A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s

by Rebecca E. Klatch

The 1960s was not just an era of civil rights, anti-war protest, women's liberation, hippies, marijuana, and rock festivals. The untold story of the 1960s is in fact about the New Right. For young conservatives the decade was about Barry Goldwater, Ayn Rand, an important war in the fight against communism, and Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). In A Generation Divided , Rebecca Klatch examines the generation that came into political consciousness during the 1960s, telling the story of both the New Right and the New Left, and including the voices of women as well as men. The result is a riveting narrative of an extraordinary decade, of how politics became central to the identities of a generation of people, and how changes in the political landscape of the 1980s and 1990s affected this identity.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Sociology, Politics

400 pages, Paperback

First published October 20, 1999

Reviews

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Valuable study of the often unexpected convergences (and totally predictable divergences) between the leftist activists affiliated with Students for a Democratic Society and the conservative activists of the Young Americans for Freedom during the 1960s. Probably most important as an archive of first person reflections on the paths that led them to their political stances and the tensions that emerged on both sides of the spectrum.

[Billy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rebecca Klatch’s A Generation Divided, a book in which she asserts that the Right reasserted itself on American Campuses alongside the left. The “new left” of the 1960s continues to dominate American public memory. This liberal movement made up of students that lacked the intellectual underpinnings of previous liberal, leftist movements. Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, formed in 1960, but released the Port Huron Statement in 1962. Simultaneously, the right was also repositioning itself. In 1960, William F. Buckley hosted a group of young conservatives at his home in Connecticut. They proposed the “Sharon” statement, which pushed for free markets as a cornerstone of democracy. Thus the Young Americans for Freedom was born. Former YAF members reached power with the presidency of Richard M. Nixon and later within Reagan’s administration. So the question remains: If these groups grew up in the same decade of conformity, why did they choose such divergent political paths?

Klatch revisited former SDSers during the 1990s and discovers that many maintain the ideals of their youth.

SDSers focused on – Vietnam, Civil Rights,
YAFers focused on – Barry Goldwater, the Rise of Reagan

The “new right” was not formed from a reaction to SDSers or the New Left; their most important political documents, the Port Huron Statement and the Sharron Statement, were both drafted in 1960.The extremes of Vietnam and Government responses to protests—which often turned violent—moved some member of both the YAF and the SDS further to the extreme polls of their political spectrum (libertarians).

[Chelsea Szendi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Klatch asks an important question that gets dropped out of a lot of studies of the new left in the 1960s: why the new LEFT? What about youth on the right?

She examines transformations underway in a younger generation of activists on both the left and the right in the 1960s and after (finding that the Reagan era had a whole demographic primed by participation in the new right, e.g.). The research is based heavily on interviews of former participants. For me, the most interesting aspect was that both poles of the ideological spectrum had a very awkward time of facing "the woman question."