David Shankbone via Creative Commons
Todd Gitlin
Todd Gitlin, an early leader of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), passed away on February 5 at age seventy-nine. Gitlin’s fellow SDS cohorts, Tom Hayden and Paul Booth, died in 2016 and 2018, respectively, meaning Gitlin’s passing bookends the saga of the most well-known college campus activists, who went from the Port Huron Statement to lead far-reaching community organizing initiatives.
After the 1970s, Gitlin drifted from left to left-liberal, or center-left, marked by impatience with younger radicals, especially on college campuses. Yet, toward the end of his life, he applauded the Occupy movement, and later joined others in vocal opposition to the Republican Party’s shift toward Trumpism.
Gitlin, as he grew older, appeared to lose patience with young radicals, especially those on campus.
The early SDS was a small-scale affair on a handful of campuses. As Kirkpatrick Sale wrote in his definitive history of the group, it was a movement of Easterners, a mixture of “red diaper babies” (activists with parents who had been members of the Communist Party) and assorted idealists, overwhelmingly male and inspired by the civil rights movement.
Gitlin, a graduate of Bronx High School of Science at age sixteen, fit the mold of those who flung themselves into activism. Graduating from Harvard and then from graduate school at the University of Michigan, he traveled widely, joining and sometimes leading protests—including a spectacular sit-in at the main office of Chase Manhattan Bank in New York City against the bank’s collaboration with South African Apartheid.
He recalled later that he wanted “to be like” Tom Hayden and other romantic leaders of the new movements. Within a still-small SDS, he succeeded Hayden as president of the organization from 1963 to 1964, steering the movement with a steady hand as it ballooned on campuses across the country.
Leaving school behind for several years, he quickly made himself the face of antiwar protests, both as a highly skilled organizer and as a self-made favorite of the TV camera in an age when protest itself became a media phenomenon. After moving to California, Gitlin became a leading figure at the San Francisco Express-Times, one of the livelist, most well-produced “underground” newspapers of the day. And he had almost finished his sojourn with the radical left.
In 1970, Gitlin’s first book (in collaboration with his first wife, Nanci Hollander), Uptown:Poor Whites in Chicago, garnered wide interest. He had captured the vitality and difficulty of the organizing projects that were effectively abandoned when campus sentiment against the war in Vietnam took their place.
Enrolling in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley while teaching some courses at San Jose State University, he grew steadily more interested in the role of media in society, about which he would write several of his most influential books. Securing a PhD in 1977, he became director of Berkeley’s Mass Communications program, remaining there until 1995.
Gitlin would ultimately author eighteen books (the final one, a novel called The Opposition, is scheduled for release later this spring). His best-known and most controversial books, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media and the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (1980) and The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987), mixed his own memories with some keen insights into the manipulations of media and how the young New Left could be caught up in its own illusions.
These two books also confirmed the drift he had already made politically as he left Berkeley for NYU in 1995. His critics, many of whom were among an older crowd of activists, tended to view this change in shorthand: when he ceased to be a central figure in the movement, it would naturally wither within and finally fizzle into obscurity.
Hayden, his nearest counterpart, would share part of Gitlin’s trajectory, but would remain a charismatic opponent of U.S. foreign misadventures, rallying crowds of youngsters and playing a considerable role in the Democratic Party of California. Gitlin became best known as a media critic, highlighted by his book Inside Prime Time (1983). In 1987, he wrote “The Lone Driver” about television advertising for The Progressive.
Gitlin, as he grew older, appeared to lose patience with young radicals, especially those on campus. Shifts in political and theoretical paradigms around him seemed to assume ominous proportions, and newer versions of activism appeared entirely—or at least mostly—wrong. His book, The Twilight of Common Dreams (1995), signaled mostly animus. Hanging a U.S. flag from the balcony outside of his apartment window after the 9/11 attacks marked high distress.
The Occupy Movement, which Gitlin championed, and would write his last non-fiction book about, offered him a way back: Occupy Nation: the Roots, the Spirit and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street (2012) seemed a fresh if late life rebeginning.