In the curious alchemy of the 1960s, in which American culture was shaken and stirred and the Old Left was transformed into the New Left, Todd Gitlin was not just present at the creation but ubiquitous throughout the subsequent decades. A radical historian, media critic, academic sociologist, and political activist, Gitlin succumbed to heart disease last week, and at 79, it was as if the ’60s themselves had died of old age.
If anyone was bound to be swept up in the maelstrom of that epoch, it was Gitlin, the son of immigrant Jewish parents who taught in the New York City public schools. Valedictorian at the Bronx High School of Science, he arrived at Harvard University in 1959, in the words of the New York Times, “a clean-cut supporter of Adlai Stevenson [who] fell in love with a woman whose parents had been communists. She introduced him to folk music and to an outlaw culture that fascinated him, and he became involved with a peace group called Tocsin.”
It was the dawn of a lifelong pattern. Gitlin became and remained a man of the countercultural Left: He succeeded Tom Hayden as president of Students for a Democratic Society, led student demonstrations against apartheid in South Africa, was a community organizer in Chicago, and in 1965 in New York was a planner of the first major anti-Vietnam War demonstration in America. In the 1980s, he evolved into a trenchant critic of the corporate culture of network television. Four decades later, he thrilled to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. His final book was an enthusiastic account of the Occupy movement, Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street (2012).
Yet he was more than a “freelance agitator,” as he once called himself. After graduating from Harvard, he went on to earn a master’s degree in political science at the University of Michigan, and after a brief tenure writing for an underground newspaper in San Francisco, he earned a doctorate in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he ran Berkeley’s mass communications program. His dissertation was later expanded into his first important work, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (1980), quickly followed by an influential account of TV programming, Inside Prime Time (1983).
By then he had graduated to the status, in his words, of a “not-very-private intellectual.” In 1995, Gitlin moved east to New York University, and in 2002, he joined the faculty at Columbia University, where he taught journalism and sociology and was chairman of its doctoral program in communications.
While Gitlin remained a lifelong radical and romanticized the New Left culture and crusades of his youth, he was more than a mere partisan enthusiast, and at times, his dissenting opinions and rueful recollections were not just unorthodox but denounced as heresy by comrades-in-arms on campus.
In his most influential work, a history memoir titled The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987), he reflected that he and his fellow student agitators had largely been “living in a bubble, talking to ourselves,” extolling violence and anarchy while ignoring the real-life concerns, dilemmas, and loyalties of middle- and working-class people. He expanded this critique in The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars (1995), predicting that the decline of the radical political Left would be accelerated by its growing obsession with multiculturalism and identity politics.
“While the Right has been busy taking the White House,” he observed, “the Left has been marching on the English department.”
Most striking, perhaps, was his awareness of the steady estrangement between his fellow radicals and Israel. While sharply critical of many Israeli policies, he once recalled that the “news that Egyptian forces had crossed the Suez Canal (1973) sent me in tears to a … shul I had never set foot in before, knowing acutely, desperately, that if the state of Israel was going to be destroyed, I wanted to receive the news among Jews.”
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
