What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s? ★ CHAPTER 25 ★ THE SIXTIES 1960–1968 FOCUS QUESTIONS What were the major events in the civil rights movement of the early 1960s? What were the major crises and policy initiatives of the Kennedy presidency? What were the purposes and strategies of Johnson’s Great Society programs? How did the civil rights movement change in the mid-1960s? How did the Vietnam War transform American politics and culture? What were the sources and significance of the rights revolution of the late 1960s? In what ways was 1968 a climactic year for the Sixties? O n the afternoon of February 1, 1960, four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, a black college in Greensboro, North Carolina, entered the local Woolworth’s department store. After making a few purchases, they sat down at the lunch counter, an area reserved for whites. Told that they could not be served, they remained in their seats until the store closed. They returned the next morning and the next. As the protest continued, other students, including a few local whites, joined in. Demonstrations spread across the country. After resisting for five ★ 983 months, Woolworth’s in July agreed to serve black customers at its lunch counters. The sit-in reflected mounting frustration at the slow pace of racial change. White Greensboro prided itself on being free of prejudice. In 1954, the city had been the first in the South to declare its intention of complying with the Brown decision. But by 1960 only a handful of black students had been admitted to all-white schools, the economic gap between blacks and whites had not narrowed, and Greensboro was still segregated. More than any other event, the Greensboro sit-in launched the 1960s: a decade of political activism and social change. Sit-ins had occurred before, but never had they sparked so massive a response. Similar demonstrations soon took place throughout the South, demanding the integration not only of lunch counters but of parks, pools, restaurants, bowling alleys, libraries, and other facilities as well. By the end of 1960, some 70,000 demonstrators had taken part in sit-ins. Angry whites often assaulted them. But having been trained in nonviolent resistance, the protesters did not strike back. Even more than elevating blacks to full citizenship, declared the writer James Baldwin, the civil rights movement challenged the United States to rethink “what it really means by freedom”—including whether freedom applied to all Americans or only to part of the population. With their freedom rides, freedom schools, freedom marches, and the insistent cry “Freedom now,” black Americans and their white allies made freedom once again the rallying cry of the dispossessed. Thousands of ordinary men and women—maids and laborers alongside students, teachers, businessmen, and ministers—risked physical and economic retribution to lay claim to freedom. Their courage inspired a host of other challenges to the status quo, including a student movement known as the New Left, the “second wave” of feminism, and activism among other minorities. By the time the decade ended, these movements had challenged the 1950s’ understanding of freedom linked to the Cold War abroad and consumer choice at home. They exposed the limitations of traditional New Deal liberalism. They forced a reconsideration of the nation’s foreign policy and extended claims to freedom into the most intimate areas of life. They made American society confront the fact that certain groups, including students, women, members of racial minorities, and homosexuals, felt themselves excluded from full enjoyment of American freedom. Reflecting back years later on the struggles of the 1960s, one black organizer in Memphis remarked, “All I wanted to do was to live in a free country.” Of the movement’s accomplishments, he added, “You had to fight for every inch of it. Nobody gave you anything. Nothing.” 984 ★ CHAPTER 25 The Si xti es What were the major events in the civil rights movement of the early 1960s? THE CIVIL RIGHTS REVOLUTION The Rising Tide of Protest With the sit-ins, college students for the first time stepped onto the stage of American history as the leading force for social change. In April 1960, Ella Baker, a longtime civil rights organizer, called a meeting of young activists in Raleigh, North Carolina. About 200 black students and a few whites attended. Out of the gathering came the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), dedicated to replacing the culture of segregation with a “beloved community” of racial justice and to empowering ordinary blacks to take control of the decisions that affected their lives. “We can’t count on adults,” declared SNCC organizer Robert Moses. “Very few . . . are not afraid of the tremendous pressure they will face. This leaves the young people to be the organizers, the agents of social and political change.” Other forms of direct action soon followed the sit-ins. Blacks in Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi, engaged in “wade-ins,” demanding access to segregated public beaches. Scores were arrested and two black teenagers were killed. In 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) launched the Freedom Rides. Integrated groups traveled by bus into the Deep South to test compliance with court orders banning segregation on interstate buses and trains and in terminal facilities. Violent mobs assaulted them. Near Anniston, Alabama, a firebomb was thrown into the vehicle and the passengers beaten as they escaped. In Birmingham, Klansmen attacked riders with bats and chains, while police refused to intervene. Many of the Freedom Riders were arrested. But their actions 1960 Greensboro, N.C., sit-in Young Americans for Freedom founded 1961 Bay of Pigs Freedom Rides Berlin Wall constructed 1962 Port Huron Statement University of Mississippi desegregated Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring Cuban missile crisis 1963 Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” March on Washington Kennedy assassinated 1964 Freedom Summer Civil Rights Act passed Gulf of Tonkin resolution 1965– Great Society 1967 1965 Voting Rights Act Watts uprising Hart-Celler Act 1966 National Organization for Women organized 1968 Tet offensive Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated American Indian movement founded Richard Nixon elected TH E CI VI L R I G H T S R E V O L U T I O N ★ 985 led the Interstate Commerce Commission to order buses and terminals desegregated. As protests escalated, so did the resistance Woodstock festival of local authorities. Late in 1961, SNCC and 1973 Roe v. Wade other groups launched a campaign of nonviolent protests against racial discrimination in Albany, Georgia. The protests lasted a year, but despite filling the jails with demonstrators— a tactic adopted by the movement to gain national sympathy—they failed to achieve their goals. In September 1962, a court ordered the University of Mississippi to admit James Meredith, a black student. The state police stood aside as a mob, encouraged by Governor Ross Barnett, rampaged through the streets of Oxford, where the university is located. Two bystanders lost their lives in the riot. President Kennedy was forced to dispatch the army to restore order. 1969 Police raid on Stonewall Inn Birmingham The high point of protest came in the spring of 1963, when demonstrations took place in towns and cities across the South, dramatizing black discontent over inequality in education, employment, and housing. In one week in June, there were more than 15,000 arrests in 186 cities. The dramatic culmination came in Birmingham, Alabama, a citadel of segregation. Even for the Deep South, Birmingham was a violent city—there had been over fifty bombings of black homes and institutions since World War II. Local blacks had been demonstrating, with no result, for greater economic opportunities and an end to segregation by local businesses. With the movement flagging, some of its leaders invited Martin Luther King Jr. to come to Birmingham. While serving a nine-day prison term in April 1963 for violating a ban on Civil rights demonstrators in Orangeburg, South demonstrations, King composed one Carolina, in 1960. of his most eloquent pleas for racial 986 ★ CHAPTER 25 The Si xti es What were the major events in the civil rights movement of the early 1960s? A fireman assaulting young African-American demonstrators with a high-pressure hose during the climactic demonstrations in Birmingham. Broadcast on television, such pictures proved a serious problem for the United States in its battle for the “hearts and minds” of people around the world and forced the Kennedy administration to confront the contradiction between the rhetoric of freedom and the reality of racism. justice, the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Responding to local clergymen who counseled patience, King related the litany of abuses faced by black southerners, from police brutality to the daily humiliation of having to explain to their children why they could not enter amusement parks or public swimming pools. The “white moderate,” King declared, must put aside fear of disorder and commit himself to racial justice. In May, King made the bold decision to send black schoolchildren into the streets of Birmingham. Police chief Eugene “Bull” Connor unleashed his forces against the thousands of young marchers. The images, broadcast on television, of children being assaulted with nightsticks, high-pressure fire hoses, and attack dogs produced a wave of revulsion throughout the world and turned the Birmingham campaign into a triumph for the civil rights movement. It led President Kennedy, as will be related later, to endorse the movement’s goals. Leading businessmen, fearing that the city was becoming an international symbol of brutality, brokered an end to the demonstrations that desegregated downtown stores and restaurants and promised that black salespeople would be hired. TH E CI VI L R I G H T S R E V O L U T I O N ★ 987 But more than these modest gains, the events in Birmingham forced white Americans to decide whether they had more in common with fellow citizens demanding their basic rights or with violent segregationists. The question became more insistent in the following weeks. In June 1963, a sniper killed Medgar Evers, field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi. In September, a bomb exploded at a black Baptist church in Birmingham, killing four young girls. (Not until 2002 was the last of those who committed this act of domestic terrorism tried and convicted.) The March on Washington On August 28, 1963, two weeks before the Birmingham church bombing, 250,000 black and white Americans converged on the nation’s capital for the March on Washington, often considered the high point of the nonviolent civil rights movement. Organized by a coalition of civil rights, labor, and church organizations led by A. Philip Randolph, the black unionist who had threatened a similar march in 1941, it was the largest public demonstration in the nation’s history to that time. Calls for the passage of a civil rights bill pending before Congress took center stage. But the march’s goals also included a public-works program to reduce unemployment, an increase in the minimum wage, and a law barring discrimination in employment. These demands, and the marchers’ slogan, “Jobs and Freedom,” revealed how the black movement had, for the moment, forged an alliance with white liberal groups. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King delivered his most famous speech, including the words, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’” The March on Washington reflected an unprecedented degree of blackwhite cooperation in support of racial and economic justice. But it also revealed some of the movement’s limitations, and the tensions within it. Even though female activists like Jo Ann Robinson and Ella Baker had played crucial roles in civil rights organizing, every speaker at the Lincoln Memorial was male. The organizers ordered SNCC leader John Lewis (later a congressman from Georgia) to tone down his speech, the original text of which called on blacks to “free ourselves of the chains of political and economic slavery” and march “through the heart of Dixie the way Sherman did . . . and burn Jim Crow to the ground.” Lewis’s rhetoric forecast the more militant turn many in the movement would soon be taking. “Seek the freedom in 1963 promised in 1863,” read one banner at the March on Washington. And civil rights activists resurrected the Civil War–era vision of national authority as the custodian of American freedom. Despite the fact that the federal government had for many decades promoted segregation, 988 ★ CHAPTER 25 The Si xti es What were the major crises and policy initiatives of the Kennedy presidency? blacks’ historical experience suggested that they had more hope for justice from national power than from local governments or civic institutions— home owners’ associations, businesses, private clubs—still riddled with racism. It remained unclear whether the federal government would take up this responsibility. THE KENNEDY YEARS John F. Kennedy served as president for less than three years and, in domestic affairs, had few tangible accomplishments. But his administration is widely viewed today as a moment of youthful glamour, soaring hopes, and dynamic leadership at home and abroad. Later revelations of the sexual liaisons Kennedy obsessively pursued while in the White House have not significantly damaged his reputation among the general public. Kennedy’s inaugural address of January 1961 announced a watershed in American politics: “The torch has been passed,” he declared, “to a new generation of Americans” who would “pay any price, bear any burden,” to “assure the survival and success of liberty.” The speech seemed to urge Americans to move beyond the self-centered consumer culture of the 1950s: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” But while the sitins were by now a year old, the speech said nothing about segregation or race. At the outset of his presidency, Kennedy regarded civil rights as a distraction from his main concern—vigorous conduct of the Cold War. Kennedy and the World Kennedy’s agenda envisioned new initiatives aimed at countering communist influence in the world. One of his administration’s first acts was to establish the Peace Corps, which sent young Americans abroad to aid in the economic and educational progress of developing countries and to improve the image of the United States there. By 1966, more than 15,000 young men and women were serving as Peace Corps volunteers. When the Soviets in April 1961 launched a satellite carrying the first man into orbit around the earth, Kennedy announced that the United States would mobilize its resources to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The goal seemed almost impossible when announced, but it was stunningly accomplished in 1969. Kennedy also formulated a new policy toward Latin America, the Alliance for Progress. A kind of Marshall Plan for the Western Hemisphere, although involving far smaller sums of money, it aimed, Kennedy said, to promote both “political” and “material freedom.” Begun in 1961 with much fanfare about T H E K E N N E D Y Y E A R S ★ 989 alleviating poverty and counteracting the appeal of communism, the Alliance for Progress failed. Unlike the Marshall Plan, military regimes and local elites controlled Alliance for Progress aid. They enriched themselves while the poor saw little benefit. Like his predecessors, Kennedy viewed the entire world through the lens of the Cold War. This outlook shaped his dealings with Fidel Castro, who had led a revolution that in 1959 ousted Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Until Castro took power, Cuba was an economic dependency of the United States. When his government began nationalizing American landholdings and other investments and signed an agreement to sell sugar to the Soviet Union, the Eisenhower administration suspended trade and diplomatic relations with the island. The CIA began training anti-Castro exiles for an invasion of Cuba. In April 1961, Kennedy allowed the CIA to launch its invasion, at a site known as the Bay of Pigs. Military advisers predicted a popular uprising that would quickly topple the Castro government. But the Bay of Pigs invasion proved to be a total failure. Of 1,400 invaders, more than 100 were killed and 1,100 captured. Cuba became ever more closely tied to the Soviet Union. The Kennedy administration tried other methods, including assassination attempts, to get rid of Castro’s government. The Missile Crisis Meanwhile, relations between the two “superpowers” deteriorated. In August 1961, in order to stem a growing tide of emigrants fleeing from East to West Berlin, the Soviets constructed a wall separating the two parts of the city. Until its demolition in 1989, the Berlin Wall would stand as a tangible symbol of the Cold War and the division of Europe. The most dangerous crisis of the Kennedy administration, and in many ways of the entire Cold War, came in October 1962, when American spy planes discovered that the Soviet Union was installing missiles in Cuba capable of reaching the United States with nuclear weapons. Rejecting advice from military leaders that he authorize an attack on Cuba, which would almost certainly have triggered a Soviet response in Berlin and perhaps a nuclear war, Kennedy imposed a blockade, or “quarantine,” of the island and demanded the missiles’ removal. After tense behind-the-scenes negotiations, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles; Kennedy pledged that the United States would not invade Cuba and secretly agreed to remove American Jupiter missiles from Turkey, from which they could reach the Soviet Union. For thirteen days, the world teetered on the brink of all-out nuclear war. The Cuban missile crisis seems to have lessened Kennedy’s passion for the Cold War. Indeed, he appears to have been shocked by the casual way military leaders 990 ★ CHAPTER 25 The Si xti es What were the major crises and policy initiatives of the Kennedy presidency? spoke of “winning” a nuclear exchange in which tens of millions of Americans and Russians were certain to die. In 1963, Kennedy moved to reduce Cold War tensions. In a speech at American University, he called for greater cooperation with the Soviets. That summer, the two countries agreed to a treaty banning the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere and in space. In announcing the agreement, Kennedy paid tribute to the small movement against nuclear weapons that had been urging such a ban for several years. He even sent word to Castro through a journalist that he desired a more constructive relationship with Cuba. Kennedy and Civil Rights In his first two years in office, Kennedy was preoccupied with foreign policy. But in 1963, the crisis over civil rights eclipsed other concerns. Until then, Kennedy had been reluctant to take a forceful stand on black demands. He seemed to share FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s fear that the movement was inspired by communism. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s brother, approved FBI wiretaps on King. Despite promising during the 1960 campaign to ban discrimination in federally assisted housing, Kennedy waited until the end of 1962 to issue the order. He used federal force when obstruction of the law became acute, as at the University of Mississippi. But he failed to protect civil rights workers from violence, insisting that law enforcement was a local matter. Events in Birmingham in May 1963 forced Kennedy’s hand. Kennedy realized that the United States simply could not declare itself the champion of freedom throughout the world while maintaining a system of racial inequality at home. In June, he went on national television to call for the passage of a law banning discrimination in all places of public accommodation, a major goal of the civil rights movement. The nation, he asserted, faced a moral crisis: “We preach freedom around the world, . . . but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other, that this is a land of the free except for Negroes?” Kennedy did not live to see his civil rights bill enacted. On November 22, New York City train passengers reading the news 1963, while riding in a motorcade of President Kennedy’s assassination, Novemthrough Dallas, Texas, he was shot ber 22, 1963. and killed. Most likely, the assassin T H E K E N N E D Y Y E A R S ★ 991 was Lee Harvey Oswald, a troubled former marine. Partly because Oswald was murdered two days later by a local nightclub owner while in police custody, speculation about a possible conspiracy continues to this day. In any event, Kennedy’s death brought an abrupt and utterly unexpected end to his presidency. As with Pearl Harbor or September 11, 2001, an entire generation would always recall the moment when they first heard the news of Kennedy’s death. It fell to his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, to secure passage of the civil rights bill and to launch a program of domestic liberalism far more ambitious than anything Kennedy had envisioned. LY NDON JOHNSON’S PRESIDENCY Unlike John F. Kennedy, raised in a wealthy and powerful family, Lyndon Johnson grew up in one of the poorest parts of the United States, the central Texas hill country. Kennedy seemed to view success as his birthright; Johnson had to struggle ferociously to achieve wealth and power. By the 1950s, he had risen to become majority leader of the U.S. Senate. But Johnson never forgot the poor Mexican and white children he had taught in a Texas school in the early 1930s. Far more interested than Kennedy in domestic reform, he continued to hold the New Deal view that government had an obligation to assist less-fortunate members of society. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 When he became president, nobody expected that Johnson would make the passage of civil rights legislation his first order of business or that he would come to identify himself with the black movement more passionately than any previous president. Just five days after Kennedy’s assassination, however, Johnson called on Congress to enact the civil rights bill as the most fitting memorial to his slain predecessor. “We have talked long enough about equal rights in this country,” he declared. “It is now time to write the next chapter and write it in the books of law.” In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited racial discrimination in employment, institutions like hospitals and schools, and privately owned public accommodations such as restaurants, hotels, and theaters. It also banned discrimination on the grounds of sex—a provision added by opponents of civil rights in an effort to derail the entire bill and embraced by liberal and female members of Congress as a way to broaden its scope. Johnson knew that many whites opposed the new law. After signing it, he turned to an aide and remarked, “I think we delivered the South to the Republican Party.” 992 ★ CHAPTER 25 The Si xti es What were the purposes and strategies of Johnson’s Great Society programs? Freedom Summer The 1964 law did not address a major concern of the civil rights movement— the right to vote in the South. That summer, a coalition of civil rights groups, including SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP, launched a voter registration drive in Mississippi. Hundreds of white college students from the North traveled to the state to take part in Freedom Summer. An outpouring of violence greeted the campaign, including thirty-five bombings and numerous beatings of civil rights workers. In June, three young activists—Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, white students from the North, and James Chaney, a local black youth—were kidnapped by a group headed by a deputy sheriff and murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Between 1961 and 1965, an estimated twenty-five black civil rights workers paid with their lives. But the deaths of the two white students focused unprecedented attention on Mississippi and on the apparent inability of the federal government to protect citizens seeking to enjoy their constitutional rights. (In June 2005, forty-one years after Freedom Summer, a Mississippi jury convicted a member of the Ku Klux Klan of manslaughter in the deaths of the three civil rights workers.) Freedom Summer led directly to one of the most dramatic confrontations of the civil rights era—the campaign by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to take the seats of the state’s all-white official party at the 1964 Democratic national convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. With blacks unable to participate in the activities of the Democratic Party or register to vote, the civil rights movement in Mississippi had created the MFDP, open to all residents of the state. At televised hearings before the credentials committee, Fannie Lou Hamer of the MFDP held a national audience spellbound with her account of growing up in poverty in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta and of the savage beatings she had endured at the hands of police. Like many other black activists, Hamer was a deeply religious person who believed that Christianity rested on the idea of freedom and that the movement had been divinely inspired. “Is this America,” she asked, “the land of the free and home of the brave, where . . . we [are] threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings?” Johnson feared a southern walkout, as had happened at the 1948 party convention, if the MFDP were seated. Party liberals, including Johnson’s running mate, Hubert Humphrey, pressed for a compromise in which two black delegates would be granted seats. But the MFDP rejected the proposal. The 1964 Election The events at Atlantic City severely weakened black activists’ faith in the responsiveness of the political system and forecast the impending breakup of the coalition between the civil rights movement and the liberal wing of the LY N D O N J O H NS O N ’ S P RES I DEN CY ★ 993 Democratic Party. For the moment, however, the movement rallied behind Johnson’s campaign for reelection. Johnson’s opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, had published The Conscience of a Conservative (1960), which sold more than 3 million copies. The book demanded a more aggressive conduct of the Cold War (he even suggested that nuclear war might be “the price of freedom”). But Goldwater directed most of his critique against “internal” dangers to freedom, especially the New Deal welfare state, which he believed stifled individual initiative and independence. He called for the substitution of private charity for public welfare programs and Social Security, and the abolition of the graduated income tax. Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His acceptance speech at the Republican national convention contained the explosive statement, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Stigmatized by the Democrats as an extremist who would repeal Social Security and risk nuclear war, Goldwater went down to a disastrous defeat. Johnson received almost 43 million votes to Goldwater’s 27 million. Democrats swept to two-to-one majorities in both houses of Congress. But although few realized it, the 1964 campaign marked a milestone in the resurgence of American conservatism. Goldwater’s success in the Deep South, where he carried five states, coupled with the surprisingly strong showing of segregationist governor George Wallace of Alabama in Democratic primaries in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland, suggested that politicians could strike electoral gold by appealing to white opposition to the civil rights movement. One indication of problems for the Democrats came in California, with the passage by popular referendum of Proposition 14, which repealed a 1963 law banning racial discrimination in the sale of real estate. Backed by the state’s realtors and developers, California conservatives made the “freedom” of home owners to control their property the rallying cry of the campaign against the fair housing law. Although Johnson carried California by more than 1 million votes, Proposition 14 received a considerable majority, winning three-fourths of the votes cast by whites. The Conservative Sixties The 1960s, today recalled as a decade of radicalism, clearly had a conservative side as well. With the founding in 1960 of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), conservative students emerged as a force in politics. There were striking parallels between the Sharon Statement, issued by ninety young people who gathered at the estate of conservative intellectual William F. Buckley in Sharon, Connecticut, to establish YAF, and the Port Huron Statement of SDS of 1962 (discussed later in this chapter). Both manifestos portrayed youth as the cutting edge of a new radicalism, and both claimed to offer a route to greater 994 ★ CHAPTER 25 The Si xti es What were the purposes and strategies of Johnson’s Great Society programs? freedom. The Sharon Statement summarized beliefs that had circulated among conservatives during the past decade—the free market underpinned “personal freedom,” government must be strictly limited, and “international communism,” the gravest threat to liberty, must be destroyed. YAF aimed initially to take control of the Republican Party from leaders who had made their peace with the New Deal and seemed willing to coexist with communism. YAF members became Barry Goldwater’s shock troops in 1964. Despite his landslide defeat in the general election, Goldwater’s nomination was a remarkable triumph for a movement widely viewed as composed of fanatics out to “repeal the twentieth century.” Goldwater also brought new constituencies to the conservative cause. His campaign aroused enthusiasm in the rapidly expanding suburbs of southern California and the Southwest. Orange County, California, many of whose residents had recently arrived from the East and Midwest and worked in defenserelated industries, became a nationally known center of grassroots conservative activism. The funds that poured into the Goldwater campaign from the Sunbelt’s oilmen and aerospace entrepreneurs established a new financial base for conservatism. And by carrying five states of the Deep South, Goldwater showed that the civil rights revolution had redrawn the nation’s political map, opening the door to a “southern strategy” that would eventually lead the entire region into the Republican Party. Well before the rise of Black Power, a reaction against civil rights gains offered conservatives new opportunities and threatened the stability of the Democratic coalition. During the 1950s, many conservatives had responded favorably to southern whites’ condemnation of the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision as an invasion of states’ rights. The National Review, an influential conservative magazine, referred to whites as “the advanced race” and defended black disenfranchisement on the grounds that “the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.” In 1962, YAF bestowed its Freedom Award on Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, one of the country’s most prominent segregationists. During the 1960s, most conservatives abandoned talk of racial superiority and inferiority. But conservative appeals to law and order, “freedom of association,” and the evils of welfare often had strong racial overtones. Racial divisions would prove to be a political gold mine for conservatives. The Voting Rights Act One last legislative triumph, however, lay ahead for the civil rights movement. In January 1965, King launched a voting rights campaign in Selma, Alabama, a city where only 355 of 15,000 black residents had been allowed to register to vote. In March, defying a ban by Governor Wallace, King attempted to lead a march from LY N D O N J O H NS O N ’ S P RES I DEN CY ★ 995 Selma to the state capital, Montgomery. When the marchers reached the bridge leading out of the city, state police assaulted them with cattle prods, whips, and tear gas. Once again, violence against nonviolent demonstrators flashed across television screens throughout the world, compelling the federal government to take action. Calling Selma a milestone A sharecropper’s shack alongside Jefferson Davis Highway, the route followed from Selma to Montin “man’s unending search for freedom,” gomery, Alabama, in 1965, by marchers demanding Johnson asked Congress to enact a law voting rights. The photograph, by James “Spider” securing the right to vote. He closed Martin, who chronicled the march, suggests the his speech by quoting the demonstradeep-seated inequalities that persisted a century after the end of the Civil War. tors’ song, “We Shall Overcome.” Never before had the movement received so powerful an endorsement from the federal government. Congress quickly passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which allowed federal officials to register voters. Black southerners finally regained the suffrage that had been stripped from them at the turn of the twentieth century. In addition, the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the Constitution outlawed the poll tax, which had long prevented poor blacks (and some whites) from voting in the South. Immigration Reform By 1965, the civil rights movement had succeeded in eradicating the legal bases of second-class citizenship. The belief that racism should no longer serve as a foundation of public policy spilled over into other realms. In 1965, the Hart-Celler Act abandoned the national-origins quota system of immigration, which had excluded Asians and severely restricted southern and eastern Europeans. The law established new, racially neutral criteria for immigration, notably family reunification and possession of skills in demand in the United States. On the other hand, because of growing hostility in the Southwest to Mexican immigration, the law established the first limit, 120,000, on newcomers from the Western Hemisphere. This created, for the first time, the category of “illegal aliens” from the Americas. Indeed, since the act set a maximum annual immigration quota of 20,000 persons for every country in the world, it guaranteed that a large part of Mexican immigration would be unauthorized, since labor demand for Mexican immigrants in the United States far exceeded that number. Establishing the same quota for Mexico and, say, Belgium or New Zealand made no sense. The act set the quota for the rest of the world at 170,000. 996 ★ CHAPTER 25 The Si xti es What were the purposes and strategies of Johnson’s Great Society programs? However, because of special provisions for refugees from communist countries, immigration soon exceeded these caps. The new law had many unexpected results. At the time, immigrants represented only 5 percent of the American population—the lowest proportion since the 1830s. No one anticipated that the new quotas not only would lead to an explosive rise in immigration but also would spark a dramatic shift in which newcomers from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia came to outnumber those from Europe. Taken together, the civil rights revolution and immigration reform marked the triumph of a pluralist conception of Americanism. By 1976, 85 percent of respondents to a public-opinion survey agreed with the statement, “The United States was meant to be . . . a country made up of many races, religions, and nationalities.” The Great Society After his landslide victory of 1964, Johnson outlined the most sweeping proposal for governmental action to promote the general welfare since the New Deal. Johnson’s initiatives of 1965–1967, known collectively as the Great Society, provided health services to the poor and elderly in the new Medicaid and Medicare programs and poured federal funds into education and urban development. New cabinet offices—the Departments of Transportation and of Housing and Urban Development—and new agencies, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the National Endowments for the Humanities and for the Arts, and a national public broadcasting network, were created. These measures greatly expanded the powers of the federal government, and they completed and extended the social agenda (with the exception of national health insurance) that had been stalled in Congress since 1938. Unlike the New Deal, however, the Great Society was a response to prosperity, not depression. The mid-1960s was a time of rapid economic expansion, fueled by increased government spending and a tax cut on individuals and businesses initially proposed by Kennedy and enacted in 1964. Johnson and Democratic liberals believed that economic growth made it possible to fund ambitious new government programs and to improve the quality of life. The War on Poverty The centerpiece of the Great Society, however, was the crusade to eradicate poverty, launched by Johnson early in 1964. After the talk of universal affluence during the 1950s, economic deprivation had been rediscovered by political leaders, thanks in part to Michael Harrington’s 1962 book The Other America. Harrington revealed that 40 to 50 million Americans lived in poverty, often in isolated rural areas or urban slums “invisible” to the middle class. The civil LY N D O N J O H NS O N ’ S P RES I DEN CY ★ 997 rights movement heightened the urgency of the issue, even though, as Harrington made clear, whites made up a majority of the nation’s poor. During the 1930s, Democrats had attributed poverty to an imbalance of 60 Black, Latino, Asian, and economic power and flawed economic Native American 50 institutions. In the 1960s, the administration attributed it to an absence of 40 skills and a lack of proper attitudes and work habits. Thus, the War on Poverty 30 did not consider the most direct ways Total 20 of eliminating poverty—guaranteeing White an annual income for all Americans, 10 creating jobs for the unemployed, promoting the spread of unioniza0 1959 1961 1963 1965 1967 1969 tion, or making it more difficult for Year businesses to shift production to the *The poverty threshold for a non-farm family of four was $3,743 in 1969 and $2,973 in 1959. low-wage South or overseas. Nor did During the 1960s, an expanding economy and it address the economic changes that government programs assisting the poor prowere reducing the number of well-paid duced a steady decrease in the percentage of manufacturing jobs and leaving poor Americans living in poverty. families in rural areas like Appalachia and decaying urban ghettos with little hope of economic advancement. One of the Great Society’s most popular and successful components, food stamps, offered direct aid to the poor. But, in general, the War on Poverty concentrated on equipping the poor with skills and rebuilding their spirit and motivation. The new Office of Economic Opportunity oversaw a series of initiatives designed to lift the poor into the social and economic mainstream. It provided Head Start (an early childhood education program), job training, legal services, and scholarships for poor college students. It also created VISTA, a domestic version of the Peace Corps for the inner cities. In an echo of SNCC’s philosophy of empowering ordinary individuals to take control of their lives, the War on Poverty required that poor people play a leading part in the design and implementation of local policies, a recipe for continuing conflict with local political leaders accustomed to controlling the flow of federal dollars. Percentage below poverty level F I G U R E 2 5 . 1 P E R C E N TA G E O F P O P U L AT I O N B E L O W POVERTY LEVEL, BY RACE, 1959–1969* Freedom and Equality Johnson defended the Great Society in a vocabulary of freedom derived from the New Deal, when his own political career began, and reinforced by the civil 998 ★ CHAPTER 25 The Si xti es How did the civil rights movement change in the mid-1960s? rights movement. Soon after assuming office in 1963, he resurrected the phrase “freedom from want,” all but forgotten during the 1950s. Echoing FDR, Johnson told the 1964 Democratic convention, “The man who is hungry, who cannot find work or educate his children, who is bowed by want, that man is not fully free.” Recognizing that black poverty was fundamentally different from white, since its roots lay in “past injustice and present prejudice,” Johnson sought to redefine the relationship between freedom and equality. Economic liberty, he insisted, meant more than equal opportunity: “You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. . . . We seek . . . not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.” Johnson’s Great Society may not have achieved equality “as a fact.” But it represented the most expansive effort in the nation’s history to mobilize the powers of the national government to address the needs of the least-advantaged Americans, especially those, like blacks, largely excluded from the original New Deal entitlements such as Social Security. Coupled with the decade’s high rate of economic growth, the War on Poverty succeeded in reducing the incidence of poverty from 22 percent to 13 percent of American families during the 1960s. It has fluctuated around the latter figure ever since. The sum spent, however, was too low to end poverty altogether or to transform conditions of life in poor urban neighborhoods. Today, thanks to the civil rights movement and the Great Society, the historic gap between whites and blacks in education, income, and access to skilled employment has narrowed considerably. But with deindustrialization and urban decay affecting numerous families, the median wealth of white households remains ten times greater than that of blacks, and nearly a quarter of all black children still lives in poverty. THE CHANGING BL ACK MOVEMENT Even at its moment of triumph, the civil rights movement confronted a crisis as it sought to move from access to schools, public accommodations, and the voting booth to the economic divide separating blacks from other Americans. In the mid-1960s, economic issues rose to the forefront of the civil rights agenda. Violent outbreaks in black ghettos outside the South drew attention to the national scope of racial injustice and to inequalities in jobs, education, and housing that the dismantling of legal segregation left intact. Much of the animosity that came to characterize race relations arose from the belief of many whites that the legislation of 1964 and 1965 had fulfilled the nation’s obligation TH E CH A N G I N G B L A C K MO V E ME N T ★ 999 to assure blacks equality before the law, while blacks pushed for more government action, sparking charges of “reverse discrimination.” The Ghetto Uprisings The first riots—really, battles between angry blacks and the predominantly white police (widely seen by many ghetto residents as an occupying army)— erupted in Harlem in 1964. Far larger was the Watts uprising of 1965, which took place in the black ghetto of Los Angeles only days after Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. An estimated 50,000 persons took part in this “rebellion,” attacking police and firemen, looting white-owned businesses, and burning buildings. It required 15,000 police and National Guardsmen to restore order, by which time thirty-five people lay dead, 900 were injured, and $30 million worth of property had been destroyed. By the summer of 1967, violence had become so widespread that some feared racial civil war. Urban uprisings in that year left twenty-three dead in Newark and forty-three in Detroit, where entire blocks went up in flames and property damage ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The violence led Johnson to appoint a commission headed by Illinois governor Otto Kerner to study the causes of urban rioting. Released in 1968, the Kerner Report blamed the violence on “segregation and poverty” and offered a powerful indictment of “white racism.” It depicted a country in danger of being torn apart by racial antagonism: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” But the report failed to offer any clear proposals for change. With black unemployment twice that of whites and the average black family income little more than half the white norm, the movement looked for ways to “make freedom real” for black Americans. In 1964, King called for a “Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged” to mobilize the nation’s resources to abolish economic deprivation. His proposal was directed against poverty in general, but King also insisted that after “doing something special against the Negro for hundreds of years,” the United States had an obligation to “do something special for him now”—an early call for what would come to be known as “affirmative action.” A. Philip Randolph and civil rights veteran Bayard Rustin proposed a Freedom Budget, which envisioned spending $100 billion over ten years on a federal program of job creation and urban redevelopment. In 1966, King launched the Chicago Freedom movement, with demands quite different from its predecessors in the South—an end to discrimination by employers and unions, equal access to mortgages, the integration of public housing, and the construction of low-income housing scattered throughout the region. Confronting the entrenched power of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s political 1000 ★ CHAPTER 25 The Si xti es How did the civil rights movement change in the mid-1960s? machine and the ferocious opposition of white home owners, the movement failed. King’s tactics—marches, sit-ins, mass arrests—proved ineffective in the face of the North’s less pervasive but still powerful system of racial inequality. King’s language became more and more radical. He called for nothing less than a “revolution in values” that would create a “better distribution of wealth” for “all God’s children.” Malcolm X The civil rights movement’s first phase had produced a clear set of objectives, far-reaching accomplishments, and a series of coherent if sometimes competitive organizations. The second witnessed political fragmentation and few significant victories. Even during the heyday of the integration struggle, the fiery orator Malcolm X had insisted that blacks must control the political and economic resources of their communities and rely on their own efforts rather than working with whites. Having committed a string of crimes as a youth, Malcolm Little was converted in jail to the teachings of the Nation of Islam, or Black Muslims, who preached a message of white evil and black self-discipline. Malcolm dropped his “slave surname” in favor of “X,” symbolizing blacks’ separation from their African ancestry. On his release from prison he became a spokesman for the Muslims and a sharp critic of the ideas of integration and nonviolence, and of King’s practice of appealing to American values. “I don’t see any American dream,” he proclaimed. “I see an American nightmare.” On a 1964 trip to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, Islam’s spiritual home, Malcolm X witnessed harmony among Muslims of all races. He now began to speak of the possibility of interracial cooperation for radical change in the United States. But when members of the Nation of Islam assassinated him in February 1965 after he had formed his own Organization of Afro-American Unity, Malcolm X left neither a consistent ideology nor a coherent movement. Most whites considered him an apostle of racial violence. However, his call for blacks to rely on their own resources struck a chord among the urban poor and younger civil rights activists. His Autobiography, published in 1966, became a great best-seller. Today, streets, parks, and schools are named after him. The Rise of Black Power Malcolm X was the intellectual father of Black Power, a slogan that came to national attention in 1966 when SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael used it during a civil rights march in Mississippi. Black Power immediately became a rallying cry for those bitter over the federal government’s failure to stop TH E CH A N G I N G B L A C K MO V E ME N T ★ 1001 violence against civil rights workers, white attempts to determine movement strategy (as at the Democratic convention of 1964), and the civil rights movement’s failure to have any impact on the economic problems of black ghettos. A highly imprecise idea, Black Power suggested everything from the election of more black officials (hardly a radical notion) to the belief that black Americans were a colonized people whose freedom could be won only through a revolutionary struggle for self-determination. In many communities where black parents felt that the local public education system failed to educate their children adequately, it inspired the establishment of black-operated local schools that combined traditional learning with an emphasis on pride in African-American history and identity. But however employed, the idea reflected the radicalization of young civil rights activists and sparked an explosion of racial selfassertion, reflected in the slogan “Black is Beautiful.” The abandonment of the word “Negro” in favor of “Afro-American” and the popularity of black beauty pageants, African styles of dress, and the “natural,” or “Afro,” hairdo among both men and women signified much more than a change in language and fashion. They reflected a new sense of racial pride and a rejection of white norms. Inspired by the idea of black self-determination, SNCC and CORE repudiated their previous interracialism, and new militant groups sprang into existence. Most prominent of the new groups, in terms of publicity, if not numbers, was the Black Panther Party. Founded in Oakland, California, in 1966, it became notorious for advocating armed self-defense in response to police brutality. It demanded the release of black prisoners because of racism in the criminal justice system. The party’s youthful members alarmed whites by wearing military garb, although they also ran health clinics, schools, and children’s breakfast programs. But internal disputes and a campaign against the Black Panthers by police and the FBI, which left several leaders dead in shootouts, destroyed the organization. By 1967, with the escalation of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, the War on Poverty ground to a halt. By then, with ghetto uprisings punctuating the urban landscape, the antiwar movement assuming massive proportions, and millions of young people ostentatiously rejecting mainstream values, American society faced its greatest crisis since the Depression. VIETNAM AND THE NEW LEFT Old and New Lefts To most Americans, the rise of a protest movement among white youth came as a complete surprise. For most of the century, colleges had been conservative institutions that drew their students from a privileged segment of the 1002 ★ CHAPTER 25 The Si xti es How did the Vietnam War transform American politics and culture? population. During the 1950s, young people had been called a “silent generation.” If blacks’ grievances appeared self-evident, those of white college students were difficult to understand. What persuaded large numbers of children of affluence to reject the values and institutions of their society? In part, the answer lay in a redefinition of the meaning of freedom by what came to be called the New Left. What made the New Left new was its rejection of the intellectual and political categories that had shaped radicalism and liberalism for most of the twentieth century. It challenged not only mainstream America but also what it dismissively called the Old Left. Unlike the Communist Party, it did not take the Soviet Union as a model or see the working class as the main agent of social change. Instead of economic equality and social citizenship, the language of New Deal liberals, the New Left spoke of loneliness, isolation, and alienation, of powerlessness in the face of bureaucratic institutions and a hunger for authenticity that affluence could not provide. These discontents galvanized a mass movement among what was rapidly becoming a major sector of the American population. By 1968, thanks to the coming of age of the baby-boom generation and the growing number of jobs that required post–high school skills, more than 7 million students attended college, more than the number of farmers or steelworkers. The New Left was not as new as it claimed. Its call for a democracy of citizen participation harked back to the American Revolution, and its critique of the contrast between American values and American reality, to the abolitionists. Its emphasis on authenticity in the face of conformity recalled the bohemians of the years before World War I, and its critique of consumer culture drew inspiration from 1950s writers on mass society. But the New Left’s greatest inspiration was the black freedom movement. More than any other event, the sit-ins catalyzed white student activism. Here was the unlikely combination that created the upheaval known as the Sixties—the convergence of society’s most excluded members demanding full access to all its benefits, with the children of the middle class rejecting the social mainstream. The black movement and white New Left shared basic assumptions—that the evils to be corrected were deeply embedded in social institutions and that only direct confrontation could persuade Americans of the urgency of far-reaching change. The Fading Consensus The years 1962 and 1963 witnessed the appearance of several pathbreaking books that challenged one or another aspect of the 1950s consensus. James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time gave angry voice to the black revolution. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring exposed the environmental costs of economic growth. VI ETN A M AN D T H E N E W L E F T ★ 1003 Members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in a University of Delaware yearbook photo. Despite their raised fists, they appear eminently respectable compared to radicals who emerged later in the decade. The group is entirely white. Michael Harrington’s The Other America revealed the persistence of poverty amid plenty. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs, criticized urban renewal, the removal of the poor from city centers, and the destruction of neighborhoods to build highways, accommodating cities to the needs of drivers rather than pedestrians. What made cities alive, she insisted, was density and diversity, the social interaction of people of different backgrounds encountering each other on urban streets. Yet in some ways the most influential critique of all arose in 1962 from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), an offshoot of the socialist League for Industrial Democracy. Meeting at Port Huron, Michigan, some sixty college students adopted a document that captured the mood and summarized the beliefs of this generation of student protesters. The Port Huron Statement devoted four-fifths of its text to criticism of institutions ranging from political parties to corporations, unions, and the military-industrial complex. But what made the document the guiding spirit of a new radicalism was the remainder, which offered a new vision of social change. “We seek the establishment,” it proclaimed, of “a democracy of individual participation, [in which] the individual shares in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life.” Freedom, for the New Left, 1004 ★ CHAPTER 25 The Si xti es How did the Vietnam War transform American politics and culture? meant “participatory democracy.” Although rarely defined with precision, this became a standard by which students judged existing social arrangements— workplaces, schools, government—and found them wanting. The Rise of SDS By the end of 1962, SDS had grown to 8,000 members. Then, in 1964, events at the University of California at Berkeley revealed the possibility for a far broader mobilization of students in the name of participatory democracy. A Cold War “multiversity,” Berkeley was an immense, impersonal institution where enrollments in many classes approached 1,000 students. The spark that set student protests alight was a new rule prohibiting political groups from using a central area of the campus to spread their ideas. Students—including conservatives outraged at being barred from distributing their own literature— responded by creating the Free Speech movement. Freedom of expression, declared Mario Savio, a student leader, “represents the very dignity of what a human being is. . . . That’s what marks us off from the stones and the stars. You can speak freely.” Likening the university to a factory, Savio called on students to “throw our body against the machines.” Thousands of Berkeley students became involved in the protests in the months that followed. Their program moved from demanding a repeal of the new rule to a critique of the entire structure of the university and of an education geared toward preparing graduates for corporate jobs. When the university gave in on the speech ban early in 1965, one activist exulted that the students had succeeded in reversing “the world-wide drift from freedom.” America and Vietnam By 1965 the black movement and the emergence of the New Left had shattered the climate of consensus of the 1950s. But what transformed protest into a full-fledged generational rebellion was the war in Vietnam. The war tragically revealed the danger that Walter Lippmann had warned of at the outset of the Cold War—viewing the entire world and every local situation within it through the either-or lens of an anticommunist crusade. A Vietnam specialist in the State Department who attended a policy meeting in August 1963 later recalled “the abysmal ignorance around the table of the particular facts of Vietnam. . . . They made absolutely no distinctions between countries with completely different historical experiences. . . . They [believed] that we could manipulate other states and build nations; that we knew all the answers.” Few Americans had any knowledge of Vietnam’s history and culture. Viewing Asia through the lens of Cold War geopolitics, successive administrations VI ETN A M AN D T H E N E W L E F T ★ 1005 reduced a complex struggle for national independence, led by homegrown communists who enjoyed widespread support throughout their country in addition to Soviet backing, to a test of “containment.” As noted in the previous chapter, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations cast their lot with French colonialism in the region. After the French defeat, they financed the creation of a proAmerican South Vietnamese government, in violation of the Geneva Accords of 1954 that had promised elections to unify Vietnam. By the 1960s, the United States was committed to the survival of this corrupt regime. Fear that voters would not forgive them for “losing” Vietnam made it impossible for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to remove the United States from an increasingly untenable situation. Kennedy’s foreign policy advisers saw Vietnam as a test of whether the United States could, through “counterinsurgency”—intervention to counter internal uprisings in noncommunist countries—halt the spread of Third World revolutions. Despite the dispatch of increased American aid and numerous military advisers, South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem lost control of the countryside to the communist-led Viet Cong. Diem resisted American advice to broaden his government’s base of support. In October 1963, after large Buddhist demonstrations against his regime, the United States approved a military coup that led to Diem’s death. When Kennedy was assassinated the following month, there were 17,000 American military advisers in South Vietnam. Shortly before his death, according to the notes of a White House meeting, Kennedy questioned “the wisdom of involvement in Vietnam.” But he took no action to end the American presence. Lyndon Johnson’s War Lyndon B. Johnson came to the presidency with little experience in foreign relations. Johnson had misgivings about sending American troops to Vietnam. But he was an adept politician and knew that Republicans had used the “loss” of China as a weapon against Truman. “I am not going to be the president,” he vowed, “who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.” In August 1964, North Vietnamese vessels encountered an American ship on a spy mission off its coast. When North Vietnamese patrol boats fired on the American vessel, Johnson proclaimed that the United States was a victim of “aggression.” In response, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, authorizing the president to take “all necessary measures to repel armed attack” in Vietnam. Only two members—Senators Ernest Gruening of Alaska and Wayne Morse of Oregon—voted against giving Johnson this blank check. The nearest the United States ever came to a formal declaration of war, the resolution passed without any discussion of American goals and strategy in Vietnam. 1006 ★ CHAPTER 25 The Si xti es How did the Vietnam War transform American politics and culture? T H E V I E T N A M WA R , 1 9 6 4 – 1 9 7 5 9 4 6 4 5 4 9 5 4 40 10 4 3 3 34 4 6 7 8 4 25 3 Party Democrat Republican Candidate Johnson Goldwater 12 21 43 29 26 13 26 7 12 12 9 13 11 6 8 7 10 12 10 14 Electoral Vote (Share) 486 (90%) 52 (10%) 4 14 4 8 3 17 10 3 Popular Vote (Share) 42,825,463 (61%) 27,146,969 (38.4%) A war of aerial bombing and small guerrilla skirmishes rather than fixed land battles, at the time it was fought, Vietnam was among the longest wars in American history and the only one the United States has lost. During the 1964 campaign, Johnson insisted that he had no intention of sending American troops to Vietnam. But immediately after Johnson’s reelection, the National Security Council recommended that the United States begin air strikes against North Vietnam and introduce American ground troops in the south. When the Viet Cong in February 1965 attacked an American air base in South Vietnam, Johnson put the plan into effect. At almost the same time, he intervened in the Dominican Republic. Here, military leaders in 1963 had overthrown the left-wing but noncommunist Juan Bosch, the country’s first elected president since 1924. In April 1965, another group of military men attempted VI ETN A M AN D T H E N E W L E F T ★ 1007 to restore Bosch to power but were defeated by the ruling junta. Fearing the unrest would lead to “another Cuba,” Johnson dispatched 22,000 American troops. The intervention outraged many Latin Americans. But the operation’s success seemed to bolster Johnson’s determination in Vietnam. By 1968, the number of American troops in Vietnam exceeded half a million, and the conduct of the war had become more and more brutal. The North Vietnamese mistreated American prisoners of war held in a camp known sardonically by the inmates as the Hanoi Hilton. (One prisoner of war, John McCain, who spent six years there, courageously refused to be exchanged unless his companions were freed with him. McCain later became a senator from Arizona and the Republican candidate for president in 2008.) American planes dropped more tons of bombs on the small countries of North and South Vietnam than both sides used in all of World War II. They spread chemicals that destroyed forests to deprive the Viet Cong of hiding places and dropped incendiary bombs filled with napalm, a gelatinous form of gasoline that clings to the skin of anyone exposed to it as it burns. The army pursued Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces in “search and destroy” missions that often did not distinguish between combatants and civilians. Weekly reports of enemy losses or “body counts” became a fixation of the administration. But the United States could not break its opponents’ ability to fight or make the South Vietnamese government any more able to survive on its own. The Antiwar Movement As casualties mounted and American bombs poured down on North and South Vietnam, the Cold War foreign policy consensus began to unravel. By 1968, the war had sidetracked much of the Great Society and had torn families, universities, and the Democratic Party apart. With the entire political leadership, liberal no less than conservative, committed to the war for most of the 1960s, young activists lost all confidence in “the system.” Opposition to the war became the organizing theme that united people with all kinds of doubts and discontents. “We recoil with horror,” said a SNCC position paper, “at the inconsistency of a supposedly ‘free’ society where responsibility to freedom is equated with the responsibility to lend oneself to military aggression.” With college students exempted from the draft, the burden of fighting fell on the working class and the poor. In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. condemned the administration’s Vietnam policy as an unconscionable use of violence and for draining resources from needs at home. At this point, King was the most prominent American to speak out against the war. As for SDS, the war seemed the opposite of participatory democracy, since American involvement had come through secret commitments and decisions 1008 ★ CHAPTER 25 The Si xti es How did the Vietnam War transform American politics and culture? made by political elites, with no real public debate. In April 1965, SDS invited opponents of American policy in Vietnam to assemble in Washington, D.C. The turnout of 25,000 amazed the organizers, offering the first hint that the antiwar movement would soon enjoy a mass constituency. At the next antiwar rally, in November 1965, SDS leader Carl Ogelsby openly challenged the foundations of Cold War thinking. He linked Vietnam to a critique of American interventions in Guatemala and Iran, support for South African apartheid, and Johnson’s dispatch of troops to the Dominican Republic, all rooted in obsessive anticommunism. Some might feel, Ogelsby concluded, “that I sound mighty anti-American. To these, I say: ‘Don’t blame me for that! Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart.’” The speech, observed one reporter, marked a “declaration of independence” for the New Left. By 1967, young men were burning their draft cards or fleeing to Canada to avoid fighting in what they considered an unjust war. In October of that year, 100,000 antiwar protesters assembled at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Many marched across the Potomac River to the Pentagon, where photographers captured them placing flowers in the rifle barrels of soldiers guarding the nerve center of the American military. The Counterculture The New Left’s definition of freedom initially centered on participatory democracy, a political concept. But as the 1960s progressed, young Americans’ understanding of freedom increasingly expanded to include cultural freedom as well. Although many streams flowed into the generational rebellion known as the counterculture, the youth revolt was inconceivable without the war’s destruction of young Americans’ belief in authority. By the late 1960s, millions of young people openly rejected the values and behavior of their elders. Their ranks included not only college students but also numerous young workers, even though most unions strongly opposed antiwar demonstrations and countercultural displays (a reaction that further separated young radicals from former allies on the traditional left). For the first time in American history, the flamboyant rejection of respectable norms in clothing, language, sexual behavior, and drug use, previously confined to artists and bohemians, became the basis of a mass movement. Its rallying cry was “liberation.” Here was John Winthrop’s nightmare of three centuries earlier come to pass—a massive redefinition of freedom as a rejection of all authority. “Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command,” Bob Dylan’s song “The Times They Are A-Changin’” bluntly informed mainstream America. To be sure, the counterculture in some ways represented not rebellion but the fulfillment of the consumer marketplace. It extended into every realm of life the VI ETN A M AN D T H E N E W L E F T ★ 1009 VOICES OF FREEDOM From Barry Goldwater, Speech at Republican National Convention (1964) In his speech accepting the Republican nomination for president in 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona outlined a political vision rooted in the conservatism of the Southwest and California. Charged with being an extremist, Goldwater responded, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” an explosive statement that enabled President Lyndon Johnson to portray him as a dangerous radical. My fellow Americans, the tide has been running against freedom. Our people have followed false prophets. We must, and we shall, return to proven ways—not because they are old, but because they are true. We must, and we shall, set the tide running again in the cause of freedom. And this party, with its every action, every word, every breath, and every heartbeat, has but a single resolve, and that is freedom—freedom made orderly for this Nation by our constitutional government; freedom under a government limited by laws of nature and of nature’s God; freedom—balanced so that liberty lacking order will not become the slavery of the prison cell; balanced so that liberty lacking order will not become the license of the mob and of the jungle. Now, we Americans understand freedom. We have earned it, we have lived for it, and we have died for it. This Nation and its people are freedom’s model in a searching world. We can be freedom’s missionaries in a doubting world. But, ladies and gentlemen, first we must renew freedom’s mission in our own hearts and in our own homes. . . . Tonight there is violence in our streets, corruption in our highest offices, aimlessness among our youth, anxiety among our elders and there is a virtual despair among the many who look beyond material success for the inner meaning of their lives. . . . We Republicans seek a government that attends to its inherent responsibilities of maintaining a stable monetary and fiscal climate, encouraging a free and a competitive economy and enforcing law and order. . . . Our towns and our cities, then our counties, then our states, then our regional contacts and only then, the national government. That, let me remind you, is the ladder of liberty, built by decentralized power. On it also we must have balance between the branches of government at every level. . . . I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. From Statement of Purpose, National Organization for Women (1966) Founded in 1966, the National Organization for Women gave voice to the movement for equality for women known as the “second wave” of feminism. Written by 1010 ★ CHAPTER 25 The Si xti es Betty Friedan, and adopted at the group’s organizing meeting in Washington, D.C., the statement of purpose outlined a wide range of areas, public and private, where women continued to be denied full freedom. The time has come for a new movement toward true equality for all women in America, and toward a fully equal partnership of the sexes, as part of the worldwide revolution of human rights now taking place within and beyond our national borders. The purpose of NOW is to take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all the privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men. . . . We organize to initiate or support action, nationally, or in any part of this nation, by individuals or organizations, to break through the silken curtain of prejudice and discrimination against women in government, industry, and professions, the churches, the political parties, the judiciary, the labor unions, in education, science, medicine, law, religion and every other field of importance in American society. . . . The actual position of women in the United States has declined, and is declining, to an alarming degree throughout the 1950’s and ’60s. . . . Working women are becoming increasingly—not less—concentrated on the bottom of the job ladder. . . . Today, women earn only one in three of the B.A.’s and M.A.’s granted, and one in ten of the Ph.D.’s. In all the professions considered of importance to society, and in the executive ranks of industry and government, women are losing ground. Where they are present it is only a token handful. Women comprise less than 1% of federal judges; less than 4% of all lawyers; 7% of doctors. . . . We do not accept the traditional assumption that a woman has to choose between marriage and motherhood, on the one hand, and serious participation in industry or the professions on the other. . . . True equality of opportunity and freedom of choice for women requires such practical, and possible innovations as a nationwide network of child-care centers, which will make it unnecessary for women to retire completely from society until their children are grown. . . . QU E STIONS We believe that a true partnership between the sexes demands a differ1. Why does Goldwater stress the interconnecent concept of marriage and equitable tion of order and liberty? sharing of the responsibilities of home 2. What social changes does NOW believe and children and of the economic burnecessary to enable women to enjoy equaldens of their support. We believe that ity and freedom? proper recognition should be given to the economic and social value of 3. How do the two documents differ in assesshomemaking and childcare. . . . ing the dangers to American freedom? VO I C E S O F F R E E D O M ★ 1011 Timothy Leary, promoter of the hallucinogenic drug LSD, at the Human Be-In in San Francisco in 1967. definition of freedom as the right to individual choice. Given the purchasing power of students and young adults, countercultural emblems—colorful clothing, rock music, images of sexual freedom, even symbols of black revolution and Native American resistance—were soon being mass-marketed as fashions of the day. Self-indulgence and self-destructive behavior were built into the counterculture. To followers of Timothy Leary, the Harvard scientist turned prophet of mind-expansion, the psychedelic drug LSD embodied a new freedom—“the freedom to expand your own consciousness.” In 1967, Leary organized a Human Be-In in San Francisco, where he urged a crowd of 20,000 to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” Personal Liberation and the Free Individual But there was far more to the counterculture than new consumer styles or the famed trio of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. To young dissenters, personal liberation represented a spirit of creative experimentation, a search for a way of life in which friendship and pleasure eclipsed the single-minded pursuit of wealth. It meant a release from bureaucratized education and work, repressive rules of personal behavior, and, above all, a militarized state that, in the name of freedom, rained destruction on a faraway people. It also encouraged new 1012 ★ CHAPTER 25 The Si xti es How did the Vietnam War transform American politics and culture? forms of radical action. “Underground” newspapers pioneered a personal and politically committed style of journalism. The Youth International Party, or “yippies,” introduced humor and theatricality as elements of protest. From the visitors’ gallery of the New York Stock Exchange, yippie founder Abbie Hoffman showered dollar bills onto the floor, bringing trading to a halt as brokers scrambled to retrieve the money. The counterculture emphasized the ideal of community, establishing quasiindependent neighborhoods in New York City’s East Village and San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district and, in an echo of nineteenth-century utopian communities like New Harmony, some 2,000 communes nationwide. Rock festivals, like Woodstock in upstate New York in 1969, brought together hundreds of thousands of young people to celebrate their alternative lifestyle and independence from adult authority. The opening song at Woodstock, performed by Richie Havens, began with eight repetitions of the single word “freedom.” Faith and the Counterculture Religious conviction, as has been noted, helped to inspire the civil rights movement. A different religious development, the sweeping reforms initiated in Roman Catholic practice (such as the delivery of the Mass in local languages, not Latin) by the Second Vatican Council of 1962–1965, led many priests, nuns, and lay Catholics to become involved in social justice movements. This produced a growing split in the church between liberals and conservatives. “Liberation theology,” a movement that swept across parts of Latin America in which priests helped to mobilize rural peasants to combat economic inequality, also reverberated among some Catholics in the United States. Many members of the New Left were motivated by a quest for a new sense of brotherhood and social responsibility, which often sprang from Christian roots. Like adherents of the Social Gospel of the late nineteenth century, many young people came to see a commitment to social change as a fulfillment of Christian values. The quest for personal authenticity, a feature of the counterculture, led to a flowering of religious and spiritual creativity and experimentation. The Jesus People (called by their detractors Jesus Freaks) saw the hippy lifestyle, with its long hair, unconventional attire, and quest for universal love, as an authentic expression of the outlook of the early church. The Sixties also witnessed a burgeoning interest in eastern religions. The Beats of the 1950s had been attracted to Buddhism as a religion that rejected violence and materialism—the antithesis of what they saw as key features of American society. Now, practices derived from Hinduism like yoga and meditation became popular with members of the counterculture and even in the suburban mainstream as a way of promoting spiritual and physical well-being. Some Americans traveled to Tibet and India to seek spiritual guidance from “gurus” (religious teachers) there. VI ETN A M AN D T H E N E W L E F T ★ 1013 More sinister was the emergence of religious cults based on single-minded devotion to a charismatic leader. The one with the most tragic outcome was the People’s Temple, founded by Jim Jones, whose religious outlook combined intense spiritual commitment with strong criticism of racism. He attracted a racially mixed community of devout followers, whom he led from Indianapolis to San Francisco and finally to Guyana. There, in 1978 over 900 men, women, and children perished in a mass suicide/murder ordered by Jones. THE NEW MOVEMENTS AND THE RIGHTS REVOLUTION The civil rights revolution, soon followed by the rise of the New Left, inspired other Americans to voice their grievances and claim their rights. Many borrowed the confrontational tactics of the black movement and activist students, adopting their language of “power” and “liberation” and their rejection of traditional organizations and approaches. By the late 1960s, new social movements dotted the political landscape. The counterculture’s notion of liberation centered on the free individual. Nowhere was this more evident than in the place occupied by sexual freedom in the generational rebellion. Starting in 1960, the mass marketing of birthcontrol pills made possible what “free lovers” had long demanded—the separation of sex from procreation. By the late 1960s, sexual freedom had become as much an element of the youth rebellion as long hair and drugs. Rock music celebrated the free expression of sexuality. The musical Hair, which gave voice to the youth rebellion, flaunted nudity on Broadway. The sexual revolution was central to another mass movement that emerged in the 1960s—the “second wave” of feminism. The Feminine Mystique The achievement of the vote had not seemed to affect women’s lack of power and opportunity. When the 1960s began, only a handful of women held political office, newspapers divided job ads into “male” and “female” sections, with the latter limited to low-wage clerical positions, and major universities limited the number of female students they accepted. In many states, husbands still controlled their wives’ earnings. As late as 1970, the Ohio Supreme Court held that a wife was “at most a superior servant to her husband,” without “legally recognized feelings or rights.” During the 1950s, some commentators had worried that the country was wasting its “woman power,” a potential weapon in the Cold War. But the public 1014 ★ CHAPTER 25 The Si xti es What were the sources and significance of the rights revolution of the late 1960s? reawakening of feminist consciousness did not get its start until the publication in 1963 of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Friedan had written pioneering articles during the 1940s on pay discrimination against women workers and racism in the workplace for the newspaper of the United Electrical Workers’ union. But, like other social critics, she now took as her themes the emptiness of consumer culture and the discontents of the middle class. Her opening chapter, “The Problem That Has No Name,” painted a devastating picture of talented, educated women trapped in a world that viewed marriage and motherhood as their primary goals. Somehow, after more than a century of agitation for access to the public sphere, women’s lives still centered on the home. In Moscow in 1959, Richard Nixon had made the suburban home an emblem of American freedom. For Friedan, invoking the era’s most powerful symbol of evil, it was a “comfortable concentration camp.” Few books have had the impact of The Feminine Mystique. Friedan was deluged by desperate letters from female readers relating how the suburban dream had become a nightmare. “Freedom,” wrote an Atlanta woman, “was a word I had always taken for granted. [I now realized that] I had voluntarily enslaved myself.” To be sure, a few of Friedan’s correspondents insisted that for a woman to create “a comfortable, happy home for her family” was “what God intended.” But the immediate result of The Feminine Mystique was to focus attention on yet another gap between American rhetoric and American reality. The law slowly began to address feminist concerns. In 1963, Congress passed the Equal Pay Act, barring sex discrimination among holders of the same jobs. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, as noted earlier, prohibited inequalities based on sex as well as race. Deluged with complaints of discrimination by working women, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission established by the law became a major force in breaking down barriers to female employment. The year 1966 saw the formation of the National Organization for Women (NOW), with Friedan as president. Modeled on civil rights organizations, it demanded equal opportunity in jobs, education, and political participation and attacked the “false image of women” spread by the mass media. Women’s Liberation If NOW grew out of a resurgence of middle-class feminism, a different female revolt was brewing within the civil rights and student movements. As in the days of abolitionism, young women who had embraced an ideology of social equality and personal freedom and learned methods of political organizing encountered inequality and sexual exploitation. Women like Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer had played major roles in grassroots civil rights organizing. But many women in the movement found themselves relegated to typing, THE NEW M O VEM EN TS A N D TH E RI G H T S R E V O L U T I O N ★ 1015 cooking, and cleaning for male coworkers. Some were pressured to engage in sexual liaisons. Echoing the words of Abby Kelley a century earlier, a group of female SNCC activists concluded in a 1965 memorandum that “there seem to be many parallels that can be drawn between the treatment of Negroes and the treatment of women in our society as a whole.” What bothered them most was the status of women within the movement, where assumptions of male In 1967, in a celebrated incident arising from the new feminism, a race official tried to eject supremacy seemed as deeply rooted as Kathrine Switzer from the Boston Marathon, only in society at large. to be pushed aside by other runners. ConsidThe same complaints arose in SDS. ered too fragile for the marathon (whose course “The Movement is supposed to be for covers more than twenty-six miles), women human liberation,” wrote one stuwere prohibited from running. Switzer completed the race, and today hundreds of thousands of dent leader. “How come the condition women around the world compete in marathons of women inside it is no better than each year. outside?” The rapidly growing number of women in college provided a ready-made constituency for the new feminism. By 1967, women throughout the country were establishing “consciousness-raising” groups to discuss the sources of their discontent. The time, many concluded, had come to establish a movement of their own, more radical than NOW. The new feminism burst onto the national scene at the Miss America beauty pageant of 1968, when protesters filled a “freedom trash can” with objects of “oppression”—girdles, brassieres, high-heeled shoes, and copies of Playboy and Cosmopolitan. (Contrary to legend, they did not set the contents on fire, which would have been highly dangerous on the wooden boardwalk. But the media quickly invented a new label for radical women—“bra burners.”) Inside the hall, demonstrators unfurled banners carrying the slogans “Freedom for Women” and “Women’s Liberation.” Personal Freedom The women’s liberation movement inspired a major expansion of the idea of freedom by insisting that it should be applied to the most intimate realms of life. Introducing the terms “sexism” and “sexual politics” and the phrase “the personal is political” into public debate, it insisted that sexual relations, conditions of marriage, and standards of beauty were as much “political” questions 1016 ★ CHAPTER 25 The Si xti es What were the sources and significance of the rights revolution of the late 1960s? as the war, civil rights, and the class tensions that had traditionally inspired the left to action. The idea that family life is not off-limits to considerations of power and justice repudiated the family-oriented public culture of the 1950s, and it permanently changed Americans’ definition of freedom. Radical feminists’ first public campaign demanded the repeal of state laws that underscored women’s lack of self-determination by banning abortions or leaving it up to physicians to decide whether a pregnancy could be terminated. Without the right to control her own reproduction, wrote one activist, “woman’s other ‘freedoms’ are tantalizing mockeries that cannot be exercised.” In 1969, a group of feminists disrupted legislative hearings on New York’s law banning abortions, where the experts scheduled to testify consisted of fourteen men and a Roman Catholic nun. The call for legalized abortions merged the nineteenth-century demand that a woman control her own body with the Sixties emphasis on sexual freedom. But the concerns of women’s liberation went far beyond sexuality. Sisterhood Is Powerful, an influential collection of essays, manifestos, and personal accounts published in 1970, touched on a remarkable array of issues, from violence against women to inequalities in the law, churches, workplaces, and family life. By this time, feminist ideas had entered the mainstream. In 1962, a poll showed that two-thirds of American women did not feel themselves to be victims of discrimination. By 1974, two-thirds did. Gay Liberation In a decade full of surprises, perhaps the greatest of all was the emergence of the movement for gay liberation. Efforts of one kind or another for greater rights for racial minorities and women had a long history. Homosexuals, wrote Harry Hay, who in 1951 founded the Mattachine Society, the first gay rights organization, were “the one group of disadvantaged people who didn’t even think of themselves as a group.” Gay men and lesbians had long been stigmatized as sinful or mentally disordered. Most states made homosexual acts illegal, and police regularly harassed the gay subcultures that existed in major cities like San Francisco and New York. McCarthyism, which viewed homosexuality as a source of national weakness, made the discrimination to which gays were subjected even worse. Although homosexuals had achieved considerable success in the arts and fashion, most kept their sexual orientation secret, or “in the closet.” The Mattachine Society had worked to persuade the public that apart from their sexual orientation, gays were average Americans who ought not to be persecuted. But as with other groups, the Sixties transformed the gay movement. If one moment marked the advent of “gay liberation,” it was a 1969 THE NEW M O VEM EN TS A N D TH E RI G H T S R E V O L U T I O N ★ 1017 police raid on the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village, a gathering place for homosexuals. Rather than bowing to police harassment, as in the past, gays fought back. Five days of rioting followed, and a militant movement was born. Gay men and lesbians stepped out of the “closet” to insist that sexual orientation is a matter of rights, power, and identity. Prejudice against homosexuals persisted. But within a few years, “gay pride” marches were being held in numerous cities. Latino Activism As in the case of blacks, a movement for legal rights had long flourished among Mexican-Americans. But the mid-1960s saw the flowering of a new militancy challenging the group’s second-class economic status. Like Black Power advocates, the movement emphasized pride in both the Mexican past and the new Chicano culture that had arisen in the United States. Unlike the Black Power movement and SDS, it was closely linked to labor struggles. Beginning in 1965, César Chavez, the son of migrant farm workers and a disciple of King, led a series of nonviolent protests, including marches, fasts, and a national boycott of California grapes, to pressure growers to agree to labor contracts with the United Farm Workers union (UFW). The UFW was as much a mass movement for civil rights as a campaign for economic betterment. The boycott mobilized Latino communities throughout the Southwest and drew national attention to the pitifully low wages and oppressive working conditions of migrant laborers. In 1970, the major growers agreed to contracts with the UFW. In New York City, the Young Lords Organization, modeled on the Black Panthers, staged street demonstrations to protest the high unemployment rate among the city’s Puerto Ricans and the lack of city services in Latino neighborhoods. (In one protest, they dumped garbage on city streets to draw attention to the city’s failure to collect refuse in poor areas.) Like SNCC and SDS, the Latino movement gave rise to feminist dissent. Many Chicano and Puerto A 1970 poster urging male and female homosexuals to join the Gay Liberation Front, one of the numerous movements that sprang to life in the late 1960s. 1018 ★ CHAPTER 25 The Si xti es What were the sources and significance of the rights revolution of the late 1960s? Rican men regarded feminist demands as incompatible with the Latino heritage of machismo (an exaggerated sense of manliness, including the right to dominate women). Young female activists, however, viewed the sexual double standard and the inequality of women as incompatible with freedom for all members of la raza (the race, or people). Red Power A scene in Denver in the mid-1960s. Rodolfo Corky Gonzáles, center, a former professional boxer who headed the city’s War on Poverty program, greets demonstrators whose sign juxtaposes Latino inequality with Mexican-American service in the army in Vietnam. The 1960s also witnessed an upsurge of Indian militancy. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations had sought to dismantle the reservation system and integrate Indians into the American mainstream—a policy known as “termination,” since it meant ending recognition of the remaining elements of Indian sovereignty. Many Indian leaders protested vigorously against this policy, and it was abandoned by President Kennedy. Johnson’s War on Poverty channeled increased federal funds to reservations. But like other minority groups, Indian activists compared their own status to that of underdeveloped countries overseas. They demanded not simply economic aid but self-determination, like the emerging nations of the Third World. Using language typical of the late 1960s, Clyde Warrior, president of the National Indian Youth Council, declared, “We are not free in the most basic sense of the word. We are not allowed to make those basic human choices about our personal life and the destiny of our communities.” Founded in 1968, the American Indian movement staged protests demanding greater tribal self-government and the restoration of economic resources guaranteed in treaties. In 1969, a group calling itself “Indians of All Tribes” occupied (or from their point of view, re-occupied) Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, claiming that it had been illegally seized from its original inhabitants. The protest, which lasted into 1971, launched the Red Power movement. In the years that followed, many Indian tribes would win greater control over education and economic development on the reservations. Indian activists would bring land claims suits, demanding and receiving monetary settlements for past dispossession. As a result of a rising sense of self-respect, the number of Americans identifying themselves as Indians doubled between 1970 and 1990. THE NEW M O VEM EN TS A N D TH E RI G H T S R E V O L U T I O N ★ 1019 Silent Spring Liberation movements among racial minorities, women, and gays challenged long-standing social inequalities. Another movement, environmentalism, called into question different pillars of American life—the equation of progress with endless increases in consumption and the faith that science, technology, and economic growth would advance the social welfare. Concern for preserving the natural environment dated back to the creation of national parks and other conservation efforts during the Progressive era. But in keeping with the spirit of the Sixties, the new environmentalism was more activist and youthoriented, and it spoke the language of empowering citizens to participate in decisions that affected their lives. Its emergence reflected the very affluence celebrated by proponents of the American Way. As the “quality of life”—including physical fitness, health, and opportunities to enjoy leisure activities—occupied a greater role in the lives of middle-class Americans, the environmental consequences of economic growth received increased attention. When the 1960s began, complaints were already being heard about the bulldozing of forests for suburban development and the contamination produced by laundry detergents and chemical lawn fertilizers seeping into drinking supplies. The publication in 1962 of Silent Spring by the marine biologist Rachel Carson brought home to millions of readers the effects of DDT, an insecticide widely used by home owners and farmers against mosquitoes, gypsy moths, and other insects. In chilling detail, Carson related how DDT killed birds and animals and caused sickness among humans. Chemical and pesticide companies launched a campaign to discredit her—some critics called the book part of a communist plot. Time magazine even condemned Carson as “hysterical” and “emotional”—words typically used by men to discredit women. The New Environmentalism Carson’s work launched the modern environmental movement. The Sierra Club, founded in the 1890s to preserve forests, saw its membership more than triple, and other groups sprang into existence to alert the country to the dangers of water contamination, air pollution, lead in paint, and the extinction of animal species. Nearly every state quickly banned the use of DDT. In 1969, television brought home to a national audience the death of birds and fish and the despoiling of beaches caused by a major oil spill off the coast of California, exposing the environmental dangers of oil transportation and ocean drilling for oil. The postwar economic boom, with its seemingly limitless demand for resources like land, energy, and building materials, placed enormous stress on the natural environment. As highways and suburbs paved over the landscape, 1020 ★ CHAPTER 25 The Si xti es What were the sources and significance of the rights revolution of the late 1960s? more and more Americans became committed to the survival of places of natural beauty. Despite vigorous opposition from business groups that considered its proposals a violation of property rights, environmentalism attracted the broadest bipartisan support of any of the new social movements. Under Republican president Richard Nixon, Congress during the late 1960s and early 1970s passed a series of measures to protect the environment, including the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts and the Endangered Species Act. On April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day, some 20 million people, most of them under the age of thirty, participated in rallies, concerts, and teach-ins. Closely related to environmentalism was the consumer movement, spearheaded by the lawyer Ralph Nader. His book Unsafe at Any Speed (1965) exposed how auto manufacturers produced highly dangerous vehicles. General Motors, whose Chevrolet Corvair Nader singled out for its tendency to roll over in certain driving situations, hired private investigators to discredit him. When their campaign was exposed, General Motors paid Nader a handsome settlement, which he used to fund investigations of other dangerous products and of misleading advertising. Nader’s campaigns laid the groundwork for the numerous new consumer protection laws and regulations of the 1970s. Unlike 1960s movements that emphasized personal liberation, environmentalism and the consumer movement called for limiting some kinds of freedom—especially the right to use private property in any way the owner d...
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