As youthful cultural rebelliousness grew, so did student political activism, most noticeably on the left. Campus leftism fell to a nadir in the early and mid-1950s, as the adult left lost its allure and anticommunist crusading made students fearful of speaking up. It began to revive in the late 1950s, as anticommunist repression diminished. At Berkeley, the country’s most politically active campus, left-leaning students and their more moderate allies captured the student government (only to be maneuvered out of office by the college administration); protested compulsory participation in ROTC (a common requirement at state universities); and demonstrated against the House Committee on Un-American Activities when it held hearings in San Francisco in 1960 (marking an end to the fear and deference the committee long had commanded). In February 1962, several thousand students picketed the White House to protest nuclear testing and the civil defense program, the largest demonstration held there in nearly a decade.
In many ways, the campus activists were not that different from a new breed of adult activists who began popping up in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In New York City, “reform Democrats” opposed the backroom dealmaking of established party leaders. The National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and Women Strike for Peace opposed nuclear testing and the arms race. The Fair Play for Cuba Committee tried to stop American intervention in Cuba. The 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, documenting the effects of pesticides on the environment, sparked protests against industrial pollution and the loss of open space and wilderness.
Though they addressed different issues, these groups had common traits. With the exception of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which had a number of prominent black members, all were primarily white and middle class. Women played a major role in many of them, especially those concerned with peace and the environment. Their members, like their student equivalents, had great faith in reason and discussion and optimism about the ability of the country to right moral and political wrongs. Confident about their own abilities and standing, they believed it their right and duty to intervene with the government and challenge established powers and policies. Though some of the activists had or once had ties to left-wing groups, they generally played down ideology, focusing on specific issues. Reminiscent in some ways of Progressive Era reform, the new liberal activism was a decidedly polite affair, with the young and old alike generally careful to wear suits and ties and skirts or dresses to picket lines and demonstrations.
Liberal activism soon became more militant, though, especially on campuses, as a result of the civil rights movement. The sight of young southern blacks placing their lives on the line in sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and voter registration drives electrified many northern students. In 1960, thousands of them picketed chain stores that refused to desegregate their southern branches. Some headed south to report on or join the civil rights effort, returning to their campuses transformed by the experience.
In 1964, Mississippi civil rights groups decided to bring northern white students to spend the summer working on a voter registration drive and help run “Freedom Schools,” calculating that their presence would bring national publicity and perhaps federal protection to the effort, knowing from bitter experience how little ripple occurred when local blacks were the victims of violence. Before the bulk of the nearly nine hundred “Freedom Summer” volunteers even got to Mississippi, segregationist terror took a heavy toll. Fires and bombs damaged or destroyed churches and civil rights headquarters associated with the project, while unprovoked violence against blacks increased. On June 21, three project members, James Chaney, an African American from Meridian, Mississippi, Andrew Goodman, a white student from New York City, and Michael Schwerner, another white New Yorker and the oldest of the group at twenty-four, on their way back from investigating a church burning, were arrested by a deputy sheriff in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and then released on a deserted road into a Ku Klux Klan ambush. Klan members killed all three and hid their bodies. The disappearance of the civil rights workers, two of them northern whites, brought massive national attention to the Mississippi struggle and increased federal involvement. Still, it took the FBI six weeks to find the bodies, while the reign of terror continued.
The sensibility and political approach of the civil rights movement, especially SNCC, profoundly influenced the emerging student movement. Students absorbed from it the notion of direct action as a form of political pressure and moral witness against perceived wrongs. They also adopted from SNCC a belief in participatory democracy as a social goal and a way of running their own organizations, seeking to develop modes for meaningful involvement of ordinary people in self-governance.
Well into the mid-1960s, programmatically the student movement remained within the parameters of liberalism. The 1962 “Port Huron Statement,” issued by one of the new campus groups, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), put forth a sweeping indictment of American society for racism, inequality, complacency, and bureaucracy. But its suggested remedies—federal initiatives in the areas of civil rights, poverty, housing, and economic development and a realignment of the Democratic Party into a national party of liberalism—went only a bit beyond Fair Deal–New Frontier liberalism.
In its sensibility, though, the emerging student movement represented a challenge to liberalism and even a break with it. The impatience of student activists, black and white, with the gap between the official rhetoric and lived reality gave an urgency to their politics at odds with the unhurried confidence of early 1960s liberalism that America was fundamentally good and was on the inevitable and irreversible road to fulfilling its promises. The desire to breathe mass participation into the idea of democracy and to apply it to everyday situations in schools, workplaces, and communities cut against the faith in expertise, democracy through pluralist representation, and distrust of popular mobilization that characterized post–New Deal liberalism. Also, consistent with taking democracy at face value, the student movement rejected the anticommunism that had become central to postwar liberalism, refusing to exclude groups or individuals on the basis of their political associations. Early SDS leader Al Haber’s comment that he hoped his group would be a “radical liberal force” captured the ideological tension that gave energy to what was becoming known as the New Left.
The Free Speech Movement (FSM) at Berkeley brought the New Left to national attention. More students from the San Francisco Bay Area participated in the Freedom Summer than from any other part of the country except New York, including Mario Savio. But Berkeley administrators seemed indifferent to the changing student mood. Most colleges tightly controlled all student activities and enforced rules that many students found antiquated and ridiculous. At Harvard (then still all male), undergraduates had to wear ties to all meals, a requirement some breakfasters met by wearing their cravats over undershirts. At Radcliffe, its sister school, students could not wear pants to class and could leave their dorms in the evening only by signing out to a specific destination. Almost every college had strict “parietal” rules regulating visits by members of the opposite sex to dorm rooms. At Berkeley, the administration clamped down on political as well as personal behavior, blocking appearances by controversial speakers and allowing student groups to raise funds and distribute literature concerning off-campus issues only at tables in a small area on the edge of the campus. When in the fall of 1964 the university closed down that area too, students began pressing for greater political rights.
On October 1, university police arrested a former student for soliciting funds for CORE on campus. When they tried to take him away, hundreds of students sat down, surrounding the police car in which he had been placed. The standoff lasted thirty-two hours and led to the formation of FSM. The new organization tapped a well of student discontent. Berkeley was the prototypical large liberal university—bureaucratic, closely linked to the business, government, and military establishments (the first H-bomb had been built at a Berkeley-run weapons
lab), and generally more concerned with research than with teaching. Students complained about large classes, a lack of contact with faculty, and a new computerized registration system that for many symbolized the impersonality of the university. And they resented being treated like children.
The failure to resolve issues between FSM and the university administration culminated in the December 2 sit-down. Many of the protestors shared Savio’s view that the university and the larger society were impersonal and unjust; that it was a moral obligation as well as an existential act to oppose such a society; and that by nonviolent direct action, social change could be effected. And it was. Within three weeks of the arrests of the protestors, after a student strike and much turmoil, the university board of regents adopted new rules regulating on-campus political activity similar to those proposed by FSM. The national student movement remained small—in December 1964, SDS had only forty-one chapters and twenty-five hundred members—but it had made a dramatic entrance onto the national political stage.
The New Right
At the same time that civil rights and student activists were taking liberal leaders and institutions to task for not living up to their professed beliefs, liberalism also came under attack from the right, from a conservative movement that mushroomed in the early 1960s. Though small in itself, the “New Right,” like the New Left, had growing intellectual and political influence. At its forefront stood a charismatic senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater.
The 1950s had been a difficult time for conservatives. The success of anticommunism as an ideology meant that it provided them with only a limited boost, since liberals and centrists embraced it with equal fervor. The fall of Joe McCarthy tainted conservatism with an image of recklessness and indecency. The death of Robert Taft in 1953 and the control of the national Republican Party by moderates like Thomas Dewey and Dwight Eisenhower thwarted any full-scale effort to reverse the New Deal. The attack on union rights proved a dud, resulting in big defeats for the Republicans in 1958.
Goldwater was the exception to the rule. A member of the Senate committee investigating labor racketeering, he had launched an investigation of the UAW (which turned up no corruption), then won reelection after portraying an effort by the union to defeat him as undue interference in his state’s affairs by an outside force. Emerging as a bright star on the conservative horizon, he helped revive the movement by repackaging old themes in attractive new ways.
The breakthrough came with The Conscience of a Conservative, a short book prepared as part of Goldwater’s unsuccessful bid for the 1960 Republican presidential nomination. Ghostwritten by former McCarthy speechwriter L. Brent Bozell, it portrayed the central political issue of the day as the threat to individual freedom from an unrestrained federal government that unduly interfered in the daily lives of its citizens, hampered business through excessive regulation, and stepped on states’ rights. Goldwater had a different notion of freedom than the civil rights movement, which also was making freedom its central demand. For Goldwater, freedom meant not interfering with free-market capitalism, maximizing the social and economic liberty of individuals, and restraining government, including federal interference in southern racial practices. In The Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater said almost nothing about communist subversion at home—a break with a long-standing right-wing obsession. He did take a hard line toward the Soviet bloc; American policy, he argued, should be built around the idea “that we would rather die than lose our freedom.” But most of his book focused on proposals for radically reducing federal spending, limiting union power, and leaving economic and social regulation to the marketplace. By November 1960, half a million copies of The Conscience of a Conservative had been sold, with sales especially strong at college bookstores. Eventually sales exceeded three million.
Goldwater failed to gain the nomination in 1960, but the election established conditions for a conservative revival. With Eisenhower leaving office, Republicans no longer felt constrained about attacking entrenched programs of the New Deal that the president had supported. Conservative activists who felt betrayed by an agreement Nixon worked out with Nelson Rockefeller that gave the party’s 1960 platform some decidedly liberal planks began working, with backing from conservative business interests, to make sure that next time around there would be a conservative presidential candidate running on a conservative platform. Meanwhile, the hyperbolic Cold War rhetoric of the incoming Kennedy administration helped legitimate far-right anticommunism. In 1958, Robert Welch, a right-wing businessman who had been chair of the National Association of Manufacturers’ education committee, founded the John Birch Society in reaction to the internationalism and domestic moderation of the Eisenhower administration. Though liberals and moderates derided Welch’s charges of communist conspiracies penetrating the government and American society, his emotional tenor and dire warnings did not lie all that far from Kennedy’s portrayal of the “hour of maximum danger.” By the early 1960s, the Birch Society claimed sixty thousand members, with considerable influence beyond its ranks through its publications and connections within the Republican Party.
The activists drawn to the emerging New Right in some respects resembled their liberal and left-wing counterparts. The young conservatives who in 1960 founded the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) had a similar combination of earnest engagement with politics, rebelliousness against established positions and institutions, and disdain for compromise. But on many specific issues they took a diametrically opposite position, supporting loyalty oaths for recipients of federal fellowships and student loans; seeking a continuation of nuclear testing; supporting “right-to-work” laws; pressing for the reduction of welfare programs; and promoting a vigorous anticommunist foreign policy. Many YAF supporters had a strong libertarian streak. The novels of Ayn Rand served a similar role for young conservatives as the works of Albert Camus did for New Leftists; both writers laid out notions of freedom and morality that, while differing from one another, demanded individual self-scrutiny and uncompromising action. But among young conservatives, and even more so their elders, there also were “traditionalists” who adhered to religious-based social values, sought moral and legal limits on individual behavior, and feared what they saw as the nihilism and spiritual emptiness of Rand’s hyperindividualism.
Grassroots conservatism found many adherents among upwardly mobile professionals, small business owners, and their wives living in socially homogeneous, growing suburban areas in the South and West. Like the liberal reformers, this new breed of conservatives refused to defer to established authorities, having great confidence in their own judgment and right to shape society. Like their liberal counterparts, they tended to be highly literate, influenced by books and journals like National Review, a conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley in 1955; FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s anticommunist tract Masters of Deceit; and more extreme literature put out by hard-right groups.
Growth in the western part of the country helped propel the right’s resurgence. Western conservatives resented the control Washington had over their region as a landholder and regulator of natural resources, while downplaying the benefits they received from its subsidies. In Orange County, California, the epicenter of the New Right, newcomers flooding in from small towns in the Midwest, upper South, and Southwest brought with them conservative social values and conservative forms of Protestantism. The region’s military-industrial complex contributed to its prosperity and its deep anticommunism. Many beneficiaries of the booming local economy attributed their success to individual initiative and ability, reinforcing their free-market ideology, overlooking the massive government spending that sustained the area and the West more generally.
Dismay with changes wrought by liberal hegemony fueled the New Right. The 1962 Supreme Court decision in the case of Engel v. Vitale sparked as much or more controversy than Brown. A decade earlier, at the height of the anticommunist fervor, the New York State
Board of Regents had written a nondenominational prayer that some school districts used to start each day. Ruling on a challenge to that practice, the Court, with only one dissenting vote, decided that having the government compose a prayer to be recited as part of a religious program carried out by a government body violated the First Amendment prohibition of government-established religion. The next year the Court extended its ruling by declaring the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer or the reading of Bible verses in classrooms to be unconstitutional, even if children were allowed to excuse themselves from the exercise.
Seemingly overnight, a practice that had been part of the routine of public schools in much of the country since their founding—brief prayer to begin the day—had been banished. Many Jewish and mainstream Protestant leaders supported the Court decisions, but the Catholic Church and many southern Protestant ministers vehemently denounced them. Popular opposition to the rulings, though widespread, proved insufficient to push through proposed constitutional amendments to allow school prayer. But outrage at court-ordered secularization brought new adherents to the conservative movement.
The civil rights movement created other openings for conservatives and the Republican Party. As the Kennedy administration began to more actively support civil rights, southern segregationists again questioned their ties to the national Democratic Party. The embrace of states’ rights by non-southern conservatives like Goldwater created the potential for a political realignment. To capitalize, the Republican National Committee launched a southern organizing drive, which it called Operation Dixie, the same name the CIO had used for its largely unsuccessful southern organizing effort a decade and a half earlier. The South, once seen by labor liberals as the key to expanding the New Deal and organized labor, now came to be seen by conservatives as the key to undoing them. In the North, too, some white voters moved in a conservative direction in reaction to the civil rights movement, especially the use of government power to enforce nondiscriminatory practices in home sales, hiring, and school placement.
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