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FREEDOMWAYS    FOURTH QUARTER 1966 
 
  The New Left has been charged by a former adherent, Donald Jackson, in the Williams College Record with being "an amalgam of students lost in their personal alienation from well-to-do parents, middle-class homes and dull mechanical colleges.... For [them] Leftism is not a political commitment but a late adolescent life style in-corporating the dimly remembered slogans from the failure of the Thirties, the chronic Tory radicalism of upper-class do-gooders, the radical individualism of Emerson and Thoreau, plus large slices of misunderstood Camus." That is to say the New Left is both ahistorical and apolitical-notwithstanding its everlasting talk of politics.
  The reasons why this is so are rooted in the relationship of white students to the American society. As they themselves declare in the Port Huron statement, "We are the people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit." They seem not to understand that the principal question of this moment in history is precisely their right to inherit. They seem not to understand, too, how their "radical opposition" to the Establishment is fundamentally different from that of a Mississippi share-cropper or a Watts "rioter" whose life is being strangled by that Establishment. Not understand these things, their attacks on the power structure resemble old rites of puberty. Their rebellion unfortunately is more Oedipal than political. (In the end the students seem to pack their peace with the society, accept their heritage and-unlike Thomas Wolfe-go on home again.) In this connection, it is interesting to note that only one of the authors still maintains a full time working relationship with the Movement. The others have either taken up gainful employment with the "system" or returned to their studies. Indeed, one is even an aide of the Mayor of a large midwestern city.
  It would be incorrect, however, to overlook the contribution to history made by these young people. It was after all the young white students who went with SNCC into Mississippi in the summer of '64; it was the young white students who vigiled for the Mississippi Free-dom Democratic Party in Atlantic City and protested apartheid at Chase Manhattan. It was these same young people, responding to the call of conscience, who shattered the belief that freedom could be won in American through the use of moral power alone. That myth was killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi, with Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman. In most ways that are pertinent the New Left represented in this book have "paid their dues." It was the nature of the task which defeated them.

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Transcription Notes:
in-corporating and Free-dom was dashed in the middle as it was cut off and continues on the next line.