Selection from A Prophetic Minority: A Probing Study of the Origins and Development of the New Left
By Jack Newfield, pp. 88-90.
The notion of “nonleadership” and the fear of
manipulation are definitive characteristics of the New Left. So it is that in
SDS there is no one leader, not even a cadre of eight or ten who make basic policy
decisions. Instead, power is shared by the National Council of about 35 members
and the “Chicago kernel” of about 15 who work out of the national office.
Except for the gap between the sophisticated and the naïve, all the other
disparities within the organization are reflected inside the leadership, from
ideological and Puritanical Steve Max in New York, to archaic and sensitive Jeff
Shero in Texas, to Carl Oglesby, the playwright and ex-actor who is now SDS’s
president.
The following are sketches of three of the more influential
of SDS’s nonleaders.
...
Bearded, slouched, thirty-year-old father of three, Carl
Oglesby is the current president of SDS. Less political and more romantic than
Hayden, he is close to being the archetypal New Leftist.
Oglesby, who looks a little like D.H. Lawrence, was born in
1935 in Akron, Ohio, or working-class and later divorced parents. He attended
Kent State University, dropped out to spend a year in Greenwich Village, and
then returned to earn his degree. As with Parris and Forman of SNCC, there
followed a period of intellectual searching through the desert of the 1950’s,
as if waiting for a social movement to rescue him from his ennui.
Oglesby began to write plays. One was produced by a theatre
group in Dallas, and another read at the Actors Studio in New York. Two others, The
Hero and The Peacemaker, were
produced at the University of Michigan. There is also an unfinished novel in
Oglesby’s past.
In June of 1965 Oglesby was making twelve thousand dollars
a year with the Bendix Systems Division at Ann Arbor; “a hireling in the Cold
War,” he has said of himself. Then at the SDS convention he was nominated for
president and elected over four rivals. In a classic Narodnik gesture, he quit
his affluent job in the corporate hierarchy to become the face and voice of SDS
for a token salary that often went unpaid.
There is something very Emersonian about SDS,” Oglesby
has told several interviewers, and that is true. The comment also reflects the
romantic, transcendence-seeking core of Oglesby’s own radicalism, which is
admittedly nonprogrammatic. This quality was sharply reflected in the
Shakespearean-cadenced speech Oglesby delivered to the annual dinner of the National
Guardian in November of 1965. He said in part:
At our best, I think we (SDS) are SNCC translated to the North and trained on a somewhat different and broader set of issues. Our best concern comes from SNCC. Some find that concern a bit shocking, but I’ll name it anyway. It is to make love more possible. We work to remove from society what threatens and prevents it¾the inequity that coordinates with injustice to create plain suffering and to make custom of distrust. Poverty. Racism. The assembly line universities of this Pepsi Generation. The ulcerating drive for affluence. And the ideology of anti-communism, too, because it smothers my curiosity and bribes my compassion. This ideology decrees to me that I may not love Castro, however shining-bright his anguish...