Word: cowans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...their little brothers and sisters, their younger friends, or their tutorial students, many of us have less claim to first-hand experience than they do. Cowan's book (subtitled "A Dialogue with Experience") can be rewardingly informative for the movement's second generation. The college student of the early Seventies has a real problem articulating his unwillingness to work from within to change his government. He often feels disarmed by liberal parents who insist that he "give it a chance...
AMERICA failed the chances Cowan gave it. The liberal credo on which he was nurtured (described with almost poetic beauty in a passage about his childhood fantasies of stalwartly crushing Joe McCarthyism) went so deep that it inhibited his anger for years. He treats his involvement with the Civil Rights movement and the Peace Corps in Ecuador so thoroughly, tracing his individual frustration back to the power source that fundamentally opposes meaningful change, as to argue convincingly that the chance-giving approach must fail. The implications for those younger than Cowan bring to mind George Santayana's maxim that people...
...book's primary value is not as a warning to those who already share Cowan's sentiments. The same subjective passion that may flaw the book as history makes it a uniquely persuasive political statement. The Making of an Un-American owes its uniqueness as a polemic to the fact that it is first and foremost about people, which (as often as we may forget) is also what politics is about. Cowan's development as a human being, which encompasses his development as a political activist, becomes all-important to the reader. Parts of the book read like a diary...
...humanization of Cowan's story is the source of its power. By the time Cowan confronts the bureaucracies that always seem to tower over his activities, we know much about him. Even those who can't directly identify with his upper-middle class liberal background (Choate before Harvard) will have trouble not liking him. He recalls his past ingenuousness critically, sometimes with a sense of humor that chides our own intellectual pretensions. He questions every step of his wavering journey in the same way and with many of the same questions that we do (or should). Nor is this humility...
That same modesty underlies the book's most serious limitation, at least for readers who already share Cowan's disillusionment. Making of an Un-American looks behind us: its few implications for the future are cautious and vague. Cowan is, as Mark Rudd would doubtless sneer, an armchair revolutionary. He freely admits his inability to reduce the bankruptcy of reformism to personal revolutionary action. He brilliantly delineates how he got where he is, but takes us no further. His book ends with a disappointing abruptness after his revulsion for the Peace Corps comes to a climax. He is "un" -Americanized...