USA: Protest and reaction, 1963-72 Flashcards
Why did students protest in the 1960s?
The targets of student protesters included the college authorities, conformity, materialism, war and racism. Unprecedented numbers of students protested in the 1960s because of some or all of the following reasons:
• President Kennedy encouraged idealism. In his July 1960 speech, he had urged Americans to face the challenges posed by issues such as peace and prejudice. Many students took up his challenges and demanded peace in Vietnam and an end to prejudice against ethnic minorities. In his inaugural address in 1961, he said, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.’ For many of the young, change and improvement seemed possible in their optimistic, affluent society led by this charismatic and idealistic young president.
• The civil rights movement gave practice and inspiration to many student protesters.
• Students resented college authorities who treated them as children and supported an unjust war in Vietnam.
• The rocketing student population decided it could protest without risk because everyone else seemed to be protesting, there was safety in numbers and students had no jobs to lose or families to support.
What was the SDS and what were their main aims?
One of the most influential student organisations was Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). SDS was established in 1960 by Tom Hayden and other University of Michigan students who were inspired by the socialists of the 1930s, the beat generation and student participation in the civil rights movement .
In 1962, representatives of SDS, the SNCC, the CORE and the Student Peace Union met at Port Huron, Michigan. They called upon students to change the political and social system, to liberate the poor, the ethnic minorities and all enslaved by conformity, and to support a peaceful foreign policy. SDS emphasised the potential of the individual, currently stifled by the impersonal nature of the big universities, bureaucracy and the centralisation of all power, and called for ‘participatory democracy’ and a ‘New Left … consisting of younger people’ to awaken Americans from ‘national apathy’.
SDS first gained national attention with its April 1965 anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Washington DC. Possibly as many as 25,000 marched, but the march did nothing to halt President Johnson’s continued escalation of the war. However, that demonstration was not the first student protest to hit the headlines. Student radicalism had first gained national attention in December 1964 at the University of California at Berkeley.
why were their protests at Berkeley in 1964-5?
The leader of the December 1964 protests at the University of California at Berkeley was Mario Savio. Savio had participated in the SNCC’s Mississippi Freedom Summer and black voter registration campaign and wanted to raise money for the SNCC. However, the university authorities did not allow fundraising and political activity on campus. This prompted thousands of Berkeley students to protest against this infringement upon their constitutional right to free speech. They occupied the administration building until the police ejected them and made 800 arrests. This student movement became known as the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM). Its slogan was ‘You can’t trust anyone over 30’. The students gained considerable support from the Berkeley teaching staff, so the university backed down and allowed political discussion and activities on campus. However, there was another flare-up in 1965 when a student was arrested for displaying the word ‘fuck’.
The FSM triggered nationwide student protest. Students criticised their universities as impersonal, bureaucratic and excessively regulatory (the age of majority was 21 so universities served in loco parentis) and demanded a say in university government. Antiwar students disliked universities undertaking (paid) research for government defence agencies.
why were their major protests at Columbia in 1968?
In 1968, students at Columbia University had multiple grievances. They opposed the university’s involvement in weapons research; as this research assisted the government, the students felt the university was supporting the Vietnam War. There was also controversy about the relationship between the university and adjacent Harlem and its black and Hispanic populations. Since 1958, Columbia University’s expansion programmes had led to the eviction of several thousand Harlem residents from properties owned by the university. In 1968 the university planned to construct a gym in a public park. The Harlem population would be able to access the gym, but through a separate door. Students interpreted this as a segregationist policy and opposed the construction of ‘Gym Crow’, although defenders said that the separate door was necessary because the gym was situated on a hill.
These grievances generated protests in which 1,000 of Columbia’s 17,000 students participated. Students seized five university buildings and covered the walls with pictures of Malcolm X and communist heroes such as Karl Marx and Che Guevara. The police used clubs and made 692 arrests. The university shut down for that term and abandoned the gym and many defence contracts. Hundreds of similar occupations followed across the USA.
What is counterculture?
Some define the ‘counter-culture’ as including all those who protested against the dominant culture, such as feminists, those opposed to the Vietnam War, the Black Panthers and the hippies. Others focus solely on hippies when they consider the counter- culture. The hippies certainly seem to best illustrate a movement that adopted an alternative lifestyle to that of the dominant culture.
The roots of this hippie counter-culture lay in the beat generation , with its spontaneity, drugs, free love and general defiance of authority and convention. The hippie counter-culture rejected American society’s emphasis on individualism, competitiveness and materialism, preferring communal living and harmony. In their uniform of faded blue jeans, they listened to music that reaffirmed their beliefs, singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ by Joan Baez, ‘All You Need is Love’ by the Beatles and antiwar songs.
What were the most popular hippie activities?
n the mid-1960s, a group of alienated young people moved into San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury area, wearing ‘alternative’ clothes such as Indian kaftans, attending ‘happenings’, smoking and selling cannabis, adopting new names such as Coyote and Apache, and growing their hair. Perhaps as many as 100,000 hippies visited Haight-Ashbury, which became a centre of a bohemian lifestyle and was re-christened ‘Hashbury’ because of the popularity of hash. Two events in San Francisco in 1967 gained national attention. The first was the ‘Human Be-in’ that took place in Golden Gate Park in January. Thousands of young people met to celebrate personal freedom, communal living and environmentalism. Allen Ginsberg and Dr Timothy Leary were among those attending. The second was the ‘Summer of Love’, which attracted tens of thousands of followers of the counter-culture from all over America. Time magazine noted that every major city had ‘hippie enclaves’ and estimated that there might be around 300,000 hippies.
why is Woodstock a typical example of 1960s counter-culture?
The greatest counter-culture happening was the Woodstock rock festival in New York State in 1969, which was attended by 400,000 people. Its favourite slogan was ‘Make love not war’. One enthusiastic participant recalled how ‘everyone swam nude in the lake, [having sex] was easier than getting breakfast, and the pigs [police] just smiled and passed out the oats [drugs]’. The acts were led by Joan Baez, Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix’s performance of the American national anthem, ‘Star Spangled Banner’, attracted criticism from those who interpreted his use of amplifier feedback and distortion to make a sound like exploding bombs as an antiwar statement.
who where the ‘diggers’?
Many hippies were content to listen to music and experience communal living. Others wanted more. For example, the Diggers of San Francisco sought a social revolution and the end of capitalism. They organised free music concerts and distributed free food, medical care and transportation. In a happening in December 1966, they paraded a coffin through the streets of San Francisco, carrying signs saying ‘The Death of Money’. In October 1967, they proclaimed the ‘Death of Hippie’ and rejected the counter-culture, which they said had been taken over by the media.
In what ways was life unequal for women in the early 1960s?
The economic inequality of women was pronounced. Increasing numbers of women worked after the Second World War. By 1963, most of them were in low-paid jobs such as waitresses, cleaners, shop assistants or secretaries. Educated women were ‘female occupations’ such as nursing and teaching, expected to choose which conformed to traditional stereotypes of women as providers of nurture and care. Many employers were sexist. In the mid-1960s, Congresswoman Martha Griffiths scolded an airline that had fired stewardesses when they married or reached age 32: ‘You are asking that a stewardess be young, attractive and single. What are you running, an airline or a whorehouse?’
Statistics demonstrated inequality in employment opportunities in the early 1960s; for example, women constituted 80 per cent of teachers but 10 per cent of principals, and only 7 per cent of doctors and 3 per cent of lawyers.
Gender inequality was often enshrined in law and practice. Eighteen states refused to allow female jurors, and six said women could not enter into financial agreements without a male co-signatory. Schools expelled pregnant girls and fired pregnant teachers. Some states prohibited married women from accessing contraception. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a leading figure in President Nixon’s administration, admitted that ‘male dominance is so deeply a part of American life the males don’t even notice it’.
Not surprisingly, increasing numbers of articulate middle- class women agitated for equal pay, equal opportunities and equal respect in the 1960s.
How significant was other protest movements in the women’s movement?
Other protest movements encouraged women’s activism in the 1960s. First, they showed that protests could bring desired results, such as legislative reform. Second, their sexism inspired a reaction. Women faced discrimination and sexual harassment in civil rights organisations such
as the SNCC and SDS. ‘Women made peanut butter, waited on table, cleaned up and got laid. That was their role,’ confessed one SDS male. In 1964 women constituted 33 per cent of SDS members but only 6 per cent of the leadership. Although SDS approved a pro-women’s rights resolution, the accompanying debate was characterised by male ridicule of and contempt for gender equality. Having been politicised by organisations such as SDS, some disillusioned women moved on to campaign for women’s rights.
Some antiwar protesters became feminists. In early 1968, hundreds of women attended an antiwar meeting in Washington then marched to Arlington National Cemetery and staged a mock ‘Burial of Traditional Womanhood’.
Who was Betty Friedan and what did she describe in the feminine mystique?
In 1963, Smith College graduate and suburban housewife Betty Friedan drew attention to the dissatisfaction of many middle-class housewives with domesticity.
Women’s magazines, films and advertisements in the 1950s frequently promoted domesticity as the norm and the ideal. Girls were encouraged to play with dolls, to emphasise their femininity and to play down their intellectual capacity. Some women took refuge in tranquillisers (the quantity taken doubled between 1958 and 1959) or alcohol.
Friedan wrote about what she described as ‘the problem that has no name’ in The Feminine Mystique (1963). She said women were imprisoned in a ‘comfortable concentration camp’, taught that ‘they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity’. That destiny required focussing upon the needs of their children and husband rather than upon their own needs. Friedan urged women to break out of the ‘camp’ and fulfil their potential through education and work. Her bestselling book tapped a reservoir of discontent, especially among college students.
who were the NOW and how successful were they?
In 1966 Betty Friedan and others formed the National Organization for Women (NOW) because they were unhappy when the government’s Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) refused to enforce Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination in employment on the basis of sex as well as race. The NOW aimed to monitor the enforcement of the legislation and to demand an amendment to the Constitution that affirmed women’s right to equality in all areas.
The NOW used a variety of tactics including:
• Litigation - for example, the NOW represented Lorena Weeks, who said that the Southern Bell company had contravened the 1964 Civil Rights Act when it denied her application for promotion to switchman because a woman would not be able to lift a weight of 30 pounds. Weeks and the NOW lost the initial case in 1966, but were victorious in 1969 after several appeals.
• Political pressure - for example, the NOW produced a Bill of Rights for Women (1968) that sought the enforcement of Title VII, equal access to education and employment, maternity leave, federally funded childcare to assist working mothers and reproductive rights (the NOW was the first national organisation to endorse the legalisation of abortion).
• Public information campaigns - for example, in 1967 the NOW helped gained national attention for the flight attendants’ fight against sexist airline advertisements such as ‘I’m Debbie, Fly Me’.
• Protests - for example, in 1970 the NOW organised a national women’s strike for equality. An estimated 100,000 women gave the strike active support. Thousands marched with ‘Don’t iron while the strike is hot’ banners. Some protesters dumped their children on their husbands’ desks.
How did the movement for women’s liberation differ from that for women’s rights?
The women’s rights movement in the early and mid-1960s sought equal rights and opportunities in work. The late 1960s saw the development of the women’s liberation movement, which put a new emphasis upon publicising and opposing sexist oppression and cultural practices that objectified women. The movements overlapped.
Among the leading radicals were Jo Freeman, Shulasmith Firestone and Ti-Grace Atkinson.
what sort of methods did the ‘women’s lib’ movement use?
In 1967, Freeman and Shulasmith Firestone attended a National Conference of New Politics in Chicago. Conference director William Pepper said that their resolution on gender equality did not merit floor discussion: ‘Move on, little girl. We have more important issues to talk about here than women’s liberation.’ This inspired Freeman to produce a newsletter, Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement, which encouraged the formation of women’s liberation groups nationwide.
The first national meeting of women’s liberation activists was held in Chicago, where Freeman lived. She saw the women’s liberation movement as complementary to the older organisations such as the NOW.
Support for ‘women’s lib’ was generated through Freeman’s newsletter and through ‘consciousness-raising’ meetings in colleges and in the community. These meetings sought to raise awareness of gender inequality and to encourage activism to combat it. Awareness certainly increased; in 1960, one-quarter of women polled said they felt discriminated against, but after consciousness-raising, it had reached two-thirds by 1974.
Shulasmith Firestone and Ti-Grace Atkinson were excellent examples of women’s libbers’ whose opposition to male domination went too far for many members of the NOW. The experience at the National Conference of New Politics inspired Shulasmith Firestone to establish a women’s liberation group in New York City, the New York Radical Feminists, which held consciousness-raising meetings focussed upon the issue of male subordination of females. In her book, The Dialectic of Sex (1970), she suggested solutions such as in vitro fertilisation to free women from their biologically determined position in society.
Ti-Grace Atkinson was an early member of the NOW, but left the organisation in 1968 because she considered it insufficiently radical. She set up a group called The Feminists in New York City. Atkinson argued that the sexual revolution had benefited men more than women as it had given them easier access to women’s bodies. She was critical of marriage (which she likened to slavery) and pornography.
what issue was the women’s movement disunited over?
Women activists frequently disagreed over tactics and issues:
• Some members of the NOW felt that the beliefs of Shulasmith Firestone and Ti-Grace Atkinson and the dramatic demonstrations of some supporters of ‘women’s lib’ made the American public less sympathetic.
For example, in 1968, a group of over 100 women disrupted the swim-suited parade at the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City with a stink bomb and crowned a live sheep ‘Miss America’. They threw bras, girdles, curlers, false eyelashes, wigs and other ‘women’s garbage’ into a ‘freedom trash can’, singing, ‘Atlantic City is a town without class, they raise your morals and they judge your ass.’
• Some women activists disagreed over the demand for legalised abortion.
• Breakaway groups such as the Radicalesbians resented the lack of support from the NOW for lesbian women.
However, despite the disunity, the women’s movement proved more lasting than most 1960s protest movements. Its effectiveness was demonstrated by the response of the federal government.
What was the equal pay act of 1963?
• Prohibited wage discrimination
• Equal work… on the basis of skill, effort, working conditions, responsibility; ensured fair comparisons of roles.
what was title VII of the civil rights act of 1964?
Title VII prohibits employment discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex and national origin.
When Title VII was enacted, airlines subjected female flight attendants to discriminatory requirements around weight, pregnancy, marriage, and other issues. After one of its very first investigations, the EEOC found that an airline’s policy of firing only female flight attendants once they married was sex discrimination in violation of Title VII. Through this and other efforts, Title VII led to changes in that industry and others allowing women to be judged on their abilities, opening the doors of opportunity.
What was the 1967 executive order?
-extended full affirmative action rights to women.
-was signed by Lyndon B. Johnson on October 13 1967.
-It banned discrimination on the basis of sex (gender) in hiring and employment in both the United States federal workforce and also as part of government contractors.
-Advanced workplace as it ensured women got the same kind of equality as other marginalized groups.
What was Roe v Wade’s impact?
Roe v Wade ruled (7–2) that unduly restrictive state regulation of abortion is unconstitutional. The ruling was that a person may choose to have an abortion until a foetus becomes viable, based on the right to privacy contained in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Viability means the ability to live outside the womb, which usually happens between 24 and 28 weeks after conception.
In what ways was there a sexual revolution in the 1960s?
While groups such as students, women and black Americans protested publicly against establishment values, many Americans privately disregarded social norms through sexual behaviour that defied convention and upset conservatives.
Anxieties about sexual liberalisation were nothing new; conservatives in the 1920s had bemoaned women with short skirts and ‘loose morals’. However, exceptional changes in attitudes in the 1960s constituted a sexual revolution with increased acceptance of casual premarital sex, abortions, homosexuality and extramarital relations. The proportion of unmarried couples living together increased dramatically. The number of couples who cohabited rose dramatically:
• 1955-around 250,000
• 1960-500,000
• 1970 - nearly 750,000
• 1980-around 2 million.
Similarly, the percentage of single white women who had had sex was around 25 per cent in the mid-1950s, but more than double that by 1972. The percentage of babies born to unmarried women also rose. These changes were rapid. In Revolution’, while the married couple in the popular The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-66) were assigned separate beds separated by a nightstand. In a flashback episode about their son’s birth, the word ‘pregnant’ was considered unsuitable for use. However, by 1968, the Broadway show Hair celebrated sexual freedom. The naked cast on the stage caused a sensation that helped trigger increasing nudity and graphic depictions of sexual activity in mainstream entertainment.
had there already been a sexual revolution before the 1960s?
The sexual revolution had its roots in slowly changing attitudes after the Second World War, when sensationalist book covers and Playboy (first published in 1953) increasingly emerged onto the open shelves rather than from under the counter and the Kinsey Reports (1948-52) generated greater and more open discussion of sex. Shocked but fascinated, Americans learned from Kinsey that:
68 per cent of American males and 50 per cent of American females had engaged in sex before marriage
• 37 per cent of males and 13 per cent of women had had at least one homosexual experience
8 per cent of males and 4 per cent of females had had some kind of sex with animals.
why was the invention of the pill so important for women’s liberation?
The pace of change speeded up even more after 1960, when the widespread availability of the first oral contraceptive for women (‘the pill’) liberated many women from fears of pregnancy at a time when many groups were demanding greater freedom and change. Armed with the pill and influenced by the rights revolution and the counter- culture, women began to insist upon their right to express their sexuality as they saw fit, unrestricted by old conventions.
Long-standing conservatism about birth control and abortion had held back sexual liberalisation. It was 1965 before the Supreme Court ruled in Griswold v. Connecticut that married couples could not be refused contraception and 1974 before doctors could no longer refuse birth control to unmarried adults for ‘moral reasons’. Abortion was illegal until 1973, so women sought backstreet practitioners, or used bleach douches or inserted coat hangers. In the early 1960s, one Chicago hospital treated over 5,000 women patients for abortion-related complications.
How homophobic was american society in the 1960s?
American culture had long been homophobic. In the post-Second World War era, same-sex sexual activity was illegal and homosexuals were considered perverted and commonly expelled from universities or fired from jobs. The American Psychiatric Institute classified homosexuality as a mental illness until 1974.
Gay men had been involved in nationwide community building, lobbying, publishing and networking since the Second World War but had struggled to gain acceptance. In 1951 a group of homosexual men in Los Angeles established the first Mattachine Society to promote greater tolerance. In Mattachine Societies in several cities in the 1960s there was much discussion of emulating the black civil rights movement and the Black Power movement. However, as yet the authorities remained intolerant, as demonstrated in New York City.
The mattachine society and the daughters of Bilitis was formed in 1955. Both groups actively fought against the 1953 executive order 10450 that barred homosexuals from applying fro federal jobs. This order ended up causing over 5,000 federal employees to be fired on the suspisicion of being gay.
In 1958, the first U.S supreme court case on the topic of homosexuality was won when ONE The Homosexual Magazine was declared as not obscene publication, and so could be printed.
1965: A picket line at the White house, organised by the Mattachine Society of Washington. This is very prominent as a turning point in the gay rights movement.
why were the stonewall riots a landmark moment for the gay rights movement?
Gay men had long suffered entrapment at the hands of the New York City police. In 1969 homosexuals at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village fought back against police harassment, triggering five days of rioting in which hundreds participated. This has often been seen as the birth of gay rights. Although gay life in America did not begin with the Stonewall riots, what was new in the late 1960s was increased gay group consciousness and assertiveness and slowly changing public attitudes. However, gay rights such as the legalisation of homosexual acts and freedom from discrimination had not yet been attained.
-A year later was the first pride parade, the christopher street liberation day, publicly marking the event, creating an emphasis on being openly gay.
what were the Mattachine society ‘sip-ins’?
The Mattachine society ‘sip-ins’: In spring 1966, at Julius’ Bar, close to the Stonewall Inn, 4 gay men engaged in a ‘sip-in’, in order to challenge a law that made it a prosecutable offence for one man to buy another drink.
-The New York Times ran a headline saying ‘3 deviates invite exclusion by bars’, the next day.
-The Mattachine then challenged the liquor rule in court and the courts ruled that they had a right to assemble peacefully.
-With this right a new era of licensed, legally operating gay bars began.
what were the views of the ‘great silent majority’?
When Richard Nixon accepted the Republican nomination for the presidency in August 1968, he talked about those whom he would soon christen the silent majority. He was not the first to use the phrase ‘silent majority’ but he popularised it after a speech in November 1969 in which he asked ‘the great silent majority of my fellow Americans’ to support his Vietnam policies. From his speeches, it is clear that Nixon’s silent majority were those who did not protest against the war (Nixon spoke of the ‘vocal minority’ who did), participate in riots or adopt a counter-cultural pose. When Nixon talked to advisers, he used the term ‘Middle America’ interchangeably with the ‘silent majority’.
The rise of the silent majority owed much to exasperation with riots and protests and to events during 1968 that suggested that the United States was a nation in crisis.
How did the January 1968 Tet Offensive influence Americans’ views on Vietnam and Johnson?
By the end of 1967 there were over 500,000 American troops in Vietnam. The war was becoming increasingly unpopular among Americans, so the Johnson administration launched a public relations offensive which claimed that America was winning the war.
During the Tet holiday in January 1968 the Vietnamese communists launched their great Tet Offensive on South Vietnam. Although American and South Vietnamese forces eventually re-took South Vietnam’s cities, American media images showing communists overrunning the South Vietnamese capital suggested a ‘credibility gap’ between what Johnson was saying about winning the war and what was actually happening. Exhausted by the war and public hostility to his policies, Johnson said he would not stand for re-election but would focus on ending the war. The silent majority did not want to lose the war but hoped that America could somehow achieve the ‘peace with honour’ that the Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon promised.
Why did demonstrations at the August 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago aid the rise of the ‘silent majority’?
In August 1968 the Democrats met in Chicago for their National Convention to choose their presidential candidate. The Mobe and the Youth International Party (Yippies) called on young people to come to Chicago to demonstrate contempt for the American political process by disrupting this convention.
The silent majority watched in horror as:
- around 30,000 members of the New Left arrived in Chicago, spreading rumours that they were going to put LSD in the city’s water supply
-Chicago’s Mayor Daley mobilised around 12,000 police and banned marches
-the Yippies produced their candidate for president - ‘Pigasus’, a squealing young pig
- the media revealed students having sex in public and provoking the police (calling them ‘pigs’, blowing marijuana smoke in their faces, throwing bags of urine at them and giving them the finger). Removing their badges and nameplates, the police retaliated with clubs and gas.
Polls recorded 56 per cent approval of police actions against the protesters, while one Congressmen accused radicals of wanting ‘pot instead of patriotism’ and ‘riots instead of reason’. Chicago confirmed, and sometimes caused, many voters’ support for the presidential candidate for law and order in 1968, Republican Richard Nixon.
What was different about the 1968 presidential election, that allowed Nixon to be victorious?
• Johnson withdrew from the race during the primaries, and Hubert Humphrey won the nomination. Loyal to Johnson on Vietnam, his selection in Chicago caused widespread protest. Humphrey promised to continue Johnson’s war on poverty and to support the civil rights movement.
• Nixon ran on a campaign that promised to restore law and order to the nation’s cities and provide new leadership in the Vietnam War. (He didn’t use the term ‘silent majority’ until 1969). He also aimed to win conservative Southern white voters who had traditionally supported the Democrats.
• Alabama governor George Wallace ran on the American Independent Party ticket, campaigning in favor of racial segregation.
• In doing so he split the democratic vote against Humphrey, allowing Nixon to win the presidency, despite carrying only 43% of the popular vote.
What happened in the 1972 election?
-Nixon won the election in a landslide, taking 60.7% of the popular vote and carrying 49 states and 520 electoral collage votes, while being the first republican to sweep the south
-Nixon received almost 18 million more votes than McGovern, who only won Massachusetts. He ran a grassroots, anti-war campaign, relying on student activists.
what were the reasons for McGovern’s loss in the 1972 election?
-Nixon maintained a large lead in polling, Nixon emphasised the strong economy and his success in foreign affairs (ending American involvement in Vietnam and establishing relations with China). US troops had mostly withdrawn from Vietnam by 1972, and the 1973 Paris Peace Accords saw the rest leave.
-McGovern seen as a fairly left-wing - he ran on a platform calling for an immediate end to the Vietnam War and the institution of a guaranteed minimum income. -McGovern became known as the candidate of ‘amnesty, abortion and acid’, even though he only supported the decriminalisation of marijuana and maintained that legalised abortion fell under the purview of states’ rights. -McGovern was poorly impacted by his outsider status as well as the scandal and subsequent firing of VP nominee Thomas Eagleton (over his medical record).
What happened at Kent State University (Ohio) on 4 May 1970, and how did American conservatives view this event?
Kent State students rioted in the central business district and firebombed the ROTC building. Some held a peaceful protest rally at which panicked National Guardsmen fired indiscriminately, killing four and wounding 11. Days later, two more students were killed and 12 wounded at Jackson State, Mississippi, when police opened fire on the women’s dormitory. Perhaps it was because the Jackson State students were black that there was far less attention from the press (and also from historians ever since).
After Kent State, some Americans felt the government was deliberately murdering dissenters, but Middle America agreed with Nixon’s criticisms of ‘these bums … blowing up the campuses’. Over half of Americans blamed the students for what happened at Kent State.
How far did Nixon reduce government spending on welfare, unemployment and poverty?
During the 1968 presidential election campaign, Nixon said he wanted to save taxpayers’ money by eliminating the more wasteful, inefficient Great Society programmes and by reforming what he called the ‘welfare mess’. He told his advisers that the American people were ‘outraged’ by the welfare system. Polls in 1968 revealed that 84 per cent of Americans believed ‘there are too many people receiving welfare money who should be working’.
President Nixon attacked Great Society programmes and principles from several angles:
• He successfully shrank the Office of Economic Opportunity, closed 59 Job Corps centres and cut federal housing programmes.
• He tried to reform the welfare system. Polls showed that 80 per cent of Americans believed over half of those on welfare could get a job if they wanted, and Nixon hoped he could make welfare recipients work through his Family Assistance Plan (FAP).
-Conservatives liked three aspects of the FAP: first, welfare recipients would only have received $1,600 per annum; second, there were work requirements; third, the number of bureaucrats who administered the system was decreased. Liberals disliked those provisions, but were pleased that the plan would have made 13 million more Americans eligible for federal aid. That in turn alienated conservatives. There were so many criticisms of Nixon’s FAP that Congress rejected it.
-Nixon vetoed the 1971 Child Development Act, which would have provided free childcare to enable poor mothers to work. He said it was too expensive and held traces of communism.
However, having been brought up in poverty, Nixon was sympathetic to the poor. Despite all his anti- Great Society campaign rhetoric, he increased federal expenditure on education, private healthcare, social security, Medicare and Medicaid, and actually spent more on social programmes than Johnson.
What were Nixon’s views on bussing and tackling ‘de facto’ segregation in schools
The Great Society was to have been characterised by racial equality. In pursuit of this, Supreme Court rulings in 1971 and 1973 supported the bussing of students from one neighbourhood to a school in another neighbourhood in order to end de facto segregation of schools. However, Americans opposed bussing by eight to one, and Nixon attacked it as ‘wrenching’ children from their families.
He was initially unsuccessful in his attempts to slow down school desegregation, but his appointment of conservative Supreme Court justices led to rulings that eventually ended bussing.
what were Nixon’s views on affirmative action?
Nixon claimed to dislike affirmative action , which he described as reverse discrimination, but in practice his administration gave minorities considerable help. For example, he put pressure on federal contractors to employ more minority workers. As so often with Nixon, there was a gap between what he said and what he did. In many ways, his record on race was quite impressive. His promotion of affirmative action helped ensure its entrenchment in federal government agencies and contractors for many years to come.
How far did film and television promote conservative values in the 1960s?
Sometimes, television and film promoted conservative values. For example, John Wayne made the move The Green Berets (1968) in support of the war. It did well at the box office, suggesting silent majority support for US efforts in Vietnam. However, the black comedy movie MAS*H (1970), although ostensibly about the Korean War, was clearly critical of militarism and the Vietnam War and it too was very popular. In another tale of opposites, the family-friendly movie The Sound of Music (1965) was incredibly popular, while Easy Rider (1967), which celebrated drug taking, sexual liberalisation and the counter-culture, was not. Much depended of the film; Bob and Carol and on the quality Ted and Alice (1966) traced sexual liberalisation in Los Angeles and was a big critical and commercial hit. Hollywood offered more challenges to traditional values than television in this period, and such challenges no doubt contributed to change
What was the My Lai massacre
Soon after Tet, 347 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians were beaten and ad killed by American soldiers at the South Vietnamese village of My Lai. The army wanted to cover up such atrocities in order to protect the reputation and morale of its forces. However, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s exposure of the My Lai massacre was picked up by the major newspapers in late 1969.
Polls suggested that the extensive coverage of the massacre did not change people’s attitude to the war, while it shocked those who were already antiwar, others felt this was simply how war was. After all, the North Vietnamese also killed civilians. However, in it has been argued that the coverage did help change some people’s attitude to the war in that it made them think that if the war was turning American boys into killers of civilians, then it was time to get out.
what happened with the pentagon papers?
The papers were a study of US involvement in Vietnam from 1945
-Released by Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on the study and then charged with espionage; they were first brought to the attention of the public on the front page of The New York Times in 1971.
-The Pentagon Papers revealed that the U.S. had secretly enlarged the scope of its actions in the Vietnam War with the bombings of nearby Cambodia and Laos, coastal raids on North Vietnam, and Marine Corps attacks—none of which were reported in the mainstream media
