The Future of 1968’s “Restless Youth” by Tom Hayden
From the forthcoming Book "1968 in Europe"
On September 4, 1968, CIA director Richard Helms sent President Lyndon Johnson a 233-page report entitled “Restless Youth,” only for the eyes of the president and his adviser Walt Rostow, who had requested the analysis. Helms warned the president of “the peculiar sensitivity which attaches to the fact that CIA has prepared a report on student activities both here and abroad.” Under American law, the agency was permitted to surveil movements abroad but strictly forbidden to spy on American youth. The director therefore recommended that Johnson authorize the FBI to utilize “more advanced techniques” to investigate young radicals than laws at the time allowed.
The CIA report included France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and several Arab, African, and Asian countries; it neglected Latin America, except for Argentina. Helms wrote of being “disappointed, as perhaps you will be, by our inability to be more precise about the motivation and direction of this worldwide movement,” blaming some of the ambiguity on the “somewhat unfocussed nature of the movement itself.” He hinted that more investigative techniques or technology might extract “that precision of information which would make a more positive report possible.” He did understand, far better than the president, something “new” was in the air. Declassified transcripts show that Johnson was convinced that an international communist conspiracy lay behind the protests, and ordered the CIA to investigate. The most politically important finding of the CIA report was, however, that “There is no convincing evidence of control, manipulation, sponsorship, or significant financial support of student dissidents by any international Communist authority […] the dissidents are contemptuous of the Neanderthal leaderships entrenched in most national communist parties, including the CP/USA.”
I was 27 years old as the year 1968 unfolded. When the decade began, I was the first in my family to attend a university, and my non-conformist instincts led me to the campus paper and the sociology department at the University of Michigan. While pursuing an institutional career, I was a follower of Jack Kerouac as well, whose On The Road was published in my senior year, 1957. During that same year, black high school students integrated a high school in Bill Clinton’s Little Rock, Arkansas, amidst beatings, insults and federal military protection. Two years later, after I directly encountered black students risking their lives in the South, I became a committed activist.
Like most of my friends, I was feeling that our future was already prepared, and would be only a recycling of the past. I drafted the 1962 manifesto of Students for a Democratic Society, whose opening passage was studied carefully for clues by the CIA: “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” This was hardly the Communist Manifesto, but a careful statement of middle class anxiety over the world we were inheriting, especially the immediate crisis of racism and, in the near background, the nuclear arms race. While a few of the SDS founders came from Marxist traditions and families, most members of the founding generation were homegrown radicals in the American populist tradition. Our prophets were John Dewey, C. Wright Mills, and J.D. Salinger. Experience was our teacher. Organizing and dialoging with “ordinary people” was our technique. Participatory democracy was the name of the process. As we could not vote, direct action and expression were the avenues.
Most of the early SDS believed that movements from “below” would catalyze a liberalism which had been neutered by Cold War anti-communism, that the civil rights and student movements would energize the mainstream to tackle poverty and structural unemployment, that the military budget could be diverted to much-needed peacetime investments at home and abroad. Instead, we were betrayed by the party of our elders, the Democrats, who promised “no wider war” in 1964, only to draft hundreds of thousands of us by 1965. The Vietnam War, an extension of Cold War thinking, became the dominant feature of our lives in the second half of the Sixties. Civil rights reforms devolved into hundreds of black ghetto uprisings. Dr. King was rebuked by the New York Times for daring to criticize the war. Chicanos finally achieved recognition for rural farmworkers but were treated brutally when they opposed the war. Flower power and free speech evolved into resistance against police guarding military induction centers. Radical consciousness was spurred not only by Vietnam and racism, but by the stunning fate of reformers I had known: John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and many lesser-known figures. The killings seeming to escalate and concentrate in 1968.
Now I was some sort of revolutionary, improvising in the vortex. I began 1968 at a tri-continental Congress in Havana, shortly after the killing of Che Guevara in Bolivia. The Tet Offensive erupted that month. I gave up community organizing in Newark in the face of the war’s escalation. Suddenly I found myself leading a building occupation at Columbia University. Then, with King and Kennedy dead, I went through five days of street confrontations, two beatings and two arrests at the Chicago Democratic Party convention, and found myself sitting in someone’s living room watching civil rights marchers in Northern Ireland. They were singing “We Shall Overcome,” and it was a revelation. The anthem of our movement was universalized, and yet I knew so little about these young Irish radicals. My Irish heritage – beginning with the Famine generation – had been effectively sanitized from my memory behind the lace curtains of assimilation.
I began paying more personal attention to the global dimension of the Sixties. I understood and broadly identified the revolutions in Cuba and Vietnam, but who were these people like myself all across Europe? My contacts with European movements were indirect at best. I had interviewed U.S. and Vietnamese parties to the Paris peace talks in summer 1968, which exposed me to the student-led revolution then occurring in France. I also spent some time in Czechoslovakia in late 1967 at meetings with the Vietnamese, which led me to ties with a hopeful student underground before the Soviet invasion of August 1968, just before the events of Chicago. All that was clear was that a “generation of ‘68” was everywhere, across all boundaries and curtains, from the lace curtain variety to the iron kind. One could not help but feel that an inevitable historical force was playing out, that no Machiavellians seemed able to stop it.
Then, as it reached its peak of frenzy, about 1969-70, one could feel the tide begin to turn. The movements themselves were convulsed by division. The Marxist sectarians were not dead at all, merely hatching in the garbage we left unattended. After factions ripped its body apart, SDS was closed down as “too bourgeois.” No one could transcend the inevitability of the women’s movement as it shredded the male hierarchies. The counterculture was shocked by Altamont [1] and Manson [2]. Drug euphoria devolved into the dark trips of paranoia, depression, and schizophrenia. Thousands of veterans came home with bad papers and strung out. Richard Nixon – wasn’t he the man we thought we dumped in 1960, the year it all began? – soon became president of the United States.
And yet there was a double paradox. First, as the Sixties organizations were disintegrated under factionalism and COINTELPRO [3] , the spontaneous Sixties movements were exploding as never before. In the five years after 1968, these rapid changes unfolded like domestic dominoes: - The Vietnam War began to end in 1969 and imploded in the years 1973-75; Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew, were driven from office;
- The compulsory military draft was ended;
- The War Powers Act was passed as a curb on the imperial presidency;
- The Democratic Party and national election rules were radically reformed;
- Earth Day arose apparently from nowhere, historical environmental laws were passed, and the planet Earth was seen in a photo for the very first time;
- After 25 years of failing passage, the 18-year-old vote became law;
- Black studies, Latino studies, women’s studies, and environmental studies were integrated into the curriculum of high schools and universities;
- Everyone was humming The Yellow Submarine and quoting Allen Ginsberg;
- Several national blue-ribbon commissions (the Kerner report on the ghettos, the Scranton report on the campuses, the Walker report on Chicago) seemed to vindicate the New Left analysis of causes and solutions.
It is important to remember these reforms in the blurred and contentious struggles to recall the Sixties. To say they were merely superficial cooptation is to miss the significance of the sacrifices made and the empowerment gained for millions of people. If they were only superficial reforms, why did the state oppose them so ferociously for so long? Furthermore, to say the Sixties were about only a “cultural” shift rather than a political one is to ignore the lasting legal, regulatory and institutional significance of these reforms. But one cannot read the list without wondering where it all has gone. Are we still restless, or pacified, or in between? This is the second paradox: the Sixties largely ended when our most popular demands succeeded. When order was reformed, order was restored.
From all this experience, I understood a model of social change, which I think of as a persistent struggle between social movements and Machiavellians. Before the beginning, there are hidden memories, legacies of social movements beneath the icy silence of conforming apathy. Then the shoots of present and future movements unexpectedly disturb the peace: the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, or the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Gaining momentum, the movements appear suddenly at the margins, among the structurally disenfranchised. The Machiavellians are surprised, react first with repression but also with probes promising cooptation and gradual and, at first, token reform. The movements touch chords of memory in the mainstream, continue to grow through transformative moments (for example, the shooting of an innocent person), and face their own divisions between the radicalized and the pragmatic. As their core ideas reach the mainstream and are accepted by majority opinion, the Machiavellians splinter over whether to grant reforms once thought beyond the possible. As the reforms are achieved, the mass base of the movement subsides, leaving the radical elements stranded and quarreling. The counter-revolution becomes intense as the moderate Machiavellians are perceived to betray the cause of whatever supremacy is at stake (white over black and brown, men over women, colonists over natives, and so on). The once-radical reforms become the new status quo, the counter-movement is contained, the pragmatists become a new elite, the Machiavellian order is renewed, and the conflict continues on the battlefield of memory. In this model, reform is another term for the moment of synthesis in dialectics.
This is a multi-class model, not a Manichean single-class one. It incorporates the natural world as a revision of both capitalist and social models of political economy. It allows for the possibilities of revolution and counter-revolution but only as extreme and temporary cases. This model emphasizes social movements as more important forces of history rather than personalities, parties or social movement organizations. On the organizational level, the most important actors are catalytic groups more than bureaucratic ones. Social movements arise at the margins but successful ones always eventually penetrate the institutions, making inside-outside strategies more useful than simply oppositional ones (this, I believe, is perhaps what Rudi Dutschke was implying with his concept of the “long march through the institutions”)[4].
In my view, the Sixties may be fading, but are far from over. Even Bill Clinton thinks that the basic dividing line in American politics is between those with a generally favorable view of the Sixties phenomenon (who tend to be Democrats) and those who are still attempting to erase the achievements of the Sixties altogether (the neo-conservatives, for example). To quote Clinton is not to define him as a Sixties radical, but as a Sixties pragmatist and opportunist, who began as a war resister and ended by bombing the Balkans. Nevertheless, his affections lie with the Sixties, and the right wing has demonized him as an example of all that went wrong with our generation. More precisely, his is an example of what happens when the individual will to power competes with and precedes the desire to change values and priorities. As of this writing, he and his wife Hillary, who was an observer in Chicago in 1968 and wrote her senior thesis on radical community organizing (within the system), may be the last members of our generation to win and hold these high offices. What then will be the Sixties legacy?
I think it is crucial to realize that starting in 2010, at the fiftieth anniversary of everything that happened in the Sixties, the turning point will lay in the battle over memory. The current attention to the fortieth-anniversaries of events – the books, films, and media attention to 1968 for example – will then pale before the relentless re-examination of all the events – local, national, global – that occurred in that incredible decade. Only then will the Sixties, like the Thirties before, be ready for the graveyard both literally and historically. The cultural discourse over the meaning of the fiftieth anniversary will between three broad views: - those who want to restore and revitalize the Sixties heritage to propel future social movements;
- those who want to bury the Sixties to make the world safe for their various supremacist ideologies;
- those who want to manage the stories of the Sixties to prove that the institutions always reform themselves and prevail.
The question is, what side will we be on?
I strongly embrace the first narrative, not to dwell in the past glories of social movements but as a sustaining thread between past, present and future. I regret that I entered the Sixties movements shorn of any consciousness of previous social movements. I am reassured by the persistence of Sixties consciousness into the 21st century. For example, a recent study of the American movement against the Iraq War found that anti-war protesters are concentrated among the young (18 to 27) and the old (46 to 67). This means to me that the anti-Vietnam spirit never died completely but went underground in American culture, surfacing once again during Iraq in full support of a new generation of radicals and activists, many of whom have cultural or family roots in the Sixties but original visions of their own.
In Europe there may be a similar pattern of resistance to Iraq, American imperialism and especially corporate neo-liberalism, not only among the young, but among the generations who battled against empire and for socialism, labor rights, health insurance and other democratic reforms of the market aimed at insuring human dignity. In Latin America, the generation that supported Che – now joined this year in global commemoration of his martyrdom – has defeated dictatorship and seen a succeeding generation come to political power, propelled by radical social movements, to resist the destruction of democratically chosen social safeguards in the name of US-led corporate free trade.
All across the world, the drama, contradictions and dangers of the Cold War are being recycled in a Manichean notion of the War on Terrorism with unlimited budgets, unlimited boundaries, and unlimited secrecy brothers. The European people, with their historical experience, may be best suited to devise serious alternatives to the doomed future prophesied by Machiavellians with vested interests in their so-called “long war.” Sooner of later, the new generations will question and resist the programmed future of counter-terrorism, economic privatization, environmental chaos, and sordid alliances justified in the name of this War.
Above all, Europeans may help us chart the most peaceful transition away from imperialism and empire. By all measures, the Europeans – along with the Canadians and Japanese – are models for America that show there can be an improved quality of life after Empire. We are living in a time of epochal transition from the uni-polar model of empire (whether the empire of Capital or that of the United States) to a more realistic, pluralistic model of a multi-polar world, influenced in turn by a third model that derives from the Sixties, a model of democratic social movements capable of both influencing their nation states for the better while creating new cultural norms – on human rights and global warming, for example – that can hold both nation state and multinational corporation accountable. This third model, or participatory democracy from below, needs to gain force and go much deeper, towards an enforceable living wage standard and corporate accountability, for example. But we are seeing a growing global struggle between expanding the rights gained in the Sixties (and the Thirties before) and the contraction of those rights in the name of market, militaristic, and theological fundamentalisms.
The future of the Sixties therefore lies ahead, somewhere between survival and oblivion. Notes: [1] Altamont was the San Francisco Bay Area site of a 1969 Rolling Stones concert where the Hells’ Angels beat a black man to death in front of the stage while the Stones were singing “Sympathy with the Devil.” The Stones were heroes of the counter-culture, and many fantasized that the Angels were potential revolutionaries. [2] Charles Manson and his communal “family” brutally murdered the actress Sharon Tate at her Los Angeles home for inexplicable reasons. Jerry Rubin and Bernadine Dohrn, among others, had made statements fancifully identifying with the Manson “tribe” at various times. [3]COINTELPRO was the FBI’s counter-intelligence program unleashed against anti-war, black, Latino and radical groups, including leaders like Rev. Martin Luther King. COINTEL consisted of deploying undercover agents and paid informants to spread false and inflammatory rumors, incite militant rhetoric and action, and generally disrupt or discredit groups the FBI considered threats to the status quo. Among others, I was targeted to be “neutralized” in a May 1968 FBI memo. [4] See the chapter by Martin Klimke in this book. [5] Michael T. Heaney and Fabio Rojas, “Partisans, Nonpartisans, and the Anti-war movement in the United States”, American Politics Research, Sage Publications (http://apr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/35/4/431). This essay is taken from 1968 IN EUROPE: A HISTORY OF PROTEST AND ACTIVISM, 1956-1977 (New York/London: Palgrave Macmillan, New York/London, forthcoming March 2008), 325-331, (c) 2008 Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth. It may not be reproduced elsewhere without the permission of the publisher.
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Tom Hayden is national co-director of No More Sweatshops!, a coalition of labor, clergy, community and campus advocates of "sweat-free" guidelines on public procurement and enforceable labor standards for corporate behavior.
