Discussion 12 - Did Activism in the 1960s produce a better Nation

vo_l. ?<-, 19_6!-1963; and Foreign Relations of the United States, "Cuban Missile Cnsis and Aftermath," vol. XI, 1961-1963. See www.state.gov/

Docume~ts Rel~tin~ to American Foreign Policy: The Cuban Missile Crisis is a website mam~amed by Mount Holyoke College. The collection includes d~c~men~s: lmks, and other historical materials concerning the Cuban missile cnsis. See www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/cuba.htm

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ISSUE /0 ... ~

~ Did the Activism of the 1960s

Produce a Better Nation?

YES: Terry H. Anderson, from The Sea Change (Oxford University

Press, 1995)

NO: Peter Clecak, from The New Left (Harper & Row, 1973)

Learning Outcomes

After reading this issue, you should be able to:

• Define the term "New Left" as it applies to the 1960s. • Summarize the main goals of the Port Huron Statement. • Evaluate the legacy of the Students for a Democratic Society

(SDS) and the Youth International Party ("Yippies"). • Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the New Left critique

of American society. • Compare and contrast the political and cultural rebels of the

1960s in terms of their leadership, goals, strategies, and level of success in affecting change.

ISSUE SUMMARY

YES: Terry H. Anderson concludes that the activism of the 1960s in­ spired citizens of all types to demand changes that produced a trans­ formation of American politics, society, culture, and foreign power and made the United States a more democratic and inclusive nation.

NO: Peter Clecak contends that the political and cultural revolu­ tionaries of the 1960s failed to revolutionize themselves or Ameri­ can society and quickly discovered that, without a clear program, viable organizations, or a significant constituency, they were essen­ tially powerless against the prevailing social order.

In the summer of 1960, a University of Michigan undergraduate named Tom Hayden, who served as an editor for his campus newspaper, the Michigan Daily, made a trip to California. He paid a visit to the University of California

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at Berkeley before making his way to Los Angeles to cover the Democratic National Convention. In Los Angeles, Hayden was captivated by the idealistic energy and enthusiasm for change articulated by young Massachusetts Senator John Kennedy, who became the Democratic Party's nominee for president of the United States. Only a few months before, Hayden had joined with a hand­ ful of his campus associates in Ann Arbor to resurrect an almost defunct stu­ dent organization-the Student League for Industrial Democracy-that traced its roots to an early twentieth-century student group founded by the Socialist writer Upton Sinclair. Changing the name of their organization to Students for a Democratic Society, these young campus activists established connections with participants of the ongoing college student sit-ins, whom they admired for the ferocity of their commitment to eliminating segregation in southern public accommodations in order to bring racial democracy to Dixie. Follow­ ing his Michigan graduation in 1961, Hayden headed south to represent SDS in support of the newly established and largely African American Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) organizing efforts, and he was beaten and jailed while participating in civil rights activities. (Hayden eventu­ ally served for nearly two decades in the California legislature and is currently a political activist and writer for The Nation.)

The creators of SDS envisioned their organization as a think tank compris­ ing talented activists from the nation's elite universities and colleges. Many of the early members were "red-diaper babies"-the children of American Communist parents who had comprised the Old Left of the 1930s and 1940s, whose support of the Soviet Union, however, had diminished in the wake of news reports of the Stalinist purges in which millions of Russians perished at the hands of the totalitarian state, as well as in response to the firestorm of anti-Communist hys­ teria associated with the early years of the Cold War. Propelled by family ideolo­ gies along with encouragement from intellectuals such as C. Wright Mills, who insisted that a "new left" should be led by students on the nation's campuses, SDS members sought to champion radical democratic values, and Tom Hayden took up the task of outlining the group's purpose and goals. At a conference convened at a United Auto Workers' educational camp in Port Huron, Michigan, in June 1962, Hayden penned a manifesto that expressed concern over the inconsisten­ cies between ideals and reality that he observed in the United States: racial dis­ crimination in a country dedicated to equality; growing affluence while millions resided in poverty; discussion of the benefits of nuclear power amidst fears of nuclear destruction; and presidential statements about America's peaceful inten­ tions while the Kennedy Administration poured more and more dollars into the nation's military budget. This "Port Huron Statement" presented a clarion call for a new ideology of change, demanding that college students abandon the apathy of the 1950s and seek to transform society through the application of participa­ tory democracy and mass protest emanating from college campuses. The univer­ sity, after all, was a place where ideas should be openly debated. Or was it?

In 1964, the Free Speech Movement erupted on the Berkeley campus when the university's administration attempted to prohibit students from handing out fliers encouraging participation in voter registration projects in the South. Mario Savio, a graduate student who had recently returned from

362

the Mississippi Freedom Summer, emerged as one of the key leaders of this California campus protest, which resulted in the occupation of administrative offices and mass arrests, activities that would be repeated at Berkeley and on many other campuses over the course of the decade.

These challenges to university policies reflected a broader rejection of authority by members of the "baby boom" generation, many of whom, like the members of SDS, were questioning the legitimacy of The Establishment in a variety of forms: the university; the family; the federal government; and corporate America. In his book, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Doubleday, 1968), historian Theodore Roszak attempted to articulate a context for what was going on. Targeting what he labeled the "technocracy," which seemed arbitrarily to restrain individual initiative and imagination, Roszak concluded that "the primary project of our counter culture is to proclaim a new heaven and a new earth so vast, so marvelous that the inordinate claims of technical expertise must of necessity withdraw to a subordinate and marginal status in the lives of men." In addition, Roszak contributed to our understanding of the counter culture by describing two groups of rebels: the political rebels of the New Left and the sociocultural rebels (or "hippies") whose alienation from mainstream culture was leading them to drop out of society and to seek solace in a parallel lifestyle of hallucinogenic drugs and communal living.

Many Americans insisted that this youth rebellion was little more than people behaving very badly, and these attitudes were reinforced as the protest­ ers took to the streets in response to the expanding involvement of the United States in the Southeast Asian conflict. Scholars continue to debate the extent to which antiwar activists influenced the Vietnam policies of either the Johnson or Nixon administrations, but there is little doubt that the opposition to the war began to draw to a close once the protests returned to campus in 1970. First, at Kent State University, Ohio National Guardsmen were summoned by Governor James Rhodes to quell an uprising that had led to the burning of the campus ROTC building-fueled by media reports about "secret" exten­ sions of the Vietnam conflict. On May 4, the soldiers opened fire on students, killing four and wounding nine others-some but not all of them involved in a protest against escalation of the war into Cambodia. Almost four months later, four young domestic terrorists bombed the Army Math Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, killing a postdoctoral physicist and causing $6 million damage. Columnist George Will characterized the incident as "the Hiroshima of the New Left."

For many who came of age during the 1960s, there is a tendency to ideal­ ize the decade as one in which young Americans sought to remake the lethal culture of their parents. Critics of the counter cultural rebellion see little to applaud. In the YES and NO selections, Terry Anderson and Peter Clecak offer sharply different appraisals of the activism of the 1960s. Anderson believes that the 1960s produced a positive transformation of American politics, society, cul­ ture, and foreign policy resulting in a more democratic and tolerant society. Minority groups benefited from a legal and political revolution that destroyed Jim Crow, and women gained far greater access to political and economic power.

363

He concludes that the New Left effectively destroyed the Cold War political cul­ ture by challenging its authority and inspiring Americans to demand change in many areas of life.

Clecak, on the other hand, argues that radicals in the 1960s failed to revolutionize themselves or their society and largely remained powerless to shape the prevailing social order. Organizations like Students for a Democratic Society fell far short of realizing their egalitarian ideals, demonstrating that it is easier to craft a statement of political goals than to carry those goals to frui­ tion. In the end, according to Clecak, these activists had little to offer in terms of ethical or political insight into contemporary American problems.

YES +J Terry H. Anderson

The Sea Change

... Whatever one thinks of the sixties, the tumultuous era cracked the cold war culture and the nation experienced a sea change-a significant trans­ formation in politics, society, culture, and foreign policy. The legacies of that era are worthy of another book, one that would detail recent trends in the nation's history, and thus be as controversial as the popular debate over whether the sixties were "good or bad" or the academic arguments over race, gender, and equality. Since that book is not possible here, this chapter will offer some gener­ alizations about the legacies of the movement and the sixties.

The political legacies of the sixties were apparent to anyone watching the 1976 Democratic National Convention in New York City. African American Congresswoman Barbara Jordan of Houston gave a stirring opening address, and black Mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles and Chicano Governor Jerry Apodaca of New Mexico were selected as two co-chairs of the convention. Grace Olivarez, a Chicana feminist from New Mexico, presented the welfare reform plank to the platform. Cesar Chavez delivered the nominating speech for youthful California Governor Jerry Brown, and also from that state was delegate Tom Hayden. The eventual nominee, Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia, represented the end of Jim Crow-in the November election both white and black southerners voted for the same candidate for the first time, delivering the presidency to the first man from the Deep South since before the Civil War.

That bicentennial year also revealed the impact of the new left, although those activists had been grumbling since the 1968 election that they had failed to bring about a "revolution," a New America. In 1962 they had set a course for the nation in The Port Huron Statement, which condemned racial bigotry, anti­ Communist paranoia, popular complacency, corporate irresponsibility, and a remote control government and economy controlled by power elites. Those activists failed to interest the majority in long-term efforts to reduce poverty, reform welfare, or curtail the military-industrial complex. Nevertheless, they succeeded in destroying cold war political culture. Americans no longer live in a society that fears change, that suspects dissent. Activists buried McCarthyism. Demonstrations have become routine. Authorities are questioned, scrutinized, and that has changed official behavior. Government offices are open for public inspection, and activists altered police tactics. No longer are protesters beaten.

From The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee by Terry H. Anderson (1995), pp. 412-415, 416-423. Copyright© 1995 by Terry H. Anderson. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Ltd.

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Police are more educated and integrated; they are trained in crowd control, and they work at improving their relations with all in the community. Because of political activists, empowerment is taken for granted.

The new left also influenced the Democratic party. In 1896, William Jennings Bryan co-opted the Populist party platform of 1892 and thus transformed the Democrats into the party of reform. Eighty years later the Democrats did the same, embracing ideas expressed in The Port Huron State­ ment. Since then, they have become the party of civil rights, personal freedom, environmentalism, corporate responsibility, and a foreign policy emphasizing human rights. Moreover, political activists of the 1960s pried open democracy, which earlier reformers had done by extending the vote during the Jacksonian and progressive eras. This time, the movement wrestled political control from white males who for years had been negotiating alone behind closed doors. Activists revived the old progressive idea, You can fight city hall, and what activ­ ist Bo Burlingham noted in 1976 will remain pertinent for some years: "The con­ vulsions of the last decade have produced something that has fundamentally altered the terms of American politics ... change is both possible and necessary."

The movement inspired citizens of all types to express their democratic rights, to demand change, and that included conservatives. The backlash began as a response to blacks marching for their civil rights and to students making demands on campus. The struggle raised issues of integration and equal employment opportunity, and that contributed to white flight to the suburbs and charges of "reverse discrimination." Because of race issues, many white working men deserted the party that had boosted and represented them, the Democratic, and became conservatives who voted Republican. The coun­ terculture and women's movement shocked other citizens and they joined the backlash: Phyllis Schlafly and her campaign Stop ERA; Anita Bryant and her crusade against sexual liberation; and a host of others who appeared as tel­ evangelists on the "700 Club," "Praise the Lord Club," and "The Old-Time Gospel Hour"-conservatives who reached the zenith of their popularity dur­ ing the first administration of the "Reagan Revolution."

Ronald Reagan's triumph in 1980 did not overturn the 1960s; there was no return to 1950s America. While the president was very popular, the majority of citizens did not honor his call for traditional social roles or support his environmental views, cold war foreign policy, or attempts to dismantle civil rights legislation and defeat the Equal Rights Amendment.

In fact, sixties political values marched on during the 1980s, and a central theme since has been inclusion. Every primary campaign and con­ vention since has included delegates representing all Americans. Jimmy Carter named more women and minorities to his administration than any previous president, and by 1984 civil rights activist Jesse Jackson had formed his Rainbow Coalition and was running for the Democratic nomination for president. That year female Representative Geraldine Ferraro accepted the party's vice presidential nomination. Republican presidents during the 1980s named Hispanics, African Americans, and women to their Cabinets and to the Supreme Court, and a member of the sixties generation, Bill Clinton, pledged and then appointed a Cabinet that would "look more like America." The long era of white men exclusively controlling the body politic was over.

YES I Terry H. Anderson 367

America became multicultural-a legacy of the struggle. For minorities, the sixties were a legal and political revolution. In just a few years minorities overturned centuries of legal inferiority and discrimination and obtained their rights guaranteed by the Constitution-an astounding achievement for any society. President Johnson proposed and Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, Fair Housing Rights Act of 1968. With the support of the Supreme Court, the nation integrated politic facilities, ended all voting restrictions, and accepted the idea that men and women charged with a crime should be judged by a jury of their peers. The 1960s killed the legal system called Jim Crow, and since then citizens have witnessed the unprec­ edented election of people of all races and the rise of minority political power, from mayors and police chiefs of predominately white cities, to governors, Congress, the Cabinet, and the Supreme Court. Furthermore, Black Power advocates stimulated a flourishing of cultural pride that spread to Hispanics, Native Americans, and other ethnic groups, all of whom have embraced empowerment. The federal government answered ethnic demands by ruling against discriminatory practices by businesses and agencies and by enforcing bilingual ballots and education. Ultimately, the struggle challenged Anglo America, and the result was a new definition of "American."

The struggle also diminished stereotyping and racism. That was appar­ ent as early as 1975 when a Cabinet member, Earl Butz, made a racist joke and was forced to resign. Since then, a black leader who was hated by millions, mistrusted by presidents, harassed by the FBI, and assassinated-Martin Luther King, Jr.-has become a national icon. Congress established a federal holiday observing his birthday, placing him on equal footing with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. Numerous opinion polls since have demonstrated that racism as measured by slurs and stereotypes has declined, especially among the young. Compare white racial convictions before and after the 1960s. Attitudes that had been held for centuries have changed considerably, have become more tolerant. Television programs and movies today depicting minorities would not have been possible without the struggle, and school textbooks are more inclusive than at any time in our history. Opinion polls in the 1990s demonstrated that whites and blacks, three to one, felt that race relations have improved since the 1960s and two-thirds felt that the nation has made signifi­ cant progress. "There's room for improvement," stated black restaurant owner W. A. Mathis in 1994 about race relations in Mississippi, "but it's 99 percent better than it used to be." ...

The legacy of the struggle is clouded by the issue of race, but the impact made by student activism on the American university is more apparent. The sixties generation of students raised fundamental questions: Who controls the university? What rights do students have? What are appropriate courses for a college degree? Activism disrupted and then changed campus life, and at most colleges, gone are the days of in loco parentis, the barracks regimented dormitory life, the mandate that the administration rules and the students are ruled. What Mount Holyoke College activist Julie Van Camp stated in 1969 remains valid: "After Columbia a lot of administrators got a rude awakening, but they also realized that many of the student grievances were valid. So now when we want change we a aren't going up against a stone wall any more. It's

368 ISSUE 15 1 Did the Activism of the 1960s Produce a Better Nation?

more like a mattress." Administrators became more flexible, students received more choice, and activism has been apparent whenever moral issues arise, as demonstrated by the anti-apartheid crusades of the 1980s.

Furthermore, students in the various power movements challenged an education based on male European civilization, provoking administrators to develop new classes on African American, Chicano, Native American, Jewish, and women's studies. That prompted a debate. "About the sixties it is now fashionable to say that although there were indeed excesses, many good things resulted," wrote professor Allan Bloom in 1987. "But, so far as universities are concerned, I know of nothing positive coming from that period; it was an unmitigated disaster for them." Conservatives complain about a seemingly endless debate over what is and what is not politically correct. Others, how­ ever, note that the debate demonstrates that the movement brought about more sensitivity about language, and they note that activists forced changes in the educational experience that resulted in new scholarship on new topics for a multicultural America. Whatever the case, students of the sixties confronted the educational establishment, and the result was more personal freedom on campus, and a broader college curriculum, than at any time in history.

The legacies of the antiwar movement also are mired in debate. As North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon in 1975, Americans sank into resentment, cynicism, the willed attempt to forget the long nightmare. Depression and denial. "The United States did not lose the war," proclaimed Hubert Humphrey in 1975. "The South Vietnamese did." Within a few years neo-conservatives were adopting a new approach. Actually, the war was, President Reagan declared in 1982, a "noble cause," and a few years later Richard Nixon reinter­ preted his own policy: "On January 27, 1973, when Secretary of State William Rogers signed the Paris peace agreements, we had won the war in Vietnam. We had attained the one political goal for which we had fought the war: The South Vietnamese people would have the right to determine their own politi­ cal future." He and many conservatives claimed that the United States lost the war because wimpy liberals forced his administration to end aid to South Vietnam. Our troops were stabbed in the back by cowardly congressmen, an idea popularized after every defeat, and one boosted this time by actors in numerous "Rambo" and "missing in action" movies. Although these actors and almost all of the young neo-conservatives avoided service in Vietnam, their ideas were warmly received by many who wanted someone to blame and by those who desired to accept another nationalistic myth instead of cruel fact. But in fact, by 1970 two-thirds of citizens wanted to withdraw from South Vietnam even if that nation fell to the North, a figure that increased to 80 percent as the last U.S. troops came home in 1973. Congress was only rep­ resenting the views of the electorate. Furthermore, after the Cambodian inva­ sion there were no Rambos in the U.S. Army in Vietnam. "By 70," recalled General Norman Schwartzkopf, "it was over .... Everyone wanted to get out." Indeed, antiwar activism inside the military was rampant. Americans at home did not want to continue the conflict, and G.I.s in the war zone had little desire to risk their lives. Eventually, even to the great silent majority, Vietnam was not a noble cause, but a lost one. "Nobody was sorry to hear the war

YES I Terry H. Anderson 369

was over," wrote Jerry Rubin. "And even more amazing, nobody asked, 'Who won?' Nobody gave a fuck."

But citizens did care about future foreign policy, for Vietnam taught two lessons: America is not invincible; in that sense, the Vietnamese killed the John Waynes. Second, the presidents and their wise men who direct foreign policy cannot be trusted. While Americans have supported the commander-in-chief in short military operations, they also have continually expressed skepticism about intervention in foreign lands. Citizens had cast aside the 1950s ideas of containment and the Domino Theory even before the demise of the Soviet Union. Despite Ronald Reagan's popularity, citizens two to one opposed his attempts to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and his sta­ tioning of only 55 army advisers in El Salvador. George Bush understood the popular mood, promising that the allied intervention to liberate Kuwait was "no~ another Vietnam," and then withdrawing U.S. troops as soon as feasible, endmg Desert Storm.

The antiwar movement alone did not end U.S. participation in Vietnam, but it did provoke citizens out of cold war allegiance, it generated and focused public opposition, and influenced presidents Johnson and Nixon. After all, LBJ quit his job and Nixon withdrew from Vietnam, actions incompatible with their personalities and inconceivable without the antiwar movement. Protest­ ers also prompted citizens to raise questions about their nation's foreign pol­ icy, and so, the sixties killed the Imperial Presidency. The commander-in-chief since has not had the power to order U.S. troops to fight in foreign lands with­ out citizens asking, Why? Is U.S. involvement necessary, is it in the national interest? True, the quick Desert Storm war was popular. It also had interna­ tional support and was approved by Congress, itself a legacy of the movement. But one wonders how much activism and counterculture behavior would have resurfaced if the desert campaign would have forced the reintroduction of the draft and lasted three years, just a third of the length of Vietnam. In this sense then, the antiwar movement was victorious, for as historian George Herring stated: "The conventional wisdom in the military is that the United States won every battle but lost the war. It could be said of the antiwar movement that it lost every battle but eventually won the war-the war for America's minds and especially for its soul."

The movement also won a new armed force. The resistance publicized a discriminatory Selective Service, and that along with an unpopular war, forced Nixon to abolish the system and establish a lottery, eventually leading to a volunteer armed forces that has freed young men from a staple of cold war culture-two years of military service. On campus, ROTC training is no longer mandatory. Because of G.I. resistance within the services, the brass tossed out numerous "Mickey Mouse regulations" and erected a more flexible and espe­ cially professional U.S. military. The Old Army became the New Army.

The movement changed other American institutions. Many religious denominations today are more concerned about social ills, more active in their communities, and more integrated, while the number of alternative beliefs has expanded and is more accepted. Sixties activists raised old questions concern­ ing business: What is more important, personal and community or private and

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corporate rights? What is legitimate corporate behavior? By challengi~g. ~he establishment the movement provoked a return to business social responsibility. Corporations 'since have increased their visibility in communities, ~nd their advertisements often attempt to convince the public that they are envuonmen­ tally aware and good citizens. Executives of old companies and some new busi­ nesses have become involved in progressive politics, from Ben and Jerry's to Working Assets. Finally, companies have changed their hiring. patter_ns. Giving applicants an equal opportunity was a fundamental change. m b~smess prac­ tices, affecting many occupations, and according to one busmess ~ournal, ne,;" positions for minorities and women were "clearly a response to soCial protest.

The establishment today includes more women than ever before-a leg­ acy of the women's movement. At the beginning of the n~w wave of femi­ nism, editor John Mack Carter of Ladies' Home Journal published a statement that raised eyebrows. "The point is: this is 1970. All peoples and both sexes are free to reexamine their roles. They are free to grow where they have been stunted, to move forward where they have been held back, to find dignity and self-fulfillment on their own terms." Radical as it seemed then, the statement now is taken for granted. Since then, a "woman's place" is her decision. On tel­ evision gone are the days of June Cleaver. Sitcoms since have portrayed numer­ ous car~er females, from "Hill Street Blues" to "Murphy Brown." Heroines can be as complex as heroes. Feminists confronted sexism, provoked men to recon­ sider their views, and along the way brought about men's liberation. Men have the freedom to choose whether to be the provider, the decision-maker, to stay at home with the children, or to remain single. Roles shifted, as demonstrated by polls in the 1980s that a majority of citizens agreed.t~at men and women should share housework and child-rearing equally. Femimsts also changed the family. In the 1950s about 70 percent of families were traditional: a dad who was the breadwinner, and a mom who was the wife, mother, and homemaker. By 1990 only 15 percent of families fit that descriptio~. ~ore w~men t~an ever before are working, and while the economy was sigmficant m pushmg them out of the house and into the office, contemporary opinion polls demon­ strate that a majority of females want marriage, children, and career. Naturally, that strained the family. Divorce rates have doubled since 1970, but another view is that people no longer feel obligated to spend their entire lives in love­ less marriages. "It now appears," pollster Louis Harris noted in.1987, "th.at the country is witnessing a radical and even revolutionary change m the basiC role of women within the family unit." Sex roles have not ended, of course, but because of the movement, America has become a more androgynous society with more flexible views on those roles than at any time, and of any nation.

Activists also were successful in winning legal and political power. Although feminists did not succeed in gettin? the Eq~al .Ri~hts Amendment ratified, they utilized civil rights acts and deCimated discnmmatory ~tate and federal laws. During the 1970s most states revised divorce laws, estabh~hed the idea of common property and no-fault divorce, and accepted the notiOn that women were full and equal partners in marriage, not subordinate to the husband. Women also revolutionized American politics. While very few had been elected before 1970, by 1990 women had become mayors, governors, congresswomen,

YES I Terry H. Anderson 371

senators, and Supreme Court Justices. Two decades after the Strike for Equality, Texas elected a female governor and senator, California elected two such sena­ tors, and they had become prime ministers in nations such as Britain, Canada, Norway, Poland, and Turkey. By the time a female becomes president, few will be concerned about the question, "Would you vote for a woman?"

Feminists liberated occupations and the professions. Females sued states universities, and corporations, resulting in major victories and job opportuni~ ties. Almost all states and hundreds of local governments legalized the concept of equal pay for comparable worth, and since then the amount females make ~ompared with males, the earnings gap, has been slowly narrowing. While crit­ ICS ~harge that there is a "glass ceiling," that most top positions still are held by white ~en, feminists nevertheless punched open the door of opportunity. Quo­ tas keepmg women out of colleges and professional schools have been abolished and clearly, women-not minorities-were the main beneficiaries of affirmativ~ action and equal opportunity; they are the ones competing against white males for appointments in colleges and professional schools and for jobs. Between 1970 and 1990 the percentage of female attorneys, professors, physicians, and business ma~agers increased from approximately 5 percent to one-third. Supreme Court JustiCe Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted: "When I began teaching law in 1963, few women appeared on the roster of students, no more than four of five in a class of over one hundred .... Law school textbooks in that decade contained such handy adv.ice as 'la~d, like women, was meant to be possessed.' ... The changes we have Witnessed smce that time are considerable. Women are no longer locked out, they are not curiosities in any part of the profession."

The argument here is not that the women's movement brought about complete equality, a condition reserved for utopia. In fact, as feminist scholars not~, liberation generally helped white, middle-class women, having much less Impact on the poor, and it contributed to the feminization of poverty since new laws made it easier for husbands to abandon their families. The number of single mothers living in poverty has soared. Since liberation, women do more ofte~ re:eiving the double burdens of home and work, while they listen to th~ media discuss the so-called burdens of being independent.

Nevertheless, activists exposed private matters long suppressed-abortion h~rass~ent, incest, lesbianism, rape, wife and child beating-forcing publi~ discussion that resulted in a more open society. They challenged the traditional ~ystem of education and brought about more sensitivity in the classroom and m textbooks, and they inspired female writers who flooded the nation with new, exciting literature and scholarship. Moreover, in a relatively short time f~minists revolutionized the legal status of women while they changed rela~ tlons between males and females that had existed for centuries, resulting in more freedom to define their own lives. Because of feminists, women have more ~pportunities, more equality, more freedom, than at any time. "It changed my hfe," Betty Friedan simply wrote. The women's movement resulted in changes so profound, and so accepted, that to the ire of many older activists, young females today often take their rights for granted and have to be reminded of their mothers' status. Women's liberation was the most successful social move­ ment of the sixties-and of American history.

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Feminists changed the meaning of "traditional values," and that also is the legacy of the counterculture. Since the first hippies walked down the streets of Haight-Ashbury, critics have castigated them, blaming them for everything from the decline of the American family, to the drug and venereal disease epidemics, even for AIDS. Sex, drugs, rock and roll. To most citizens since, the word "hippie" is similar to "Communist" in the 1950s-anyone undesirable. Freaks filled the void in the great American pastime: the search for a scapegoat. No doubt some of their values and behavior did contribute to social problems. But that topic demands a balanced monograph, not a brief chapter, and not another polemic.

The counterculture first subverted, and then with the aid of other move­ ments, significantly altered the cold war culture. Coming out of the Great Depression, the older generation saved for the future, worked for the fam­ ily, and followed the roles and the rules. The counterculture challenged that, encouraged experimentation, and provoked millions to consider, or reconsider, their lives. As one middle-aged journalist wrote about his two years visiting communes, "My route criss-crossed the country, leading me into the centers of great cities, far into the backwoods and wilderness, and up a great many moun­ tains. It also took me-sometimes to my great surprise and distress-off the external roadmap into uncharted areas of my own consciousness, where I nego­ tiated for the first time a bewildering tangle of fears, prejudices, and longings."

The counterculture resulted in a value system that has survived with the baby boomers. Surveys by Daniel Yankelovich Group in the early 1970s were confirmed in the late 1980s by Peter Hart Research Associates. The ethics of about 30 million people were altered in a meaningful way by the 1960s events, especially by civil rights struggle, women's liberation, and the war. Some 16 million also stated that personal changes were the result of the coun­ terculture. Those who participated in some aspect of the movement are differ­ ent from their parents. These sixties people are more skeptical about experts, leaders, politicians, and about institutions-the church, government, and mil­ itary. They are more flexible, introspective, and tolerant, especially concerning race, living arrangements, and personal behavior. They are more open about their feelings, compassionate, and more liberated sexually. Women feel that they have the same right to sexual satisfaction as men, as demonstrated by a revolution of opinion about premarital sex: The double standard has been buried. Even during the conservative 1980s, numbers soared of interracial mar­ riages, gay and lesbian couples, and single men and women living together. Cohabitation and other alternative living arrangements are common. Being "normal" is no longer a mandate for behavior: Be yourself. Sixties people are more interested in self-fulfillment, defining their own lives, and they often question authority and do their own thing: Let it be.

Most of the counterculture values that since have become cliches still influence behavior. America is more casual in dress and behavior than ever before, and the daily diet includes a wide variety of health foods as corpora­ tions proclaim on their packages, "No Artificial Flavors or Preservatives." States have repealed laws prohibiting various forms of sexual behavior between con­ senting adults, and they have decreased penalties for personal use of drugs. Gone are the days when a court would sentence Timothy Leary to years in

YES I Terry H. Anderson

prison for half an ounce of marijuana, a drug that still is th illegal one in the nation. Youth is not necessarily defined b; most common strated by a legion of middle-aged joggers, hikers, swimmers :g\ as d~ others participating in behavior that in the 1950s would not h' ocbest~, and

. ave ena pnate. The result is more personal freedom than at any time in th . ppro- the Republic-so much in fact that youth since has had little to e history of some have become bewildered with all their options. As James Rprotest, and b . eston wrote a out the graduatmg class of 1985, there was "nothing to confu h

f d " M h se t em but ree om. ore t an ever, America is the land of the free. · Most likely, the sixties will remain for some time as the ben hm

th · · 1 b h c ark for e way Sixties peop e e ave and think, just as their parents were · fl d b . m uence

y the Great DepressiOn and World War II. Regardless of the barrage fr th press declaring that another former hippie or radical has seen the l"ghom de

. . . . I tan accepted a positiOn on Wall Street, opm10n polls and surveys have d _ strated that sixties people continue to live their lifestyles. In the 1970s M~mchonl R t . d 1 . h . 1 ae

ossman ne to exp am t at to JOurnalists who asked him what happen d t d• 1 II h th II II e 0 ra ICa s w en ey g~,ow up. How can I tell them," he remarked, that "it is

a process, not a state? And in the 1990s Bernadine Dohrn added "You 't "fl" h , can wm or osmg. Eit er you fulfill their stereotype of being a radical 60's person

or you've sold out." Most have not sold out, and evidence is supplied at college reunions. "~here's n~ going back," stated Michigan alumna Julia Wrigley, and at the twentieth anmversary of the Columbia uprising Morris Dickstein noted that instead of describing careers in law, medicine, or banking, the former stu­ dents "talked about working as labor organizers, peace activists, or campaign­ ers for abortion rights or gay liberation." In Madison, a sociology professor surveyed 300 former civil rights activists and found that most of them had become teachers, lawyers, writers, and consultants: "None voted for Nixon. Two voted for Reagan." Studies have demonstrated that the protest generation remains quite distinctive in its views on civil rights, equality, politics, and life­ style, a phenomenon Newsweek called "The Graying of Aquarius."

Since the sixties, all of the various movements have diminished. That is natural, for the activists succeeded in bringing about a sea change, a different America. Like their predecessors during the Jacksonian period, progressive era, and 1930s, sixties activists were provoked by the inconsistencies between the Founding Fathers' noble ideals and the disappointing realities for many citi­ zens. They responded by holding demonstrations that raised questions. The first wave asked about the rights of black citizens, the rights of students, about their obligation to fight a distant and undeclared war. They provoked the nation to look in the mirror. The second wave expanded the issues to include all minori­ ties and women, and broadened the attack against the establishment. Since, liberation and empowerment have become threads in the nation's multicul­ tural social and political fabric. By confronting the status quo, activists inspired a debate that since has taken place in Congress, courts, city halls, board rooms, streets, and even bedrooms. The debate involves the political and the personal, and it asks the central question of this democracy: What is the meaning of "America"? Like reformers before, provoking a re-evaluation of that question was the most significant legacy of [the movement and the sixties.]

Peter Clecak 1~NO The New Left

As the stultifying fifties drew to a close, a new generation of radicals prom­ ised fresh directions in American politics. Idealistic, bright, and energetic, these young people revived the confidence of weary men on the Left. Of course the new radicals had obvious limitations: they possessed no clear program, no viable organization, not even a formidable constituency. And they were inno­ cent of the disastrous potentialities of moral vision insufiiciently tempered by political realism. But these were the inseparable strengths and weaknesses of youth. Vision would be modified by experience, it was supposed. What counted was their idealism and their enormous energy-indeed, their very existence after an arid season on the Left ....

After a decade of movement, however, ... the hopes of a generation of radicals soured; their visions took on disturbing shapes; their politics turned into fantasies of an impossible revolution. Born in the optimistic climate of the New Frontier, the movement reenacted "the tragic rhythm of American radicalism" within the brief span of a decade. The two most publicized styles of radicalism at the end of the sixties-Students for a Democratic Society and the Yippies-revealed the intense frustration and impotence of those who thor­ oughly reject the present social order. If the political revolutionaries acquired the usual symptoms of exhaustion-sectarianism, dogmatism, and elitism-the cultural revolutionaries displayed the opposite marks of radical incoherence. Both groups exchanged the complexities of history for simplistic myths ....

The Political Revolutionaries Although largely repudiated by later leaders of SDS factions, "The Port Huron Statement" is in many respects a remarkable document, a powerful record of the dominant moods of an articulate minority of the young in the early sixties. The wide disparities between the rhetoric and the realities of American life stirred them into radical action. Everywhere they looked, students confronted specific manifestations of radical paradoxes: the American creed of racial equality and the grim facts of bigotry; the celebration of domestic progress and the aimlessness of much work and most leisure; the myth of affluence and the realities of poverty; the rhetorical commitment to assisting underdeveloped nations and the ever more lopsided global polarization of wealth; and most ominously, the proclamations of peaceful intentions amid furious preparations for a catastrophic nuclear war.

From Radical Paradoxes: Dilemmas of the American Left: 1945-1970 by Peter Clecak (Harper & Row, 1973). Copyright© 1973 by Peter Clecak. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

374

NO I Peter Clecak 375

. A~ the outset, then, the young Left displayed a partial awareness of the chief dilemmas of contemporary American radicalism: the paradox of power­ lessness and the moral ambiguities of politics. Their youth allowed them fresh, vivid perceptions of the intolerable dilemmas that parents and teachers had distanced through a variety of perspectives, best summarized in Daniel Bell's concept of "the end of ideology." Since the chance of total revolution­ ary change in advanced nations of the West had vanished, Bell contended, progress would henceforth come about less dramatically, in slow, relatively even stages. By emphasizing the enormous complexity of modern societies and the unavailability of revolutionary levers of change, the "end of ideol­ ogy" theorists-Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, and others-also tended to mini­ mize the moral dimensions of domestic and international injustices, and the urgency of acting against them. In the end, these intellectuals "resolved" the dilemmas by obliterating the paradox of radical powerlessness; they came to accept the basic features of the American system, if only because there seemed to be no politically viable alternative.

A political conflict between the generations became imminent as the new radicals focused on what their elders no longer wanted to look at directly. The young had no good reason to accept the resignation of the intellectuals for their own radical odyssey had just begun. And older, ex-Left intellectuals ~ere still adjusting to the crushing losses of an earlier radicalism. For a variety of reasons, then, neither group could accept the basic position of the other. The fresh, unmediated perceptions of American dilemmas reinforced the mood of urgency among the young radicals at Port Huron: "Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living." Still, they understood that most of their fellow citizens did not care-or had learned not to care-about the drift toward apocalypse. "We are," they frankly admit­ ted, "a minority .... In this is perhaps the outstanding paradox: we ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative .... "The received wisdom of resignation struck the young as a cou~sel of des~air that they sought to exorcise with hope, with a "yearning to beheve there zs an alternative to the present."

To reestablish radical vision after its virtual disappearance in the 1950s activists formulated an optimistic though tentative statement of their values: They asserted that man is "infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love." But in America the myth of unlimited consumption had dehumanized everyone-the affluent who had too much and the poor who had too little. The expression of man's dormant capacities required a new social setting, "a democracy of individual participation, gov­ erned by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation."

Recognizing the initial need for enlarging their campus constituencies, founders of the movement cast about for political equivalents of the existential moods of students. In the early phases, it was assumed that success could not be measured by political victories or even by "the intellectual 'competence' or

376 ISSUE 15 I Did the Activism of the 1960s Produce a Better Nation?

'maturity' of the students involved .... "The leaders harbored no illusions about prevalent student attitudes or the dismal state of higher education. After portray­ ing the defensive ennui and the flight into private life by the vast majority, "The Port Huron Statement" provisionally traced individual frustrations to structural causes, noting that "apathy is not simply an attitude" but rather "a product of social institutions and of the structure and organization of higher education itself." Hence the primary opportunity of the new movement lay "in the fact [that] the students are breaking the crust of apathy and overcoming the inner alienation that remain the defining characteristics of American college life."

Within this general framework, specific targets were brought into focus: the outmoded character of the in loco parentis theory, the excessive specialization and compartmentalization of knowledge, the alienating effects of value-free social science, and a cumbersome "academic bureaucracy" that contributes "to the sense of outer complexity and inner powerlessness." University authorities now openly acknowledge the validity of nearly every criticism of higher educa­ tion in "The Port Huron Statement." And the beginnings of reform are evident in the abandonment of in loco parentis by major institutions, in the develop­ ment of interdisciplinary curricula, and in the search for new modes of teaching and learning. But in 1962 few academics understood (or would acknowledge) the breadth and depth of student discontent. It is probably not too cynical to assume that the guardians of higher education would have accelerated their drive toward specialized undergraduate programs of study as long as students remained outwardly docile (and funds for rapid expansion remained available). The most impassioned critics of the new radicalism frequently display notori­ ously bad memories; whatever SDS was to become, it played a serious part in nudging the complacent into an awareness of the profound conflicts that were to dominate colleges and universities throughout the sixties.

Though sketchy, the radicals' analysis of the larger political scene had the solid virtues of identifying the primary problems that would haunt the nation throughout the decade, and of outlining the intricate social, psychological, and political dimensions of a fresh departure from the pace and direction of American life. Drawing heavily on the work of [C. Wright] Mills, they clearly identified the dominant trend toward increasing private power under the pub­ lic fa\ade of democracy. American politics was sinking into an "organized ... stalemate: calcification dominates flexibility as the principle of parliamen­ tary organization, frustration is the expectancy of legislators intending liberal reform, and Congress becomes less and less central to national decision­ making, especially in the area of foreign policy."

To rescue the essential values of American liberalism from the complacency of intellectuals and from the crude deformations of philistines, the founders charted a vague politics of radical reform that included protest and confronta­ tion as well as electoral activity. In general, the early SDS advocated a Left-liberal coalition of students, civil-rights and peace groups, labor, the poor, and the conscience constituency of affluent professionals. Since the wide range of avail­ able tactics was to serve the larger ends of their vision, they ruled out violence, which "requires generally the transformation of the target, be it a human being or a community of people, into a depersonalized object of hate."

NO I Peter Clecak 377

Though flawed by strains of pretentious romanticism, "The Port Huron Statement" generally struck a balance between the articulation of ideals and the recognition of social realities. The founders intended to combine the best elements of the liberal tradition-its sense of the fragility of democracy and of the complexity of modern social problems-with a critique of its failures. They fused an awareness of the problematic with their passionate determination to solve radical paradoxes by embarking upon a sweeping politics of reform. But it was far easier to draw up a statement of political intentions than to execute it. The founders of SDS did not anticipate the devastating effects that the impend­ ing clash with the larger society would have on their efforts to develop a radical analysis, vision, and politics. Unable to calculate the narrow range of American politics, they could not know how quickly their activity would dramatize the inherent weaknesses and limitations of a radical youth movement in an advanced capitalist society. This interplay between their own expectations and the resistance of society propelled the drive toward sectarianism ....

Unable to chart the historical present accurately, incapable of developing a politics of transition, the new Left of the sixties also failed to imagine the out­ lines of a decent future. The social vision of young revolutionaries was essen­ tially a simplistic negation of the worst features of the present. lt proceeded from the fundatmentalist premise of the absolute depravity of a world where, under capitalism, each man bears the marks of the Original Sin of alienation, which turns him away from himself and against others. Dehumanized people continually reproduce a dehumanized world of bureaucracy, technology, and centralized control over ever wider areas of public and private life. Blind to their own unfreedom, the vast majority of the people do not even consciously desire liberation. Overadministered and ceaselessly manipulated individuals do not want what they need, and they generally do not need what they want. Since the disease of alienation resides both in contemporary social structures and in individuals, the movement's theorists had to posit a new society and a newman ....

The vague images of a new man and society vacillated between the revo­ lutionaries' desire for total liberation and their need to submit to tightly struc­ tured collectives .... Liberation turned into a growing charter of "freedom from": it signified release from stultifying work and enervating leisure; from social convention; from corrupt, media-dominated politics; from sexual inhi­ bitions; and from the culture of the past. In the widest sense, then, it repre­ sented a quasi-religious yearning to be free from "the things of earth," which is to [stay] free from the complexities and ironies of history.

The loss of historical perspective implied by these images seriously sub­ verted the political potentialities of the movement. Despite individual excep­ tions, those who controlled the organizations of the new Left tended toward ever more bizarre notions of liberation, until at last the distinction between capitalism and civilization blurred. Every institution, value, and social conven­ tion fell short of the simplistic criterion of egalitarianism. All notions of order, rank, hierarchy, and distinction came under sustained attack-along with the gross economic, social, political and cultural inequities built into monopoly capitalist society ....

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How could it have been otherwise? The seemingly opposed notions of liberation actually met on common ground. Both were politically impossible in the American context. And both were profoundly antidemocratic. ... But the concept of liberation, conceived as a charter of total freedoms from exist­ ing forms of civilization, presupposed a Marcusean context of a communist community in which all genuine needs of individuals would be met. Yet the political revolutionaries obviously could not enact this version of liberation in contemporary society: they could not become the new men they vaguely imagined. Nor could they, in the early stages, create an egalitarian, democratic political organization without leaders. Moreover, many radicals used this uto­ pian concept of freedom, deduced from an impossible social vision, to judge and condemn the present. In the process, the idea of socialism as a goal lost whatever power it had, or might have gained. And the idea of democracy, both as a political means of inducing change and as an intrinsically important com­ ponent of a fully developed socialist society, was deprived of much of its force.

This ideological pattern alone would have guaranteed political marginal­ ity and intensified feelings of alienation. But the final impetus toward sect~ri­ anism and organizational collapse was provided by the complementary notion of liberation considered as submission to the rigid dictates of an obviously repressive collective, a false community. The authoritarian version of libera­ tion was repressive in practice, since it entailed the reduction of individual needs and potentialities to the narrow demands of the whole. Though such a diminished image of man was at least historically possible on a small scale, the dominant cultural pattern of individualism quickly blunted its main thrust. No amount of collectivist rhetoric could dispel the pervasive emotional attach­ ment of large numbers of young radicals to the cluster of notions summarized in the concept of individualism.

Thus utopian radicals of the sixties ensured their own political powerless­ ness by refusing to accept the disparity between emotional individualism and collectivist rhetoric of community as a pervasive fact of American life. This fun­ damental paradox, I believe, illuminates the main internal cause of the organi­ zational demise of the political"revolutionaries." Despite its many ambiguous meanings and mythical connotations, the central impulse of individualism sur­ vived, thwarting the efforts of utopian Marxists to establish disciplined political organizations. Individualism functions as a self-selecting mechanism by which people attracted to utopian ideologies leave-or never join-organiz~tions based on authoritarian notions of "liberation." Or else it becomes a centnfugal force within vanguard parties, promoting splintering and, in many instances, total disintegration. This, at least, was the experience of the sixties.

The Cultural Revolutionaries Plagued by similar frustrations, political and cultural revolutionaries shar~d a spirit of unremitting opposition to American society. This is not surpns­ ing, considering their common backgrounds: predominantly young, white, middle-class, and disillusioned, they demanded full release from the dull, affluent settings of their childhoods, no less than from the prefabricated adult

NO I Peter Clecak 379

roles in what they regarded as the same meaningless rituals of production and consumption. Of course no clear line separates political from cultural revolu­ tionaries; their moods, tactics, and personal styles were responses to the same society and culture. Though few people held a pure form of either position in the sixties, the extremes illuminate much of the interior social and psychic territory. On the continuum of liberation, cultural revolutionaries stand to the left of their political counterparts who cling (however tenuously) to language and logic, theory and political action as means of shaping men and history. The Yippies, representing the most flamboyant semipolitical force in the cul­ tural revolution, found these lingering commitments a source of new frustra­ tions, new orthodoxies, new prisons of the mind.

Unencumbered by the idea of reason and history, Yippies did not need to establish political priorities, to mediate between utopian desires and genuine historical options. Jerry Rubin, a leading spokesman, experienced the futility of sectarian politics at first hand: "For years I went to left-wing meetings try­ ing to figure out what the hell was going on. Finally I started taking acid, and I realized what was going on: nothing. I vowed never to go to another left­ wing meeting again. Fuck left-wing meetings!" By submitting wholly to the spirit of liberation through total opposition to American culture and society, they evaded the radical paradoxes of independent Left intellectuals and the radical problems of the new revolutionaries. "The Yippies are Marxists," Rubin declared facetiously: "We follow in the revolutionary tradition of Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Karl."

The accent was on direct, unmeditated, frenetic action against every actual and imagined form of repression. Do It!, Rubin's bestseller, provided the cultural revolutionary's reply to the perennial question, "What Is to Be Done?" The vague parody of Lenin was sufficiently precise for Rubin's purpose: "Previ­ ous revolutions aimed at seizure of the state's highest authority, followed by the takeover of the means of production. The Youth International Revolution will begin with mass breakdown of authority, mass rebellion, total anarchy in every institution in the Western world. Tribes of longhairs, blacks, armed women, workers, peasants and students will take over." The subtitle-Scenarios for Revolution-is equally revealing. For the cultural revolutionaries sought to bypass radical paradoxes by obliterating distinctions between life (in particu­ lar, the categories of reason, history, and politics) and art, turning everything in sight into a gigantic set for a musical comedy in a violent key: "language," Rubin contends, "does not radicalize people-what changes people is the emo­ tional involvement of action. What breaks through apathy and complacency are confrontations and actions, the creation of new situations which previous mental pictures do not explain, polarizations which define people into rapidly new situations."

Personal and social salvation-and the two cannot be distinguished in this gestalt-begin when one externalizes his frustrations, dreams, hopes, and anxieties. Conformity and isolation turn into creative conflict and com­ munity. Once large numbers enlisted as revolutionary actors, it was claimed, old structures would crumble and power would pass into the hands of the people ....

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Whereas theorists of the political Left were obsessively scholastic (however mad their points of departure), the Yippies regarded reason as a trap. As Hoffman put it: "It's only when you get to the End of Reason can you begin to enter WOODSTOCK NATION." Anti theoretical and antirational, the Yippies searched for new modes of expressing their·revulsion against the PIG NATION. Since rea­ son and language had been appropriated by the enemy, Yippies sought the only uncorrupted modes of expression-sensations and feelings. In their attempts to constitute new worlds, they thus begin with severe, partially self-imposed limitations. Through spokesmen such as Hoffman, the Yippies registered their opposition in concrete, intensely personal terms. Insofar as they depended upon language at all, they avoided alienating abstractions, sticking to a language of the nerves.

Since the aim was to make an instant cultural revolution rather than to define a long-range political one, Hoffman rejected theory and politics, relying instead on a self-consciously fashioned social myth to account for his revulsion against contemporary America. Like the political revolutionaries, he divided the world simplistically into two camps-the PIG NATION and the WOODSTOCK NATION, one perishing, the other rising out of its ruins. For Hoffman, the gathering at Woodstock in the summer of 1969 was not merely a rock festival but the birth of a nation, the formation of another country where the diseases of civilization would disappear. Let the tribe gather together, let everyone do "what the fuck he wants," and then the details of government can be worked out. There is in this comic-strip perspective no need for elabo­ rate theory, no need for social vision, and no need for a politics of transition. The cultural revolution is NOW, and the only "politics" of this transformation is self-defense against the "fascist pigs," he declares, sweeping the details of strategy aside with the grandiose phrase "by any means necessary." According to Hoffman, the flower children of the middle sixties were beginning to rise above their early innocence and passiveness. Like the political militants who graduated from liberalism to uncompromising revolutionary postures, Yippies had to drop their pacific fantasies in order to resist actively the harsh repres­ sion of the larger society.

The Yippies' primitivism obviously had little to offer in the way of ethi­ cal or political insight into contemporary dilemmas. The idea of doing one's own thing is not the culmination of ethics but its obvious precondition and cause. And the political and social consequences of everyone's pursuing his whims were predictably disastrous. Hoffman ... romanticizes the pathetic scene at Woodstock that provided the content for his fantasies. But the new "nation" survived only three days before paralysis set in. As the New York Times observed, "What kind of culture is it that can produce so colossal a mess: one youth dead and at least three others in hospitals from overdoses of drugs; another dead from a mishap while sleeping in an open field. The highways for twenty miles around made completely impassable, not only for the maddened youth but for local residents and ordinary travelers." Had the Times reporter been able to go beyond the perspective of a foreign correspondent and drop his mask of moral arrogance, he might have been able to recognize the respon­ sible culture as his own.

NO I Peter Clecak 381

For Hoffman, an insider, the tragic aspects of Woodstock disappeared into his fantasy of a new nation taking shape. He was as blind as most petty chieftains to the agony of the lower castes, of those who form the writhing backdrop to his own flamboyant fantasies. Except for a few media figures such as Joan Baez and Jerry Rubin, Hoffman revealingly portrayed Woodstock as a faceless nation. He saw only the incredible energy of the young, not the mas­ sive waste of human potential that such gatherings of aimless people exem­ plify. As one participant in Woodstock West observed: "I kept thinking we are so stupid, so unable to cope with anything practical. Push forward, smoke dope. But maintain? Never. We don't know how. We've been coddled, tread­ milled, straight-teethed and vitamin-pilled, but we don't know what to do on our own. Reports of a revolution are vastly premature. We don't like the power structure. But we have to live together. We will be governed by others until we learn how to govern ourselves .... "

At bottom, then, the Yippie quest is for authenticity, for a believable sense of self. Since the prevailing culture has appropriated and distorted rationality through its language and values, no less than through its disorienting pace of technological change, the search centers on feelings as the only remain­ ing mode of authenticity. In Woodstock Nation, Hoffman presents himself as a representative character in revolt (though he makes it quite clear that he is cleverer and more intense than others) ....

What renders the total performance unconvincing, however, is Hoffman's steady refusal to take himself seriously. All the confident pronouncements become tentative by virtue of his self-conscious comic pose. By disclaiming accountability for his fantasies, his thoughts, and his actions, he ultimately denies any responsibility for himself. The external and internal sense of real­ ity he frantically tries to construct turns out to be no more than an illusion. Protesting that he's "only in it for kicks and stuff," he nevertheless emerges as the sad butt of his own elaborate gag. None of the roles he tries on so cava­ lierly fit-nor do all of them at once. They are so many unconvincing media images that fail to provide satisfying forms for the amorphous flow of energy. And so the endless cycle of expending himself continuously exposes his own emptiness ....

In the end, after the brief appeal of the Yippies had been exhausted by the media, Rubin and Hoffman cut their hair. And when the Democratic Party held its 1972 convention in Miami, they were there, inside the hall. Facing the television cameras once again, they looked rather like their former selves­ innocent, ambitious high-school seniors of the middle fifties. Meanwhile, remnants of the Yippies, camping out in a nearby park, complained that Jerry and Abbie had sold out. Actually they were only looking for new ways to buy in, to retain their tenuous roles as prophets of a new culture.

Like many leaders of the new Left, Rubin and Hoffman could not suc­ ceed in their quest for authenticity if only because they were individualists who rejected conventional ways of making it without ever really abandon­ ing the aim of personal success. Their revolt against alienation demanded the establishment of community. Yet through savage caricatures of other revolu­ tionaries who sought political roads to utopia, Yippies rejected the very idea

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of organization. As the underground writer Paul Krassner put it, "The Crazies have a rule that in order to become a member one must first destroy his mem­ bership card." Lacking both the desire and the capacity for organization, Yippie leaders could not hope to retain the attention of would-be followers, who quickly dispersed, seeking new modes of metapolitical expression ....

Like other packaged entertainment figures without disciplined talent, however, new Left leaders could not hold an audience for long. Doubtless the media, as some claim, corrupted many ambitious young Leftists. But most turned out to be willing victims who sought publicity as avidly as publicists sought them. Having been weaned on such cultural fare as Howdy Doody Time and the Mickey Mouse Club in the fifties, Hoffman, Rubin, and others easily fell into their comic roles in the sixties. The cultural distance only seemed greater than it was. The leaders of leaderless groups committed to total change could not resist the most fundamental American, imperative of making it.

Conclusion As a major expression of the wider cultural revolt, Yippies articulated the antipolitical implications of the new Left's search for utopia. Each grouping exposed the utopian and apocalyptic character of the other. And though there is an endless variety to the themes, moods, and styles of metapolitical criti­ cism, the underlying perspectives and social implications remain fairly con­ stant. Insofar as contemporary visionaries reject social criticism and politics for modes of spiritual salvation from alienation, they join with multitudes of more conventional secular and religious figures in the American tradition. The basic paradigm of personal salvation experienced in small communities has a long heritage: the critic-preacher or prophet articulates hopes, fears, and frustrations, and, then prescribes a means of personal relief, often with the stipulation that if everyone were to accept his prescription, the world would be quickly delivered from evil. This formula links the tracts of vegetarians, the sermons of Billy Graham, and the latest techniques of transcendental medita­ tion imported from remote Indian villages.

Thus it was not surprising that by the early seventies, when Yippies and the political revolutionaries had passed from the center of the public stage, the Jesus movement was flourishing, along with a plethora of exotic religious fantasies that furthered the formation of small communities, or the establish­ ment by fiat of "communities" of solipsists unable to distinguish their own from other worlds. As long as the disparity between the cultural aim of end­ ing alienation through the enactment of community and the political aims of achieving full democracy and social justice persists, temporary, unstable groups of hippies, Yippies, and Jesus freaks will form colonies in the interstices of advanced industrial society. The rank and file will reject its pressures and the ethic of private material gain only to magnify the private virtues of pas­ sivity and self-involvement. As antipolitical minorities, however, these groups will be as harmless to the establishment as sanctified members of tiny funda­ mentalist sects: both renounce certain values of society only to legitimize and perpetuate them by acquiescing in the status quo.

NO I Peter Clecak 383

By the end of the sixties, SDS and the Yippies emerged as the most extreme symbols of white protest and revolt in American society; they were at the same time among the most impotent radical groups, with their encounter with power ending in powerlessness. In their distinctive ways, political and cultural revolutionaries reinforce antipolitical attitudes in the wider society. Though not without some political importance, they exercise virtually no control over the uses of their public activity. Their analyses, visions, and poli­ tics preclude a coherent synthesis of motive and act, intention and execution. Hence, in addition to being self-defeating, the revolutionaries have become potentially dangerous insofar as they threaten less apocalyptic radical con­ stituencies, intensifying political repression across the Left, and contributing to the erosion of civil rights and liberties ....

The most disheartening failure of the new Left, however, was one of omis­ sion. Revolutionaries not only repelled the majority of Americans: they also dis­ illusioned a majority on the Left who refused to go over the psychological brink into holistic fantasies of total change. There is a terrible irony here: the new radicals who contributed in important ways to the emergence of anticapitalist modes of consciousness in the sixties were unable to organize the energies they helped to unleash. Driven to mythical modes of understanding that symboli­ cally united their incompatible desires to establish social justice and end aliena­ tion, they could neither anticipate nor control the antipolitical consequences of their activity. Isolating themselves even as they were isolated by others, the new revolutionaries could revolutionize neither themselves nor society.

As a youth movement, the new Left quickly reached its predictable politi­ cal limits, though not before having helped to shake the country out of the complacency of the Eisenhower years. Many of its graduates, and countless others whose outlooks have been influenced by the movement, will move into society, mainly as members of the service professions-law, medicine, teaching, social work, urban planning. Even though they temper the utopian visions of their youth, they will also retain their distrust of received ideology. Some will pursue experimental attitudes toward the questions of how to live within the dominant society. Others will drop out to pursue even more fluid alternative patterns of work and leisure ....

The most obvious-and most modest-lesson of the radicalism of the sixties, then, is a negative one that was implicit in the theory of plain Marxists and explicit in the practice of the new revolutionaries: visions of a Gemeinschaft community in twentieth-century America are "romantic and utopian in the­ ory, oppressive and reactionary in practice." Mounting social problems may in fact lead to an apocalyptic seizure. But that real possibility ought not to license an uninhibited play of subjective visions of disaster. It is one thing to possess the capacity for imagining an apocalypse and quite another to succumb to the apocalyptic imagination. Those who looked forward to the greening of America, whether through the evolution of a new consciousness or after a destructive revolution, hopelessly blurred this distinction. Instead of evading radical paradoxes, the new revolutionaries submitted to ahistorical versions of them. They quickly discovered their powerlessness against the prevailing social order ....

EXPLORING THE ISSUE(~

Did the Activism of the 1960s~ Produce a Better Nation?

Critical Thinking and Reflection 1. What was the Port Huron Statement? To what extent were the goals

of this document realized by the radical activists of the 1960s? 2. According to Terry Anderson, what were the key contributions of

young activists to American society in the 1960s? 3. Compare and contrast the leaders, goals, strategies, and accomplish­

ments of both the political and cultural revolutionaries in the 1960s. 4. According to Peter Clecak, what factors prevented 1960s' activists

from accomplishing their goals?

Is There Common Ground? Most Americans would agree that the decade of the 1960s was a divisive period in which youthful rebels launched an assault against the traditional values of twentieth-century America. A prominent target appeared to be authority in any form, whether parental, educational, political, or cultural. Many young people obviously found these protest activities exhilarating, ideologically meaningful, and politically essential to move the United States toward a more consistently progressive path. Many of their elders were more liable to judge the revolt as nonsensically self-indulgent and immature at best and dangerous and destructive at worst.

The larger question posed by this issue, however, is whether or not this activism produced beneficial results. Those who view the decade from a more positive perspective can point to the improved pattern of race rela­ tions, a more inclusive society in general that extends rights broadly, a system of higher education in which the tradition of in loco parentis was dis­ lodged by a recognition that students deserve a voice in curricular and pol­ icy matters that concern them, and a more self-conscious environmentalist movement bent on protecting the planet from the carelessness of human behavior. Critics of the activism very often contend that whatever problems exist in the United States today can be placed at the feet of a "sixties genera­ tion" that was more determined to tear down than to build up and whose protest generated incivility that has infected most of the nation's institu­ tions. Perhaps the only issue upon which all can agree is that the music was really great.

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Additional Resources Students interested in. knowing more about the 1960s have many sources t~ c.ho,?~e from .. The six-hour television documentary "Making Sense of the Sixties IS magmficent. Three of the best scholarly studies of the period are: Allen 1. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (Harper & Row, 1984); John Patrick Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American ~eft (W. W. Norton, 1992); and David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams: America ~n the 1960s (Hill and Wang, 1994). Valuable autobiographical accounts mclu~e !om Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (Random House, 1988); Todd Gitlin, The Szxtzes: :ears of Hope, Days of Rage (Bantam, 1993); and Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days: Memozrs of An Ant~war Activist (Beacon Press, 2001). Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (Random ~ous~, 1973) IS the most comprehensive work on the Students for a Democr.atiC Sooe~y. ]ames Miller, "Democracy is in the Streets": From Port Huron to the Szege of Chzcago (Simon & Schuster, 1987) is written by a former SDS member but is generally balanced. Mark Rudd's Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen (William Morrow, 2009) follows the path of the leader of the 19.69 ~olumbia University strike into the terrorist Weather Underground Or?amzat10n. For an unabashedly critical assessment of student activism wntten. by former radicals, see Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generatio~: s:cond Thoughts About the '60s (Summit Books, 1989).

RadiCalism on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley is co~ered. impressively in W. ]. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: the 1960s (Oxford Um~ersity Pre.ss, 1989) and David Lance Goines, The Free Speech Movement: C?mm~ o( Age m the 1960s (Ten Speed Press, 1993). Michael Rossman, The Wed­ dmg wzthm the War (Doubleday, 1965) provides first-hand observations from on~ of the key participants in the Free Speech Movement. The impact of the a.ntlwar prote~t on the con.flict in Vietnam is argued from opposing perspec­ tives by Melvm Small, Antzwarriors: The Vietnam War and the Battle for Ameri­ ca's Hearts and Minds (Scholarly Resources, 2002) and Adam Garfinkle: Telltale Hearts: The Origins and Impact of the Vietnam Antiwar Movement (St. Martin's Press, 1995). To.m B.ates, R~ds: The 1970 Bombing of the Army Math Research Center at the Umverszty of Wzsconsin and Its Aftermath (Harper Collins 1992) is the most comprehensive account of that tragedy. '

For an .explanation o~ youthful alienation and dissent from a psychologi­ ca.l perspective, see three Important studies by Kenneth Keniston: Youth and Dzss.ent: The Rise of a New Opposition (Harcourt Brace jovanovich, 1960); Young Radzcals: Not~s on C?mmitted Youth (Harcourt Brace jovanovich, 1960); and The Uncommztted: Alzenated Youth in American Society (Dell, 1968). The classic ~cco_unt of the counter culture in the Haight-Ashbury District in San Francisco IS NICholas von Hoffman's We Are the People Our Parents Warned us Against (Ivan R. Dee, 1968).

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