Radical America
Cover design in a New Left Periodical
Below is a selection of covers from Radical America, a magazine that emerged out of the campus-based New Left of the late 1960s, founded by members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) who sought to learn from prior generations of radicals and activists.
We founded Radical America in the 1960s to recuperate what was called, by radical historians in those years, a “useable past,” that is, something to build upon. The problem we faced was an intellectual paucity in the young generation of radicals brought to consciousness by civil rights and antiwar and anti-imperialist impulses: they had sincerity and political experience, at least some political experience, but what they lacked was intellectual depth, or any perspective on the history of the US Left.
So, in this sense, perhaps Radical America really began in the basement of the University of Illinois library archives, during the Fall of 1965, when I became spokesman for the SDS chapter/student antiwar movement. I was determined to grasp what I had learned in my brief sojourn in the Socialist Labor Party, and the earliest Marxist years of Daniel DeLeon, the socialist leader of the 1890s, was my subject. The issues of the weekly socialist newspaper The People had not been microfilmed yet, and so I flipped through the yellowed pages, while thinking of what could be done on campus. Why did the US Left fail? What are lessons that can be learned? And what hidden strengths – hidden most of all from us, generations later – can be grasped by social history, use of non-English languages, and so on? These were the questions that animated Radical America.
Radical America ran from 1967 to 1999; during the 1970s and 1980s, it took on a “more of an academic Marxist flavor.” The covers below span from around 1969 to 1985, the magazine’s most active years, when it was a hub of thought on feminism and women’s liberation, Black liberation, workers' rights, and unions, among other topics.
I wrote this previously about feminist counterculture publications, but it applies equally to Radical America: “Limited funds and small circulations did not hinder them from creating radical magazines/newspapers with powerful covers and design, though the design styles were as varied as their viewpoints—from graphic and stylized, to messy, hand-drawn and immediate.” All issues can be read in their entirety on Brown University Library’s website. I highly recommend reading this whole interview with Paul Buhle by Viewpoint Magazine.
I’ve included the names of designers, artists, and photographers, where credited.
