BLACK POWER
45
to stand on his own two feet, to make his own decisions, to develop
self-reliance and a sense of self-worth.ll SNCC may be scornful of
present-day liberals and "statism," but it seems hardly to realize that
the laissez faire rhetoric it prefers, derives almost verbatim from the
classic liberalism of John Stuart Mill.
A final, more intangible affinity between Anarchism and the
entire New Left, including the advocates of Black Power, is in the
area of personal style. Both hold up similar values for highest praise
and emulation: simplicity, spontaneity, "naturalness" and "primi–
tivism." Both reject modes of dress, music, personal relations, even
of intoyication, which might be associated with the dominant middle–
class culture. Both, finally, tend to link the basic virtues with "the
people," and especially with the poor, the downtrodden, the alien–
ated. It is this
lumpenproletariat
-long kept outside the "system"
and thus uncorrupted by its values - who are looked to as a reposi–
tory of virtue, an example of a better way. The New Left, even
while demanding that the lot of the underclasses be improved, im–
plicitly venerates that lot; the desire to cure poverty cohabits with
the wish to emulate
it.
The Anarchist movement in the United States never made
much headway. A few individuals - Benjamin Tucker, Adin Bal–
lou, Lysander Spooner, Stephen Pearl Andrews, Emma Goldman,
Josiah Warren - are still faintly remembered, but more for the style
of their lives than for any impact on their society.12
It
is not difficult
to see what prevented them from attracting a large following. Their
very distaste for organization and power precluded the traditional
11. For more detailed discussions of the way in which the rhetoric of the
New Left and the traditional Right have begun to merge, see Ronald
Hamowy, "Left and Right Meet,"
The New Republic,
March 12, 1966;
Martin Duberman, "Anarchism Left and Right,"
Partisan Review,
Fall,
1966; Paul Feldman, "The Pathos of 'Black Power,'''
Dissent,
Jan.-Feb.,
1967; and Carl Oglesby and Richard Schau1l,
Containment and Change
(MacmiIIan: 1967). In the latter Oglesby (p. 167) seems actually to call
for a merger between the two groups, arguing that both are "in the grain
of American humanist individualism and voluntaristic associational action."
He confuses, it seems to me, a similarity of rhetoric and of means with a
similarity of goals.
12. The only over-all study of American Anarchism is Eunice M. Schuster,
Native American Anarchism,
(Northampton: 1932). But some useful biog–
raphies exist of individual figures in the movement; see especially, Richard
Drinnon,
Rebel in Paradise: A Biography of Emma Goldman
(Chicago :
1961) .
