Clancy Sigal wrote an "Open Letter to the Left" in the English journal, New Left Review (Jan.-Feb. 1960 issue). He spoke of a "crippling pragmatism" on the left. And: "the New Left so far has been lazy about its political and economic analysis because it too easily depended, not for its vocabulary but its assumptions, on the Old Left; and it was superficial in its cultural observations." He urged the British left to establish a socialist Student movement.New Left Review (which, as I say, began publishing in 1960) counted among its first editorial board members Norman Birnbaum, Doris Lessing, Dorothy Thompson, Raymond Williams. The main editor was (famously) Stuart Hall. Also publishing pieces in the first issue: E. P. Thompson on "The Point of Production," Dave Dellinger asking "Ar Pacifists Willing to Be Negroes?" and Paul Rose on the youth of Manchester. The gist of the project was to bring intellectuals and workers together (long a craving of the Anglo-American left). The editorial stance was anti-Soviet Marxist and, generally, anti-communist--although at the same time anti-anticommunist.
Is '60 the moment when the end of the end of the Old Left had been reached and the New Left began to emerge? Is it the final ascendancy, in certain scenes at least, of poetic postmodernity? Surely the publication of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry that year suggests this, but then again--once again--we look back on "New" here and see continuity. The rhetoric of the Kennedy-Nixon contest made much less of a dent than everyone (at the time as well as since) claimed, so one wonders why were such great claims made? 
Had we come to expect "1960" to be truly ubiquitously modern in a way that the 1950s really were not--not quite? And what specifically does "modern" mean in the Kennedyesque talk then and now about the torch being passed to a new generation, etc.? The First Lady really meant "modernist" when Camelotians said "modern." What about the others across the new young cultural leadership? I've been surprised by how frequently the 
"Beat movement" was covered in 1960 in the mainstream press. I was expecting a fair measure but I've found tonnage. 1960 was the year when the figure of the beat was beginning to find acceptance, although still 80% of these stories are mocking, rebels-without-cause condescension. For anyone whose analysis made an impact nationally, do these antipolitical adolescents count as part of the "new young cultural leadership"? No, but rather than the two being opposites, they fall along a Continuum of the New American. Now that's a change for '60.
