American Experiment (356 page)

“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.

Unexpected though it was, the police-car sit-in was a spark struck off from long-growing friction between students and authorities, and a spark that ignited afresh the fires of campus rebellion. A “free speech” movement had been kindling at least since May 1960, when Berkeley students had tried to attend hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee in San Francisco; repeatedly refused admission, they staged a sit-in, only to be washed out of the rotunda and down the steps of city hall by fire hoses. Dozens were arrested. Savio and others involved in the police-car sit-in had been suspended by the university after earlier protests. Then, when the university abruptly extended its ban on political activity to a small strip of pavement that had been a haven for political talk and recruiting, activists lashed back that October noon. They were being treated like southern blacks, they protested—their own civil rights were being violated. The university authorities were thrown off guard by the readiness and vehemence of their young adversaries.

In the heady days after the armistice an unusually broad coalition of student groups, ranging from Goldwaterites and Young Republicans to socialists and Maoists, formed the Free Speech Movement. Because of lingering McCarthyism and relentless red-baiting, “we had to convince people that we were small ‘d’ democrats in addition to whatever else we were,” Savio said later. “We were hung up about democracy.” They sought to make FSM a model of participatory democracy. Students chose
representatives to a large executive committee, which in turn elected delegates to a small steering committee that carried out the larger body’s policies and tactics from day to day. The steering committee tried to act by the Quaker method of consensus and the FSM ethic of openness. Aptheker, Savio, and others spent many long nights churning out leaflets with detailed accounts of the day’s happenings; these were printed by dawn and handed out, 20,000 daily, by 8
A.M.
The FSM, however, lacked a key dimension of democracy—there were few women in leadership positions.

The university itself served as one of FSM’s best organizers. When the movement seemed to be losing steam, Berkeley’s chancellor rejuvenated it by bringing new charges against Savio and another leader. Aroused once again, a thousand students took over Sproul Hall, administration headquarters. After a night electrified by Joan Baez’s singing “We Shall Overcome,” and nourished by peanut butter sandwiches, Charlie Chaplin films, and “Free University” classes, the students were beset by hundreds of police who rooted them out floor by floor. Eight hundred were arrested, the biggest campus civil disobedience in the country’s history.

In response, graduate students organized a strike so widely supported that it shut down the university. Scores of professors emerged from their studies to back the movement. In a remarkable faculty decision the Academic Senate voted overwhelmingly to back the FSM demands. After the vote, Aptheker recalled, “we students parted ranks, forming an aisle through which the faculty seemed to formally march in a new kind of academic procession.” It was only then, ten weeks after the police-car sit-in, that the regents rescinded the ban on campus free speech.

The Berkeley rebellion, scrupulously nonviolent, the first major white student movement since the 1930s and the first to employ mass direct action on campus, involved much more than traditional political freedoms. Many students felt alienated by the intellectual assembly line of a huge, impersonal “multiversity” harnessed to the needs of large corporations and the Pentagon. Berkeley political theorists Sheldon Wolin and John Schaar observed that the students were “ill-housed, and ill-clad, and ill-nourished not in the material sense, but in the intellectual and spiritual senses.” Students contended that they were being bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated by faceless bureaucrats; they were fighting to gain more control over their lives. They saw the university’s intellectual repression as of a piece with its contribution to basic social ills, from automation to the nuclear arms race, and they hoped that by forcing the institution to live up to its original scholarly ideals, they could take a big step toward reshaping the entire society.

Clark Kerr, president of the University of California, did not feel like a
faceless bureaucrat, pawn of the power elite, or a master of power. He felt more like a punching bag. “The university president in the United States,” he wrote in 1963, “is expected to be a friend of the students, a colleague of the faculty, a good fellow with the alumni, a sound administrator with the trustees, a good speaker with the public, an astute bargainer with the foundations and the federal agencies, a politician with the state legislature, a friend of industry, labor, and agriculture, a persuasive diplomat with donors, a champion of education generally, a supporter of the professions (particularly law and medicine), a spokesman to the press, a scholar in his own right, a public servant at the state and national levels, a devotee of opera and football equally, a decent human being, a good husband and father, an active member of a church.” Kerr played most of these roles with skill and versatility.

Yet there was something gravely lacking in all this, and the students sensed it. In trying to deal with what historian Frederick Rudolph called the “delicate balance of interests,” in searching ever for consensus, in settling for day-to-day “practical steps” of management and persuasion, Kerr and a host of other university heads evaded the crucial tasks of clarifying educational goals, setting priorities, being controversial, leading rather than mediating and bargaining. Students saw themselves as the least of a president’s concerns. They were now making the multiversity a political battleground.

While a few of the FSM leaders like Savio had been tutored in civil rights protest in Mississippi, most of the campus dissidents were so immersed in their own battles against the multiversity that for a time they paid little attention to struggles hundreds of miles away in the South or nine thousand miles away in Southeast Asia. The Port Huron Statement had referred to the “Southern struggle against racial bigotry” and Vietnam, American imperialism, and the bomb only as items in a much wider set of problems. Southern black leaders were also so preoccupied with endless crisis and confrontation that they had little time either for the “rich rebels” in northern universities or for peasants far across the Pacific. As the civil rights struggle moved North during the 1960s, widening the arc of black concerns, and as the war in Vietnam escalated, blacks and students were drawn together in the vortex of a new conflict. But the civil rights battle in the North still remained to be fought out.

In mid-August 1965, just a few days after LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act, the Watts section of Los Angeles burst into violence. It seemed a curious location for a “race riot”—not a place of dark and towering
tenements, but a ghetto, in the Los Angeles style, of bungalows and ranch houses, intermixed with trash-filled alleys, boarded-up stores, bars and pool halls, drunks and drug peddlers. It was 98 percent black. Starting with a routine arrest of a black youth suspected of drunken driving, the violence whirled out through the streets on the wings of rumor. Day after day, in torrid heat, blacks looted and torched stores, pelted cops and passing cars, randomly attacked whites, hurled Molotov cocktails, ambushed firemen and policemen.

Once again neighborhood people—in this case street people—were taking the lead, but this was a leadership of nihilism. In their fury blacks set scores of major fires, tried to burn a local community hospital, and torched the shops of other blacks despite signs on storefronts pleading ownership by a “Black Brother” or “Soul Brother.” The rioters were “burning their city now, as the insane sometimes mutilate themselves,” wrote a reporter for the Los Angeles
Times,
himself black.

Martin Luther King flew to Los Angeles and walked the debris-strewn streets of Watts among smoldering ruins of shops and houses, imploring the locals to turn away from violence, which had brought ten thousand National Guard troops into the area. King provoked argument, skepticism, even heckling. Some youngsters told him, “We won.”

“How can you say you won,” King demanded, “when thirty-four Negroes are dead, your community is destroyed, and whites are using the riots as an excuse for inaction?”

“We won,” a jobless young man responded, “because we made the whole world pay attention to us.”

Increasingly blacks were turning to the ideas King had fought—to separation from whites rather than integration, to street riots rather than nonviolence, to the religion of the Nation of Islam rather than Christianity. Elijah Muhammad, suspected by some of having instigated the murder of Malcolm X, continued to lead the Nation, with its Muslim schools, businesses, and publications, including
Muhammad Speaks,
the Muslim weekly newspaper. In 1962 the paper had printed Muhammad’s “Muslim Program,” in which he had trumpeted that since blacks could not get along with whites “in peace and equality, after giving them 400 years of our sweat and blood and receiving in return some of the worst treatment human beings have ever experienced, we believe our contributions to this land and the suffering forced upon us by white America, justifies our demand for complete separation in a state or territory of our own.” He demanded separate schools and a ban on “intermarriage or race mixing.”