Standard Joke About America in the 1960s

¶ … standard joke about America in the 1960s claims that, if you can remember the decade, you did not live through it. Although perhaps intended as a joke about drug usage, the joke also points in a serious way to social change in the decade, which was so rapid and far-reaching that it did seem like the world changed almost daily. This is the paradox of Todd Gitlin's "years of hope" and "days of rage" -- that with so much social and cultural upheaval, the overall mood at any given moment in the 1960s must surely have seemed contradictory. How then can we assess the three most important themes in this broad social change? I would like to make the case that the three longest-lasting social changes came with America's forced adjustment to new realities on the international scene, with Vietnam; on the domestic scene, with the Civil Rights movement; and finally through the large-scale cultural shift, which emerges both from the youth protests of Vietnam and the legal maneuvering of the campaign for Civil Rights, to result in the so-called "sexual revolution" and the women's movement. By examining these three themes, I think we can understand better the mood of the 1960s which Gitlin tries to capture, and see the ways in which large-scale social trends in the 1960s informed each other, only to be transformed in subsequent decades.

The first historical trend of the 1960s I wish to examine is Civil Rights. It is worth noting at the outset that the Civil Rights movement is bookended by two decisions by the United States Supreme Court. After an initial flurry of liberty in the "Radical Reconstruction" period after the Civil War, in 1896 the Supreme Court would issue the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which codified a policy of social segregation ("separate but equal"). The Civil Rights era proper will then begin not with the slow integration of African-Americans into society at large, but into the military first: in 1948, President Harry S. Truman would desegregate the military by executive order, and this newly-integrated force would fight in Korea. The role played by African-Americans in the military as the 50s and 60s progressed, though, would be a point of contention in terms of the failure of the American government to provide equal treatment for citizens who were now equally subject to military conscription, discussed further in the analysis of Vietnam below. But it is worth noting that the integration of the military gave the final impetus for African-Americans to finally start agitating for Civil Rights under the law. Ultimately this led to various legal challenges to Plessy until it was the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954, as Chafe notes, that would set into motion the larger agitation that took place in the 1960s (Chafe 159-60).

But to a certain degree, the 1960s marked a shift in the Civil Rights campaign, from the legal means pursued in the 1950s not only with the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education but also with the non-violent protests organized by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., towards a more violent confrontation that would erupt with the new decade. Obviously it was the vested interests within the former states of the Confederacy to put down the agitation on the part of African-Americans, and the means employed grew increasingly violent. Gitlin notes that by the spring of 1963, the relatively new medium of television was bringing images of this violence into homes across America:

What commandeered the TV cameras that spring were the Negro demonstrators in Birmingham, and Bull Connor's cattle prods, fire hoses, and police dogs that greeted them. The national liberal conscience was galvanized; civil rights groups now found themselves the cutting edge of a coalition of unions, churches, and students. White police and racist mobs were now the conspicuous disorder that Kennedy had to manage. When Governor George Wallace grandstanded against Negro admissions at the University of Alabama, Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and faced him down. (Gitlin 144)

It is worth noting what Gitlin is careful to point out -- that the increasing violence in the Civil Rights movement would, in fact, earn the movement additional supporters, who were largely not African-American, but represented a "coalition of unions, churches, and students." Hampton and Fayer note that, in less than three weeks after the great triumph of Dr. King's non-violent campaign in the massive March on Washington organized in 1963, violence would change the interpretation of the success of non-violent means of achieving the desired goal:

Eighteen days after the euphoria of the March on Washington, four hundred worshippers crowded into the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham for Sunday services. Only months earlier, the church had been the rallying point for the marches against Bull Connor's police dogs and fire hoses. On September 15, 1963, a group of young girls had just finished a Sunday school lesson and were in the basement changing into their choir robes. A few blocks away, but within sight of the church, a white man stood waiting on the sidewalk. He was Birmingham truck driver and one-time city employee Robert Edward Chambliss -- the man whom friends in the Eastview 13 Klavern of the Alabama Klan called Dynamite Bob. At 10:19 A.M., fifteen sticks of explosive blew apart the church basement and the children in the changing room. (Hampton and Fayer, 171)

The bombing, which would ultimately kill four African-American schoolgirls (while injuring many more), shocked the nation and represented an even uglier transformation of the reactionary forces in the South. But of course this legitimization of violence -- and the ugly mood in the Southern states -- would have a massively disruptive effect about two months after the Birmingham church bombing, with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In the meantime, the Republican Party underwent a shift in which internal party revolutionaries like Phyllis Schlafly -- whose pamphlet A Choice not an Echo would help the supporters of Senator Barry Goldwater to win the GOP's nomination for their candidate -- would re-organize the Republican Party along strong ideological lines which included rhetoric which seemed incredibly irresponsible, and which stood up for "states rights" as a way of veiling outright racism. It is slightly staggering to realize that Goldwater's claim that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" would come after the assassination of Kennedy and of the four little girls in Birmingham, in a time when extremism clearly merited no defense. Clearly, the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s would lead to greater radicalization on both sides of the divide.

The second historical trend of the 1960s I wish to examine is the anti-war movement, whose origins came initially) from the intersection of young white people with the Civil Rights movement. College students who began to work on behalf of the Civil Rights movement would spearhead an extraordinary politicization of young people throughout the 1960s, giving rise to a youth movement (complete with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin's "Youth International Party" or Yippies) and a youth-oriented "counterculture" eventually. Bloom and Breines note that it was the involvement as "Freedom Riders" and in the registration of African-American voters throughout the south in the early 1960s that would set the path for the later radicalization of young people in the decade:

White northern students were inspired to aid the civil rights movement in the South and on their own campuses. That ?activism led to an attempt at UC Berkeley to raise money for SNCC, ?which led in turn to the first widely heralded campus action of the ?1960s, the Free Speech Movement. Students began to look at their ?own institutions and to realize how profoundly undemocratic they ?were. (Bloom and Breines, 59).

This concern with "undemocratic" institutions in America would lead to a more broad "New Left" movement, with documents like Tom Hayden's "Port Huron Statement" which (despite criticism from some quarters as being a "compromised second draft") focused its attention on the idea of "participatory democracy," in other words, increasing political involvement altogether. (This concept would become more important in the cultural trends of the later 1960s, such as feminism and gay rights, which in many ways hinged upon the very idea of "consciousness raising" and held to the slogan that "the personal is the political.") But of course the predominant reason for the increased student politicization was the "escalation" of the conflict in Vietnam. Bloom and Breines point out that

It is impossible to separate the antiwar movement from the student ?movement. It was among students that opposition to the war began ?and developed its massive following. For years students remained ?the most vocal and active group opposing American involvement in ?Vietnam. SDS called for the first demonstrations against American ?involvement in 1965; organizers were staggered when 25,000 people ?showed up in Washington to protest the war. After initial eruptions over campus issues and other questions, by 1965 campus activism began to focus on opposition to ?the war. Teach-ins offered day- and night-long forums of opinion and ?information about American policy in Southeast Asia. Opposition ?grew to campus recruiting by war-related industries, defense-related ?and -funded research, and campus Reserve Officer Training Corps ?(ROTC). Student protests against these institutions and representatives erupted on countless campuses. Off-campus, students demonstrated in front of the White House and the Pentagon, attempted ?to prevent government officials from speaking around the country, ?campaigned for candidates running against the war, and sought in ?numerous ways to convince others of the immorality and wrongheadness, to say nothing of the incredible destruction and probable failure, ?of American involvement. (Bloom and Breines 203)

The continuation of the draft into the later 1960s occasioned greater protest against continued U.S. involvement. Additionally, the fact that the draft was viewed as disproportionately affecting poor African-Americans helped to increase radicalization of the African-American community, and to a certain degree was responsible for the growth of "black power" organizations in the 1960s such as the Nation of Islam of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, or the Black Panthers of Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton, and Eldridge Cleaver. Finally, as Bloom and Breines note, there was a substantial overlap in the anti-war community and the Civil Rights community: "Students were not alone in protesting the war. Civil rights activists, ?initially SNCC and later Martin Luther King, Jr., joined" (203). It is also worth recalling that the Rev. King was assassinated in the midst of a speaking tour about the Vietnam war, not about the Civil Rights movement per se. To some extent, the greater radicalization in Civil Rights as the 1960s progressed would inspire a greater radicalization in the anti-war left as well.

In consequence, the anti-war movement to a certain degree led to a total disconnection between the culture of young persons and the older generations. Mario Savio in Berkeley's Free Speech Movement would warn students "don't trust anyone over 30," the reason presumably being because that age is required for election to the U.S. Senate or Presidency, the very persons who had permitted "escalation" in Vietnam. The Vietnam war seemed perfectly logical to the people whose policy it represented; but to the teenagers who were drafted and sent to Southeast Asia to fight a guerilla campaign on unfamiliar territory, it seemed like sheer absurdism. Tim O'Brien's famous Vietnam fiction, The Things They Carried, nicely captures the disconnect in his story entitled "How to Tell a True War Story":

What happened was, we crossed a muddy river and marched west into the mountains, and on the third day we took a break along a trail junction in deep jungle. Right away, Lemon and Rat Kiley started goofing. They didn't understand about the spookiness. They were kids; they just didn't know. A nature hike, they thought, not even a war, so they went off into the shade of some giant trees -- quadruple canopy, no sunlight at all -- and they were giggling and calling each other yellow mother and playing a silly game they'd invented. The game involved smoke grenades, which were harmless unless you did stupid things, and what they did was pull out the pin and stand a few feet apart and play catch under the shade of those huge trees. Whoever chickened out was a yellow mother. And if nobody chickened out, the grenade would make a light popping sound and they'd be covered with smoke and they'd laugh and dance around and then do it again. (66-7)

The jokey nicknames, the "goofing," and the insistence that "they were kids; they just didn't know" are O'Brien's ways of bringing home to the reader that there was very little traditional military heroism about the fight in Vietnam: the platoons that were sent there to fight were full of "kids," and they were not expected to "know" about anything, least of all a credible reason beyond Kennan's containment strategy, Kennedy and Johnson's domino theory, and ultimately Henry Kissinger's Realpolitik. Radicalization would come so easily to the anti-war and youth movements because the U.S. Government's escalation in Vietnam had been premised upon an outright lie. Robert Buzzanco notes that the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which made America's involvement in Vietnam a little less vague by authorizing the Johnson White House to use conventional military force in Southeast Asia, was based on a fraud:

In August, two American destroyers, the Maddox and the C. Turner Joy, were in DRVN territorial waters as part of the 34-A operations when they were allegedly attacked by north Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin. The attacks were never substantiated -- Johnson himself laughed, "hell, those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish" -- but the episode gave LBJ a convenient excuse to begin air strikes above the seventeenth parallel and to ask Congress for authority to "take all necessary measures" to defend the RVN. The so-called Gulf of Tonkin Resolution then passed 416-0 in the House of Representatives and 88-2 in the Senate… (Buzzanco 70)

But it is also worth contextualizing the increased American military involvement with the overall process of demobilization after World War Two, and Eisenhower's warnings at the outset of the decade about the "military-industrial complex." To a certain degree, what is termed the "Cold War" represents a failure of American capitalism to fully demobilize, requiring the protracted proxy wars conducted in the wake of World War II (such as Korea and Vietnam) to justify the continued central role played by defense-related industries within the American economy.

The final historical trend of the 1960s I wish to identify is the "sexual revolution" with the women's movement and the rise of feminism considered as a vital adjunct. If O'Brien's "kids" fighting a war are emblematic of the final way in which youth culture transformed American society in the sixties, which was through a less overtly political and more personal means -- what is generally termed "the sexual revolution." Most persons are not accustomed to thinking of the United States Supreme Court and sex in the same thought, yet it is worth noting that the sexual revolution of the 1960s was intellectually driven by the Supreme Court's intervention in a number of pivotal cases, much as the Civil Rights movement had been similarly sparked. These cases -- which include Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), Loving v. Virginia (1967), and of course Roe v. Wade (1973) -- indicate the Supreme Court's growing intervention in issues related to sexuality, and to some extent are driven by intellectual changes wrought by the Civil Rights movement. Although the Court's decision in Griswold v. Connecticut was handed down at the height of the Civil Rights era in 1965, to a certain degree, it represented the established Civil Rights tradition of challenging legislation in courts through a prepared and motivated activist organization -- in this case, the head of Connecticut's chapter of Planned Parenthood, Estelle Griswold, deliberately opened a family planning clinic in downtown New Haven, within spitting distance of Yale University. To a certain degree, Griswold was already acting in the feminist tradition of Civil Rights, which had -- in the earlier suffragist era -- already launched the careers of early 20th century birth control reformers like Margaret Sanger in the U.S.A. Or Marie Stopes in London. But in Griswold v. Connecticut, Eliza Griswold and Planned Parenthood were deliberately challenging an enumerated law in the state of Connecticut. Justice Douglas in the Court's majority decision in Griswold quotes the relevant portion of Connecticut's existing statute (which had been legislated in 1879): "Any person who uses any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception shall be fined not less than fifty dollars or imprisoned not less than sixty days nor more than one year or be both fined and imprisoned." (Griswold 1965). What is most noteworthy -- especially in lights of the emergence of the Griswold decision from the decade that was the crucible of the Civil Rights movement -- is that Griswold herself did not represent the first attempt to challenge the Connecticut statute in the Supreme Court. Yet the shock of the Griswold decision was not that the Court found in favor of the right to birth control, but how it did so. Douglas, deciding for the majority, claimed that the right was held under the First Amendment, which -- in the words of his Griswold opinion -- "has a penumbra where privacy is protected from governmental intrusion" (Griswold 1965). In other words, the Supreme Court would determine that the right to buy a condom is somehow protected by the guarantees of freedom of speech and religion offered in the Bill of Rights. Yet Douglas' vague invocation of a "penumbra" to those rights which includes a right to "privacy" would become the more central contention in later cases.

But only two years after the Griswold decision, the Court -- still in Lyndon Johnson's presidency, and perhaps influenced by the administration's willingness to address the concerns of previously disenfranchised minorities -- would make another decision about sexual behavior and the law which more obviously derives from the mainstream Civil Rights movement for African-Americans in Loving v. Virginia (1967). The aptly-named Loving case challenged the openly racist statutes in Virginia, but common throughout the South, prohibiting interracial marriage. The legal grounds for challenge, however, did not have to depend upon the invocation of a "penumbra" of the First Amendement -- instead, as a way of acknowledging the origin of the Reconstruction-era amendments in an attempt to ameliorate the lot of former slaves, the Court's decision would hinge upon the violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. As Chief Justice Earl Warren would note in his majority opinion on the case, Loving v. Virignia presents a constitutional question never addressed by this Court: whether a statutory scheme adopted by the State of Virginia to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications violates the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. (Loving 1967).