American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  386 [From “civil rights” to “human rights”]: “The Ballot or the Bullet,” April 3, 1964, in Malcolm X Speaks, pp. 23-44, quoted at p. 34.

  [“By ballots or by bullets”]: “With Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer,” December 20, 1964, in Malcolm X Speaks, p. 111;see also “Ballot or Bullet” in ibid.

  [“By any means necessary”]: see Wollenstein, pp. 8-9, 324-25; Goldman in Garraty, p. 724.

  [Carmichael]: Carson, pp. 162-63; Donald J. McCormack, “Stokely Carmichael and Pan-Africanism: Back to Black Power,,” Journal of Politics, vol. 35, no. 2 (May 1973), pp. 386-409; “Stokely Carmichael,” in Charles Moritz, ed., Current Biography Yearbook 1970 (H. W. Wilson Co., 1971), pp. 66-69.

  [Lowndes County Freedom Organization]: Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (Vintage, 1967), ch. 5; Carson, pp. 162-66; Walton, ch. 4; “Lowndes County Freedom Organization Voting Pamphlet,” in Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau, The New Radicals (Random House, 1966), pp. 143-44.

  [“Comes out fighting”]: John Hulett, quoted in Carson, p. 166.

  [SNCC May 1966 meeting]: ibid., pp. 191-206; Forman, ch. 54.

  [Meredith march]: Garrow, Bearing, pp. 473-89; Oates, pp. 395-405; Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (Harper, 1967), pp. 23-32; Carson, pp. 207-11; Paul Good, “The Meredith March,” New South, vol. 21, no. 3 (Summer 1966), pp. 2-16; Steven F. Lawson, In Pursuit of Power: Southern Blacks and Electoral Politics, 1965-1982 (Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 49-63.

  [“Highlight the need”]: quoted in Lawson, In Pursuit, p. 52.

  [“Ain’t going to jail no more”]: quoted in Oates, p. 400.

  [King-Carmichael exchange]: Where Do We Go, pp. 30-32, quoted at pp. 30-31.

  [Assassination of Malcolm X]: Alex Haley, “Epilogue,” in Malcolm X and Haley, pp. 422-52; Marsh, p. 89.

  [Black Power and divisions within movement]: Carson, chs. 14-15; Forman, chs. 47, 55; Blair, ch. 3; Carmichael and Hamilton, esp. ch. 2; Garrow, Bearing, ch. 9 passim; Walton, pp. 114-28; King, Where Do We Go, ch. 2 and passim; Meier and Rudwick, CORE, ch. 12 and Epilogue; Rhoda L. Blumberg, Civil Rights: The 1960s Freedom Struggle (Twayne, 1984), ch. 8; Julius Lester, Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama! (Dial, 1968); Charles V. Hamilton, “An Advocate of Black Power Defines It,” in August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, eds., Black Protest in the Sixties (Quadrangle, 1970), pp. 154-68; Ansbro, pp. 211-24; Bruce Miroff, “Presidential Leverage over Social Movements: The Johnson White House and Civil Rights,” Journal of Politics, vol. 43, no. 1 (February 1981), pp. 2-23; Joel D. Aberbach and Jack L. Walker, “The Meanings of Black Power: A Comparison of White and Black Interpretations of a Political Slogan,” American Political Science Review, vol. 64, no. 2 (June 1970), pp. 367-88; Irwin Klibaner, “The Travail of Southern Radicals: The Southern Conference Educational Fund, 1946-1976,” Journal of Southern History, vol. 49, no. 2 (May 1983), pp. 195-201; Chafe, ch. 7; Bayard Rustin, “‘Black Power’ and Coalition Politics,” Commentary, vol. 42, no. 3 (September 1966), pp. 35-40; David Danzig, “In Defense of Black Power, ” ibid., pp. 41-46.

  388 [King’s shift leftward]: see Oates, pp. 365-68, 418-26, 431-43; Lewis, ch. 10 passim; see also Ansbro, ch. 7; King, Where Do We Go.

  [“Reconstruction of the entire society”]: quoted in Oates, p. 442.

  [CORE approval and NAACP rejection of Black Power]: Meier and Rudwick, CORE, p. 414; New York Times, July 5, 1966, pp. 1, 22; ibid., July 6, 1966, pp. 1, 14; ibid., July 10, 1966, p. 53.

  9. The World Turned Upside Down

  389 [Medicare]: Theodore R. Marmor, The Politics of Medicare (Aldine, 1973), esp. ch. 4; Eric F. Goldman, The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson (Knopf, 1969), pp. 284-96; Lyndon B. Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives on the Presidency, 1963-1969 (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), pp. 212-20.

  [Omnibus Housing bill and creation of HUD]: John Nicholson et al., eds., Housing a Nation (Congressional Quarterly Service, 1966), pp. 60-86; Robert Taggart III, Low-Income Housing: A Critique of Federal Aid (Johns Hopkins Press, 1970), ch. 5; John B. Willmann, The Department of Housing and Urban Development (Praeger, 1967), ch. 2. [National Foundation for the Arts and the Humanities]: Stephen Miller, Excellence and Equity: The National Endowment for the Humanities (University Press of Kentucky, 1984), ch. 1; Michael M. Mooney, The Ministry of Culture (Wyndham Books, 1980), pp. 46-49.

  [Water Quality bill and 1965 Clean Air Act]: Clarence Davies III, The Politics of Pollution (Pegasus, 1970), pp. 38-44, 49-54; Charles O. Jones, Clean Air: The Policies and Politics of Pollution Control (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975), pp. 62-66; Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962); Frank Graham, Jr., Since Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1970), esp. part 1.

  [School aid program]: Hugh Davis Graham, The Uncertain Triumph: Federal Education Policy in the Kennedy and Johnson Years (University of North Carolina Press, 1984), ch. 3 passim; Vaughn D. Bornet, The Presidency of Lyndon B Johnson (University Press of Kansas, 1983), pp. 222-24; Goldman, pp. 296-308; Johnson, pp. 206-12; New York Times, April 12, 1965, pp. 1, 22.

  390 [Great Society and LBJ’s presidential style generally]: see Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (Harper, 1976), chs. 7-8; Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Lyndon B. Johnson, The Exercise of Power (New American Library, 1966), chs. 17, 19, 22; Bornet, chs. 1-2, 10; Harry McPherson, A Political Education (Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1972), pp. 248-333 passim; Goldman, esp. chs. 2, 4-5, 12, and pp. 164-67; Jack Valenti, A Very Human President (Norton, 1975); Hugh Sidey, A Very Personal Presidency: Lyndon Johnson in the White House (Atheneum, 1968); Frank Cormier, LBJ: The Way He Was (Doubleday, 1977); David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (Random House, 1972), esp. ch. 20.

  [Peace Corps]: Gerald T. Rice, The Bold Experiment: JFK’s Peace Corps (University of Notre Dame Press, 1985); Robert G. Carey, The Peace Corps (Praeger, 1970); David Hapgood and Meridan Bennett, Agents of Change: A Close Look at the Peace Corps (Little, Brown, 1968); Marshall Windmiller, The Peace Corps and Pax Americana (Public Affairs Press, 1970).

  [U.S. personnel in Vietnam at Kennedy’s death]: Johnson, p. 42.

  390-1 [American deaths in Vietnam, 1963 ]: George McT. Kahin and John W. Lewis, The United States in Vietnam (Dial, 1967), p. 188 (Table 4).

  People of This Generation

  391 [Scientists and the bomb]: Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Pantheon, 1985), part 3; Morton Grodzins and Eugene Rabinowitch, eds., The Atomic Age: Scientists in World and National Affairs (Basic Books, 1963); Alice Kimball Smith, A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists’ Movement in America, 1945-47 (University of Chicago Press, 1965); Joseph Rotblat, Scientists, the Arms Race and Disarmament (Taylor & Francis, 1982); Linus Pauling, No More War! (Dodd, Mead, 1958); Lawrence S. Winner, Rebels Against War: The American Peace Movement, 1933-1983 (Temple University Press, 1984), pp. 143-50, 165-69, 175-78, 188-90, 199-201.

  [“Bridge the gap”]: Wittner, p. 251.

  [CNVA]: ibid., pp. 246-50, 252-53, 261-62; see also Thomas B. Morgan, “Doom and Passion Along Rt. 45,” in Harold Hayes, ed., Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire’s History of the Sixties (McCall Publishing, 1970), pp. 548-60.

  [Voyage of the Phoenix]: Earle Reynolds, Forbidden Voyage (David McKay, 1961); Albert Bigelow, The Voyage of the Golden Rule: An Experiment with Truth (Doubleday, 1959); Wittner, pp. 247-50; Barbara Deming, Revolution & Equilibrium (Grossman, 1971), pp. 124-35.

  [“Gigantic flash bulb”]: Reynolds, p. 61.

  [Omaha Action]: Wittner, p. 262; Wilmer J. Young, “Visible Witness,” in A. Paul Hare and Herbert H. Blumberg, eds., Nonviolent Direct Action, American Cases: Social-Psychological Analyses (Corpus Books, 1968), pp. 158-70.

  [New London action]: Deming, pp. 23-37; Wittner, pp. 261-62.

  [March to Moscow]: Deming, pp. 51-72, Lytlle quoted at p. 69; Jules Rabin, “How We Went,” in Lillian Schlissel, ed., Conscience in Americ
a: A Documentary History of Commentions Objection in America, 1757-1967 (E. P. Dutton, 1968), pp. 376-83.

  392 [Women Strike for Peace]: New York Times, November 2, 1961, p. 5; Wittner, p. 277; Amy Swerdlow, “Ladies’ Day at the Capitol: Women Strike for Peace Versus HUAC,” Feminist Studies, vol. 8, no. 3 (Fall 1982), pp. 493-520; Walter Goodman, The Committee (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968), pp. 437-42.

  [SANE]: Wittner, pp. 242-46, 251-52, 257-61, 280; Robert A. Divine, Blowing on the Wind: The Nuclear Test Ban Debate, 1954-1960 (Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 165-69; Deming, pp. 38-50.

  [1963 limited test ban]: Harold K. Jacobson and Eric Stein, Diplomats, Scientists, and Politicians: The United States and the Nuclear Test Ban Negotiations (University of Michigan Press, 1966); Glenn T. Seaborg, Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Test Ban (University of California Press, 1981); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Houghton Mifflin, 1965), ch. 17 and pp. 893-915 passim: Wittner, pp. 279-81; see also Divine.

  [SDS origins and Port Huron conference]: James Miller, “Democracy is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Simon and Schuster, 1987), chs. 1-6; Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (Random House, 1973), chs. 2-4 and pp. 673-93; Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (Bantam, 1987), ch. 5.

  [“Bones,” “widgets,” and “gizmos”]: quoted in Sale, p. 49.

  393 [Port Huron Statement]: in Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau, The New Radicals (Random House, 1966), pp. 150-62, quoted at pp. 150, 152-53, 155; see also Miller, chs. 5, 8; Wini Breines, The Great Refusal: Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962-68 (Praeger, 1982), esp. ch. 4; G. David Garson, “The Ideology of the New Student Left,” in Julian Foster and Durward Long, eds., Protest! Student Activism in America (Morrow, 1970), pp. 184-201; David Westby and Richard Braungart, “Activists and the History of the Future,” in ibid., pp. 158-83; Irwin Unger, The Movement: A History of the New American Left, 1959-1972 (Dodd, Mead, 1974), pp. 52-56.

  [Breines on SDS goals]: Breines, p. 57.

  [Freedom struggle and New Left]: see Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (Knopf, 1979); Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the Sixties (Harvard University Press, 1981 ), pp. 53-55 and ch. 12 passim; Mitchell Cohen and Dennis Hale, eds., The New Student Left (Beacon Press, 1966), pp. 50-109; see also Mario Savio, “An End to History,” in Hal Draper, Berkeley: The New Student Revolt (Grove Press, 1965), pp. 179-82.

  394 [“No Honor”]: Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System (Random House, 1960), p. 12; see also Richard Flacks, “Who Protests: The Social Bases of the Student Movement,” in Foster and Long, pp. 134-57; Steven Warnecke, “American Student Politics,” Yale Review, vol. 60, no. 2 (December 1970), pp. 185- 98; Kenneth Keniston, The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth in American Society (Harcourt, 1965); Keniston, Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth (Harcourt, 1968); Paul Cowan, The Making of an Un-American: A Dialogue with Experience (Viking, 1970); Unger, pp. 25-42.

  [The Beats]: Gitlin, Sixties, pp. 45-54; Lawrence Lipton, The Holy Barbarians (Julian Messner, 1959), part 4 and passim; Bruce Cook, The Beat Generation (Scribner, 1971); Daniel Wolf and Edwin Fancher, eds., The Village Voice Reader (Doubleday, 1962); Jack Newfield, A Prophetic Minority (New American Library, 1966), ch. 2.

  [“Rise of the cheerful robot”]: Mills, “The Politics of Responsibility,” in Carl Oglesby, ed., The New Left Reader (Grove Press, 1969), pp. 23-31, quoted at p. 26; see also Mills, “Letter to the New Left,” New Left Review, no. 5 (September-October 1960), pp. 18-23; Miller, ch. 4; Ronald Berman, America in the Sixties: An Intellectual History (Free Press, 1968), pp. 110-18.

  [Free Speech Movement]: Draper; Editors of California Monthly, “Chronology of Events: Three Months of Crisis,” in Seymour Martin Lipset and Sheldon S. Wolin, eds., The Berkeley Student Revolt: Facts and Interpretations (Anchor/Doubleday, 1965), pp. 99-199; Lipset and Wolin passim; Sale, pp. 162-69; Daily Californian (University of California, Berkeley), October 1, 1984; Breines, pp. 23-31, 46-47; Berman, pp. 156-64; Bettina Aptheker talk at University of California, Berkeley, October 2, 1984.

  395 [“Take all of us!”]: Draper, p. 39.

  [Aptheker’s speech]: Stewart Burns interview with Aptheker, February 18, 1986.

  [Berkeley students at HVAC hearings, 1960]: Goodman, The Committee, pp. 429-34; Unger, pp. 45-47; see also Max Heirich and Sam Kaplan, “Yesterday’s Discord,” in Lipset and Wolin, pp. 10-35.

  [“Had to convince people”]: Savio talk at University of California, Berkeley, October 2, 1984.

  396 [“We students parted ranks”]: Aptheker talk at University of California, Berkeley, October 2, 1984.

  [The multiversity]: see Lipset and Wolin, part 2; Wolin and John H. Schaar, “The Abuses of the Multiversity,” in ibid., pp. 350-63; Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University (Harvard University Press, 1963); Berman, pp. 145-56; Michael W. Miles, The Radical Probe: The Logic of Student Rebellion (Atheneum, 1971), ch. 3; Immanuel Wallerstein and Paul Starr, eds., The University Crisis Reader (Random House, 1971), vol. 1, ch. 2-3, 7.

  [“Ill-housed”]: Wolin and Schaar, p. 360.

  397 [Kerr on university president]: Kerr, “Selections from The Uses of the University, “ in Lipset and Wolin, pp. 38-60, quoted at p. 38; see also Kerr, “Reply to Wolin and Schaar,” in ibid., pp. 364-66; Kerr, “Presidential Discontent,” in David C. Nichols, ed., Perspectives on Campus Tensions (American Council on Education, 1970), pp. 137-62.

  [“Delicate balance”]: Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (Knopf, 1962), p. 423.

  [“Southern struggle”]: in Jacobs and Landau, p. 150.

  [Watts]: Jerry Cohen, Burn, Baby, Burn!: The Los Angeles Riot, August 1965 (E. P. Dutton, 1966); Robert E. Conot, Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness (Bantam, 1967); Paul Jacobs, Prelude to Riot: A View of Urban America from the Bottom (Random House, 1966); William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream (Little, Brown, 1974), pp. 1062-65; Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harper, 1982), pp. 377-78.

  398 [“Burning their city”]: Robert Richardson, quoted in Manchester, p. 1064. [“How can you say you won … ?”]: quoted in Oates, p. 377.

  [Muhammad on need for “complete separation”]: in John H. Bracey, Jr., et al., eds., Black Nationalism in America (Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), pp. 404-7, quoted at pp. 404, 405; see also C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America (Beacon Press, 1961 ), pp. 84-97 and passim.

  399 [National Conference on Black Power]: New York Times, July 21, 1967, pp. 1, 34; ibid., July 22, 1967, pp. 1, 10-11; ibid., July 24, 1967, pp. 1, 16; Thomas L. Blair, Retreat to the Ghetto: The End of a Dream? (Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 202.

  [Black Panther party]: Gene Marine, The Black Panthers (New American Library, 1969); Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (Harcourt, 1973); Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (McGraw-Hill, 1968); Bobby Seale, A Lonely Rage (Times Books, 1978); Blair, pp. 86-103 passim; Don A. Schanche, The Panther Paradox: A Liberal’s Dilemma (David McKay, 1970); Paul Chevigny, Cops and Rebels. A Study of Provocation (Pantheon, 1972); James Korman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Macmillan, 1972), ch. 64.

  [Seale on arming blacks]: quoted in Blair, p. 92.

  [Fragmentation of movement groups along political spectrum]: see Blair, pp. 81-83; Carson, pp. 144-45, l89, 191.

  [“Thrust of Black Power”]: Blair, p. 82.

  [Black culture]: see ibid., ch. 5 passim; Lee Rainwater, ed., Soul (Transaction Books, 1970); Al Galloway, “An Introduction to Soul,” in Hayes, pp. 708-12; Ulf Hannerz, “The Significance of Soul,” in August Meier, ed., The Transformation of Activism (Aldine, 1970), pp. 155-78; Adrian Dove, “Soul Story,” in August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, eds., Black Protest in the Sixties (Quadrangle, 1970), pp. 243-51. Peter Schrag, “The New Black Myths,” Harper’s, vol. 238, no. 1428 (May 1969), pp. 37-42.

  [Black theology]: see Charles V.
Hamilton, The Black Preacher in America (Morrow, 1972), esp. ch. 5; James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore, eds., Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1966-1979 (Orbis Books, 979); James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (Seabury Press, 1969); Blair, pp. 128-33.

  [Growth in number of black Roman Catholics]: Blair, p. 133.

  400 [“Gonna knock the hell”]: quoted in Oates, p. 397.

  [“We Shall Overrun”]: ibid.

  [King in Chicago]: David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian leadership Conference (Morrow, 1986), chs. 8-9 passim; Oates, pp. 365-69, 387-95, 405-19; David L. Lewis, King (Praeger, 1970), ch. 11; Bill Gleason, Daley of Chicago (Simon and Schuster, 1970), chs. 4-5; see also CORE (Chicago Chapter), 1956-64, boxes 1 and 2, Chicago Historical Society.

  [“Unable to deliver”]: quoted in Oates, p. 406; see also August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, “Negro Protest and Urban Unrest,” Social Science Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 3 (December 1968), pp. 438-43.

  [“Never seen anything like it”]: quoted in Oates, p. 413.

  401 [“We want freedom”]: in Bracey et al., p. 404.

  [“Full and complete freedom”]: ibid.

  [“Power to determine”]: in ibid., pp. 526-29, quoted at p. 526.

  [Black opposition to Vietnam]: Henry E. Darby and Margaret N. Rowley, “King on Vietnam and Beyond,” Phylon, vol. 47, no. 1 (March 1986), pp. 43-50; Garrow, esp. ch. 10 passim; Oates, pp. 373-76, 431-44; Lewis, pp. 307-12, 355-71 passim; Carson, pp. 183-89; Korman, pp. 444-47; Michael Ferber and Staughton Lynd, The Resistance (Beacon Press, 1971), pp. 29-33; Adam Fairclough, “Martin Luther King. Jr., and the War in Vietnam,” Phylon, vol. 45, no. 1 (1984), pp. 19-39.