Todd Gitlin (born 1943) is an American
sociologistSociology is the scientific or systematic study of human societies. It is a branch of social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social structure and activity, often with the goal of applying such...
, political writer, novelist, and cultural commentator. He has written widely on the
mass mediaMass media denotes a section of the media specifically designed to reach a very large audience such as the population of a nation state. The term was coined in the 1920s with the advent of nationwide radio networks, mass-circulation newspapers and magazines. However, some forms of mass media such...
, politics, intellectual life and the arts, for both popular and
scholarlyAcademia, Acadème, or the Academy are collective terms for the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research....
publications.
In the 1960s, Gitlin was a political activist. In 1963 and 1964, Gitlin was president of
Students for a Democratic SocietyStudents for a Democratic Society was a student activist movement in the United States that was one of the main iconic representations of the country's New Left...
; he was elected, he writes, because "none of the other four candidates, each of whom was experienced, was willing to serve," since "we mistrusted power, including our own! Recruiting leaders was hard." (
Letters to a Young Activist, p.
Todd Gitlin (born 1943) is an American
sociologistSociology is the scientific or systematic study of human societies. It is a branch of social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social structure and activity, often with the goal of applying such...
, political writer, novelist, and cultural commentator. He has written widely on the
mass mediaMass media denotes a section of the media specifically designed to reach a very large audience such as the population of a nation state. The term was coined in the 1920s with the advent of nationwide radio networks, mass-circulation newspapers and magazines. However, some forms of mass media such...
, politics, intellectual life and the arts, for both popular and
scholarlyAcademia, Acadème, or the Academy are collective terms for the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research....
publications.
New Left activist
In the 1960s, Gitlin was a political activist. In 1963 and 1964, Gitlin was president of
Students for a Democratic SocietyStudents for a Democratic Society was a student activist movement in the United States that was one of the main iconic representations of the country's New Left...
; he was elected, he writes, because "none of the other four candidates, each of whom was experienced, was willing to serve," since "we mistrusted power, including our own! Recruiting leaders was hard." (
Letters to a Young Activist, p. 117) Indeed, he writes, the SDS abolished its presidency and vice-presidencies in the mid-sixties. He helped organize the first national
demonstration againstOpposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War is significant because it was the first time a war was shown and accessed through the media to the public in the United States.-1945:...
the
Vietnam WarThe Vietnam War or the Second Indochina War was a Cold War military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1959 to 30 April 1975...
, held in Washington, D. C., on April 26, 1965, with 25,000 participants, as well as the first
civil disobedienceCivil disobedience is the active refusal to obey certain laws, demands and commands of a government, or of an occupying power, without resorting to physical violence. It is one of the primary methods of nonviolent resistance...
directed against American corporate support for the apartheid regime in
South AfricaThe Republic of South Africa is a country located at the southern tip of Africa, with a coastline on the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. To the north lie Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe, to the east are Mozambique and Swaziland, while Lesotho is an independent country surrounded by South Africa.Modern...
- a sit-in at the Manhattan headquarters of
Chase Manhattan BankChase is the consumer and commercial banking division of JPMorgan Chase. The bank was known as Chase Manhattan Bank until it merged with JPMorgan in 2000. Chase Manhattan Bank was formed by the merger of the Chase National Bank and the Bank of the Manhattan Company in 1955...
in 1965.
Academic career
Later, Gitlin returned to graduate school; he holds an A.B. degree from Harvard College (mathematics), and graduate degrees from the University of Michigan (political science) and the University of California, Berkeley (sociology). He is also a graduate of the
Bronx High School of ScienceThe Bronx High School of Science is a specialized New York City public high school. Founded in 1938, it is located in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx. Admission is by an exam open to all grade-eligible students in New York City, reportedly taken by more than 20,000 students annually...
, where he was valedictorian. He served as professor of sociology and director of the mass communications program at the University of California, Berkeley, then a professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University. He is now a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph.D. program in Communications at Columbia University. During 1994-95, he held the chair in American Civilization at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He has been a resident at the Bellagio Study Center in Italy and the Djerassi Foundation in Woodside, California, a fellow at the Media Studies Center, and a visiting professor at Yale University, the University of Oslo, and the University of Toronto.
Public intellectual
He has written 12 books, and has also written for dozens of publications, including
The New York TimesThe New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded in 1851 and published in New York City. The largest metropolitan newspaper in the United States, "The Gray Lady"—named for its staid appearance and style—is regarded as a national newspaper of record...
, Los Angeles TimesThe Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California since 1881. It is distributed throughout the Western United States. It is the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in the United States and the fourth-most widely distributed newspaper in the United States...
, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Columbia Journalism ReviewThe Columbia Journalism Review is an American magazine for professional journalists published bimonthly by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism since 1961....
and many more. He has been a columnist for the
San Francisco Examiner and the
New York ObserverThe New York Observer is a weekly newspaper first published in New York City on September 22, 1987, by Arthur L. Carter, a very successful former investment banker with publishing interests...
, and is a frequent contributor to
TPMcafe.com. He is currently on the editorial board of
DissentDissent is an intellectual quarterly edited by Michael Walzer and Michael Kazin. Founded in 1954 by a group of New York Intellectuals, which included Irving Howe, Lewis A...
and the Progressive Book Club, a contributing writer to
Mother JonesMother Jones is an independent, nonprofit magazine rooted in liberal and progressive political values. It is widely known for its investigative reporting...
, and a member of the board of trustees of
openDemocracy.net. He has been co-chair of the San Francisco branch of PEN American Center and a member of the board of directors of
GreenpeaceGreenpeace is a non-governmental organization for the protection and conservation of the environment. Greenpeace uses direct action, lobbying and research to achieve its goals. Greenpeace has a worldwide presence with national and regional offices in 46 countries, which are affiliated to the...
.
Gitlin has become a prominent critic of the tactics and rhetoric of the Left as well as the Right. He emphasizes what he sees as the need in American politics to form coalitions between disparate movements, which must compromise ideological purity to gain power by working together within the two major political parties. He argues that the Republican party has managed to accomplish this with a coalition of what he calls two "major components - the low-tax, love-business, hate-government enthusiasts and the God-save-us moral crusaders" but that the Democratic Party has often been unable to accomplish a pragmatic coalition between its "roughly eight" constituencies, which he identifies as "labor, African Americans, Hispanics, feminists, gays, environmentalists, members of the helping professions (teachers, social workers, nurses), and the militantly liberal, especially antiwar denizens of avant-garde cultural zones such as university towns, the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and so on. (The categories obviously overlap somewhat.)" (from
The Bulldozer and the Big Tent, pp. 18-19). He adds that "it is easier [for Republicans] to coax one of two ideological tendencies (usually the Christian right) to compromise for the greater good of conservatism than it is to persuade an identity-based group (feminists, gays, African Americans) to make concessions on what is, after all, their identity as they see it.”
Quote
~ from Varieties of Patriotic Experience
~ from "Paraphrasing the '60s" Los Angeles Times, January 27, 2007
Books
- Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago (1970) ISBN 0-06-090235-3
- Campfires of Resistance: Poetry from the Movement, editor (1971)
- Busy Being Born (1974) ISBN 0-87932-073-7
- The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the Left (1980) ISBN 0-520-23932-6
- Inside Prime Time (1983) ISBN 0-520-21785-3
- The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987) ISBN 0-553-37212-2
- Watching Television, editor (1987) ISBN 0-394-54496-X
- The Murder of Albert Einstein (1992) ISBN 0-553-37366-8
- The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars (1995) ISBN 0-8050-4091-9.
- Sacrifice (1999) ISBN 0-8050-6032-4
- Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives (2002) ISBN 0-8050-7283-7
- Letters To a Young Activist (2003) ISBN 0-465-02738-5
- "Varieties of Patriotic Experience," in The Fight Is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World, ed. George Packer (New York: Perennial, 2003). ISBN 0-06-053249-1
- The Intellectuals and the Flag (2006) ISBN 0-231-12492-9
- The Bulldozer and the Big Tent (2007) ISBN 0-471-74853-6
External links