Cohen, Robert, When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America’s First Mass Student Movement, 1929-1941. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Summary
Responding to the “amnesia” in historical scholarship that has largely overlooked student movements during the Depression era, Robert Cohen’s book, When the Old Left was Young focuses specifically on the student movement (communists, socialists, liberals, pacifists, and Trotskyists) of the 1930s that emerged out of the crisis of the Great Depression and the growing rift in international relations that would ultimately lead to WWII. The largest supporters of the movement were Communists, either from the American Student Union or the American Youth Congress. Young communists had helped build a broad student movement by responding to needs, anxieties, and idealism of a generation affected by the Depression, war and fascism. Cohen also notes that unlike other movements of the Depression era, the student movement “devoted as much attention to foreign policy as domestic issues” as the movement’s largest demonstrations were anti-war and anti-fascists strikes “aimed at staving off world war.” (xv). However it also had a big weakness, in particular its apologetic stance to Soviet/Stalin practices, especially after the soviet-Nazi pact. Cohen thus summarizes: “From the fall of 1939-1941 the increasingly communist-dominated ASU so discredited itself that the student movement died, burying as well the politically active style of student life that it had pioneered.” (277)