If I had a hammer ... the death of the old left and the birth of the new left.

• Author: Miller, Jim

If I Had a Hammer. . . . The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left.

Maurice Isserman. Basic, $18.95. The fifties were a tough decade for the left in America. In the popular mind, socialism and communism were two words for the same evil. To be a radical was to know penury; it was to be hated and despised. In 1952, the treasurer of perhaps the most important group of pacifist activities in America reported that the organization had $12.84 in its bank account. Three years later, when its leader A.J. Muste participated in the first modest act of collective disobedience in the fifties, he and his comrades were promptly arrested. Their crime? Gathering in a park outside New York's City Hall and refusing to take shelter when the air-raid sirens sounded. At their trial, the judge called these self-styled pacifists "murderers,' on the grounds that their disdain for civil defense would mean the death of millions of New Yorkers in the event of a genuine nuclear attack.

Still, the fact is that a radical American sub-culture did survive the big chill of the fifties to influence the young activists of the sixties. As Maurice Isserman shows in this scholarly and lucid study, the recent history of American radicalism is "less spasmodic' than is generally supposed.

Isserman, a professor at Smith, is best known for Which Side Were You On?, a history of the Communist party during World War II. Although his new book begins with a chapter on the collapse of the American Communist party, its chief interest lies in the detailed accounts he gives of three more obscure groups: the activists who swore allegiance to Max Shachtman, the intellectuals associated with Irving Howe and his small journal, Dissent, and the radical pacifists linked to A.J. Muste.

The strangest story in many respects is that of Shachtman. A Jewish immigrant born in Warsaw in 1904, Shachtman was a communist in the twenties, a follower of Trotsky in the thirties, and--after he broke with his mentor in 1939--the leader of an independent and increasingly esoteric Marxist sect that has left a surprisingly large mark on American political...