Writer on the Storm

Former New Left leader Carl Oglesby on the '60s, his old friend Hillary Clinton, and the dream of a left-libertarian alliance

Bill Kauffman from the April 2008 issue

In the 1960s there emerged a New Left. Until it was infected with the viruses of violence and Leninism, it was contemptuous of the Old Left’s embrace of bureaucratic centralism and committed to “participatory democracy,” civil rights for blacks, and, above all, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam.

Carl Oglesby was the Middle American—and emphatically libertarian—voice of this New Left. The Akron, Ohio, native and son of a rubber-factory worker was a 30-year-old playwright laboring for a defense contractor in Ann Arbor, Michigan, when a series of events thrust him into the presidency of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the largest and most influential bloc of the student protest movement. Through marches and teach-ins and protests, SDS kicked up a ruckus in what Oglesby called “the assembly-line universities of this Pepsi Generation.”

In his influential 1967 essay “Vietnamese Crucible,” Oglesby praised “the libertarian tradition” and insisted that the New Left draw nourishment from the heritage of “humanistic individualism and voluntaristic associational action.” He disdained socialism, for as he explains in his most recent book, “In the eyes of a generation raised on George Orwell, big government seemed too much the suspect of choice in contemporary crime to be trusted as the manager of social progress.”

Oglesby parleyed and parried and partied with everyone from the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard to a young Wellesley activist named Hillary Rodham. He had the time of his life. But by 1968, SDS had splintered into rival factions. Oglesby represented what he called “SDS’s freewheeling participatory democracy” against the violent Weathermen, whose public face was the cheerleader turned bomb-cheerer Bernardine Dohrn. The Weathermen won the competition by losing: SDS was destroyed, in Oglesby’s words, by “the toxic blend of road rage and comic book Marxism…of the Weathermen.” The blast that shattered the student left was detonated on March 6, 1970, when three Weathermen died in a Greenwich Village townhouse after their homemade nail bomb accidentally went off.

The movement splintered; Oglesby burned out. He went on to record two folk albums, suffused with a kind of Beat Americana and elegiac—and nonpolitical—lyricism. Always haunted by the assassination of John F. Kennedy, he analyzed elite politics in The Yankee and Cowboy War (1976), in which he viewed American history from the JFK assassination to Watergate as a struggle between Eastern (Yankee) and Southwestern (Cowboy) interests. Oglesby would write two more books about the Kennedy killing.

Oglesby has recounted his experiences as the libertarian soul of SDS in a new memoir, Ravens in the Storm (Scribner’s), which he wrote with the research assistance of his 4,000-page FBI and CIA files. A septuagenarian now living in Amherst, Massachusetts, Carl Oglesby spoke with author Bill Kauffman in January.

Reason: How does a young aerospace supervisor at Bendix go from toiling for the military-industrial complex to president of SDS in the space of a year?

Carl Oglesby: Easy. The steps were simple, logical, nothing strange about what happened. I went to work for a congressional candidate [Wes Vivian, in 1964], and he wanted a position statement on Vietnam. I drew the short straw, so I started researching the war and wrote a paper for him, which said, “Wrong war. Wrong place. Don’t do it.” He said, “I’m not going to say anything like that: It sounds like appeasement.” So I withdrew from his campaign. About that time, New York SDS fought a big battle to get a subway poster that showed a picture of a burned Vietnamese kid and asked the question, “Why are we burning, torturing, killing the people of South Vietnam? Get the facts. Write SDS.” People had to fight to get the poster up because the city didn’t want to do it. That created a stir, the poster did go up, a few people wrote to SDS for the “facts,” and SDS didn’t have anything to send out. I had come across SDS people at the University of Michigan teach-in, and my paper became the document that got sent around when people wrote to SDS responding to that poster.

Reason: You go from supplying a position paper to president. That’s a meteoric rise.

Oglesby: You’ve got to remember that SDS was a very new organization, and the fact that I had just come in the door was not unique; a lot of people were in the same position. There had been a movement to get rid of the national officers on the grounds that to have a president, a vice president, a national secretary, was inherently elitist. I spoke against that, saying that SDS was going to be a part of the world and needed to have spokespeople it could hold to account. That position won out, somebody nominated me for president, and the winner turned out to be me.

Reason: You called yourself a libertarian while active in SDS. How significant was the libertarian presence within SDS and the New Left?

Oglesby: There was a strong presence but not dominant or majoritarian. Remember that SDS was founded to be a democratic organization, not to be socialist. Its most basic slogan was “People Should Be Involved in Making the Decisions that Affect Their Lives.” That was what SDS was about. Whatever decision gets made, it should be democratic. It was on that basis that SDS cut through the whole argument about socialism vs. capitalism. We simply said that whatever economic formation we adopted should be adopted democratically and openly.

Reason: In your 1967 essay “Vietnamese Crucible,” you quoted libertarian sorts like Frank Chodorov and Garet Garrett and asserted that “the Old Right and the New Left are morally and politically coordinate.” How did you come to that conclusion?

Oglesby: Just by looking at the things that those right-wing guys said. I can’t say that mine was the majority view within SDS in terms of that question, but I always thought that principled conservatives had as solid a reason to oppose the Vietnam War and to oppose racism as anyone within the conventional left.

Reason: Assessing the New Left from 40 years later, was it “morally and politically coordinate” with the Old Right?

Comments

|3.26.08 @ 12:48PM|#

Carl reinvents himself 40 years later! Two friends who attended the 1968 SDS convention returned to tell me that the Maoists had taken over the SDS. They said this in triumph, as they were quite sympathetic to that point of view. (I was disappointed. I had hoped the New Left might get beyond that.) They said Oglesby was the chief Maoist and had manipulated his own riseto power. Carl had no real organizer's skills, and he lost heart in the New Left with the death of his friends. The SDS did not fail due to the Weathermen, but because Carl seized power and then lost heart.

I'm willing to believe that he is now a Libertarian, but there is no way he expressed that point of view then. The whole SDS Convention knew he was a Maoist, and he never denied it in 1968.

Jesse Walker|3.26.08 @ 12:55PM|#

Two friends who attended the 1968 SDS convention returned to tell me that the Maoists had taken over the SDS. They said this in triumph, as they were quite sympathetic to that point of view. (I was disappointed. I had hoped the New Left might get beyond that.) They said Oglesby was the chief Maoist and had manipulated his own riseto power. Carl had no real organizer's skills, and he lost heart in the New Left with the death of his friends.

Carl Oglesby was SDS chief from 1965 to 1966, not in 1968. And the Greenwich Village deaths didn't happen until 1970.

Episiarch|3.26.08 @ 12:58PM|#

Now I don't know what to believe!

Jesse Walker|3.26.08 @ 12:59PM|#

I think Blaupanzer is confusing Carl Oglesby with Carl Davidson, another SDS activist (and a bona fide Maoist).

Episiarch|3.26.08 @ 1:03PM|#

Well, in all of their defense, they were probably pretty high at the time.

Paul|3.26.08 @ 1:06PM|#

"humanistic individualism and voluntaristic associational action."

So he wasn't exactly immune from the jargon-riddled patois of the 60's.

Paul|3.26.08 @ 1:16PM|#

Whatever decision gets made, it should be democratic. It was on that basis that SDS cut through the whole argument about socialism vs. capitalism. We simply said that whatever economic formation we adopted should be adopted democratically and openly.

Could this be the core of what ultimately turned out so wrong with the left? That they saw an opportunity to make economics itself democratically controlled, and thus we now have the world where the left believes that things like property rights should democratized?

|3.26.08 @ 1:16PM|#

Episiarch,

Maoist movement high.

Episiarch|3.26.08 @ 1:19PM|#

Maoist movement high.

Is that the extreme altitude high you get when you invade Tibet?

Jesse Walker|3.26.08 @ 1:22PM|#

I think it was a song by Bizarro-World John Denver.

|3.26.08 @ 1:26PM|#

And it's Jesse for the win. Though Episiarch's answer adds a nice nuance to the whole tune.

Maoist mountain high.
Damned Dalai Lama. Maoist mountain high.

|3.26.08 @ 1:27PM|#

"I think Blaupanzer is confusing Carl Oglesby with Carl Davidson, another SDS activist (and a bona fide Maoist)."

Jesse may be right. After 40 years, maybe all the Carls blend together in my head. I still do not recall any SDSers who were in agreement with Goldwater (i.e., libertarians) in Oglesby's period of time.

Episiarch|3.26.08 @ 1:29PM|#

Bizarro-World John Denver am me favorite singer-songwriter.

|3.26.08 @ 1:30PM|#

Is that the same Carl who blew up Bushwood under questionable circumstances? I didn't know that was politically motivated.

Jesse Walker|3.26.08 @ 1:51PM|#

After 40 years, maybe all the Carls blend together in my head. I still do not recall any SDSers who were in agreement with Goldwater (i.e., libertarians) in Oglesby's period of time.

I've read enough of Oglesby's '60s stuff to know that he wasn't a 100% pure libertarian on every issue. His basic values were solid, though, and he didn't have any totalitarian tendencies; I would be very surprised to learn it if he was carrying a torch for Chairman Mao.

He also got more libertarian as he got older. Indeed, the one time I actually met him, in 1991, was at a Libertarian Party convention. We sat at the same table during a Ron Paul speech that blew Oglesby away.

|3.26.08 @ 2:10PM|#

If I remember rightly Karl Hess joined the SDS.

And he wrote speeches for Goldwater.

|3.26.08 @ 2:21PM|#

Mind you, I'm also pretty sure that Karl was pretty much an outlier in the organization.

Kolohe|3.26.08 @ 2:49PM|#

Ah, 'Students for a Democratic Society.' Worse misnomer since the Holy Roman Empire.

|3.26.08 @ 2:53PM|#

Whenever I imagine what it would had been like to be a part of the group of twentysomething radicals in The Weathermen, I just imagine what it would be like if all of my idiot twentysomething friends, people who can't even keep a rock band together, where to gang together and try to overthrow the government.

|3.26.08 @ 5:25PM|#

"Ah, 'Students for a Democratic Society.' Worst misnomer since the Holy Roman Empire."

It wasn't a ridiculous misnomer until the Maoists took over. For a brief moment, the Left almost got reinvented as a democratic movement -- "overcome the republic by becoming even more democratic." This direction did not serve either the Socialists (read: those of the New Right by the later era under Bushes I and II) or the government (read: all organizations in that 60's era were viewed as either for the current system or as representing "evil Communists" (an unnecessary redundency)). One way or the other the ideals fell to be replaced by the intelligence guys' nightmare.

|3.26.08 @ 5:31PM|#

From what I understand, it was Oglesby who brought the communist factions into SDS by removing the organization's anti-communism stance.

|3.26.08 @ 5:33PM|#

You've got to remember that SDS was a very new organization, and the fact that I had just come in the door was not unique; a lot of people were in the same position. There had been a movement to get rid of the national officers on the grounds that to have a president, a vice president, a national secretary, was inherently elitist. I spoke against that, saying that SDS was going to be a part of the world and needed to have spokespeople it could hold to account. That position won out, somebody nominated me for president, and the winner turned out to be me.

That's interesting; the current SDS has no national leadership and operate on a commune/co-op kind of structure, even when it comes to local chapters. I'd say that the former would be better for the reasons he said.

Gene Berkman|3.26.08 @ 5:43PM|#

Carl Oglesby was a featured speaker in 1970 @ the "Left Right Festival of Liberation" sponsored by the California Libertarian Alliance. His speech was well delivered, although I am not sure what the substantive points were.

Carl hung out both days of the convention, and on Monday hung out with Karl Hess (our other featured speaker) and some of the organizers. He was still developing his thoughts, but clearly in a libertarian direction. And he was not in any way a Maoist.

I met Karl Hess originally at the 1969 YAF National Convention, and he showed me his SDS membership card. Then following the 1970 CLA conference, he joined the IWW at a party with a group of anarchists.

economist|3.26.08 @ 7:53PM|#

I have none of Oglesby's faith in democracy.

|3.26.08 @ 9:49PM|#

Also, a while ago I asked some old SDS members whatever their was a libertarian presence within SDS and one of them said "fuck no."
All three of them were Marxists, so I'd guess by the end of SDS came, the libertarians where completely ousted.

Matt|3.27.08 @ 10:49AM|#

"The decision to take up weapons, to become violent-that was not a democratically reached decision."

So according to theses liberals, the violence was fine if there had been a vote.

The Founders understood democracy was bad because it would not protected the rights of the individual. Liberals are ALWAYS trying to confuse these principles. References in this article: Democracy - 13, Freedom - 0, Liberty - 0.