Chapter One
Campus Wars and Culture Wars
Student protest in the 1960s, which began as a rejectionof parental authority and the Vietnam War, rapidlyevolved into a social movement. The Students for a DemocraticSociety (SDS), the chief organization of the campus-based NewLeft, gained strength as Democratic politicians lost control ofthe war in Vietnam and the unrest in America's inner cities.SDS, which began the 1960s with just a few members, endedthe decade 100,000 strong. By then it had committed itself to violentconfrontation with university and government officials.
More than three hundred of the nation's two thousand campusesexperienced sit-ins, building takeovers, riots, and strikesin the sixties. In a period of a year and a half—between January1969 and April 1970—young radicals bombed five thousandpolice stations, corporate offices, military facilities, and campusbuildings set aside for the Reserve Officers' Training Corps(ROTC). Twenty-six thousand students—of a campus populationof ten million—were arrested and thousands injured or expelledwhile engaged in protest activities. (Fifty-seven thousandyouths, many of whom lacked the financial means to attendcollege and secure draft deferments [II-S], died in Vietnam.)Against a backdrop of student protest, the campus drug cultureblossomed. The proportion of' college students who hadsmoked marijuana jumped from 4 percent in the early 1960s to60 percent by 1972.
At the same time many American cities became combatzones. Violent crime, which was largely concentrated in America'spoorest urban precincts, in the sixties rose 126 percent. In1968, 125 cities experienced riots that left 225 dead and caused$112 billion in property damage. While politicians such as Alabamagovernor George Wallace blamed social unrest on "lawless"blacks and students, leftist intellectuals justified rioting asrevolutionary acts against "white racism." Sadly for the Democraticparty—which since the era of Franklin Roosevelt haddominated national politics—divisions over Vietnam, sexualliberation, recreational drug use, and urban crime spelled itsdecline. As social conflict grew, Southern whites, union members,and Northern Catholics parted ways with their formerblack, Jewish, and professorial allies.
Although these developments are ample reasons for the importanceof the 1960s, another force is at work to ensure that theera does not fade into the mists of time. Manufacturers ofAmerica's popular culture have found that the events of the1960s offer compelling plots around which to construct filmsand television shows. For example, in Wild in the Streets (1968),a young rock-and-roll star becomes President of the UnitedStates when the voting age is lowered to fourteen. He immediatelyestablishes a dictatorship of "love," sending citizens overthe age of thirty to concentration camps where they are fedLSD. A decade later Animal House (1978) created "Faber College,"a fictional 1960s-era campus. At Faber, students smokedope, sleep around, fail their classes, and gleefully destroy property.
In contrast to Animal House, Forrest Gump (1994) depicts the1960s as an era of class and cultural polarization. While youngworking-class men like the title character fight in the VietnamWar, college students take drugs, denounce the military, andembrace the Black Panthers. In one of the most vivid scenes ofthis film, Gump punches out the abusive, weasel-like presidentof the Berkeley SDS during the 1967 march on the Pentagon.Perhaps unknown to the scriptwriters, the president of theBerkeley SDS in 1967, Michael Lerner, had become, by the dateof the film's release, an adviser to First Lady Hillary RodhamClinton.
If films on the 1960s span the ideological spectrum, networktelevision series and specials more consistently support BabyBoomer activists. (An unprecedented U.S. population boom occurredin the fifteen years following the end of World War II.The millions of American children born in those years soon becameknown as Baby Boomers.) In 1998 the NBC series "Lawand Order" aired a fictional, retrospective account of the 1968SDS takeover of Columbia University. Police investigators,working on the case of a militant who had been murdered in1968, discover that the radical had been an undercover NewYork police officer. Then the investigators, and a district attorneywho had himself been an anti-war demonstrator, learn thatnearly all of the most outspoken radicals at "Kensington College"were police spies sent to provoke violence and discreditthe SDS. While such agent provocateurs did exist in real life,"Law and Order" suggested that the violence of the New Leftwas nothing more than the work of a manipulative Establishment.
Despite television series and films, most Americans' memoriesof the 1960s are evoked by rock songs. Jefferson Airplane'slively 1967 song "Somebody to Love" has endured as an anthemof countercultural liberation. Whenever Hollywood scriptwriterswant to conjure among viewers images of free love andpsychedelics—without having to create fully realized characters—theyturn to singer Grace Slick.
Equally evocative, the Rolling Stones' 1968 hit "Street-fightingMan" celebrated "violent revolution" against cops and"compromised solutions." After the Stones released "Street-fightingMan," no campus riot was complete without this tunebeing blasted over the stereo speakers. Finally there wasCrosby, Stills, Nash, and Young's 1970 dirge "Ohio," commemoratingthe slaying of four students at Kent State University bythe Ohio National Guard. To this day, as soon as a disc jockeyplays "Ohio" in a student bar, conversation turns to the song'sorigins in the Kent State tragedy.
Looking past popular culture to the historical record, we cansay that "The 1960s" began as myth and reality in Greensboro,North Carolina, in 196o, when a handful of black college studentschallenged local segregation ordinances. These religiouspacifists asked to be served a cup of coffee at a Woolworth five-and-tenlunch counter. When they were refused service, theyinspired thousands of other Southern black students to imitatetheir example. Soon black youths established a new civil rightsorganization to promote racial equality in Dixie—the StudentNonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, often pronouncedas Snick).
At the same time young white radicals at the University ofMichigan were founding the Students for a Democratic Society.SDSers condemned Washington's anti-Communist foreign policyand the "racism" of the Democratic and Republican parties.Often forgotten is that even as students were building a NewLeft, conservative white youths were laying the basis for a NewRight, founding the anti-Communist, free-market-orientedYoung Americans for Freedom (YAF).
The student-led phase of the civil rights movement peakedin 1964 during the Mississippi Freedom Summer campaign. Aswhite and black students battled Southern racists, they alsobegan to fall out among themselves. Returning to their campusesin the fall of 1964, young activists at Berkeley initiatedtheir own freedom struggle against college administrators. TheBerkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM) inaugurated a spiral ofconflict that transformed many tranquil college campuses intobattlefields over university regulations and a widening war inIndochina.
America's initial military involvement in Indochina datedfrom World War II. Determined to defeat Imperial Japan, theRoosevelt administration had sent weapons and military advisersto Ho Chi Minh and his Vietnamese Communist guerrillas.After World War II, when France insisted on reclaiming its Indochinaempire and ousting Ho Chi Minh as the leader of Vietnam,the United States stood on the sidelines. President HarryTruman did not consider Ho Chi Minh to be a threat to Americansecurity interests in Asia. But Truman did not wish toalienate a needed European ally by trying to awaken Francefrom its colonial dreams. After the Korean War began in 1950,and the United States found itself fighting hundreds of thousandsof Chinese soldiers, Truman decided that France's Indochinawar was part of a broader struggle against Communistexpansion.
Although Washington ultimately underwrote 80 percent ofFrance's doomed military effort in Vietnam, neither Trumannor President Dwight Eisenhower were eager to commitAmerican combat troops to Indochina. The Korean War hadturned into a wrenching stalemate. Eisenhower, though desirousof checking the Soviet-backed Vietnamese Communists,had no intention of getting involved in another Asian land war.Instead he supported the creation of an independent SouthVietnamese government. He hoped that American financialand technical assistance to Saigon would buy President NgoDinh Diem the time he needed to consolidate his power andstabilize the economy. But South Vietnamese insurgents, withthe backing of North Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union,launched a wave of political assassinations and terrorism at theend of the 1950s that rocked Diem's government. Diem respondedineptly to Communist terrorism, alienating peasantsand Buddhist monks.
Most South Vietnamese tried to take a neutral stance, wantingnothing to do with the urban, Roman Catholic Diem or HoChi Minh. They knew that Ho Chi Minh had imprisoned orexterminated thousands of capitalist "class enemies" in 1954upon taking power in Hanoi. Unfortunately for Diem, Communistterrorism escalated, and the thousands of Americanmilitary advisers that President John F. Kennedy sent to assistSaigon were more than matched by the troops that infiltratedSouth Vietnam from the North.
When Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated Kennedy in November1963, newly installed President Lyndon Johnson found themilitary situation in South Vietnam rapidly deteriorating.South Vietnamese military officers, with the tacit support ofU.S. leaders, had killed Diem earlier in November 1963. Thegenerals and their American patrons erroneously thought theywere better equipped to impose order. Johnson ran for electionin 1964 publicly proclaiming his unwillingness to send Americancombat troops to South Vietnam. Privately he was bidinghis time until the conclusion of his campaign against Republicanchallenger Barry Goldwater, whom he depicted as a wild-eyed,bomb-throwing extremist.
To the Democratic heirs of former First Lady Eleanor Rooseveltand two-time presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson,Johnson insisted that he, unlike Goldwater, was a responsibleanti-Communist who would deploy force only as a last resortand then only in careful measure. The Stevenson-Eleanor RooseveltDemocrats believed that accommodation with China andthe Soviet Union was possible. Such Democrats, most of whomcame from suburban, white-collar Protestant and secular Jewishbackgrounds, were also suspicious of politicians who woretheir anti-communism on their sleeves.
The revolt of the white-collar Democrats began in February1965 when President Johnson bombed military targets in NorthVietnam. Hanoi responded by deploying more Communisttroops to South Vietnam. Johnson's decision to introduceAmerican combat troops into South Vietnam in March 1965prompted thousands of college faculty and middle-class suburbanstudents to hold teach-ins on the war. These special sessionsserved largely as forums for condemning U.S. military actionagainst the North Vietnamese army and its southern guerrillawing, the National Liberation Front (or Viet Cong). SDS presidentCarl Oglesby proclaimed that corporate-serving Democratswere behind the escalation of the Vietnam conflict.
It quickly became evident that winning the Vietnam Warwould not be easy. The first major clash between American andNorth Vietnamese army regulars took place in 1965 in the IaDrang Valley. U.S. troops, despite being outnumbered seven toone, managed to kill three thousand Communist soldiers. Twohundred forty Americans died. The Hanoi regime realized thatits army would have to pursue hit-and-run attacks, blend intothe local population, and retreat to Cambodian and Laotiansanctuaries which the United States could not assault. Such astrategy, Hanoi anticipated, would lead Washington to bombSouth Vietnam indiscriminately and, as a consequence, turn theSouth Vietnamese people against the United States and itsSaigon ally. Hanoi's strategy made for a protracted war thatfrustrated the American electorate.
While the Vietnam War grew bloodier, campus protestagainst the draft, university research for the military, and relatedmatters mounted. At the same time Northern black activists—whowere not as religious or as committed tononviolence as their Southern brethren—expelled whites fromSNCC. Black militants established organizations such as theBlack Panthers in the San Francisco Bay Area. By 1967, confrontationsescalated on the nation's college campuses and inthe cities of the North. White and black radicals advocated"picking up the gun" to destroy "American imperialism."
1968, one of the most traumatic years in recent Americanhistory, began with the North Vietnamese army and the VietCong launching the Tet offensive. Despite the loss of severalthousand American and South Vietnamese soldiers, the Communistforces were decimated. The U.S. army and air forceeliminated the Viet Cong as a military threat to Saigon. YetPresident Johnson and the elite media misread the results of theTet offensive, regarding it as a devastating American defeat.(The Johnson administration had not believed the Communistswere capable of launching such a massive attack. Many journalistsfelt they had been lied to, and Johnson himself felt deflated.)Weary of anti-war protest and unwilling to invade North Vietnamlest China intervene, Johnson announced that he wouldopen peace negotiations with Hanoi—and that he would notseek reelection.
With the assassination of civil rights leader Martin LutherKing, Jr., in the spring of 1968, a new wave of rioting struckAmerica's urban black neighborhoods. No sooner had the riotssubsided when SDSers at Columbia University seized controlof their campus in an effort to spark a student revolt acrossAmerica. As the national SDS argued in 1968, "The whole educationsystem now—from grade schools on up—is used to tiethe allegiance of youth to the capitalist system by building up anideological army for the ruling class." Higher education, farfrom being an Ivory Tower, was, according to SDS, a citadel ofU.S. imperialism that had to be liberated or destroyed.
In August 1968, ten thousand demonstrators gathered inChicago to disrupt the Democratic National Convention. Theviolence that occurred in the streets of Chicago, much of it intentionallyprovoked by partisans of the New Left, shatteredthe Democratic electoral coalition and led to the party's captureby anti-war activists. Such Democrats rejected America's anti-Communistforeign policy and embraced abortion, racial hiringquotas, and gay rights, among other causes.
In 1969 campus protest in support of black power, andagainst defense contracting by the universities, accelerated.Where just one-quarter of the nation's campuses could claim aleftist student organization in 1965, four years later 46 percenthad one. Bombings, building seizures, and assaults against facultyand students who did not embrace SDS and the Black Panthersbecame the norm at Berkeley, Cornell, and Kent State.One faction of SDS split off and dedicated itself to armed revolution.Meanwhile, "do-your-own-thing" libertarians in theYoung Americans for Freedom—who accounted for a third ofthe organization's membership—divided the conservative studentmovement. Boomer libertarians protested the draft andbelieved that government should not regulate the marketplaceor the bedroom.
The wave of violence that hit hundreds of campuses in 1969continued unabated into the early months of 1970. In April1970, President Nixon announced that U.S. forces had invadedCambodia. The Cambodian incursion sparked rioting at severalcampuses and led to the Ohio National Guard occupationof Kent State. After the Ohio Guard killed four Kent State studentson May 4, 1970, America witnessed the greatest studentstrike in its history. Four million youths protested the slayingsand the invasion of Cambodia.
Thinking that their campus had cooled down with the endof the spring quarter, University of Wisconsin administratorswere not prepared when a bomb with the equivalent destructivepower of 3,400 sticks of dynamite exploded outside theArmy Mathematics Research Center. (Twenty-eight full-timemathematicians at the center helped develop infrared detectiondevices which the army deployed in Vietnam to root out Communisttroops.) The blast killed Robert Fassnacht, a doctoralphysics student, blinded a night watchman, and damaged 28campus buildings. Paradoxically, "Army Math" emerged unscathed.
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Copyright © 2001 Kenneth J. Heineman. All rights reserved.
