36 results
Appendix A - A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority
- Paul Lauter
-
- Book:
- Our Sixties
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 January 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2020, pp 227-230
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
A number of intellectuals came together to create the “Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority.” These included Marc Raskin and Arthur Waskow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, Noam Chomsky and others in Cambridge, MA, Donald Kalish at UCLA, and in New York, a group led by Robert Zevin, then a professor of economics at Columbia. It was Zevin who opened an office and hired the first staff person for the organization, Resist, that would attempt to implement the call. These individuals and others circulated the call, mostly by mail, to colleagues and friends.
To the young men of America, to the whole of the American people, and to all men of goodwill everywhere:
1. An ever growing number of young American men are finding that the American war in Vietnam so outrages their deepest moral and religious sense that they cannot contribute to it in any way. We share their moral outrage.
2. We further believe that the war is unconstitutional and illegal. Congress has not declared a war as required by the Constitution. Moreover, under the Constitution, treaties signed by the President and ratified by the Senate have the same force as the Constitution itself. The Charter of the United Nations is such a treaty. The Charter specifically obligates the United States to refrain from force or the threat of force in international relations. It requires member states to exhaust every peaceful means of settling disputes and to submit disputes which cannot be settled peacefully to the Security Council. The United States has systematically violated all of these Charter provisions for thirteen years.
3. Moreover, this war violates international agreements, treaties and principles of law which the United States Government has solemnly endorsed. The combat role of the United States troops in Vietnam violates the Geneva Accords of 1954 which our government pledged to support but has since subverted. The destruction of rice crops and livestock; the burning and bulldozing of entire villages consisting exclusively of civilian structures; the interning of civilian non-combatants in concentration camps; the summary executions of civilians in captured villages who could not produce satisfactory evidence of their loyalties or did not wish to be removed to concentration camps;
12 - Where We Went and What We Did (and Did Not) Learn There
- Paul Lauter
-
- Book:
- Our Sixties
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 January 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2020, pp 198-219
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The “sixties,” as we know, did not end on December 31, 1969. The war in Southeast Asia continued. Racism didn’t evaporate. Feminist organizations dedicated to combatting patriarchy were just being organized. And America was confronted by a corrupt and secretive presidency that attacked “enemies,” domestic and foreign, and would end only with a resignation provoked by the threat of impeachment. There was plenty to keep activists busy.
Many different paths opened before me. In 1972, after a year at the United States Servicemen’s Fund (USSF), I returned to full-time teaching at a college, the State University of New York’s College at Old Westbury. I wondered: Could I apply some of the lessons learned in nearly a decade of movement activity? Would the teaching and scholarly work I had begun at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and at The Feminist Press be politically relevant? This new SUNY campus was an untried experiment that hadn’t existed ten years earlier. Now the college was under construction in opulent Old Westbury, where the zoning then required two acres to build a house—or, more accurately, a mansion. The new campus, once the F. Ambrose Clark family estate, included some five hundred wooded acres belonging to a network of fancy establishments that once upon a time graced Long Island’s North Shore. In the beginning, the college had been located in another elegant domain, the Planting Fields Arboretum in Oyster Bay. The SUNY system had shut down that first version of the college, in part because it gave birth to the radical Puerto Rican Young Lords Party. But more troublesome, its students and faculty, oriented to 1960s beliefs, and its liberal president, Harris Wofford, were unable to agree on governance structures and central elements of the curriculum. Now, SUNY College at Old Westbury was to reemerge as one among a number of experimental colleges—like Hampshire, Evergreen State, Governors State, Naropa University—across the country.
I asked myself: Could this innovative college become a movement outpost? Could a largely new faculty and student body pursue movement priorities: a commitment to social justice, open access for an unusually diverse student body, hiring an equally diverse faculty, and establishing a curriculum informed by freedom school values?
3 - Mississippi Summer: A Quaker Vacation
- Paul Lauter
-
- Book:
- Our Sixties
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 January 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2020, pp 41-60
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
A scene in the 2000 movie Freedom Song, set fifty-some years before the movie was made, illuminates the dominant culture of Mississippi in the century leading up to 1964. A small black boy of about five, Owen, wanders into the “whites only” luncheonette at the bus terminal of “Quinlan,” a fictional representation of McComb, Mississippi. His father, Will Walker (Danny Glover) has been talking for a few moments with the baggage handler, a friend and former customer at his gas station. The baggage handler, like others in the black community, has been warned away from patronizing Walker’s store because he has questioned the system of racial segregation. You can’t push against them, his friend warns Walker. Now he discovers that his son has literally stepped into the middle of that system, for Owen is being gently held by a grinning young white man in the luncheonette. In the ensuing scene, fraught with tension, the whites—still grinning—force Walker to spank his son right there, in public, to “teach him” his place, which is never in a “whites only” establishment. Of course, Will Walker is being taught his place, subordinate to the smirking white guys in the luncheonette.
The humiliation of Will Walker and his son might be a minor moment in the arrangements of segregation: no one is evicted, arrested, beaten, or murdered. No churches are burned, no homes bombed, no black men shot. However, looked at more closely, the scene dramatizes the daily operations of racial power. Will and Owen are unmanned and enraged by their very lack of control in this everyday incident. A never-stated, always-present threat of heavier violence underwrites segregation here. If Will doesn’t agree to chastise his son, the whites will cheerfully provide the lesson. The economic consequences of expressing even the slightest qualm about the system—here threatening Will’s customers—also helps maintain segregation. In the film, which concerns the development of the freedom movement in southwestern Mississippi, the most repressive area of the state, the scene quietly evokes the racist burden of the status quo.
10 - A Working-Class Movement of GIs
- Paul Lauter
-
- Book:
- Our Sixties
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 January 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2020, pp 169-182
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In June of 1971, I was once more out of a job. My courses at UMBC, including revolutionary literature, received positive student reviews. Mostly with Florence Howe, I continued to publish extensively, including The Conspiracy of the Young in 1970 and articles in the New York Review of Books. I’d become something of an authority on community control of schools. Good enough credentials for tenure, I thought, especially at a new and not very well-developed college. But the dean didn’t want someone who conspired with students to oppose the war, or some man who agitated for women’s studies. So I was gone at the end of my two-year contract.
But once again, opportunity emerged from adversity. Florence, who had been elected MLA second vice president and chaired its active Commission on the Status of Women, had become a hot professional commodity. She opted for a new tenured job at the SUNY College at Old Westbury on Long Island in New York, and so I decided to follow whence I’d come—back to the city. I began to look around for employment. One of my movement friends proposed that I should take the reins of the United States Servicemen’s Fund (USSF), an organization that supported coffeehouses near military bases, underground GI antiwar newspapers, and other forms of edgy entertainment for guys in the service.
A dubious marriage I thought. I had been 4-F (unfit for military service) and viewed military service through the anxious lens provided by Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones’s From Here to Eternity. Neither my father, either of my grandfathers, nor anyone else in my immediate family had, so far as I knew, served in any army—not the tsar’s, the emperor’s, or the president’s. It was almost a tradition. Moreover, I shared something of the mainstream peace movement’s gut-level but dumb antagonism to soldiers—why hadn’t they beaten the draft? Then again, I had some experience raising money for antiwar projects, which the position required. And I was deeply committed to ending the war. So I became “national director” of the USSF.
Selected Bibliography
- Paul Lauter
-
- Book:
- Our Sixties
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 January 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2020, pp 259-268
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
8 - Resisting
- Paul Lauter
-
- Book:
- Our Sixties
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 January 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2020, pp 133-153
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The night before October 2, 1967, at my mother’s Washington Heights apartment where I had grown up, I kept thinking, “This will be big. This will make a difference.” Then I worried: Was I indulging an adolescent fantasy, like rooting for the old Brooklyn Dodgers to come from behind in the bottom of the ninth, as I had often done in this very room? The event wasn’t a ballgame but the formal release the next day of our “Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority.” Signed by hundreds of famous and not-so-famous academics, writers, and intellectuals, the call committed us to breaking the draft law by urging potential inductees to say no to military service. In response to this big display of civil disobedience, the war-makers would react. But would the intervention of this “Call to Resist” begin to reverse the momentum of America’s war on Vietnam? Could anything do that?
I had spent much of the last four years ever-more enraged by what my country was doing in that faraway Asian nation and desperately seeking something—a statement, an action like the freedom rides, a commitment of my life and “sacred honor”—to bring about change. I wish I had a way to get this page physically hot to make my readers feel the fury with which I thought about the president, his advisers, the generals, and, yes, even the marine privates who were making Vietnam a place of torment and misery.
Now, at the distance of half a century, even an effective documentary like the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick film history The Vietnam War cannot make that fury sufficiently vivid. Poetry perhaps:
The same war
continues.
We have breathed the grits of it in, all our lives,
our lungs are pocked with it,
the mucous membrane of our dreams
coated with it, the imagination
filmed over with the gray filth of it. …
(Denise Levertov, “Life at War,” Poetry Magazine, June 1966)But even Levertov’s intensity fails before the tide of “hard rain” that was engulfing us. I’d been working for pacifist organizations. But now I felt that, given the opportunity, I’d lay nonviolence aside to somehow decapitate America’s warmongering leadership. I was hardly alone.
7 - Visions of Freedom School in DC (For Bob Silvers)
- Paul Lauter
-
- Book:
- Our Sixties
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 January 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2020, pp 116-132
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Florence Howe and I moved back East from Chicago in the spring of 1967. She took up her tenured position at Goucher College and I moved into a new educational venture: as associate director of the Morgan Community School. Fortunately, one of the families involved with the school project offered us their top-floor bedroom while we looked for an apartment. Alice Jackson, who had been a student at the 1964 freedom school that Florence had organized at the Blair Street AME church in Jackson, had come North with us at the end of summer 1965 to continue her high school education at a good school and ultimately to attend college. Now she joined Florence in searching for a place for all of us to live.
The two followed a variety of leads, but without success. We were puzzled. It never occurred to us that people, seeing Alice, who is black, with Florence would assume that she and I were a “mixed” couple. We expressed our bewilderment to one of the friends with whom we were staying. Looking at them, she said, “they are probably seeing you as a ‘mixed couple.’ You’d best not go together.” That proved to be sage advice. Florence alone soon found a lovely flat on Biltmore Street, a block into Adams-Morgan from the Calvert Street Bridge and a quick walk to the Morgan Community School. It had one bedroom and an indoor sleeping porch, which was Alice’s when she was with us. When the windows were open and the breeze blew in the right direction, we could hear the sea lions barking at the Washington Zoo. At the end of the tumultuous 1967–68 year, when we left Washington for Baltimore, closer to Florence’s job at Goucher, we showed the apartment to a man who would become its new tenant. He was a police reporter for the Washington Post named Carl Bernstein.
Adams-Morgan, later to become DC’s hip neighborhood, was in 1967 racially diverse—sort of. White, upper-middle-class professionals lived west of 18th Street and across Rock Creek, while blacks, mainly poor, lived east of 18th Street. Further east, the neighborhood was haunted by drugs and violence.
13 - Authority and Our Discontents
- Paul Lauter
-
- Book:
- Our Sixties
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 January 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2020, pp 220-226
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Edward Norton’s 2019 film Motherless Brooklyn presents a character, Moses Randolph, largely based on Robert Moses, who—more than any other person—shaped the built environment of twentieth-century New York. The Moses Randolph character isn’t particularly interested in wealth, though he uses it, but in power, authority. His goal, he insists, is to reshape the city for those millions who will live in it in the future. Central Park serves as a living model for his work; he is more than willing to dislocate those—mainly black—now living in Brooklyn and Manhattan to bring about that future. In the past, he imposed himself on a black woman and fathered a mixed-race daughter; she now works with preservationists to oppose Randolph’s effort to destroy thriving communities in the name of “slum clearance”—aka “Negro removal,” as one of the film’s characters comments.
While the film is set in the 1950s, Randolph’s outlook models the characteristic form of twenty-first-century capitalism: Silicon Valley disruption. Amazon will displace the bookstore and the mall; Uber will displace the taxi driver and the bus; charters and computers will displace public schools and teachers. Randolph will, in the imagery of the movie, displace the communities that provide nourishment for jazz musicians and the local black society. Of course, much money will be made by “developers” who will build on newly opened grounds. But that isn’t Randolph’s object in organizing a base for his operation, referred to in the film as the Borough Bridge Authority. The name is a neat substitute for its models, the Port of New York Authority, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, the Metropolitan Transit Authority. “Authority,” the key term here, designates the unelected power of those who run the organizations in the name of the citizens of New York and New Jersey. And generally for the benefit of future generations. Generally.
I remember a student at SUNY Old Westbury who worked as a conductor on the New Jersey Transit railroad. He always spoke of the “Port of Authority,” which I took as a humorous jab at his employer. But I’ve now rethought his phrase. Not because these authorities create the disruptive troubles Moses Randolph produces in Motherless Brooklyn. Generally, they do not.
Index
- Paul Lauter
-
- Book:
- Our Sixties
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 January 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2020, pp 269-288
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
1 - The Movement and Me
- Paul Lauter
-
- Book:
- Our Sixties
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 January 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2020, pp 1-19
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Americans discovered that one of the major candidates called himself a “socialist.” A “democratic socialist,” to be sure, but a socialist nonetheless. For many—not all of them on the far Right—the word evoked the Enemy, the Other, Satan, even Stalin. Good grief. How could we have a socialist running for president of capitalist America?
As we entered the 2018 political campaign, many more candidates were calling themselves socialists. And some got elected, too, generally as Democrats. Polls suggest that a majority of Americans no longer pledge allegiance to capitalism. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America climbs daily. The stars in the Democratic Party firmament, like defeated Congressman Joe Crowley, sink in the east—and in the west, too. Hillary Clinton has disappeared from the screen, displaced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Even the New York Times ran a story on the first page of the Sunday Review by Corey Robin explaining how socialist values—he cites “freedom”—differ from capitalism’s dominative culture. Bob Dylan’s lyrics have once again become relevant: “Something is happening here,” Mr. Jones, “but you don’t know what it is.”
Fifty-some years ago change was also afoot. And Mr. Jones didn’t know what was happening then either. Then, we didn’t speak of “socialism” but of the “movement.” Capacious terms, both could be interpreted differently by different individuals and groups. But always, both spoke change. In the 1960s change meant ending segregation and white supremacy, terminating the war on Vietnam, and eventually combatting sexism, homophobia, and other forms of inequality and conflict.
Today, the push for change takes different names: Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, Red for Ed, Green New Deal. Speaking change does not require socialist or even identifiably progressive names or programs; indeed, by the time you read this, the name “socialism” might have once again been pushed to the margins of American political discourse. I think not, because what’s at stake are the values, like freedom and equality, and the goals—like supporting public schools, ending gerrymandering and other threats to voting rights, and seriously addressing climate change and inequality—for which “socialist” or “progressive” have come to stand.
Contents
- Paul Lauter
-
- Book:
- Our Sixties
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 January 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2020, pp vii-viii
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Notes
- Paul Lauter
-
- Book:
- Our Sixties
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 January 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2020, pp 233-258
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
2 - Among Friends in Philly
- Paul Lauter
-
- Book:
- Our Sixties
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 January 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2020, pp 20-40
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
How does a budding professor turn into a blooming revolutionary? In late summer 1963, as a bedraggled thirty-something who had just lost his marriage and stepped out of his job, I moved from a town in upstate New York, Geneva, to the big city, or a big city, anyway: Philadelphia. The following summer, I played a small part in one of the most influential projects the civil rights movement carried out, Mississippi Summer. This chapter concerns the beginnings of my conversion from academic to activist. Conversions don’t generally resemble the apostle Paul’s, struck by the hand of God on the road to Damascus. Rather, they happen slowly, provoked by small revelations, fresh insights, and friendly guidance; inspired by new pleasures, some of the body, some of the eyes and ears, others of the heart and mind. Or so I found it to be.
One evening that fall of 1963, I maneuvered my car into its alleyway garage and returned to my tiny Center City, Philadelphia, apartment from a late date. I knew I’d find a few people from Students for a Democratic Society camped out in my apartment. I’d been in the front row at the Academy of Music with a new friend, Helen Vendler, who was teaching at Swarthmore, to hear Eugene Ormandy conduct Brahms’s smiling Second Symphony. Helen and I would both begin teaching at Smith College the following fall, and someone there had suggested that we might want to meet. An inspired proposal. One of the cleverest people I’d ever met, Helen loved conversation, better even than I had come to love Bassetts ice cream. Divorced from her former husband, Zeno, a philosopher, she lived with her child in suburban Philadelphia. She was certainly lonesome and welcomed talk and play. She had had an intense but, I thought, narrow education at Emmanuel, a Catholic women’s college in Boston. Poetry was the food of her intellect; music existed only at the fringes. I recall some time later when I took her to a concert in Amherst being surprised that she had never heard my favorite, Mendelssohn’s Octet. I’m sure I amused her with my fragmentary pacifism. She doubtless found it peculiar when I appeared for a date one evening announcing that, for some forgotten purpose, I was fasting that day.
11 - A Man in the Women’s Movement
- Paul Lauter
-
- Book:
- Our Sixties
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 January 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2020, pp 183-197
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
At the 1969 national convention of the New University Conference in Iowa City, the women formed a separate caucus on the first day. They left the men in order to work out their own organizational demands. In 1969, everyone had “demands.” Students made demands of their colleges, and sometimes their high schools; minorities made demands of mayors; wives made demands of their husbands; and children learned to make demands of baffled parents. Given this trend in the movement and the strong separatist tendencies already evident in nascent feminist groups, it was not altogether a surprise that the women would decide to meet separately—at least for a time.
The guys were not especially troubled; we sat around in the dormitory lounge, reading and arguing, and trying to make ourselves comfortable on the serviceable beige furniture. Some went for a beer and pizza. A certain impatience vexed the lounge—after all, we could be there only for two or three days, and obviously we couldn’t move forward on organizational business with half the people off in another room. But we counted on the affiliations most of us had with one or another of the women. Sooner or later the demands, whatever they might be, would be revealed; discussions, more or less fraught, would begin; agreements would be reached; and we could then get on to the “real work” of the meeting.
Late in the evening, Florence Howe was dispatched by the women’s caucus to meet with some of the men to discuss or perhaps to negotiate these demands. She came into the lounge where we were hanging out and said something to the effect of “here’s what the women have decided we want.” “Sharp struggle,” in the Chinese phrase then popular, ensued, sharpest over the most obvious organizational mandate—equal numbers of women and men on the steering committee. Hardly a radical departure, we were made aware, since both the Republican and the Democratic Parties already had such an arrangement. Even so, we quickly heard every argument against “special group privileges” and the burden such “unnecessary,” rigid measures presented to our radical organization. We were—were we not?—democratically committed as activists, socialists even: Why did we need such rules, which seemed to bring into question our basic commitment to equality?
Acknowledgments
- Paul Lauter
-
- Book:
- Our Sixties
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 January 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2020, pp ix-x
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
4 - Professing at Smith and Selma
- Paul Lauter
-
- Book:
- Our Sixties
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 January 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2020, pp 61-74
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
Wordsworth, not a poet with whom I ordinarily connect, conveys the wonder of that time and place. This is a book about the transformation of minds, my own and many others’. In 1964 the dawn of change cast splendor and excitement over all it touched, however rough or silly a cooler eye might have pronounced our acts of desire, protest, and expectation.
Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth,
The beauty wore of promise . . . .
(The Prelude, XI, 108–9, 117–18)Smith College, where I taught in 1964–65, had arranged a brilliant schedule for faculty: we had classes on three consecutive days, Monday to Wednesday for me, and then did whatever we did on the other four. I began speaking, fundraising, and carrying out a variety of tasks for Friends of SNCC, in New York, Washington, Poughkeepsie, and many places in between. I learned how to use a mimeograph machine and to write leaflets people could actually read. I joined others at Smith in circulating a statement proclaiming resistance to the Vietnam War, and in organizing a teach-in on that subject. I helped establish and sustain a Smith-Amherst SDS chapter. I traveled to Montgomery with a couple of my students during the Selma-Montgomery march and got arrested. In short, for a wonderful academic year, I experienced many of the pleasures of an undergraduate education at a fancy liberal arts college.
And this, too: as a single man of thirty-two, I was set loose among exceptionally smart and attractive young women at a moment when having a fling with one’s professor was becoming part of the educational program. It would take a few years for the just-stirring feminist revolution to challenge that perfidious mentality. Smith actually had a reputation for hiring gay men—a number from Yale—presumably because they offered no threat to its young women. That practice had come to a disastrous end in 1960 when the Northampton Post Office had opened a packet of what they designated gay “pornography” addressed to Professor Newton Arvin. In fact, the material was what we might today call “beefcake” photography—scantily-clothed muscled guys—hardly sexual in content, much less pornographic.
5 - Return to Mississippi (Goddam)
- Paul Lauter
-
- Book:
- Our Sixties
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 January 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2020, pp 75-89
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In politics, success can bring as many problems as failures. During the 1964–65 school year, and just before, the movement leapt forward. Mississippi Summer broadened a primarily southern civil rights movement to involve large numbers of young northerners, primarily white; often, it caught up as well their parents, schoolmates, friends, and even their congressional representatives. The following spring, events in Selma, Alabama, and the march to Montgomery stamped the issue of voting rights on the national consciousness. Protest played loudly in schools, churches, and television stations throughout America. The US Congress, increasingly responsive to movement pressure, passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, banning segregation (at least in theory). In 1965, in direct response to the Selma-Montgomery march, it approved a historic Voting Rights Act. In April of that same year, SDS organized the first mass demonstration in Washington against the Vietnam War—shortly after the initial US Marine Corps combat force had landed on the beach near Da Nang. On campuses across the nation, teachers and students reacted with excitement and uncertainty: What would changes in race relations and the new student activism mean for the organization of campus life, as well as for curricula and classroom dynamics? We were increasingly contesting the very definition of “education.”
The assassination of Malcolm X in February 1965 also defined these months, along with the uprising against unemployment, crumbling housing, inadequate schools, and police brutality of the black community of Watts in Los Angeles. Change involved more than peace and roses. In fact, it proved hard to know what the next steps in our “revolution” might be. Everywhere movement activists gathered, we debated that question—in meetings of our new SDS chapter, in the Friends of SNCC office in Washington, in jail during the Selma-Montgomery march. Nothing seemed fixed—not what we did in our classrooms, in the streets, in our lobbying, even in our movement organizations. “We’ve come this far to freedom, / And we won’t turn back,” we sang. Yes. But just where were we headed? And with whom?
9 - A New University?
- Paul Lauter
-
- Book:
- Our Sixties
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 January 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2020, pp 154-168
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In the spring of 1969, after a year and a half of steady activity with Resist, I decided to return to academe. During that time, I had written parts of The Conspiracy of the Young, coauthored a number of articles for the New York Review of Books and other periodicals, and added my body to many protests. I was weary. Our disruption of the 1968 Modern Language Association convention in New York—to which I will turn shortly—offered a kind of bathetic climax to the increasingly murderous events of 1968. I felt I needed the steadiness and, yes, the salary of a regular job.
I had very mixed feelings about moving full time into movement work, which was one of the options for me at this time. To support my children financially, I needed a regular income. But, the idea of raising the funds for my own salary gave me the creeps. Nor, as a depression baby, could I live with the prospect of being broke five or ten years down the road. I worried: When the war crisis passed and people returned to their normal lives, would they support someone who didn’t have a “normal” life? I enormously admired Dave Dellinger as a person and a movement leader. But I couldn’t accept the economic uncertainty that marked a life like his. Perhaps it was my petty bourgeois upbringing. Or maybe changes in the movement turned me away. The sectarianism dividing the movement seemed loony to me, especially as bombs rained down on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. I couldn’t accept factionalism, given what the American military was doing in Southeast Asia. But even if one didn’t join one or another group, one had at least to pay the various lines some heed in order to maintain credibility in a divided movement and to sustain the momentum of antiwar activity.
The university was familiar terrain—both enjoyable and politically ambiguous. True, we academics helped reproduce the structure and culture of American capitalist society. But maybe we could change that. Maybe we could provoke students and colleagues into questioning racism and patriarchy and the exceptionalism that underwrote America’s culture of war. Education, as I had learned in the 1964 freedom schools, could help liberate and empower people.
6 - The Draft: From Protest to Resistance?
- Paul Lauter
-
- Book:
- Our Sixties
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 January 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2020, pp 90-115
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The young man has been wandering around the reception room, nervously scanning the pamphlets and flyers on conscientious objection. Now he comes back into the office—can we talk about whether he should apply for C.O.? “You see,” he apologizes, “I probably don’t qualify.”
“We usually let the draft board or the courts decide about that,” I say. “Why should a guy rule himself out?” I try not to let the question sound routine. “Why do you think you don’t qualify?”
“Well, I’m against this war . . . but I’m not a Quaker or anything—you know, that kind of pacifist.”
“You don’t have to be a Quaker to qualify. Why are you against the war?”
“Well, that’s it. I’m against it on political grounds, and that doesn’t seem to make it.”
“What do you mean by political grounds?”
“I mean, I’m against American policy in Vietnam.”
“Yeah, but why?”
“You know, like we say we’re for free elections, only we didn’t let them have elections in 1956.”
“So?”
“What do you mean, ‘so?’”
“I mean, why are free elections important?”
“Well, because people should be able to make up their own minds about their government.”
“Why should they?”
“Isn’t that right?”
“Sure, I think so, but I want to know why you do. Why should people be free to make up their own minds about their government?”
He sits there working it out for himself. Nineteen, perhaps twenty. A sophomore or junior maybe, “safe” from the draft board for two years anyway, but not “safe” inside himself from what’s happening in Vietnam.
“I guess,” he says finally, “it has to do with human dignity . . . you know, that men have certain rights, like liberty . . . and life. And you can’t take those away from them.”
“Is that what you mean by ‘political objection’?”
The young man concerned about conscience and conscription has overcome enormous anxiety in order to come to our office. But he’s full of doubt. He worries—is it unpatriotic, an act of cowardice to question the draft?
Appendix B - Syllabus for a Course on the Sixties
- Paul Lauter
-
- Book:
- Our Sixties
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 January 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2020, pp 231-232
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Appendix