The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics. - book reviews

Reason, Feb, 1998 by John A. Andrew, III

Two years before SDS's better-known "Port Huron Statement," YAF came out with its own angry rebel yell, the "Sharon Statement," which characterized the late 1950s - the very period contemporary conservatives invoke as an American Eden - as a "time of moral and political crisis." Largely written by M. Stanton Evans, the Sharon Statement is pitched to youthful idealists - "It is the responsibility of the youth of America to affirm certain eternal truths" - who saw danger in creeping governmental centralization.

"Foremost among the transcendent values is the individual's use of his...free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force," reads the statement. "Liberty is indivisible, and that political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom." At the same time, the statement invoked Cold War containment politics that suggested national interests could be placed ahead of individual rights: "The forces of international Communism are, at present, the greatest single threat to these liberties...the United States should stress victory over, rather than coexistence with, this menace." Hence, YAF supported the peacetime draft and its early national director, Douglas Caddy, defended before Congress the loyalty-oath provisions of the National Defense Education Act, arguing state intervention was justified in the name of national security.

As Andrew notes, this mix of individual liberty and collective response was not particularly stable and would in fact lead to significant splits within the organization. But he also notes that "more than anything else...their anticommunism bound them together and made possible agreement despite the conflicting strains of conservative thought." (Throughout the book, Andrew identifies libertarians - "libs" - as a subset of"conservatives." Which, in a YAF context and the context of the times, they were.)

The Other Side of the Sixties details YAF's activities during the early 1960s, especially its significant contribution to Goldwater's nomination. Members testified before Congress, published essays and op-eds excoriating every manifestation of liberalism, proselytized on college campuses, and pulled the GOP rightward by lobbying for hard-core conservative candidates and issues. A measure of YAF's appeal was their 1962 "Conservative Rally for World Liberation from Communism" in New York, which pulled an "overflow crowd" to Madison Square Garden. Dues-paying membership probably peaked around 30,000 and YAF was considered important - and subversive - enough to be surveilled by the federal government and regularly attacked by other student groups such as SDS.

But, Andrew argues persuasively, the group's real contribution cannot be measured in numbers, or even be understood only in terms of the '60s themselves. "Although never able to transform electoral politics or enact dramatic reforms during the period," he writes, "YAF infiltrated the Republican Party at the grass roots and served as a breeding ground for future generations of conservative leaders. The Goldwater defeat in 1964, often considered a lethal blow to conservatism, stilled neither the excitement nor the commitment of [young conservatives]."