No one who teaches in a contemporary American public high school can be unaware of the apathy of the majority of students sitting before them. Almost nothing excites them and very little generates even mild interest. Feeling somewhat powerless in a totally unresponsive system, they shrug their shoulders over the prospect of having no heating fuel this winter or put down voting because “it never makes a difference, nothing ever gets better.” Their attitude reflects a disillusionment with America that is widespread, growing and that is not restricted solely to students. In searching for historical topics and issues of interest to my students and an explanation for the great “turn-off” of the American people, I look to the events of the 1960s for some insight.
The rest of this essay represents a two-to three-week unit on the decade of the 1960s which will be taught near the end of eleventh grade U.S. History course. This unit focuses on student protest in the 60s and is divided into four sections—the first on the political, economic and cultural background to the 60s, the second on the visible signs of the youth “counterculture” which developed in the 60s and the issues adopted by it, the third (and longest section) on four episodes of student protest in the 60s and the fourth on what has survived of the protest (and protesters).
Throughout the unit students will examine issues and will be asked what decisions they would have made then and what kinds of choices they have now. In essence, through studying about the political and cultural revolutions of the 60s, students will be examining their own culture. For many it will be a real revelation that they are determining what that culture is.
The early 1960s saw the United States in an Augustan mood. The post-war boom led to a general rise in prosperity as evidenced by the tremendous increase in home ownership and the acquisition of all sorts of electrical home conveniences. John Kenneth Gailbraith and Walter Heller preached the New Economics to the “Affluent Society,” making Americans confident almost to a point of complacency about the perfectibility of American society.
Politically, no greater symbol of the nation’s imperial mood could be found than in the newly elected leader, John F. Kennedy. Young yet rational, stylish yet cautious, Kennedy behaved the way the leader of a great nation was expected to. His handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis was reassuring and inspiring—he showed that he was both anti-Communist and unafraid to call the Russians’ bluff. It had been a long time since Americans hung pictures of their president over the mantel. If time has tarnished his image, Kennedy was almost a saint to the American people and, at least, extremely popular in the rest of the world’s eyes.
More than a symbol of the nation’s optimistic mood, Kennedy epitomized an American ideology which began to emerge in the mid-50s, reached a climax in 1960, and continued until about 1965. It was a liberal ideology and it was built on six basic assumptions:
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American capitalism works; it creates abundance; it has potential for solving social problems.
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The key to this potential is growth, thus eliminating the predicted conflict over resources.
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American society is getting more equal; class is being eliminated; workers are becoming members of the middle class.
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Social problems can be solved with abundant capital and resources.
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The most urgent threat to this system comes from communism, which must be contained.
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Since democratic capitalism works here, it is the duty of the U.S. to bring it to the rest of the world.
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Ironically, the two basic assumptions of this liberal ideology were wrong: American capitalism did not solve all our problems at home; nor was communism our most urgent danger. This was to be realized soon enough, but not before tearing apart the very fabric of American society. The years of consensus (1955-1965), when there was virtually no difference between conservative and liberal thinking, presented 20th-century America with the most serious challenge to the authority of American institutions. The most conspicuous challenge came from two groups: upper-middle-class youth (especially college students) and the urban poor. The two groups did not always work together, but a set of very special circumstances led them along parallel paths that occasionally intersected.
Dissatisfied with the world they inherited and following a pattern of dissent from their parents’ generation, the youth of the 1960s formed a “counter-culture” which rejected many of the fundamental values of American society. A much larger generation than previous ones (economics was not all that boomed after World War II), this generation grew up with every advantage their parents could afford to give them, including a college education.
When in the mid-60s some six million students descended on the college campuses they found that the institution itself had changed and grown larger, more impersonal and bureaucratic. Because there were not enough dormitories on campus, there grew up little student communities near many of the large universities. It was in these student neighborhoods that the dichotomy between the way they had been brought up in suburbia and the realities of city life became painfully apparent. As some of the youth ghettos bordered on black ghettos, students realized that what they took for granted as “self-evident truths,” rights such as liberty and equality, were blatantly denied some Americans.
Visible signs of their opposition to traditional society were hard to ignore. Highly distinctive dress marked the first obvious difference in the young’s appearance: blue jeans (not the designer type of today; rather the faded, sometimes dirty, patched and bell-bottomed type) brightly-colored and often embroidered shirts, love beads, head bands, arm bands, fringed vests, American Indian designs on leather clothing, hand-made sandals were some of the characteristics of the new generation’s style. Hair worn long on men and natural on women (straight, curly or frizzy, but never rolled in curlers and definitely not bouffant:). If other people lived separately, the new generation lived in communes. If others worked for large corporations with massively complex technology, the new generation worked alone making things by hand. If others drank alcohol and made marijuana illegal, the new generation denounced alcohol and smoked pot (or “tripped” on LSD—Acid). The culture even developed a distinctive, colorful and sometimes obscene vocabulary (the translation of which could make for part of an interesting lesson) which was popularized further through the culture’s own underground press (an idea here would be to compare articles from
Village Voice
with some from the
Advocate)
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A final characteristic of the counter-culture was its music. The evolution of the culture can be seen in the changes which occurred in its music. In the beginning of the 60s Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Phil Ochs told of changing times in their folk songs. About mid-60s rock dominated the scene with bands such as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead leading the way. Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, and Diana Ross were some of the big “Soul” sounds of the sixties.
Almost every college student of the 1960s was affected by the youth culture in some way. Although the majority of students did not share every aspect of the culture completely, most students participated in it to some degree. A university campus is an especially favorable place for a youth movement or culture to develop, given the relative freedom of the students in terms of time they have to give to a cause. The fact that, due to the physical situation of the university, large numbers of students can be mobilized to protest, meant that with organization and issues, a whole army-in-waiting committed itself, at first, to correcting the ills of American society, and, later, to overtaking American society.
It was over the issue of race that student protest began in 1960. Although racism was not new to American society in the 60s, students became less tolerant of it and the institutions which seemed to perpetuate it. The Greensboro sit-in by four college students (who asked for a cup of coffee at the local Woolworth’s and were refused because they were black) started a whole wave of sit-ins by young people all over the country. Most of the efforts of the Civil Rights Movement focused on the South and the problem of legally enforced or protected patterns of segregation. One of the first organized activities in the early 60s was the Freedom Rides in May, 1961. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sent two busloads of young blacks and older white pacifists from Washington, D.C. to Jackson, Mississippi. Along the route one bus was burned to the ground,and at the end twenty-seven Freedom Riders were arrested and sentenced to sixty days on the state prison farm. The one successful result of the rides was that bus and train stations were ordered desegregated by the Interstate Commerce Commission.
The March on Washington in 1963 marked the culmination of non-violent protest. It was the time of Martin Luther King, Jr. and of his dream. The march resulted in the administration’s (Kennedy’s) working more closely with the movement and added pressure for passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965). But, as many people came to realize, laws did not change people’s attitudes.
Between 1963 and 1965 the Civil Rights Movement came to mean something different for the northern blacks whose problems were social and economic (rather than legal, as in the South). It was in this period that a war on poverty was declared by the Johnson administration and millions of federal dollars were pumped into American cities in the hope that the problems of poverty could be eradicated. One of the efforts in this period, the Mississippi Summer Project (a voter registration drive) provided important lessons for the eight hundred or so college students who volunteered to go south and work on the project. Not only did they see first-hand that blacks were being denied the right to vote, they learned the techniques and acquired the habit of protest.
After 1965 the emphasis of the civil rights movement shifted again to the theme of self-respect and pride in Black Cultural heritage. From non-violence to integration to separatism to black power, these changing strategies became well-known to the American people in the 1960s, thanks largely to television. The Black Panther party, which came into existence in 1965 and which was led by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, signalled the end of unity and of the civil rights movement as leaders of various groups could no longer agree on issues and tactics. The final blow to the movement came in April, 1968 with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Just as race was not a phenomenon new to American society in the 1960s, neither was war. In fact, many Americans saw the two issues, the war and the cities, as connected in that they both involved a deprivation of rights, dignity and autonomy which go back well over one hundred years in American history. It was no coincidence that the height of the counter-culture occurred roughly at the same time as the buildup of the Vietnam War, between 1965 and 1968, and the climax of the racial confrontation, from Selma to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
In the specific case of opposition to the Vietnam War, what started out as a tiny traditional peace movement broke out of its shell,reaching a far wider segment of the population by 1965 and becoming a radical peace movement on college campuses. Within three years polls would show that more than half the population was opposed to the war. The radicalization of the peace movement began with the formation of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). A student wing of the New Left (which grew out of a tiny New York Old Left), SDS issued a sixty-four page statement in 1962, mostly written by Tom Hayden, which became the manifesto of the New Left. The Port Huron statement expressed skepticism about the “troubling events” of racism, the Cold War and the apathy of the nation. It called on students to work for a society based on “participatory democracy.”
The evolution of campus unrest from expressing skepticism to burning buildings and throwing rocks or bombs at law enforcement officials can be seen by looking at four episodes of students protest in the 1960s’ Berkeley (1964-66), Columbia (1968), Kent State (1970) and Jackson State (1970). As we have seen, student discontent in America did not begin in 1960 with the civil rights movement, but it did revive at this time with civil rights activities encouraging students to express support for the movement through non-violent action.
As much as Berkeley was the perfect microcosm of liberal America, so, too, the rebellion that started there in the fall of 1964 became the younger generation’s model for protest throughout the rest of the decade. New issues, new tactics, new moods and new fashions were started at Berkeley, and, thanks to television, were imitated by other graduate schools across the nation, who were then imitated by junior colleges and then by high schools.
When some of the students who volunteered for the Mississippi Voter Program arrived back on campus in the fall of 1964 and picketed the Oakland
Tribune
for racially discriminatory practices, an executive from the newspaper questioned the practice of organizing political rallies on university property. The administration responded by enforcing an old rule which prohibited political groups from soliciting money, recruiting or advertising themselves. When campus activists openly defied the rule, eight students were suspended. The following day, campus police arrested a non-student activist for trespassing. When they tried to take him away in the police car, a crowd surrounded the car and began a thirty-two-hour sit-in. After the university promised not to press charges, the crowd broke up. Over the next two months, the issue of how much political activity was to be allowed on campus was hotly debated. At the end of November two students were told that they were being suspended for their activities earlier in the fall.
On December 2, six thousand students supported the Free Speech Movement’s (FSM) two-day sit-in to defend their right to organize on campus. The sit-in ended when the Governor called in police. More than eight hundred arrests were made and there were many charges of police brutality. Thousands of students responded by joining the FSM and supporting its goals.
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Several elements found in the Berkeley invention were to be seen in later episodes of campus unrest. Some of these elements were:
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The protest was initiated by a small group of student activists (the most radical of which were the leaders).
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The issue was a dual issue, involving both civil liberties and a university issue.
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The activists introduced new tactics which some had learned in the civil rights movement and which disrupted the university.
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Police action produced a strong reaction on the part of other students and faculty.
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Liberals and moderates aligned themselves temporarily in a common organization with many decisions being reached by group consensus.
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Although broad demands were made for university reform, few changes resulted from all this effort.
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1968 was by far the most devastating year of the decade for Americans. The Tet offensive by the North Vietnamese and Vietcong, Johnson’s announcement not to run for a second term, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the riots that followed, the Columbia revolt, Robert Kennedy’s assassination, the violent demonstrations and brutal police reactions at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and Richard Nixon’s election to the Presidency were just some of the events that were to have terrible repercussions in the years to come.
Columbia University experienced a whole series of demonstrations, sit-ins and disruptions that, in some ways, resembled the Berkeley scenario four years earlier: occupation of buildings, confusion of faculty, students and administration, police intervention, student injuries, indignation of the moderate students and faculty, a major strike and endless consideration of reforms, disciplinary actions, etc. The spring of 1968 was an especially busy one for SDS at Columbia and for its leader, Mark Rudd. A plan to build a gymnasium in a park between the campus on Morningside Heights and Harlem, and Columbia’s affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a consortium of twelve universities doing research for the Pentagon, were the issues being protested—again the dual issue of civil liberties and university issues. Different from Berkeley, protest at Columbia was vastly more violent and destructive, with property, papers and records destroyed to the tune of thousands of dollars. Police reaction to protesting students was often brutal and actually heightened tensions. In the end, very few reforms were actually made.
By 1970 more than three quarters of American college students thought that basic changes in the system were necessary and that confrontations ranging from non-violent demonstrations to violent acts were necessary to achieve those changes. The polarization from one end of the spectrum to the other was evident in the division of SDS into three factions: Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), and the Weathermen (advocating the most violent tactics).
Although the SDS chapter at Kent State had not been active for a year, when President Nixon announced on April 30, 1970, that U.S. troops were being ordered into Cambodia, former members of SDS actively participated in a series of protests that led to the killing of four students by the Ohio National Guard. The initial rally in a series of four days of rallies and demonstrations was a small and peaceful one. It was co-sponsored by a group calling themselves World Historians Opposed to Racism and Exploitation (WHORE) and a more radical group known as the New University Conference. That night, however, a group of rowdy students broke windows in downtown Kent. Tear gas was used to force the students back on campus and there were fifteen arrests.
After a series of meetings between administrators, city police, county police, student groups, city officials and the Highway Patrol, university officials decided to call the National Guard. That night students burned down the ROTC building, bringing the National Guard to the campus. Antagonism between the students and Guardsmen and other law enforcement officials grew during the next two days.
The next day, Sunday, May 3, Governor Rhodes held a news conference and declared a state of emergency. He stated that “we will take all necessary ... action to maintain order”. That night as crowds gathered on the Commons, a curfew was imposed, the Ohio Riot Act was read to the students, ordering them to disperse within five minutes. Students became hostile, cursing and throwing rocks at the Guardsmen and police. Again tear gas was used in a number of instances and about fifty more arrests were made.
On Monday, May 4, a noon rally was planned for the Commons, a crossroads between several major buildings. By noon nearly two thousand students had assembled, many just curious and waiting to see what was going to happen. The Guardsmen were ordered to march from the Commons to the football field in an effort to clear the area. Antagonism heightened with rock throwing and an exchange of tear gas canisters between the students and Guardsmen—almost like a game. The confrontation worsened as the Guard approached an area known as Blanket Hill. At about 12:30 p.m., twenty-five Guardsmen fired sixty-one shots within thirteen seconds, killing four students and wounding nine.
The news from Kent State, when added to the announced exPansion of the Vietnam War,brought on a nationwide student strike with over seven hundred colleges participating. Americans everywhere discussed students actions and the guardsmen reactions. A polarization developed between those supporting the students’ rights to protest and those defending the Guardsmen’s orders to maintain law and order. Public pressure increasingly demanded that the Nixon administration stop the war as had been promised.
A less well-known-about protest, but an equally tragic confrontation occurred on the campus of Jackson State (Mississippi) on May 13-14, 1970. A well-travelled street bisects the campus and was the area where trouble began on May 13. Rock-throwing incidents brought the city police to the campus and prompted the mayor to call the National Guard and the Mississippi Highway Patrol. An attempt made to burn down the ROTC building was quickly halted by campus security police. Several other incidents that night led to increased tension.
When the president of the college met with students the following day, students were unable to explain the disturbances; there were no serious grievances against the college. The president then warned students that the National Guard had been activated and would be on call twenty minutes from the campus.
That night crowds threw rocks at passing white motorists, a dump truck was burned and when the fire truck responded, students threw more rocks and bricks. The Guard and the Highway Patrol were called in when large crowds would not disperse. Just as the Guardsmen reached one of the dormitories and as the crowd seemed to be moving in on them, jeering, chanting and screaming obscenities, someone threw a bottle which smashed at the feet of several Guardsmen. In the next twenty-eight seconds a whole barrage of shots was fired, killing two students and wounding twelve. All those shot were black. All law enforcement officials were white. The tragedy at Jackson State pointed up a problem that the whole United States has of race relations. It also pointed up the escalation of student activism to the point of lawless violence.
In each of the four episodes considered, students will be asked to identify issues being protested, types of protests used and give an assessment of each tactic employed. They will also be asked to identify the point at which they would have stopped their own participation in any of the situations. In addition, students will be asked to consider what commitment to an issue involves and at what point individual anger becomes part of collective resistance.
In terms of an overall objective for this unit, students will be asked to think about (and write about) something which has survived the protests. What good did the protests do? What did they accomplish? Possible topics bring us to another decade and another watershed in American history: the end of the Vietnam War (so why are we still paying and what will happen to the “boat people”?), the Freedom of Information Act (which unfolded the COINTELPRO counter-espionage operations and wiretapping, etc.), Watergate, Women’s Movement, Gay Rights, to name a few. Where are Tom Hayden and Mark Rudd today? Anyone who has seen the “China Syndrome” or has waited in a gas line recently may have an idea.