American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  The war in Vietnam turned what had been a small New Left into something approaching a mass movement, at least on campuses. The war seemed to confirm many of the criticisms dissident students and intellectuals had been making about American life, giving abstract analyses a bloody reality. For idealist critics, images of death and destruction in Vietnam wrenchingly belied their idea of what their country was, or at least what they thought it should be. From there, it was a short step to question leaders and structures of authority, not only in the government but throughout society. SDS, which emerged as the largest (but far from only) campus left-wing group, went from twenty-five thousand members in October 1966 to an estimated eighty thousand to one hundred thousand members in the winter of 1968–69, with chapters on some 350 campuses.

  The effort of the government to disguise the extent of its Vietnam engagement and its unfounded optimistic claims fueled questioning of authority. During the Kennedy administration, some reporters in Vietnam, struck by the disparity between official briefings and what they saw in the field, began challenging the veracity of the government’s portrayal of the war, providing a more skeptical, darker account. After New York Times reporter David Halberstam wrote in August 1963 that in spite of nearly two years of American military buildup, “South Vietnam’s military situation in the vital Mekong Delta has deteriorated in the past year,” an angry president demanded analyses of his work from the Pentagon and the CIA, while the secretary of state publicly criticized his story, seeing the problem in the messenger, not in the reality he accurately conveyed. Johnson’s later repeated failure to give an honest account of how many troops had been sent to Vietnam and how many he planned to send added to what became dubbed a “credibility gap” that slowly eroded public confidence in the war. By the spring of 1966, just half the public supported a continuation of U.S. policy in Vietnam, while 35 percent wanted an immediate withdrawal, up 15 percent over the previous year.

  The sapping of respect for authority became generalized, in part because so many institutions and leaders of American life played a role in sustaining the war. Campus critics of the conflict discovered that they did not have to go far to find targets to attack. Faculty scientists, engineers, and social scientists did research for the military. Foreign policy experts assisted the government, sometimes clandestinely. Career offices hosted recruiters from the military, the CIA, and defense contractors, including Dow Chemical Company, which made napalm. ROTC programs trained students for military leadership. All these became objects of student protests, which challenged not only Vietnam policy but also the rules, claims, and character of the academy.

  Revelations of secret government funding of student, political, and cultural groups further undercut the credibility of official authority. In 1967, Ramparts, a left-wing magazine, revealed that the CIA, which by law was not supposed to engage in domestic operations, had secretly funded the National Student Association, the main umbrella group for college student governments, using its international programs to promote American foreign policy and launder money. It soon came out that the CIA had clandestinely funded political and cultural journals, publishers, and academic research as well.

  The revelations did not stop the president from mobilizing the CIA against the antiwar movement. Local police forces and the FBI already had extensive programs targeting antiwar and left-wing groups (and some white supremacist groups too), which often went beyond surveillance to disruption, harassment, and entrapment. In 1967, Johnson, frustrated by growing antiwar protests and convinced that communists were behind them, ordered the CIA to undertake a program of domestic spying against war critics. The agency’s “Operation Chaos” mushroomed into a massive effort that collected information on hundreds of thousands of citizens.

  Cultural changes added to a sense of national division. During the second half of the 1960s, a “counterculture” blossomed, at first among the young but eventually infiltrating adult culture as well. More a catchphrase than a coherent outlook, the counterculture encompassed an assortment of behaviors, professed values, artistic developments, aesthetic inclinations, and product choices that departed, or at least seemed to depart, from dominant social standards. Youth began dressing differently than adults, listening to different music, using different mind-altering substances, and spurning the common adult association of maturity with early marriage, career, and family. With extraordinary rapidity, a new cultural landscape of drugs, sexual experimentation, “underground” newspapers, rock and roll, niche FM radio stations, brightly colored clothing, and long-haired men blanketed the country, starting in long-established bohemian centers, spreading to college campuses and big cities, and then reaching suburbs and small towns. By the late 1960s, young America looked and felt very different from just a few years before.

  The counterculture was both of and opposed to the dominant national culture. Raised on a steady diet of the professed ideals of American society, many young people sought some higher meaning to life than daily necessity, and more fun too. The civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam fertilized an antiauthoritarian inclination already present in aspects of the Beat and teenage cultures of the 1950s. Meanwhile, prosperity diminished young people’s anxieties about their future, allowing many of them to spend a prolonged period of limbo between childhood and adulthood, with few responsibilities, free to experiment. Affluence and birth control made many traditional pieties, like self-denial, deferred gratification, and sexuality only within marriage, seem irrelevant.

  Yet the counterculture shared much with what it purportedly rejected. The search for individual fulfillment, central to the counterculture, had deep roots in American culture. So did the fixing of cultural and spiritual meanings to products and fashions. Seen from a distance, much of the counterculture looked simply like a series of aesthetic and cultural choices, long hair instead of short hair, the Rolling Stones instead of Frank Sinatra, John Coltrane instead of Louis Armstrong, marijuana and psychedelics instead of alcohol and tranquilizers. Yet these distinctions became freighted with great political and personal significance because they became associated with divisions over other issues that were increasingly polarizing the country, including the war in Vietnam. Long hair was not simply long hair for a young man in 1967, but rather a statement of rejection of the dominant culture, a refusal to accept its notions of comportment and masculinity, and, at least implicitly, a rejection of the policies and priorities of the nation-state. Or at least it was taken as all that by the millions of adults (and many young people too) who were appalled at such behavior and sometimes moved to take a whack at the offending head of hair.

  Law and Order

  Other developments, besides the war and the counterculture, contributed to a deepening sense of national division and disarray during Johnson’s second term. Particularly wrenching were issues of rights, law, and personal security. During the sixteen years Earl Warren served as chief justice of the United States (1953 to 1969), the Supreme Court reinterpreted federal law and the Constitution to a greater extent than during any equivalent period in the past. Forty-five times the Warren Court overturned previous Supreme Court rulings. Until then, in its entire previous history, the Court had overturned its own decisions only eighty-eight times. Between 1963 and 1969 alone, the Court overruled thirty-three prior decisions, undermining a sense of fixity in the law and adding to the disorienting, liberating, and divisive sense of social transformation sweeping the country.

  Some Warren Court decisions, though major breaks with past rulings, generated little controversy because they in effect were catching up with social or political values that already had changed, at least in most of the country. Between 1964 and 1967, the Court largely eliminated the system of anticommunist political control erected during the Cold War, such as loyalty oath requirements, laws allowing the firing of public employees for belonging to the Communist Party, and the denial of passports to communists. These decisions provoked little discuss
ion, a measure of how much the political atmosphere of the country had changed since even the early 1960s and how utterly marginal the Old Left had become.

  Other rulings imposed national norms and values on the South, which had retained exceptional ideas and legal practices. In 1964 the Court struck down a Florida law that made interracial cohabitation illegal. Three years later, in the delightfully titled case of Loving v. Virginia, it went further to declare all antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional, ending the last major area of legally mandated segregation. By then, laws imposing racial criteria for marriage had been eliminated by state courts or legislation everywhere except in the South. Gideon v. Wainwright, the celebrated 1963 decision that required states and localities to provide lawyers to criminal defendants who could not afford one, forced a change in criminal procedure only in a few states, all in the South. Everywhere else, this already was the practice. The Warren Court’s most important ruling about freedom of the press, New York Times v. Sullivan, which made it much more difficult to win libel suits against publications, also had a regional dimension, since it arose out of the southern effort to block the civil rights movement.

  Less commonly, the Court forced other parts of the country into alignment with national norms. In jurisprudence related to sexuality, the Warren Court had the greatest effect on heavily Catholic states that had practices at variance with most of the country. Some states thought of as liberal in other matters, like Massachusetts and Rhode Island, had unusually strict censorship of books, magazines, and movies that the state deemed pornographic or contrary to government-imposed standards of decency. Such controls were all but dismantled by a series of Court rulings that kept narrowing the definition of obscenity, until almost any writing or imagery involving consenting adults came to be seen as protected by the First Amendment.

  Contraception was another area in which the Court nationalized legal practices. In 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut, the Court ruled unconstitutional an 1879 Connecticut law that criminalized the use of contraceptives and providing advice about them. Griswold rested on an expansion of a line of reasoning the Court had occasionally used earlier, which contended that citizens had certain federally protected rights even if they were not explicitly laid out in the Constitution, such as the right to marry, have children, teach them a foreign language or send them to private school, or, in this case, to a “zone of privacy” within the marital relationship. Griswold represented one of the most blatant examples of the Warren Court inventing new rights to meet its sensibility. Later, the decision would become highly controversial as an important step toward the Supreme Court’s decision protecting the right to abortion in Roe v. Wade. At the time, however, Griswold provoked little dissent. Though a few other northeastern states had similar laws to Connecticut’s, which had kept birth control clinics out of the state, polls showed a strong national consensus in support of allowing the dispensation of birth control advice to married couples.

  The Warren Court decisions that provoked the most controversy were the ones that forced changes not just in one deviant region but nationally, most notably in dealing with crime. In 1962 the Court said that a federal rule that prohibited illegally seized evidence from being introduced in a trial applied to state courts as well. This all but eliminated the routine practice by police departments in half of the states of making raids and arrests without a warrant and then using the illegally seized evidence in court. The Court’s exclusionary rule made meaningful the constitutional protection from unreasonable search and seizure, but it also meant that some criminals would be freed because of police misconduct. A decision two years later that voluntary confessions could not be admitted in court if a defendant had requested a lawyer but none was present during questioning again meant that some guilty parties would be freed, provoking sharp criticism from conservatives and police officials. Even more fire was directed at the Court for its 1966 Miranda v. Arizona decision, which required police to inform arrestees of their right to remain silent, that anything they said might be used against them, and that they had a right to have an attorney present during questioning. The Court completed the revolution in criminal procedure two years later when it applied the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to say that various protections in the Bill of Rights, including protection from self-incrimination, the right to a speedy trial and a trial by jury, the right to confront witnesses, and protection from double jeopardy, applied to state as well as federal courts.

  Taken together, the Warren Court decisions brought a remarkable expansion of individual rights. Largely, the Court moved in accord with shifting public sentiment. But when it did not, notably in regard to criminal procedure, it came under fierce criticism for making up new law and imposing the values of unelected justices on the nation.

  Rising fear of crime and disorder heated criticism of the Court. The crime rate rose substantially during the 1960s, both crimes of violence and those against property. There had been periods in the past when crime rates had been higher. The murder rate, for instance, had been over 50 percent higher in 1933 than in 1967. But with crime increasing throughout the Johnson years, more and more people felt personally insecure.

  Criminologists attributed much of the crime increase to demography. Many types of crime were disproportionately committed by the young, from rape to auto theft. As the bulging generation born right after World War II reached its teens and twenties, crime rates rose significantly simply as a result of the changing age composition of the population. Crime experts argued that ongoing urbanization also contributed to the rise in crime, since historically rural areas and small towns had lower crime rates than more densely settled regions.

  During the 1964 presidential campaign, both Goldwater and Wallace had raised the crime issue, with little impact. But in succeeding years, crime became an increasingly effective issue for conservatives. The conservative discourse on law and order lumped together common crime, civil disobedience, urban riots, and the proliferating use of illegal drugs as all manifestations of a breakdown of authority and respect for the law under the liberal aegis. Liberals, conservative politicians charged, were indifferent to issues of personal safety and were undermining the ability of the police to do their job. They lambasted the Supreme Court for its decisions expanding the rights of criminal defendants, which they portrayed as contributing to the growth of crime and demonstrating callous disregard for the plight of the average man and woman who faced a growing likelihood of becoming a victim.

  A 1966 referendum in New York City demonstrated the power of the law-and-order issue. New York’s liberal Republican mayor, John Lindsay, had added civilians to an advisory police review board in response to repeated charges of police misconduct against people of color. Though a bipartisan coalition backed Lindsay’s board, a referendum measure keeping civilians off it passed by nearly two to one. In a city renowned for its liberalism, the weak support, except in nonwhite neighborhoods, for civilian review of police exposed the rapidly shifting political ground.

  Riots contributed to the transmutation. New rounds of urban disorder “brought shock, fear and bewilderment to the nation,” as a federal commission later wrote, and added to a yearning in many quarters for a reassertion of law and authority. The year 1967 brought even worse disorders than in past summers. Labor conflicts had once been the main occasion for mobilizing the National Guard to assert the authority of the state against civilian groups; now racial disturbances took their place. In June, the Guard was mobilized to deal with riots in Tampa and Cincinnati, as it had been in Chicago a year earlier. In July, in Newark, New Jersey, a report that the police were beating an arrested taxicab driver set off a massive riot that left twenty-three dead and sparked disturbances in a constellation of other northern New Jersey cities. Less than two weeks later, a police raid on an after-hours club in Detroit led to an even bloodier conflagration that left forty-three dead, seventy-two hundred arrested, and ended only after twenty-seven
hundred regular Army troops joined five thousand National Guardsmen on the streets of the city.

  Most of the urban riots of the mid-1960s, as the federal commission put it, were “not interracial” but rather “involved action within Negro neighborhoods against symbols of white American society—authority and property—rather than against white persons.” The vast majority of riot casualities were African Americans. Some were shot while looting, attacking the police, or running away, but many died from indiscriminate fire by police and National Guardsmen. The New Jersey National Guard, with only 303 African Americans among its 17,529 members, like its equivalents in other states, proved utterly unsuited for patrolling inner-city streets, turning them into something like a free-fire zone. In Newark, victims of law enforcement violence included two children and a seventy-three-year-old. In Detroit, Guardsmen firing a tank-mounted machine gun killed a four-year-old girl and a white businesswoman who had the misfortune of opening her motel window at the wrong moment.

  In response to the Newark and Detroit events, Johnson appointed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, headed by Illinois governor Otto Kerner. The Kerner Commission produced an impressive, thoroughly liberal report on the riots, which became a national best seller. It portrayed the nation’s long history of racial discrimination and the harsh conditions in urban black America as the underlying causes of urban disorder. A commission survey of areas hit by riots found the leading grievances to be police practices, unemployment and underemployment, and inadequate housing. Deindustrialization had reduced the number of good jobs for the growing urban black population. Whites leaving cities for racially segregated suburbs left behind shrinking tax bases and deteriorating schools and services, even as they hung on to a disproportionate number of public-sector jobs and positions of power. National policies that directed resources to suburbs at the expense of cities contributed to creating the urban crisis and the riots that brought it to national attention.