American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  King laughed, “I have been used before. One more time won’t hurt.”

  Neither side swayed the other, but out of respect for their veteran leader, the SNCC and CORE chiefs agreed to defer using either slogan until the expedition was over. Later King disavowed the “Black Power” slogan, but he never repudiated Carmichael or SNCC; he still hoped for a united black movement.

  This was not to be. Pressures were building up, now in the North, that would drive black leadership further apart. The assassination of Malcolm X in February 1965 led to fears of a “holy war” between his followers and those loyal to Elijah Muhammad. SNCC was already shifting its center of gravity to the North. Brilliantly focusing the pent-up anger of urban blacks, Carmichael became the leading popularizer of Black Power and an international media star. The ambiguity, complexity, and poetry of Black Power gave it mystique: its democratic aspirations for black self-determination; its critique of integration as a one-way street; its irresistible insistence, in the spirit of Malcolm X, on racial pride and the beauty of blackness; and for some, inspired by Algerian psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon, the glorification of violence as a psychic need and an end in itself.

  King was moving left too, but not this fast. He remained the apostle of nonviolence, but he was edging closer to SNCC’s belief in long-term community organizing, toward grass-roots, class-based interracial alliances of the poor. Always a philosopher of social change, he was thinking more of a “reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.” The old-line black organizations were moving too, but more slowly. At its 1966 convention the NAACP sharply questioned “Black Power” as a slogan just after the CORE convention had endorsed it. Blacks were losing one of their mightiest weapons—unity.

  It was the old story of younger, more radical leaders pushing to the fore on the billows of revolution as the tidal wave of change surged toward distant shores. But this tidal wave was about to be transformed by forces boiling up from the back yards and front stoops of city blacks—and from age-old but resharpened conflicts at the opposite ends of the globe.

  CHAPTER 9

  The World Turned Upside Down

  IN THE “100 DAYS OF 1965,” stretching from June to late October of that year, Congress passed and the President signed the Medicare bill, long heatedly fought by the American Medical Association; the epochal Voting Rights bill; Omnibus Housing, which mandated stepped-up rent supplements to low-income families; a measure to create a new Department of Housing and Urban Development; another measure to establish the National Foundation for the Arts and the Humanities; a major broadening of the immigration laws; the Water Quality bill, requiring states to set and enforce water quality standards for all interstate waters within their borders; and the Clean Air Act of 1965, which supplemented and strengthened the Clean Air Act of 1963, targeting now automobile exhaust, following three years of controversy touched off by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Earlier in the year the first large-scale program of aid to elementary and secondary schools had been enacted, and fueled with a grant of $1.3 billion.

  In the midst of this flood of legislation stood Lyndon Johnson, still using the techniques of personal persuasion he had honed in the Senate, techniques now backed up by a formidable array of White House resources. With a shrewd eye for the strengths and vulnerabilities, appetites and sensitivities of his targets, the President spent hundreds of hours on the telephone or face to face, bullying and pleading, bidding and dealing, placating and mediating, all in the currency, now hard and now soft, of presidential-congressional exchange. If the Kennedys had gloried in using the arts of “blarney, bludgeon, and boodle,” LBJ inflated all these, Texas style.

  It was by no means a one-man show. Working closely with the White House in the Senate were Hubert Humphrey, still ebullient even as Vice President, and Mike Mansfield, the dour Majority Leader. In the House, where John McCormack was Speaker and the well-liked Carl Albert of Oklahoma was Majority Leader, a band of liberal Democrats, headed by the astute and resolute Missourian Richard Boiling, helped marshal the huge Democratic majority that Johnson had helped bring into the lower chamber in the 1964 election.

  These were the creative months of the Great Society that Johnson sought to build. The currents of history converged in a fashion that the labor-liberal-left forces in America had rarely known: the program that John F. Kennedy had advanced with his glowing rhetoric; the homage the nation wished to pay to the martyred young President; Barry Goldwater’s conservative campaign, which catalyzed and united a new Democratic party coalition; the Congress and its committees liberalized; and a new President determined to show that a Texan and a Southerner could fight for a progressive program, that a politician stigmatized for his wheeling and dealing on Capitol Hill could become a great President in the tradition of FDR.

  These should have been the memorable, the glory times of the Great Society, when programs were introduced that would transform the lives of countless Americans for decades to come—but glory times they were not. For the attention of Americans was increasingly distracted by events nine thousand miles away, and LBJ seemed as crippled in dealing with this growing crisis as he had been creative in leading his domestic program through Congress.

  For Johnson was now swaying under the full burden of the divided legacy of Kennedy’s foreign policy—the pacific legacy of the Peace Corps, the resolution of the missile crisis, the test ban treaty, the hard legacy of confrontation in Europe and escalation in Vietnam. The Peace Corps, established by Kennedy within six weeks of his inauguration, had become a special link with his successor. It was a reminder to LBJ of the hopes and ideals of his days in the National Youth Administration; he liked its chief, Sargent Shriver, whom he made head of his Job Corps; and the work of the volunteers—helping people grow better crops and dig better wells and build better habitations—was the kind of thing that appealed to the new President’s belief in benign progress, in gritty, hands-on social change without trauma. Attacked on the right as “global do-goodism” and on the left for being merely a disguised form of American cultural imperialism and indeed as an opiate to calm the potentially revolutionary masses, the Peace Corps, with its thousands of volunteers in developing countries around the world, was nevertheless an exquisitely appropriate living memorial to John Kennedy.

  But Kennedy had left another living heritage—thousands of American troops in Vietnam. The onetime “military advisers” had escalated to a force of some 16,000 personnel by the time of JFK’s death. They were now conducting “combat support” missions and they were now dying in action—77 had in 1963. Lyndon Johnson inherited Kennedy’s war—and the divisions within the Administration over its conduct. He would continue the creeping escalation.

  People of This Generation

  At the start the peace movement appeared innocuous, even quixotic. It was indeed hard to find a start. Ever since Hiroshima, of course, antiwar activists had been protesting the bomb. Radical pacifists, many of them Quakers, had agitated especially against civil defense drills, but the scourge of McCarthyism had thinned their ranks. Scientists, including some who had worked on the bomb, became so alarmed about the dangers of radioactive fallout that they sought to educate their colleagues and the public; some even hoped to “bridge the gap between East and West” and unite the world scientific community as a step toward peace. Made credible by such technical expertise, the issue of atmospheric testing galvanized a movement to stop nuclear tests, just when the orbiting of Sputnik heightened America’s fear of Soviet technological progress.

  At the cutting edge of the peace movement in the mid-fifties was the Committee for Nonviolent Action, which sponsored a number of daring and imaginative projects. In 1958, Earle and Barbara Reynolds and their family, piloting the good ship Phoenix built in Hiroshima, penetrated the vast Pacific area that the Atomic Energy Commission had blocked off for H-bomb tests that summer. Arrested and detained at the navy base on Kwajalein atoll, Barbara Reynolds and her son witnessed in the nig
ht a dirty orange light, like a “gigantic flash bulb,” illuminating the dark clouds.

  Later that year, after CNVA protested the construction of a missile base near Cheyenne, Wyoming, five men and women were imprisoned for blocking trucks. The next year, when the militants launched Omaha Action, a campaign of community education and civil disobedience to halt the building of missile silos, one of those arrested for climbing over a fence was A. J. Music, the seventy-four-year-old ringleader and chair of CNVA, longtime radical pacifist, labor leader, strike organizer, incorrigible civil disobedient. After CNVA settled in New London, Connecticut, where missile-firing Polaris submarines were built, peace guerrillas paddled out to board the subs or block their launching. They were repulsed.

  Tired of being yelled at to “tell it to the Russians,” a group of Americans and Europeans walked through the Iron Curtain into East Germany and Poland, made their way to Moscow’s Red Square, held a vigil, and passed out leaflets urging disarmament. “I went to jail because I refused to serve in the U.S. Army,” Bradford Lyttle told a crowd in Minsk. “I have protested against American rockets aimed at your cities and families. There are Soviet rockets aimed at my city and my family. Are you demonstrating against that?”

  CNVA carried on two more years of peace walks, test site invasions, campus rallies, marches. Women Strike for Peace organized a simultaneous protest by 50,000 women in a few dozen cities. To complement the direct action of CNVA with more conventional political activity, peace activists and “nuclear pacifists”—among them Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling and noted journalist Norman Cousins—had in 1957 formed the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. SANE quickly grew into a major national organization and, like CNVA, broadened its goal to general disarmament. But it underwent a purge of alleged communist members and many radical pacifists resigned in protest.

  Then, when Washington and Moscow in August 1963 agreed on a limited test ban treaty, some activists for a time assumed that the government was serious about negotiating a halt to the arms race, that a thaw in the cold war might even be at hand. After all the bold and quixotic actions— was it in part because of them?—a little chunk of peace had been won but the peace movement seemed defused. New allies were soon to arrive, however, from ranks of young Americans who saw themselves as among the most powerless people in America.

  Sixty members of a little-known student group, Students for a Democratic Society, convened in June 1962 at the United Auto Workers’ FDR Camp on the southern shore of Lake Huron, forty miles north of Detroit. This was not the usual student beer bust—these men and women were deadly serious. Under a different name SDS had served for decades as the student wing of the democratic-socialist League for Industrial Democracy, but since 1960 it had been asserting more independence, symbolized by its change of name. SDS field secretary Tom Hayden, a journalism student at the University of Michigan and editor of the campus paper, had worked with SNCC on voter registration in Georgia and had suffered the usual beatings and jailings. Hayden and SDS president Al Haber hoped that radical students could link up with the black student activists. But much as they admired SNCC’s spirit and political style, their aims were broader.

  The conferees broke off into small study groups to revise the rough draft of a manifesto mainly written by Hayden, who had been analyzing the ideas of myriad thinkers. The students then focused on what they called the “bones,” essential matters worth an hour’s debate, as against “widgets,” of medium importance, and “gizmos,” worth only ten minutes. The pieces were then sewn back together into a patchwork quilt that emerged as a stinging moral critique of American society and a compelling vision of a regenerated democracy.

  “We are people of this generation,” the Port Huron Statement began, “bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” They did not spare their teachers—“their curriculums change more slowly than the living events of the world; their skills and silence are purchased by investors in the arms race; passion is called unscholastic.” Indeed, they spared virtually nothing and no one—the brokers of politics, militarism, the economic system, the universities, passive students.

  The manifesto proclaimed in fresh and forceful prose a radicalism that exalted aspirations for personal empowerment, wholeness, and authenticity; transformed what might seem personal needs and troubles into legitimate political concerns; and brought to light the hidden linkages in the web of issues that plagued the nation and the world. From the heart of the message issued its call for a new kind of democracy:

  “We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity. As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life, that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.” Politics should bring people out of isolation into community. All major institutions—political, economic, cultural, educational—had to be fully democratized. Thus the students, historian Wini Breines noted, “sought to create both a community within the movement and structural transformation in the larger society.” They were eager to serve as transforming leaders who would rise above the shabby brokerage of institutional life. But even the most ardent, as they left Port Huron after five days of nonstop debate, could hardly know that they had helped set the stage for the surge of grass-roots democratic activity and New Left militance in the 1960s.

  It was not by historical accident that the SDS appeared at this time. Its members and the New Left in general were catalyzed by the southern freedom movement and in particular by SNCC, some of whose values and organizing style SDS imitated and refined, as well as by the ban-the-bomb movement and efforts to restore civil liberties in the wake of McCarthyism. At a deeper level, the New Left was a direct response to the cool conformist culture of the 1950s with its ethic of acquisitiveness, its model of the unquestioning “organization man,” its “Catch-22” insanities that seemed to apply more to the cold war than to World War II. Caught in the yawning chasms between American ideals of self-fulfillment and the felt experience of bureaucratic manipulation and personal emptiness, between the possibilities for freedom and creativity offered by technology and the harsh realities of spiritual poverty, middle-class youth was “growing up absurd,” the title of Paul Goodman’s book. Our abundant society, Goodman wrote, “has no Honor. It has no Community.”

  Unable to make sense of their world, angered by what they saw as almost universal hypocrisy, many young people acted out their semi-conscious critique of the “system” through deviant behavior of one kind or another: as rebels without causes, as followers of the Beat subculture of nonconformity, as spiritual dropouts. Beat figures like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were role models for many of the rebels, and the existentialisms of Sartre and Camus their chosen philosophy.

  If the passionate and sardonic Goodman was the chief interpreter of youthful cultural alienation, the equally committed and iconoclastic C. Wright Mills, a Texas-bred Columbia University sociologist, was centrally involved in translating it into overt political expression and commitment. Criticized for imputing too much power to the interlocking “power elite” of corporate, military, and political leaders, and for other nonconforming social science, Mills feared that in both superpowers “we now witness the rise of the cheerful robot, the technological idiot, the crackpot realist,” all of them embodying the common ethos of “rationality without reason.” His solution was less programmatic than a matter of transforming consciousness: to make reason into an instrument for restless and rebellious social criticism, for penetrating society’s invisible controlling assumptions and interlocking power systems; to convince intellectuals, especially the young intelligentsia, of their moral responsibility to tackle the real problems of the era; and
to lead the academy, and then all of society, out of conformity and apathy and into informed engagement. His words and spirit had shone through every page of the Port Huron Statement, adopted three months after his death from a heart attack at forty-five.

  High noon, Berkeley, October 1, 1964. Two deans and the campus police chief advanced on a young man sitting at a table in Sproul Hall Plaza at the University of California’s 27,000-student campus across the bay from San Francisco. The table displayed literature on the Congress of Racial Equality and a collection jar, violating a campus ban on advocacy and fund-raising. When CORE organizer Jack Weinberg refused to take down the table the security people put him under arrest, but a large crowd gathered around him shouting, “Take all of us!” A police car arrived, the cops hustled Weinberg into it, only to find a sea of students surging around them and then sitting down. Mario Savio, a philosophy major just in from the Mississippi Freedom Summer, jumped on top of the police car—a perfect soapbox—and after politely removing his shoes demanded Weinberg’s release and an end to the ban on free speech.

  For thirty-two hours the students held the police car hostage—with Weinberg still in it—while student reinforcements lined up to revel in the delights of free speech. Bettina Aptheker, who as a teenager had marched against the bomb and Jim Crow and had picketed her local Woolworth’s in Brooklyn in support of the southern sit-ins, “got inspired,” as she said later. After fending off nervousness she climbed up to face the television lights and cameras that pierced the darkness. “There was this tremendous glare of light” and “roar from the crowd” that seemed to come out of nowhere. She remembered one of her favorite quotations from black leader Frederick Douglass and yelled at the crowd, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” The next evening Savio announced an armistice with university administrators. The students freed the police car and later paid for its badly dented roof. A brief calm settled over the campus.