ABSTRACT
The year 1968 may be taken as marking the major watershed in the development of the new left (NL). During that year the NL became recognized in official circles as undeniably a serious movement; as it reached the zenith of its mass support, it moved to near-revolutionary militancy in the spring and summer. The style and tone of the confrontations was more militant, involving more verbal violence than before; Rudd warned the President, that if the students won, they would take ‘control of his world’. Thus Columbia exemplified a stage in the growing provocation-repression strategy of the NL – especially Students for a Democratic Society; henceforth, the violence of the police was almost desired and elicited to prove a point; it pointed forward to Chicago in August. The thaw in Eastern Europe and the new wave of intellectual dissent during the 1960s, were taken by many to be a simple mirror-image of the growth of the NL in the West.
