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While some Americans were dropping out of society to form their own “counter culture,” others were trying to reform the political and economic foundations of American life. Out of the Ban-the-Bomb movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the Civil Rights activities in the South came a new generation of activists determined to expose and correct injustices at home and change the course of the Vietnam War overseas.
Until 1964 the New Left and other activists utilized peaceful, educational and nonviolent tactics such as teach-ins, political rallies, door-to-door canvassing and leafleting to spread the word of reform. Later, as they grew more and more frustrated with “the system,” and the changes they advocated were not materializing, and as a government hostile to criticism infiltrated and harassed some groups, tactics changed to confrontation and violence, with murmurs, then shouts of a new American “Revolution.”
Nonviolent, educational tactics were often displaced by bombings, take-overs of buildings and advocacy of armed revolution.Reformers became radicals and were perceived by the government and “the silent majority” as a real threat to the country’s stability and/or war-making powers.
Rat. May 3, 1968
(NY: R.A.T. Publications)
The underground press never claimed objectivity. Rather than simply reporting the news, underground editors and writers created and announced events of their own making.
In December 1967, a group of media activists, including Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and others, met to plan strategy for movement activities. During one marathon, stoned brainstorming session, Paul Krassner, editor and publisher of The Realist, jumped up and shouted “Yippie, we’re Yippies,” giving birth to the Youth International Party. Their tactics included satirical theatrics and calculated outrage aimed at capturing publicity in the mass media.
With “Clean-for-Gene” student volunteers working for Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 Presidential candidacy, and the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, the Yippies planned a “Festival of Life” that would provide an alternative to the August 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, dubbed a “convention of death” by the Yippies.
For months, the underground press heatedly debated the wisdom of luring thousands of peace-loving flower children to a knowingly hostile territory, Richard Daley’s Chicago.“Don’t come to Chicago if you expect a festival of peace,” warned the Chicago Seed, ironically a central vehicle for organizing the event.
Avatar. Vol.2,no.6,
1968 (NY: Avatar, Inc.)
©Avatar, Inc.
The mass violence which erupted shocked Americans already grim by the murders that year of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and riots in black urban ghettoes in previous summers. Rather than garnering support for the radical cause, and despite assertions that Daley’s police forces were chiefly responsible for the violence, the Chicago events further polarized Americans and marked the beginnings of increased violence and intensity of purpose on the part of both the radical groups and the government.
Lured by the counterculture into rejecting what they perceived as hypocritical American values, influenced by the Old and New Left and numerous peace movements, and emboldened by the adventurous daring of the truly radical groups, American youth
united with them all over the issue of the Vietnam War to form and perpetuate what was then referred to as “The Movement.” Their activities culminated in massive protests in large cities and on the nation’s campuses in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Widespread anti-war demonstrations spread rapidly throughout academia as groups such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) spread the movement rhetoric by establishing chapters on a wide number of college campuses and publishing their own newspapers for distribution among student activists. By 1969 SDS split into several factions, including the notorious Weather Underground (or “Weathermen”), which utilized violent tactics on campuses to gain publicity for a variety of causes.
Protests intensified in the late 1960s over issues as specific as objections to campus expansion into the local community or as global as the end to U.S. imperialism. Students demanded a greater role in decision-making within their respective colleges and universities.
UConn Free Press.
Vol.1, no.2, 1969 (Storrs,
CT: Radical Action Press)They challenged the presence of recruiters for war-related industries, objected to the presence on campus of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) and questioned the role of academia in the “military-industrial complex.”
Campus activity was not always peaceful. Reacting to violence, whether real or feared, university administrators called in riot-equipped police and even the National Guard. In May 1970 at Kent State University, Ohio National Guardsmen fired into demonstrating students, killing four and wounding eleven others. Shortly afterward two students died by police bullets when a dormitory at Jackson State University in Mississippi was fired upon.
Immediately afterward, a wave of protests closed down campuses throughout the country in a National Student Strike. Classes were canceled or devoted to discussions of turbulent contemporary issues, and business as usual stopped on as many as 250 campuses.
