Lecture 14: 1960s Protest: The New Left, the Counterculture and the new right

Unprecedented number of protests marked the 1960s, such as…

• against Vietnam war

• on behalf of women’s rights and liberation

• free speech

• gay rights

• Latinx rights

• Black power

• countercultural movement that is associated with the hippies

Most of these movements criticized American society from the political left (criticized pro-government Dems like LBJ for not being liberal enough

• A new wave of conservatism also started to grow

  • small government

  • low taxes at home

  • extremely aggressive stance toward communism abroad

Was an incredibly polarizing time

What trends helped protest movements on the political left flourish?

1) the example of the civil rights movement and its exposure of injustice

2) the Vietnam War

3) economic affluence and rising college attendance

4) The persistence of many forms of inequality despite this affluence

5) a rising tide of cultural conformity in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Black Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and 60s

• highlighted major injustices in American society

• Showed how various forms of protest could help underscore injustice in general. 

• Nearly every major protest movement in the 1960s on the political left was in one way or another was influenced, even made possible by this movement.

Vietnam war protests

The deep distaste for the war, especially among America’s youth, encouraged a broader critique of American society as an unjust and corrupt society.  Moreover, war protests tended to spur and even energize other protest movements as well.

How did affluence and rising levels of college attendance help protest movements flourish?

• College often offered middle-class youth a relatively safe environment for mounting vigorous protests. 

• The fact that more and more of these college students had to worry less and less about money also gave them the time to protest and also the freedom to do so without major financial repercussions (compare a college student protesting to a union worker out on strike in the old days).

Inequality

• Poverty impacted many people of color in the United States, such as Latinos and Native Americans.  Such groups often intensified their protests for equality in the 1960s, often in ways that paralleled the Black struggle for freedom that we have discussed at length. 

• In addition, many women remained acutely aware of their unequal status in society.  Many middle-class women were still expected to remain in the home, serve their husbands and not build careers of their own.   That said, more and more women had joined the work force in the 1950s and 1960s.  Those that did so, however, knew full well that they got paid less for doing the same work as men.  Women, too, began to protest against unequal pay and the rigidly defined roles that a male-dominated American had laid out for them. 

• Other groups, such as gay and lesbian Americans, hoped to end various forms of discrimination directed at them. 

Conformist Culture of the 1950s and 60s

• More and more white Americans began to live in suburbs in which housing looked remarkably the same. 

• Americans who had lived through the travails of the Great Depression and World War II seemed above all to search for stability, defined primarily as economic stability and focusing on establishing a traditional nuclear family.

• The threat of instability and even annihilation amid the Cold War reinforced some of these patterns. 

• Another force that helped to propel this pressure to conform to certain cultural norms, namely the spread of television.  The 1950s were really the first decade when television had spread.  New television shows and especially television advertisements sent strong messages about what constituted “normal” and “abnormal” behavior – an incredibly strong picture of what it meant to be a true American.  Usually this meant being white, middle-class, living in a suburban home and going along with prevailing cultural trends; rebellion of all kinds was frowned upon in “T.V. Land.”  In T.V. Land, pre-marital sex was off limits, for instance, as was being a mother who did anything other than mother.  It was against this vision of women’s roles that many women in the 1960s would rebel.  Similarly, it was against this vision of a perfect suburban America where everyone lived and dressed the same, and largely held the same life goals, that the hippies of the 1960s would rebel.

What was the first major 1960s protest movement on the political left to gain widespread recognition other than the African American Civil Rights movement?

The “free-speech movement” which took hold on the campus of US Berkely in the fall of 1964.

• That fall, the president of the University, Clark Kerr, forbade students from actively recruiting on behalf of political causes in public spaces on the campus. 

• In reaction, a group of predominantly white students mounted a major protests.  Very importantly, many of the leaders of those protests had just returned from a summer working alongside Black civil rights workers in Mississippi.  Thus, among other things, the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley provides a clear example of how the famous protests that swept across college campuses in the 1960s were directly related to the Black struggle for civil rights. 

• Eventually the protests at Berkeley that year grew so intense that students occupied the main administration building.  Over 700 students were arrested during the ensuing protests, before college administrators finally reversed their policy.

The Free Speech Movement inspired student protests on college campuses across the country.  Over time, many of them would be led by an organization called ______________

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

• An organization whose main complaint was that modern American life left too little room for individual freedom.

• Began to spark major protests on campuses across the country.  Over the next several years, student protests spread to campuses throughout the country, often with members of Students for a Democratic Society in the lead. 

• These students protested an array of issues.  They protested against the role of universities in promoting experiments to help the military and against the absence of academic departments studying traditionally marginalized groups, such as women, Black Americans and Latinos. 

• These protests help spark the establishment of women studies, Black Studies, and Latinx Studies programs in colleges and universities throughout the country. 

• Perhaps most frequently and intensely of all, after 1965 students protested the Vietnam War. 

• And by the late 1960s, it seemed, students protested nearly everything.  In 1968, there were over 200 major student protests on college campuses across the country.  The most famous, perhaps, took place at Columbia University in New York City, where a leader of Students for a Democratic Society led others in occupying the office of the university president as well as some classroom buildings. 

• In time, the student movement fractured and grew increasingly radical. 

• By the late 1960s, for many student protestors, free speech and Vietnam were no longer the only issues; instead, capitalism and American imperialism had become the major targets. 

• Meanwhile, certain members of the student movement grew aggressively militant, even advocating violence to foment a major revolution.

College students, of course, were hardly the only Americans to protest in the 1960s.  The Black struggle for freedom, of course, continued, a movement that included many college students but also people from other walks of life as well.  As we’ve discussed, as the 1960s wore on, certain factions of the struggle for Black equality grew less committed to nonviolent resistance and integration as advocated by Martin Luther King, Jr.  In 1966, as I have mentioned, leaders of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, which had originally formed in the wake of the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins in 1960s, expelled its white members and adopted “Black Power” as its rallying cry.  As we’ve noted, advocates of Black Power were heavily influenced by Malcolm X.  They similarly preached separation from the white community, black self-reliance, and also self-defense instead of non-violence.

            Additionally, other people of color, such as Latinos, Native Americans, and also Asian Americans intensified their efforts to end their long experience of second-class citizenship in the United States.  As in the case of the Black movement, as the 1960s wore on, such groups often combined confrontational protests with an intense focus on ethnic pride.

Moderate form of Women’s protests

• Mainly fought for legal equality

• the National Organization of Women (NOW) was formed

• In the 1960s women could still not open a bank account or buy property without the signature of their father or husband. Similarly, women were often dismissed from their jobs upon getting pregnant. 

• Eventually, NOW also reinvigorated the call for an equal rights amendment in the constitution and continued to fight for one for years to come. 

Women’s liberation movement

• More radical part of women’s protests

• Advocates of women’s liberation saw society as fundamentally structured to serve the goals of men and saw centuries of male-domination as the source of many of society’s most pressing problems. 

• Critiqued everything from women’s fashion -- as too restricting and geared toward satisfying the male gaze – to family life – to the fact that many women were encouraged to put men’s sexual satisfaction first and their own second, if they had been taught to value their own sexual satisfaction at all. 

• Moreover, many of them called for a complete and radical transformation of American economic and political life along lines more suitable for women and less directly designed by men. 

• Some of the frustration of women on the political left had grown out of how women had been treated in major political movements, including the Black civil rights movement.

LGBTQ Protests

• Throughout most of the 20th-century, prejudices forced gay and lesbians to keep their love lives completely secret. 

• Those who were discovered at times were fired from their jobs or were even arrested for engaging in officially illegal sexual acts.  

• By the mid-1960s gay activists had begun to protest this situation.  In 1965, for instance, a collection of gay men filed lawsuits and launched protests against discrimination against them in the civil service exams that determined who got many federal jobs. 

• Four years later, however, the gay and lesbian rights movement surged in the wake of a police raid on a gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, in New York City

Stonewall Rebellion

Police raid on a gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, in New York City.  Such raids of gay bars were routine at the time.  But on this occasion, bar patrons rebelled, fighting off officers who tried to arrest them.  In the wake of the Stonewall rebellion, more and more gay and lesbian political organizations formed demanding their rights.

Interwoven throughout many of the movements I have been discussing was a new emphasis on sexual freedom, on recreational drug use, and on rejecting conventional ways of dressing or wearing ones hair. → led to _________

the hippies

Hippies

• Flourished for the first time in the late 1960s. 

• Some were involved in the more explicit political movements. 

• Others, however, were less interested in politics per se than in personal exploration, in pursuing sensual pleasure through sexual experimentation and drug use, and rebelling against cultural norms.

Views of the New Right

• Called for greater individual freedom but that also advocated dramatically less government while also calling for greater military interventions to stop communism abroad. 

• Much like the early student movements on the left, the new right in part had roots in the student culture of the 1950s and early 1960s. 

• These students called for a return to traditional values and the deconstruction of the huge New Deal state that they argued included unfair taxes, destructively interfered with the free market and made Americans too dependent on government. 

• Often these students combined such views with a rabid anti-communism. 

• These conservative students quickly found allies in Americans who deeply embraced the anti-communist cause and increasingly with many Southerners, who increasingly saw federal interference in the issue of Civil Rights as evidence that the reach of the federal government itself had become overgrown and needed to be cut back. 

Barry Goldwater

• Combination of anti-civil rights Southerners, staunch and aggressive anti-communists, as well as Americans who increasingly favored government cutbacks came together in the Presidential election of 1964, to support the candidacy.

• Conservative Republican Senator from Arizona who supported

  • Aggressive military action to stop the spread of communism

  • Saw federal efforts to promote integration as an overextension of federal power

  • Opposed nearly all aspects of the New Deal, instead favoring a largely unregulated, “free market,” economy, or an economy in which government doesn’t really intervene

• Goldwater, of course, lost the election of 1964 to Lyndon Johnson in a landslide.  Still, his candidacy signaled the power of a new conservatism in American life.  Moreover, he managed to win five Southern states, which in itself signaled the beginning of a political shift of major historic importance – the shift of white Southerners away from the Democratic Party, which they had supported almost unanimously since before the Civil War, to the Republican party.