American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  The Washington march, with close to a quarter of a million people gathering peacefully in front of the Lincoln Memorial (an estimated two-thirds black and one-third white), had no real precedent for the sheer mass of humanity brought together, the media coverage it received, and the impact it had on the public mood and political consciousness. On a day full of dramatic imagery and rhetorical eloquence, King’s speech near the end of the rally captured the most attention. Full of phrases and cadences familiar to black churchgoers and civil rights activists, his painting of his “dream” that one day the country would achieve “the true meaning of its creed” of equality and all people would be “free at last” cemented King’s position as one of the country’s great orators and moral leaders.

  What the march did not do was win rapid passage of civil rights legislation in Congress. Meanwhile, civil rights workers continued to be attacked, arrested, and murdered with no significant federal effort to protect them; schools and public accommodations across much of the country remained segregated; and most southern blacks still could not vote. Within CORE and SNCC, activists questioned the reliability of liberal white allies and the pace of change. Black critics of nonviolence, like Black Muslim leader Malcolm X, who mocked the August demonstration as the “Farce on Washington” and called for black armed self-defense, presented an increasingly influential alternative pole within the black community to civil rights leaders. The September 1963 Ku Klux Klan bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, which killed four black girls attending Sunday school, belied the optimism that had infused King’s speech just a month before.

  Dallas

  Violence has always been a feature of American political life. Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley were killed in office, and both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt narrowly escaped death from assassins’ bullets. During the Truman administration, two Puerto Rican independence advocates tried to kill the president, shooting three policemen before themselves being shot, and four others opened fire on the House of Representatives from a visitors’ gallery, wounding five congressmen. Nonetheless, the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, shocked the nation. The official, dominant portrait of the country stressed the orderly, democratic nature of its governance, contrasting it to other nations where leaders were put in place or removed through dictatorial measures and violent acts. Southern civil rights workers had an intense sense of violence as a determining and immediate force in American history, but most Americans probably considered events like the killing of Medgar Evers and the Birmingham bombing aberrations. The Kennedy murder, beyond the human tragedy of a father of two dying young, struck at the heart of the understanding most Americans had of their country. Arthur Schlesinger’s daughter said to him after he returned home from meeting the plane that carried Kennedy’s body back to Washington, “If this is the kind of country we have, I don’t want to live here anymore.”

  Things kept getting weirder after Kennedy died. As was soon revealed, the man arrested for shooting him, twenty-four-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, a onetime Marine, had defected to the Soviet Union, where he had lived for several years before redefecting with his Russian wife to the United States, where he became active in a group opposing U.S. intervention in Cuba. Before Oswald had a chance to publicly speak about the crime with which he had been charged, he was murdered in front of national television cameras in the basement of a Dallas police station, from which he was being transferred, by a local nightclub owner, Jack Ruby, with a history of connections to the police and organized crime. Both in official and unofficial circles, the belief quickly spread that Oswald and perhaps Ruby could not possibly have acted alone, with the Cuban government, anti-Castro exiles, extreme right-wing groups, organized crime, Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa (whom the Kennedy brothers had relentlessly pursued on various criminal charges), and the CIA suggested as possible participants in a conspiracy to get rid of the president.

  The new president, Lyndon Johnson, moved quickly to reassure the nation that Oswald had acted alone and that no unseen forces had been behind Kennedy’s death. He himself doubted that was true, but he told colleagues that unless claims of communist involvement were refuted, war might result. Johnson appointed a commission headed by Earl Warren to investigate the assassination, but the FBI and CIA, with investigatory failings and covert actions to hide, proved unforthcoming in the information they gave the group. The lengthy Warren Commission report, which found “no evidence that anyone assisted Oswald in planning or carrying out the assassination,” was quickly ripped apart by critics. But subsequent investigations also failed to provide a convincing explanation of what had happened.

  The murkiness of the assassination was in some ways as distressing as the crime itself, suggesting the existence of subterranean layers of American life with power over the government and the fate of the nation. Millions of supporters and opponents grieved for Kennedy, who had increased his popularity during his presidency. His death left the country unsettled, stripped of the civic certainties that the Cold War had made so pervasive.

  CHAPTER 8

  * * *

  The Democratic Revolution

  On December 2, 1964, Mario Savio, an undergraduate philosophy major, who had grown up in a working-class family in Queens, New York, spoke to a crowd of over a thousand students and their supporters protesting a ban on political activity on the University of California–Berkeley campus. Just before the protestors sat down inside the main campus administration building, Savio told them, “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 passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.”

  The next day, on orders from liberal Democratic governor Edmund Brown, police moved into the building and carted off 773 demonstrators, the largest mass arrest in California history. The sit-down and the language Savio used to encourage it reflected a new sensibility that would propel a democratic revolution for years to come.

  During the mid-1960s, political change took place with rapidity and on a scale unseen in the United States since the New Deal. Post–New Deal liberalism reached its high-water mark with a flood of federal legislation and a series of Supreme Court decisions that bolstered democratic rights and expanded the role of government in promoting social well-being. Civil rights and student activists energized, criticized, transformed, and undermined liberalism, as politics came to mean more than the sum of discrete issues like civil rights or foreign policy. Increasingly, people began to question the very nature of authority in the institutions that shaped their lives, from local and national government to colleges and universities, churches, and even their own families. A swelling movement for greater democracy pressed liberalism to expand its ambitions, abandon its anticommunist boundaries, and open up hierarchical structures to popular participation.

  By the end of 1966, liberalism had reached its apogee. Even as it faced swelling challenges from its left, it came under growing pressure from its right, as conservatives built popular movements and political infrastructure dedicated to ending liberal dominance. As cultural and political divisions within the country grew, to many the nation seemed to be fragmenting. Like most revolutions, the democratic revolution of the 1960s turned out to be a disorderly, exhilarating, frightening affair.

  Rebellious Youth

  It was far from coincidental that one of the first nationally publicized, militant challenges to a major liberal institution in the name of democracy took place on a college campus. The pressure on liberalism to reinvigorate itself in part stemmed from a generational divide particularly evident in the academy. And what happened on college campuses mattered more during the 1960s than ever before, because higher education played a more significant role in American life than ever before.

 
; After World War II, the federal government fostered the massive expansion of higher education through investment in research and development, the GI Bill, and the National Defense Education Act. A growing demand for trained professionals in science, engineering, and management, and rising family income, which allowed young people to delay entering the workforce, led more and more students to stay in school for longer and longer. In 1946, two million enrolled in higher education programs; in 1960, three and a half million. When the baby boom generation came of age, enrollments exploded, nearing eight million by 1970. In 1946, one out of eight eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds was attending college or graduate school; in 1960, nearly one out of four; in 1970, nearly one out of three.

  The schools they attended varied immensely, from elite private institutions to huge state universities to modest junior colleges. By the mid-1960s, there were twice as many public colleges and universities as private ones. California provided the model. Under its 1960 master plan, the state built an enormous three-tier system to provide free higher education to its residents. The top tier, the research-oriented University of California, took in the highest-achieving high school graduates and offered the most advanced degrees. State colleges provided four-year programs to less qualified students. Community colleges offered two-year degrees.

  Standardized tests helped determine which students got admitted to which schools. When California adopted its master plan, it initiated a standardized admission test. The trend spread as more and more colleges required applicants to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) or the American College Testing (ACT) exam. The military gave a boost to such testing when it adopted a standardized exam to decide which college students would get draft deferments.

  Standardized testing facilitated a push by social and educational leaders to create more opportunities for outsiders to win places in elite institutions. The resiliency of the white, male, Protestant leadership of the country lay in part in its willingness to open its ranks, a bit, to smart young men from families of modest means. Top colleges and universities provided an arena for selecting, socializing, and training such men, who then were recruited for important positions in government and business. The increasing number of students reaching top schools on the basis of grades and test scores rather than social pedigree began changing the culture at many of the nation’s most celebrated educational institutions, where students in the past generally had placed little value on academic enterprise, saving their time and energy for social activities, athletics, and dissipation.

  As colleges and universities became more linked to the ongoing administration of society, they became poles for cultural and political dissidence. An expanding economy freed college students from fears about their future well-being. Many became drawn to intellectuals and artists who took to task or at least opted out of what looked to them like a hegemonic, corporate, Cold War cultural consensus. Academics like Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, and Paul Goodman gained followers through their attacks on psychological and sexual repression, which they believed were integral to the dominant culture. European existentialists cut against the grain of Cold War patriotism and demands for social and political conformity with their concern for immediate experience, individual moral commitment, and the need to act against falsehood (themes strongly echoed in Savio’s speech).

  “Beat” writers—Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, and Gregory Corso among the best-known—made deviating from conventional mores alluring. Their work burst with Whitmanesque celebrations of America, but of a raucous, down-and-out, drug-using, hard-drinking, sexually exuberant, rebellious America. The Beat sensibility soon permeated bohemian neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side in New York and North Beach in San Francisco. It could be found, too, in the student quarters near large college campuses, in places like Berkeley; Madison, Wisconsin; Austin, Texas; and Minneapolis’s Dinkytown. With the middle class deserting cities for suburban living, cheap, run-down apartments were easy to find, providing a material and geographic base for an emerging culture of dissent. But the Beat influence went beyond enclaves of hipness and student life. Ginsberg’s 1955 poem Howl, initially deemed obscene by government authorities, sold 100,000 copies during its first decade in print, while Kerouac’s novel On the Road was a 1957 best seller. By the beginning of the 1960s, cultural iconoclasm had begun penetrating some of the mainstream taste-making industries, including advertising, which experimented with selling products by identifying them with authenticity and nonconformity.

  Only a minority of students got heavily involved with intellectual and literary dissent, but many identified with a broader youth culture that had been emerging since World War II. At various times in the history of the United States, youth had been prized and celebrated, but generally young people did not think of themselves nor did others think of them as a distinct social formation. In the decade after World War II, that began to change. Adolescents and young adults, coming of age during a period of extended economic growth, chafed under the cultural norms and expectations of an older generation shaped by the Great Depression and World War II. Writer Joan Didion, who attended Berkeley in the early 1950s, recalled that “we were the last generation to identify with adults.” During the 1940s, the term “teenager” began to be used, with its underlying assumption of a shared set of experiences among those of a particular age, cutting across other social divisions. In reality, multiple overlapping youth subcultures were emerging, reflecting differences in race, gender, class, and region. Still, a commercial mass culture, aimed at teenagers and young adults, helped create a conscious sense of a distinct generation, with a sensibility different from and in some ways at odds with that of its elders. With young people having more free time (because fewer worked) and more money than in the past, companies designed and marketed clothes, music, and other goods specifically for them.

  Comic books set the pattern. Introduced in the 1930s, they were inexpensive enough that children and teenagers could buy them on their own. By the early 1950s, they had grown immensely popular. Estimates of sales ranged from nearly seventy million books a month or higher, with surveys reporting over 90 percent of under-eighteen-year-olds reading them. While some comics upheld adult notions of morality, patriotism, and proper behavior, others provided children and adolescents with an alternative to prevailing pieties and values. Horror and crime comics reveled in the macabre. Scantily clad women, with and without superpowers, exuded dangerous sexuality. Some comic books even disseminated dissenting political views, depicting government authorities as corrupt and the Korean War as a pointless bloodletting.

  Parents, cultural arbiters, and government officials fretted about the irreverence of comic books and their creation of an imaginative world they neither understood nor liked. Well-publicized charges that comics promoted juvenile delinquency led to a series of government investigations. To protect themselves, in 1954 comic book publishers adopted a system of self-censorship, which led to much more bland content and declining sales, as the medium stopped serving, at least for a while, as a promoter of a youth culture at odds with adult values.

  By then, rock and roll had begun taking over that role. Rock and roll defined itself as youth music, engaged with the particular experiences and sentiments of adolescents and celebrating a rejection of the adult world. Musicians like Chuck Berry embodied the amalgam of blues, rhythm and blues, and country music that produced rock and roll. A black man nearing thirty when he had his first hit, Berry appealed to a mostly white teenage audience, carefully crafting his songs to speak to the experience of high school dances, hot rod cars, and teenage infatuation.

  Berry achieved modest commercial success, but the best-selling musicians of the late 1950s and early 1960s were white. Some made their fortunes doing cover versions of black records, toning them down and desexualizing them. Others, like Elvis Presley, developed styles that drew on black musical genres but did not s
imply ape them. The racial promiscuousness of rock and roll, along with its general exuberance and open sexuality, gave it a rebellious aura. By the mid-1950s, the demand by white southern high school and college students for records by black artists had grown to the point that record stores serving the white community began to stock them. In the early 1960s, racially integrated rhythm and blues shows toured the South, attracting large crowds of blacks and whites and generating considerable tension. Rock and roll was creating a new cultural universe, in which whites imitated blacks and middle-class teenagers made proletarian clothing, especially blue jeans, an international fashion.

  Parents and government authorities tried to hold back the tide of youth culture. Schools instituted dress codes. Prosecutors went after radio disc jockeys for taking payoffs from record companies. Southern officials banned interracial concerts, and segregationists physically assaulted black performers. As in the case of comic books, the cultural counterattack had some short-term success. Bland white pop music dominated record sales and the airwaves in the early 1960s. But it was only a temporary reprieve before British rock groups, led by the Beatles, and black artists from Detroit’s Motown label took over the top of the charts in 1964.