The rise and fall of the American left

by John P. Diggins

The American Left was born in America--not, as some would have it, in Europe or the Third World, and the American Left was nurtured by intellectuals and activists who read Jefferson and Whitman before they read Marx or Mao. One lesson this brilliant history teaches us is that the fury of radical innocence and wounded idealism so peculiar to American intellectual history springs from native soil. The American Left is not a single phenomenon but four surprising eruptions throughout the past century:. The Lyrical Left, of the First World War years. Sometimes known as "the New Intellectuals," its leaders, born and educated in the United States, were uniformly mindful of America's roots. The Old Left, as it came to be known, wrote its agenda driven by the legacy of World War I, the hopes that had sprung from the promise of socialism, and the clear failure of American capitalism so manifest in the Great Depression. The New Left of the 1960s combined a revolt against the banalities of middlec