Some Thoughts on the Port Huron Statement and U.S. Intellectual History

The Port Huron Statement used us to write itself, not the other way around….There’s no fucking way that I could have written it. It’s not possible if you read it.  And there’s sections of it I don’t remember at all. And I don’t know who wrote them.  So, it was fifty people at the crest of a great movement, having gone through the experience of jail in Mississippi and Georgia…There’s a way in which the words just came gushing forth….Something takes you over; it’s not that you are in charge.

-- Tom Hayden, "The Port Huron Statement at 50," Madison, Wisconsin, May 4, 2012 

MAUDE (Julianne Moore): Tell me a little about yourself, Jeffrey.
DUDE (Jeff Bridges):  Well, uh. . . Not much to tell.  I was, uh, one of the authors of the Port Huron Statement.--The original Port Huron Statement.
MAUDE:  Uh-huh.
DUDE: Not the compromised second draft. 

-- from The Big Lebowski (1998)

What’s gone on in the last 18 months is, to me, a fulfillment of virtually every dimension of participatory democracy, which was the dream at Port Huron fifty years ago, as outlined in the statement. And I hope to convince you that it’s a perspective and a framework that has a recurring life, independent of its authors, independent of its publication, because it always arises where people suffer too much and the institutions are too slow in making a response. 

-- Tom Hayden, "The Port Huron Statement at 50"

I

June 15, 2012, marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Port Huron Statement. This year has already seen a large number of academic events reflecting on the document's golden anniversary, including a conference at UC Santa Barbara in February, a dialogue on the Port Huron Statement between Noam Chomsky and Tom Hayden at MIT in April, and a short series of lectures at the Havens Center for the Study of Social Structure and Social Change at UW Madison in May.  Many reflections on it have also appeared in print.  One of the constants at these events has been the participation of Tom Hayden, who is usually credited with writing the Statement.

Although any reflection on the Statement is historical, the concerns of the various fora on its fiftieth anniversary have not principally been historical, which is fair enough.  Hayden, and many others, see the Statement as a living text. And much of the discussion of it has involved its relationship to our current political situation.

Nonetheless, the Port Huron Statement is an historical text. Given the interests of this blog, I think it's worth briefly reflecting on its significance for U.S. intellectual history.

II

There is no question in my mind that the Port Huron Statement is a significant--and canonical--text in American intellectual history. Indeed, I'd argue that, now that Lester Frank Ward's "Mind as a Social Factor" has been restored, the single most significant omission from Hollinger and Capper's American Intellectual Tradition reader is the Statement.

Its historical significance lies in at least three things:  First, it richly reflects a number of important strands in twentieth-century American thought. Deweyite pragmatism, C. Wright Mills's analysis of the power elite, existentialism, as well as the ideas swirling around the ongoing Black freedom struggle, are perhaps most clearly reflected in the text. But it is also in creative dialog with the mainstream of post-war liberalism and, at least implicitly, the Marxism of the Old Left.

Second, it captures a very particular, important, and brief moment in American history and thought.  The Statement truly could not have been written three years earlier and would not have been written three years later.  It emerged most directly from then very recent experiences of the civil rights movement in the South. Both Tom Hayden and Paul Potter had been beaten while working for civil rights in Mississippi earlier in 1962.  The point of view of Port Huron is very much that of people of relative privilege already bound up in others' struggles for justice.

Though it emerged from these social struggles and a sense of the failures of the status quo, the Statement also reflects the optimism of the early Sixties. One of the first things that Tom Hayden did when the Port Huron Statement was drafted was to travel to Washington, D.C. in the hopes of presenting it to President Kennedy.  They managed to get a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who apparently did get a copy of the Statement to the President.

Within three years of the Statement's writing, however, LBJ had begun to escalate the War in Vietnam and the black freedom struggle had begun to split over questions of goals and tactics. The War would come to dominate the politics of the New Left in the second half of the decade. And the relationship of SDS to both those in power and to the Marxist legacy of the Old Left began to change dramatically and rapidly.  By the end of the decade, a younger generation of SDS leaders had largely repudiated Port Huron as too "reformist."

The third historical significance of the Port Huron Statement is related to the second: the text became almost instantly canonical.  SDS had come into existence when, two years earlier, the Student League for Industrial Democracy, the youth wing of the old, socialist League for Industrial Democracy, had changed its name. But SDS really as an organization in its own right with the framing of the Statement, which, in its movement away from anticommunism, also drove a wedge between SDS and its erstwhile sponsor, the LID.  The Port Huron Statement thus initially defined what SDS stood for.  And as SDS, along with SNCC, defined what the emerging New Left stood for, academics and public intellectuals turned to the Statement to understand what was going on politically on campus.  Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau's The New Radicals: A Report with Documents (1966) included a long excerpt from the Statement.*

But even as the Statement became an object of journalistic and academic analysis in the mid-to-late 1960s, its significance within the movement began to wane, as noted above.  By the late Sixties, those writing about it frequently noted that it had fallen into disfavor among the current leadership of SDS.  But the declining importance of the Statement for the movement only served to highlight its historical significance...and thus its canonicity.

III

In a sense the first two quotations with which I started this post reflect the extent to which the Statement is a generational marker, the first in a serious mode, the second in a humorous one.  In Hayden's account, the statement wrote itself...which is very close to saying that it was written by its historical moment (though not quite...and I'll get back to how below).  The Coen Brothers' use of the Statement as an important piece of backstory for Jeff Bridge's Dude in The Big Lebowski presents it as a different sort of generational marker.  Once, it would appear, the Dude was politically involved; now, we know, he's the ultimate slacker, more concerned about White Russians and the fate of his erstwhile rug ("it really tied the room together!") than anything else.  The absurdity of the former political commitments of Baby Boomers like the Dude have been a frequent object of humor in turn-of-the-millenium U.S. culture. And the cult popularity of The Big Lebowski apparently has led some young people today to associate the Port Huron Statement with the Dude.

But although the statement is often (correctly) seen as a product of its particular moment, Hayden and others of his generation frequently treat it as strangely timeless.  Much of Hayden's talk in Madison in May, from which the above quotations are taken, revolves around his presenting participatory democracy as a truly eternal idea. This is reflected in the last of the three quotes with which I started this blog post.  Participatory democracy, says Hayden, is "a perspective and a framework that has a recurring life, independent of its authors, independent of its publication, because it always arises where people suffer too much and the institutions are too slow in making a response."

This sense of the timelessness of the ideas of the Statement also appears in the comic entitled "The Port Huron Statement Today" that the historian Paul Buhle and the cartoonist Gary Dumm recently created for New York high school students.  Today's social struggles, the comic suggests, are exactly the same struggles that SDS addressed in 1962 and they admit of the same solutions.  This view is most immediately captured in this panel from the comic (which, incidentally incorporates an image from the late '60s rather than the period in which the Statement was actually framed):

I have no problem whatsoever with the desire to treat the Port Huron Statement as a living document. I think, in many ways, it is.  But I also think that, both politically and historically, treating its message as entirely eternal is inadequate.  Most obviously, the Statement is a document that is absolutely of its time, from its highly gendered language to its very existentialist assumptions. Anyone who tries teaching the document today will, for example, immediately recognize that this is a text written by and for people who have read Camus...and young people today by and large have not.  Understand this text entails, among other things, having a rich understanding of its moment.

But the vision of an eternal Port Huron Statement has another, equally important downside.  Put simply, the vision of the Port Huron Statement failed.  It did not even sustain the organization that produced it for half a decade. It did not transform the U.S. as its authors hoped it would. That does not, of course, mean that there is nothing of value in the Statement or that many of its ideas might not succeed in the future. Far from it. But grappling with the historical failures of the Port Huron Statement is a necessary part of understanding it historically...and, I'd argue, renewing a version of its politics (if one wants to do so).

This point is also poignantly illustrated by the third of the quotes with which I began this post.  Writing in the midst of the ongoing battle to recall Gov. Scott Walker, Hayden sounded an optimistic note in early May:  "What’s gone on in the last 18 months is, to me, a fulfillment of virtually every dimension of participatory democracy, which was the dream at Port Huron fifty years ago, as outlined in the statement."  But of course, that effort ultimately failed on June 5. Ever since, the internet has been overrun with a variety of postmortems trying to figure out what went wrong.  Though the left, like any political tradition, can and should find sustenance in its history, it will be better served if it treats that history in a slightly more hardheaded fashion.  The Port Huron Statement was a watershed of early New Left thought. But it didn't--and doesn't--provide all the answers.

_________________________________________________
* The Port Huron Statement is a very long document and it is frequently reprinted in edited form without that fact being made clear.  Nowhere in Jacobs and Landau's book do they indicate that they were reprinted merely an excerpt (though the ellipses in the text would have informed the careful reader).  Similarly the link to the "full text of the statement" on the Wikipedia page on the Port Huron Statement currently leads until recently led to a different, long excerpt that appears on the University of Virginia's Sixties Project site, again without noting that the document has been severely edited (I just changed the link myself so that it now leads to an actual copy of the full text).

The Gay Sixties

A few weeks ago I argued here that the short era known as the “sixties” should be understood to have been radical, relative to short eras before and since, even though such an understanding need also be tempered by knowledge, bolstered by a growing historiography, that plenty of non-radical history happened in the sixties as well. Claims about the radicalness of the sixties are especially true when the history of gay liberation, largely absent from standard accounts, is included. Or, as historian John D’Emilio argues in his splendid essay, “Placing Gay in the Sixties”—chapter two of his indispensable collection, The World Turned: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and Culture—the inclusion of gay history in the larger history of the sixties changes the standard sixties narrative.

The first standard element of the sixties narrative that the inclusion of gay liberation complicates is declension. Whereas many historians and other assorted commentators (Todd Gitlin comes to mind) draw a hard-and-fast line between the “good” early sixties and the “bad” late sixties, or assume that the liberation politics of the sixties quickly gave way to the regressive politics of the seventies, D’Emilio guesses “that for many gay men and lesbians, the sixties happened in the seventies.” “While millions of gay men and lesbians around the world look to 1969 as the dawn of a bright new age,” he writes, “everyone else reads it as part of the ‘bad’ sixties and all that follows.” In other words, at the moment when the civil rights and antiwar movements were foundering on the shoals of sectarianism, police repression, and cultural backlash, the gay liberation movement had its watershed moment with the Stonewall Riots.

The best history of the Stonewall Riots, and really, one of the most interesting history books I have ever read, is Martin Duberman’s Stonewall. Duberman analyzes the Stonewall Riot, what he calls “the emblematic event” of the gay right’s movement, and its larger historical context by way of a close biographical study of six individuals. These six people were key figures in gay liberation, if not necessarily lead actors in the actual events of the riot that followed a police raid of a gay bar on Christopher Street in Manhattan on June 27, 1969. The biography of Karla Jay, currently Distinguished Professor of English and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Pace University, and one of the six lives Duberman chronicles, provides evidence of how the history of gay liberation shakes up standard sixties narratives.

Jay came of age in in a pre-Stonewall world. Although the gay rights movement predated Stonewall, represented by the two homophile organizations founded in the 1950s—the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis—awareness of gay rights was limited. Even many gay rights activists were hesitant about public displays of homosexuality. The Mattachine Society, for example, relied upon alliances with respected heterosexual liberals who spoke on behalf of gay rights, since most Mattachine members preferred not to “out” themselves. Such reticence was logical given the broader cultural stigma attached to homosexuality, a stigma reflected in and reproduced by the dominant professional psychological paradigm that understood homosexuality as pathological. The American Psychological Association (APA) finally declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973, in large part due to the gay liberation movement, which targeted APA meetings for disruption.

Political repression was mirrored by the personal. Jay grew up in a fairly traditionalist Jewish household where heterosexuality was assumed normative. Thus, she was unable to form a sense of what her sexual feelings meant, one way or another. In her freshman year at Barnard in 1964 she awoke to the reality that homosexuality was taboo when two of her classmates were expelled after a peeping tom witnessed them having sex in their dorm room. The young man who ratted on them suffered no consequences for his peeping, to the contrary, he was hailed as a protector of public norms. Given this, it is no surprise that Jay hid her sexuality until she was an adult.

Like many in the gay liberation movement, Jay got her activist start as part of the broader New Left and counterculture. Formative to her cultural awakening was drug use, which she claims opened her mind to alternative viewpoints. Formative to her political awakening was participating in the 1968 protests at Columbia University, against the university’s expansion into nearby black neighborhoods, and against the institution’s military-sponsored research. But, like so many other New Left women, she grew convinced that sexism plagued the movement.

By 1969, feminism became Jay’s political priority. But just as the feminist movement gained a rebirth, signified by the 1968 Miss America pageant protest in Atlantic City,
it suffered from a wave of sectarianism every bit as divisive as the sectarianism the larger New Left experienced after the 1968 debacle in Chicago. The many thousands of women who sought to join up with the feminist movement, like Jay, had to choose sides in this sectarian struggle. Many selected the more reformist route and joined the National Organization for Women (NOW). But those feminists tied to the New Left, and thus interested in more revolutionary stances than those advocated by NOW, joined up with various radical feminist groups. But, as Alice Echols shows in Daring To Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975, radical feminism experienced its own schisms even apart from its differences with establishment groups like NOW. The divide, at first, was between those who sought to relate the issue of women’s liberation to larger issues already on the New left’s front burner, and those who sought to prioritize the patriarchal repression of women. Jay chose the latter since, according to Duberman, she “disliked the then common notion that feminism should take a backseat to the ‘main’ struggles against capitalism, racism, and imperialism. She saw that argument as a convenient one for men, as a long-standing rationale for deferring women’s liberation by insisting that its time had not yet come, while arguing that it would automatically come once the ‘larger’ struggle had been won.”

Jay joined Redstockings, a radical feminist group founded in 1969 by Shulamith Firestone and Ellen Willis. The Redstockings rejected many doctrinaire New Left positions, but maintained a Marxist analysis about gender inequality. They argued, for example, that women mostly married out of material needs. In terms of tactics, Redstockings focused on consciousness-raising rather than direct action. Consciousness-raising, where activists gathered together to voice their individual struggles, enabled feminists to relate their personal problems to the larger political problems of living in a patriarchal society. When Jay finally came out of the closet at a Redstockings consciousness-raising group, she realized she was among many lesbians. Thus she began the process of expanding her feminist activism to her gay rights activism. In fact, “coming out” as a political tactic was similar to consciousness-raising. Jay explained the theory that guided “coming out”: “the process of self-realization that would emerge from speaking freely and honestly to other gays in the protected atmosphere of a consciousness-raising session would ramify outward, that speaking truth would end by cleansing and reconstituting society at large.”

Jay was not a Stonewall participant. Few women were. Duberman writes about her because he seeks to demonstrate the overall effect Stonewall had on the push for gay rights. Stonewall shifted the tone of the gay right’s movement. Rather than quiet and demurring, the after effects of Stonewall enabled many young activists to be confrontational and demanding of their rights. Out of this the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) formed. Duberman writes: “Karla had been initially disdainful of the ‘little penny-ante thing’ going on at Stonewall; to her it was just another all-male squabble with the prize nothing more than the right to lead an unhampered bar life—a life she scorned. But then she got wind of the effort afoot to form a Gay Liberation Front—men and women working together to produce broad social change. Now that did interest her.”

Most of the founding GLF activists were veterans of other New Left groups. “When these young gay and lesbian radicals now flocked to join the Gay Liberation Front, they brought with them a rich set of insights from their prior involvements: from the black civil rights movement came an awareness of the inequities of American life; from the women’s movement, consciousness of sexism and the profoundly important idea that the personal is political, that one’s experience mattered; from the antiwar struggle, the revelation that the government operated as a bulwark of conformity and privilege; from the countercultural revolution, the injunction to reject all received authority, to ‘do it now, to be what you want to be.’” In this, Duberman not only relates gay liberation to the larger New Left—to the radical sixties more broadly construed—he also implies that the GLF was the culmination, the full flowering, of New Left sensibilities. The GLF carried the radical sixties into the seventies.

Stonewall—1969—was a watershed for gays, a hopeful moment in their efforts to end the sadistic homophobia that dominated American culture. 1969, then, was not the end of liberation politics. D’Emilio argues that this history of gay liberation, when included in the broader narratives at all, often serves to support the declension narrative. He draws a pithy analogy: “without exactly saying as much, gay becomes associated with reaction, backlash, and social decay. We might as well be reading Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the classic eighteenth-century work that tied Rome’s collapse to sexual immorality.” In this vein, the fall of the New Deal order, the decline of labor, is implicitly connected to the rise of gay liberation: too much is made of the changing demographics in the Democratic Party that followed the 1972 reform commission headed up by George McGovern, after which the number of minority, women, and gay delegates came to more closely represent the number of such constituents in the party, diminishing the number of (white, male) labor delegates. Jefferson Cowie’s excellent book, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class seeks to correct this labor declension narrative by replacing it with an alternative one: the white working class helped usher in its own demise by allowing its racism, sexism, and homophobia to override class solidarity.

Of course, none of this is to suggest that the declension narrative that either ignores gay history or relates gay liberation to reaction should be replaced by Whiggish interpretations of unbroken progress. Although life in America is undoubtedly better for gays and lesbians, there has been much heartache along the way. As Lisa Szefel makes clear in her review of Age of Fracture, any history of the 1980s that ignores how the AIDS epidemic was allowed to go largely unchecked due to rampant homophobia of is not getting a very full picture. I’m working hard to avoid that mistake in my book on the culture wars. I spent a week in the Reagan archives last summer, where I discovered mountains of evidence that Reagan administration officials, especially liaisons to the Christian Right—Morton Blackwell during the first Reagan term, Gary Bauer during the second—helped spread anti-homosexual propaganda in order to slow the government response to the AIDS crisis.

But back to the sixties. If you’re interested in an alternative analytical model for understanding them, I highly recommend the D’Emilio’s chapter. It has much more in it that I have yet to mention, including a short but fascinating intellectual history of four sixties thinkers who also happened to be homosexuals: James Baldwin, Bayard Rustin, Allen Ginsberg, and Paul Goodman. D’Emilio argues their homosexuality is significant because, prior to gay liberation, to be public about one’s homosexuality, as these four men were to various, limited degrees, was a mark of protest, a willingness to thumb one’s nose at tradition. D’Emilio regards these thinkers as emblematic of a “gay sensibility” that worked to erode American traditions. Being publicly gay “branded one’s consciousness with a marker of difference… It necessarily made one perpetually aware of separation, of division in the body of humanity, of marginalization and ostracism.”

Ginsberg’s relation to gay liberation is fascinating. Although he wasn’t necessarily an activist in the typical sense of that role, the eponymous beat poet seemed to appear at all the sixties moments of radical lore. He makes an appearance at the Stonewall Inn, for example, two nights following the 1969 riot. When he saw “Gay Power!” scrawled on the front of the bar, he told a Village Voice reporter: “We’re one of the largest minorities in the country—10 percent, you know. It’s about time we did something to assert ourselves.” Ginsberg went inside the bar, which had been cleaned up and reopened, and described the customers as “beautiful—they’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had 10 years ago.” As Duberman relays: “Deputy Inspector Pine later echoed Ginsberg: ‘For those of us in public morals, things were completely changed… suddenly they were not submissive anymore.” That's a radical shift.

Return to the Radical Sixties

The Sixties have been on my mind lately. I’m currently writing the early chapters of my book on the culture wars, where the Sixties figure large (the “Sixties” being a label loosely connected to the actual decade—the 1960s—yet not overly constrained by the decimal system). I argue it was during the Sixties when the stalemate later called the culture wars hardened to an unprecedented degree (which is not to say the clash over modernity was new, as I make clear in a previous post on “The Return of the Culture Wars.”) So the question I want to ponder in this post: were the Sixties radical?

Participants in the various left-leaning movements of that era, as Ben Alpers points out, mostly wrote the early history of the Sixties. Thus, the focus was often tilted too heavily towards the view that the Sixties were a time of radical change, more so than previous eras in U.S. history. In dialectic fashion, conservatives, or more commonly, neoconservatives agreed that the most significant fact about that decade was the disruptions to traditional America brought about by radical movements. Love them or hate them, the Sixties were remembered as a time of radical change.

This participant-historiography (and its neoconservative flip side), often mirrored by popular cultural portrayals of the Sixties, failed to capture the full extent of American political life. Obviously. As such, it seems historians have since felt compelled to work overtime to correct the misconception that the Sixties were revolutionary. In the tsunami-like waves of books being written about postwar American conservatism, historians now argue that the 1960s were conservative. This is the glue that holds together the excellent new anthology edited by Laura Gifford and Daniel Williams, The Right Side of the Sixties (which includes Jason Stahl’s chapter on conservative think tanks, excerpted in his guest post for us last week).

Reversing course entirely is not the answer. Yes, the ranks of conservatism grew in the Sixties. But this was in part—in large part, arguably—a reaction to the qualified successes chalked up by left-leaning movements. Thus, taking stock of the Sixties necessitates that historians study the right and left in tandem (not to mention everything in between, since the most powerful people in the Sixties—LBJ, Nixon—were neither right nor left). In their indispensible synthesis, America Divided, Michael Kazin and Maurice Isserman pinpoint the correct word to describe the Sixties: “polarized.” In less measured tones, this is Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland approach, though, more than polarization, Perlstein focuses on the pathological style of politics given birth by the Sixties, specifically, by Nixon.

In my just published Reviews in American History essay, “Up From the Sixties,” where I look at Eric Miller’s excellent biography of Christopher Lasch together with Thomas Jeffers’s lousy biography of Norman Podhoretz, I make a similar point about how the topsy-turvy Sixties recast the intellectual lives of two of the most important American thinkers. They experienced epistemic crises of sorts. My first paragraph gives a sense of my approach:

Reactions to the political disorderliness of the Sixties were often quite dramatic. In response to the violent repression of protestors at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, a splinter faction of Students for a Democratic Society formed the infamous Weathermen, an underground revolutionary cell ultimately responsible for exploding several small bombs, including at the Pentagon. At the other end of the power spectrum, the Nixon White House countered high-profile leaks of classified information by setting up a clandestine special investigation unit, the notorious “plumbers” who, among other illegal activities, broke into and wiretapped Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. Intellectual responses to Sixties ferment were no less striking. This is made clear by new biographies of Christopher Lasch (1932–94) and Norman Podhoretz (b. 1930), two of the most renowned figures in recent U.S. intellectual history. Lasch’s and Podhoretz’ stunning political reorientations help us make sense of the post-Sixties fractures that still characterize contemporary American social thought.

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My favorite synthetic treatment of the Sixties is David Steigerwald’s The Sixties and the End of Modern America. In analyzing the Sixties as both polarized and, more to the point, polarizing, in that we are still living with the legacies of the Sixties, Steigerwald’s tone is pitch perfect. He writes: “U.S. progressives see the sixties as a moment of great change abruptly ended by war and right-wing backlash, the consequence of which was only a partial liberation of the nation. On the right, the decade is seen as the beginning of a national crisis in authority and morality, which in the end has hurt the poor more than anyone else by legitimizing antisocial behavior.”

Steigerwald seems sympathetic to many of the left-leaning movements of the Sixties. He writes about the Sixties, it seems to me, because it was a more interesting time than most. People who believed in radical, even utopian challenges to the status quo, however quixotic, existed in greater numbers during the Sixties than at most other times in U.S. history. In analyzing the overblown rhetoric of the Black Panthers, a tiny group remembered mostly for their ostentatious political aesthetics and for their trumpeting the poor as the revolutionary vanguard, Steigerwald writes, wistfully: “It speaks to the beauty of the Sixties that the lumpenproletariat cats would politicize their bleak condition at all.”

But despite such admiration, Steigerwald is unsparing in his assessment of movement successes and failures. For example, in analyzing the New Left and its close relation, the antiwar movement, he addresses the problems inherent in a radical movement led by middle-class college students, more often than not in search of “mere therapy.” “In the long run, the deepest flaw in the New Left was that, given its suppositions, it could encourage mere rebelliousness masquerading as radicalism, a phony radicalism that saw politics as a vehicle for exhibitionism and self-assertion rather than change.”

Steigerwald seems sympathetic to the early Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), personified by deep thinker Tom Hayden, which sought to help politically powerless people organize, even though such actions were doomed to failure. But he harbors no love for the later SDS, prefigured by the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and its charismatic leader Mario Savio. “Partly because of their early connection to the counterculture, Berkeley’s student radicals were less like the original SDS members and more akin to the second generation of the New Left,” Steigerwald writes. “The Berkeley radicals aimed their attention at the university itself and stood the Port Huron statement on its head: instead of using the university as a base from which students would move into the community, the Berkeley activists sought revolutionary change within the institution.” Of all the repressive institutions that needed change in U.S. society, Berkeley would not have been at the top of Steigerwald's list. (Things might be different now, of course.)

So back to my original question: were the Sixties radical, even revolutionary? Again, Steigerwald strikes the right tone. In 1967 and 1968, the most frenzied years of the Sixties—when Black Power, combined with urban riots, gave many the impression African Americans were in full-blown revolt, and when the antiwar movement reached its peak alongside a growing counterculture that staged “love ins”— “Revolution was not entirely out of the question,” Steigerwald writes, tongue half in check. “But then again, of course, it was.”

So revolution was out of the question. How then do we explain the massive social and cultural changes that occurred between Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration speech and Nixon’s resignation in 1974? Take one such shift as an instructive example: changes in sexual mores. As Steigerwald writes about the beginning of that era: “the censor and the moralist ruled. In New York divorce was granted only on grounds of adultery. Movies were screened, authors banned, and their books threatened. Privacy rights were routinely invaded. In particular, when sex and sexuality were at issue, the authorities were prudish at best and often repressive. The slightest hint of sexually suggestive material was enough to unnerve the cultural watchdogs. Universities exercised the right of in loco parentis and regulated the lives of their students, separating the sexes and imposing curfews.” By 1974 things were much, much different.

So what explains this shift? In part, it has to be about the left-leaning movements. The radicals. Let me conclude, then, with an excerpt from the introduction of David Farber’s excellent review essay (also in Reviews in American History): “The Radical Sixties” (which reviews Robert Cohen, Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s).

To start with a banality: a lot happened in the 1960s. And the historiography of the era has come to mirror that banal observation. The Sixties has become a capacious subject, so much so that, I have come to think, we have lost “the Sixties” in writing about the Sixties. On this topic, as I have contributed to that capacious banality, I am a man in a glass house.

Right now historians seem to be taking the Sixties in several different directions, all at the same time. Many of us are invested in writing a history of the transnational Sixties, which is not surprising given the herd-like movement in the transnational direction by historians-at-large. And cattiness aside, I am convinced that the “transnational Sixties” will prove to be a fruitful approach. Similarly, I think (obviously, given my own work) that a “Conservative Sixties” is a useful angle. At the same time, a few historians have begun to re-emphasize the liberal triumphs of the era, with a focus on national civil rights policy and the war on poverty. Given the long conservative policy ascendency that followed the Kennedy-Johnson years, I think these historians are right to argue that liberals were not the soulless, sell-out compromisers some have made them out to be. They were not just impediments, in other words, to greater social justice. Then, too, we are all now convinced that the social changes and political challenges associated with the “Sixties” really transpired over a much longer time frame, making the events that happened to occur in the 1960s less important, or at least less causal, than earlier accounts often made them seem. So we all now acknowledge that the civil rights movement was a “long” movement and not a historical subject best understood as being just of the 1960s or best characterized by the now-legendary Southern protests of the 1960–65 years. Similarly, historians are convincing us to see many of the other classic Sixties-identified historical processes, such as the sexual revolution, as being born of a longer, decade-defying process. A “long” Sixties, then, extending from World War II through the 1970s, makes a certain amount of sense—although why the “Sixties” label should be retained, in that case, is hard to defend. In my own course on “The American Sixties,” I find myself beginning with the New Deal and ending sometime during the Reagan years. It seems to make sense when I do it, but I worry that, in my attempt to contextualize and explain historical trajectory, I have begun to forget the point of talking about a historical subject called “The Sixties.”

Robert Cohen, in his new work, Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s, wants to remind us what that point might be, what it should be. And given his provocative, even mysterious use of the word radical in his book title to modify the word legacy, I think he wants us to think what the meaning of “the Sixties” could be even now and ever after. In specific, Robby Cohen tells us how and why a brilliant young man born into a conventional Catholic American family in New York City in 1942 became a self-described radical and why the kind of radicalism he championed made the “Sixties” seem so exciting and threatening and explosive to many Americans living through those years. Here is the Sixties as a time of radical thought and radical action consciously pursued by young, white, self-identified radicals out to remake the world. This approach to the history of the Sixties is so old it is new.

They're Back!

Entering First-Year Students Perform the OU Chant at Convocation

The new school year at the University of Oklahoma started today.*  As Andrew's post below suggests, the thoughts of most USIHers are no doubt returning to the classroom.

For the third straight fall semester, I'm teaching my Honors colloquium on America in the Sixties. After another round of syllabus fiddling--some of it inspired by suggestions from the readership of this blog--I once again start the semester feeling that this course is better than it was in its last iteration.

One of the many ways in which I know this is no longer a new course is that I'm beginning to pare down the material on the syllabus.  I took out some things--including Doug Rossinow's The Politics of Authenticity, which I love, but undergrads seem to hate--and added others. But when the dust settled, the reading load is lighter than it was last time through. Among the new items I'm most looking forward to teaching is Frederick Wiseman's documentary High School (1968).  A clip (one of the few from the film available on YouTube):

My other class is new...at least to me:  the first half of a very traditional Great Books (of the Western Tradition)** course that we're starting to offer in the Honors College.  I borrowed the syllabus, with only minor changes, from my colleague Bob Lifset, who did his PhD at Columbia. Though he's an energy historian, Bob taught in CC, in many ways the mother of all American Great Books courses, and now among the last of that dying breed.

Even preparing to teach this course has made me think a lot about the canon wars that framed the ongoing crisis of the academy when I was in college and graduate school in the 1980s and early 1990s.  But I'll save those thoughts for another day.

Back to prepping....

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* Of course, for folks around here other than students and faculty, the year doesn't start until a week from Saturday:

** Scare quotes can be added to both capitalized terms if it makes you feel better.

Fifty Years Ago Today: Newton Minnow's Vast Wasteland Speech

I'm cooking something else up that's more involved than this post, but as it's competing for my time with various end-of-the-semester duties, I wanted to at least note this important anniversary.

Fifty years ago today, on May 9, 1961, Newton Minnow, speaking to the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Washington, D.C., gave his first public address as President John F. Kennedy's FCC Chairman. It was a doozy.  Famously declaring that television was a "vast wasteland," Minnow attempted to lay out an alternative vision of television in the public interest.  This latter, positive goal was Minnow's intended focus. But his jeremiad is what is most remembered.  The speech lives on as an example of the rhetoric of Kennedy's New Frontier and a model for anti-television screeds for generations to come (though Minnow himself was as enamored of the possibilities of the medium as he was concerned about its actual performance).  Mike Dann, then a CBS executive, has called it "the Gettysburg Address for broadcasters."

An audio recording of the speech, along with a complete transcription, can be found here.

An excellent report on the fiftieth anniversary of the speech aired last Friday on NPR's On the Media.

Fifty Years Ago Today: Newton Minnow's Vast Wasteland Speech

I'm cooking something else up that's more involved than this post, but as it's competing for my time with various end-of-the-semester duties, I wanted to at least note this important anniversary.

Fifty years ago today, on May 9, 1961, Newton Minnow, speaking to the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Washington, D.C., gave his first public address as President John F. Kennedy's FCC Chairman. It was a doozy.  Famously declaring that television was a "vast wasteland," Minnow attempted to lay out an alternative vision of television in the public interest.  This latter, positive goal was Minnow's intended focus. But his jeremiad is what is most remembered.  The speech lives on as an example of the rhetoric of Kennedy's New Frontier and a model for anti-television screeds for generations to come (though Minnow himself was as enamored of the possibilities of the medium as he was concerned about its actual performance).  Mike Dann, then a CBS executive, has called it "the Gettysburg Address for broadcasters."

An audio recording of the speech, along with a complete transcription, can be found here.

An excellent report on the fiftieth anniversary of the speech aired last Friday on NPR's On the Media.

A Brief Stray Thought on the Historiography of the Seventies

In recent months, this blog has devoted numerous posts to the historiography of the 1970s, most recently in Andrew's consideration of of two excellent books on that period, Jefferson Cowie's Stayin' Alive and Daniel K. Williams's God's Own Party.

Like other USIH bloggers, I've found the recent explosion of interesting work on the 1970s to be really exciting.  A whole cohort of historians are asking critical questions about the recent past that intersect in interesting ways with U.S. intellectual history in general and my own scholarly interests in particular.  

Rather suddenly, I think, the historiography of the 1970s has become in certain ways richer, more coherent, and more interesting than the older and more established historiography of the 1960s.

There's obviously no simple explanation for this fact. Some of it, I suspect, has to do with the fact that, from the perspective of the early 21st century, the Seventies now seem to have been a more significant watershed decade than the Sixties.*  But I suspect that there's another, more strictly historiographical factor, at work here, too.

Much of the foundation of the historiography of the Sixties consisted of books by people who were, in one way or another, active participants in the events about which they wrote.  I'm thinking of books like Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward's Poor People's Movements, Todd Gitlin's The Whole World is Watching, James Miller's Democracy is in the Streets, or Sara Evans's Personal Politics.  These were among the books I read when I studied the Sixties in graduate school at the end of the 1980s.  And I learned a ton from them. But the questions they ask and the stories they tell are very much grounded in the concerns of the historical actors themselves.  And these books in a sense created the foundational narratives to which younger historians of the Sixties like Lisa McGirr, Joe Crespino, and Doug Rossinow would find themselves responding to.  To get a historical perspective on that decade, this second generation of historians had to, in a sense, move beyond its immediate struggles.

Now there are some wonderful participant-observer books about aspects of the 1970s, too (among many half-finished books on my shelf is Max Elbaum's Revolution in the Air, a fascinating history of the New Communist Movement of the '70s, written by a participant).  But the core historiography of the Seventies, in part because it arrived fairly late to the party, has been created by historians a little more removed from the events about which they are writing than those who wrote the foundational texts of Sixties historiography.

The Seventies fascinates today precisely because of things we could only really see with the hindsight of history.  And the wonderful books about the period that have appeared in ever-increasing numbers over the last decade are distinctly historical in the questions they ask and the answers they offer.
____________________________________________
* I'd add that contemporary popular culture seems to suggest that the place of the Sixties and Seventies in American public memory is shifting, too.  For example, compare and contrast the very slowly emerging Sixties of Mad Men with the wild and woolly Seventies of Life on Mars....but this is a conversation for another post.

A Brief Stray Thought on the Historiography of the Seventies

In recent months, this blog has devoted numerous posts to the historiography of the 1970s, most recently in Andrew's consideration of of two excellent books on that period, Jefferson Cowie's Stayin' Alive and Daniel K. Williams's God's Own Party.

Like other USIH bloggers, I've found the recent explosion of interesting work on the 1970s to be really exciting.  A whole cohort of historians are asking critical questions about the recent past that intersect in interesting ways with U.S. intellectual history in general and my own scholarly interests in particular.  

Rather suddenly, I think, the historiography of the 1970s has become in certain ways richer, more coherent, and more interesting than the older and more established historiography of the 1960s.

There's obviously no simple explanation for this fact. Some of it, I suspect, has to do with the fact that, from the perspective of the early 21st century, the Seventies now seem to have been a more significant watershed decade than the Sixties.*  But I suspect that there's another, more strictly historiographical factor, at work here, too.

Much of the foundation of the historiography of the Sixties consisted of books by people who were, in one way or another, active participants in the events about which they wrote.  I'm thinking of books like Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward's Poor People's Movements, Todd Gitlin's The Whole World is Watching, James Miller's Democracy is in the Streets, or Sara Evans's Personal Politics.  These were among the books I read when I studied the Sixties in graduate school at the end of the 1980s.  And I learned a ton from them. But the questions they ask and the stories they tell are very much grounded in the concerns of the historical actors themselves.  And these books in a sense created the foundational narratives to which younger historians of the Sixties like Lisa McGirr, Joe Crespino, and Doug Rossinow would find themselves responding to.  To get a historical perspective on that decade, this second generation of historians had to, in a sense, move beyond its immediate struggles.

Now there are some wonderful participant-observer books about aspects of the 1970s, too (among many half-finished books on my shelf is Max Elbaum's Revolution in the Air, a fascinating history of the New Communist Movement of the '70s, written by a participant).  But the core historiography of the Seventies, in part because it arrived fairly late to the party, has been created by historians a little more removed from the events about which they are writing than those who wrote the foundational texts of Sixties historiography.

The Seventies fascinates today precisely because of things we could only really see with the hindsight of history.  And the wonderful books about the period that have appeared in ever-increasing numbers over the last decade are distinctly historical in the questions they ask and the answers they offer.
____________________________________________
* I'd add that contemporary popular culture seems to suggest that the place of the Sixties and Seventies in American public memory is shifting, too.  For example, compare and contrast the very slowly emerging Sixties of Mad Men with the wild and woolly Seventies of Life on Mars....but this is a conversation for another post.

The Sixties Counterculture and Intellectual History, or Something is Happening Here, But You Don't Know What It Is

We've been devoting a lot of space around here lately to the Seventies...and rightly so. That decade has recently received an enormous amount of richly deserved historiographical attention and a growing list of excellent works on it is reaching print.

The historiography of the 1960s is a good deal more developed. But there are still major gaps in the literature. And one of them that I find most frustrating involves the counterculture.

I'm currently teaching an undergraduate seminar on the U.S. in the Sixties. This is the second time I've offered this course. And while there's an embarrassment of riches when it comes to secondary works on the New Left, the Great Society, and even conservatism, I've had a terrible time finding the right thing to use to teach the counterculture.

Last year, I used Alice Echols's biography of Janis Joplin, Scars of Sweet Paradise. This is a fine book, but ultimately two weeks on Janis Joplin is really too much.

This year I'm using a combination of primary source readings, music, and film, as well as Natalya Zimmerman's Counterculture Kaleidoscope. Like Echols, Zimmerman focuses on music in San Francisco in the late '60s. Though a less good book than the Echols, in certain ways it is better in the undergraduate classroom: it is shorter, it covers more ground by focusing on a variety of musicians, and it has a stronger argument, albeit one that is a tad simplistic. But it's not very satisfying as an account of the San Francisco scene...let alone the larger counterculture.

Why is there not a stronger, general book on the intellectual and cultural history of the counterculture?*

The counterculture seems to me to have a number of historiographical strikes against it:

First, the counterculture has more enemies than friends...even on the left. Leading figures in the New Left, especially folks associated with the early New Left, often held the counterculture in contempt. And these folks--I'm thinking e.g. of Todd Gitlin--helped frame the historiography of the Sixties. Of course conservatives--and conservative liberals like Joan Didion--have treated the counterculture with an almost apocalyptic sense of horror.

Second, unlike Sixties conservatism (which led to the political successes of the right in later decades) or even the New Left, the counterculture seems to have producd a series of cultural and intellectual dead ends. It was not only quickly commodified. In retrospect it seems to have been always already commodified. Its most obvious cultural legacies--e.g. the rise of seventies New Age thought; jam bands--often make it harder for academics to take it seriously.

Third, the most obviously significant cultural achievements of the counterculture were in the area of music, a subject that most (though by no means all) US historians generally write and think poorly about.

Fourth, chemically altered states of consciousness played an obviously major role in the sixties counterculture and are another area that is difficult to write well about historically.

Of course, I may be missing something here. Perhaps the book I have in mind has, in fact, been written. And if it has, I'm sure it will be revealed (to my eternal embarrassment) in comments.

_____________________________________________________

* There are obviously many fine works of history on particular aspects of the counterculture, from Thomas Frank's Conquest of Cool to Sean Wilentz's Dylan in America.

The Sixties Counterculture and Intellectual History, or Something is Happening Here, But You Don't Know What It Is

We've been devoting a lot of space around here lately to the Seventies...and rightly so. That decade has recently received an enormous amount of richly deserved historiographical attention and a growing list of excellent works on it is reaching print.

The historiography of the 1960s is a good deal more developed. But there are still major gaps in the literature. And one of them that I find most frustrating involves the counterculture.

I'm currently teaching an undergraduate seminar on the U.S. in the Sixties. This is the second time I've offered this course. And while there's an embarrassment of riches when it comes to secondary works on the New Left, the Great Society, and even conservatism, I've had a terrible time finding the right thing to use to teach the counterculture.

Last year, I used Alice Echols's biography of Janis Joplin, Scars of Sweet Paradise. This is a fine book, but ultimately two weeks on Janis Joplin is really too much.

This year I'm using a combination of primary source readings, music, and film, as well as Natalya Zimmerman's Counterculture Kaleidoscope. Like Echols, Zimmerman focuses on music in San Francisco in the late '60s. Though a less good book than the Echols, in certain ways it is better in the undergraduate classroom: it is shorter, it covers more ground by focusing on a variety of musicians, and it has a stronger argument, albeit one that is a tad simplistic. But it's not very satisfying as an account of the San Francisco scene...let alone the larger counterculture.

Why is there not a stronger, general book on the intellectual and cultural history of the counterculture?*

The counterculture seems to me to have a number of historiographical strikes against it:

First, the counterculture has more enemies than friends...even on the left. Leading figures in the New Left, especially folks associated with the early New Left, often held the counterculture in contempt. And these folks--I'm thinking e.g. of Todd Gitlin--helped frame the historiography of the Sixties. Of course conservatives--and conservative liberals like Joan Didion--have treated the counterculture with an almost apocalyptic sense of horror.

Second, unlike Sixties conservatism (which led to the political successes of the right in later decades) or even the New Left, the counterculture seems to have producd a series of cultural and intellectual dead ends. It was not only quickly commodified. In retrospect it seems to have been always already commodified. Its most obvious cultural legacies--e.g. the rise of seventies New Age thought; jam bands--often make it harder for academics to take it seriously.

Third, the most obviously significant cultural achievements of the counterculture were in the area of music, a subject that most (though by no means all) US historians generally write and think poorly about.

Fourth, chemically altered states of consciousness played an obviously major role in the sixties counterculture and are another area that is difficult to write well about historically.

Of course, I may be missing something here. Perhaps the book I have in mind has, in fact, been written. And if it has, I'm sure it will be revealed (to my eternal embarrassment) in comments.

_____________________________________________________

* There are obviously many fine works of history on particular aspects of the counterculture, from Thomas Frank's Conquest of Cool to Sean Wilentz's Dylan in America.

New Book: Massa Offers A Catholic Intellectual History Of The 1960s

Continuing somewhat this week's discussion of the intellectual history of religion in the United States, I present to you a new work by Boston College Professor of Church History---and Dean of the School of Theology and Ministry---Mark Massa titled The American Catholic Revolution: How the Sixties Changed the Church Forever.

I learned of Massa's new work from John Fea, who also presented a relevant discussion with Massa conducted by Daniel Burke. It's not the most comprehensive or penetrating of interviews, but I offer a few excerpts nonetheless:

-----------------------------
- "Massa's [book]...describes how celebrating the Mass in English, butting heads with the pope on birth control, and priests protesting the Vietnam War opened new possibilities -- and controversies -- in the church."
- "Q: Why did the "Catholic Revolution," as you call it, begin in 1964? A: The new Mass (which was introduced in America that year) made real, or concrete, the changes that Vatican II made in ways that theology, or other declarations from the council could not."
- [Massa] "A great majority of Catholics (once) thought of the church as outside of time altogether. ...Vatican II attacked this notion of the church as providing a timeless set of answers to life's questions about meaning."
- [Massa] "Catholics, like all believers, want security. The world seems, and can be, a very scary place; and they want...certainty, security, and peace of mind. But faith is a stance in history; it doesn't preserve us from messiness."
- "Q: How much was the "Catholic Revolution" affected by the cultural tumult of the'60s? A: There was always an international dimension that made the Catholic '60s different from the general culture, because of this long devotion to Rome and the primacy of the pope. My sense is that most of the important stuff wasn't a reaction to events and ideas outside the church but to things happening inside the church itself."
-----------------------------

As a practicing Catholic and intellectual historian, my personal sense is that this book will find an audience---either via discussions about reviews or through actual readings. Why? Conservative Catholic intellectuals fancy themselves keepers of the true/real/authentic/orthodox history of the Church (and hence police new histories). Liberal Catholic intellectuals either still celebrate the era of concern, or at least wonder what the fuss today is about (and hence may read the book for curiosity's sake). My prediction, however, is that if this book gets wider attention, it'll be because of disgruntlement by the former rather than celebration by the latter.

Unless another faithful USIH reader or contributor wants to review Massa's new offering, I think I'll commit myself to the task (although multiple reviews of a book never hurt---even if published by the same entity). - TL

New Book: Massa Offers A Catholic Intellectual History Of The 1960s

Continuing somewhat this week's discussion of the intellectual history of religion in the United States, I present to you a new work by Boston College Professor of Church History---and Dean of the School of Theology and Ministry---Mark Massa titled The American Catholic Revolution: How the Sixties Changed the Church Forever.

I learned of Massa's new work from John Fea, who also presented a relevant discussion with Massa conducted by Daniel Burke. It's not the most comprehensive or penetrating of interviews, but I offer a few excerpts nonetheless:

-----------------------------
- "Massa's [book]...describes how celebrating the Mass in English, butting heads with the pope on birth control, and priests protesting the Vietnam War opened new possibilities -- and controversies -- in the church."
- "Q: Why did the "Catholic Revolution," as you call it, begin in 1964? A: The new Mass (which was introduced in America that year) made real, or concrete, the changes that Vatican II made in ways that theology, or other declarations from the council could not."
- [Massa] "A great majority of Catholics (once) thought of the church as outside of time altogether. ...Vatican II attacked this notion of the church as providing a timeless set of answers to life's questions about meaning."
- [Massa] "Catholics, like all believers, want security. The world seems, and can be, a very scary place; and they want...certainty, security, and peace of mind. But faith is a stance in history; it doesn't preserve us from messiness."
- "Q: How much was the "Catholic Revolution" affected by the cultural tumult of the'60s? A: There was always an international dimension that made the Catholic '60s different from the general culture, because of this long devotion to Rome and the primacy of the pope. My sense is that most of the important stuff wasn't a reaction to events and ideas outside the church but to things happening inside the church itself."
-----------------------------

As a practicing Catholic and intellectual historian, my personal sense is that this book will find an audience---either via discussions about reviews or through actual readings. Why? Conservative Catholic intellectuals fancy themselves keepers of the true/real/authentic/orthodox history of the Church (and hence police new histories). Liberal Catholic intellectuals either still celebrate the era of concern, or at least wonder what the fuss today is about (and hence may read the book for curiosity's sake). My prediction, however, is that if this book gets wider attention, it'll be because of disgruntlement by the former rather than celebration by the latter.

Unless another faithful USIH reader or contributor wants to review Massa's new offering, I think I'll commit myself to the task (although multiple reviews of a book never hurt---even if published by the same entity). - TL