Emancipation From Dogma.

There was an American Left in the thirties. Then the country went through a World War and a cold war, reconversion, McCarthyism and prosperity, and for a time there was not in this country much that could reasonably be called leftist. Now in the sixties the New Left has emerged. It bears some resemblance to the radicalism of the thirties, but what follows here will be primarily an exercise in contrasts. It is all too easy to be witty in describing of the militant Left of the 1930's the stage whispering, the posturing, the dogma, the in-fighting, the Talmudic debates among Trotskyists, Communists, Lovestonites, old Wobblies; the hypocrisy, the self-righteousness.