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THE EDUCATION OF THE NEW LEFT IN COLUMBIA, MISSOURI, 1961-1967
Travis Seay
2006
In the spring of 1967, administrators at the University of Missouri (MU) commenced
their second stage of closing down the New Left in Columbia, Missouri.i On April 20, Dean of
Students Jack Matthews fired off a note to Dean Robert Callis: “Any chance of putting the Navy
back in the Union, and ‘drawing a line on the floor’? I am completely fed up with some of these
people, and I think it is high time to have a real ‘confrontation’ if this exceedingly small minority
of students desires one.” Since the previous academic year, left-leaning student groups had
engaged the administration in a debate over the proper use of the student union. At the center of
the debate stood the question of whether or not to allow military recruiters to set up tables in the
union while the administration denied access to the local Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
and to the Columbia Free Press, a student publication. In 1967 the debate intensified, and the
administration’s change in tone marked a transition between two phases of Columbia’s New
Left. The first phase began in 1961, and the second ended in about 1970.ii In opposing the
Navy’s presence in the student union, both the older and newer activists took up the banner of
free speech that had inspired Berkeley students in the fall of 1964, and both recalled the
spectacular antiwar march on Washington the following spring. The newer phase of activism—
based in the university’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and propelled
mainly by the growing national antiwar movement—lacked, however, something that
Columbia’s early New Left had managed to acquire: a political identity that owed as much to its
community-based work as to its affiliation with a national organization.
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A similar overlap of organizational attitudes had begun to transform the national SDS
only two years prior to the change in Columbia’s New Left. At the outset of the sixties, SDS had
been an obscure organization. Although its membership rolls listed mainly the sons and
daughters of former leftist activists, it initially consisted of small student associations in and
around Ann Arbor, Michigan; Berkeley, California; Madison, Wisconsin; and New York City
and hardly seemed like a group that would, over the course of the decade, disrupt universities
nationwide and invoke the anger of millions of Americans. But its profile grew quickly after the
April 1965 antiwar rally in Washington. New chapters sprang up across the country, particularly
on campuses in the West and Midwest. In June, dozens of “Prairie Power” radicals arrived at the
national SDS convention in Kewadin, Michigan. The organization’s “old guard” viewed the
newcomers as unread, inarticulate, inexperienced, and hostile toward a centralized SDS. Indeed,
the new members tended to skip discussions about the Old Left, and they walked out of meetings
in which old guarders presented papers on political theory. They opted instead to speak
extemporaneously about the immorality of war and racism. Whereas the old guard inherited
from its forebears a tradition of unionism and student activism, their Prairie Power counterparts
came to SDS as initiates in the civil rights and antiwar movements. And the newcomers strongly
preferred local community action to planning on a national scale. At the Kewadin convention
and during the subsequent months, the newcomers changed the complexion of SDS. Young men
and women from the West and Midwest continued to pour into the organization, and the year
following the convention saw a 300% rise in membership.iii
To many in the old guard it appeared that undisciplined, emotional radicalism had
replaced comparatively rational, methodical radicalism. Concerned primarily with local chapter
work, the new New Left significantly weakened the authority of SDS’s national office, and the
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society became a scattershot arrangement of local chapters. Still, almost overnight, SDS grew to
be a mass organization, subject to the glare of the national media and to the scrutiny of the
government. Toward the end of the sixties, a couple of New Left factions increasingly used
revolutionary rhetoric to express frustrations and courted violence as a remedy for America’s
political and social defects. Aside from raising the ire and anxiety of a great number of
Americans, such actions undermined the New Left’s credibility in the public eye. By the mid
seventies, only traces remained of what had been the largest student movement in American
history.
Since the late sixties, scholars of the movement have flooded shelves with explanations
of the New Left’s rapid rise and fall. Though many have focused on the ways in which student
activists ruined their public image, others have targeted the movement’s overall intellectual
integrity. For Christopher Lasch protestors of the sixties lacked a firm grounding in socialist
theory. Having come of age in Cold War America, baby boomers missed an opportunity to
develop viable alternatives to modern political and social institutions. Put simply, the cultural
environment “made it difficult to get a political education in the fifties,” thereby consigning the
young left to a stint of uninformed and ultimately unsuccessful activism.iv
Unsound preparation in socialist theory likewise composes part of Todd Gitlin’s
diagnosis of the ailing left. An old guard veteran of the movement, Gitlin links the theory gap to
differences between the original members of SDS and those who joined around the summer of
1965. In his view, the two sides diverged sharply in their processes of radicalization. The
second “generation” entered the movement as reactionaries to their “right wing” environments.
Moreover, “as cultural rebels they tended to skip the stage of consciousness that marked the Old
Guard generation and informed its politics: a radical disappointment with existing liberal
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institutions, liberal promises, and liberal hopes.”v Gitlin leaves a tenuous connection between the
missing “stage of consciousness” and the collapse of the New Left. He implies that by the midsixties the absence of a proper socialist education left SDS with an immoderate, inexperienced
leadership that lacked a vocabulary for addressing the fundamental inadequacies of American
liberal reforms. Like most New Left scholars of his generation, Gitlin casts the movement in
terms of its shortcomings as a national program. Unlike the vast majority of New Left
commentators, however, he inches open the door to New Left studies by suggesting that the new
generation of young activists be placed in its local context.
Local studies of the New Left are a relatively recent phenomenon, particularly when
discussing communities in the interior of the United States. Two decades after Gitlin’s
embryonic description of the newcomers’ political education, Doug Rossinow points out the
irony that virtually no bottom-up histories have been written of the New Left, which emphasized
the potential of participatory democracy, took up the banner of the underprivileged, and
conferred to the historical profession the idea of the bottom-up account. With The Politics of
Authenticity, which traces the New Left’s development at the University of Texas—Austin,
Rossinow contributes to bottom-up local studies of protest activity in the sixties. He broadly
defines the New Left as a youth movement in search of meaningful relationships as an antidote
to the spiritual alienation that characterized life in late capitalist society. By placing Austin at
the convergence of postwar liberal politics, turn of the century populism, early manifestations of
the civil rights movement, and a well-established student Christian movement, Rossinow argues
that the UT community helped to generate the New Left’s existentialist response to alienation.vi
His reconstruction of local New Leftists’ incipient political and cultural attitudes stands out
among scholarly works on the sixties.
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To be sure, several works trace the origins of the most prominent New Left campus
movements, particularly Berkeley and Columbia University;vii discussions of less prominent
schools supplement our knowledge of the New Left at the local stratum.viii Still, the former
generally present their subjects as archetypical events, basing their assumptions about the
movement on the motivations and attitudes of a particular segment of activists, and the latter
largely investigate the degree to which their subjects either conform to or deviate from the
Berkeley and Columbia University prototypes. Accordingly, local studies reinforce the
conventional late sixties and SDS paradigms. Kenneth Heineman argues that such reliance on
SDS and elite university models neglects the “differing cultural and historical context of each
campus community.” Indeed, although it would be a mistake to downplay the influence that the
most famous movements had on student left communities in the heartland, a significant gap in
New Left history remains: few scholars have investigated in any depth the impact that activists
in outlying left communities had on the organization of the national movement. The question of
how attitudes about organization developed within local communities underlies this problem.
The construction of a bottom-up history of the New Left, if it is to continue, requires the
consideration of such matters.
This paper offers a case study of the New Left’s development in a Midwestern university
community. At the outset of the sixties, a militant movement emerged in Columbia, Missouri. It
fit the old guard description of Kewadin’s newcomers in four important ways. First, Columbia’s
New Left grew largely out of civil rights activism. Second, it developed in a politically
conservative environment. Third, it had virtually no exposure to the Old Left. These three
factors conditioned the fourth characteristic: its anti-hierarchical, decentralized pattern of
organization. By placing these features in their local context, this study links attitudes about
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organization to some of the processes by which activists acquired and expressed their identities
as members of the political left. In doing so, it reveals a few ways in which organizational traits
became integrated into activists’ value systems. First, the composition of Columbia’s New Left
reflected the experiential diversity within the local civil rights movement, and its leaders
consciously paralleled their goals and strategies with those of the national Civil Rights
Movement. Second, New Left activists expressed aversion to the uniformity of American Cold
War ideology and viewed it as an agent of their political miseducation. Alienated from the
mainstream, they pursued alternatives that tolerated dissent. Third, they sought ways to
compensate for the political rootlessness wrought by their Cold War education. These included
drawing from academic interests, invoking symbols of the left from the past, employing a system
of self-education, and engaging in individual, experimental acts of protest. By linking
themselves to the resulting image of their leftist heritage, they incorporated diversity and the
freedom of individual development as key components of their identity. So rather than being a
distinguishing trait of a well-meaning yet uninformed faction of New Left upstarts, decentralized
organization represented a sharpened perception of political dissent. In short, it became integral
to the radical mindset in Columbia during the early sixties.
This study borrows from Wini Breines’ critique of the “instrumental” theory of
democratic organization forwarded by several sociologists in the late sixties. Brienes explains
that Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, and others insisted that the recognition
of a group’s political efficacy required evidence that it achieved its goals through deliberation
and compromise, as do the major parties in American representative democracy. Lipset in
particular dismissed what he saw as the New Left’s anti-political stance and ineptitude as
articulator, let alone achiever, of specific goals. More “expressive . . . than instrumental,” New
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Left politics showed itself to be incapable “of effecting major social change.”ix Breines argues
for a broader definition of organized political behavior. Her use of the term prefigurative politics
aids in the identification and interpretation of New Left strategies for constructing a democratic
society. The central task of prefigurative politics, she writes, was “to create and sustain within
the live practice of the movement, relationships and political forms that ‘prefigured’ and
embodied the desired society.” Thus, in the context of political and cultural alienation brought
on by industrial capitalism since the nineteenth century—a “lack of control at work, school and
play” and an “impersonality and competition in all areas of life”—the sustenance of a
community in opposition to capitalist encroachment, though based on anti-hierarchical,
seemingly anti-political principles, counts as organized political behavior.x This model, with
which Breines emphasizes the tension within SDS’s national office between the New Left’s
second generation politics and the comparatively formalized strategic politics of the old guard, is
helpful in identifying and interpreting nascent, pre-SDS local left communities such as the one in
Columbia during the early sixties.
Columbia’s New Left at a Glance
An old guard member of SDS who visited Columbia prior to 1965 would have gained a sense
of the local left’s rootlessness relative to the national organization. She or he would have found no
local SDS chapter. Moreover, he or she would have seen virtually no references to the Old Left and
might have wondered about the origins of local radicalism on the left. Few if any MU students
could trace a radical lineage in their families. Prior to about 1962, excepting the local CORE,
activist institutions drew little public interest. Labor unions, according to one early New Left
Columbian, comprised “a particularly sad lot here.”xi And although Missourians periodically
flooded the mailrooms of local newspapers with accusations that the University of Missouri harbored
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a throng of communists and socialists, only one faculty member at MU—William Allen, an associate
professor of history—openly confirmed his left politics: he belonged to the Socialist Party of
America. Even so, Allen, who hailed from a wealthy, conservative Chicago suburb and who had
entered his late twenties by 1960, hardly fit the Old Left image.xii
Despite the lack of Old Left influence, however, no visitor to Columbia could justifiably
describe the city’s left as inconsequential. Regular attendance at meetings of the New Fabians,
MU’s student social democratic discussion group, rose from its original membership of twelve in
1961 to between fifty and seventy by the fall of 1964.xiii Discussion topics ranging from “Harlem
and Violence in the Black Ghettos” to “Should the American Left Support Johnson?” yielded
impressive crowds. One of the largest gatherings occurred in the fall of 1963, when a meeting
devoted to participants’ reports on the recent civil rights march on Washington drew 250 people and
resulted in thirty-four new memberships in the New Fabians.xiv
Not only did students show an interest in left politics, but many also contributed to
increasingly visible activism on and near the MU campus. By 1965, for example, student
outspokenness persuaded the university’s administration to abolish its “balanced speakers policy.”
The policy guaranteed a politically conservative speaker for every leftist or liberal who spoke on
campus. The spontaneous outcry of students stemmed from controversy surrounding Socialist Party
leader and former presidential candidate Norman Thomas’s visit to MU in February 1965.
Thomas’s speech attracted an audience of about 1,600; his conservative counterweight, Assistant
Director of the FBI William C. Sullivan, drew around four hundred people. Buoyed by the apparent
interest in socialism, students on the left began to denounce the policy. The Maneater, the
university’s official student newspaper, printed letters and articles critiquing top administrators’
attitude toward Thomas as dismissive and arguing that their open support of Sullivan constituted
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political bias and imbalance.xv A month later, when administrators threatened to cancel national
CORE chairman James Farmer’s appearance because an appropriate balancing speaker could not be
found, an interracial group of students proposed a sit-in at the university chancellor’s office. MU
agreed to an open speakers policy, and Farmer addressed an audience of more than three thousand.xvi
In a separate demonstration the following year supporters of the Columbia Free Press, a
student underground newspaper, challenged with partial success the city’s inconsistent application of
an ordinance that prohibited the sale of periodicals on public property. The Free Press began in the
fall of 1966 as a supporter of Local 45, a university non-academic employee union that went on
strike after MU declined to negotiate with its leaders. Contributors to the Free Press presented the
paper as a substitute for the established dailies that sanitized coverage of the issue and that the
university allowed to sell on campus. The paper’s stories prompted the local American Association
of University Professors (AAUP) to urge the university’s board of curators to negotiate with Local
45 as well as to lift its restriction against the Free Press. Within weeks, MU began talks with
employee representatives, and it allowed the Free Press to sell at one location near the student
union. By the end of the year, the Columbia Free Press averaged about two thousand readers per
month.xvii
In brief, an old guard visitor to Columbia in the early to mid sixties would have noticed
evidence for a burgeoning New Left community but would have seen few familiar progenitors for
such a community. Columbia’s early New Left emerged from an array of organizations and
personalities. Its diverse components borrowed from and sustained one another through the first half
of the sixties, yielding what appeared as a scattered series of protests that met with varying degrees
of success. They in fact represented a forum that periodically furnished unified dissent against
conventional mores and that encouraged an experimental, often individualistic attitude toward
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political activism. Based in a decentralized organizational structure, the diversity both of personal
backgrounds and forms of protest within Columbia’s left became prominent in local activists’
political identities.
Civil Rights, Diversity, and a Multi-Organizational Alliance
A foundation for Columbia’s New Left had been in place since the late fifties, when local
civil rights initiatives began to realize success. Columbia’s CORE chapter provided a rationale for
organizing a coalition on the left. Denied recognition as an official university organization in the
spring of 1959, CORE based itself in the community and waged an ultimately successful five year
campaign against the segregation of Columbia’s public accommodations. Its drive to desegregate
MU’s housing, however, met with considerably less success. Although CORE spearheaded a
program that eventually integrated every on-campus residential facility, the administration continued
to publish a list of university-approved, off-campus dwellings that included segregated buildings.xviii
Pressed by CORE to remove those sites from the list, administrators simply ended their oversight of
off-campus housing. CORE’s determination to realize goals through activism, along with the
impasse it experienced in challenging MU’s administration, argued strongly for a campus-based
movement that could persuade the university to comply with local reforms.xix
In addition to providing a rationale for New Left organization, local civil rights activism
offered the movement an organizational model. CORE’s makeup prefigured an organization that
emphasized experiential diversity as a strength in social contestation. It consisted of professors and
students from area high schools, colleges, and MU. Its interracial membership (fifty percent black
and fifty percent white) offered experiences unlike those in any other Columbia association. White
and black members frequently met for Sunday church services. They worked out strategies in long,
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late-night meetings, and they picketed restaurants and sat down together at lunch counters. After a
December 1960 test case, five CORE members—including John Schopp and Edward Tomich, both
professors at MU, and three students—joined one another in jail when the restaurant’s owner
charged that they had trespassed. The subsequent trial and acquittal of the demonstrators produced
an outpouring of public support and placed Columbia on the map of civil rights battlegrounds.xx
Alliances among the community’s various activist groups extended from CORE’s diverse
membership. By the late fifties, Columbia’s left represented a combination of interests, including
socialism, pacifism, and various shades of liberal politics. All of them intersected in the local civil
rights movement. John Schuder, MU professor of biophysics and an early financial contributor to
Columbia CORE, advised the Student Peace Union and led the Committee for Informed Opinion on
Nuclear Arms; in 1965, he ran for the city council as a socialist. Professor William Allen and
students Jack Hamilton, Jack Logsdon, and Stan Matoren represented overlapping memberships in
CORE, SP, YPSL, and the New Fabians. “We all belong to all,” explained Allen.xxi Others belonged
to other combinations of these, the Council on Religion and Race, and later, SDS. This held true
especially among the movement’s leaders. In the spring of 1963, Allen recruited to the SP Gloria
Newton, an African American and the vice president of Columbia CORE; he later worked with
James Rollins, a black law school student who chaired CORE. Rollins joined SDS after its arrival at
MU in 1965. A number of other civil rights activists held multiple memberships in Columbia’s leftleaning groups. Rory Ellinger, a graduate student in history and SDS’s MU chapter president during
the mid to late sixties, involved himself in several operations. In addition to SDS, he held
memberships in the Young Christian Student Movement, the New Democratic Coalition, and he
later worked on the campaigns of Tom Eagleton and Eugene McCarthy. Ruth Wilhite, another
graduate student in history and an SP member, headed MU’s Student Rights Movement, which
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worked to include in the writing of university reforms not only “‘radicals’ and the committed, but
undergraduates, graduate[ students] and professors.” Gordon Burnside, who became Allen’s
temporary replacement as local contact for the SP during a yearlong sabbatical, joined SDS by
1966.xxii
During the early sixties, this inter-organizational trend mirrored the general pattern of
affiliation among civil rights activists and leftists. But by the mid sixties, Columbia’s alliances on
the left contrasted in a couple of ways with what appeared elsewhere as a reconfigured left. First,
the mid sixties witnessed a parting of ways of, on one side, CORE and the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which had become increasingly militant and separatist, and on the
other, SDS and white liberals. This occurred particularly within civil rights alliances forged in the
Deep South.xxiii Second, toward the mid to late sixties, certain New Left factions grew sectarian and
rigid in their memberships. Both developments limited organizational crossover. In contrast, the
tendency of Columbia’s New Left to retain a civil rights-based, multi-organizational movement
promoted valuable, if unconventional, combinations of activist experiences.xxiv
Membership overlap among CORE, the local SP, the New Fabians Society, and peace
organizations enabled individuals to generate ideas for protest by providing a rich exchange of
information targeted against authoritarian institutions and patterns of repression. The exchange
guided the left in defining local and national problems and in framing responses to them. Identifying
a shared adversary became important to several movement spokespersons. The November 1966
issue of the Columbia Free Press compared the university’s ban on its sale to the censorship of a
short-lived CORE publication called the Catalyst, which criticized MU’s dorm segregation policy.
Prohibited from selling on campus, the monthly folded in 1962 after only three issues. The editors
of the Free Press asked its readership if it too would fall prey to MU’s suppression of free speech.xxv
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By setting up a framework in which social and political dissenters identified their problems, the civil
rights-New Left exchange provided a continuity of purpose.
Continuity on the left became evident not only in locally-printed literature, but also in the
characteristics of local demonstrations. One such demonstration, a “chalk-in” during the spring of
1967, represented a plea for the community to recognize the sincerity and dignity displayed by the
local youth movement, as well as to appreciate the diversity of its membership. In early April, local
police arrested three young men—Gordon Burnside and Vernon Urban, both white MU students,
and James Elmo Black, Jr., of Lincoln University, a black institution in Jefferson City—for defacing
public property. On a stretch of campus sidewalk, the three had chalked messages advertising
Gentle Tuesday, a campus event that invited students to put aside political and cultural differences
and to peacefully gather outdoors for a picnic and recreation day. Burnside and Urban each received
a forty-five day jail sentence; Black received thirty days. William Allen responded with a letter to
Chief of Police Paul Cheavens. He wrote that on April 17 he would lead a demonstration against the
excessive sentences outside the Boone County Courthouse; he planned to write an excerpt from the
Declaration of Independence on the sidewalk. Allen informed the chief that he would do everything
in his power to make the chalk-in an orderly event.xxvi Between eight hundred and 1,500 people
marched to the courthouse at the designated time. After chalking “that all men are created equal”
onto the sidewalk, Allen spoke to the mass of students, professors, police officers, and passers-by:
“We must begin to work patiently together—whether the person is a student or a townsman” and
regardless of physical appearances. The crowd dispersed without incident. That evening, Allen and
MU Student Body President John Leet addressed the Columbia city council. In addition to
recommending the amendment of the anti-graffiti ordinance in order to allow chalk writing, they
criticized a recently-released county court document that referred to “some students [as] ‘creeps and
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weirdos.’”xxvii Allen’s critique of the local justice system drew from his civil rights experience the
model of peaceful mass disruption and the idea that all people had a right to dignified treatment. But
it also translated as a statement on government authoritarianism, particularly the threat to free
expression.
Explicit acknowledgements of continuity between the goals of the civil rights and student left
movements appeared in Columbia by the mid sixties. Such acknowledgements derived from two
closely-related ideas that national civil rights leaders voiced with increasing frequency by the middle
of the decade. First, as a social plague, racism could not be neatly disentangled from the scourges of
poverty, war, and imperialism. Second, one had to abandon the idea that a single political platform
or organizational format could address the web of social problems to which racism belonged; rather,
such conditions required the multi-organizational response of a liberal-left coalition.xxviii In a speech
titled the “20th anniversary of Nagasaki,” local student activist Rory Ellinger argued for peace. He
warned an audience of students that he saw “no way of guaranteeing it,” unless people committed
themselves to an open discussion on “international life.” For Ellinger, military conflict and racial
injustice traveled together, along with “massive social dislocation, unemployment, poverty and
social diseases such as . . . selfishness.” In offering strategies for learning about and confronting
these problems, Ellinger suggested that his listeners “[d]evelop student debates” and read literature
other than “those anti-Communist books.” He advised young, socially conscious people to “[j]oin an
organization. Become active in other areas of human life, for example civil rights and you will see
how these problems are all interrelated.” Not only did such activity clarify the links among the
problems of various societies around the world, but it also made one aware of oppressive strategies
that operated close to home. College students with backgrounds in civil rights activism, explained
Ellinger, “cannot help but draw analogies between the suppression of the Negro in America and at
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least to some degree the failure of students to be able to make decisions that effect [sic] their own
lives.”xxix Ellinger thus deliberately linked his political and social interests to the Civil Rights
Movement and promoted a multi-dimensional approach to activism. Overlaps among protest groups
reveal the value that Columbia’s left placed on the diversity of inputs to its organizational structure
and to the substance of its arguments.
Opposition to Cold War Ideologies
To many young people in the sixties, American Cold War politics engendered unthinking
conformity that conflicted with a sense of imagination, experimentation, and individual autonomy.
Its binary system of judging the value of political ideas often alienated people who found themselves
caught between stark capitalism and outright communism. In the sixties, a considerable number of
young adults discovered the need to break away from the Cold War’s political mindset. As a result
of this discovery, Columbia’s left community became fertile ground for a decentralized
organizational format.
Missouri’s New Left generation entered college under a cloud of anti-communism that
stretched from the end of the Second World War. Twice in two years—1946 and 1947—Horace
Williams, a Republican in the Missouri senate, headed a state investigation into claims that
instructors at the University of Missouri indoctrinated their students with communist ideas. A stateappointed, university-based committee ruled that the suspicions were groundless. Still, editorials
across outstate Missouri reflected popular concurrence with Williams’s charges. Some university
administrators succumbed to the hysteria. Missouri: Show Me, an MU humor magazine, became a
target of the senator’s accusations of communist subversion after it parodied Williams’s anticommunism and political opportunism. MU administrators forced the publication’s business
manager to resign.xxx
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Similarly, in the early fifties, F. Gano Chance, a top executive in Missouri’s John Birch
Society and the board chairman of A.B. Chance Co., a Centralia, Missouri, manufacturer, lectured at
churches, schools, and civic organizations across the state on the dangers of communism. He
included socialism in the category of subversive and dangerous organizations, playing on popular
anxieties that it inevitably led to communism. Because Chance sat on the Board of Trustees of the
Bible College of Missouri in Columbia, he also had the opportunity to lead two investigations with
the intention of terminating a Bible College faculty member whom he suspected was a communist.
The Bible College’s administration exonerated the instructor both times, but the latter resigned in
1953 under the public pressure Chance had exerted.xxxi
Columbia’s civic and religious institutions extended the anti-communist tradition into the
sixties. The chamber of commerce periodically offered free courses on communism that were open
to the public. A course called “Freedom versus Communism” and its accompanying texts,
“Consumer Control or Controlled Consumers” and “What You Can Do About Communism,” left
little doubt about the business community’s agenda. Campus groups sponsored similar programs. In
February 1962, MU’s Newman Club, a Catholic student organization with branches at non-Catholic
universities, hosted a “Panel on Communism” to discuss the red menace in Latin America and the
efforts of the Catholic Church to oppose it. The Campus Republicans likewise maintained a
schedule of conservative speakers who denounced communism in all its forms. Pushed into the
margins of local political discussions, left-of-center thinkers increasingly pushed back. “A climate
of opinion exists in central Missouri that does not encourage active dissent,” lamented one
underground writer. “When progressive voices speak out, too often the Radical Right applies the
‘soft on Communism’ label—without trying to begin a responsible dialogue.”xxxii
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Exposed to such a setting for most of their lives, many who reached their twenties and early
thirties during the 1960s and who rejected the postwar capitalist-communist dichotomy spoke of
their alienation from mainstream notions of justice and clear thinking. William Allen doubted the
capacity of a mind raised on Cold War rhetoric to soundly evaluate political expression that deviated
from government-prescribed ideology. “[I]rrational fears of Communism have gone so deep in our
society,” he wrote, “that citizens may denounce one another on utterly vague grounds.” Rory
Ellinger remarked that in a society thus conditioned, “McCarthyism becomes internalized and we are
so inwardly terrorized by words like power and freedom that both are taken from us.” Aside from
manufacturing fear, large, centralized political programs represented oppressive elitism. Left
literature written in Columbia cited USSR-style “bureaucratic dictatorship” as equal to the
“manipulative elitism of the USA” in its power to restrict the intellectual development of young
people.xxxiii Similarly, New Fabians president Dave Wigder condemned the “‘radicalism of the
right,’” which he said troubled students on the left, who wanted to provide “an alternative” way of
thinking about social issues. Still, the restriction of decision making to “one or two power bases”
solved nothing. Desires to be free of manipulation, to have a “share in decision making power” at
the university level, and to strive for a “complete democracy . . . in which all men may control their
own destiny” helped to direct Columbia’s New Left toward decentralized organizational strategies.
By the mid sixties not a few local SDS members described the executive control of any group
(including their own) at the national level as hierarchical and elitist, because it “alienated [the local
chapter] from the rest of campus.” Accordingly, few SDS members in Columbia ever paid their
national dues.xxxiv
New Left activists at MU connected their mistrust of organizational uniformity and
centralization to a sharp critique of American liberal politics. Flyers, speeches, and underground
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articles denounced the Democratic Party’s approach to social problems. One pamphlet, distributed
in the fall of 1964, argued that Lyndon Johnson barely offered an alternative to Barry Goldwater.
The War on Poverty fell far short of success, it argued, and Johnson had “no plan to decrease the
stranglehold which corporations have on our economy, no vision of increasing Labor’s share of our
national wealth.” A March 1965 underground article viewed America’s presence in Vietnam as a
symbol “of feudalism and privilege” that threatened revolutionaries’ hopes for an egalitarian society.
As much as anyone in the right wing of the Republican Party, liberals in the tradition of John F.
Kennedy and Johnson sowed despair and hatred in the third world. For a number of New Left
leaders in Columbia, America’s two-party system stifled political imagination and got in the way of
real social reforms.xxxv
One could nonetheless argue that the connection between the American Socialist Party, a
national organization with affiliates around the world, and William Allen, probably the most
energetic organizer and recruiter in Columbia’s left, represented a step toward rather than away from
organizational uniformity and centralization. It appears, however, that Allen viewed his association
with the SP in Columbia principally as an alliance with which to marshal a response to what he saw
as the region’s smug Cold War conservatism. For Allen the SP served more as a storehouse for
ideas and strategies to be used in jumpstarting a fledgling movement than as a source of correct
ideology. The professor did not consider himself a Marxist. Rather, he saw the SP as a “group of
people that made a great deal of common sense,” that was available to all who sincerely desired
radical social reform. Moreover, rather than building a socialist organization with his own hands,
Allen encouraged students to become imaginative and self-reliant in articulating their ideas and in
persuading people from varied political and cultural backgrounds—African Americans, married
students, the poor, and local members of the working class—to join their coalition. Ultimately, for
19
Allen, activists should work, through “self-education,” toward the freedom of the individual to
“develop his personality fully.”xxxvi
Allen’s resistance to a fixed theoretical framework for his socialist views allowed him to
accommodate a wide spectrum of leftist ideas. It left him free to associate with and to recruit
activists from any number of groups without the hindrance of sectarian prejudices. Further, his
arrival at MU in 1961 put him into contact with a mass of young refugees—holdovers from an
uncritical 1950s mindset.xxxvii Allen found that in addition to openness to various ideas of
organization and political expression, the recruitment of young people to a socialist-oriented
community in the midst of overt conservatism required an organizer who identified with the inherent
hardship of thinking against the grain of one’s immediate cultural and political environment. By the
middle of the decade, Allen had become that organizer and had taken part in forming something
decidedly dissimilar from capitalist anti-communism, namely a highly decentralized coalition of the
left.
Self-Education
If the construction of a local New Left required tolerance and empathy, its long-term survival
depended on its participants’ organizational self-sufficiency. In particular, survival relied upon
growth in membership, the generation of project ideas, and the identification of core principles
acceptable to all participants. Such a level of self-sufficiency in turn demanded an education of the
individual that stressed independent thinking, risk-taking, experimentation, and the recognition and
amelioration of one’s political rootlessness. For some, the university worked against these
objectives. By opposing the standard, bipolar format of political expression encouraged on college
campuses, the New Left intended to separate from and provide a substitute for the forces responsible
for its miseducation. William Allen viewed American higher education as a buttress for a middle-
20
class technocracy that served the “military-industrial complex.” As one arm of an increasingly
authoritarian government, the university made possible the efficient production of young conformists
who gave up critical thinking—and the chance at a radical education—in exchange for a guaranteed
place in the middle class. For Allen, the ideal university was “fundamentally a library surrounded by
scholars”; in reality, higher education meant manipulative authoritarianism.xxxviii
As remedies, counterinstitutions such as the “free university” and the “teach-in” appeared in
Columbia after 1965.xxxix They merged, however, with a pre-1965 impulse toward working within
the university and changing the culture of education beginning with the individual. The New
Fabians arrived on campus in the fall of 1961 (a year before SDS produced the Port Huron
Statement). Named for a late nineteenth-century British socialist group, the New Fabians sponsored
debates, offered a forum for the open discussion of political and social issues, and sponsored leftist
speakers of local and national interest. A 1963 flyer stated the club’s major tasks: the education
first “of members themselves, next of the university community, and finally of the community at
large.” The New Fabians did not organize demonstrations, print political literature, or endorse
candidates for public office. It began not as a political group, but as a tool for developing
individuals’ political identities by filling a gap fostered in the biases of mainstream information
sources.xl
Two key organizers in Columbia—Professor William Allen and Rory Ellinger, a graduate
student—provided models for developing personal political identities. Before describing these
personalities, it is pertinent to explain the placement of a university professor in the New Left, a
movement conventionally considered to have been run by students. Two explanations stand out.
First, throughout the fifties and sixties, college instructors from a wide range of fields and from all
ranks publicly supported a variety of social and political movements. Kenneth Heinemen
21
demonstrates, for example, that professors protested nationwide against the war in Vietnam. Some
had tenure, and others knowingly risked being denied tenure because of their actions. Second, and
more significantly, Doug Rossinow asserts that although during the late sixties many professors took
their “political cues” from students, the reverse was true in the late fifties and early sixties.xli Hence,
in order to grasp the full scope of campus protest movements, professors’ political activities should
be included in New Left studies. This applies particularly to discussions on the formation of radical
communities at the outset of the sixties.
A radical “in the classical sense,” Professor William Allen used his sharp wit and his
penchant for public debate to spur discussions about “the roots” of social issues. His ability to
organize activists, many of whom had little or no political background, helped to convert Columbia’s
left into a forum where citizens worked to articulate and defend their deepest values. Allen explains
that his own family demonstrated few inclinations toward political activity: “My father was a
Democrat, but that was because we were Irish.” He “was not an active person politically.” Allen’s
interest in left politics developed during the early fifties as an undergraduate at the University of
Michigan, where a member of the SP handed him a copy of the party’s platform. In 1959, while a
doctoral student at the University of Minnesota, he organized an enthusiastic but short-lived socialist
group. The following academic year, while teaching history at MIT, he “edited a newsletter called
the ‘YANKEE RADICAL’” for the local SP in Boston.xlii Activism as a student, then, rather than
family tradition or economic circumstances, led Allen to identify himself as a member of the
political left.
Allen’s work as a historian reinforced his activism. His first book, The Nazi Seizure of
Power, an adaptation of his Ph.D. dissertation, offered one of the first bottom-up accounts of
resistance against the Nazis’ dismantling of Weimar Germany. Allen’s research revealed a lack of
22
active resistance to the Nazis before they took power, even though “[t]here was ample evidence of
what kind of movement it was.” Through extensive oral histories and archival work, the young
scholar saw that “the only people who stood up [to the Nazis] were the socialists.” Ultimately, he
brought from his research the belief that “if people don’t speak out and don’t act, then they have no
one but themselves to blame when things fall apart.” Scholarly activity remained a significant point
of reference for the professor’s senses of political identity and morality during his tenure at MU. In
a letter to his department head explaining his decision to travel to Montgomery for the rally at the
end of the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965, Allen cited his research. “My own study of Nazi
Germany has convinced me,” he wrote, “that it is fundamental to freedom that men act as though
they were free, even in the face of intimidation.”xliii
The professor’s trip to Alabama confirmed his identity as a political actor who behaved
according to personal standards of morality. In Montgomery he encountered a spontaneous
gathering of most of the civil rights and socialist activists he knew. “No one really organized this,”
explains Allen. Rather, individuals decided to go, and they happened to meet at the same place and
time; the culmination of those decisions produced a moving experience for the young professor.xliv
Thus possessing no inherited identity as a member of the political left, Allen constructed one—
through dedication to his scholarly pursuits, through experimentation with strategies of protest, and
through a reliance on personal ideas about socially responsible behavior.
Rory Ellinger offered a similar model for the construction of political identity. The son of a
successful businessman, Ellinger spent his childhood in the comfortable St. Louis suburb of Webster
Groves. A practicing Catholic, he became active in the Newman Association. Through his church
and his Newman contacts, he developed an interest in issues of the poor and working class. He
began to study labor history and to participate in demonstrations. In 1964, Ellinger became a case
23
worker for the Cook County, Illinois, welfare department distributing relief checks to impoverished
and disabled residents. A tightened focus on community problems became increasingly important to
his political education, and the observations he made in poor neighborhoods caused him to question
the effectiveness of both church-related and government-prescribed relief programs.xlv By 1966,
when he arrived in Columbia as a graduate student, Ellinger had turned away from the Newman
Association, citing its unacceptably low level of involvement in solving problems of the poor and
oppressed. He viewed members’ inactivity as the result “mainly . . . of their Catholic education,”
which emphasized “obedience to authority and hatred of Communism.” Although the latter teaching
did not by itself constitute irresponsible stewardship by church officials, it had not been “balanced
on the other hand by a love for the poor of the world and the problems they face.”xlvi Ellinger
transferred a core of beliefs from an institution he identified as hierarchical, conformist, and
occasionally hypocritical, to a set of personal practices and ideas he could fashion into a substitute
for the institution. In this way, he acted out of a desire to be free of tethers to provincial decision
making.
Ellinger demonstrated, through defiance of institutional authority, his conviction in the power
of a personal political stance. As a teaching assistant in the history department at MU, he once
cancelled a class in sympathy with Local 45’s “wildcat strike” and then publicly denounced the
administration’s attempts to punish him. In a separate act of individual protest, Ellinger turned in his
draft card at a government office. He subsequently wrote to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about the
commitment to moral standards he shared with others who refused to go to war. “[W]e are neither
cowards or [sic] heroes,” explained Ellinger. “We are perhaps in the biblical sense of the word,
witnesses. By our witness we become prophetic question marks. And the answer to our action and
the war lies in each one of us.”xlvii Disenchanted with conventional avenues of political expression,
24
Ellinger constructed a political identity in part by sharing with others the experience of taking a lesstraveled path of voicing disapproval. In part, he built his political identity by relying on a portion of
his consciousness too personal to express to others.
Thus as inheritor of strategies practiced by individuals for gaining self-knowledge,
Columbia’s New Left community validated individual acts of defiance undertaken in the defense of
mutually-held convictions. Rory Ellinger’s refusal to teach his class in support of Local 45 stands as
an example of such an initiative. But perhaps the example of Frank Headbrink reveals more about
the organizational values of Columbia’s New Left. Headbrink was a white laborer who later joined
Columbia CORE and the SP. He directed his first protest at his boss, F. Gano Chance, in 1961. To
his coworkers, Headbrink denounced the John Birch Society and Chance’s connections to it; his
termination came shortly thereafter. In September 1964, when Allen and a group of students from
Columbia drove to Centralia (about thirty miles away) to picket in front of a Goldwater for President
campaign office, Headbrink joined them. “I feel that the picketing was directly against [Chance] as
well as Goldwater,” he later wrote. But his opposition to Chance came not solely from a political
ideology; “convicted in the price fixing scandal of 1960-61,” Chance had become for Headbrink an
agent of corporate corruption and social injustice. Four days later, Headbrink returned for another
Republican rally and picketed for about five hours—by himself—against both Goldwater and Jean
Paul Bradshaw, a candidate for the U.S. Senate from Missouri. The lone picketer then drove his car,
adorned with handmade signs denouncing the Republican candidates, along the route of a campaign
parade. Upon receiving a newspaper clipping that mentioned the errant parade entry, the SP’s
national secretary congratulated Headbrink on his act of defiance.xlviii Headbrink’s experiences
indicate that his local left community drew strength from legitimizing independent forms of protest
undertaken by people working out their personal means of political expression.
25
Just as individuals enriched their experiences as political actors by linking themselves to
networks of like-minded activists, the local left educated itself as a group through the symbolic
resurrection of left institutions. References to historical personalities, publications, and events
allowed the local left community to compensate for its political rootlessness. By identifying with
past forms of radical activity, the New Left in Columbia could claim to be inheritors of traditions
submerged beneath decades of the type of conservatism responsible for its political miseducation.
The politically radical Fabians discussion group of Britain stood as one such resurrected institution.
Pro-labor, inclusive of women, and supportive of “individual development” as a means to lasting
democracy and public morality, turn-of-the-century Fabian socialism modeled for curious, leftleaning university students in the 1960s an appealing form of dissent.xlix
The American left, however, drew more attention than did other radical traditions. Along
with the names of active Columbia SP members, the mimeographed letterhead used by the Central
Missouri Organizing Committee of the SP featured a noteworthy quotation: “‘So long as there is a
lower class, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.’ --Eugene V. Debs.”l Although
the quotation may have worked as a reminder of the centrality of civil rights to the young left in the
mid sixties, it also anchored the local left community in the American socialist tradition. Moreover,
by invoking Debs, Columbia radicals confirmed for themselves a Midwestern orientation and
elevated an example of self-education in socialist principles.
Another historical resurrection occurred with the publication of the Whipsaw, a Columbia
underground paper. It derived its name from the National Rip-Saw, the St. Louis socialist monthly
that gained a large readership among farmers and urban laborers in the Midwest and Southwest
around the turn of the twentieth century. With particularly strong links to socialist and antisegregationist sentiments in the working-class German neighborhoods of St. Louis, the Rip-Saw
26
modeled a public forum that sustained diversity in political expression.li Founded in November
1964, the Whipsaw offered Columbia’s left news of local activism and a “theoretical article” each
month. By the following April, its staff of college students claimed 250 subscriptions and handled
“many letters of inquiry.”lii
Similarly invoking a radical Missouri heritage, several visiting speakers shared their
experiences on the political left. In 1962, for example, Tucker Smith, an elderly farmer living in
Perry, Missouri, spoke to the New Fabians and to local peace activists about his career as an
attorney, General Counsel for the CIO, and 1948 vice presidential candidate on the Socialist ticket.
In a 1966 talk to MU students, Detroit socialist and labor activist Martin Glaberman referred
repeatedly to “Missouri’s ‘long radical tradition in U.S. history.’”liii By thus recalling numerous
manifestations of the historical left, Columbia’s New Left identified precursors to its own radical
activity.
The education of interested persons about political stances on the left extended from the
immediate members of left organizations and into the community at large. Citing a lack of
understanding among central Missourians about the tenets of socialism, William Allen developed
and taught a socialist theory course. He designed the multi-session course for laymen and offered it
outside the university’s regular instructional hours; about thirty locals attended from beginning to
end.liv In the fall of 1964 Allen completed a pamphlet called “Questions and Answers about
Socialism.” Though he wrote it primarily with outstate Missourians in mind, he expected that it
would be distributed by the national SP to people who inquired about basic socialist principles or
who voiced common misconceptions about socialism. Among a variety of topics, the pamphlet
distinguished between socialism and communism, which Allen described as a “perversion of the
socialist idea.” Socialists, he explained, had little patience for the violence frequently employed by
27
communists as a blunt implement of social control. In fact, wrote Allen, “[s]ocialists doubt that
initiative is caused by the whip or the carrot.” Rather, “they believe that men show maximum
initiative when they are free, secure, and infused with a sense of purpose.”lv
Efforts to teach fundamental socialist theories occurred alongside comparatively
confrontational methods of education. Twice in 1962 Allen publicly debated Fulton Lewis III,
Washington, D.C., coordinator of Young Americans for Freedom and former staff investigator for
the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). The debate topics—“Resolved: that
HUAC should be abolished” and “Which Way America: Free Enterprise or Democratic
Socialism?”—directly addressed the social tensions that surrounded the developing left community
in central Missouri.lvi Allen and several MU students later wrote three fifteen-minute responses to
the “Manion Report,” a television program that presented rightist political messages to the local
viewing area. Arguing that federal regulations permitted equal time for a response from the left, the
group used the television station’s studio to deliver its rebuttals and reached an audience far wider
than had been possible with flyers and campus meetings. After airing only a couple of responses,
the television station pulled Manion from its schedule and ended the local left’s experiment in
teaching through broadcast media.lvii
Columbia’s New Left education anchored itself in individual experience, from which it
expanded, via activism, into the community. Together with the construction of political roots from
the past, these features of local radicalism provided the New Left a sense of tradition and gave
meaning to individual political identities.
* * * * * *
Through numerous projects, New Left activists in Columbia constructed their political
identities as if working in a laboratory. The experimental nature of their political education resulted
28
from two key realizations. First, young activists shared a sense of estrangement from the cultural
and political mainstream. Authoritarian institutions, buttressed by the university, squelched radical
inquiry and furthered the alienation of students and their mentors. Second, left-leaning activists
possessed few inherited resources on which to model either diagnoses of their shared condition or
strategies for clearly identifying and responding to their oppressors. As radicals, however, they
understood that their political rootlessness necessitated the construction of political roots. To
distinguish itself as a viable political entity, the local New Left depended on an array of devices it
collected through personal, often highly individualized experiences with activism, through academic
interests in protest and dissent, and through assembling linkages to (occasionally disparate) symbols
of vitality on the left. Cold War attitudes about what constituted responsible political activity drove
activists to search for organizational models that provided broad exposure to alternative means of
proposing social change. Local patterns of civil rights activity functioned as one such model.
Moreover, those patterns demonstrated that challenges to prevailing cultural and political practices
could succeed. The local left’s system of self-education encouraged the individual to construct his
or her own political roots, and it merged with the civil rights tradition of the late fifties and early
sixties to set examples for critiquing local and national political environments.
The combination yielded not only precedents for activism but also helped to determine the
forms that activism took by creating alternatives to mainstream cultural and political prescriptions.
Becoming a substitute for predominant institutions meant, in part, developing models of local
democracy through a radical detachment from hierarchical, authoritarian organizations. In other
words, decentralization became a way of prefiguring the society in which people desired to live.
“[M]eans and ends are fundamentally linked,” wrote Allen in his “Questions and Answers”
pamphlet. “Means condition ends,” he later instructed, “and the only realistic means to a democratic
29
society is through democracy, rationality, and love.” For community New Left thinkers, a just
society required consideration of the long-term consequences of actions taken in the present. They
stressed such consideration not only in reference to direct relationships between particular actions
and their future consequences, but also because they recognized the impact that ideas and actions
permitted in the present had on the general psychological climate. To many, a favorable
psychological climate was the equivalent to a successful counterinstitution. An article by local
activist Gene Locke in the November 1966 issue of the Columbia Free Press emphasized the latter
point. Locke promoted the adoption of “situation ethics,” which he defined as the “use of rational
inquiry to solve problems on an individual basis.” He counted among the most important benefits of
the philosophy freedom from codes and “archaic rules” as well as from “conformity, irrational fears,
and crippling guilt.”lviii
Wini Breines and Doug Rossinow place such situational, anti-hierarchical, and seemingly antiorganizational elements at the fountainhead of New Left consciousness. For Breines, leadership that
embraced these elements did not preclude thoughtful, conscious attempts at organization; rather, it
posited social reform that focused more immediately on political means than on political ends.
Moreover, for a prefigurative political activist, a just society required that means not be divorced from
ends: sanity and justice could be achieved in both. Rossinow finds that students and youth activists
straddled several traditions at once. The New Left in the South and Southwest took as much from the
ideas of personal integrity and individual autonomy of the social gospel and populist movements as
from its liberal contemporary elders in combating the “culture of conformism.” When, by the early
sixties, activists resolved to disrupt and challenge the political system as a means of resisting anxiety
fostered in an uncritical atmosphere, they relied on moral and religious frameworks to help legitimize
their political dissent. Young people also resisted alienation and anxiety through the idea of the
30
“beloved community,” a trait that Rossinow attributes to “Christian existentialism.” Religious
communitarians, he argues, linked black and white civil rights activism and hence proved crucial to
the formation of the New Left at the local level.lix Although Breines and Rossinow cast considerable
light on early local New Left movements, much research remains to be done on the relationship
between those movements and the mid-sixties organizational transition that accompanied the growth
of SDS, the association most often cited as the vanguard of the late-sixties New Left movement.
Organizational changes in Columbia suggest one direction for future research. Although
Students for a Democratic Society had grown since its arrival at MU in 1965, administrative pressure
had, by 1967, broken up the loose coalition of activist groups of the early sixties. In 1965 Ruth
Wilhite stepped down from her role as organizer of the local Student Rights Movement after citing an
impasse in negotiations with the university’s chancellor. In March of 1967 African American law
school student, vocal chair of Columbia CORE, and new SDS member James Rollins received an
indictment on marijuana possession charges. Before a court could hear his case, the MU Board of
Curators voted to expel him. Finally, in the summer of the same year and following a narrowly
successful battle with the administration to receive tenure, William Allen departed Columbia for
Detroit. Wayne State University had offered Allen a salary that the University of Missouri refused to
match, despite a unanimous plea from his tenured colleagues in the history department to retain him. lx
After the removal of Wilhite, Rollins, and Allen as campus activists, the Student Rights Movement,
the local CORE, and the local SP collapsed.
Student, Korean War veteran, and Whipsaw editor Gordon Burnside viewed the local left’s
transition as a turn toward “tactically and strategically” conservative thinking. By 1967, he had
witnessed the undoing of a movement he had helped to build. Along with only a handful of early
sixties activists, Burnside watched the disintegration of an alliance in which Columbia’s New Left had
31
anchored itself. A single organization—SDS—now served as the rallying point for left-of-center
student activism at MU. For Burnside, it lacked much of the experimental attitude and political
diversity that had enabled its predecessors to express a broad range of ideas in the local New Left
movement.lxi
The looseness with which Columbia’s early New Left organized itself did nothing to
protect the local movement from the university’s strategies for controlling political expression.
In fact, the movement’s decentralized organizational style exposed it to a particularly effective
method of repression. Local authorities—in part because they experienced minimal pressure to
recognize a unified movement as their adversary—concentrated on eliminating movement
leaders individually and under apolitical pretenses. According to Allen, MU President Elmer
Ellis “did a pretty good job of covering up what he was actually doing.”lxii Such ideas suggest the
limits of decentralized organizational structures at the local level, and they indicate a need for
further research on the formation of New Left communities across the United States. Subsequent
studies could inquire about the inherent frailties of early New Left movements and could help to
recast the discussion about how and why the national movement ultimately faltered.
32
i
Notes
In 1963, the University of Missouri acquired campuses in Kansas City and St. Louis,
transforming it into a four-campus system (the fourth campus, in Rolla, has been in existence
since 1870). City designations were added later (e.g., the University of Missouri—Columbia), but
it appears that throughout most of the 1960s, the Columbia campus was referred to without the
city designation. This paper follows that practice, most often referring to the Columbia campus
as MU.
Jack Matthews to Dean Robert Callis, 20 April 1967, UMC, Administration, Office of
the Dean of Students, Administrative Records, University of Missouri—Columbia Archives,
Columbia, Missouri (hereafter cited as MU Archives), Box 1, f. 4; Rory Ellinger to President
John C. Weaver, 5 May 1967, UM-System, President’s Office, Administrative Correspondence,
MU Archives, Box 6, f. 19. For a study of the New Left’s second, SDS-centered phase at MU,
see Clayton W. Douglas, “Dissent and Response: Student Protest Movements and
Administration Response at the University of Missouri—Columbia, 1967-1970” (M.A. Thesis,
University of Missouri—Columbia, 2003).
ii
Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Random House, 1973), 203-10; Todd Gitlin, The
Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1980), 21.
iii
iv
Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the American Left (New York: Knopf, 1969), viii.
v
Gitlin, 30-31.
Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left
in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 5-6.
vi
See, for example, W.J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960s (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989); Diana Trilling, “On the Steps of Low Library: Liberalism and the
Revolt of the Young,” Commentary 46 (November 1968): 29-55; Jonathan Eisen and David
Steinberg, “The Student Revolt Against Liberalism,” Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science 382 (March 1969): 83-94.
vii
See Douglas; Gregory Duhé, “The FBI and Students for a Democratic Society at the
University of New Orleans, 1968-1971,” Louisiana History 43 (Autumn 2002): 53-74; Dona
Gearhart, “The 1960s Revolution: UNLV Style,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 40
(Winter 1997): 184-206; John Hennen, “A Struggle for Recognition: Marshall University
Students for a Democratic Society and the Red Scare in Huntington, 1965-1969,” West Virginia
History 52 (1993): 127-147.
viii
33
Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left: 1962-1968: The Great
Refusal (South Hadley, MA: J.F. Bergin Publishers, 1982), 4-5; Philip Altbach and S.M. Lipset,
eds., Students in Revolt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 498-99, 512.
ix
x
Breines, 6-7. Of course the idea of prefigurative politics originated neither with Breines
nor with the New Left. It derived from the Christian notion of the “beloved community,” in
which the blessings of heaven were cultivated on earth. During the twentieth century, the idea
that one should insist upon living in the present the way in which he or she would live in a just
society was injected deliberately and successfully into both the realms of political strategies and
political ends by American civil rights leaders. See Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and
the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 21.
William Allen to Betty Elkin, 19 April 1963, Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke
University, Box 550, 1960-63, State and Local Party Files, Missouri.
xi
Richard Ichord to Mrs. Paul E. Sapp, 8 May 1967, UM-System, President’s Office,
University Relations, Administrative and Media Relations Records, MU Archives, Box 3, f.
“Controversial Issues”; “The Battle of Ideas,” Centralia Fireside Guard, Newspaper clipping,
1964, Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke University, Box 550, 1964-72, State and Local
Party Files, Missouri; William Allen of Buffalo, NY, telephone interview by author, Monett,
MO, 16 September 2005.
xii
William Allen to Irwin Suall, November 1961, Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke
University, Box 550, 1960-63, State and Local Party Files, Missouri; “Political Groups Sign
Speakers,” (Columbia) Maneater, 14 October 1964, p. 7.
xiii
“New Fabian Society[:] A Student Democratic Socialist Discussion Group,” Flyer, n.d.,
UMC, College of Arts and Science, Department of History, Administrative Records, MU
Archives, Box 1, f. “William Allen”; Allen to Elkin, 7 October 1963, Socialist Party of America
Papers, Duke University, Box 550, 1960-63, State and Local Party Files, Missouri.
xiv
Allen to Elkin, 5 March 1965, Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke University, Box
550, 1964-72, State and Local Party Files, Missouri; Lew Harris, “Equal Motives,” Maneater, 3
March 1965, p.6; Lew Harris, “Speechless,” Maneater, 24 February 1965, p. 6; Allen to Elkin, 9
April 1965, Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke University, Box 550, 1964-72, State and
Local Party Files, Missouri.
xv
“Senate to Hear Reports Tonight,” Maneater, 24 February 1965, p. 1; Terry Deshler,
“Farmer to Speak March 17, Verbal Approval Granted,” Maneater, 10 March 1965, p. 1; Allen
to Elkin, 9 April 1965, Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke University, Box 550, 1964-72,
State and Local Party Files, Missouri.
xvi
Trisha Ware, “‘Which Side Are You On?’” Columbia Free Press, 10 May 1966, p. 2,
Rory Vincent Ellinger Collection, Western Historical Manuscript Collection (hereafter cited as
WHMC), oversized file; Gordon Burnside, “Local 45: Coming Storm?” Columbia Free Press,
xvii
34
October 1966, p. 1; Allen, “Resolution Offered to the University of Missouri Chapter of the
AAUP,” Typewritten document, 19 October 1966, UM-System, President’s Office,
Administrative Correspondence, MU Archives, Box 5, f. 10d; Tom Wellman, “Toward a Freer
Press:” Columbia Free Press, November 1966, p. 1, Rory Vincent Ellinger Collection, WHMC;
Article fragment, n.d., Rory Vincent Ellinger Collection, WHMC, oversized file; “Columbia
Free Press,” Typewritten document, fall 1966, Rory Vincent Ellinger Collection, WHMC, f. 96.
Marc Drye, “Columbia CORE and the Campaign to Integrate Public Accommodations”
(M.A. thesis, University of Missouri—Columbia, 1991), 15-16; Patricia Pyrah, “Council Enacts
Accommodations Bill,” Columbia Missourian, 9 June 1964, p. 1; John Schopp to University of
Illinois Director of Off-Campus Housing, Congress of Racial Equality, Columbia, Missouri,
Papers (hereafter cited as CORE Papers), WHMC , v. 1.
xviii
The black to white student ratio at MU evidently dropped during the mid sixties,
contributing to a diminished base for extending civil rights policies to off-campus student
housing. “Assistant to Chancellor,” Typewritten document, 21 October 1964, UM-System,
President’s Office, Administrative Correspondence, MU Archives, Box 5, f. 2; Sylvia Carter,
“Inter-Racially, They Date More, Hide Less,” Maneater, 15 February 1967, p. 11.
xix
“The CORE,” Columbia Missourian, Clipping, 1963, CORE Papers, WHMC, v. 1;
Schopp to Marvin Rich, 20 December 1960, CORE Papers,WHMC, v. 1; National CORE’s
Charles R. Oldham defended the five Columbia CORE members who were charged with
trespassing. “National Chairman to Defend CORE,” Newspaper clipping, December 1960,
CORE Papers, WHMC, v. 1; “$300 Donated for Defense in CORE Case,” Newspaper clipping,
December 1960, CORE Papers, WHMC, v. 1.
xx
“Socialist Groups at Missouri University,” Jefferson City Post-Tribune, 23 February
1965, p. 2; Allen to Elkin, 9 April 1965, Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke University,
Box 550, 1964-72, State and Local Party Files, Missouri; Allen to Elkin, 21 February 1963,
Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke University, Box 550, 1960-63, State and Local Party
Files, Missouri. YPSL stands for Young People’s Socialist League; as the name suggests, it was
the youth branch of the national SP. It is unlikely that Allen meant that he belonged to YPSL;
rather, he probably referred to it as the link between SP and the students he mentioned in his
letter.
xxi
Stanley Matoren to Irwin Suall, 14 November 1961, Socialist Party of America Papers,
Duke University, Box 550, 1960-63, State and Local Party Files, Missouri; Allen to Elkin, 21
February 1963, Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke University, Box 550, 1960-63, State and
Local Party Files, Missouri; Allen to Elkin, 22 June 1965, Socialist Party of America Papers,
Duke University, Box 550, 1964-72, State and Local Party Files, Missouri; “SRM: Will it
Survive?” Whipsaw, March 1965, CORE Papers, WHMC, f. 21, p. 1.
xxii
Several civil rights historians credit SNCC with fueling both the 1960 wave of sit-ins
that began in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Power movement, which Stokely
Carmichael inaugurated during the 1966 Meredith march in Mississippi. “Black Power” and
xxiii
35
groups espousing black nationalism had in fact reached Columbia by 1967. And by the late
sixties, MU’s black activist groups had largely grown apart from white activists. Still, during the
middle sixties, Columbia’s left appeared to withstand the civil rights-New Left fracture that
occurred within southern alliances.
Richard J. Ellis, “Romancing the Oppressed: The New Left and the Left Out,” Review of
Politics 58 (Winter 1996): 109-54; Sylvia Carter, “Inter-Racially, They Date More, Hide Less,”
Maneater, 15 February 1967, p. 11; Donald H. Moon to “Comrade,” 26 May 1967, Socialist
Party of America Papers, Duke University, Box 550, 1964-72, State and Local Party Files,
Missouri.
xxiv
xxv
“R.I.P. Catalyst,” Columbia Free Press, November 1966, p. 2.
Gentle Tuesday originated in the fall of 1966 as Gentle Thursday at UT—Austin. It
began as a countercultural form in which “people were asked to ‘be nice and gentle to each
other’ for one whole day.” Rossinow, 261-62; Sale, 327; “Judge Sentences Students For Writing
on Sidewalk,” Columbia Missourian, 9 April 1967, p. 2; Bob Kappstatter, “Chalk-Writers’
Messages Spread,” Columbia Missourian, April 18, 1967, p. 9; Gordon Burnside, “Missouri
Report,” Typewritten document, n.d., Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke University, Box
550, 1964-72, State and Local Party Files, Missouri.
xxvi
“Chalk-Writers’ Messages Spread,” Columbia Missourian, 18 April 1967, p. 9. The
document was a Boone County grand jury report that accompanied the indictment of James
Rollins for the possession of marijuana. William D. Tammeus, “Protests Produce City-Student
Consultations,” Columbia Missourian, 18 April 1967, p. 9.
xxvii
Peter B. Levy, The New Left and Labor in the 1960s (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 1994), 190; Ellis, 130-36.
xxviii
xxix
Rory Ellinger, Speech to YCS, August 1965, Rory Vincent Ellinger Collection, WHMC,
f. 104.
Ronald W. Johnson, “The Communist Issue in Missouri: 1946-1956” (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Missouri—Columbia, 1973), 10-11, 14-18.
xxx
xxxi
Ibid., 138, 140, 142.
“Chamber Course on Communism Remains Open,” Columbia Missourian, 19 February
1962, p. 3; “Newman Club Plans Panel on Communism,” Columbia Missourian, 11 February
1962,
p. 4; “Dr. Ellis Replies,” Columbia Missourian, 16 March 1965, p. 10; “Towards a Freer
Press?” Columbia Free Press, November 1966, p. 1, Rory Vincent Ellinger Collection, WHMC,
oversized file.
xxxii
36
Allen to Senator Edward V. Long, 22 June 1965, Socialist Party of America Papers,
Duke University, Box 550, 1964-72, State and Local Party Files, Missouri; Typewritten
document, n.d., Rory Vincent Ellinger Collection, WHMC, f. 107; “Some Reasons for and
Against Joining the Socialist Party,” Flyer, 1965, Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke
University, Box 550, 1964-72, State and Local Party Files, Missouri.
xxxiii
“New Fabians Organize for ‘Joiner-Type’ Left Wingers,” Maneater, 28 March 1962, p.
9; “We Believe,” Maneater, 3 May 1967, p. 4; Allen to Elkin, 7 September 1964, Socialist Party
of America Papers, Duke University, Box 550, 1964-72, State and Local Party Files, Missouri;
“Convention Reports,” YCS Bulletin, 1966, Rory Vincent Ellinger Collection, WHMC, f. 117;
Robbie Lieberman, Prairie Power: Voices of 1960s Midwestern Student Protest (Columbia, MO:
University of Missouri Press, 2004), 135, 137.
xxxiv
Allen, “Some Reasons for and Against Joining the Socialist Party,” Flyer, 1965, Socialist
Party of America Papers, Duke University, Box 550, 1964-72, State and Local Party Files,
Missouri; “What’s Our Choice?” Typewritten document, September 1964, Socialist Party of
America Papers, Duke University, Box 550, 1964-72, State and Local Party Files, Missouri;
“Socialism and Isolationism—Part 1,” Whipsaw, March 1963, p. 2, CORE Papers, WHMC f. 21;
“The New Fabian Society,” Flyer, n.d., Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke University, Box
550, 1964-72, State and Local Party Files, Missouri.
xxxv
William Allen of Buffalo, NY, telephone interview by author, Monett, MO, 16
September 2005; Allen to Elkin, 2 November 1964; Allen to Elkin, 24 January 1965; Allen to
Elkin 24 July 1965; all in Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke University, Box 550, 196472, State and Local Party Files, Missouri; “Questions and Answers about Socialism,” Pamphlet,
7 September 1964, Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke University, Box 550, 1964-72, State
and Local Party Files, Missouri; Allen to Elkin, 2 November 1964, Socialist Party of America
Papers, Duke University, Box 550, 1964-72, State and Local Party Files, Missouri.
xxxvi
William Allen of Buffalo, NY, telephone interview by author, Monett, MO, 17
September 2005.
xxxvii
Allen, “Some Reasons,” Flyer, 1965, Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke
University, Box 550, 1964-72, State and Local Party Files, Missouri; “University Far From FirstRate, Panelists Say,” Maneater, 22 May 1967, pp. 1, 3; “Allen,” Columbia Free Press, March
1967, p. 4, Rory Vincent Ellinger Collection, WHMC, oversized file.
xxxviii
“Inter-University Committee for a Public Hearing on Viet Nam,” Typewritten document,
11 June 1965, MU Archives, vertical file, “Bill Wickersham”; Allen to Elkin, 24 July 1965,
Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke University, Box 550, 1964-72, State and Local Party
Files, Missouri.
xxxix
“New Fabians,” Flyer, October 1963, Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke
University, Box 550, 1960-63, State and Local Party Files, Missouri; “New Fabian Society,”
xl
37
Flyer, n.d., Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke University, Box 550, 1964-72, State and
Local Party Files, Missouri.
Kenneth Heineman, Campus Wars: The Peace Movement at American State Universities
in the Vietnam Era (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 100; Rossinow, 18; In 1960,
Columbia, Missouri, police arrested John Schopp, a professor of astronomy at MU and
spokesman for the local CORE during the late fifties and early sixties. Schopp, a colleague from
MU, and three students had been charged with trespassing while testing a restaurant’s
discrimination policy. In 1962 Schopp was denied tenure. Although no connection between
Schopp’s civil rights activity and his denial of tenure has been definitively established, some
documents suggest such a connection. “Absence of Dissention Keeps Climate Moderate,”
Maneater, 1 May 1963, p. 11; see also Drye.
xli
William Allen of Buffalo, NY, telephone interview by author, Monett, MO, 16
September 2005; Allen to Elkin, 21 February 1963, Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke
University, Box 550, 1960-63, State and Local Party Files, Missouri; Typewritten document,
n.d., UMC, College of Arts and Science, Department of History, Administrative Records, MU
Archives, Bx. 1, ff. “William Allen.”
xlii
William Allen of Buffalo, NY, telephone interview by author, Monett, MO, 17
September 2005; Allen to Rod McGrew, 23 March 1965, UMC, College of Arts and Science,
Department of History, Administrative Records, MU Archives, Box 1, f. “William Allen.”
xliii
William Allen of Buffalo, NY, telephone interview by author, Monett, MO, 17
September 2005.
xliv
xlv
Ellinger to Judy, 1964, Rory Vincent Ellinger Collection, WHMC, f. 2.
xlvi
Essay fragment, 1965, Rory Vincent Ellinger Collection, WHMC, f. 180.
Ellinger to Bertram H. Davis, AAUP General Secretary, 23 December 1969, UMSystem, President’s Office, Administrative Correspondence, MU Archives, Box 5, f. 8; Ellinger,
“Upon Turning In a Draft Card,” 8 December 1967, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 2-B.
xlvii
Frank Headbrink to “Comrades,” 9 November 1964, Socialist Party of America Papers,
Duke University, Box 550, 1964-72, State and Local Party Files, Missouri; Elkin to Allen, 19
November 1964, Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke University, Box 550, 1964-72, State
and Local Party Files, Missouri.
xlviii
Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1995), 88, 112, 285.
xlix
Allen to Elkin, 5 March 1965, Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke University, Box
550, 1964-72, State and Local Party Files, Missouri.
l
38
Sally M. Miller, From Prairie to Prison: the Life of Social Activist Kate Richards
O’Hare (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 78-80, 82-3.
li
Allen to Elkin, 2 November 1964, Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke University,
Box 550, 1964-72, State and Local Party Files, Missouri; Allen to Elkin, 25 April 1965, Socialist
Party of America Papers, Duke University, Box 550, 1964-72, State and Local Party Files,
Missouri.
lii
Allen to Suall, 14 April 1962, Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke University, Box
550, 1960-63, State and Local Party Files, Missouri; Tucker Smith to Allen, 29 March 1962,
Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke University, Box 550, 1960-63, State and Local Party
Files, Missouri; “Socialist Tells SDS of Labor History,” Columbia Missourian, 3 March 1966, p.
20.
liii
Allen to Elkin, 7 September 1964, Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke University,
Box 550, 1964-72, State and Local Party Files, Missouri; Allen to Elkin, 15 April 1964, Socialist
Party of America Papers, Duke University, Box 550, 1964-72, State and Local Party Files,
Missouri.
liv
“Questions and Answers about Socialism,” Pamphlet, 7 September 1964, Socialist Party
of America Papers, Duke University, Box 550, 1964-72, State and Local Party Files, Missouri.
lv
Allen to Suall, 14 April 1962, Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke University, Box
550, 1960-63, State and Local Party Files, Missouri; “Which Way America: Free Enterprise or
Democratic Socialism,” Flyer, May 1962, Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke University,
Box 550, 1960-63, State and Local Party Files, Missouri.
lvi
Allen to Elkin, 15 April 1964, Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke University, Box
550, 1964-72, State and Local Party Files, Missouri; William Allen of Buffalo, NY, telephone
interview by author, Monett, MO, 16 September 2005.
lvii
“Questions and Answers about Socialism,” Pamphlet, 7 September 1964, Socialist Party
of America Papers, Duke University, Box 550, 1964-72, State and Local Party Files, Missouri;
“Some Reasons,” Flyer, 1965, Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke University, Box 550,
1964-72, State and Local Party Files, Missouri; Gene Locke, “Situation Ethics,” Columbia Free
Press, November 1966, pp. 7-8, Rory Vincent Ellinger Collection, WHMC, oversized file.
lviii
lix
See Breines, 47-50, 94-95; Rossinow, 53-84.
Terry Deshler, “MSA, Rights Movement Criticize Speaker Policy,” Maneater, 3 March
1965, p. 1; “SRM Mobilizing for Demonstrations,” Maneater, 24 March 1965, p. 1; “Leaders
Quit ‘Rights’ Group,” Maneater, 31 March 1965, p. 1; “Racial Picket Planned,” Newspaper
clipping, 29 April 1964, CORE Papers, WHMC, f. 18; “Schwada Returns Study to Housing
Committee,” Newspaper clipping, 14 October [n.y.], Columbia Council on Religion and Race
Records, WHMC, f. 24; “FCSC: Double Jeopardy?” Columbia Free Press, January 1967, Rory
Vincent Ellinger Collection, WHMC, oversized file; “Grand Jury Charges Rollins with
lx
39
Dispensing Marijuana,” Maneater, 12 April 1967, p. 7; “M.U. Senate Denounces SDS Picketing
Pamphlets,” Columbia Missourian, 19 May 1967, p. 9; Charles Nauert to Dean Francis English,
18 January 1967, UMC, College of Arts and Science, Department of History, Administrative
Records, MU Archives, Box 1, f. “William Allen”; “Allen,” Columbia Free Press, March 1967,
p. 1, Rory Vincent Ellinger Collection, WHMC, oversized file; “The Great Brain Robbery,”
Columbia Free Press, March 1967, p. 1, Rory Vincent Ellinger Collection, WHMC, oversized
file.
Gordon Burnside, “Missouri Report,” Typewritten document, n.d., Socialist Party of
America Papers, Duke University, Box 550, 1964-72, State and Local Party Files, Missouri.
lxi
William Allen of Buffalo, NY, telephone interview by author, Monett, MO, 17
September 2005.
lxii
40
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