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Student Activism in the 1930s
50th and 25 National Reunion--ASU and SDS--1986 James Wechsler
For the author, a reading of this book more than thirty-five years after its appearance was alternately a nostalgic, poignant, and even melancholy exercise; it is, after all, a cruel documentation of the passage of time in one man's life and a reminder of what in many ways were golden days of high passion and virtuous certitude. It was written in the summer months immediately following my graduation from Columbia (an event which I attended bearing a picket sign rather than cap and gown in protest against the expulsion of an anti-war group at the university's medical school. It was not until the latter part of the 1960's that there occurred any student upheavals on American campuses comparable to those recorded here. Militant as was our image of our radicalism, it had an almost muted tone when viewed against the tactics employed by some factions of the Students for a Democratic Society and their fellow-travelers. Those of us who entered college in the years of what is now remembered as the Great Depression were primarily products of that setting. We had seemingly good reason to believe that the American system had lost control over events; and many of those disposed to think much about the chaos were captivated by the view that the Soviet "experiment" showed us how to resolve the grotesquerie of poverty in a country so richly endowed as ours. The Moscow mystique largely guided much of our ensuing activity; when the Kremlin decreed in 1935 that traditional revolutionary dogma must give way to the concept of a Popular Front against fascism, all the signals were changed. The pacifist overtones of the student movement were slowly transformed into the gospel of collective security; by 1936—when I was serving as a post-graduate functionary for the American Student Union—defense of the Spanish republic had largely preempted the anti-war slogans, and muted the revolutionary music at home. Spain became almost in reverse the obsession that Vietnam was to become for many thirty years later; it was, ironically, our hope that the United States would provide, as it never did, the aid for the embattled Spanish regime that it was to supply for Saigon while students in growing numbers demonstrated for American withdrawal from the Indo-China wasteland. But I would also contend that there has been one valid continuity between the upheavals of the two eras. In both instances young Americans were reacting against what seemed to be the blind-alley blandness and sterility of national and world leadership. This was as true of the campus movement for Norman Thomas in 1932 as it was for the Eugene McCarthy crusade of 1968 (and the McGovern upsurge of 1972). Without reverence for much that is recorded here, I submit that it exhibits an involvement in "the actions and passions of our time" without which, Justice Holmes reminded us, man can be judged not to have lived. I know it has long been fashionable to assume that the activist undergraduate is some kind of psychological freak; one might argue at least as convincingly that education is an unrewarding sedative if its model specimens are those who do not give a damn, or have acquired the spurious maturity of cynical disengagement. In so far as we were moved then, as other young men and women are now, by an impulse "to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," I should like to believe that many of us were engaged in something more meaningful than ego-trips. Many of us were to move from those days of dogma toward a democratic humanism to which we still adhere. In doing so we have perhaps at least refuted the smug bromide that young radicals are hopelessly destined to become aged reactionaries. Home | Historical Essay | Documents | Credits |
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