"The sixties in the United States" by Giuseppe Lojacono
Social crisis and racial revolt in the U.S.A. The attempt of demolition of
the traditional culture and the institutions gone out of the second world war.
2nd part of the article
The birth of the student movement
The fifties in the United States were characterized by deep social and political
changes that would have had great consequences only in the following decade. At
the end of the Second World War, with the reentry in the homeland of million of
American soldiers, there was a real baby boom that would have increased the number
of registrations to the high schools and the universities in the first years of
the sixty. Besides, the spreading anticommunist feeling fomented by the McCarthy's
movement, contributed to create an ideological ultraconservatorism that didn't
allow any comparison between the new and the old generations. It remained, nevertheless,
an ample economic comfort deriving from a world economy in great growth from which
the United States more than all other nations profited. Such wealth, if on one
side it allowed the children of the average middle class to access with great
facility the expensive secondary education (the university students between 18
and 22 years old would have passed from 15% in 1940 to 44% in 1965), on the other
one they will underline deep social disparities between the privileged classes
and the proletariat, above all the black one.
The studies that have dealt with the birth of the American student movement,
have often labored to individualize the causes of his blooming just at the beginnings
of the sixties. Conditions had not been different for the years that had preceded
that period and they would not changed in the following period (the 70s). Then,
for which reason in that decade there was the highest concentration of youth protests
that the American history remembers? It can be affirmed that a concomitance of
elements that taken separately would seem harmless, they made turbulent the campus
of the American universities. Firstly, the teaching imparted either by the parents
either from the university structures. The former, educated to the austerity and
the traditionalism of the 30s and 40s, for reaction allowed an excessive laxism,
also influenced by the pedagogical theories of the doctor Spock that became the
model of thousand of American mamas. The latter, in the attempt make up for the
parental educational lacks, they were worried more for the morality of their own
affiliates than for their cultural preparation. In this environment of family
laxity and institutional repression, the American young people didn't recognize
themselves, neither culturally neither socially.
In the great American universities, first among all Berkeley and Harvard, the
students started that activity of dismantlement of the traditions that the sociologist
Daniel Bell defined “the knowledge revolution”. In front of a politics
and a society that recalled themselves entirely to the realism and the pragmatism,
the young people started seeking new ideals of existentialism derived from the
reading of French philosophers novelists, mainly Camus and in smaller way Sartre.
The taking of conscience of the lack of a precise destination to the American
social development upset the certainties that obstinately the parents had inculcated
in their own children. The “American dream” had created a society devoted
to the wealth and the exploitation of the fellow creatures, at least for which
young people thought. Daniel Bell has given another definition to us that suits
well for this period and that is that in the sixties it was reached the “end
of the ideologies”, in the sense that the patriotism, the Americanism, the
ultraconservative democracy that had characterized the two preceding decades was
abhorred by the young people who "tabula rasa" of their own cultural
patrimony and they looked for a new not prebuilt one.
The communist influence
Were they really years without ideologies? Had not the students any political
or social ideal? It would not be correct to answer in affirmative way to both
questions. The American student movement, although substantially apolitical in
its development, it was at the origins deeply influenced by the socialist and
communist thought, but with great differences in comparison to what it would have
happened in Europe subsequently, for instance in the incubators of the juvenile
Marxism of the universities in Oxford and Frankfurt. In the Old continent, the
students referred to the communist orthodoxy, to the Marxism, or to the newer
Maoism. In the United States, after the maccartism, an appeal so open to Marxism
was not possible anymore. The political and cultural repression had been too strong
to allow an inversion of tendency that brought to the pure communist thought,
of class revolt and government of the people, meant as proletariat. The American
teen-agers that would have protested in the plazas and in the universities came
from families without economic problems and they didn't know the hard life of
the ghetto or the countries. In addition to this, the class traditionally nearer
to the communist ideas, that is the workers, in the United States it was not inclinable
to changes, but it sustained openly the government. The labor unions, after the
hard battles of the thirties, had soothed and integrated in the American productive
system that in the collective imaginary gave wealth to everybody.
Therefore, to which type of socialism does the students referred to found what
would have become the New American Left? Essentially, to a most romantic communism
without political connotations. A naïf communism of social equality, of justice
and of elimination of the racial disparities. To give great push to this not traditional
vision, to give great emphasis to these ideas, it came the Castro's revolt. The
generation of the sixties that was conforming quickly to the models represented
by Ginsburg in his "Howl" and from Jack Kerouac with "On the road",
it was literally fallen in love with the Cuban revolution. Between 1958 and 1961,
year when the America State Department prohibited the trips to Cuba and to China
and Albania, thousand of students approached in the Caribbean island to take contact
with “the empire of the evil” as Ronald Reagan would have labeled the
communist world subsequently.
The enthusiasm and the ardor of the Castro's troops had to be contagious, because
between 1960 and 1963 It was created a discreet number of American associations
that followed the socialist and communist teachings. Among them, it is rightful
to quote the Progressive Labour Party (Plp), the Student Peace Union (Spu), the
Young People Socialist League and the W.E.B. Du Bois that got the name from a
Afro-American researcher curiously become communist at the age of 90. All these
groups, though they were very active, remained always of scarce numerical weight.
The reasons were essentially two: the strict control of the FBI to which they
were submitted all subjects that professed themselves communist and the inconstancy
of the affairs of the young people. Analyzing better this second point, it can
be noticed how the affiliation to an organized group didn't often last more than
few months and only for well-determinated causes. The young people often met for
local protests only without any other type of finality.
This is particularly true if we analyze the affairs of the Students for Democratic
Society (Sds) the largest student organization created in the United States. Created
in 1960, it was completely refounded in 1962, following the principles dictated
in the “Declaration of Port Huron”, an ideological manifesto almost
entirely written by Tom Hayden. In the writing, it claimed the right of the American
young people to modify the existing social and political inequality in the U.S.A,
through a direct action. This action was manifested firstly with the collaboration
with the Movement for the Civil Rights in States of the South. The white university
students devoted their free summer time to the struggle for the abolition of the
segregation and for the social equality, in collaboration with the black associations
for the whole period 1961-1964. However, the increasing number of accidents and
repression of not authorized demonstrations, mined at the base the collaboration
between races. The black movements, particularly dissatisfied of the help given
by the white young people, started to meet in the nationalists of the “Black
Power” of which we shall speak subsequently. The attention of the Sds members
was moved on those institutions where they lived for large part of the year: the
universities. As already explained, the study institutions were seen as class-conscious
and deniers of the fundamental right to a free education. To change the status
quo was formed a spontaneous movement denominated “Free Speech Movement”
in which had great role the Sds organization itself.
The first real clashes happened in the University of Berkeley in 1964. The
stiring up cause was enough futile. The rector of the university prohibited the
distribution of political material near the gates of the campus. Theoretically,
the reason was of the students, because the zone of distribution was not under
the authority of the university, but in practice the intervention of the police
prevented any activities in proximity of the university structures. The occupation
of the campus was so decided and involved several thousand of students. The accidents
that followed the forced clearing of the university, brought to the attention
of the whole nation the new student movement. Some of the leaders of the movements
were arrested and among them also Mario Savio who was accused to have wildly beaten
a police officer. The forced repression didn't do anything else other than increasing
the desire of liberty of the young people. Other better organized demonstrations
developed in 1965 spring giving great strength to the Free Speech Movement. Despite
the increasing affiliates to the Sds that became the first organization at national
level headquartered in all the states of the Union, it missed a true project and
a leader that dictated the directives to be followed. It was so that the interest
for every new struggle diminished quickly: the civil rights, the liberty of word,
the Vietnam war, the sexual freedom were firstly elevated to dogmas of faith for
then to be abandoned.
The protest against the Vietnam war.
With the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam through the dispatch of regular
troops at beginning of 1965, there was also a change in the finalities, always
very confused, of the student movements. From the social struggle, they passed
to a political confrontation. The government was attacked for the presumed imperialism
shown in intervening in such a distant war that was not felt as “right”.
All previous armed conflicts in the American history had been painted as “struggles
for freedom” and as such mantled with patriotism and rhetoric. In the era
of television, the lies could be easily unmasked. In August 1965, the reporter
Morley Safer of the NBC (the American National Television), transmitted a journalistic
service in which there was a platoon of American soldiers that after having combed
a Vietnamite village looking for Vietcong, it set fire without reason the huts
and the cultivation. The disdain provoked by the revelation of cruel and inhuman
behaviors perpetrated by the American soldiers, baited a reaction of collective
scorn among the young people, the same ones who would have had to participate
in the war as recruits.
Initially, the protest was pacific. They were organized sit-ins in a lot of
universities and protest demonstrations. The students thought that in a true democracy
as the American one, it was enough to show the errors committed by the political
men so that they could correct their own behavior. The ingenuity of such a thought
is explainable surely with a blind pacifism that was present among the young people.
Nobody in that first period would have ever imagined that the government of the
United States would have continued in the conflict in the Asian South East, arriving
to use really weapons like napalm. To partially lift the veil that covered the
eyes of these revolutionary teen-agers, it arrived the great number of forced
enlistment. At the end of the war, 1.800.000 American young people would have
spent at least six months in Vietnam as members of the armed forces. The answer
was not collective, but generally individual. The escapes abroad multiplied, especially
in Canada and Sweden, as well as the increasing number of exemptions for medical
causes among the high middle class that let suspect a certain connivance between
the physicians that certified the illnesses and the families the enlisted men.
These two solutions were possible only for those people that had enough money
to pay for the exile or the very discussed medical certificate. For all other
people, there was the Vietnam War or the clandestinity. The division between the
black students that, originating from poorer families, could not avoid the war
and white students was one of the explanations for the quick decline of importance
of the Sds. After a march near the Pentagon to which around 75.000 persons participated,
the Sds organization had believed that the moment had come to create a political
party that gathered all the groups of the United States in a formation that pleaded
the juvenile cause inside the Congress. This way, in a general Conference in Chicago
it was tried to find some finalities common to all the participants of the student
movement. The meeting was a failure for the lack of real general ideal, but, above
all, of a true leader.
1968 was the year of the apotheosis and the decadence of the Sds. In January
and June, hundreds of demonstrations upset almost all the university. Despite
after the offensive of the Tet, according to a survey 'Gallup', the people favorable
to the conflict had gone down from 56% to 42 %, nobody among the opponents to
the war considered right the methods of opposition used by the students. The crisis
was increased in 1969 when the Sds were divided in intransigent radical corpuscles
that transformed themselves in terrorists in some cases. In June of that year,
the group of the “Weathermen” was created (from a strophe of a song
of Bob Dylan). Initially, it had as purpose “to change the weather”
above the heads of the political men in Washington, but well soon it degenerated
in a gang of armed action, guilty of terrorist attacks, useless and above all
misunderstood by the other students. After the beginning of the American withdrawal
from Vietnam (that however would have lasted until 1975), nobody understood for
what reason was had to attack with violence (and weapons) the institutions. The
Weathermen accelerated the breakup of the Sds that ended up with losing that character
of national organization splitting up in subgroups that struggled for the most
disparate causes, from the defense of the environment to the struggle against
the death penalty. In ten years, the movement of student protest had crossed the
whole possible arc of evolution, from expression of protest up to the armed struggle,
for then to go off in a spontaneous death.
The “Hippies” and the sexual revolution.
To decree the premature end of the Sds was also the limited time duration of
the political and social interest of the young people. The period coincided, in
wide measure, with the duration of the university quadrennium and once reached
the so-called “maturity” it diminished, being substituted by career,
family, and children. That the feeling of revolt was a generational aspect it
can also be deduced from the increased number of home escapes of the teenagers
and from the creation of a style of alternative life. The Puritanism and the cultural
preclusion of the parents was only partially the base of almost 90.000 escapes
certified by the FBI in 1966. Juvenile wish to find a parallel world to the daily
reality had increased the interest for the oriental cultures and religions and
for the experience with narcotics. The boom of the light drugs, first among all
marijuana, was a consequence of the search of feelings that transcended the human
being.
The development of the hippy communities was very faster than that of the student
movements, either on the East Coast either on the West Coast. In fact, already
in 1965, in the East Side in New York and in the district of Haight Hasbury in
San Francisco were founded the first true communities that grew to dizzy rhythm
up to half the seventies. The use of narcotic substances didn't respond to a necessity
of breakup with the dominant culture only, but it becomes a real religion. A teacher
of the Harvard University, Timothy Leary, expelled from the teaching order for
founded suspicions that he delivered to the students LSD during the lessons, founded
the League for the Spiritual Search that through the use of drugs wanted to reach
a new stadium of the human development. Famous writers as Ginsburg and Kesey,
singers of international level as Bob Dylan, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones,
were near to this movement for a more or less long period.
Other characteristic element of the hippy communities was the concept of free
love in all its forms that was practically resolved in a great sexual freedom.
In an extremely puritanical society, the accented promiscuity present in the communities
aroused greater scandal than whatever else “vice” that the hippies could
have. The fact that the largest part of them was teenagers, increased the resentment
of the middle class. The radical change of the sexual habits brought to important
consequences in the personal relationship. The homosexual love was no more considered
an absolute taboo and the first gay organizations did their appearance especially
in the zone of New York. Besides, the strong increase of the sexual activity in
adolescent age was followed from an increase of the births. In 1960, the Food
and Drug Administration had approved the use of the contraceptive pill and immediately
the women had discovered what advantages its use furnished. The large diffusion
of a system of prevention of the pregnancy, freed the girls from the terror of
the fifties, that is an illegitimate child because born out of the marriage. Instead,
the mature women could pursue working success with great safety, without the fear
to see interrupted their own career from an unwanted child.
The two elements quoted above were only the point of the iceberg of that general
feminist movement that was born in the sixties. The twentieth century in the United
States until the Great Depressions had seen the woman in the traditional role
of housewife and mother. With the desperate need of money that gripped the families
in the thirties, the female job became more and more frequent. During the Second
World War, what in principle was a family necessity it was transformed in a national
duty. The women had to replace the men in the factories and often also in the
fields. With the end of the conflict, the smaller production involved an occupational
cut that mainly strokes the so-called “weak sex.” How this definition
wasn't true, it had to be already shown in the fifties. The media of mass communication
started to pay attention to that category of housewives, former workers who felt
frustrated from the return to the “civil life” after the war. The improved
conditions allowed to a larger percentage of women to achieve university degrees
equal, if not superior, to the men but the clear contrast between the personal
worth and the reachable managerial levels or the obtainable pay unmasked the depth
sense of female dissatisfaction for the American social reality. The middle salary
of a woman was between 59 and 65% of that of a man with the same office and to
parity of schedule of job. In 1963 the writer Betty Friedan published the book
The Femine Mistique that can be considered as the manifesto of the American feminist
movement. In it, it was described mercilessly the incongruity between the social
stereotype of the happy housewives and the existence of a lot of dissatisfied
and depressed female professionals.
Initially, the female dissatisfaction was assembled in the student groups and
around the same ideal shared by these movements: the freedom of thought and the
civil rights. Well soon however, the leaders of the movement realized that the
masculine component of the student movements had the tendency to put in minority,
consciously or unconsciously, the other sex. It is difficult to establish whether
it was a wanted behavior or not, but it is a fact that, although the female groups
as the Women's International Leage for Peace and the Women Strike for Peace picked
up a large number of registrations, it was only in 1966 with the creation of the
National Organization for Woman (NOW) that the female claims assumed an autonomous
course and addressed to the gaining of the full equality between the sexes. The
NOW, founded by Betty Friedan, had as principal purpose a political struggle that
conducted to the realization of legislative actions of concrete equalization and
not simply paternalistic measures as those happened in precedence for that that
it concerned the world of the workers.
The feminist political struggle was not stopped at the formulation given by
the NOW, but it went well further. A most radical stream of that organization
separated for originating the “Movement for the liberation of the Woman",
real fulcrum of that fighting feminism that would have characterized the seventies.
The exponents of the movement affirmed with conviction that every personal aspect
of the female universe could constitute matter of struggle politics. Therefore,
not only the professional world, but also that of the family and, above all, of
the health. Under this aspect, the absolute right of the woman to the pregnancy
was exasperated. Screeming 'Off Our Bodies' (title also of a diffused radical
magazine of the period), the women pretended the legalization of the abortion.
The struggle would have concluded in 1973 only, with the sentence Roe v. Wade
that would have allowed it at least in the first months of the pregnancy.
As mentioned in precedence, the feminist movements had started its own activity
within the civil rights and then it has changed its goals. This is not entirely
true for the black exponents of the movement. The black women continued to have
great importance in the Movement for the Civil Rights and in the Black Power and
even in the Black Panthers. This is due to the fact that in the forties and fifties,
they were the only ones in their family to have a well-remunerated job, often
as waiter or housekeeper in white families. With the progressive embitterment
of the racial revolt and the consequent detention of the black men, the women
reached more easily power positions that they preserved with extreme ability.
Among them, it is important to quote Fannie Lou Hamer. Born in 1917 in the state
of Mississippi, one of the more segregationist one of the whole nation, she had
had to change life when, pushed by the legitimate desire to participate in the
political vote, she had enrolled in the electoral lists, being dismissed for such
motive from her own employer. From that moment on, she fought with vigor for an
full racial equality, through the creation of the Mississippi Freedom Democrat
Party and the organization, also at juvenile and student level, of the black protest
against the status quo. The sixties were doubly important for the black women.
They could not only get important victories for their sex, but also for their
race. In fact, with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the black women, finally level
up to the white, had new and unexplored possibilities in the field of the job
and the education that allowed the amelioration of the life condition in an exponential
way. With the increasing of the economic resources and of the level of education,
however, the serious social discrimination in which the black minority was living
in the United States was more and more underlined. For such reason, the claim
of the black women gradually met those of the Afro-Americans as race, becoming
an essential component of it.
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