Table Of ContentWhen the Old Left
Was Young
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WHEN
THE OLD LEFT
WAS YOUNG
Student Radicals and
America's First
Mass Student Movement,
1929-1941
ROBERT COHEN
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Bombay
Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam
Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi
Kuala Lurnpur Madras Madrid Melbourne
Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore
Taipei Tokyo Toronto
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1993 by Robert Cohen
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 30016
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1997
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicaiion Data
Cohen, Robert.
When the old left was young:
student radicals and America's first mass student protest movement,
1929-1941 / Robert Cohen.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-506099-7
ISBN 0-19-511136-2 (pbk.)
1. Student movements'—United States—History—20th century.
2. College students—-United States—Political activity—History—20th century.
3. Depressions—1929—United States- -History.
I. Title.
LA229.C62 1993 378.1'981—dc20 92-22733
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To my parents,
Marvin and Shirley Cohen
and to the memory of my grandparents,
Ben and Rose Cohen,
Irving and Florence Balas
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Acknowledgments
This study began as a dissertation in the UC Berkeley history department.
I owe a great debt to my dissertation chair, Diane Shaver Clemens, for
her encouragement, advice, and willingness to share her knowledge of
international relations during the Age of Roosevelt. Diane's commitment
to her students, to her scholarship, and to a more democratic university
have been inspirational. Her friendship and guidance made my disserta-
tion work more enjoyable than I would have thought possible. Leon Lit-
wack offered helpful criticism, which convinced me to broaden the scope
of the study. I am also grateful to Leon for emphasizing the literary pos-
sibilities of historical writing and insisting that historians write for the public
rather than just for the academy or themselves. Michael Rogin's com-
ments on several drafts of this study were invaluable, as was his encour-
agement to look at the Old Left critically but empathetically. My under-
standing of the American Left also has been enhanced by discussions with
Candace Falk and Richard Boyden. I am indebted to Candace for provid-
ing me with the opportunity to work on the Emma Goldman Papers Proj-
ect while completing this study. Goldman's brilliant writings on the Span-
ish Civil War influenced my own thinking, as did her radical critique of
Stalinism. My thanks to James Kettner for being so generous with his time
and advice.
My interest in the political history of the American university origi-
nated in an undergraduate seminar at SUNY Buffalo taught by Jesse
Lemisch. Jesse's pioneering scholarship in this area served as a model for
my own work, and I am grateful for his friendship, support, and for his
criticism of parts of the manuscript. My thanks go as well to another of
my former teachers at Buffalo, Philip Altbach in the School of Education,
whose publications have helped make the study of American student pol-
itics an exciting field. Athan Theoharis of Marquette University opened
up a valuable source for this study by encouraging me to obtain the FBI
documents on the student movement.
The Berkeley campus itself is a great teacher about student politics.
I learned much about the dynamics of student protest from my former
colleagues on the Daily Californian—including David Pickell, Will Miner,
Colleen Lye, Leigh Anne Jones, and Drew Digby—and from a whole gen-
viii Acknowledgments
eration of fellow activists in the Association of Graduate Student Employ-
ees, Berkeley's divestment movement, and the Graduate Assembly.
This study could riot have been completed without the resources of
many archives and libraries and the assistance of their staffs. I am espe-
cially grateful to Elizabeth Denier and the rest of the staff at the FDR
Library in Hyde Park, New York, for promptly" processing the Joseph P.
Lash Papers, and making accessible this rich collection of documents on
the American student movement of the 1930s. My thanks to the archivists
at the Swarthrnore College Peace Collection, the Tamiment Institute Li-
brary at NYU, the New York Public Library and its Schomburg Center
for Research in Black Culture, the YWCA National Board Archives in
New York, the American Civil Liberties Union Archives at Princeton Uni-
versity, and the National Archives in Washington, D.C. I am also indebted
to the Carlson Library at the University of Toledo and the Tamiment
Institute Library at NYU for allowing me to use microfilmed copies of
Duke University's collection of the Socialist Party of America Papers.
Since American college campuses constituted the student movement's
base, constituency and political environment, I found it necessary to un-
dertake extensive research on individual campuses. This research was
greatly expedited by the talented archivists and fine archival collections of
many campuses. I owe a special debt to City College of New York archi-
vist Barbara Dunlap for her help in tracking down materials on that cam-
pus's student protesters and administration. J. R. K. Kan tor and his suc-
cessor as University of California archivist, William Roberts, as well as
other staff members at the Bancroft Library, were of great assistance in
uncovering sources on UC Berkeley and UCLA. My thanks to the archival
staffs at Barnard College, Brooklyn College, Columbia University's Col-
umbiaria Collection arid Low Library, the Regensteiri Special Collections
Department of the University of Chicago, Emory University, Fisk Univer-
sity, Harvard University, Howard University, Hunter College, the Univer-
sity of Michigan and its Labadie Collection, the State University of New
York at Buffalo, Oberliri College, the Ohio Historical Society, the South-
ern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,
the University of Texas, the University of Toledo, UCLA, Vassar College,
the University of Virginia, the University of Wisconsin, and the Wisconsin
Historical Society. The libraries of Dartmouth College, the University of
Illinois, the University of Kansas, the University of Kentucky, Marshall
University, and Ohio State University were generous in lending me their
student publications. My thanks to the interlibrary loan departments at
UC Berkeley's Doe Library and the University of Toledo's Carlson Li-
brary for obliging me in what I am sure seemed an unending stream of
requests for student and radical publications from across the United States.
I was very fortunate that former activists and leaders from the stu-
dent movement allowed me to interview them. Their memories offered
an important supplement to the written record. Celeste Strack Kaplan,
Monroe Sweetland, the late F. Palmer Weber, and the late Larry Rogin
Acknowledgments ix
not only took time to talk with me, but also assisted me in contacting other
movement veterans. I am grateful to the following Depression era alumni
for sharing with me their memories of the student movement: Riva Stocker
Aaron, Dorothy Burnham, Joseph Clark, Kenneth B. Clark, Homer Coke,
Richard Criley, Hal Draper, Theodore Draper, Judah Drob, Mary Felton
Drob, Ishmael Flory, Elizabeth Pope Franklin, Marge Frantz, Emanuel
Geltman, Serril Gerber, Harold Goldstein, Max Gordon, Gil Green, Rob-
ert Hall, Albert Herling, John Herling, Esther Cooper Jackson, James E.
Jackson, the late Joseph P. Lash, Toni Locke, Leonard Lurie, Harry Mag-
doff, William Mandel, Henry May, the late Jack McMichael, the late Wil-
liam Parry, Paul Porter, Harry Ring, Shura Kamenir Saul, Morris Schappes,
Judith Solomon, Nathan Solomon, Lil Sweetland, George Watt, the late
James Wechsler, Vivian Weinstein, Max Weiss, Leon Wofsy, and Molly
Yard. Toni Locke, Henry May, and Max Gordon were generous in pro-
viding me with documents from their student activist days. My knowledge
of the movement was also enhanced by discussions at the American Stu-
dent Union's 50th anniversary reunion, held in Long Beach, California,
and organized with great skill by Leo Rifkin.
The initial research for this study was made possible by funding from
UC Berkeley's Humanities Research Fellowship and the History depart-
ment's Eugene McCormac and Max Farrand Fellowships. My hnal re-
search trips were funded by grants from the University of Toledo and the
Toledo Humanities Institute. Georgian College in Orillia, Ontario, gen-
erously made available an office in which to begin revising the manu-
script. My thanks to Richard Allen, Tiffany Patterson, Michael Kay, Fred-
erico and Pura Arcos, Lorin Gary, Carol Menning, William Hoover, Roger
Ray, Michael Meranze, Mary Odem, and Janice LIughes for their friend-
ship and support. I hope that Gary and Wanda Davis know how much I
appreciate all their help over the years and their role in making my south-
ern California research trips so pleasurable. Thanks to all my friends,
relatives and friends of friends who housed me during my low budget
research trips through the Midwest and South and to the East Coast. I
am grateful to Judith Preissle, Guy Larkins and the University of Geor-
gia's department of Social Science Education for providing a congenial
environment in which to complete this work.
I am indebted to Vivian McLaughlin for skillful copy-editing of the
typescript. My thanks to Sheldon Meyer for his patience and understand-
ing, which enabled me to delay the completion of the manuscript until I
had made use of essential sources recently released in the Lash Papers.
Elizabeth Bryan, Joan Stroer, and David Pickell provided valuable assis-
tance with the final proofreading.
Many Americans of my generation learned their first lessons about
the Great Depression not from history books, but from their parents. I
grew up with my father's stories of the hard times he and his brothers
endured as children in a Brooklyn ghetto during the 1930s. I want to
thank him for sharing those stories and sparking my interest in Depres-
