When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America's First Mass Student Movement, 1929-1941

by Robert Cohen

The Depression era saw the first mass student movement in American history. The crusade, led in large part by young Communists, was both an anti-war campaign and a movement championing a broader and more egalitarian vision of the welfare state than that of the New Dealers. The movement arose from a massive political awakening on campus, caused by the economic crisis of the 1930s, the escalating international tensions, and threat of world war wrought by fascism. At its peak, in the late 1930s, the movement mobilized at least a half million collegians in annual strikes against war. Never before, and not again until the 1960s, were so many undergraduates mobilized for political protest in the United States. The movement lost nearly all its momentum in 1939, when the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact served to discredit the student Communist leaders. Adding to the emerging portrait of political life in the 1930s, this book is the result of an extraordinary amount of research,
has fascinating individual stories to tell, and offers the first comprehensive history of this student insurgency.

456 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

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Robert Cohen is a professor of history and social studies in NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. He is an affiliated member of NYU’s History Department. His historical scholarship focuses on politics, higher education, and social protest in twentieth century America. His social studies work links middle and high school teachers with the recent advances in historical scholarship and develops curriculum aimed at teaching their students to explore history as a critical discipline – and one that is characterized by intense and exciting debate.

Source:NYU.