Strategy

by Lawrence Freedman

  With the war going so badly, Lyndon Johnson had decided not to stand for reelection. His vice president and anointed successor, Hubert Humphrey, got the nomination after Robert Kennedy’s assassination and antiwar senator Eugene McCarthy’s effective withdrawal from campaigning. Johnson’s withdrawal was no reason to abandon the protest. All the different factions of the movement converged on Chicago “like moths to the flame.” There were the new hard men of the SDS, radical pacifists still committed to nonviolent direct action, and the Yippies taunting the authorities with talk of LSD in the water supply, smoke bombs in delegates’ halls, and sexual shows of varying degrees of provocation. The gathering mood spoke more of violence than peace. The city’s long-time mayor, Michael Daley, who ran one of the most formidable machines in American politics, had form when it came to turning the police onto demonstrators. He was determined to make life as difficult as possible for all those who opposed the careful orchestration of the convention. The police were under orders to show no restraint. Some were operating undercover. Both sides had their provocateurs and both had an interest in confrontation.

  Tom Hayden was at the center of the preparations for Chicago, including seeking permits for demonstrations. His rhetoric when talking with other activists was becoming wilder. This was his existential moment. He could show he was not like the “good Germans” who were in denial about the Holocaust. In making his stand against a terrible war, he was prepared—as an existentialist—to pay his own personal price. This was reinforced by the persistent notion that underdogs benefited by appearing as innocent victims of police brutality. Heightened confrontation would push up the internal costs of the war. The establishment, he had concluded, would only abandon South Vietnam on the basis of a cost-benefit calculation, even if this involved arousing “the sleeping dogs on the right.”45 Rubin also bought into the theory that the movement required repression to grow. Repression, he enthused, would turn “demonstration protest into wars. Actors into heroes. Masses of individuals into a community.” It would eliminate “the bystander, the neutral observer, the theorist. It forces everyone to pick a side.”46

  Such talk made Ginsberg wary. He had never, he explained later, been a poet of “revolt.” That would have meant trying to “become wiser by becoming dumber, you want to become more peaceful by getting angry.” His aim was to alter consciousness.47 In Chicago, instead of the “academies of self-awareness” and “classes in spirituality” he favored, he saw “bloody visions of the apocalypse.”48 He flew there writing a poem (“Remember the Helpless order the/ Police armed to protect/the Helpless Freedom the Revolutionary/ Conspired to honor”). He later explained his presence at Chicago as a “religious experimenter,” not only on behalf of the Yippies but “also in the context of our whole political life, too.” In the face of police determination to close down the music festival, he urged caution. Presenting himself as a calming influence, he encouraged demonstrators to chant “Om” in the face of violence or hysteria. “Ten people humming Om can calm down one hundred. One hundred people humming Om can regulate the metabolism of a thousand. A thousand bodies vibrating Om can immobilize an entire downtown Chicago street full of scared humans, uniformed or naked.” At one point during the demonstrations he led chanting for seven hours. The aim of this, and his other antiwar performances, was not to transmit a thought or assert a principle but to “bring about a state of being.”

  Once again we see the idea that getting the state to reveal its true nastiness would set people against it, without considering the circumstances in which ordinary people might support the state. The radicals, disappointed with their own numbers, sought to use police brutality as a means of expanding their constituency. Watching it all were the world’s media, who were treated to a spectacle of baton charges and bloodied demonstrators.49 Tactically, the hard-liners had won and the movement lost. The progressive radicalization of the decade had reflected the limits of a politics based on gaining attention through sacrifice, appeals to conscience, and assertions of shared values. The early concepts of dignified nonviolence, which “implied erect bearing, silent passage, and respectable dress,” had given way to “shouting and threats, hissing, hoaxes, foul language, heckling, garbage-dumping, a sense of great anger vented, and a growing tendency to violence.”50

  One type of Marxist analysis of the clashes at Chicago would have observed that they were largely between working-class police and middle-class demonstrators. Working-class anger was directed at those who had enjoyed privileged lives and now turned on the system that had pampered them, mocking those who upheld traditional values, turning away from responsibilities and challenging the patriotic symbols (notably the flag) of which they should be proud. Fears of disorder and decadence began to influence working-class political attitudes. Alinsky feared that the rise of the right would be the inevitable response to violence and extremism on the left. He wrote Rules for Radicals to remind the new revolutionaries of the “central concepts of action in human politics that operate regardless of the scene or the time.” He argued the need for a “pragmatic attack on the system.” He warned, correctly, of the dangers of insulting and ignoring ordinary working people. “If we fail to communicate with them, if we don’t encourage them to form alliances with us, they will move to the right.” In urging an ethic of responsibility on a new generation of radicals, Alinsky and Rustin were aware that they must appear like old men jealous of the energy of youth and with evidence of their failures all around them in persistent poverty, inequality, and violence. At the same time they recognized that the people for whom they struggled were underdogs precisely because they lacked the capacity to become the majority, and that organizing them was a hard slog that would require compromises and certainly coalitions. They understood the futility of expecting people absorbed in a daily struggle for survival to sign up for an even larger and more dangerous struggle defined only by vague slogans.

  The United States did not withdraw from Vietnam until 1973. But the American role became less toxic politically with the end of conscription. The young activists of the New Left moved on, some becoming milder versions of their former selves, others abandoning their commitments. What lasted was the critique of everyday life, reflected in music and fashion, and to a degree in the use of recreational drugs, but also in a distrust of elitism and hierarchy and a wariness of bureaucracy.51 The focus on the worth of individuals led to the anticolonial language of self-determination and liberation coming to be applied to groups, such as gays and women, who had felt stigmatized and oppressed.

  Women’s Liberation

  Feminism was not a new cause and important books were written prior to the growth of the student movement, but “women’s liberation” flowed naturally out of a movement dedicated to the idea of humans controlling their own destinies and asserting their worth. The original groups from the suffragette era had disappeared. Demands for equal rights tended to be promoted through the labor movement, if at all. Women had been given a boost in 1961 when President Kennedy established a Commission on the Status of Women, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. It produced a report in 1963 detailing the restrictions on women’s rights and opportunities. “Sex” was added to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, suggested at first by a segregationist congressman as something of a joke and then pushed through in a curious coalition with feminists. The Equal Employment Opportunities Commission treated it as a joke and did nothing. In 1966, the National Organization of Women (NOW) was founded in response to this rebuff. Its president was Betty Friedan, whose book The Feminine Mystique gave voice to a generation of women who felt marginalized by both workplace practices and the expectations of home-making.52 Women were steadily becoming a vital part of the American workforce (40 percent by the start of the 1970s) and were increasingly disinclined to accept second-rate pay and conditions. Friedan was an effective publicist and used her role as the head of what was a relatively small organization to gain media attention for her views and those of her colleagues. From the start, the
movement had an articulate leadership.

  Quite apart from NOW, another strand of the movement was developing among numerous young women who had experienced their own rebuffs as they worked as New Left activists. They could not help but notice the contrast between the denunciations of oppression coming from a largely male leadership, coupled with expectations of women occupying subordinate roles and offering sexual favors. The “only position for women in SNCC,” observed Stokely Carmichael in 1964, “is prone.” In a landmark essay, Mary King and Casey Hayden (Tom Hayden’s first wife) reported that women in the movement were not “happy and contented” with their status, and that their talent and experience was being wasted. In what now appears as a rather tentative document they judged that “objectively, the chances seem nil that we could start a movement based on anything as distant to general American thought as a sex-caste system.” For that reason they expected to continue to work on the problems of war, poverty, and race. They nonetheless insisted that “the very fact that the country [couldn’t] face, much less deal with” the questions they were raising meant that the “the problems of women functioning in society as equal human beings are among the most basic that people face.”53

  Soon, however, the dismissive attitude of male activists became too annoying to ignore. The more women were treated with condescension by their male colleagues, the greater their anger. In 1967, groups began to push a more distinctively feminist agenda and by 1968 they had their own national conference. Unlike NOW, this group of women had considerable experience of protest and grass-roots organization.54 In 1969, Carol Hanisch wrote a paper reflecting on the position of women in the movement and complained that when they got together for mutual support it was a form of “therapy,” as if they were seeking a cure for some sickness. The key was to understand that the personal was political. These were issues that could only be solved through collective action.55 The reason this worked as an existential strategy was that it did not depend on leadership and organization, other than when seeking legislative changes, but on the routine assertion of core principles of equality and worth, often without agreement on where the movement should or could lead, and accommodating a range of lifestyle choices. The core feminist complaints, once they were out in the open, were easy to understand and hard to ignore. Some might recoil at more radical denunciations of patriarchy and the coercive quality of marriage and motherhood but they were free to ignore this and concentrate on issues that mattered to them, whether abortion, indifference to sexual assault or rights to equal pay.56

  As women moved increasingly into the space opened up by the civil rights movement, so did gays. After blacks, they pointed out, they constituted the largest minority group in America. Many just craved respectability, so that they were not stigmatized for their sexual preferences. This was the time when homosexuality was considered aberrant, a psychiatric disorder that might benefit from treatment. During the 1960s there was a push to end this pariah status, insisting that whatever consenting adults did together in private was no business of government or employers. Under the influence of the counterculture, concerns about mainstream respectability came to be pushed to one side by demands for “gay liberation” and full sexual freedom. In July 1969, a police raid at the Stonewell Inn, a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, produced an outraged response that led to a riot. The more conservative homophile groups were anxious, but the event encouraged radical activists to embrace gay rights as a vital cause.57

  In some respects, the activism against the Vietnam War was similar. The more dramatic acts of protest—burning draft cards, let alone the American flag—might not have been to everybody’s taste, but the increasingly large demonstrations against the war demanded attention. The fact that SDSers had been to the fore of the original opposition did not endow it with a right to continue to set its terms. As opposition became broad-based, backed by opinion polls and mainstream commentators, it carried a political weight that the government could not ignore. These movements had a Tolstoyan quality in that out of the individual decisions of many people emerged new lifestyles, cultural forms, and political expressions.

  The methods that could be used to dramatize issues that mattered to many individuals, helping the personal to become political, could not forge a broader political consciousness. The initial preoccupation with power, as a precious resource unequally distributed, led to wariness about anybody getting an unfair share. Power should not be sought; indeed, the appearance of an interest in power created suspicion. The preferred organizational forms were designed to hold back putative leaders and avoid a stifling bureaucracy. Such organizations could work, to a point, when populated by educated, articulate, committed, and energetic young people communicating in a common cause, but they soon faltered when energy levels dropped; the causes became routine; difficult choices had to be faced; the emerging strategies had to be implemented over extended periods; and when the feelings reflected boredom, fatigue, and confusion.

  Alternatively, when the feelings were intense anger and deep frustration, actions could be impulsive, involving lashing out and grandiose gestures. The fate of SDS and SNCC could be taken as a warning of the consequences of a lack of deliberation and distrust of leadership. Even here, however, there was a legacy: the inclination to think about power from the bottom up and not solely from the top down, for making organizations and their decisions more transparent, had a lasting effect on governmental and corporate bureaucracies, reflected in demands for flatter hierarchies and more open structures. The futile terrorism of Far Left groups made more headlines in the 1970s and 1980s than nonviolent direct action. Yet events in Eastern Europe in 1989 and—at least initially—in the “Arab Spring” of early 2011 provided echoes of the techniques used by the civil rights movement in the early 1960s. The link between the two was provided by Gene Sharp, a long-standing pacifist who had worked with Muste and participated in some of the early sit-ins. He became the leading contemporary theorist of nonviolence, even gaining the patronage of Tom Schelling, who supplied the introduction to Sharp’s major three-volume treatise, The Politics of Nonviolent Action.58 This emphasized Gandhi’s innovative role and employed Gregg’s concept of jiu-jitsu, but was mainly notable for a view of power by which governments were assumed to be dependent upon the “people’s good will, decisions and support” rather than the other way around. When this was the case, obedience was voluntary and consent could be withdrawn. He listed many ways by which this could be achieved, from demonstrations and petitions to boycotts, strikes, and even mutinies.59 Authoritarian regimes in the 2000s, from Iran to Venezuela, identified Sharp as a dangerous agitator, and his ideas reached the Arab streets.60 The experience underlined both the potential and limits of nonviolence. A regime so intolerant of disobedience that it was prepared to use uncompromising violence was likely to push its opponents to violence as well.

  The inspirational and imaginative aspects of the movement during the 1960s provided its initial momentum. Those who thought about short-term consequences would probably have been deterred if they placed their hopes on what might be achieved in the early boycotts, sit-ins, and demonstrations. The weight of experience was against them. It was the cause which animated the movement and the sense of worth that came from doing what was right, even against the odds. Once mobilized, a movement that was about political rather than social change would be under pressure to become more organized and calculating, thinking about consequences. Todd Gitlin, one of Tom Hayden’s early comrades in SDS, became an academic sociologist and also memoirist of the movement. He was aware of the impact of the counterproductive talk of violence, and how that had played into the Right’s agenda, allowing the New Left to be portrayed as mindlessly disruptive rather than idealistic. This was a common theme of rueful SDS memoirs. At an age approaching Saul Alinsky’s when he wrote Rules for Radicals, Gitlin wrote Letters to a Young Activist in which he advised how to avoid the mistakes of his generation. He opened with Max Weber and later returned to him, ac
knowledging that he had found “Politics as a Vocation” irritating and “anti-inspirational” in his youth. Against Weber’s assertion of an ethic of responsibility, Gitlin noted that then he would have responded with the claim that “radical action might just transform the circumstances, make the impossible somewhat more possible.” Now he accepted: “Consequences: there’s no getting away from them. How disconcerting that ideals and passions are compatible with gross miscalculations!” For activists considering a campaign of civil disobedience to address contemporary ills, he urged that it be “farsighted, strategic.” Such a campaign should “not hope to reinvent the world at will” or “simply express itself.” It must argue and “take place within history, not beat on its doors from outside,” seizing opportunities and calling on “popular (even if latent) convictions and sentiments.”61

  CHAPTER 26 Frames, Paradigms, Discourses, and Narratives