Todd Gitlin, who organized rallies against South African apartheid, racial segregation and the Vietnam War before turning to writing as a vehicle for social change, emerging as an incisive media scholar, sociologist and sometime critic of his colleagues on the left, died Feb. 5 at a hospital in Pittsfield, Mass. He was 79.
His stepdaughter, Shoshana Haulley, confirmed his death but did not know the cause. She said he had suffered cardiac arrest on New Year’s Eve and was diagnosed with covid-19 after being hospitalized near his home in Hillsdale, N.Y. Dr. Gitlin also had an apartment in Manhattan, where he taught at Columbia University.
Drawing on his immersion in the tumultuous student protest movement of the 1960s, Dr. Gitlin was a voice of the American left for more than half a century, writing cultural and political commentary, appearing as a talking head in documentaries and championing pro-democracy and antiwar causes at picket lines and teach-ins.
“He didn’t just watch from the sidelines,” said his friend Peter Dreier, a professor of politics and urban and environmental policy at Occidental College in Los Angeles. “From his college days onward, he was deeply involved in the major movements of his time,” including an effort to organize working-class Whites in Chicago, which he chronicled in his first book, “Uptown” (1970), and the Occupy Wall Street movement, which he examined in “Occupy Nation” (2012).
A self-described “not very private intellectual,” Dr. Gitlin wrote nearly 20 books and contributed to publications including The Washington Post, the New York Times, the San Francisco Examiner, USA Today and the Jewish online magazine Tablet. Philadelphia Inquirer journalist Carlin Romano once described him as “one of our shrewdest culture critics, a bracing mix of jazzy, colloquial rhythms and internally-footnoted academic erudition.”
As a scholar, Dr. Gitlin investigated the inner workings of the television industry and examined the role that journalism plays in shaping social movements — an issue he had firsthand experience with as a leader of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which extolled “participatory democracy” and came to define the New Left before disintegrating into factionalism at the end of the 1960s.
“I never thought about a career,” he once told the Harvard Crimson, “because I thought the movement was going to be my life.”
Dr. Gitlin was elected the president of SDS in 1963 at age 20, succeeding Tom Hayden, one of the country’s most prominent radicals. He was arrested while protesting a Whites-only amusement park in Baltimore County, and in 1965 helped organize an anti-apartheid sit-in at the New York headquarters of Chase Manhattan Bank, one of the South African government’s lenders. Later that year, he and fellow SDS leader Paul Booth spearheaded one of the first major protests of the Vietnam War, a march on Washington that drew more than 15,000 students.
“Everything these people did was charged with intensity,” Dr. Gitlin wrote in his book “The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage” (1987), reflecting on his work with SDS. His fellow activists “were at once analytically keen and politically committed,” he added, “but also, with a thousand gestures of affection, these unabashed moralists cared about one another.”
Written in the first and third person, “The Sixties” mixed memoir and history, dissecting the decade and the cultural and political currents that shaped it. Reviewing the book for the New York Times, author Jim Miller called it “required reading for anyone who wants to grasp the youthful spirit of the time,” adding, “Without false sentimentality, he re-creates the political odyssey of the radicals of his generation, as well as his own role in that odyssey.”
Looking back on those years, Dr. Gitlin wrote that he and other student organizers “were living in a bubble, talking to ourselves,” like “Narcissus admiring himself in a TV screen.” He was extremely critical of violent protest tactics on the left, especially by members of the Weather Underground, whom he blamed in part for destroying the movement. By the early 1970s, he said, he had grown increasingly disillusioned, taking down his “Malcolm X and Cuban posters” and replacing them with prints by Van Gogh, Degas and Renoir.
Dr. Gitlin maintained his liberal viewpoint even as he frustrated some activists with his writing. In “The Twilight of Common Dreams” (1995), he examined the decline of the left, accusing activists of being distracted by identity politics and multiculturalism. “While the Right has been busy taking the White House,” he wrote, “the Left has been marching on the English department.”
The book received generally positive reviews but “caused breaches with many of his old comrades,” according to his friend and fellow SDS organizer Robert J.S. Ross, an emeritus professor of sociology at Clark University in Massachusetts.
In a phone interview, Ross said Dr. Gitlin “was committed to equality, small-D democracy and a civic culture of tolerance and respect. His anger and frustration did not lead to enervation or despair, but to action. He said when Trump was inaugurated, ‘Bob, I’m going to have a good war.’ And boy did he go at it,” writing essays and op-eds arguing that the president posed a threat to democracy.
Dr. Gitlin “never deserted activism,” he added, saying that the scholar’s books and articles were an extension of his earlier work as an organizer. Volumes like “The Sixties” were “about coming to terms with error on the one hand,” he said, “and on the other, kindling hope.”
The older of two children, Todd Alan Gitlin was born in Manhattan on Jan. 6, 1943, and grew up in the Bronx. His grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and his parents were high school teachers — his father taught history, his mother typing and stenography — and liberal Democrats.
Dr. Gitlin was class valedictorian at the Bronx High School of Science, graduating at age 16, and enrolled at Harvard University to study mathematics. As he told it, he was not politically engaged until his sophomore year, when he fell in love with a daughter of former communists, went to a rally against nuclear weapons and accepted an invitation to join an anti-nuclear group called Tocsin.
“Before long I was going up to Vermont to campaign for a pacifist congressman,” he told the Crimson in 1988. “The next thing I knew I was on the executive committee [of Tocsin]. It all happened in a month. Tocsin became the center of my life for the next two years.”
By the end of that period, he had grown frustrated with the organization’s approach of “amiable persuasion,” in which activists sought to change people’s minds “by proving how well-read we were.” He resigned from the group and became increasingly involved with SDS, meeting local leaders at a bar in Cambridge and plotting a move to Ann Arbor, Mich., a center of SDS organizing.
After graduating in 1963 he headed to the Midwest, where he was elected the organization’s president shortly before he started a graduate program in political science at the University of Michigan. He served as president until 1964, received a master’s degree in 1966 and wrote for the underground press before deciding to get a PhD in sociology.
“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,” he said in an interview for the reference work Contemporary Authors. “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 earned his doctorate in 1977 from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was a professor for 16 years and directed the school’s mass communications program. He taught at New York University before joining the faculty of Columbia in 2002, serving as a professor of journalism and sociology and chairing the PhD program in communications.
“Todd’s influence is so great that many people who are influenced by his ideas don’t know his name,” his friend Dreier said in an email. “Every organizer and activist recognizes the dilemma of trying to get media attention by engaging in various forms of protest. The media often focus on the protesters, not the issues they are protesting. Todd’s book ‘The Whole World is Watching,’ ” published in 1980, “was the first systematic analysis of that dilemma, based on both his scholarly research and his experiences as an activist.”
Dr. Gitlin also wrote “Inside Prime Time” (1983), a study of the Hollywood television industry, and several works of poetry and fiction. His latest novel, “The Opposition,” is slated for publication later this year, and follows a group of New Left organizers in the 1960s.
Dr. Gitlin’s first marriage, to criminal defense lawyer and “Uptown” co-author Nancy Hollander, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Carol Wolman. In 1995, he married Laurel Cook, who worked in public relations at Doubleday. In addition to his wife, of Manhattan and Hillsdale, and his stepdaughter, of Manhattan, survivors include two stepsons, Justin Haulley of Hillsdale and Fletcher Haulley of Albany, N.Y.; a sister; and three grandchildren.
In his classes at Berkeley and elsewhere, Dr. Gitlin said he often tried to demystify the 1960s to his students. “The ’60s seem completely other to them — unfathomable,” he told the Times in 1989. “Until now, they’ve never heard of it except in lurid images — Jerry Rubin, hippies. … It’s very odd to them.” Still, he added, “it’s odd enough even if you lived through it.”
