Collection is open. All materials listed in the finding aid can be requested.
This collection is located on-site.
This collection has no restrictions.
Todd Gitlin (1943-2022) was an activist, author, poet, and scholar of mass media at Columbia University. A leader of the anti-war group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960s and a self-identified progressive for his whole life, he became a noted critic of the American left from the 1990s on for a perceived overemphasis on identity and cultural issues.
Only about half of this collection has been processed. Though this processed part of the collection contains material from Gitlin's entire adult life, including FBI files and correspondence related to his anti-war activities in the 1960s, the bulk is related to his academic and popular writing in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, on topics including politics, foreign policy, left-wing activism, and the legacy of the 1960s. Contents include personal and business correspondence, published and unpublished writings (including articles, book reviews, lectures and talks, book manuscripts, poetry, and screenplays and teleplays), research materials (mainly academic scholarship and clippings from newspapers and magazines), and notes. The collection also contains several boxes of teaching materials that are currently restricted. Researchers interested in additional material on 1960s New Left activism and Gitlin's work from the 2010s should inquire about unprocessed cartons.
Series I: Correspondence, 1962-2012, bulk 1971-2012
This series contains Gitlin's personal and family correspondence, mostly incoming, in the form of letters, cards, and emails. Some professional correspondence is also included, though correspondence related to articles and book publishing can also be found in Series II. Notable correspondents include Kathy Boudin, Sidney Blumenthal, Tom Hayden, Marshall Berman, Staughton Lynd, David Riesman, and Stuart Hall. Family correspondents include his sister (Judy Gitlin), his parents, and his romantic partner from roughly 1982 to 1992, the historian Ruth Rosen. Correspondence is largely organized by date, though in some cases by correspondent.
Series II: Writings, 1963-2018, bulk 1980-2008
Manuscripts, research, reviews, correspondence, and other material related to Gitlin's published and unpublished writings, organized in subseries by writing type. The bulk of this material is contained in Subseries II.1: Books and Subseries II.2: Articles, Talks and Interviews.
Series III: Subject Files, 1960-2016, bulk 1965-1990
This series contains files not explicitly related to particular writing projects. Of particular note are several folders of material related to a campaign against the dismissal of André Schiffrin from Pantheon Books; extensive FBI files on Gitlin, SDS, and the Weather Underground; and several files on 1960s activism. Material includes correspondence, clippings, and other research material.
Series IV: Teaching, 1979-2018, bulk 2000-2018
Series IV contains syllabi, exams, and other course materials taught by Gitlin at Columbia University and elsewhere. These materials are restricted.
Rbml Advance Appointment
Collection is open. All materials listed in the finding aid can be requested.
This collection is located on-site.
This collection has no restrictions.
Reproductions may be made for research purposes. The RBML maintains ownership of the physical material only. Copyright remains with the creator and his/her heirs. The responsibility to secure copyright permission rests with the patron.
Identification of specific item; Date (if known); Todd Gitlin Papers; Box and Folder; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.
Materials may have been added to the collection since this finding aid was prepared. Contact rbml@columbia.edu for more information.
2015.2016.M110: Source of acquisition--Bancroft Library. Method of acquisition--Transfer; Date of acquisition--2/2016.
Columbia University Libraries, Rare Book and Manuscript Library
2024-07-30 Part 1 of 4 of the papers processed by Aaron Freedman (GSAS).
2024-07-30 Finding aid written by Aaron Freedman (GSAS).
2024-07-30 Part 1 of 4 comprises document boxes 1 through 54 [22.68 LF]. cml
2024-07-30 Part 1 of 4 includes Accession: 2018.2019.M099 [all 21 boxes]. cml
2024-07-30 Part 1 of 4 includes Accession: 2019.2020.M090 [boxes 1, 2, and 3]. cml
Todd Alan Gitlin was born on January 6, 1943, in Manhattan and grew up in a liberal Jewish household in the Bronx. His father, Max Gitlin, taught high school history. His mother, Dorothy (nee Siegel) Gitlin, taught typing and stenography.
After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science in 1959 at 16 as class valedictorian, he studied mathematics at Harvard. Before he graduated in 1963, he met Tom Hayden and other leaders of what was then a tiny organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Within a year he had succeeded Hayden as president of SDS. He served in 1963 and 1964. Among his activities in the 1960s New Left were trying to integrate a whites-only amusement park in Baltimore (for which he was arrested) and organizing a sit-in in New York to protest the Chase Manhattan Bank's loans to apartheid South Africa.
At the same time, Gitlin enrolled in graduate school at the University of Michigan, where he graduated with a master's degree in political science in 1966.
After two more years as what he called a "freelance agitator," he moved to California. He wrote for The San Francisco Express Times, a short-lived underground weekly; lectured at San José State University; and joined a men's consciousness-raising group.
He didn't plan for a career, he told The Harvard Crimson in 1988, because "I thought the movement was going to be my life." Eventually, he pursued a doctorate in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, saying it would give him the freedom to write, especially about the media.
"I wanted a certificate and a location which would permit me to write as much about whatever interested me, in the ways that interested me, as possible," Gitlin said. "In a specialized world, writing about media and popular culture gave me a way of slicing into a whole tangle of political, social, cultural and intellectual questions."
He would go on to regard much of the establishment news media as tools of the profit-driven corporate state it covered, the goal of both being to perpetuate the status quo.
His dissertation at Berkeley turned into a book, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left, published in 1980 and revised in 2003. In it, he traced the media's symbiotic role in political movements, SDS in particular.
After earning his doctorate in 1977, he taught sociology at Berkeley and was director of the university's mass communications program until 1995. His well-received Inside Prime Time (1983, revised in 1994), for which he interviewed 200 people in the television industry, showed how advertisers and network executives colluded to set the cultural agenda.
His best-known book was The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987), a firsthand account, part history and part autobiography, of the rise and fall of the left during that decade of upheaval. The leftists who held sway, he said in the book, were never prepared to govern. "Often," he wrote, "I'm glad we're in no position to take power: If we did, the only honorable sequel would be abdication."
As time went on, he continued to write from a progressive perspective but became increasingly critical of his own cohort. In The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (1995), he said the left had become distracted by identity politics, multiculturalism and political correctness when it should have been focused on issues like economic justice.
"While the right has been busy taking the White House, the left has been marching on the English department," he wrote. Kirkus Reviews said the book made for "provocative and convincing reading that will doubtless earn Gitlin demerits from the P.C. orthodox." Meanwhile his critics said that his politics had turned to mush, that he offered no new ideas and that his writing had devolved into score-settling.
Over the 1990s Gitlin also became an increasingly vocal critic of pro-Palestinian activists, writing in support of Israel and against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in the 2000s and 2010s.
Moving east in 1995, Gitlin taught at New York University until 2002, when he joined the faculty at Columbia, where he was a professor of journalism and sociology and chairman of the doctoral program in communications.
Gitlin wrote nearly 20 books over the course of his life. Most were on socio-political themes, but he also wrote four novels, many published and unpublished poems, and an unproduced screenplay.
His first two marriages, in 1964 to co-author and collaborator Nanci Hollander and in 1976 to Carol Wolman, ended in divorce. From about 1982 to 1992 he was in a romantic partnership with the historian Ruth Rosen. In 1995 he married Laurel Ann Cook, who worked in public relations at Doubleday.
Gitlin died on February 5, 2022.
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