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Introduction |Civil Rights Movement | Cold War Liberalism and the Old Left

Student Movements | Against the War

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Introduction

Even the term 'movement' is something of a misnomer – a rhetorical stuffing of a huge constellation of inter-related and at time competing groups into a smooth, seamless bag. The reality, however, was quite different: those protesting the war came from many different social, ethnic, political, and religious positions, often having little in common besides opposition to the war.

Furthermore, although anti-war protest became a pressing issue for a wide array of groups and individuals, the mass movement against the war was in itself hugely influenced by older forms of activism, which initially had nothing to do with the war in Vietnam.

To completely untie the tangles of sixties social protest is perhaps impossible; but to inspect the various roots and branches is to achieve an understanding of that difficult phenomenon known as the New Left.

Berkeley 212 Images of peace and force are the yin and yang of the call to "unite"

These extensive lines of influence and lineage are a key reason why an examination of the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era must start with a focus on the New Left. Van Gosse defines the New Left as “a ‘movement of movements’ encompassing all of the struggles for fundamental change from the early 1950s roughly to 1975” and including the Civil Rights Movement, various student movements, Black Power, Women's Liberation, and a host of other divergent interests — “all existing as part of a challenge to the established order.”¹

Other scholars are far less specific. Terry H. Anderson defines “The Movement” as “all activists who demonstrated for social change.”² Anderson himself acknowledges the troubling ambiguity of such a definition, but this ambiguity is in itself indicative of the deeply complex blend of social forces that has come to be labeled with this name. Anderson quotes one participant who defined the movement as “'a grand geodesic dome fitted together from pieces of Marx, Freud, Zen, Artaud, Kesey, lenin, Leary, Ginsberg, Che, Gandhi, Marcuse, Laing, Fidel and Lao Tzu . . . with a 40-watt rock amplifier strapped to the top”³

It is thus highly problematic to examine the anti-war movement in isolation from other dissenting voices that preceded and co-existed with it or to assume some kind of simple homogeneity when referring to anti-war protest.

Cold War Liberalism and The Demise of the Old Left

One can sit back and marvel at the rich tapestry, and then one can pick apart the threads. A few common ones emerge. Social and political dissent in the 1960s and early 1970s emerged against the backdrop of the 1950s. In this post-war period of unprecedented prosperity, America lived out two paradoxical narratives. In one, millions of families reaped the benefits of “marvelous consumer abundance” and the “white majority reached a level of comfort and disposable income never seen before in any country”; in the other, McCarthyism, “enforced unity”, and the apocalyptic anxieties of the Cold War belied the consumer utopia and apparent homogeneity of the period.⁴

McCarthy and Roy Cohn Conferring during the infamous Army-McCarthy Hearings

Politically, it was an era dominated by Cold War Liberalism: a mix of expansive social programs at home combined with a foreign policy of rigid anti-Communism and an intolerance for domestic dissent.⁵ The once-strong Communist part (or CPUSA) had become a shattered fragment of its former self. “The Old Left was victimized,” writes Maurice Isserman, and he concludes that the later history of American radicalism was “less spasmodic” a development and “more a process of unfolding” from previous leftist movements.⁶ The “older generation on the Left came to discard the dogmas to which they once subscribed, and in so doing […] they helped give new direction to an emerging generation of younger radicals”.⁷ These younger radicals founded their own movements and engaged in their own forms of agitation for social change.

The social and political pressures of Cold War Era America were unsustainable; underneath the facade of harmony and prosperity, racial and gender-based tensions simmered, along with a silenced minority who increasingly looked with dismay on an America they saw as imperialist, sexist, and racist.

Civil Rights Movement

Berkeley 128 A call to "unite" mixed with visual themes of inter-racial solidarity.

One of the main cracks in the Cold War facade was the civil rights movement, emerging in the late 1950s in protest of the 'Jim Crow' system of segregation that structured life in the American South. Rebelling against a social system that forced blacks to sit in separate areas of public buses and barred them from using many 'for-whites-only' facilities, civil rights activists employed many forms of civil disobedience. Incidents such as Rosa Parks' refusal to sit at the back of the bus in 1956 or the famous 'sit-in' of four black college students in 1960 — who sat at a lunch counter that refused them service — have become iconic examples of civil disobedience.⁸ But the struggle for civil rights extended far beyond southern black communities. As DeBenedetti and Chatfield note, “the experience refined in civil rights was critical in positioning radical pacifism within the changing peace movement.”⁹

Not only did the civil rights movement offer models of civil disobedience for later activists, but it became the vehicle through which many northern white students became radicalized and involved in social activism.¹⁰ Thousands of northern college students organized sympathetic sit-ins and boycotts in 1960 in response to the events happening in the south and over 1000 northern students migrated south to participate in civil rights activities; during the next five years, “the southern freedom movement was a magnet, radicalizing a whole cohort of young northerners.”¹¹ These radicalized northerners went on to participate in the student movements that laid much of the groundwork for the larger mass protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Student Movements

Out of the collapsing ‘old left’ emerged new organizations on the left side of the political spectrum. They were largely comprised of young intellectuals, based in elite state colleges, “united in their commitment to racial equality,” and energized by a range of other local issues.¹² However, whereas the Old Left had become worn down by the waves of McCarthyite persecution and accepted an engagement with liberal Democratic politics, many younger radicals rejected the terms of the current system in their search for a new form of political participation.¹³ The new radicals were in some ways also less structured and more idealistic. As Michael Rossman writes, “[t]he trademark of old radicalism was a political ideology with historical roots and structural goals. The trademark of the new radicals [was] a primitive, moral ideology.”¹⁴

One of the most enduring organizations of this new vanguard is Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a splinter group of the League for Industrial Democracy, which was a socialist organization founded in the early 1900s. SDS is the descendant of the student wing of the league, which in the early 1960s changed its name and began a tense process of distancing itself from its ‘adult’ parent organization; “thus began the process of differentiation from the ‘old left’”.¹⁵

Tom Hayden At the Democratic Convention, 2004 (Distributed in accordance with the GNU Free Documentation License)

At the 1962 SDS convention in Port Huron, Michigan, the group adopted the famous Port Huron Statement, one of the most influential political documents of the time. It's opening lines make a dramatic attempt to define a new generation of young, middle-class students against the backdrop of Cold War Liberalism — and to cast this awakening of generational awareness as an issue of birth-right: “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.”¹⁶

As a whole, the statement reflects the expanding purview of social protest in the early 1960s, and it expresses not just the impulse to pursue particular causes but a “special responsibility” to “rescue America’s very democratic process”.¹⁷ The statement was drafted by Tom Hayden, a white northerner who “learned firsthand about the black democratic revolution” while working in Atlanta, Georgia.¹⁸ Hayden’s statement calls for a fundamental change in the nature of the American political system, a ‘Participatory Democracy’. It was “a new politics, somewhere between liberalism and radicalism, non-Marxist but open to socialist analysis, and focused on a total democratization of society—the economy, schools, and governmental institutions.”¹⁹

SDS experienced much success throughout the early part of the 60s, and is active today; however, scholars such as Van Gosse claim that the actual influence of the movement was limited compared to the central role often accorded it in histories of the period, and that the scale of its activities was small compared to contemporaneous efforts in the south by civil rights activists.²⁰

Interestingly, prior to even joining SDS, Tom Hayden steeped himself in the radical atmosphere of another city now famous for its social protest — Berkeley, California.²¹ Berkeley had seen significant impulses of student activism as early as the late 1950s; Berkeley progressives formed SLATE, a left-leaning campus political party, in 1958, and numerous Bay Area students participated in sympathetic civil rights protests in the early 60s.²²

Student activists in Berkeley were further energized and mobilized by the events of 1964, which led to the birth of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement or FSM. These events were, as participant Michael Rossman notes, a “a turning point, rather than a beginning.”²³ By 1964 “The Movement itself had become a presence, forcing all the young to begin in some way to define themselves with respect to it”; “student political activism was the only major expression that clearly belonged to the young.”²⁴ FSM was born in part to protest the increasingly authoritarian administration of U.C. Berkeley President Clark Kerr, who banned most political activities on campus. He prohibited setting up information tables and restricted student groups from collecting donations and recruiting members. In response, a range of campus groups from across the political spectrum banded together in protest of the decision. Students continued to set up tables in defiance of administration orders, and the administration responded by suspending student leaders.

FSM leader Mario Savio and his famous 'Gears of the Machine' speech.

One famous incident involving the FSM is the police car sit-in in Sproul Plaza. In October, 1964, when U.C. Berkeley campus police seized a recent graduate, Jack Weinberg, from an information table for being a 'non-student', hundreds of people sat down spontaneously around the car.

Click for photos of the October sit-in by Mike Friedman

The resulting 'sit-in' lasted 32 hours, during which the police car became a an open podium:

Then somebody gets on top of the car—the cops let him—to talk to the crowd, it was unhappy. And then this incredible dialogue began. People got up on top of that car from before noon Wednesday, they were talking until two in the morning. All different points of view were offered. The top of that car was a platform thrown open to anybody who wanted to come up and say what he had to say. I have never heard anything like this in my life. It was a continuous dialogue that went on for fifteen straight hours.²⁵

Rossman closes his testimonial about the sit-in with the following paragraph:

There's so much hate around. There was so much hate yesterday, and so much last night. We were sitting there surrounded by hate, and singing about "There is love in that land." And after you've been at it two or three days, after you haven't slept, after you've sat there in the goddamned sun, with people yelling for your blood, knowing that you've been getting the boot steadily for the past six years—you get delirious. You honest to God get delirious. And you can almost believe what you're singing. You can almost con yourself into believing that these things mean something. That there is love in that land. That there is free speech, and all those other crazy abstractions, in that land.²⁶

Hayden's sweeping vision, Savio's emotional oratory, and Rossman's personal reflections both validate Rossman's earlier analysis of the differences between Old and New Left: these students were by no means cold ideologues but rather deeply emotional crusaders for liberties and causes they saw as fundamental. This is one of several senses in which they were 'radical', besides their more obvious agitation for social change. Both intellectual and idealistic, these protestors achieved their greatest popular support when they made their tent large enough to attract a significant chunk of the mainstream; more often than not, they failed when rigid ideologies clashed, when anti-organization anarchists prevented structured action, or when frustration at an apparent lack of success led them to abandon issues with broad national appeal.²⁷

Against the War

In an iconic image, a female demonstrator offers a flower to an MP officer

In general, student radicals from campuses such as U.C. Berkeley and University of Michigan in Ann Arbor were among the vanguard of the anti-war protest movement. However, if student groups such as SDS showed leadership in certain areas of the anti-war protest, it would nonetheless be difficult to call it the leader of the movement. The true scale of anti-war protest in the long sixties was simply too vast, too multi-faceted, and too de-centred to be guided by a single, organizing principle. Protest against local issues could give immediate feedback, providing assurance of right action and guidance for correcting strategic errors. But protest against a force as titanic as US foreign policy was a different process, and this was something many demonstrators failed to understand. Faced with the apparent ineffectiveness of their massive protests and attempts to sway the administration, groups such as SDS, the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE), and the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (SMC) often fell victim to political in-fighting, disillusionment, and despair.²⁸

Furthermore, disagreement over tactics (Peaceful protest? Civil disobedience? Violent resistance? Domestic bombing?) and ideology plagued anti-war resisters throughout the process and alienated much of the movement's mainstream support.

And yet, millions did march, boycott, strike, picket, and otherwise act to protest the war in Vietnam. The collective action of so many people created a whole much greater than the sum of its often dysfunctional parts. Driven not just by ideology but by the force of visceral revulsion at a terrible war, many Americans grew, like one active soldier, to “hate the war for its own sake, as a war, a human travesty, for the sake of unscrupulous motives.”²⁹

This vintage newsreel footage provides a glimpse into the diversity of the movement at its broadest:

Anti-Vietnam march, April 15, 1967 Up to 400,000 march from Central Park to the UN building in New York, featuring Martin Luther King.

This collection of footage comes from the fall protest of 1967, organized by the MOBE:

Washington Rally, October 21, 1967 It was this day that anti-war activist Abbie Hoffman famously attempted to 'levitate' the Pentagon.

With its varied roots and massive but often ephemeral blooms, the movement to protest the war in Vietnam remains enigmatic. It is, most literally, the sum of individuals who participated in it; and these individuals cannot be reduced to simple organizational affiliations or racial/gender/class categories. Anti-war participants formed a huge constellation of purposes, drives, impulses, and sentiments — colliding, joining together, and falling apart. The actual efficacy of this movement in accomplishing their aims is another subject altogether. But as to the question of who they were, these people who protested against the war, there is no short answer. They were anti-imperialist crusaders, radical pacifists, and often simply people who “grieved over the war's horrendous human toll”.³⁰