Immediately after the Clay/Liston fight the new champion announced that he was a Muslim and changed his name to Muhammad Ali. Every kid I knew loved Ali, so many of us experienced cognitive dissonance while reading the laments of older sports writers who compared the new outspoken champion unfavorably to Joe Louis, the black boxing hero of the older generation, who had always been polite outside the ring.
Malcolm X would not benefit from the champ’s explosion of popularity because on March 8, Malcolm publicly broke with Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam. Ali, who overnight had become one of the most popular black Americans, remained loyal to the NOI.
In 1961, CORE began freedom rides to integrate buses and interstate bus terminals in the South; the group later expanded to voter registration. On June 21, 1964, CORE workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman disappeared. Their bodies were later found—they had been murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
That same year, in response to the blatant voter suppression of blacks in Mississippi, civil rights activists, including Fannie Lou Hamer, formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). The group sent sixty-eight representatives to the Democratic Convention that August in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and demanded to be seated as delegates. President Lyndon B. Johnson orchestrated a “compromise” that offered the MFDP a mere two nonvoting seats at the convention while retaining the all-white “official” Mississippi delegation. Hamer and her MFDP colleagues were outraged. The sense of betrayal would fuel an increased militancy in many quarters of the civil rights movement in years to come.
After Malcolm X left the NOI, he converted to Sunni Islam, made a pilgrimage to Mecca, returned with a more nuanced view of race relations, and was tragically killed, allegedly by members of NOI, on February 21, 1965. A month later, on March 21, 1965, after a couple of failed attempts, Dr. King led the Selma-to-Montgomery March for Voting Rights in Alabama.
The Road to Vietnam
During this same period, there was a subculture of Americans who objected to the Cold War foreign policy that had taken hold after the death of Franklin Roosevelt. My parents were among this minority who felt that President Harry Truman had betrayed many of Roosevelt’s ideas, particularly with regard to the Soviet Union. They had volunteered for Henry Wallace’s ill-fated, anti–Cold War third-party campaign in 1948. Like the parents of many of the baby boomers who would become my friends in the sixties, they were appalled by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his “ism.” They felt that McCarthy wildly exaggerated the threat of American Communists and used the ensuing hysteria to ostracize non-Communist liberals and Socialists who had been part of Roosevelt’s New Deal.
The Korean War started on June 25, 1950, nine days before I was born, at the peak of the American baby boom that would be at the cultural center of the late sixties.
The protests against the war in Vietnam in the sixties would be driven by resistance to the military draft, but there had been a draft fifteen years earlier for the Korean War, and many of the arguments that were used against the Vietnam War applied to Korea as well. Yet there had been no mass resistance to the Korean War. What had changed in America between 1950 and 1965 to create the space for such a dramatically different response just one generation removed?
One factor was that the Korean War itself left an unsatisfying aftertaste to much of the American public. More than 36,000 American soldiers died in the war, but it did not produce an emotionally satisfying victory like World War II had. Instead there was a negotiated settlement, the benefit of which was at best an abstract concept to many Americans.
“Pacifist” is another word like “hippie” and “Socialist” that was supposedly unacceptable for serious people. Yet many Americans felt that pacifists like Britain’s Lord Bertrand Russell, who had vainly opposed World War I and who was outspoken until his death in 1970, had been vindicated by history. Among these were two Quaker organizations, the American Friends Service Committee and the War Resisters League, which brought a quiet, spiritual fervor to the peace movement.
The oldest person integral to the peace movement of the sixties, Abraham Johannes “A.J.” Muste, was born in 1885 and began his career as a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church. A believer in nonviolence, Muste opposed America’s participation in World War I. During the 1920s he switched his focus to the labor movement, but by the thirties he had renewed his commitment to pacifism, for which he would be known for the rest of his life. Muste also opposed US involvement in World War II and said in 1940, “If I can’t love Hitler, I can’t love at all,” which he meant as a spiritual belief consistent with many religious teachings but which reinforced his outsider status in the American political world including most of the left.
Nonetheless, as chairman of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, A.J. Muste was a mentor to many who would lead the nonviolent civil rights movement in the fifties and sixties, including James Farmer, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King Jr. An unrelenting critic of the Cold War, Muste led various efforts to stop nuclear proliferation and was later among the first to criticize the war in Vietnam.
Muste never particularly related to the counterculture. In an obituary of Albert Camus for Liberation magazine, he favorably contrasted the French existentialist with beatniks, whom Muste claimed “stupidly give up the search for meaning.” Yet in the context of the antiwar movement of the midsixties, Muste, by then in his early eighties, had a unique status. Although physically frail, he had a spectral presence and exuded a moral purity that made him the elder statesman of the pacifist side of the movement. Asked for his motivation at a candlelight vigil outside the White House to protest the Vietnam War, he said, “I don’t do this to change the country. I do this so the country won’t change me.”
Dave Dellinger was thirty years younger than Muste, but as a fifty-year-old in 1965 when the Vietnam protests began, he too was a pacifist elder in the movement. Dellinger had refused to fight in World War II, and was sentenced to a term in jail where he was punished for not recognizing racially segregated seating. In 1956, Dellinger, Muste, and others started Liberation magazine, which became an important voice of the non-Communist left.
The nuclear arms race accelerated over the course of the fifties. The level of American paranoia increased markedly between the winter of 1959, when the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro overturned the US-backed government, and the spring of 1961, when the Soviet Union launched a satellite with a pilot named Yuri Gagarin into outer space, the first time a human being escaped the force of gravity.
“There was the constant sense of doom,” recounts Joel Goodman, my best friend in high school. In Barry Alexander Brown and Glenn Silber’s film The War at Home, an antiwar activist recalls being given a copper dog tag at his public school in New York so he could be identified if a nuclear bomb destroyed the city.
I remember reading a pamphlet that had a graphic showing the impact of a five-megaton nuclear bomb, through a series of concentric circles. At the center was the area in which everyone would be immediately vaporized or otherwise killed. A few miles beyond that people would die from radiation poisoning within twenty-four hours. A few miles beyond that people would die within the year. Of course, New York City was considered one of the most likely targets; the suburb where my family lived was in that terrifying third circle.
In my last couple of years of elementary school, a business had grown in America around the building and selling of fallout shelters. The theory was that these structures would prevent radioactive contamination in the event that the Chinese or Soviets dropped nuclear weapons on us. I was torn between jealousy of my friends who had one and a growing sense that it was an absurd scam.
In 1961, Dagmar Wilson, a children’s book illustrator who lived in Virginia with her family, became upset after reading about the arrest of Bertrand Russell at a London demonstration against nuclear testing. She and a few friends formed Women Strike for Peace to support Russell’s agenda.
Barry Commoner,
a biologist and professor at Washington University in St. Louis, suspected that the radioactive fallout from atmospheric tests could endanger the health of children exposed to the cancer-causing isotope strontium-90. Commoner’s research led him to believe that the radiation would contaminate the soil and grass, which would be eaten by cows. Those same cows would go on to produce milk that would be consumed by children whose growing bodies were particularly vulnerable.
As a college student at the University of Wisconsin, Cora Weiss had organized recall petitions against Senator Joseph McCarthy for his anti-Communist witch hunt. Several years later, now the mother of three young daughters, Weiss joined Women Strike for Peace. She organized a project for Commoner in which mothers around the country sent the professor young children’s baby teeth. “We gave them to the tooth fairy first so the kids could get their five cents,” Weiss recalls.
Commoner published the “Baby Tooth Survey” in a November 1961 edition of Science. It showed that levels of strontium-90 in children had risen steadily in those born in the 1950s, with those born later showing the most increased levels.
Women Strike for Peace were not doctrinaire pacifists. Weiss explains, “It was close enough to the memory of World War II that some of us believed in the concept of a just war.” Yet they saw nothing just about atmospheric nuclear testing. Wilson, Weiss, and Bella Abzug (who would later be elected to Congress) were among a small group that organized fifty thousand women to march at various locations across the country, calling for an end to atmospheric nuclear testing. Weiss focused on the opinion of Middle America. “We wore hats and white gloves. I wanted to make sure it was safe for Mommy and Daddy and little children, so we insisted on no civil disobedience and no unruly behavior.”
President Kennedy was said to have been deeply troubled by reports of radioactive contamination of milk, and in August 1963 the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which banned testing in the atmosphere and in the oceans. Weiss remembers fifty members of Women Strike for Peace gathering outside the White House in support of the signing, which took place in Moscow.
Jacqueline Kennedy personally delivered coffee and donuts to the women. “We were all young enough then that we ate the donuts,” Weiss says wistfully. “We were told by one of his aides that President Kennedy wanted to acknowledge the role that Women Strike for Peace had played in creating public opinion supportive of the treaty.”
This Cold War peace movement was the context in which I first crossed paths with Joel Goodman. We met on my first day at Fieldston, in seventh grade, in the fall of 1962. Joel’s father was Percival Goodman, a prominent New York architect best known for his innovative designs of postwar Jewish synagogues. Percy was also a radical intellectual and the older brother of the celebrated writer Paul Goodman, a pacifist who had recently published a critique of modern American society called Growing Up Absurd, which became an ur-text for many sixties radicals.
Although seven years apart in age, the brothers were close. Multiple copies of Paul’s books were stacked in Joel’s parents’ apartment on the Upper West Side. Percy was twenty years older than my father and was a remote figure to me and I suspect to Joel. When I would have dinner at their apartment during sleepovers, Percy, Paul, and Joel’s mother Naomi would be occupied in their world of intellectual discourse while we “kids” had our own coded conversations which we were sure had much more relevance to the world.
Yet, at the same time, we internalized the political values of our parents. Joel’s cousin Matty (Paul’s son) was a year older than him and had refused to participate in air-raid drills at the Bronx High School of Science the year before. Joel suggested to me that we should have our own protest. (Although we thought we were alone on the cutting edge, Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement had been arrested for protesting air-raid drills in 1955; Joan Baez had refused to participate in an air-raid drill at Palo Alto High School in 1958; Norman Mailer and Paul Krassner first met at an anti–air raid drill demonstration in 1961.)
The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred in October 1962, six weeks into the school year, increasing our sense of urgency. Our message was that air-raid drills were not only pointless, but they added to an atmosphere that normalized the idea of nuclear war. My parents approved. The sign I made with a black marker said, Don’t Prepare for War, Prevent It.
It was a liberal school so we were not expelled. (The alumnus Fieldston boasted most about was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who helped develop the American nuclear bomb. Oppenheimer later turned against the arms race and was subsequently ostracized by many in the military and political establishments.) We were suspended for a day and Fieldston quietly stopped having air-raid drills.
The pre–Vietnam War peace movement was richly expressed in the late fifties and early sixties folk music scene, particularly by the previously blacklisted Pete Seeger, and by Baez, who released her first album at the age of nineteen in 1960.
In the early 1950s, folk singer Ed McCurdy, who had been known for recording bawdy Elizabethan songs, wrote and released the peace song “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream”—“Last night I had the strangest dream I’d ever dreamed before. I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war.” The song would be translated into seventy-six languages and recorded by dozens of artists, including Seeger, Baez, Johnny Cash, Garth Brooks, and Simon & Garfunkel on their debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3 AM, which was released in 1964.
“Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” written in 1955 and recorded by Seeger in 1962, is a pacifist lament about the costs of war. It was later recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary, the Kingston Trio, Marlene Dietrich, Roy Orbison, Dolly Parton, the Four Seasons, Earth, Wind & Fire, Olivia Newton-John, and Flatt & Scruggs, among others. In 1963, peace songs on popular folk albums included Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War,” which he quickly followed with another antiwar classic, “With God on Our Side,” which appeared on 1964’s The Times They Are a-Changin’. Also released in 1964 was Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Universal Soldier,” which Donovan covered the following year; 1965 saw the release of Phil Ochs’s album I Ain’t Marching Anymore.
However, in 1965, pop radio was still the only way most American kids could hear new music. Barry McGuire, a former member of the pop folk group the New Christy Minstrels, had a number one hit record with Eve of Destruction. Written by P.F. Sloan, the lyrics were a despairing depiction of the American political culture. It referenced the civil rights struggle in Selma, the Vietnam War, and, implicitly, the assassination of President Kennedy. It was much more radical than anything that had previously been heard on Top 40 radio.
A few months later the promilitary song “Ballad of the Green Berets” by Sergeant Barry Sadler, which was widely perceived as an affirmation of the rationale for the Vietnam War, also went to number one. It is hard to imagine a single human being who would have been a fan of both songs. Polarization was at hand.
Several movies added to the sense of potential apocalypse. In 1959, On the Beach, starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Fred Astaire, dramatized the horrible aftermath of a nuclear war. Two films in 1964 showed how an American military could be drawn into such a war: Fail Safe, starring Henry Fonda, and my favorite, Dr. Strangelove, in which Peter Sellers played three different characters. In 1967, the Academy Award for Best Documentary went to The War Game, written and directed by British filmmaker Peter Watkins. A docudrama about the devastation caused by a nuclear war, it was originally produced for British television but the BBC refused to air it because “the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting.”
Young people were primed to weigh in. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was created in 1960 at the University of Michigan. At its first convention in 1962, SDS issued a new American left-wing manifesto called the Port Huron Statement, primarily written by twenty-two-year-old Tom Hayden, who was SDS president at the time. Hayden was brought up in Det
roit, where his Irish-Catholic family were members of a church presided over by Father Charles Coughlin, who had been a controversial conservative critic of President Roosevelt in the 1930s and was also a notorious anti-Semite. Hayden met Martin Luther King Jr. on a picket line protesting segregation at the 1960 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles. He then joined the Freedom Riders and was arrested and beaten in Mississippi and Georgia. For the rest of his life, Hayden approached activism through the prism of the nonviolent civil rights movement.
SDS agreed with the peace movement’s critique of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. It supported the civil rights movement, and criticized major political parties and labor unions for complacency about poverty. Even so, SDS was critical of what they called “the old left” because of its factionalism and its top-down decision-making hierarchies. SDS advocated “participatory democracy” and supported civil disobedience to help achieve these goals.
To the extent that there was an American left that had any political influence in the fifties and early sixties, it had vigorously denounced communism in response to the pressure of McCarthyism. SDS rejected this liberal orthodoxy and invited a representative from the Progressive Youth Organizing Committee, a Communist group, to attend their convention as an observer. This, in turn, freaked out many older Socialists who had walked a very thin line in the preceding years, most notably Michael Harrington, whose book The Other America was one of the catalysts for President Johnson’s War on Poverty programs. Harrington, who was part of a leftist group called the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), was intent on distinguishing between Socialist programs/ideology and the totalitarian repression of existing Communist governments. To the “new left” exemplified by SDS, the “old left” was hobbled by memories of the late forties and early fifties, and there was also a suspicion among many students that the self-styled lefty elders were merely being protective of their turf. (A.J. Muste agreed with Hayden about inclusivity and the old pacifist addressed SDS conventions in 1964 and 1965.)
In Search of the Lost Chord Page 6