David Shankbone/Wikimedia Commons
Political activist and writer Todd Gitlin
On a few hours’ notice last Sunday afternoon, barely 24 hours after his passing, about 125 of Todd Gitlin’s friends, admirers, and old comrades came together for an impromptu Zoom memorial that stretched into the early evening. The admirers included a surprising range of leading intellectuals from across the spectrum.
In listening to the tributes from those who knew him longer and better than I, what struck me over and over again was the genuine, abiding affection for Todd. People sought his good company, his decency, and his wisdom.
Some of the early leaders of the New Left were rather full of themselves. They were tolerated for their skill at organizing, not for their kindness. Some became sectarian and dogmatic; some became nihilists. They could be exasperating.
Todd was steadfast in his core convictions, but the opposite of dogmatic or sectarian. He managed to be intellectually and politically supple, always questioning received wisdom, without ever being opportunist or contrarian for its own sake. Nobody experienced him as exasperating.
Graduating as class valedictorian at the famed Bronx High School of Science at 16, he went on to become an activist at Harvard, president of Students for a Democratic Society at age 20, and eventually a sociologist and media critic who taught at Berkeley, NYU, and then Columbia. But he never ceased to be an organizer, and never ceased revisiting and revising past assumptions, including his own.
Todd was always learning, eager both to teach the young and learn from the young. One of his 16 books was titled, after Rilke, Letters to a Young Activist. As he got older, he would often remark on how the “old left,” both the communists and the various splinters of socialist, had resented the criticisms of the New Left figures like himself; and the irony that he, from the perspective of the young, was now in the position of old leftist. But he managed to stay forever young.
Heather Booth, one of Todd’s contemporaries and an organizer of legendary talent and diligence, recalled the appreciation Todd wrote upon the death in 2018 of her husband, Paul Booth, another of the early SDS leaders, who went on to be a labor organizer and senior strategist for AFSCME. Todd wrote, “He made arguments but not enemies.” Heather thought that was a fine description of Todd himself.
Bob Ross, Todd’s classmate from Bronx Science and the first national SDS vice president in 1961, said of Todd, “He had the ability to look over the horizon—and report back—and act on what he saw.”
“He took ideas seriously but he knew that ideas without activism didn’t produce change,” said Peter Dreier, a fellow activist-scholar.
Some remember the ’60s for the nihilistic way it turned out, after the catastrophe of Vietnam, the white backlash against civil rights, the despairing urban riots after the assassinations of the Kennedys and King, and the splinter left violence of the Weathermen, which killed SDS after just nine years, about the life span of the Beatles.
But Todd’s generation, which is also mine, came of age in a different ’60s—the early, hopeful ’60s of the Freedom Rides and sit-ins, the Peace Corps, Freedom Summer 1964, the early Johnson presidency, and the original Students for a Democratic Society, which Todd led as its second president in 1963, succeeding Tom Hayden.
Read the SDS founding document, the Port Huron Statement, today, and it seems almost Jeffersonian—patriotic, holding America to its highest ideals, connecting enlarged political democracy to economic democracy, challenging the excesses of America’s role in the world, above all hopeful. Todd was very much of that generation, and he held onto that sensibility all of his life.
In June 1962, when the Port Huron Statement was written (mostly by Hayden), the horrors were yet to come. It was before the Kennedy assassination, before the Vietnam escalation, before the Southern sheriffs, the high-pressure hoses, the dogs, the beatings and the murders. But racially, that apparent quiescence was only because the violence was so total as to be hidden. It broke out in the occasional lynching, not in police responses to mass demonstrations—because there weren’t any.
Looking back on the seemingly tranquil ’50s, the Port Huron authors wrote: “The declaration ‘all men are created equal …’ rang hollow before the facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities of the North. The proclaimed peaceful intentions of the United States contradicted its economic and military investments in the Cold War status quo.”
The idealism of the early ’60s seemed realistic, a sensibility Todd carried with him as an activist, organizer, scholar, writer, and teacher.
The chronology of Todd’s career only conveys the bare outlines of what made him special. After graduating from Harvard and working as an activist, organizer, and already the author of two books, his SDS friend and mentor, the sociologist Richard Flacks, persuaded Todd that he might as well get a sociology degree. Todd duly enrolled in Berkeley. It was there that he wrote his most influential early book, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.
The book, written in 1987, bore Todd’s signature willingness to be critical and self-critical, as well as erudition that somehow never seemed pretentious. He wrote:
I was one of those old New Leftists, anathema to all factions, who was broken up by the movement’s whirling destruction and self-destruction as much as I had been inspired—even formed—by its birth. Reproached for “revisionism” and dangerously “liberal” tendencies, I ended up identifying with something Martin Buber said about his friend the German socialist Gustav Landauer, murdered by soldiers in 1919: He “fought in the revolution against the revolution for the sake of the revolution.”
Rereading that, it seemed only natural that Todd should find a useful analogy in something Buber said about Landauer. He read everything, to learn and to synthesize, not to drop names.
In all the appreciations of Todd as activist, it’s easy to forget that he was an accomplished scholar. At Columbia, where he taught sociology and directed the communications program, his specialty was the sociology of media, a field that scarcely existed when Todd wrote the first of his five books on media and politics, The Whole World Is Watching, in 1980, on the challenge of movement activists to break through shallow or misleading media coverage.
Prospect co-editor and sociologist Paul Starr, author of the acclaimed, encyclopedic work The Creation of the Media, observes:
When Todd began work in the sociology of the media in the 1970s, the “dominant paradigm”—as he called it in an influential article—still claimed that the media had only “limited effects” on society and politics. This was at a time when three national broadcast networks had an extraordinary degree of control over what the public saw on television, and most cities had just one or two newspapers.
As a result, every social movement—whether for civil rights, against the Vietnam War, or indeed any cause—depended on coverage by a small number of media organizations. Todd’s work clarified how that system worked and that the “dominant paradigm” in media sociology was totally out of touch with reality.
IN THE PAST TWO DECADES, the Prospect published 44 pieces by Todd. They give some sense of his range, his wit, his prescience, and his talent for clear, elegant writing. Having edited several of these pieces, I can report that they seldom needed much editing. They also suggest something of his skill as a researcher and his influence in surprising places.
In 2003, The Washington Post editorial page was firmly supporting George W. Bush’s Iraq War, both in its editorials and in the preponderance of its freelance op-eds and staff columns. Todd was appalled. As a good social scientist and media critic, he meticulously tallied the columns and wrote a pained piece for the Prospect, hoping to hold the Post to a higher standard. He wrote: “To pump up its chorus of hawkish editorials, the Post called up a flock of yes-birds. For the 12-week period of Dec. 1 through Feb. 21, hawkish op-ed pieces numbered 39, dovish ones 12—a ratio of more than 3-to-1.”
Todd added:
Part of the problem at the Post is the mildness and self-vexation of liberals. Regular [conservative] columnists Hoagland, Kelly, George F. Will and Charles Krauthammer abhor doubt; [liberal] counterparts Raspberry, Richard Cohen, E. J. Dionne Jr. and Mary McGrory are in the doubt business. Now, there’s value in unpredictability. Doubt, including self-doubt, is refreshing in pundits. But the doubt ratio is terribly skewed—in American politics overall, not just at the Post. When you are the only serious daily newspaper in the nation’s capital, even if you have been yanked rightward by the government’s center of gravity, you should stoke up the strongest possible counterarguments. When your editorials read like direct transcriptions from the West Wing, it’s all the more imperative to instigate robust debate.
The column found its mark. Not long afterward, Harold Meyerson got a call out of the blue from Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, mentioning the Gitlin piece and offering Harold the job of weekly columnist. Harold likes to say that he got his job at the Post through Todd Gitlin.
Todd was also willing to play against type. He had warned, earlier than most, that the shift to identity politics was sundering the New Deal/Fair Deal economic coalition. He famously wrote in his 1995 book The Twilight of Common Dreams, “While the Right has been busy taking the White House, the Left has been marching on the English department.” But as a longtime student of social movements, when the Black Lives movement arose, Todd wrote this in the Prospect:
Contrary to what white racists and police like to say, the spirit of “Black Lives Matter” does not mean “Only Black Lives Matter.” (When women got the right to vote, did men lose it?) Nor should BLM be understood as “identity politics,” although there may be some supporters—black nationalists—who intend or half-intend it that way, to mean “Only Black Lives Matter.” To affirm that black lives matter is to affirm that they matter because they are lives. Implicitly, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, the message is: If you didn’t think black lives also matter, you were wrong. The idea is the defense of human rights, equal rights for all people, some of whom happen to be black. It’s the third term in a syllogism that goes like this:
1. All lives matter.
2. Black lives are lives.
3. Black lives matter.
Todd’s last piece for the Prospect was a critical, nuanced review of the Aaron Sorkin film The Trial of the Chicago 7. Gitlin, who was there, found meticulous fault with one Sorkin invention after another, but he found one aspect of the film all too accurate. Tom Hayden had indeed manipulated demonstrators, who assumed they had permission to march, into what became a police riot. “Hayden’s deeper intention was to set a trap for Chicago’s brutal mayor and his police by producing a sort of reality-theater piece to prove to the whole world—which was indeed watching—that the American war was so vile and (finally) unpopular it could only be defended by conspicuous force.” He found Hayden’s actions less defensible and more cynical than those of other protest leaders of the era, such as Martin Luther King or John Lewis, who were willing to lead their followers into harm’s way, because the civil rights marchers were fully aware of the risks they were taking, and most Chicago protesters were not.
FOR THE PAST YEAR OR SO, I’ve been on a regular Zoom call with several of the early leaders of SDS, including Todd. Notably, every one of them is working on the left edge of the possible, not in some outlandish utopianism.
You could say Todd came full circle, back to the sense of idealism and possibility of 1962. In those years, the dark shadow was nuclear war. Today it is fascism.
In the last months of his life, Todd was working on two projects. One was an effort to save democracy, working with people across the political spectrum. Last October, he organized an open letter, titled “In Defense of Democracy,” jointly published in The New Republic and The Bulwark, and co-signed by William Kristol. At Sunday’s memorial, people were startled to see Kristol on the Zoom.
The other project that captured Todd’s imagination is called Democracy Summer, a campaign in formation, two of whose prime leaders are Michael Ansara and Lee Webb, two other early SDS veterans. The idea, evoking Mississippi Freedom Summer 1964 and Vietnam Summer 1967, is to mobilize students to organize a massive campaign next summer to mobilize voters to save American democracy. In the several memorial conversations that have taken place since Todd’s death, there has been renewed interest in making Democracy Summer a reality. It could be his legacy.
In addition to all of his political and scholarly work, Todd found time to write poetry and three novels. His last book, a novel titled The Opposition, will be published posthumously.
Bob Ross, speaking at the memorial Zoom, quoted a few lines from one of Todd’s poems, written when he was 24, called “Assault”:The training of long distance runners over sandy soil in the thinnest air,The ginger quest for footing and a few provisions.Granite and sand seeming to fuse in the heat of the raceAnd instruments quiver, concealing the altitude.
Todd was nothing if not a long-distance runner.
