Strategy

by Lawrence Freedman

  The strategy behind the Birmingham campaign was not so much to provoke violence as to generate a crisis of which violence could be a symptom. When he found himself in jail in Birmingham, facing criticism from local clergyman for “unwise and untimely” activities, King set out a clear statement of his philosophy. The demonstrations, he insisted, should not be deplored more than the conditions which stimulated them. The objective of nonviolent direct action was negotiation, but to achieve that it was necessary to “create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.”38 This was a nonviolent version of “Propaganda of the Deed.” In the case of Birmingham, this was achieved as much by sustained economic pressure on the city center as by the excesses of the local police. The two combined to produce a dramatic effect. Again to quote Rustin, “Businessmen and chambers of commerce across the South dreaded the cameras.”39 By causing protracted disorder, the hope was that business leaders in Birmingham would be persuaded to accept that desegregation and hiring more blacks was the price of economic survival. A further objective was to shift the political calculus of the Kennedy administration in favor of a civil rights bill.

  The theater of conflict was the city center, a relatively compact space that could be flooded with protestors unless the authorities found a way to stop them. Unlike the Alabama campaign, Birmingham was well planned and drew on a strong local organization. It began at the start of April 1963, a couple of weeks before Easter, one of the busiest times of the year for city shops. It opened with the black community boycotting shops and holding demonstrations and sit-ins at lunch counters. All blacks (250,000 out of a city of 600,000) could participate in the boycott of downtown shops. The effect was immediate and damaging. To get the city under control, police chief Connor’s first tactic was borrowed from Albany. He combined a court injunction to ban sit-ins and demonstrations with the imposition of high bail bonds. Instead of obeying the injunction, as in Albany, this time the leadership decided to disobey. King and his top lieutenant, Ralph Abernathy, were arrested on Good Friday. King thought the timing symbolic and propitious.

  This was followed by mass defiance of the injunctions. On May 2, the numbers participating in the demonstrations increased with the introduction of thousands of high school students. Soon one thousand were in jail. The authorities now faced the problem of either filling the jails until they were overflowing or trying to stop the demonstrators from reaching their destination. This is when the violence began, as fire hoses, clubs, and dogs were used to stop the demonstrators from moving downtown. These measures failed to stem the tide. A report from the Birmingham sheriff spoke of “stuffed jail-houses with rebellious staffs and budgets already overspent for the year; street officers on the point of cracking from relentless stress, helpless to make further arrests but caught between taunting demonstrators, omnipresent news cameras, and the conflicting orders of an unstable and divided high command that included Bull Connor.”40 The culminating moment came on May 7, when the whole downtown area was flooded by demonstrators. The police cordons were outflanked by using decoy marches, starting the main marches earlier than normal (while the police were having their lunch), and then holding other marchers back until the police were preoccupied. With some three thousand people effectively occupying the city center, the police had to acknowledge a loss of control. King recalled how one of the businessmen returning from a lunch he had been unable to reach “cleared his throat and said: ‘You know, I’ve been thinking this thing through, we ought to be able to work something out.’ ”41 The next day the business community threw in the towel, although the political elite wanted to carry on the struggle.

  On June 19, 1963, President Kennedy sent a national civil rights bill to Congress. This was followed by the dramatic march to Washington in late August 1963, organized by Rustin, involving a quarter of a million people and culminating in King’s famous “I have a dream” speech. Civil rights were now assured a place at the top of the American political agenda.

  Inevitably, at this point the movement came to face the fact that political rights did not guarantee improvement in economic or social conditions. The vote did not feed the children or pay the rent, although it did make possible further forms of political activity that might help over time. But King’s campaign culminated not with black satisfaction but with frustration, as riots broke out in the inner cities. As King began to turn his attention to issues of poverty, the question was whether the methods that had brought political gains in the South and launched him to national prominence could work across the country on issues that were much more intractable.

  King had led a focused campaign with a clear set of objectives, working with communities he understood and with tactics that—once refined—served both to coerce local white establishments through economic pain and turn the media spotlight on to the iniquities of segregation by provoking their police forces into violence. The whites saw their local businesses being hurt by bus boycotts and city center mayhem. If they tried to suppress the movement with the methods that had served them well in the past, they alienated northern politicians and the media. If they held back, they had few options other than to find a new modus vivendi with blacks. The movement’s strategists could comfort themselves even as their people suffered harsh treatment that this played into their hands. So long as their people did not buckle under the pressure, the contrast between the dignity of the protestors and the brutality of the police created a stunning media spectacle.

  The problem was never with the clarity of the cause. The segregationists’ arguments were incredible and untenable, at odds with liberal values. The challenge was to convince blacks that to gain the same rights as other Americans they had to work together and to develop a considerable local organization. In meeting both these requirements, the Church played a central role. The strategy also required nonviolence. This was not because of any expectation that segregationist hearts could be turned by this form of witness but because it ensured that the movement kept the moral high ground. Those who learned their politics in the civil rights movements were convinced of the value of direct action and saw comparable causes to demand their attention, but these causes would not be so clear cut as civil rights. The radical politics of the sixties began with dignity and restraint but soon turned angrier, with riots in the urban ghettoes and sharp reactions against an illegitimate war.

  CHAPTER 24 Existential Strategy

  There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious,

  makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even tacitly

  take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the levers, upon all the

  apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to

  the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the

  machines will be prevented from working at all.

  —Mario Savio, Free Speech Movement, December 1964

  IT HAD BEEN young people who had sustained the later campaigns of the civil rights movement. Their experiences in the South had radicalized them, both in their critique of American society and their demand for a new politics. In the early 1960s to the extent that they were organized it was as part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was largely made up of black activists (although initially not exclusively so), or else the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which as the name suggests was based in the universities and was largely white. Both initially reflected anger at the gap between the ideals upon which their country was based and the reality of racial divides and preparations for nuclear war. Both were set up with firm commitments to nonviolence, but both by the end of the 1960s had embraced violence and factionalism.

  Of the two, SDS attracted the most comment: an active and radical political force emerging out of a disadvantaged minority was l
ess surprising than one emerging out of the affluent majority. Moreover, SDS came to be seen as part of a broad cultural shift that went well beyond politics. There was a generational break between those whose formative experiences had been depression and the fight against Germany and Japan and those who had grown up in relative comfort but found the social constraints they had inherited frustrating. This was reflected in changing musical preferences, attitudes to sex, and the use of recreational drugs. A key word for the decade, borrowed from anti-colonial struggles, was “liberation.” The word came to be applied to any group, including women and gays, that felt constrained by social conventions and outdated laws. In this respect, it challenged the role of the state in everyday life and was individualistic rather than collectivist in inspiration.

  This helps explain why there was such an uneasy fit with the orthodox Left, which was collectivist and enthusiastic about the possibilities of the state and the role of labor unions. It had been marginalized by affluence, its rhetoric seen as an echo of old struggles long lost and won, with its internal politics still marked by in-fighting between communists, Trotskyites, and social democrats. The young activists fresh from the freedom rides in the South, where they had often been in jail or suffered beatings, had little time for those who had spent their time trading theoretical blueprints for socialism. Although SDS was intended initially to be the student branch of the League for Industrial Democracy, another of John Dewey’s causes which now represented the pro-union, anti-communist strand in American socialism, it took off on its own trajectory. So the revolt was against not only the complacent liberalism and social conservatism of mainstream America but also the social democratic tradition. This tradition of mass parties organized to fight parliamentary elections on the basis of an agreed program reflecting a more or less coherent ideology had never really taken root in America. The new radicals were more in a libertarian, anarchist, anti-elitist tradition, desperate for authenticity even at the expense of lucidity, suspicious of all authorities and organizational discipline. Instead of decisions being taken by individuals who were detached, remote, and looking after their own interests, a way had to be found to engage ordinary people so that they could shape their own destinies.

  When SDS was formed in 1962, meeting at the United Auto-Workers retreat at Port Huron, Michigan, there was a clash with the social democrats of the League for Industrial Democracy. Tom Hayden, a Michigan student journalist and the lead author of the Port Huron Statement that set SDS in motion, described his wonder that “seemingly serious people could get so enmeshed in such endlessly divisive hair-splitting debates.” “As a formative experience,” he noted, “we learned a distrust and hostility toward the very people we were closest to historically, the representatives of the liberal and labor organizations who had once been young radicals themselves.”1 The old leftists in turn were shocked by the indifference of the young activists to the working-class cause and the unions, and their reluctance to get drawn into denunciations of communism. Instead of the rigorous analysis of classic texts, the new radicals were suspicious of theory. Political acts had to be genuine expressions of values and sentiments. Convictions took priority over the calculation of consequences, reflecting a wariness of expediency and a refusal to compromise for the sake of political effects. At times it seemed as if deliberate and systematic thought was suspect and only a spontaneous stream of consciousness, however inarticulate and unintelligible, could be trusted. Todd Gitlin, an early activist and later analyst of the New Left, observed how actions were undertaken to “dramatize” convictions. They were “judged according to how they made the participants feel,” as if they were drugs offering highs and lows. If it was the immediate experience which counted for most, then there was little scope for thinking about the long term.2

  This left the new radicals caught by Weber’s paradox. Though Weber was dispirited by the steady bureaucratization of society and politics, he considered it irresponsible to ignore the logic of functionality. The emerging political form of the new radicals embraced an ethic of irresponsibility. There could be no separation of means and ends. Every compromise, every denial of a core value meant that something precious had been lost, diminishing whatever might eventually be achieved. Their tactics, highlighted by the sit-in, instinctively challenged all rules. They were often strikingly lacking in both theory and organization, reveling in activism but without a clear direction. The underlying philosophy was existentialist rather than socialist.

  This experiment in existential strategy failed because those features that made it so culturally liberating, and where the effects were actually long-lasting, also made it politically exasperating. When positions were articulated in terms of core values rather than alternative outcomes compromises were hard to arrange and coalitions became fragile. Without hierarchy, when every decision was subject to constant challenge and re-examination, organization became slow and ponderous, and implementation tentative. The activists, doubting rationality and trusting feelings, became increasingly angry. Their distaste for the politics of expedience and compromise led to isolation and irrelevance and vulnerability to the intervention of groups based on hard theory and disciplined organization against which they had initially rebelled.

  Rebels

  Instead of the polarized class struggle anticipated by Marx, postwar capitalist society was marked by an improved standard of living, apparently developing into a self-satisfied but undifferentiated mass society. The salaried middle classes were on the ascendant, largely to be found in large, impersonal organizations. The daily grind of life was hardly grueling. Yet there appeared to be something missing. The critique was not of growing misery and poverty but of dreariness, not so much physical deprivation but of a psychological void. William Whyte’s The Organization Man suggested a degree of homogenization in the American middle class, reflected in standardized career paths, consumer tastes, and cultural sensibilities, with an accompanying degree of docility. The fault, he argued, was not in organization but its worship, “the soft-minded denial that there is a conflict between the individual and society.”3 Indeed, much of the writing about this group, including David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and C. Wright Mills’s White Collar Workers, suggested that the rise of this class was joyless.

  Riesman argued that inner-directed personalities followed life goals established at an early age, had a strong sense of values, and were therefore apt to suffer from guilt when deviating from those values. They were giving way to other-directed personalities, who took cues from their environment and were dependent on their contemporaries or even the media for direction. The distinction was between following either an internal gyroscope or an external radar. The Lonely Crowd became one of the most popular books ever written by a sociologist. In contrast to the earlier progressives who looked to other-directedness as a means of binding society together and encouraging a democratic sensitivity, it encouraged the view, probably more than Riesman intended, that there was something pernicious about social conventions and political orthodoxy as uncritically transmitted through the mass media.4 The idea that adapting to the social environment risked denying core values was also a theme of Erich Fromm’s Fear of Freedom. Fromm, a refugee from Nazi Germany, warned of the dangers of rootless individuals seeking security in conformism or authoritarianism. Freedom had to be about more than lack of restrictions. It needed to be more positive, creative, authentic, expressive, and spontaneous, as well as less respectful of the received wisdom of experts or the dictates of common sense. Social structures were presented as suppressing the natural, positive side of human nature rather than as restraining the negative, coercive side.5

  The enthusiasts for the cultural developments of the 1960s saw it as an affirmation of this positive side of human nature against the conformism of the corporate state. When in 1970 Theodore Roszak looked back approvingly over that decade, he described the many developments he applauded as responses to the “technocracy.” This, echoing Weber, was described as corpora
te power combined with a state of mind according to which

  the requirements of our humanity yield wholly to some manner of formal analysis which can be carried out by specialists possessing certain impenetrable skills which can then be translated by them directly into a congeries of economic and social programs, personnel management procedures, merchandise, and mechanical gadgetry.

  These experts, to be found at the corporate center, believed that most human needs had been filled; where there was a problem, it was the result of a misunderstanding.6 In different ways, Roszak claimed, the poetry, literature, sociology, political tracts, and demonstrations of the time challenged this technocratic presumption. In this respect, the politics of the decade was but one part of a general revolt against rationality, whether in challenges to bureaucracy and scientific expertise, or in hedonistic life styles and the disparagement of conventional careers. Claims of objective knowledge were distrusted. Instead of worldviews being shaped by the accumulation of knowledge, “knowledge” always deserved quotation marks, reflecting an underlying worldview rather than actual reality.

  What did this mean for strategy? At a general level it challenged an idea of strategy based on not only the presumption of choice but also the availability of methods for choosing well, which included the need to pay close attention to the operating environment and think ahead. In some respects, liberalism as it had developed through the twentieth century could pride itself on having created the optimal conditions for strategy-making: the right of free political expression, the ability to organize, and respect for the scientific method as a means of bringing clarity to choice and thinking through consequences. Now the New Left appeared to see this approach as problematic, a form of thinking that constrained the range of choice and excluded those affected by decisions from contributing to their resolution, and a stress on organization, which meant hierarchy.