People of this Generation: The Meaning of Youth in the New Left

This dissertation examines the meaning of youthfulness in the New Left. Too often slogans like "don't trust anyone over thirty" stand in as the dominant message from the era, but activists approached the topic with more uncertainty than this catchphrase suggests. In the early 1960s activists struggled to be taken seriously as adult citizens, downplaying their youthful status and struggling with a mass media that lauded youth involvement but also offered subtle condescension. Organizers also began building a movement culture that embraced an upside down view of life, where the last could be first and the youngest could be wisest, ideas that would feed a later emphasis on youth revolution. But, even in the late 1960s, the movement contained ideological diversity about the relationship of youth and radicalism. For many, youth status offered an identity apart from racial or economic privilege, thus to embrace being a youth movement was a way to organize around one's own oppression. Activists also drew on a tradition of associating youth with life, energy and beauty-- traits that went particularly well with a movement opposed to the "death culture" spawning war in Vietnam. Some embraced the media image of out of control youth, turning this into a badge of pride. Others, however, realized the limits of a youth revolution frame and the ways that movement culture was feeding a media obsession with a de-politicized generation gap. Painfully aware of the charge that they would someday outgrow radicalism, some activists began to ask questions about how to become life-long radicals. They critiqued a simplistic embrace of youth culture and moved away from privileging youth as the vanguard of revolution. Race and gender impacted this since for women and for youth of color the idea of youth as a class was simply unnecessary and could inhibit more potent organizing frames. Ultimately, there was nothing inevitable about radical youth in the 1960s infusing their life stage with revolutionary meaning. This was a created and contested part of movement culture, a volatile element that activists have, ever since, struggled to define and control.