Discussion Questions
November 16, 2015

  1. What was the "new left"?  Where did it come from, and why?  What differentiated it from the 'old left'?
  2. The Port Huron Statement is a call for action, but to whom, or for whom, is Hayden speaking?  What does this document tell us about early 1960s American society?
  3. Are there any differences in tone, audience, or intent, between Savio and Hayden?
  4. Considering together the statements by Hayden and Savio, what can we learn about the nature of American universities at the beginning of the 1960s?  What is the relationship (real and perceived) of the universities to the society at large?
  5. What is the 'nature of the dilemma' to which Schlesinger refers?
  6. What is the relationship of the Cold War to Schlesinger's vision of the 1960s?  Is he simply describing a more effective means to fight communism?
  7. On the surface Schlesinger would seem to have much in common with Hayden's rallying cry for the disaffected youth apparent in the Port Huron Statement.  Is Schlesinger though, in any meaningful way, challenging the status quo?  Ultimately what is Schlesinger's view of America which will emerge in the 1960s?
  8. Schlesinger argues that America is undergoing a reorientation in the 1960s.  But what has caused that reorientation?  Why should Americans voluntarily turn their backs on the pursuit of comfort, profit, etc., for abstract goals?  How does he explain that shift?
  9. What was the "liberal consensus"?  How and why did it begin to fall apart in the 1960s?
  10. Why did SNCC break with the mainstream civil rights movement?
  11. In what sense was 1968 "a watershed"?

    For your ongoing consideration:

    According to one historian, "By the late 1960s the Vietnam War had become a prism on American society, refracting that society into bands of linked but separate realities.  Americans were not simply divided politically over the war.  The war had become much more:  a way for Americans to vent their feelings about the values, morals, and "self-evident" truths that guided their everyday lives."