The 60s in the US: Myth or Reality?

CHAPTER I

The social, economic and political context in the US

at the beginning of the 60s

The term "the sixties" encompasses much more than just the days from January 1, 1960
to December 31, 1969 in modern American history. “The sixties” was an era of new movements
and new ideas, of domestic issues and international conflicts, of freshly formed organizations
and personal expression. “The sixties” was an era that constantly and consistently challenged the
status quo.

Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines, editors of Takin’ it to the streets: A Sixties Reader
(Oxford University Press, 2002), state in their introduction that there was a “tumultuous world of
sixties culture”. Due to the sheer variety of movements and ideas which abounded during the
sixties a “tumultuous” culture was inevitable. Many minority groups, and even some of those in
the majority, were each advocating for their own reasons and ideals.

One way to define “the sixties” is through the different organizations and ideas which
became prominent during the era but this is problematic. Many of the organizations held
completely opposite values, for example, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
and its offspring the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) lobbied and fought
for the voting rights of blacks in the south, specifically in rural impoverished areas of
Mississippi, while the Mississippi Citizens’ Council strove to keep political control in the hands
of white supremacists.

While defining “the sixties” through the different groups and ideas prominent during the
era creates some contradictions and difficulties it is important to note that problems, oppositions,
conflicts, and ultimately struggle are what truly characterize “the sixties.”
 The 60s in the US: Myth or Reality?

When did "The Sixties" Begin

When did “the sixties” begin and end is another difficult question to respond to. If “the
sixties” are defined by organizations and the struggles they embody, choosing a beginning date
for the era can be equally complicated.

One could try to choose the most prominent organization or cause of the times and select
their formation date as the starting date, however many organizations active during “the sixties”
were formed long before the era began. The National Association for the Advancement of
Colored Peoples (NAACP) began in approximately 1909 and surely one cannot choose the
beginning of the twentieth century as the beginning of “the sixties.”

1.1. The social context: the birth of the student movement

The fifties in the United States were characterized by deep social and political changes
that would have had great consequences only in the following decade. At the end of the Second
World War, with the reentry in the homeland of millions of American soldiers, there was a real
baby boom that would have increased the number of registrations to the high schools and the
universities in the first years of the sixty. Besides, the spreading anticommunist feeling inspired
by the McCarthy's movement, contributed to create an ideological ultraconservatorism that did
not allow any comparison between the new and the old generations. It remained, nevertheless, an
ample economic comfort deriving from a world economy in great growth from which the United
States more than all other nations profited. Such wealth, if on one side it allowed the children of
the average middle class to access with great facility the expensive secondary education (the
university students between 18 and 22 years old would have passed from 15% in 1940 to 44% in
1965), on the other one they will underline deep social disparities between the privileged classes
and the proletariat, above all the black one.

The studies that have dealt with the birth of the American student movement, have often
labored to individualize the causes of his blooming just at the beginnings of the sixties.
Conditions had not been different for the years that had preceded that period and they would not
changed in the following period (the 70s). Then, why was there the highest concentration of
 The 60s in the US: Myth or Reality?

youth protests that the American history remembers? It can be affirmed that a concomitance of
elements that taken separately would seem harmless, made turbulent the campus of the American
universities. Firstly, the teaching imparted either by the parents either from the university
structures. The former, educated to the austerity and the traditionalism of the 30s and 40s, for
reaction allowed an excessive laxism, also influenced by the pedagogical theories of the doctor
Spock that became the model of thousand of American mamas. The latter, in the attempt to make
up for the parental educational lacks, they were worried more for the morality of their own
affiliates than for their cultural preparation. In this environment of family laxity and institutional
repression, the American young people did not recognize themselves, neither culturally nor
socially.

In the great American universities, first among all Berkeley and Harvard, the students
started that activity of dismantlement of the traditions that the sociologist Daniel Bell defined
“the knowledge revolution”. In front of a policy and a society that recalled themselves entirely to
the realism and the pragmatism, the young people started seeking new ideals of existentialism
derived from the reading of French philosophers novelists, mainly Camus and in smaller way
Sartre. The taking of conscience of the lack of a precise destination to the American social
development upset the certainties that obstinately the parents had inculcated in their own
children. The “American dream” had created a society devoted to the wealth and the exploitation
of the fellow creatures, at least for which young people thought. Daniel Bell has given another
definition to us that suits well for this period and that is that in the sixties it was reached the “end
of the ideologies”, in the sense that the patriotism, the Americanism, the ultraconservative
democracy that had characterized the two preceding decades was abhorred by the young people
who "tabula rasa" of their own cultural patrimony and they looked for a new not prebuilt one.

The communist influence

Were they really years without ideologies? Had not the students any political or social
ideal? It would not be correct to answer in an affirmative way to both questions. The American
student movement, although substantially apolitical in its development, it was at the origins
deeply influenced by the socialist and communist thought, but with great differences in
 The 60s in the US: Myth or Reality?

comparison to what it would have happened in Europe subsequently, for instance in the
incubators of the juvenile Marxism of the universities in Oxford and Frankfurt. In the Old
continent, the students referred to the communist orthodoxy, to the Marxism, or to the newer
Maoism. In the United States, after the maccartism, an appeal so open to Marxism was not
possible anymore. The political and cultural repression had been too strong to allow an inversion
of tendency that brought to the pure communist thought, of class revolt and government of the
people, meant as proletariat. The American teenagers that would have protested in the plazas and
in the universities came from families without economic problems and they didn't know the hard
life of the ghetto or the countries. In addition to this, the class traditionally nearer to the
communist ideas, meaning the workers, was not inclinable to changes in the United States, but it
openly sustained the government. The labor unions, after the hard battles of the thirties, had
soothed and integrated in the American productive system that in the collective imaginary gave
wealth to everybody.

Therefore, to which type of socialism does the students referred to found what would
have become the New American Left? Essentially, to the most romantic communism without
political connotations. A communism of social equality, of justice and of elimination of the racial
disparities. To give great push to this not traditional vision, to give great emphasis to these ideas,
it came the Castro's revolt. The generation of the sixties that was conforming quickly to the
models represented by Ginsburg in his "Howl" and to Jack Kerouac with "On the road", it was
literally fallen in love with the Cuban revolution. Between 1958 and 1961, year when the
America State Department prohibited the trips to Cuba and to China and Albania, thousand of
students approached in the Caribbean island to take contact with “the empire of the evil” as
Ronald Reagan would have labeled the communist world subsequently.

The enthusiasm and the ardor of the Castro's troops had to be contagious, because
between 1960 and 1963 It was created a discreet number of American associations that followed
the socialist and communist teachings. Among them, it is rightful to quote the Progressive
Labour Party (Plp), the Student Peace Union (Spu), the Young People Socialist League and the
W.E.B. Du Bois that got the name from an Afro-American researcher curiously become
communist at the age of 90. All these groups, though they were very active, remained always of
scarce numerical weight. The reasons were essentially two: the strict control of the FBI to which
 The 60s in the US: Myth or Reality?

they were submitted all subjects that professed themselves communist and the inconstancy of the
affairs of the young people. Analyzing better this second point, it can be noticed how the
affiliation to an organized group did not often last more than few months and only for well-
determinated causes. The young people often met for local protests only without any other type
of finality.

This is particularly true if we analyze the affairs of the Students for Democratic Society
(Sds) the largest student organization created in the United States. Created in 1960, it was
completely refounded in 1962, following the principles dictated in the “Declaration of Port
Huron”, an ideological manifesto almost entirely written by Tom Hayden. In the writing, it
claimed the right of the American young people to modify the existing social and political
inequality in the U.S.A, through a direct action. This action was manifested firstly with the
collaboration with the Movement for the Civil Rights in States of the South. The white university
students devoted their free summer time to the struggle for the abolition of the segregation and
for the social equality, in collaboration with the black associations for the whole period 1961-
1964.

However, the increasing number of accidents and repression of not authorized

demonstrations, mined at the base the collaboration between races. The black movements,
particularly dissatisfied of the help given by the white young people, started to meet in the
nationalists of the “Black Power” of which we shall speak subsequently. The attention of the Sds
members was moved on those institutions where they lived for large part of the year: the
universities. As already explained, the study institutions were seen as class-conscious and deniers
of the fundamental right to a free education. To change the status quo was formed a spontaneous
movement denominated “Free Speech Movement” in which had great role the Sds organization
itself.

The first real clashes happened in the University of Berkeley in 1964. The stiring up
cause was enough futile. The rector of the university prohibited the distribution of political
material near the gates of the campus. Theoretically, the reason was of the students, because the
zone of distribution was not under the authority of the university, but in practice the intervention
of the police prevented any activities in proximity of the university structures. The occupation of
the campus was so decided and involved several thousand of students. The accidents that
 The 60s in the US: Myth or Reality?

followed the forced clearing of the university, brought to the attention of the whole nation the
new student movement. Some of the leaders of the movements were arrested and among them
also Mario Savio who was accused to have wildly beaten a police officer. The forced repression
didn't do anything else other than increasing the desire of liberty of the young people. Other
better organized demonstrations developed in 1965 spring giving great strength to the Free
Speech Movement. Despite the increasing affiliates to the Sds that became the first organization
at national level headquartered in all the states of the Union, it missed a true project and a leader
that dictated the directives to be followed. It was so that the interest for every new struggle
diminished quickly: the civil rights, the liberty of word, the Vietnam war, the sexual freedom
were firstly elevated to dogmas of faith for then to be abandoned.

The protest against the Vietnam war.

With the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam through the dispatch of regular troops at
beginning of 1965, there was also a change in the finalities, always very confused, of the student
movements. From the social struggle, they passed to a political confrontation. The government
was attacked for the presumed imperialism shown in intervening in such a distant war that was
not felt as “right”. All previous armed conflicts in the American history had been painted as
“struggles for freedom” and as such mantled with patriotism and rhetoric. In the era of television,
the lies could be easily unmasked. In August 1965, the reporter Morley Safer of the NBC (the
American National Television), transmitted a journalistic service in which there was a platoon of
American soldiers that after having combed a Vietnamite village looking for Vietcong, it set fire
without reason the huts and the cultivation. The disdain provoked by the revelation of cruel and
inhuman behaviors perpetrated by the American soldiers, baited a reaction of collective scorn
among the young people, the same ones who would have had to participate in the war as recruits.

Initially, the protest was pacific. They were organized sit-ins in a lot of universities and
protest demonstrations. The students thought that in a true democracy as the American one, it
was enough to show the errors committed by the political men so that they could correct their
own behavior. The ingenuity of such a thought is explainable surely with a blind pacifism that
was present among the young people. Nobody in that first period would have ever imagined that
 The 60s in the US: Myth or Reality?

the government of the United States would have continued in the conflict in the Asian South
East, arriving to use really weapons like napalm. To partially lift the veil that covered the eyes of
these revolutionary teen-agers, it arrived the great number of forced enlistment. At the end of the
war, 1.800.000 American young people would have spent at least six months in Vietnam as
members of the armed forces. The answer was not collective, but generally individual. The
escapes abroad multiplied, especially in Canada and Sweden, as well as the increasing number of
exemptions for medical causes among the high middle class that let suspect a certain connivance
between the physicians that certified the illnesses and the families the enlisted men.

These two solutions were possible only for those people that had enough money to pay
for the exile or the very discussed medical certificate. For all other people, there was the Vietnam
War or the clandestinity. The division between the black students that, originating from poorer
families, could not avoid the war and white students was one of the explanations for the quick
decline of importance of the Sds. After a march near the Pentagon to which around 75.000
persons participated, the Sds organization had believed that the moment had come to create a
political party that gathered all the groups of the United States in a formation that pleaded the
juvenile cause inside the Congress. This way, in a general Conference in Chicago it was tried to
find some finalities common to all the participants of the student movement. The meeting was a
failure for the lack of real general ideal, but, above all, of a true leader.

1968 was the year of the apotheosis and the decadence of the Sds. In January and June,
hundreds of demonstrations upset almost all the university. Despite after the offensive of the Tet,
according to a survey 'Gallup', the people favorable to the conflict had gone down from 56% to
42 %, nobody among the opponents to the war considered right the methods of opposition used
by the students. The crisis was increased in 1969 when the Sds were divided in intransigent
radical corpuscles that transformed themselves in terrorists in some cases. In June of that year,
the group of the “Weathermen” was created (from a strophe of a song of Bob Dylan). Initially, it
had as purpose “to change the weather” above the heads of the political men in Washington, but
well soon it degenerated in a gang of armed action, guilty of terrorist attacks, useless and above
all misunderstood by the other students. After the beginning of the American withdrawal from
Vietnam (that however would have lasted until 1975), nobody understood for what reason was
had to attack with violence (and weapons) the institutions. The Weathermen accelerated the
 The 60s in the US: Myth or Reality?

breakup of the Sds that ended up with losing that character of national organization splitting up
in subgroups that struggled for the most disparate causes, from the defense of the environment to
the struggle against the death penalty. In ten years, the movement of student protest had crossed
the whole possible arc of evolution, from expression of protest up to the armed struggle, for then
to go off in a spontaneous death.

The “Hippies” and the sexual revolution.

To decree the premature end of the Sds was also the limited time duration of the political
and social interest of the young people. The period coincided, in wide measure, with the duration
of the university quadrennium and once reached the so-called “maturity” it diminished, being
substituted by career, family, and children. That the feeling of revolt was a generational aspect it
can also be deduced from the increased number of home escapes of the teenagers and from the
creation of a style of alternative life. The Puritanism and the cultural preclusion of the parents
was only partially the base of almost 90.000 escapes certified by the FBI in 1966. Juvenile wish
to find a parallel world to the daily reality had increased the interest for the oriental cultures and
religions and for the experience with narcotics. The boom of the light drugs, first among all
marijuana, was a consequence of the search of feelings that transcended the human being.

The development of the hippy communities was very faster than that of the student
movements, either on the East Coast either on the West Coast. In fact, already in 1965, in the
East Side in New York and in the district of Haight Hasbury in San Francisco were founded the
first true communities that grew to dizzy rhythm up to half the seventies. The use of narcotic
substances didn't respond to a necessity of breakup with the dominant culture only, but it
becomes a real religion. A teacher of the Harvard University, Timothy Leary, expelled from the
teaching order for founded suspicions that he delivered to the students LSD during the lessons,
founded the League for the Spiritual Search that through the use of drugs wanted to reach a new
stadium of the human development. Famous writers as Ginsburg and Kesey, singers of
international level as Bob Dylan, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, were near to this movement
for a more or less long period.
 The 60s in the US: Myth or Reality?

Other characteristic element of the hippy communities was the concept of free love in all
its forms that was practically resolved in a great sexual freedom. In an extremely puritanical
society, the accented promiscuity present in the communities aroused greater scandal than
whatever else “vice” that the hippies could have. The fact that the largest part of them was
teenagers, increased the resentment of the middle class. The radical change of the sexual habits
brought to important consequences in the personal relationship. The homosexual love was no
more considered an absolute taboo and the first gay organizations did their appearance especially
in the zone of New York. Besides, the strong increase of the sexual activity in adolescent age
was followed from an increase of the births.

In 1960, the Food and Drug Administration had approved the use of the contraceptive pill
and immediately the women had discovered what advantages its use furnished. The large
diffusion of a system of prevention of the pregnancy, freed the girls from the terror of the fifties,
that is an illegitimate child because born out of the marriage. Instead, the mature women could
pursue working success with great safety, without the fear to see interrupted their own career
from an unwanted child.

The two elements quoted above were only the point of the iceberg of that general
feminist movement that was born in the sixties. The twentieth century in the United States until
the Great Depressions had seen the woman in the traditional role of housewife and mother. With
the desperate need of money that gripped the families in the thirties, the female job became more
and more frequent. During the Second World War, what in principle was a family necessity it
was transformed in a national duty. The women had to replace the men in the factories and often
also in the fields. With the end of the conflict, the smaller production involved an occupational
cut that mainly strokes the so-called “weak sex.” How this definition wasn't true, it had to be
already shown in the fifties. The media of mass communication started to pay attention to that
category of housewives, former workers who felt frustrated from the return to the “civil life”
after the war. The improved conditions allowed to a larger percentage of women to achieve
university degrees equal, if not superior, to the men but the clear contrast between the personal
worth and the reachable managerial levels or the obtainable pay unmasked the depth sense of
female dissatisfaction for the American social reality. The middle salary of a woman was
between 59 and 65% of that of a man with the same office and to parity of schedule of job. In
 The 60s in the US: Myth or Reality?

1963 the writer Betty Friedan published the book The Femine Mistique that can be considered as
the manifesto of the American feminist movement. In it, it was described mercilessly the
incongruity between the social stereotype of the happy housewives and the existence of a lot of
dissatisfied and depressed female professionals.

Initially, the female dissatisfaction was assembled in the student groups and around the
same ideal shared by these movements: the freedom of thought and the civil rights. Well soon
however, the leaders of the movement realized that the masculine component of the student
movements had the tendency to put in minority, consciously or unconsciously, the other sex. It is
difficult to establish whether it was a wanted behavior or not, but it is a fact that, although the
female groups as the Women's International Leage for Peace and the Women Strike for Peace
picked up a large number of registrations, it was only in 1966 with the creation of the National
Organization for Woman (NOW) that the female claims assumed an autonomous course and
addressed to the gaining of the full equality between the sexes. The NOW, founded by Betty
Friedan, had as principal purpose a political struggle that conducted to the realization of
legislative actions of concrete equalization and not simply paternalistic measures as those
happened in precedence for that that it concerned the world of the workers.

The feminist political struggle was not stopped at the formulation given by the NOW, but
it went well further. A most radical stream of that organization separated for originating the
“Movement for the liberation of the Woman", real fulcrum of that fighting feminism that would
have characterized the seventies. The exponents of the movement affirmed with conviction that
every personal aspect of the female universe could constitute matter of struggle politics.
Therefore, not only the professional world, but also that of the family and, above all, of the
health. Under this aspect, the absolute right of the woman to the pregnancy was exasperated.
Screeming 'Off Our Bodies' (title also of a diffused radical magazine of the period), the women
pretended the legalization of the abortion. The struggle would have concluded in 1973 only, with
the sentence Roe v. Wade that would have allowed it at least in the first months of the
pregnancy.

As mentioned in precedence, the feminist movements had started its own activity within
the civil rights and then it has changed its goals. This is not entirely true for the black exponents
of the movement. The black women continued to have great importance in the Movement for the
 The 60s in the US: Myth or Reality?

Civil Rights and in the Black Power and even in the Black Panthers. This is due to the fact that in
the forties and fifties, they were the only ones in their family to have a well-remunerated job,
often as waiter or housekeeper in white families.

With the progressive embitterment of the racial revolt and the consequent detention of the
black men, the women reached more easily power positions that they preserved with extreme
ability. Among them, it is important to quote Fannie Lou Hamer. Born in 1917 in the state of
Mississippi, she had had to change life when, pushed by the legitimate desire to participate in the
political vote, she had enrolled in the electoral lists, being dismissed for such motive from her
own employer. From that moment on, she fought with vigor for a full racial equality, through the
creation of the Mississippi Freedom Democrat Party and the organization, also at juvenile and
student level, of the black protest against the status quo. The sixties were doubly important for
the black women. They could not only get important victories for their sex, but also for their
race. In fact, with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the black women, finally level up to the white, had
new and unexplored possibilities in the field of the job and the education that allowed the
amelioration of the life condition in an exponential way. With the increasing of the economic
resources and of the level of education, however, the serious social discrimination in which the
black minority was living in the United States was more and more underlined. For such reason,
the claim of the black women gradually met those of the Afro-Americans as race, becoming an
essential component of it.

1.2. The politic and economical context

The 1960s began with Americans in an optimistic mood, with public opinion polls
reflecting the nation's sense that it was experiencing a modern-day Camelot. In early
1962, according to a Gallup poll, 80 percent of Americans approved of the job
President Kennedy was doing. While his numbers dipped during the summer of
1962, they rebounded to a remarkably healthy 75 percent following the October
1962 missile crisis. Paradoxically, the early 1960s also witnessed a groundswell of
political protest and gave rise to a number of bleak assessments about the times.
Perhaps the best way to reconcile these seemingly contradictory trends is to suggest
 The 60s in the US: Myth or Reality?

that Kennedy raised the expectations of some to the point that they could not be
met. In addition, while the young president's youth and vigor gave rise to idealism,
his inexperience and lofty rhetoric generated fears that the nation might be heading
for the abyss. Put differently, whereas the Eisenhower administration exuded a spirit
of complacency that bred apathy, the Kennedy administration exuded a spirit of
activism that in turn shook people out of their complacency.

Nowhere was the process of raised hopes and unmet expectations more clear than
among African Americans, who beginning with the Montgomery bus boycott of
1955 displayed their determination to challenge the racial status quo. To an extent,
Kennedy profited from this development. Campaigning as the candidate who could
best move forward the civil rights agenda, he narrowly defeated Richard Nixon by
winning a significantly larger percentage of the black vote than had Adlai Stevenson,
the Democratic nominee in 1952 and 1956. Yet once elected, Kennedy felt compelled
to go slow on civil rights lest he lose the support of southern whites, one of the core
constituents of the Democratic Party

1.3. The antiwar movement

Along with the Civil Rights campaigns of the 1960s, one of the most divisive forces in
twentieth-century U.S. history. The antiwar movement actually consisted of a number of
independent interests, often only vaguely allied and contesting each other on many issues, united
only in opposition to the Vietnam War. Attracting members from college campuses, middle-class
suburbs, labor unions, and government institutions, the movement gained national prominence in
1965, peaked in 1968, and remained powerful throughout the duration of the conflict.
Encompassing political, racial, and cultural spheres, the antiwar movement exposed a deep
schism within 1960s American society.

A small, core peace movement had long existed in the United States, largely based in
Quaker and Unitarian beliefs, but failed to gain popular currency until the Cold War era. The
escalating nuclear arms race of the late 1950s led Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday
 The 60s in the US: Myth or Reality?

Review, along with Clarence Pickett of the American Society of Friends (Quakers), to found the
National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) in 1957. Their most visible member was
Dr. Ben jamin Spock, who joined in 1962 after becoming disillusioned with President Kennedy's
failure to halt nuclear proliferation. A decidedly middle-class organization, SANE represented
the latest incarnation of traditional liberal peace activism. Their goal was a reduction in nuclear
weapons. Another group, the Student Peace Union (SPU), emerged in 1959 on college campuses
across the country. Like SANE, the SPU was more liberal than radical. After the Joseph
McCarthyinspired dissolution of Communist and Socialist organizations on campuses in the
1950s, the SPU became the only option remaining for nascent activists. The goal of the SPU
went beyond that of SANE. Unwilling to settle for fewer nuclear weapons, the students desired a
wholesale restructuring of American society. The SPU, never an effective interest group, faded
away in 1964, its banner taken up by a more active assemblage, Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS).

SDS formed in 1960 as the collegiate arm of an Old Left institution with an impressive
heritage-the League for Industrial Democracy. Jack London had been a member, as had Upton
Sinclair, but the organization had long lain dormant until Michael Harrington, a New York
socialist, revived it late in the 1950s as a forum for laborers, African Americans, and
intellectuals. Within a single year, however, SDS was taken over by student radicals Al Haber
and Tom Hayden, both of the University of Michigan. In June 1962, fifty-nine SDS members
met with Harrington at Port Huron, Michigan, in a conference sponsored by the United Auto
Workers. From this meeting materialized what has been called the manifesto of the New Left-the
Port Huron Statement. Written by Hayden, the editor of the University of Michigan student
newspaper, the 64-page document expressed disillusionment with the military-industrial-
academic establishment. Hayden cited the uncertainty of life in Cold War America and the
degradation of African Americans in the South as examples of the failure of liberal ideology and
called for a reevaluation of academic acquiescence in what he claimed was a dangerous
conspiracy to maintain a sense of apathy among American youth.

Throughout the first years of its existence, SDS focused on domestic concerns. The
students, as with other groups of the Old and New Left, actively supported Lyndon Johnson in
his 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater. Following Johnson's victory, they refrained from
 The 60s in the US: Myth or Reality?

antiwar rhetoric to avoid alienating the president and possibly endangering the social programs
of the Great Society. Although not yet an antiwar organization, SDS actively participated in the
Civil Rights struggle and proved an important link between the two defining causes of the
decade.

Another bridge between Civil Rights and the antiwar crusade was the Free Speech
Movement (FSM) at the University of California at Berkeley. Begun in December 1964 by
students who had participated in Mississippi's "Freedom Summer," the FSM provided an
example of how students could bring about change through organization. In several skirmishes
with University President Clark Kerr, the FSM and its dynamic leader Mario Savio publicized
the close ties between academic and military establishments. With the rise of SDS and the FSM,
the Old Left peace advocates had discovered a large and vocal body of sympathizers, many of
whom had gained experience in dissent through the Civil Rights battles in the South. By the
beginning of 1965, the antiwar movement base had coalesced on campuses and lacked only a
catalyst to bring wider public acceptance to its position.

That catalyst appeared early in February, when the U.S. began bombing North Vietnam.
The pace of protest immediately quickened; its scope broadened. In February and again in March
of 1965, SDS organized marches on the Oakland Army Terminal, the departure point for many
troops bound for Southeast Asia. On 24 March, faculty members at the University of Michigan
held a series of "teach-ins," modeled after earlier Civil Rights seminars, that sought to educate
large segments of the student population about both the moral and political foundations of U.S.
involvement. The teach-in format spread to campuses around the country and brought faculty
members into active antiwar participation. In March, SDS escalated the scale of dissent to a truly
national level, calling for a march on Washington to protest the bombing. On 17 April 1965,
between 15,000 and 25,000 people gathered at the capital, a turnout that surprised even the
organizers.

Buoyed by the attendance at the Washington march, movement leaders, still mainly
students, expanded their methods and gained new allies over the next two years. "Vietnam Day,"
a symposium held at Berkeley in October 1965, drew thousands to debate the moral basis of the
war. Campus editors formed networks to share information on effective protest methods; two of
these, the Underground Press Syndicate (1966) and the Liberation News Service (1967), became
 The 60s in the US: Myth or Reality?

productive means of disseminating intelligence. In spring 1967, over 1,000 seminarians from
across the country wrote to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara advocating recognition of
conscientious objection on secular, moral grounds. In June, 10,000 students wrote, suggesting
the secretary develop a program of alternative service for those who opposed violence. A two-
day march on the Pentagon in October 1967 attracted nationwide media attention, while leaders
of the war resistance called for young men to turn in their draft cards. The movement spread to
the military itself; in 1966, the "Fort Hood 3" gained acclaim among dissenters for their refusal
to serve in Vietnam. Underground railroads funneled draft evaders to Canada or to Sweden;
churches provided sanctuary for those attempting to avoid conscription.

Perhaps the most significant development of the period between 1965 and 1968 was the
emergence of Civil Rights leaders as active proponents of peace in Vietnam. In an article written
for the Chicago Defender in January 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. openly expressed support for
the antiwar movement on moral grounds. Reverend King expanded on his views in April at the
Riverside Church in New York, asserting that the war was draining much-needed resources from
domestic programs. He also voiced concern about the percentage of African American casualties
in relation to the total population. King's statements rallied African American activists to the
antiwar cause and established a new dimension to the moral objections of the movement. The
peaceful phase of the antiwar movement had reached maturity as the entire nation was now
aware that the foundations of administration foreign policy were being widely questioned.

As the movement's ideals spread beyond college campuses, doubts about the wisdom of
escalation also began to appear within the administration itself. As early as the summer of 1965,
Undersecretary of State George Ball counseled President Johnson against further military
involvement in Vietnam. In 1967 Johnson fired Defense Secretary McNamara after the secretary
expressed concern about the moral justifications for war. Most internal dissent, however, focused
not on ethical but on pragmatic criteria, many believing that the cost of winning was simply too
high. But widespread opposition within the government did not appear until 1968. Exacerbating
the situation was the presidential election of that year, in which Johnson faced a strong challenge
from peace candidates Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, and George McGovern, all
Democrats, as well as his eventual successor, Richard M. Nixon. On 25 March Johnson learned
that his closest advisors now opposed the war; six days later, he withdrew from the race.
 The 60s in the US: Myth or Reality?

As with the bombing of North Vietnam in 1965, which had touched off an explosion of
interest in peace activities, another Southeast Asian catalyst instigated the most intense period of
antiwar protest early in 1968. The Tet Offensive of late January led many Americans to question
the administration's veracity in reporting war progress and contributed to Johnson's decision to
retire. After Tet American public opinion shifted dramatically, with fully half of the population
opposed to escalation. Dissent escalated to violence. In April protesters occupied the
administration building at Columbia University; police used force to evict them. Raids on draft
boards in Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Chicago soon followed, as activists smeared blood on
records and shredded files. Offices and production facilities of Dow Chemical, manufacturers of
napalm, were targeted for sabotage. The brutal clashes between police and peace activists at the
August Democratic National Convention in Chicago typified the divided nature of American
society and foreshadowed a continuing rise in domestic conflict.

The antiwar movement became both more powerful and, at the same time, less cohesive
between 1969 and 1973. Most Americans pragmatically opposed escalating the U.S. role in
Vietnam, believing the economic cost too high; in November of 1969 a second march on
Washington drew an estimated 500,000 participants. At the same time, most disapproved of the
counterculture had arisen alongside the antiwar movement. The clean-cut, well-dressed SDS
members, who had tied their hopes to McCarthy in 1968, were being subordinated as movement
leaders. Their replacements deservedly gained less public respect, were tagged with the label
"hippie," and faced much mainstream opposition from middle-class Americans uncomfortable
with the youth culture of the period-long hair, casual drug use, promiscuity. Protest music,
typified by Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, contributed to the gulf between young and old. Cultural
and political protest had become inextricably intertwined within the movement's vanguard. The
new leaders became increasingly strident, greeting returning soldiers with jeers and taunts,
spitting on troops in airports and on public streets. A unique situation arose in which most
Americans supported the cause but opposed the leaders, methods, and culture of protest.

The movement regained solidarity following several disturbing incidents. In February

1970 news of the My Lai massacre became public and ignited widespread outrage. In April
President Nixon, who had previously committed to a planned withdrawal, announced that U.S.
forces had entered Cambodia. Within minutes of the televised statement, protesters took to the
 The 60s in the US: Myth or Reality?

streets with renewed focus. Then, on 4 May, Ohio National Guardsmen fired on a group of
student protesters at Kent State University, killing four and wounding sixteen. Death, previously
distant, was now close at hand. New groups-Nobel science laureates, State Department officers,
the American Civil Liberties Union-all openly called for withdrawal. Congress began threatening
the Nixon administration with challenges to presidential authority. When the New York Times
published the first installment of the Pentagon Papers on 13 June 1971, Americans became aware
of the true nature of the war. Stories of drug trafficking, political assassinations, and
indiscriminate bombings led many to believe that military and intelligence services had lost all
accountability. Antiwar sentiment, previously tainted with an air of anti-Americanism, became
instead a normal reaction against zealous excess. Dissent dominated America; the antiwar cause
had become institutionalized. By January 1973, when Nixon announced the effective end of U.S.
involvement, he did so in response to a mandate unequaled in modern times.

Though the first American protests against U.S. intervention in Vietnam took place in
1963, the antiwar movement did not begin in earnest until nearly two years later, when President
Lyndon B. Johnson ordered massive U.S. military intervention and the sustained bombing of
North Vietnam. In the spring of 1965, "teach-ins" against the war were held on many college
campuses. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organized the first national antiwar
demonstration in Washington; 20,000 people, mainly students, attended.

As the war expanded, over 400,000 U.S. troops would be in Vietnam by 1967, so did the
antiwar movement, attracting growing support off the campuses. The movement was less a
unified army than a rich mix of political notions and visions. The tactics used were diverse: legal
demonstrations, grassroots organizing, congressional lobbying, electoral challenges, civil
disobedience, draft resistance, self-immolations, political violence. Some peace activists traveled
to North Vietnam. Quakers and others provided medical aid to Vietnamese civilian victims of the
war.

In March 1967, a national organization of draft resisters was formed; the Resistance
would subsequently hold several national draft card turn-ins. In April 1967, more than 300,000
people demonstrated against the war in New York. Six months later, 50,000 surrounded the
Pentagon, sparking nearly 700 arrests. By now, senior Johnson administration officials typically
encountered demonstrators when speaking in public, forcing them to restrict their outside
 The 60s in the US: Myth or Reality?

appearances. Many also had sons, daughters, or wives who opposed the war, fueling the sense of
besiegement. Prominent participants in the antiwar movement included Dr. Benjamin Spock,
Robert Lowell, Harry Belafonte, and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Encouraged by the movement,
Senator Eugene McCarthy announced in late 1967 that he was challenging Johnson in the 1968
Democratic primaries; his later strong showing in New Hampshire was seen as a major defeat for
Johnson and a repudiation of his war policies.

The Johnson administration took numerous measures to the antiwar movement, most
notably undertaking close surveillance and tarnishing its public image, sending speakers to
campuses, and fostering pro-war activity. Many administration officials felt foreign Communists
were aiding and abetting the movement, despite the failure of both the Central Intelligence
Agency and the FBI to uncover such support.

In 1965, a majority of Americans supported U.S. policies in Vietnam. By the fall of 1967,
only 35 percent did so. For the first time, more people thought U.S. intervention in Vietnam had
been a mistake than did not. Blacks and women were the most dovish social groups. Later
research found that antiwar sentiment was inversely correlated with people's socioeconomic
level. Many Americans also disliked antiwar protesters, and the movement was frequently
denounced by media commentators, legislators, and other public figures.

By 1968, faced with widespread public opposition to the war and troubling prospects in
Vietnam, the Johnson administration halted the bombing of North Vietnam and stabilized the
ground war. This policy reversal was the major turning point. U.S. troop strength in Vietnam
would crest at 543,000.

The antiwar movement reached its zenith under President Richard M. .Nixon. In October
1969, more than 2 million people participated in Vietnam Moratorium protests across the
country. The following month, over 500,000 demonstrated in Washington and 150,000 in San
Francisco. Militant protest, mainly youthful, continued to spread, leading many Americans to
wonder whether the war was worth a split society. And other forms of antiwar activity persisted.
The Nixon administration took a host of measures to blunt the movement, mainly mobilizing
supporters, smearing the movement, tracking it, withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam,
instituting a draft lottery, and eventually ending draft calls.