The New Left and the Anti-War Movement

Question 1

Background to the New Left: The expansion of universities

Answer 1

• two million college students in 1950
• three million college students in 1960
• seven million in 1968

Question 2

What factors affected rising education levels

Answer 2

• ## Partnership between federal gvt. and universities, as funding allocated for (mostly military) research - Wini Breines, The New Left and the Student Movement

Question 3

The character of universities in the 1950s

Answer 3

• Wini Breines argues that universities were conservative.
• Policy of ‘loco parentis’ meant students were treated like children
• Conservative, gendered policies, (eg having a mens and womens dean)
• Clothing typically not counter-cultural
• Apolitical. United States represented the perfect democratic system, as opposed to communism, and political activism was discouraged

Question 4

The state of the Left on the dawn of the New Left

Answer 4

• powerless
• American communist party was fragmented
• McCarthyism/anti-communism had crippled the old left

Question 5

What made the New Left different from the Old Left?

Answer 5

• Challenged social, political and economic injustice in the US without turning to the Soviet Union and Communism
• However, many were anti-capitalist and socialists

Question 6

How did ‘mainstream’ Americans view the New Left, according to Wini Breines?

Answer 6

‘Mainstream Americans considered them utopian, communist, socialist, deviant, or unpatriotic and were disturbed to see student rebels who “should” have been grateful and content. Their student activism sharply contrasted with the main- stream university life of the 1950s—football games, fraternity pranks, and panty raids.’

Question 7

How did C. Wright Mills influence the New Left?

Answer 7

• The Power Elite (1956) argues that gvt/corporation/military triumvirate threatens American Democracy
• Letter to the New Left (1960)

Question 8

How did the Civil Rights Movement influence the New Left?

Answer 8

• learned by example through early activism eg Montgomery Bus Boycott
• SNCC ‘model’ for New Left
• Issues of the movement supported the idea that America was imperfect and needed radical change
  (Wini Breines, The New Left and the Student Movement)
• ‘Free Speech Movement grew, in significant measure, out of the Civil Rights Movement’- I+K
• Same songs, tactics, rhetoric

EVIDENCE:

• Mario Savio participated in ‘Freedom Summer’ voting drives
• Bob Dylan’s civil rights anthem ‘The Times they are a’Changing’ - ‘Your sons and your daughters/Are beyond your command’

Question 9

Were New Left activists idealistic, and how did this effect the movement?

Answer 9

• Yes, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
• Gave them high aspirations for change. They aligned themselves with American values (‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’) and so also with Kennedy’s statements on Civil Rights
• Idealism fuelled the movement.

Question 10

Did the New Left have elite origins?

Wini Breines, The New Left and the Student Movement

Answer 10

• ‘Most early activists were middle class, usually from metropolitan areas, and attended elite eastern colleges and major state universities.
• Adults assumed that 1950s prosperity and optimism would generate satisfied and conformist young people, but for a significant minority it did not.
• Particularly moved by discrimi- nation against African Americans, early activists were deeply concerned about values of truth and justice and about meaning in their own lives.
• They began to reject materialism and conformity and sought ways to live honestly, equally, and ethically in relation to others.

–> Elite origins alerted young Americans to how synthetic their existence was, and how disconnected they were, inspiring action

Question 11

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

Answer 11

EARLY DAYS
Student League for Industrial Democracy becomes SDS in 1960 under Al Haber, frustrated with its inactivity
- Ann Arbor, 1960, conference.
- Tom Hayden joins soon after
- Gradually gathers pace thanks to ‘leaders’ open and nondogmatic commitment to rebuilding a radical presence on campuses.
- By 1965, had parted ways with the League for Industrial Democracy

BY 1965

• New Left larger than SDS, characterised by ‘decentralisation and spontenaity’, but by 1965 SDS ‘the best known radical group in the country’ - I+K
• Membership of 15 000 and growing fast

Question 12

The Port Huron Statement (Primary source excerpts on separate card)

Answer 12

• ‘one of the most pivotal documents in postwar American history’ - ?
• ‘it defined the politics of the emerging New Left’
• Written in 1962 by Tom Hayden, SDS members, students from University of Michigan
• notion of ‘participatory democracy’ was crucial and radical, as democratic participation not open to some (blacks, women) and difficult for others (poor)

Question 13

How did the SDS and the SNCC work alongside the Civil Rights Movement?

(Evidence of different focuses in the early New Left)

Answer 13

• Attempted to redirect the misguided anger of poor whites, which was at poor blacks, against white elites
• Economic and Research Action Project (1963) to create an “interracial” awareness of poverty and to run community action projects
• Operating in Chicago, Newark, Cleveland

CONTENTIOUS
- Some felt the work was righhteous
- Others felt it was misguided, based on the guilt that came with affluence
- Was grassroots change needed or a focus on broader economic themes?
–> Participatory democracy in practice: discussion on everything, ‘the personal is political’
SUCCESSFUL?
- Did not foster interracial relations, good community or a challenge to capitalism
- Some smaller, local successes. Communtiy leaders asking for safe streets, playgrounds, and increased welfare

Question 14

Free Speech Movement (FSM) in Berkley, California

Answer 14

CONTEXT

• Dispute in 1964, University of California, Berkley Campus, about students’ rights to engage in political activity
• In Summer of 1964, university ruled students couldn’t involve themselves in ‘off-campus’ political activity whilst on Berkley Campus, or to publicise/recruit for political organisations

THE COMPLAINT

• Violation of 1st Amendment rights to free speech
• Evidence of the Bureaucratic

ESCALATION

• Eight suspended for violations –> Multiple demonstrations
• Police care surrounded, ‘teach in’ lasts 32 hours
• Occupation of Sprout Hall, 800 arrested - the largest ‘mass arrest’ in US history

RESULT
- Ban rescinded

Question 15

Mario Savio speech at Berkley in 1964

Answer 15

“Last summer I went to Mississippi to join the struggle there for civil rights. This fall I am engaged in another phase of the same struggle, this time in Berkeley. . . . The same rights are at stake in both places—the right to participate as citizens in democratic society and the right to due process of law. . . . It is a struggle against the same enemy.”

Question 16

How, according to Breines, did student protest operate? (5 steps)

Answer 16

1) Radical students would ask for or demand changes or rights that did not appear to be particu- larly unreasonable.
2) The university administration would overreact, apparently unable to respond in measured terms to what they considered a threat to their authority.
3) This would mobilize greater numbers of students. The scenario would repeat itself.
4) Eventually the authorities would respond in an extreme manner: suspensions, expulsions, stonewalling, police busts.
5) Overreaction on the part of the authorities politicized and radicalized young people, who were particularly sensitive to abuses of power.

Question 17

How can one distinguish between the New Left and the Student Movement?

Breines

Answer 17

Often fed into each other. New Left/SDS closely aligned on Vietnam

• Whilst New Left thought in terms of socialism, imperialism, communism, Student Movement thought in terms of injustice, ‘narrowness of the norms and values of American Society’, discontent with complacency

OR

• Generational divide?
• Working-class, lower-middle-class students aligned closer with counterculture/black power/student movement than with organised political organisations as old new left generation did?

Question 18

How did the Vietnam War impact the student movement

Answer 18

• Heavily associated with the Anti War Movement and AWM protests
• Student Movement filled with college men who were exempt from the draft
• War a point of contention for the student left who were discontented with American society

Question 19

What events in 1968 would profoundly affect the New Left/Student Movement/Anti-War Movement?

Answer 19

• Tet Offensive exposes American ‘victory’ in Vietnam as a myth
• Assassinations of MLK and Robert Kennedy. Nixon Elected
• Student Movement becomes international: French students protest in France, Bill Clinton writes his draft card from Oxford University
• ## Prague Spring crushed when USSR invades Czechoslovakia

Question 20

Why did SDS fail at the moment when the New Left/Student Movement became a mass movement and a success?

Answer 20

• Factional divisions
• Marxist-Leninist faction vs Weatherman faction, which favoured alliance with militant blacks to bring about revolution
• Divisive politics, and many identified with neither
• “…the central New Left splintered into political factions that destroyed its political relevance.”

Question 21

San Fransisco University protests 1969

Answer 21

• Black Student Union demand more black staff and students
• Strikes, demos, occupations
• Hundreds expelled, including staff, but by spring of 1970 black students programme agreed to

-> evidence of crossing over of student movement/black power

Question 22

San Fransisco University protests 1969

Answer 22

• Black Student Union demand more black staff and students
• Strikes, demos, occupations
• Hundreds expelled, including staff, but by spring of 1970 black students programme agreed to

-> evidence of crossing over of student movement/black power

Question 23

Kent State Massacre and Jackson State College massacre

Answer 23

• May 4th, 1970,
• Anti-War Protest against the invasion of Cambodia (where n. vietnamese had established base) at Kent State University sees four unarmed students, protesting nonviolently, shot and killed by national guard
• Nine others injured
• –> 4 million students strike, hundreds of universities close

Days later, two unarmed blacks shot at Jackson State College, Mississippi

Question 24

How did the violent demonstrations of the late 60s weaken the New Left

Answer 24

’ A combination of despair, hope that the government might negotiate an end to the war, and the Paris Peace Accords unde§rcut the massive student antiwar movement. ‘ - Breines

• Violence and deaths left many unwilling to participate or feeling disillusioned with the movement
• Also move towards peace in Vietnam undercut AWM
• Peace agreement signed in Paris in January 1973

Question 25

How did the federal government attempt to counter the New Left and the challenge to authority posed by the Student Movement?

Answer 25

• COINTELPRO on the pretence of investigating links to Communism
• wiretaps, spreading false information,
• 28 Black Panthers killed in shootouts - two in their beds

Question 26

How did identity politics figure into the Student Movement?

Answer 26

• University organisations and unions for people of colour
• Radical occupations on campus
• Gay/Lesbian pride movements

Question 27

Why did the Student Left Decline? - end of postwar prosperity

Answer 27

• Affluence and fewer responsibilities allowed students to take risks
• Baby boomers born into supportive, middle-class families and optimistic about the future
• Now not possible due to financial responsibilities (Breines)

Question 28

Did the New Left/Student Movement succeed?

Answer 28

YES
- Achieved Free Speech, abolished ‘in loco parentis’
- Universities became less conservative and more liberal
- Robert P. Diggins, The American Left in the 20th Century, ‘politically and morally it made a difference’; ‘crucial’ in lowering voting age to 18 by showing youth as formidable social force
BUT
- Universities are still businesses
- Though there is a strain of anti-capitalism, we now rarely speak of socialism
- ‘The New Left and student movement articulated a sense of powerlessness and lack of community that have only deepened in the last thirty years.’ - Breines

Question 29

PRIMARY SOURCE: Mario Savio at Sproul Hall, December 3rd 1964

Answer 29

‘There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!’

Question 30

PRIMARY SOURCE: The Port Huron Statement

Answer 30

CRITICAL OF APATHY

• ‘We are the people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.’
• ‘paradoxes’ in American society - denial of civil rights
• ‘hypocrisy’ of American ideals
• Critical of pervasive feeling in American society that there is ‘no alternative to the present’ - ‘

CRITICAL OF UNIVERSITIES

• Significance of the Student Movement is to ‘break the crust of apathy’
• Students characterised as ‘passive’ and ‘private’
• Emphasis on control of universities on intellect; apathy as a ‘product of social institutions’
• Critical of ‘cumbersome academic bureaucracy’

Question 31

How was Kennedy’s call to ‘ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for you’re country’ interpreted by different groups?

Answer 31

• Some join peace corps - Berkley, California was biggest source of peace corps in America
• Others join movements for civil rights and peace for the same reason - to help America

‘The same impulse that led some to volunteer for government-sponsored experiments in social service and community organising

Question 32

Was the Free Speech movement radically different to the studrnt movement of the later 1960s?

Answer 32

-‘ But by the later 1960s, the times were “a-changin” in ways that would make the FSM protest seem tame and old fashioned in contrast.’

Question 33

PRIMARY SOURCE: C Wright Mills, Letters to the New Left

Answer 33

• “Who is it that is getting disgusted with what Marx Called ‘all the old crap?’ Who is it that is thinking and acting in radical ways?…it is the young intelligentsia.’

young people ‘the real live agencies of historic change’

Question 34

How did the SDS change in the mid-1960s?

Answer 34

-‘If the SDS had ceased to exist in the spring of 1966, historians looking back through its archives might well have concluded that the organisation functioned primarily as a youth affiliate and support group for the pacifist and civil rights movements, rather than any kind of self-consciously revolutionary, let alone violence prone organisation.’

Port Huron Statement called for ‘real intellectual skills’ but now new SDS leader Carl Davidson called to achieve aims by ‘disruption, dislocation and destruction’

Question 35

To what degree was the New Left and the Student Movement an international movement?

Answer 35

• Carl Davidson (SDS, 1967): ‘common struggle with the liberation movements of the world’

EXPAND ?

Question 36

What was the internal debate in the SDS regarding the position of women?

Answer 36

• Masculine pronouns in the Port Huron Statement
• Mary King+Casey Hayden present critical paper at SNCC conference in 1964, condemning the ‘assumption of male superiority’ in the way that capable women were assigned to ‘female’ jobs .
• Later King + Hayden circulate memo with own names and many women say they relate to their complaints
• -> “consciousness raising groups” spring up in different cities, members drawn from SDS chapters

Question 37

Anti-War Movement: March on Washington 1967 as evidence of unrespectable image of the movement

Answer 37

• 21st October 1967, Protest at Lincoln Memorial and Pentagon
• 100 000, with 35 000 continuing to Pentagon
• Civil Disobedience: Flowers in gun barrels, burning draft cards

–> 638 arrested, 52 jailed, multiple injuries

Question 38

Evidence of counterculturalism of Anti-War Movement

Answer 38

• Jerry Rubem, head of Mobilisation Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE)
• August 28th 1967: promises protest would levitate Pentagon 300 ft into the air, take on orange glow, and vibrate as the demon of war was exorcised

Washington post described ‘shaggy doves and the sweet smell of pot’

Question 39

Evidence of lack of respectability in movement

Answer 39

• By 1968, 72% of polled had negative view of movement

Question 40

Growth of Anti War Movement statistic

Answer 40

Few dozen groups to 1200 1960-1970

Question 41

Origins of the Anti-War Movement

Answer 41

• 1955, pacifism and ban the bomb

Question 42

Anti War Movement organisations

Answer 42

National Committee for Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) 
Committee for Non-Violent Action (CNVA) 
Vietnam Veterans Against the War 
Clergy and Laity Concerned (CALC) 
Another Mother for Peace (AMP)

Question 43

How did the Anti War Movement act?

Answer 43

• conferences, letter writing, news adverts
• shift from “protest to resistance” was gradual and, argue Bennedetti and Chatfield, the aggression was overplayed
• Traditional election tactics: ‘Vietnam Summer’ organisation sent students door-to-door in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1967

Question 44

Aggressive tactics by AWM in the late 60s

Answer 44

20% of bombings Jan 1969-April 1970 were Anti-War Movement

Question 45

Benedetti and Chatfield on the significance of the Anti War Movement

Answer 45

1) tied into all other social movements
2) Despite failure to get America to quit the war, it did make the decision to stay or go in Vietnam the defining point of American identity ‘Vietnam as a definition of American purpose.’

However, failed to show itself as respectable so alientated supporters, and failed to capitalise on ability to define itself.

Question 46

Ideological fragmentation of the Anti-War Movement

Answer 46

• beyond central tenets of AWM, there was disagreement.
• there was ‘movement’ but it lacked ‘direction’
• For liberals, Anti War Movement was about a correcting a wrong
• For ‘old-New Left’ and more radical wing, it was about resisting American tyranny and bringing about a re-allocation of power
• Divisions: should war be considered in its own right or as connected to other issues? What sh§ould be the means of affecting change? (Negotiation? Withdrawl? How to protest?
• Was this about teaching the poor to stop American capitalism in advance of the next Vietnam? Or should socioeconomic aims be part of the movement to stop the war now?

Question 47

How was Anti-War strategy different from civil rights tactics, according to I+K

Answer 47

• Sit ins/boycotts served ‘strategic ends’ for CRM and had been planned for a long time
• By contrast, in AWM, contests were solely for the sake of media attention - which did not bring results and often led to them being portrayed badly

Question 48

Why was it difficult for the Anti War Movement to achieve immediate success?

Answer 48

• I + K argue that its sole defining aim was to end the war in Vietnam. This would be gradual and was v. hard to absolutely achieve

Question 49

Peaceful AWM march: NYC/SF

Answer 49

• MOBE organise marches in NY and SF which are peaceful and many attend hundreds of thousands. Not violent, and attended by MLK

Question 50

Stop the Draft Week, Oakland California

Answer 50

October 15th- October 22nd 1967

• Return draft cards
• sit in at Oakland induction center
• Police vs rioters on Friday October 20th, 10 000 strong crowd

Question 51

AWM as ‘therapeutic’

Answer 51

• Bennedetti and Chatfield argue AWM was therapeutic for disillusioned Americans if nothing else
• I+K agree, but note that ‘The standard of political effectiveness used to measure and justify the campus antiwar movement’s embrace of ever more militant tactics increasingly became the sense of gratification and commitment such tactics provided to participants…’
• –> Was this self-gratification damaging the movements credibility?

Question 52

Did the AWM experience a revival in 1969?

Answer 52

• ‘In the fall of 1969, as it became apparent that the dying was going to go on indefinitely in Vietnam, the antiwar movement not only revived but attained its greatest breadth of support and legitimacy’ - I+K
• Vietnam Moratorium Committee broad coalition of student leaders, unions, veterans
• October 15th 1969, 1 million participate in protest
• November, 500 000 protest in Washington including Vietnam vets
• Protests in Vietnam by soldiers to show solidarity
• National student strikes when Nixon announces intention to invade Cambodia

Question 53

Rebecca E. Klatch, A Generation Divided

Similarities between Sharon Conference (YAF) and SDS conference in 1960?

Answer 53

SDS Conference

• 150 meet to discuss ‘Human Rights in the North
• Al Haber elected president in June 1960
• Haber contends with leadership of League of Industrial Democracy (LID) who want SDS to be educational, not political, and kept free of communism that would damage its image

Sharon Conference

• September 1960, 100+ student delegates from colleges assemble under William F. Buckley, Jr.
• Not anxiety about change in the nation, but sense of ‘excitement’ reported by attendees who felt they were ‘pioneers’ of their cause
• Distanced from Republican party: ‘we carried the flag of conservatism at a time when none of us really knew what that meant’ - Sharon Dawson
• > ‘Comparing the Port Huron and Port Sharon statements reveals the commonalities as well as the differences…’
• > Common sense of lost American power/prestige - significance of foreign policy? Cold War?

Question 54

Rebecca E. Klatch, A Generation Divided

- What factors does Klatch cite for the demise of the New left, and right? §

Answer 54

SDS

VIOLENCE
- Violence by state led some to believe in the need for violence –> nature of ‘revolution that would follow led to disputes and —>
INTERNAL CONFLICT
- …Over direction of movement: Progressive Labour (Maoists) attempt to recruit from the SDS
- High ranking Marxists/Communists: Bernadine Dohrn was interorganisational secretary (elected) in 1968
- Weatherman and Klonsky’s Revolutionary Youth Movement
TENSIONS OVER WOMEN
- To be organised independently of men? Was women’s liberation central to the movement?

YAF

THE WAR
- Traditionalists supported war, libertarians didn’t.

COUNTERCULTURE

• Libertarians drawn to it, Traditionalists opposed it strongly
• -> Pennsylvania and California purge libertarians in their 1969 conventions

Question 55

Michael Harrington’s ‘The Other America’ (1963)

Answer 55

Introduces the affluent left to the concept of an ‘invisible poor’

• Robert P. Diggins, The American Left in the 20th Century - argues affluent American youth felt ignored and disconnected, and therefore had affinity with this ‘invisible poor’

Calls the book ‘Key Social Document’ of the early 60s

Question 56

Robert P. Diggins, The American Left in the 20th Century - on the cultural foundations of the new left

Answer 56

• generation had parents who’d grown up in 30s/40s, and, having survived depression and war, went on to spend –> post war boom
• Children were affluent, but parents not thinking beyond ‘economic and material comfort’

Question 57

Robert P. Diggins, The American Left in the 20th Century - on why the New Left declined

Answer 57

Ability to identify social agent
- ‘inability to find social force that would adopt a commitment of active opposition to the existing order’ (Poor were not a solidified social class, not a majority movement, workers reacted with indifference)

Vietnam war

• New left became international in focus in 1965
• …‘the new left could never successfully organise the discontent that the war had spawned’
• By the time the violence had ended, movement didn’t ‘belong’ to the New Left anymore

Repression

• ‘outside of the sanctuary of the campus, however, confrontation brought a backlash of repression’
• Evidence: failure to interrupt DNC in June 1968, violent repression by police, public supported action

Factionalism
- Split of the SDS in 1969 convention: many go to Progressive Labour, Revolutionary Youth Movement that stressed international frontier for the left, radical Weathermen faction was pro violence…

Question 58

Escalating situation in Vietnam

Answer 58

At the end of Lyndon johnson’s first year in office there
were just 23,000 American troop stationed m Vietnam, but

within twelve month the number had risen to 181,000. The beginning of a massive bombing campaign again the north Vietnam February 1965 made the war a major political issue and energized the domestic peace movement

Question 59

PRIMARY SOURCE: The Anti-War Movement: From Protest to Radical Politics (1965), Paul Booth, Lee Webb (SDS)

Answer 59

‘We feel that American foreign policy is impervious to pressure placed directly on it. Secondly, we feel that the issue of the war in Vietnam cannot involve masses of people here in the United States…Finally…We think that this single issue politics…is simply an obstacle at this time. We are concerned about all of the issues of America and think that the only way to deal with them is together’

Question 60

PRIMARY SOURCE: The Anti War Movement

“Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam”
April 30, 1967, Riverside Church, New York - MLK, Jr.

Answer 60

A MORAL ISSUE

that I see this war as an unjust, evil, and futile war.

There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal.

should not equate dissent with disloyalty
THE NATION’S CONSCIENCE

Polls reveal that almost fifteen million Americans explicitly oppose the war in Vietnam. Additional millions cannot bring themselves around to support it. And even those millions who do support the war [are] half-hearted, confused, and doubt-ridden.

As I have walked among the desperate…I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action; for they ask and write me, “So what about Vietnam?”

ECONOMIC PRAGMATISM
it is estimated that we spend $500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only fifty-three dollars for each person classified as poor

Question 61

PRIMARY SOURCE: The Anti-War Movement

Students for a Democratic Society opposes the War, 1965

Answer 61

IMMORAL
- ‘immoral at its root

TYING INTO WIDER THEMES
- foreclosing the hope of making America a truly democratic society

COUNTERPRODUCTIVE
- we propose to the President that all those Americans who seek so vigorously to build and not to burn be given the choice to do so.

LEGAL?
- Challenges constitutionality for not declaring a war, violates Geneva Accords (1954)

PROPOSE:
- exert every effort to end this war
-

Question 62

PRIMARY SOURCE:

SNCC denounces Vietnam War, 1966

Answer 62

• Show support for oppressed south east asians
• Support right to defy the draft

‘we recoil with horror at the inconsistency of this so-called free society’

Question 63

PRIMARY SOURCE: The Weathermans Call for a Revolution, 1969

Answer 63

• must ask of self what you think of US as an oppressor race and US Imperialism
• > Shows radically different takes on Vietnam war

Question 64

How do different groups justify their opposition to vietnam war?

Answer 64

• MLK, SNCC, both ally themselves with the oppressed and object on moral grounds (nonviolence

MLK/SDS both cite greater causes (economic liberation of poor, democratic society)

Weatherman sees is as a question of US Imperialism being wrong