I need help on figuring out why the new lefts (1950's and 60's) wanted what they did and how they conveyed their message to the public.
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Ummmm all I remeber is that they wanted more democracy and some of them learned peaceful protest from African-Americans who practiced civil disobedince so they had sit-ins and stuff and some of the radicals in the new left actually started bombings. And of course they did alota drugs. Yeh...hippies
The New Left started in June 1962 when 40 students from various universities met to establish Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Tom Hayden wrote their manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, which was anti-bureaucracy, anti-Cold War ideology (including Vietnam), wanted students to participate in politics, and stated that students were the main force for change in society. SDS called themselves the New Left to distinguish themselves from the Old Left of the 30s and 40s (communists, socialists, etc.).
UC-Berkley was where the first student protests (sit-ins) were in the fall of 1964. Various student organizations formed a coalition called the Free Speech Movement (FSM), led by Mario Savio. Many of the tactics used by the FSM were influenced by the civil rights movement. Many Berkley students had gone to Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964, and this made many students think more radically.
This led to student protests across the country about anything remotely unfair. The Selective Service System (the Draft) and the Vietnam War were frequent targets of protests. When students learned their universities' research money came from the government, this resulted in the commonplace occurrences of rallies, teach-ins, and student strikes. This was also the time period when students came to admire the Cuban revolutionary leader Che Guevara.
The New Left also influenced people to disregard the restrictiveness of being middle class. Taking their cue from the Beats of the 50s, the growing counterculture encouraged personal liberation by means of new music, clothes, spirituality, sex, and drugs. This wasn't exactly the best way of communicating their anti-war message to the general public, as most normal people thought of hippies with utmost disgust.
Pretty soon, the hippies who had been influenced by the New Left moved beyond protests about international affairs and focused on self-liberation, effectively ending their role in the protesting. By all means, the hippie movement is overly glorified in that not very many people were actually hippies. Most members of the New Left were just normal college students protesting what they believed to be the injustices of the world.