122 • Italian American Review 2.2 • Summer 2012
Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s. by Robert Cohen.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 544 pages.
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Best known as the fiery leader of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s, Mario Savio (1942–1996) is the subject of a long-overdue biography, Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s, by Robert Cohen. Drawing upon previously unavailable Savio papers, along with oral histories from family, friends, and fellow activists, Cohen sheds new light on Savio’s upbringing, philosophical development, and the full arc of his political activism. Cohen builds a strong case that Savio, who practiced an egalitarian leadership style, shunned dogma, and lived by an unshakable moral code, qualifies as the most transcendent white leader of the New Left in the United States. With a restrained and balanced tone, Cohen gives us a masterly analysis of the complex forces that led up to and comprised the Free Speech Movement, which was a catalyst for the explosive growth of the New Left in the United States and throughout the world. He breaks new ground by exploring the harsh personal challenges Savio faced throughout his life, including sexual abuse as a child, incarceration, academic expulsion, mental illness, a developmentally impaired child, and divorce. Striking a blow against the Big Chill (1983) stereotype that maintains that New Left activists eventually made their peace with the political establishment, Cohen’s book shows us that as Savio recovered from personal crises, he struggled against U.S. military intervention in Central America, anti-immigrant legislation, tuition hikes, and attacks against affirmative action. By using a generous selection of Savio’s speeches and writings, Cohen offers a critique of the ultra-left sectarian politics that contributed to the demise of the New Left. Savio’s own words also challenge conservative commentators who belittle the democratic idealism of the 1960s by defining the decade only by its excesses. Although Cohen could have explored the ethnic dimension of Savio’s life more rigorously, Freedom’s Orator reveals the profound ways in which Savio’s Italian-American background shaped his political development. Savio’s father was born in Sicily in 1928; however, we aren’t told where, and it is unclear whether his mother was an immigrant. Cohen recounts that Savio’s first language was Italian, without specifying whether he spoke any kind of regional dialect. While his father served in the U.S. Army during World War II, his maternal grandfather, an avowed Fascist (neither his family name or birthplace are mentioned), ruled the family roost. When Savio’s father returned after the war, he demanded that only English be spoken in the household, in order to accelerate his son’s assimilation into American culture. Later, in grade school, Savio’s teacher taunted him by singing his name in rhyme. To spare his son any further humiliation, his father legally substituted his middle name for his first name, and Mario became Bob until he reclaimed his original name while attending the University of California at Berkeley. Savio’s family was devoutly Catholic—two of his aunts were nuns—and he identifies his Catholicism as a wellspring of his radicalism. As an altar boy, he believed he would one day become a priest. He was influenced by the dramatic