Ramparts Magazine existed from 1962 to 1975. It was a glossy and often illustrated American political muckraker that captured the revolutionary zeitgeist of the era. Ramparts was perhaps best-known as one of the most respected organs of the American New Left. The New Left can possibly best be defined as a loosely organized, mostly white student movement that advocated democracy, civil rights, and various types of university reforms, and protested against the American war in Indochina.

But the term New Left was first popularized in the United States in an open letter written in 1960 by sociologist C. Wright Mills titled Letter to the New Left. He argued for a new leftist ideology that he hoped might transcend the traditional and often dogmatic (“Old Left”) focus on labor issues, into a broader focus on issues such as opposing alienation, anomie and authoritarianism.

Mills argued for a shift from traditional leftism toward the values of the counterculture, and, echoing Karl Marx, emphasized and advocated an international (rather than nationalistic) perspective on the movement.

Mills also claimed that the proletariat (collectively the working-class referenced in Marxism) was no longer the revolutionary force; the new agents of revolutionary change in the decades after World War II were, Mills believed, young intellectuals such as college students, scholars, and editors of leftist academic books, journals, muckraking publications (such as Ramparts).

(Introduction to Ramparts Magazine, "Ramparts Magazine and the New Left’s lost voice"1)

Ramparts Magazine was both a product and purveyor of a revolutionary age. Numerous stories published by the magazine were about revolution or revolutionaries. In 1964, for example, Ramparts published an essay titled “John Quincy Adams and the Revolutionary Temper” written by novelist Truman Nelson. Nelson’s essay about Adams was followed immediately in the December 1964 edition of Ramparts by a profile of Mahatma Gandhi written by the Christian mystic, Thomas Merton, who, like Martin Luther King Jr., believed the world desperately needed a moral revolution.

In a way, Merton humanized anti-colonialism for a Catholic-American audience via his celebration of Gandhi by writing that the latter “believed that the central problem of our time was the acceptance or the rejection of a basic law of love and of truth which had been made known to the world in traditional religions and most clearly by Jesus Christ.” Gandhi himself, Merton wrote, “expressly and very clearly declared himself an adherent of this one law” and was “indisputably sincere and right in his moral commitment to the law of love and truth.”

In May 1965, Ramparts published an opinion piece titled “The Triple Revolution” contributed by W.H. Ferry, who was a director of The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California. He declared that a “moral equivalent to war” was a requisite part of waging what he referred to as a “triple revolution” that would transform mankind from what he called “homoeconimicus” to “homohumanus.” In other words, Ferry proscribed that a human rights revolution in which humans were motivated by love and care for each other, rather than motivated by accruing more wealth and material comfort as fast as possible, was especially requisite.

In October 1965, Ramparts published Robert McAfee Brown’s address to the parents of Stanford University’s Class of 1965 titled “This Revolting Generation.” He noted that many adults, including FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, denigrated the 1964-65 manifestations of student unrest on American campuses as a product of immaturity and insecurity. He believed it to be evidence of an association of American college kids with the more dubious members of the faculty, or (in an increasingly widespread variant) to some Communist takeover of the student organizations. Brown expressed regret that Hoover seemed “more concerned about exposing purported Communist activity in Berkeley than in exposing manifest, blatant Fascist activity in Mississippi.” Brown thus also considered the young generation to be “revolting,” but he meant it in the best possible sense. It was a generation in revolt against the inveterate fascism of Hoover, McCarthyism, racism, and war.

Even the Roman Catholic Church seemed to be in the midst of a social and cultural revolution in the 1960s. Ramparts editor Warren Hinkle continued the theme of radical religious activism common in the magazine in the November 1967 edition in an article titled “Left Wing Catholics.” Though the American clergy depicted by Hinckle was by no means as militant or revolutionary as Father Camilo Torre, there was a liberalization of the Church happening all over the world, not just in Latin America.

The Church had often supported the anti-Semitism and snarling fascism in Europe in the interwar era and emerged from World War II with a diminished moral authority and thus diminished cultural influence, which led to the Vatican II, which provided evidence of the liberalization of the Church as it tried to maintain some semblance of cultural importance in the context of modern revolutionary movements evolving throughout the developing world. In the United States, the Church was by no means a radical institution, but it also was not free from being affected by anti-colonialism.

Fulton Sheen of Rochester, New York—the great, gray eminence of the early days of televangelism, who stood up in his pulpit every Sunday night against Milton Berle and Ed Sullivan—, held a captive audience in the 1950s with theatrical lectures on the deadly menace of communism and the real dangers of atheistic materialism. By 1967, Sheen had suddenly wanted to get out of Vietnam. He had grown so concerned over the Church's deafening silence on Vietnam that he publicly beseeched President Lyndon Johnson to “immediately” withdraw all U.S. forces. Suddenly, Sheen did not seem to be a revolutionary. “He was Paul,” Hinckle wrote, “and Rochester was Damascus… It was a conversion. A miracle.”

Other case studies of American Catholic priests advocating liberalism included James Groppi of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who said to the Youth Council of the Milwaukee NAACP that “Jesus Christ was the greatest civil rights worker.” Hinkle concluded by delving into Pope Paul VI’s seeming radical turn in the 1960s. Hinckle cited Pope Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio (On the Development of Peoples), which was called “warmed-over Marxism” and dismissed by Fortune Magazine as taking a “dated stand and suspicious view of the workings of capitalist economic enterprise.”

Hinckle paraphrased the Pope by noting how unfortunate it seemed that “a system” had been constructed, which considered “profit as the key motive for economic progress, competition as the supreme law of economics and private ownership of the means of production as an absolute right” that had “no limits” and carried “no corresponding social obligation.”

In May 1969, Ramparts published a spoof contributed by Mary Morhoff of the board game Monopoly, which was capitalism for kids, by including in the edition a centerfold and a set of rules that was meant to be for a board game title “Revolution,” which was the antithesis of Parker Brothers’ Monopoly. The spoof seemed meant to underscore how naturalized the spirit of winner-take-all capitalism was in American society in the late 1960s.

Ramparts was indeed a voice of what seemed poised to be a revolutionary generation, presiding over the Rights Revolution of the 1960s and early 1970s. The magazine’s editors were dedicated to championing a true rights revolution that would transform American society via its institutions. The editors published several articles about the American Labor movement, African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans’ quest for political and economic equality, and many essays championing women’s liberation. Several stories published in Ramparts also defended readers’ rights to live in a safe and healthy environment.

Environmentalism, in fact, evolved out of the counterculture, a general movement of people dedicated to living lives conscientiously removed from the rapaciousness, greed, and destruction part and parcel of capitalism. Ramparts also published several stories about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, thereby underscoring the point that Americans had a right to an open and honest government and a right to know what the editors perceived to be the hidden truths surrounding the murder of an American President.

Notes

1 Ramparts Magazine and the New Left’s lost voice at Meer.