tasks. “Put the movement back in the labor movement,” they plastered on bumpers and protest signs. They mounted “corporate campaigns” grounded in intensive research that compelled anti-union firms to explain their skirting of environmental, safety, and overtime pay laws. They also aligned their unions with opponents of Ronald Reagan’s interventions in the Third World.

In 1995, the labor left helped elect John Sweeney president of the AFL-CIO, hoping the white-haired veteran of union wars and his “New Voice” team could reverse the movement’s long slide. Their academic allies staged a series of crowded teach-ins featuring speakers such as Betty Friedan, the philosophers Richard Rorty and Cornel West, and the historian Eric Foner. “I have a pretty good Geiger counter,” announced Friedan, on returning to what had been her original cause, “and that counter is clicking again, because I think we are on the verge of something new.”

Despite this fresh energy, labor continued its long decline. The new breed of union activists failed to change the popular image of leftists forged in the 1960s—college-educated rebels who had little in common with ordinary Americans. The cross-class insurgency in Wisconsin that is defending the bargaining rights of public employees is a heartening exception. But it has not yet spawned a national movement to defeat conservative attempts to turn unions into toothless institutions, both at the workplace and in politics.

Today, perhaps, labor’s beleaguered champions should take a bit of inspiration from their own past. The first celebration of Labor Day occurred in New York City in 1882. Twenty thousand unionists paraded before a quarter-million cheering spectators. Planners boasted that the event would “show the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations” and “warn politicians that they shall go no farther in pandering to the greed of monopoly and reducing the condition of the masses.” Their language sounds archaic. But during the current rerun of the Gilded Age—when corporate profits are soaring and unemployment remains obscenely high—an updated version of that kind of protest would be an excellent idea.

All these works were created by individuals active in the culture of the Popular Front, a vigorously democratic and multiracial movement in the arts and daily life that was sponsored but not controlled by the Communist party. Harburg was a leading member of pro-Soviet groups in Hollywood and penned dozens of songs that satirized racist lawmakers and Cold Warriors, which helped earn him a blacklisting in 1950. But he kept the Oscar he had won a decade earlier for writing “Over the Rainbow” for The Wizard of Oz. In 1935, Lange left a fairly comfortable life as a portrait photographer to join other artists of the Farm Security Administration, most of whom were on the left fringe of New Deal opinion. Her pictures of farmworkers from all regions and races appeared in Life and other mainstream outlets. The photos, according to her biographer, Linda Gordon, “not only challenged an entire agricultural political economy, but tried also to illustrate the racial system in which they operated—a system it also reinforced.” Steinbeck, who occasionally wrote words to accompany Lange’s images, had worked closely with the Communist party-led union of agricultural and packing workers in its vain but valiant attempt to bring democracy to the fields of California. His wife, Carol Henning, was a party member. When the state’s agribusinessmen and favored lawmakers tried to get The Grapes of Wrath banned from public libraries, Communist periodicals helped organize an anticensorship campaign to stop them.

To understand the fortunes of American communism during its heyday in the 1930s and forties requires a healthy taste for irony. On the one hand, the apostles of Lenin and Stalin yoked themselves to one of the bloodiest, most repressive regimes in history and the first one whose dictatorial nature mocked its own vision of a world run by working people. Yet the Communist party had a striking influence on American culture, although seldom in its own name. The influence of Popular Front culture endured long after the party had been banished to the crumbling margins of American politics. The number of renowned writers, filmmakers, entertainers, and artists who had traveled with the Communists during its heyday was quite remarkable, given the party’s modest size and electoral inconsequence. Party members wrote “Ballad for Americans,” “Strange Fruit,” “This Land Is Your Land,” Native Son, The Little Foxes, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Artists who, while not members, had spent many evenings in the party’s milieu, created Citizen Kane, Death of a Salesman, “Fanfare for the Common Man,” For Whom the Bell Tolls, Yertle the Turtle, Invisible Man, and wrote the screenplay for Casablanca. Novelists in or close to the party had nine books at or near the top of the best-seller list from 1929 to 1945.

That we still view the Depression largely through images created by such figures suggests that the Left was more influential working through aesthetics than organization. Radicals achieved their only lasting triumphs during the years of the 1930s and forties by advancing a new common sense about larger social and moral questions: Who were the people? How did they want the nation to change? What did a commitment to equal rights require? As a young, left-wing critic observed in 1942, “It was the depression of the mind that from the first gave significance to the depression of society, for the impact of the crisis on culture was far more violent than its transformation of the social order.”

This new spirit brashly claimed the Left’s desire and need to claim America—its polyglot culture, its history, its productive might—for an expanded definition of the common people. Popular Front artists took up subjects and themes that went beyond the limits of New Deal politics. They hailed the progressive impulses of folk and blues musicians, fertilized a campaign against segregationist laws and practices that would flower fully a generation later, and made films that paid tribute to populist mass movements.

The very creation of a marketable genre known as “folk music” was due almost entirely to the Popular Front. From his office at the Works Progress Administration, Charles Seeger (father of Pete) wrote, “The folk music of America [has] embodied … the tonal and rhythmic expression of untold millions of rural and even urban Americans … the American people at large has had plenty to say and ability to say it.”

But the leftists who made a name for themselves by performing folk tunes had little interest in keeping their art pure from the seductions of commerce or the influence of other styles of music. Woody Guthrie started his career as a Dust Bowl migrant in California. But he moved to New York City in 1940 and recorded several albums of songs with political undertones for Victor Records, a major label. He also made a pilot for a one-man radio show on CBS, Back Where I Come From, which landed Guthrie dozens of appearances on national networks and on the stages of New York nightclubs. “They are giving me money so fast I’m using it to sleep under,” he marveled. His Okie-inflected radicalism turned out to be as marketable as any other cultural commodity.

The black singer Josh White also seemed to be an exemplar of the downtrodden masses. He grew up in South Carolina, the son of a Baptist minister who was locked away in an insane asylum for refusing to pay his bills. As a boy, White made a few dollars guiding blind bluesmen around the streets of Southern towns. “It was a life that no child should know,” he remembered, “roaming the roads, never certain where I’d sleep, and almost always hungry.… But the music—and the songs and the guitar—somehow made up for everything.” While still in his teens, White began recording blues and gospel for a number of labels that catered mainly to black people.

White’s first crossover hits wore his political commitments on their covers. In 1940, he recorded Chain Gang, an album of songs like those performed by black men in Southern prisons. His backup group included Bayard Rustin, a young Communist who soon broke with the party and became right-hand man to the civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph. The next year, White came out with a three-disk set entitled Southern Exposure: An Album of Jim Crow Blues. In the liner notes, the novelist Richard Wright (a Communist party member at the time) dubbed the music “fighting blues.” White went on to perform songs that touted union organizers and ones that blasted the segregated armed forces: “Airplanes flying ’cross the land and sea, / Everybody flying but a Negro like me.” By the end of World War II, Josh White had become “the best-known black songster in the country.”

But he achieved that fame with a style better suited to a nightclub stage than to a rural juke joint or storefront church. White’s voice was sly and sophisticated, almost completely free of the intonations of the black South. During the 1940s, White performed regularly, as did Billie Holiday and Lena Horne, at Café Society, a club in Greenwich Village that was a mecca for white middle-class New Yorkers with left-wing sympathies. Billie Holiday closed most of her performances at Café Society with “Strange Fruit,” the antilynching ballad written by Communist Lewis Allan (whose real name was Abel Meeropol).

No white-led radical movement since the Civil War had staked as much as the Communists on a commitment to racial equality. The party never attracted many non-white members and had trouble holding on to those it did. But its constant assaults on racist laws and politicians earned the respect of black Americans who had no intention of joining. In 1945, two black sociologists observed, “The Reds won the admiration of the Negro masses by default. They were the only white people who seemed to really care about what happened to the Negro.”

The party’s rhetoric on race was not always a guide to its actions. Communists fought for civil rights the same way they fought for industrial unions and intellectual freedom: with one eye fixed steadily on the needs of the USSR. What did remain consistent was the party’s vision of a society that would encourage both racial equality and expressions of racial pride. A mass, sustainable civil rights movement did not emerge until the 1950s, when the party had all but vanished from political life. But the Popular Front helped put forth a new way of understanding race in America, and it was on such an understanding that the marriage of pluralism and equality depends.

Communists sponsored broad ad hoc coalitions on a variety of racial issues—from a federal antilynching law to voting rights to battling against fascism as a system of explicit race hatred. These efforts attracted a prestigious group of African Americans from the arts and entertainment. The roster included W. E. B. DuBois, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, James Weldon Johnson, Josh White, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Ella Fitzgerald, and Lena Horne. According to one former radical organizer who knew the scene well, “75 percent of black cultural figures had party membership or maintained regular meaningful contact with the party.”

The advocacy of militant antiracism had its prophetic moments—particularly in the area of mass culture. In 1939, in New York and other big cities, the party launched a boycott of the movie Gone With the Wind, whose rosy depiction of the Confederacy clashed with histories of the Civil War era by DuBois and other radicals. A pro-Communist writer declared he “should like to take” the film’s producer David O. Selznick “out of his chartered skysleeper and rub his nose in the South of pellagra, of Jim Crow, of illiteracy, … of sharecroppers, of the modern Ku Klux Klan riding down unionists.” Although the boycott’s effect on the box office was minimal, it was the first major salvo in a debate over media images of black people and other ethnic minorities that continues today.

Communists had more success when they protested against the Jim Crow barrier in a form of entertainment older than film: Major League Baseball. Due to an unofficial agreement among team owners, no black player had taken the field with white ones since the mid-1880s. When he became sports editor of the Daily Worker in 1936, Lester Rodney resolved to abolish that tradition.

Cleverly, the young editor framed the campaign in the language of muckraking as well as principle: “The Sunday Worker will rip the veil from the ‘Crime of the Big Leagues’—mentioning names, giving facts, sparing none of the most sacred figures in baseball officialdom.” The strategy gained new readers as well as lavish praise from the black press. In return, Rodney reprinted similar features from such black weeklies as the Pittsburgh Courier—which further enhanced the credibility of his stand.

Over the next decade, the party pressed its case in a variety of venues. May Day paraders carried banners demanding integration of the sport; young Communists even picketed Yankee Stadium before a game. In interviews with Rodney, various Major League managers stated their support for abolishing the color bar. Paul Robeson, a former football All American, lectured baseball owners at one of their meetings: “The time has come that you must change your attitude toward Negroes.” Finally, in the fall of 1945, the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson, a college graduate and army veteran, to a contract.

Just a few months later, Frank Sinatra lent his immense fame and talent to the antiracist cause. In a ten-minute film, Sinatra sang “The House I Live In” to a group of white street kids after he stops them from beating up a Jewish boy their own age. “What is America to me?,” the lyric asks. The answer is a small-town version of social equality: “The house I live in, … / The faces that I see, / All races and religions, That’s America to me … / The house I live in, My neighbors white and black … / A land of wealth and beauty, / With enough for all to share.” The film won a special Academy Award for “tolerance short subject.” But the studio’s tolerance went only so far. Sinatra was not allowed to sing the line about “neighbors white and black.” The lyricist, Lewis Allan (Abel Meeropol), protested the decision but failed to alter it. Both he and the composer, Earl Robinson, were party members.

Popular Front artists may have had their greatest impact creating features on the big screen. During the years of Depression and world war, at least 40 percent of Americans took in a movie every week. Much of what they saw had an earnestness and sentimental vigor that dovetailed with the ethos of the Popular Front. Of course, to know that certain American radicals had a big hand in shaping such profitable and now iconic movies as The Public Enemy, Frankenstein, Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, Woman of the Year, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington does not mean that audiences were consuming a left-wing sensibility along with their sodas and popcorn.

But in Hollywood as elsewhere, cultural Communists had a talent for making themselves useful and tilting the opinions of others their way. Communist party members and their close allies took the lead in forming the first independent unions of writers, actors, and craftsmen—and sponsored such groups as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, whose events drew thousands of participants and widespread media attention. Appearing under the aegis of Popular Front groups, such liberals as Katherine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Orson Welles, and James Cagney spoke out for Republican Spain and industrial unions. The presence of such a broad alliance gave the political culture of the film world an unmistakable tinge of pink. No one in Hollywood objected when Howard Koch, the principal screenwriter of Casablanca, described Rick, the hero played by Bogart, as someone who “ran guns to Ethiopia” (which Mussolini’s armies invaded in 1935) and fought for the Spanish Republic or when Ginger Rogers, in a script for Tender Comrade, written by party member Dalton Trumbo, asserted, “Share and share alike, that’s democracy.” Later, the House Unamerican Activities Committee would blast that line as unpatriotic.

In their textual literalism, the Red hunters missed the more lasting influence of certain radical screenwriters. As with the emergence of folk music, films that embodied a spirit of left populism became a prime way to identify “the people” with the aims of the Left.

There is no better example of that than Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, directed by Frank Capra in 1939. The story adapted the traditional genre of a virtuous innocent who comes into conflict with a corrupt urban elite. Jefferson Smith, played by James Stewart, is a new appointee to the U.S. Senate from a rural Western state. When he learns he is only a “stooge” in an influence-peddling scheme run by a party boss, his venal colleague, played by Claude Rains, pressures him to resign. Instead, Smith mounts a solitary, twenty-three-hour filibuster to salvage his reputation and ends up exposing the plot to drive him from office.

Capra made other films with a populist flavor. But Mr. Smith is the only one that challenged the probity of a hallowed government institution. And it certainly incensed the keepers of the institutional flame. “The thing was outrageous,” declared James Byrnes, a powerful Democrat from South Carolina who attended the Washington premiere, “exactly the kind of picture that totalitarian governments would like to have their subjects believe exists in a democracy.” Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley called the film “as grotesque as anything I have ever seen.” Lawmakers from both parties united in disgust, as did newspapers, which echoed the charge that Mr. Smith fit the propaganda about America spewed out by Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. Joseph P. Kennedy, then U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, offered to purchase all negatives of the film from Columbia Pictures for $2 million, in order to destroy them.

Capra was fortunate his critics didn’t know that Sidney Buchman, the film’s main scriptwriter, was a member of the Communist party. Buchman already had several popular comedies to his credit. But Mr. Smith was his first serious film, and he had to persuade the director to accept its strong Popular Front message. Capra knew Buchman had joined the party and, as a result, “mistrusted me terribly.” The scriptwriter argued that, with fascism on the march, they needed to emphasize “the spirit of vigilance which is necessary if one believes in democracy, the refusal to surrender even before small things.” Capra responded, “Go f— yourself with your theme.”

But he altered few of Buchman’s lines, and the film made Capra one of the most popular directors in the country. The left-wing Americanism expressed by Mr. Smith—sentimental, combative, and implicitly interracial—was little different from that sung about by Woody Guthrie and Josh White. But the film’s huge audience and numerous Oscar nominations helped make its species of patriotism one of the most ubiquitous legacies of Popular Front culture.

That didn’t save Buchman from suffering the same fate as most Hollywood Reds. In the early 1950s, he was blacklisted after appearing before the self-appointed arbiters in Congress of who was and was not unamerican. Buchman admitted his former membership in the party (he had resigned in 1945) but refused to name anyone else. Days later, underneath the dome of the Capitol, the House of Representatives found him in contempt of Congress. There was not a single dissenting vote.

Historians continue to battle over how to define the essential nature of the Communist party and the Popular Front. One camp argues that the party and its allies were, in FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s famous phrase, “masters of deceit.” Nothing they did mattered as much as their allegiance to a foreign power, and when that allegiance became a serious handicap during the Cold War, the party was finished. The other side protests that the brave and honest labors of millions of rank-and-file radicals should not be reduced to their fealty to a dictatorial regime—instead the focus should be on what the comrades did to further democracy and equal rights in their own land.

Both groups are correct. American Communists doggedly followed the lead of bloody tyrants and found reasons to rationalize their crimes. They should have heeded George Orwell’s warning that “the central problem—how to prevent power from being abused—remains unsolved.” Yet it is also myopic to dismiss the cultural achievements of party members and their “fellow travelers.” That tale was too essential to the history of their time and ours to be written in a tone either dark or light. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1935, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”