The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left In America. - Review - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1999 by John McMillian

The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left In America. By Douglas C. Rossinow (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. 498pp. $32.50).

Throughout the long, dark years of the Cold War, before anyone ever imagined that hundreds of thousands of black and white college students would soon initiate a broad, mass-based political movement, the city of Austin, Texas was a tough place for liberals. When University of Texas president Homer Rainey acted in defense of the values of freedom of speech and thought on his campus in the 1940s, for example, he was simply fired. In response, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) "blacklisted" the university, and students boycotted their classes. At one point, as many as eight thousand students even rallied before the state capitol, carrying a black coffin that bore the words: "academic freedom." But in the end, these protests mattered little. Right-wing extremism carried the day at UT, and anyone involved in even the most minor forms of social deviance, whether by supporting labor groups, expressing a limited tolerance for homosexuality, or reading such "obscene" works as John Dos Passos's The Big Money, was likely to face grave charges of "pinko-communism." As one journalist remembered, in the age of McCarthyism, "there was a venom in [Texas] politics." [1]

So what did liberals do? As Doug Rossinow relates in The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America, a small cadre of students found refuge from the reactionary politics of their day, as well as from the stifling conformism of the "football, beer drinking" culture at UT, in a tradition of Christian existentialism. At such outposts as the Christian Faith-and-Life Community and the University YMCA-YWCA, disaffected young people found a free space for discussion and extra-curricular education, and they drew radical inferences from their exposure to social gospel Christianity and existential philosophy. Consequently, many students began to discern a possible escape from their own alienation and estrangement in a latent ethic of "authenticity." "The sense of anxiety and the need to confront it, the preference for the concrete over the abstract, the importance of decision and personal responsibility, the attractiveness of situational ethics, the desire for a vital life, and, ab ove all, the search for a life of authenticity in touch with the 'really real'" --these were the quasi-religious values that would resonate with and help to politicize the small left enclaves of Austin.

The interest that these students expressed in "the politics of authenticity" might have come to naught, however, if the cultural ethos that these organizations helped produce did not merge, in the early l960s, with the burgeoning civil rights movement. This marked an occasion where liberals broke away from politics-as-usual in Texas, as white students began to ask searching questions about the values that lay behind American society, the priorities they wished to embrace, and the people they wished to become. Henceforth, the social and political concerns of many of these students became intertwined. Though "authenticity" sometimes seems an elusive adjective, Rossinow opines that it "lay at the heart of the new left," and his study aims to explain how a pervasive quest for the "really real" became so closely linked with a sense of social mission.

Of course, few things raise the ire of new left partisans more than the charge that the massive movement of the l960s was driven primarily by student angst; that it merely represented a plaintive cri de coeur that otherwise existed in an "ideological vacuum." [2] Frequently, activists of the era were parodied as frustrated "True Believers," who, in Eric Hoffer's formulation, used mass movements as an anodyne for their own damaged psyches and unfulfilled selves. [3] Though this is not exactly Rossinow's view, his thesis might bring some discomfort to sixties-sympathizers. These readers would do well to heed Rossinow's admonishment that the search for authenticity in no way depoliticized the new left. For although the movement "did emerge from an intersection of personal and political concerns," this is the case "with all movements." In coming to terms with this aspect of new left history, Rossinow hopes we will be better equipped to understand "how it emerged from the larger fabric of American culture and wha t it meant for the development of American political life." [4]

Local studies, of course, carry both risks and advantages; Rossinow manages them well. In focusing on the development of the new left in Austin, one gains a richer understanding of the forces that led students on conservative campuses, without any ties to the old left and far removed from the high-powered intellectual circles of New York, Berkeley, or Ann Arbor, to form a major radical constituency. Yet at the same time, Rossinow relates this story in the context of larger national developments, including the emergence of Black Power, feminism, and the freak subculture of the late 1960s. While notable personalities like Al Haber and Tom Hayden certainly played important roles in the development of the new left, this was at bottom a wide-ranging, grassroots movement. As such, institutional or SDS-centric accounts of this history are bound to be limited. [5]