American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  King never completely rejected the idea of Black Power, but he remained committed to nonviolence and conceived of the struggle for black advancement as part of a larger struggle for social justice. He found himself increasingly eclipsed, at least in the media and in popularity among young African Americans, by the diffuse, rhetorically flamboyant Black Power movement. Frustrated by the failure of his efforts to fight segregation in northern cities and the continued poverty of so many blacks, King began giving greater emphasis to economic issues, seeking to build a multiracial movement addressing the plight of the poor. Also, in 1967 he followed the lead of other civil rights leaders, like Carmichael, in becoming an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam. Long a supporter of the labor movement, in March 1968 King agreed to help black sanitation workers in Memphis who were striking for union recognition. While he was visiting Memphis to lead a march in their support, an assassin, James Earl Ray, shot and killed him.

  On the night of King’s death, riots broke out in well over a hundred cities and towns. Local law enforcement officials and the Army, having anticipated another summer of urban riots, had created special weapons and tactics (SWAT) teams; bought massive quantities of arms, armored vehicles, and tear gas; and held riot training. Seventy-five thousand Army troops, Marines, and National Guardsmen, in addition to local and state police, patrolled city streets after King’s murder. Still, violence raged. The worst rioting took place in Washington, D.C., where hundreds of fires burned, some within blocks of the White House, and ten people died. In Baltimore, four nights of rioting left six people dead, a thousand businesses damaged or destroyed, and five thousand people arrested. In Chicago, eleven died as looting and arson engulfed the city’s West Side. Altogether, thirty-nine people died in the disorders sparked by King’s death. The eruption demonstrated the civil rights leader’s immense stature among African Americans, the outrage at his murder, the widespread rejection of nonviolence, and the thinness of the veneer of order that lay on top of a society that seemed close to flying apart.

  In late April, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey announced that he was joining the race for president. Humphrey inherited Johnson’s position as the candidate of the Democratic establishment: southern governors, big-city bosses, labor leaders, and corporate contributors. Though coming in too late to enter most of the primaries, he nonetheless emerged as the favorite for the nomination; most states picked their national convention delegates at state conventions, which Democratic insiders dominated, while in a few of the fifteen states that held primaries Humphrey hoped to inherit delegates won by surrogates or favorite sons. Meanwhile, Kennedy and McCarthy battled it out in the primary states, culminating in a June 4 California election. There Kennedy won a narrow victory over McCarthy, with a surrogate for Humphrey very far behind, but even before the ballots were fully counted Kennedy was dead, shot by an assassin on his way out of the hotel where he had celebrated his victory.

  Kennedy’s murder added to the growing sense of chaos in the country. In a five-year stretch, Medgar Evers, the two Kennedys, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King all had been killed by assassins’ bullets. Political murder seemed to be becoming normalized, eliminating key African American leaders and helping determine who sat in the White House. The fog of uncertainty surrounding the assassinations added to their ominousness. Hints of conspiracy and the involvement of powerful, secret forces intimated that the real exercise of power happened out of sight of most Americans. At the same time, the seeming marginality and bizarreness of the actual shooters suggested a disturbing randomness to life, that the purposeful action of millions of people could be undone by one oddball, hater, or nut. Either way, the country had moved far from the textbook constitutionalism upon which it prided itself.

  A new wave of antiwar and campus protest added to the sense that normal channels of politics were becoming eclipsed. Early in 1968, five thousand women picketed the opening session of Congress behind the eighty-seven-year-old Jeanette Rankin, the first woman to serve in Congress, who had voted against the declarations of war for both World War I and World War II. For many young protestors, World War I, with its large antiwar movement, seemed as long ago as the Civil War or the Revolution, yet Rankin provided living proof of how recent it had been. (So did the gender composition of Congress, which had not changed all that much since Rankin entered the House in 1917; in 1968, Congress had only twelve female members.) More antiwar protests came over the course of the spring, including the burning of draft files at a Selective Service office in Catonsville, Maryland, by a group dominated by Catholic priests and nuns and a one-day school boycott in which upwards of 200,000 high school and college students and teachers participated.

  As student protests against the war became increasingly common, so did protests over other issues. At Barnard College, students held a sit-down blocking the president’s office after she expelled a sophomore for living off campus with her boyfriend in violation of school rules. At Howard University, hundreds of students occupied the administration building to protest the lack of black history courses at the country’s preeminent African American university. Students at Maryland’s Bowie State College, another predominantly black college, held a boycott and occupied buildings to protest the miserable condition of their school’s facilities. When two hundred of them took their protest to the Maryland statehouse, Governor Spiro Agnew had them arrested and sent state troopers to shut down their college.

  At Columbia, students led by SDS and the Student Afro-American Society protested the university’s involvement in military research and its plan to use part of a park bordering Harlem for a gymnasium. What began as a spontaneous occupation of one building spread to four others, attracting national and international media attention. After a week, the university called in the police to clear the campus. They did so with brutal gusto, arresting 720 people and beating and bloodying not only the building occupiers but also student and faculty bystanders and even some pro-war students.

  The Columbia events took place at a moment of unprecedented student and dissident activity around the globe. During 1968, a surge of protest took place in a score of countries seemingly very different from one another: democratic, industrialized capitalist countries, including West Germany, Italy, France, Britain, and Japan; capitalistic dictatorships, like Spain; communist countries, most notably Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, and China; and parts of the developing world, including Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Pakistan, and Senegal. Much like in 1848 and 1917–19, a spirit of rebellion danced across borders, making possibilities previously unimagined seem close to hand. While the specific demands in various countries differed, everywhere antiauthoritarianism and a demand for more democracy and personal freedom informed the protests. By 1968, a post–World War II generation had come of age impatient with the social and political arrangements established at the end of the war.

  The United States helped set the stage for the global ’68 protest. The spread of American popular culture helped create distinct youth cultures in many parts of the world, which in turn contributed to the generational character of much of the protest. Mass demonstrations in many countries against the war in Vietnam established networks and inclinations toward protest that activists then mobilized around local issues. In doing so, they frequently adopted the tactics, political style, and cultural accoutrements of the American civil rights, student, and antiwar movements.

  The protests in the United States never came anywhere as near to bringing about fundamental political transformation as did protests in countries like France and Czechoslovakia, where major segments of society beyond the academy mobilized. Even together, the antiwar, student, civil rights, Black Power, and developing Mexican American movements remained too small, marginal, and diffuse to threaten the basic social order. But in the confusing sensory overload of the winter, spring, and summer of 1968, that did not seem clear to many Americans witnessing fierce fighting in Vietnam, extraordinary
presidential politics, political assassinations, urban riots, countercultural blossoming, campus protest, and antiwar demonstrations. Even mainstream, mass-circulation magazines adopted an apocalyptic tone in covering politics and society, seeing great threats and possibilities all around and portraying as tangible some sort of forthcoming revolutionary change or social explosion. Looking back at this period, Joan Didion recalled feeling, “I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flashing pictures in variable sequence, images with no ‘meaning’ beyond their temporary arrangement.” Hospitalized for vertigo, nausea, and feeling that she was about to pass out, she later wrote, “By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.”

  Of all the events of that summer, none had a more surreal quality than the Democratic National Convention. Back when it looked like it would be a triumphal recoronation of Lyndon Johnson, a loose coalition of New Leftists, antiwar organizers, black activists, and political counterculturalists (who had dubbed themselves Yippies) had begun planning demonstrations for the August convention, to be held in Chicago. They persisted even as the presidential race took one unexpected turn after another. Mayor Richard J. Daley, an old-style political boss who almost single-handedly ran Chicago, privately opposed the war in Vietnam and had his doubts about Humphrey. But he hated demonstrators and counterculturalists and did all he could to prevent their presence in his city. His refusal to grant permits for marches and rallies, the reputation of his police department for brutality, and sabotage by undercover Chicago policemen who infiltrated the groups planning the protests kept the number of out-of-town demonstrators modest. Still, chaos ensued. When demonstrators stayed in city parks past an evening curfew, the police assaulted them and the reporters watching. The clashes soon spread to downtown. On the evening of the presidential nomination, the police indulged in a carnival of violence against protestors outside the hotels where the convention delegates were housed. Their brutality itself was not so unusual, but its broadcast over live national television was, exposing millions of Americans for the first time to such conduct, later characterized in an official investigation as a “police riot.”

  The chaos in the streets echoed inside the convention hall, as delegates fought over an antiwar platform plank (which went down to defeat) and the presidential and vice presidential nominations. Many delegates expressed outrage at the events outside, including Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff, who from the podium referred to “the Gestapo tactics on the streets in Chicago.” Though Humphrey easily won the nomination, by the end of the convention the Democratic Party, as broadcaster David Brinkley put it, “could fairly be classified as a disaster area,” riven by political and cultural fissures that would weaken it for years to come.

  While the Democrats battled it out for the leadership of their party, Richard Nixon sewed up the Republican presidential nomination. It was one of the great comeback stories of American politics. After losing to Kennedy in 1960 and in his bid two years later for the California governorship, Nixon had renounced politics in a fit of anger. But over the next six years he rebuilt his career, going to endless political dinners and giving endless speeches to shore up his ties with a broad spectrum of Republican politicians.

  Nixon’s election campaign strategy rested on a shrewd reading of the intense but often confused resentments and fears that so many Americans had in 1968. Like McCarthy, Nixon understood the widespread desire for order and social harmony. Unlike McCarthy, he added a hard edge to his promise of social peace, pledging over and over to restore “law and order.” In accepting the Republican nomination, Nixon lauded “the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans—the non-shouters; the non-demonstrators” as “the real voice of America.”

  Nixon was a master at sending mixed signals. In the same speech, in an effort to project himself as a leader who could unite the nation, he appropriated phrases and cadences from Martin Luther King Jr., echoing the civil rights leader’s very last address, the night before he died: “The time has come for us to leave the valley of despair and climb the mountain so that we may see the glory of the dawn—a new day for America, and a new dawn for peace and freedom in the world.” At the same time, his selection of Spiro Agnew as his running mate reinforced the idea that a Nixon presidency would end the coddling of lawbreakers and advocates of change. Agnew was one of the first national political figures to emerge from postwar suburbanization, having long lived in the Baltimore suburbs. A centrist who had won office as a result of splits in the Maryland Democratic Party, he had gained national attention from his condemnation of moderate black leaders, blaming them for the riots in Baltimore after King’s death because they had failed to denounce more militant leaders.

  Nixon’s effort to simultaneously benefit from the divisions in the country and rise above them was complicated by the presence in the race of former Alabama governor George Wallace, running as a third-party candidate. Wallace played on the same themes of resentment as Nixon, but in a cruder, blunter, wittier fashion. Unlike Nixon, he made no effort to appear statesmanlike. His rallies were wild affairs. Wallace would denounce the “Eastern establishment,” “pointy-headed intellectuals,” “bearded professors,” welfare mothers (who he claimed were “breeding children as a cash crop”), hippies, and demonstrators (whom he called “scum”). He was at his best when he had demonstrators or hecklers to play off, pointing them out as representing all that was wrong with America. Lacking a coherent political program or even a political party behind him (he got financial and organizational help from right-wing groups and conservative evangelical ministers), Wallace’s campaign had more than a little dose of nihilism. Perhaps for this reason, it seemed to capture the bitter, dark mood of many Americans who thought that the world they had grown up in and believed in was being destroyed by big government, a failed war, spoiled students, hippies, uppity blacks, and liberals who were responsible for all these woes.

  Wallace hoped that his segregationist credentials would enable him to capture most of the South (where African Americans still made up only a modest part of the electorate), while making inroads in the North through antiliberal populism. Still, with the Democratic Party in disarray, Nixon looked like a shoo-in, even if Wallace took much of the South. But in late September Humphrey gave a nationally televised speech in which he promised to unilaterally halt the bombing of North Vietnam in pursuit of peace and set a timetable for troop withdrawals. (For his part, Nixon blandly promised “to bring an honorable end to the war in Vietnam,” without saying how.) Though Humphrey added provisos that made the practical meaning of his position unclear, for the first time he broke from his public allegiance to Johnson’s policy. By doing so, he at least partially shed his image as a bought man. Meanwhile, Wallace hurt himself badly by picking as his running mate former Air Force chief of staff General Curtis LeMay, who immediately reinforced his image as something of a nut by speaking cavalierly about the possible use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam.

  Faced with the threat of a Nixon victory and strong Wallace showing, alienated Democratic constituencies began returning to the party. Labor leaders discovered that a large minority of northern white union members planned to vote for Wallace. In response, they undertook a campaign advertising the poor conditions for workers in Alabama, which proved effective in diminishing Wallace’s northern blue-collar support. Then, just days before the election, Johnson announced a bombing halt over North Vietnam, citing progress toward getting peace talks started (having gotten indications from North Vietnam that it would accept the participation of the South Vietnamese government in negotiations, a U.S. precondition). Along with a last-minute endorsement by McCarthy, the bombing halt convinced some war critics to vote for Humphrey.

  In the end it was almost enough, but not quite. Nixon achieved a very narrow popular plurality, with 43.4 percent of the vote compared to 42.7 percent for Humphrey and 1
3.5 percent for Wallace. The electoral vote was not as close: Nixon won 301 electoral votes, carrying most of the upper South, Midwest, and Far West; Humphrey won 191 votes, mostly from the Northeast and Texas; and Wallace garnered 46 votes from the five southern states that he carried. While the Republicans picked up some congressional seats, the Democrats retained comfortable majorities in both houses.

  Seen one way, the 1968 election demonstrated remarkable continuity from the election eight years earlier. In 1960, Nixon and Kennedy had virtually tied in the popular vote, just like Nixon and Humphrey did this time, suggesting that the country remained divided between the moderate conservatism and the moderate liberalism of the major candidates. But adding together the Wallace and Nixon vote gave a different picture of a clear rejection of the liberal hegemony of the past decade. Furthermore, since the bulk of Wallace’s backers in the South said that if he had not been in the race they would have voted Republican, the election also suggested a possible fundamental party realignment, in which white southern voters would bring the region into the Republican fold and give the party a national base from which to dominate presidential contests.

  By the end of 1968, the mood of enormous uncertainty—the sense of impending change, possibly on a cataclysmic scale—began to lighten in the mass media. Life in more or less the form the country had known it might go on after all. The election had done nothing to end social divisions, which deepened over the next few years, nor had its outcome meant either the demise of liberalism or the end of radical challenges. But deep institutional and psychological structures of order had begun to assert themselves, even as the storms of political conflict and cultural change continued to rage.