There was something peculiarly wounding in the New Left attacks on older liberals and radicals. I felt that some of its spokesmen wanted not just to refute my opinions – that would have been entirely proper – but also to erase, to eliminate, to ”smash” people like me. They wanted to deny our past, annul our history, wipe out our integrity, and not as people mistaken or even pusillanimous but as people who were ”finished,” ”used up.” (Lenin in 1907 explained his attacks on the Socialists: ”That tone … is not designed to convince but to break ranks, not to correct a mistake of the opponent but to annihilate him, to wipe him off the face of the earth.”) When New Left students painted the slogan ”Up against the wall, mother*******!” on campus buildings, they had in mind not just the corporate state or the Pentagon or the C.I.A.; they had in mind the only ”enemy” they knew at firsthand, their liberal and socialist teachers; they had in mind parents of the New Deal generation who had raised them on the deplorable doctrine of ”repressive tolerance.”
–Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography, 314-315
