JEFFREY HERF
Striking a Balance:
Remembering 1968 and After
Tomorrow is my fifty-first birthday. From the perspective of this advanced
age, five years is a very short time. But the five years between 1965 and
1970 felt like a very long time indeed. I joined the New Left early enough
to have strong ties to its anti-authoritarian, culturally anarchic, highly
intellectual period and yet was still young and very involved when it
turned towards Marxist-Leninist vanguards, authoritarian and totalitarian
politics, anti-intellectualism, and violence. I stepped back from the mael–
strom and, unlike some New Left friends, survived with mind and body
intact. The issue of how the New Left moved from Port Huron to
Weatherman, and how it self-destructed, has preoccupied historians of the
period. For me this is less a matter of historical scholarship than bitter–
sweet memory of the breaks and continuities between 1968 and the radical
Left of 1969 and the early 1970s.
In 1968, I had been in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) for
three years, having joined as a freshman at Grinnell College when we trav–
eled to Washington, DC for the second national demonstration agains t the
war in Vietnam in October of 1965. Mter I transferred to the University of
Wisconsin-Madison in the fall of 1966, I continued to participate in SDS,
but, even more importantly, in the remarkable ·intellectual Left, especially
among historians , in Madison of those years. The liberal faculty who were
close to the New Left included William A. Williams, William Taylor,
Robert Starobin, Haavey Goldberg, and Richard Hamilton (now the direc–
tor of the Center for European Studies at Ohio State University). Two
German refugee scholars, the sociologist Hans Gerth, and the European cul–
tural and intellectual historian George Mosse were most important for me.
Many scholars, including some prominent scholars and intellectuals
who were then graduate students and undergraduates , emerged from
Madison's intellectual hothouse. The ones I knew included Jessica
Benjamin, Paul Breines, Wini Breines, Paul Buhle, John Cumbler, John
Coatsworth, Stuart Ewen, Elizabeth Ewen,
Ann
Gordon, Russell Jacoby ,
Editor's note:
"Striking a Balance" was originally presented as a paper at the "1968
Revisited" Conference at Ohio Uruversity in Athens, Ohio, April 23-25, 1998.
