“Egalitarian Idealists and Authoritarian Zealots: A Cautionary Memoir,” by Maurice Isserman, the Publius Virgilius Rogers Professor of American History, appears in the Winter 2025 issue of Liberties.
In this lengthy essay, Isserman provides a detailed history of the influence various Socialist organizations in the U.S. have had on his life since the 1960s, such as the Socialist Party of America, the Young People’s Socialist League, and the Democratic Socialists of America.
He describes how in 1964, “about 1,000 young civil rights volunteers from around the country were taking part in the Freedom Summer Project directed by a remarkable 29-year-old activist named Bob Moses.”
Robert Parrish Moses graduated from Hamilton in 1956 and was a leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, whose volunteers Isserman said, “conducted a voter registration drive among the disenfranchised black population, and helped organize a new political formation called the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.”
Isserman identified with the students taking part in the Freedom Summer project and from there his “otherwise conventional adolescent rebellion took on an increasingly political edge.”
He tells about joining the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam and taking part in a rally at the U.N. where he heard speeches by Dr. Benjamin Spock, Stokely Carmichael, and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. After a summer in Indianapolis with the American Friends Service Committee, Isserman said he soon considered himself “a committed pacifist.”
He also took part in 1967’s March on the Pentagon where he learned of Students for a Democratic Society at a time when the civil rights movement was taking on “a darker meaning for some activists.” With the many perspectives and ideologies he was exposed to, Isserman said he found himself a “confused, intellectual mess."
He learned valuable lessons from his experiences, and those lessons have informed his subsequent political choices, including in 1982 as a founding member of the Democratic Socialists of America. They also led to him publishing five books on the history of the American left, including most recently, Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism. A discussion of the book, moderated by Gary Gerstle of Cambridge University, is available on C-SPAN’s Book TV.
