Sunday, Sep 17, 2017
As a college student in 1967, “fifty
years ago” meant 1917 and World War I, a time and event far from any direct connection
with me. To young people today, 1967 must seem as distant and largely
irrelevant.
Yet both years were profoundly
important turning points in the life of this nation. 1917 marked the entry of
the United States into World War I — perhaps the bloodiest, most pointless war
in human history — and into a far more significant, militaristic global role.
While 1968 gets more attention from
historians, 1967 saw important shifts in the nation’s politics that have shaped
the world we live in today.
As the purveyors of public history,
mass media reflections on 1967 typically emphasize popular culture and
celebrities: Muhammed Ali stripped of his heavyweight title, the release of the
Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper,” the first rock festival at Monterey, the Summer of
Love, the release of “The Graduate, etc.” These brief glimpses fail to
convey the historical context that produced events like these.
Yet two new films, Ken Burns’ “The
Vietnam War” and Kathryn Bigelow’s “Detroit,” remind us that there are still
conversations we need to have and lessons we need to learn from this past. Both
films remind us of the roots of today’s Black Lives Matter movement and the
never-ending American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
1967 marked the fourth consecutive
“long, hot summer” of urban uprisings, epitomized by the decade’s two most
destructive riots, in Newark and Detroit. While the national media had ignored
inner-city life prior to the riots, the nation watched in horror as saturation
coverage provided staggering footage of the cities burning, residents gleefully
looting, and federal troops and National Guard crushing these urban rebellions.
Significantly, both events were
triggered by acts of police brutality — the same factor that gave rise to the
Black Panther Party for Self Defense, and much more recently Black Lives
Matter.
Although police brutality was the
spark that ignited rioting, inner-city frustrations had been building for years
even as the civil rights movement achieved historic gains in the South. “War on
Poverty” promises largely failed to improve inner-city conditions, while the
most promising bottom-up Community Action Program was co-opted by a top-down
Model Cities Act.
One young black man claimed after
the 1965 Watts riot, “We won because we made the whole world pay attention to
us.” Yet, crucially, the urban riots proved highly useful foils for
reactionary campaigns.
Barry Goldwater exploited the 1964
Harlem riot to become the first Republican presidential to win four Southern
states; Ronald Reagan played on fears aroused by the 1965 Watts riot to win the
California governorship in 1966; and, following Newark and Detroit, Richard
Nixon (and George Wallace) would successfully appeal to “law and order”
concerns in 1968. That reactionary path led, administration by administration,
to the mass incarceration of African-Americans.
At the same time, the war in Vietnam
continued to escalate in 1967 despite more than two years of significant and
growing antiwar activity and increasing numbers of “dove” voices in Congress.
Mass media accounts were outright dismissive of antiwar movement perspectives.
Frustrations were growing apace. As journalist Andrew Kopkind put it, “To be
white and radical in America this summer is to see horror and feel impotence.”
In October, following a call to
“Confront the Warmakers,” more than 150,000 people traveled to Washington
for the March on the Pentagon. In contrast to popularized myths about the
antiwar movement, they marched behind a banner that proclaimed, “Support Our
GI’s: Bring Them Home Now.” At the Pentagon, they were met by billy clubs and
bayonets.
That same month, violent police
attacks on antiwar protesters in Madison, Wisconsin, and Oakland, California,
produced the expected response in a movement that was highly decentralized:
growing militancy and, at times, violence by antiwar cadres.
While the antiwar movement remains
one of the most maligned movements of the ’60s era, its very contestation of
the war made people pay closer attention to the war. Growing antiwar sentiment
and the growing militancy of the movement eventually helped force the Nixon
administration to end the American war.
Yet, while some 60-70 percent
of the American public came to view the Vietnam War as “more than a mistake”
and “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” in the years after the war American
elites, aided by the complicit mass media, used a number of approaches — proxy
wars, CIA overthrows, counterinsurgency campaigns, and eventually all-out
wars — to overcome what they called the “Vietnam Syndrome,” returning
American foreign policy to its imperial overreach. Even today, the neutral
stance toward the war in the Ken Burns film reflects the unwillingness to
confront the fundamental nature of that war. Not surprisingly, we find
ourselves stuck in unwinnable imperial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our
military intervention producing precisely what it claimed it was preventing —
as it did in Vietnam.
The media-facilitated backlash to
these rising currents led the white South and much of the white working class
into the right-wing dominated Republican electoral camp, while the Democrats
moved systematically into the corporate center. This is where we find our
politics today, in a partisan divide between neo-fascism on the right and
corporate centrism masquerading as the left.
As for media-hyped phenomena from
1967, like the infamous “Summer of Love,” these were early indicators of the
way mass media learned to tap into youthful disenchantment and produced an
“expressive politics” capable of being largely absorbed into the culture of
consumption and entertainment.
Later generations have inherited a
popular-history “Sixties” that is all about rebellious youth, celebrities and a
politically sanitized war, absent the powerful lessons about roots of
contemporary issues and effective political organizing that could help to
empower activists today.
While there are many lessons to be
learned from this history, one that speaks powerfully to the present moment is the
need for the widely diverse and fragmented channels of progressive resistance
to find their way toward a relatively coherent left perspective that is
reflected organizationally in a way that gives effective voice to the left.
Ted Morgan is emeritus professor of political
science at Lehigh University and the author, most recently, of “What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture
Failed American Democracy.”
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