as the Progressive Coalition did in Burlington, Vermont in 1980, electing socialist Bernie Sanders as mayor the next year. For still others, the exhortation to think globally and act locally implied using community organizing to grapple with far-reaching problems that had arrived in their backyards, as did, for example, the member organizations of the Citizens’ Clearinghouse on Hazardous Wastes, founded in 1981.10
Substantial numbers of former radicals began to work inside or alongside the institutions of power during this period. A significant number of African-American organizers, for example, shifted to the mainstream electoral arena. While blacks remained dramatically underrepresented in elective offices, the number of black elected officials tripled between 1969 and 1977.11 Other activists chose to ally themselves with large liberal organizations, pursuing a species of legislative and electoral politics that tied their fate to the simultaneously declining and rightward-drifting Democratic Party. These groups included the National Organization for Women, which devoted much of its energies throughout the 1970s and early 1980s in an ultimately unsuccessful campaign for an Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution; the National Gay Task Force, founded in 1973 (and later renamed the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force), which worked to abolish sodomy laws, establish legal protections for gays and lesbians, and support gay-friendly candidates; and environmental organizations such as the National Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club, which combined lobbying with litigation to promote an environmental agenda. Circumscribed though their political vision might have been from a radical perspective, many of these organizations thrived in the seventies and eighties, expanding their membership, mastering the art of direct-mail fundraising, and honing their Beltway-insider skills.
Other progressives established alternative educational institutions, from independent Chicano colleges on the West Coast to a school for Marxist education in New York City. Many moved into the academy, where from within established colleges and universities they promoted ethnic and women’s studies: roughly 600 college and universities offered black studies courses by 1972; five years later, when the National Women’s Studies Association was created, there were 276 women’s studies programs in the country.
But above all, the sense of hunkering down for the long haul prompted many to turn their energies toward building alternative, community-based, and counter-institutions, acting to create change at a more modest scale in their immediate surroundings. Environmentalists opened local ecology centers, set up recycling projects, and organized food cooperatives, some of which still exist to this day, such as the Park Slope Food Coop (founded in 1973). Feminists, and especially lesbian-feminists, built a nationwide network of cultural institutions including women’s cafes and bookstores and events like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, which ran annually from 1976 to 2015; they also created battered women’s shelters, feminist health clinics, and self-defense classes with a feminist bent. The period from the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s could be called the age of progressive institution-building: it saw the founding of long-lived, influential infrastructure, such as a movement-oriented advertising agency (the Public Media Center, 1974–2009), a radical philanthropic network (the Funding Exchange, operating between 1979–2013), a training institute for activists of color (the Center for Third World Organizing, founded in 1980), and an annual gathering of left intellectuals (the Socialist Scholars Conference, founded in 1983, renamed the Left Forum in 2005).12
A whole wave of activists, particularly from the identity-based movements, focused on the production and distribution of alternative media during this period. “There was this passion for getting information out,” recalled Carol Seajay, one of the founders of the Feminist Bookstore Network and the longtime publisher of Feminist Bookstore News, which remained in operation until 2000. Most of the underground papers of the sixties had died by the mid seventies, but new publications took their place—along with new publishing houses, and new bookstores to disseminate it all. A certain number of these media institutions were left or broadly radical: Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco and Midnight Special Bookstore in Santa Monica (both founded in 1971; Midnight Special closed in 2004); Mother Jones magazine and the socialist weekly In These Times (both founded in 1976); the Center for Investigative Reporting (founded in 1977); the book publishers South End Press (1977–2014) and New Society Publishers (founded in 1982). But the biggest areas of growth were within the identity-based subcultures, most notably the feminist and gay movements. By 1976, there were enough gay newspapers to hold a gay press convention: staff members from nine East Coast papers, with a combined circulation of over 100,000, gathered at the offices of Gay Community News (1973–1992) in Boston to discuss common concerns. Later that year, more than 125 women—representing eighty feminist bookstores, periodicals, and publishing houses—gathered at a Camp Fire Girls Camp in Omaha, Nebraska for the first Women in Print Conference; by that point, there were an estimated 150 feminist presses and periodicals in existence.13
These institutions prided themselves on their independence, and saw their mission as explicitly political. “Control of our own voices and words is just as important as control of our bodies,” explained June Arnold, co-founder of the feminist publishing house Daughters, Inc., in 1976. Ed Hermance, the manager of Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia, which opened in 1973 as one of the country’s first gay bookstores, offered a similar rationale. “When the store first opened, there were fewer than 100 titles that anybody could identify that might possibly be of interest to gays and lesbians,” he recalled. “The store was just about the only public space that people could go to. That’s what it did, was be a public space for lesbians and gay men.”14
Much about the radical/progressive political landscape in the United States was slowly but decisively shifting in this period of activist introspection. Movements might be smaller and weaker than they had been a decade earlier, but there were more of them, speaking in a greater array of voices. The idea of a single, unitary “left” was always more myth than reality, but that myth was becoming increasingly out of line with reality on the ground. First and foremost, the radical identity-based movements were here to stay; with the late sixties’ flush of street militancy behind them, some were turned inward, focused on self-exploration and cultural work, but they would remain fiercely committed to autonomy and self-representation. Issue-based movements and activist projects multiplied alongside them. “We’ve had a tremendous increase in both the number of demonstrations and the spectrum of issues,” the director of Washington, DC’s Mayoral Command Center noted in 1978. Where a handful of large mobilizations might have taken place in the nation’s capital in any given year a decade or so before, now there was a constant stream of protests, by groups that, in the Washington Post’s lively tally, included “farmers, American Indians, religious fundamentalists, Marxists, Maoists, anarchists, anti-abortionists, pro-abortionists, women’s libbers, anti–women’s libbers, gays, senior citizens, marijuana advocates [and] ban-the-bombers.”15
Not everyone on the left celebrated this growing diversity of causes and voices, feeling that some sense of shared political purpose had been lost amid the new radical cacophony. Journalist Andrew Kopkind wrote with sadness of “the sense of isolation that pervades the American left since the disappearance of a cohesive movement sensibility,” in a 1978 essay entitled, “What to Do Till the Movement Arrives.” He continued, “Some important social movements built around specific issues—minority rights, nuclear power, and sexual liberation—have deepened in recent years, but by and large they exclude those who deviate from the narrow genetic, preferential, or topical definitions of the movements, and provide little day-to-day work for … activists of a leftist or socialist cast.” This characterization of the new movements as “narrow,” and the related claim that they were fragmenting rather than augmenting the larger radical project, would be a recurring refrain for the next forty years. “The left”—the broad more-or-less socialist political tendency that saw economic relations as fundamental—might now be only one radical subculture among many, and one whose appeal was dwindling rather than expanding, but it would too often continue to view itself as broader and more universal than all the rest. (“When many people think of leftists,” quipped Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza in a 2014 interview with journalist Julia Wong, “they think of white men
