BOOKS
Facing the Future
NEVER STOP RUNNING: ALLARD LOWENSTEIN AND THE
STRUGGLE TO SAVE AMERICAN LmERALISM. By William H.
Chafe.
Basic Books.
$28.00.
149
Reading about the late Allard Lowenstein, in this superb biography
by Duke University historian William Chafe, reminded me of a definition
Theodore Roosevelt once gave when asked to explain what he meant
when he called himself a Progressive. "A progressive," Roosevelt told his
inquisitor, "is a conservative who resolutely sets his face towards the fu–
ture." Allard Lowenstein was the last of the old Cold War liberals, a
man who sought to wage a crusade to save a floundering liberalism. But
in the sense that T.R. meant it, it is clear that Lowenstein was well
within the American mainstream, a conservative who sought incremental
reform and who was as bitterly opposed to those who sought to ditch
the democratic system for either Communism or Fascism as he was in fa–
vor of forthright action to end segregation at home and to push U.S.
opposition to the
apartheid
regime in South Africa.
But who was Allard Lowenstein? Unless one was active in the 1960s,
his is no longer a household name. Today's students, knowledgeable
about Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson,
would be hard-pressed to include him in the pantheon of important
Amerians of that era. And yet, as Chafe proves in this book, Lowenstein
was perhaps the major player in a period of turmoil and change in the
American political arena. In three key areas, his dynamism and inspiration
provided the steam and the wherewithal for the creation of social
movements that began to change the political landscape. Lowenstein was
perhaps the first white American to focus his attention on the oppressive
situation existing in South Africa. In 1959, he traveled there and became
involved in a dangerous and clandestine mission
to
help Hans Beukes, a
South-West African student, escape the country and testifY to the United
Nations about
apartheid.
Secondly, Lowenstein's commitment to civil
rights at home led him to build a student movement against segregation,
and it was his efforts and ideas that led to the famous Freedom Summer
of 1964, in which scores of white Northern students descended on
Mississippi to help Southern black activists in the early Student Non–
Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) register the local disenfran–
chised black population to vote. Finally, Lowenstein's most memorable
accomplishment, for which he was rightfully best known, was the cre–
ation of the "dump Johnson" movement in 1968. An opponent of the
Vietnam War, Lowenstein accomplished what Chafe calls "one of the
