Reading Notes

HSTAA 465

Table of contents

Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties, Rorabaugh
1. Introduction
2. Chapter 1: Kennedy
Document Collection #1
Document Collection #2
Document Collection #3
Document Collection #4
Document Collection #5
Document Collection #6
“Why I am Opposed to the War in Vietnam”, 1967
Document Collection #8
Document Collection #9

Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties, Rorabaugh

Introduction

The early 60s were a time of promise and optimism: science, wealth, technology, improving life
A society balancing between fulfilling and making promises: getting hooked on promises
When hope gets too far ahead of experience, this difference kills hope
Desire and reason: did desire govern more?
Dark undercurrents: eroding tradition, difficulties in gender and sexuality – an insistence on promising. Let’s ride on the surface!
- Contradiction between phenomena and noumean explored in music
- Tension between public and private
- Collapse of censorship and rising counterculture; coarsening of discourse
- Postmodernity
Why should we look at the 60s?
- Complex interactions between the political, social, and culture
- These interactions became in excess of themselves: liberation of the self from social constraints
- The 60s are a crucial formative period in American politics
60s as a change in tone from the conservatism of the 50s – a move from the complacent and comformist to the radical
Kennedy: mastery of the television but failure to do much as president; cautious but bold; a president of spectacle.

Chapter 1: Kennedy

The 1960s and John Kennedy have a very close relationship with each other
Americans already sensed they were entering a promising time leading up to the start of the 60s
The 50s as the Great Barbecue
- Criticism of Eisenhower as lethargic, a do-nothing.
- Vapidity of consumerism
- Not everyone can enjoy the great barbecue
McCarthy’s anti-communist smears of the 50s form an intellectual vacuum
Eisenhower as a master of deception; ruthless government across the world.
Nixon becomes Eisenhower’s VP, but not a good candidate: widely hated. A ‘middle class uneducated swindler’ without moral compass
Kennedy declares for presidency in January 2, 1960 – opening oft the decade. Projected forwards unrelenting optimism
Turned youth into an advantage
Kennedy’s family was very important
Jack was a war hero; stranded on island and survived by sending a coconut message
Suspicious relationship with McCarthy
Question of being Catholic: can a Catholic be allected?
Remaking of American politics, almost populist: appealing directly to voters, grassroots campaigning
Rise of data-driven, strategic, careerized politicking
Kennedy suffered from chronic poor health, which he hid
Kennedy’s personal relationship was scandalous and tenuous
Kennedy grew coalitional support in very complex and tense ways, almost surpassing logic
Strategic action with Civil Rights leaders to get a larger share of the Black vote
Wins very narrowly
Inaugural address: ignores domestic affairs, very global and international – reframes the role of the citizen and the government
Reshaping of the aides: smart and intellectual (a source of criticism, detached from common sense); egalitarian and chaotic; creative but poor coordination.
A liberal fantasy paradise for three months, interrupted by the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Document Collection #1

“A Frightening Message for a Thanksgiving Issue”

Increasing fear of the possibility of mutual nuclear war after the US was no longer the sole possessor of atomic reapons
Preparing the public for a nuclear attack – Americans, you can survive without protective clothing or special training!
An immanent contradiction here: fear the bomb, but also you will be fine.

Very likely you won’t finish this article, because it’s about death.

Civil defense
Ultimate death and destruction resulting from the bomb
The eternal proliferation of the cloud: radioactivity, the ‘undead’ coming to drag you towards death.
Individualization – you must save yourself, death confronts us all as individuals.
But where to go with your family? You need a thick cellar to store and save yourself.
Tensions between the individual and the collective
Shelter – what ideological, philosophical, political significance can we read in this?

Incoming Telegram, Kennan

1: Basic Features of the Post-War Soviet Outlook

USSR lives in “antagonistic ‘capitalist encirclement’”
Stalin: a socialist and capitalist center in the word order
The capitalist word is beset with inherent antagonisms which cannot be resolved peacefully, esp. between England and the US
War is endemic to capitalism
Intervention against the USSR would delay Soviet socialism
Capitalism is not unilaterally bad – qua Marx, it produces conditions of enlightenment
Moderate-socialist, socialist-democratic leaders – Lenin’s false friends of the people: these are the most dangerous elements of bourgeois-capitalist society.
The above premises imply therefore that capitalism must be weakened, Soviet efforts should be directed at maximizing tensions between capitalist nations, and socialism abroad should be put down.
To clarify, here Kennan is observing the Soviet point of view.

2: Background of Outlook

Part 1 does not represent the “natural outlook of the Russian people” – Russians are generally eager to reap the fruits of bourgeois-capitalist society.
Premises in part 1 are not true: socialism as backwardsness; war is not endemic to capitalism; ‘insanity’ of doubting the good naturedness of moderate socialism. Falseness demonstrated – how? empirically perhaps?
Soviet propaganda is not “objective”, but comes from a “neurotic view of the world” – linked with the “traditional” Russian “insecurity”. The West as more competent and powerful. Russians as motivated by a stupid defense of backwardsness and archaicity.
Marxist dogma: becomes the theoretical vehicle for insecurity, a ‘sacrifice of ethics’ (Zizek: behind every genocide there is a poet).
Russian nationalism smuggled under international Marxism: ignorance, mental dependence to the point of castration. Lack of access to “unbiased” information. Oriental secretiveness.
Is there a certain kind of racialization going on here?
Disrespect for objective truth

3: Projection of Soviet Outlook in Practical Policy on Official Level

Soviet policy has a ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ (subterranean) dimension
Participation in international organizations (Jewry? Is there a connection here – conspiracy? Semitism – Zizek, the figure of the Jew who embodies the ultimate contradiction needed to maintain the appearance of the ontological consistency of a theory)
Strategic alliances and conquering to embolden the Soviet state
Participation in colonization of conquered people – this is interesting.
Base and superstructure, qua Marx: economic reform and the ideological, legal, militaristic components

4: The Unconscious Subterranean Plane

Underground operating of world communism
Many associations in the US such as women’s organizations, labor unions, racial societies, etc. can be “dominated or influenced by such penetration”
Is there a Freudian perspective we can think about?
Religion and pan-Slavic movements – this is an interesting complicating factor. Precisely the ability to overcome differences is what endows the Soviet spirit with its omniscient power?
Encouragement of violence, and a violent synthesis of a dialectical contradiction – black and white (!!!), poro and rich, young and old, etc. This is the critical mediating (disrupting?) element which completes the triad, which moves from two to three
Manipulate influence on colonized peoples, weaken colonial policy.
Communists will destroy personal liberty and freedom
Setting Western Powers against each other – more dialectical enforcement
Soviet regime as a ‘police regime’

5: Practical Deductions for US Policy

Fanatical commitment to destroying the US and the American way of life.
Borne from a deep Russian nationalism
Soviet power is a logic of force – almost physical, brunt.
Soviets are still weaker!
Soviet system still may not work! After Stalin’s death.
Soviet propaganda can be easily beaten!
Placement of the US nto a position of universality via commimtent to objectivity and detachment – movement outside of a fanatic particularity
‘Educate’ the public on the Russian situation. In fact the obejctive is not to breed rampant anti-Sovietism but to do so rationally, to claim the appearance of rationality. This is interesting now. What kind of engendering is being done upon the Soviets here?
The courage to cling to ‘our conceptions’ of human society – do not cope, do not allow the parasite to take over.
Interesting ideological analysis which can be done on this work – contradictions and tensions abound.

Kitchen Debates, 1959

Nixon and Khrushchev – at the US Embassy in Moscow
Nixon showing kitchen to Khrushchev.
The kitchen is equipped with appliances to make women’s lives easier – Khrushchev says that this ‘capitalist attitude’ towards women does not occur under Communism.
Universalization of the domestication of women – making life easier
Differences of temporality – what goes out of date and what doesn’t?
What is the Soviet man? Not quite so backwards as in the American imagination…
Who is the slave? who has freedom?
Free exchange and free ideas – but what is the critical particular edge to universalizing free exchange?
Battle of progresion – who will go further?
The question of translation and mutual understanding

Montgomery Bus Boycott Threat, 1954

Women’s political council
Mediocre reform: black people sit from back to front, and white people from front to back
Patronization of buses by black people

Brown v. Board of Education, 1954

14th amendment invoked – separation of white and black children in public schools on the basis of race
Segregation deprives minority children of equal opportunity even if ‘tangible’ factors are equal
Separate but equal in Plessy v. Ferguson cannot continue
Segregated public schools can never be equal; they are deprived of equal protection
- Beyond differential outcomes: what would be wrong about separate but equal but truly equal, assuming this is hypothetically possible? Or is this a false question?
Removal of legal distinctions?
Equalization of ‘tangible’ factors – the decision cannot turn on a comparison of the material consequential outcomes, but rather the effect of segregation itself (yes! my previous question)
Education is an important governmental function, and it is important for a democratic society. Education is a right.
Does segregation of children on race deprive minority children of equal educational opportunities? SC opinion: it does.
- Generation of feelings of inferiority, which impedes learning
- Appeal to psychological finding
- Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal (can this be applied to other dimensions which we feel are more acceptable?)

Birmingham Public Accommodation Segregation Laws

Unlawful for control of any area in which both black and white people are allowed with equal geophysical relation
White and nonwhite people must be separated in different rooms or by a partition in restaurant
A black and white person cannot play together
Equal but separate accomodation for black and white people
Take the seat to which you belong
Interesting geopolitical divide of space: and why? Maybe it is a naive question: but why this doctrine of separate but equal? Why spatial demarcation?

Southern Manifesto, 1956

Supreme Court involvement in segregation cases – “substitute naked power for established law”
Appeal to Founding Fathers, legal conservatism, overstepping of the Constitution, abuse of judicial power
“Climaxes a trend” in the judiciary branch to legislate – increasing ‘politicization’ of the court?
Constitution does not mention education
- Essentially a shallow and strict textualist reading
Argument that the 14th amendment odes not conflict with the doctrine of separate but equal
Appeal to the right of parents to direct their children’s education
- What is wrong about this?
- Maybe we should dismantle the parental instinct.
The court ruling is “destroying amicable relations” – a vision of a fall from purity, now suspicion and hatred
“outside meddlers”
Some states declared resistance to forced integration
No appeal at all to the actual separate but equal law – instead an appeal to the protection of racial discrimination under the Constitution, or at least the lack of objection to it which can be found in the Constitution

Document Collection #2

The Dependence Effect, from The Affluent Society (Galbraith)

The idea that wants apply unilaterally across indiviudals’ conditions is repugnant to common sense
The case for the urgency of production based on the urgency of wants has no ground: one cannot defend production as satisfying wants if it creates those wants (pharmakon)
Production only fills a void that it has itself created
Consumer wants can be bizarre and frivolous. It is almost admirable if a society still desires to satisfy them. But it is like a hamster running in a wheel: satisfaction creates desire.
Keynes: the middle class has insatiable desires
People become evaluated by the types of products they have.
Direct link between production and wants in modern advertising and salesmanship: the central function is to create desires.
Advertising is a large cost – increasing growth of the modern advertising industry
Wants are dependent on production – the producer both makes the goods and the desires for them
Economists resist this concept: closed their eyes to obtrusive phenomena – the want creation.
Advertising has an uneasy place in economic theory
Notion of independently determined wants and still dominates textbooks – and the economist dedicates himsefl towards fulfilling these wants.
As a society becomes increasingly affluent, wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied.
It is no longer necessarily true that welfare is greater at a higher level of production than at a lower one – it may be the same. This is the Dependence Effect.

Like woman’s, his work is never done.

The squirrel wheel is not structurally faultless: there are structural weaknesses.

It is easy to see why the conventional wisdom resists so stoutly such change. It is far, far, better and much safer to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.

The Sharon Statement (1960), YAF

Responsibility of young (conservative) America to ‘affirm certain truths’
Individual’s use of God-given free will
Political freedom is dependent on economic freedom
The government exists to protect economic freedoms
The government becomes tyrannical past these existential requirements
Supremacy and omniscience of the Constitution
States’ rights
The market economy is the single best economy
Communism is the single greatest threat to these liberties
The US should stress victory over coexistence with the ‘menace’ of Communism – the US should pursue a world in alignment with its vision for it.
A militant and interventionist global policy

VP Nixon on Foreign Policy, 1960

“Name one Republican President whot ook us into war”
Not a question of Republican or Democrat, but of America
What will keep the peace?
Eisenhower has never acted in haste or anger, always calm and bold in the face of ‘dictators’ like Khurshchev
‘Pipsqueak’ Castro – why can’t we send the Marines in? The people of Cuba will ‘take care of it’ if the US morally supports them.
Kennedy is a flop: sometimes here, sometimes there
‘only an inexperienced and impulsive act could lead to war’
Not military or economic strength but rather a question of honor and moral strength.

The question is: Do you take a chance or do you go forward on the kind of policies that Dwight Eisenhower has given the United States? And I say we go forward.

Resting upon Eisenhower’s stability and cool-headedness
“Forget” – party label, family votes, etc. – vote for America and the world.

Eisenhower Farewell Address, 1961

Four major wars among great nations in the 20th century (which ones?)
American exceptionalism – depend upon judicial and virtuous use of American power
Purpose – to foster peace and human achievement
There will continue to be more crisis
To balance the private and the public economy
New threats are constantly arising
A strong military presence is now an integral part of America, and this necessary; but we should be wary of the military-industry complex
- An alert and knowledgeable citizenry necessary
Avoid the impulse to live only for today – conserve and sustain, do not plunder
A confederation of equals

John F. Kennedy Inaugural Speech, 1961

The world is different now – man holds the power to abolish poverty and life itself.
We must be united to confront challenges
Freedom and decolonization
Effort to help the rest of the world – it is right, a free society must help the many who are poor
Hope in the UN as an international regulatory body
Hope for peace in the face of possible darkness; never fear to negotiate
To turn science for us, to explore the unexplored, and to encourage liberal heaven.

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

Appeal to a certain Protestant work ethic – fulfill your dity

Kennedy’s Consumer Bill of Rights, 1962

Uneffective organization by consumers, despite their large nature.
Cannot afford waste in consumption; the dollar should be spent best
Technology increases the difficulties of the consumer; law is too old.
Marketing becomes impersonal
Right to
- Safety
- To be informed
- To choose
- To be heard

Kennedy at American University, 1963

Wilson: a university graduate should be a man of his nation as well as a man of his time
Few things more beautiful than a university: a striving to know
What is peace? Not peace contingent on suffering – genuine peace – not only for Americans but for all mena dn women
New war threats – but war is irrational
War as the ‘necessary rational end of rational men’
We must examine our own attitudes – look inwards, not just outwards.
Too many of us think that peace is impossible – but it is defeatist. Problems are manmade.
Conflict does not last forever.
We msut persevere: peace does not need to be impracticle; and war does not need to be inevitable. We can ‘break’ history.
Sad to realize the gulf between the Soviets and the Americans – but it is a warning, to not distort your view
No government is so evil that people might be considered to lack virtue; but the Russian people should still be ‘hailed’ for their achievements.
Never been at war with the Soviet Union
Why devote money to armment when you could to combating ‘ignorance, poverty, disease’?
Halting the arms race
Let us not be blind to our differences, but also emphasize our commonalities
We are not engaged in a debate –the world as it is now.
American weapons are deterrent
Strengthen the United Nations
Keeping peace in the non-Communist world
Maintaining alliances
Blaming change on the Communist imperialist drive
Outlawing of nuclear tests
What is the domestic attitude towards peace and freedom? We have responsibilities to pursue: to respect the rights of all others and to respect law.
Safeguard human intersts above national interests
“The US, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want war.” Ironic words

Document Collection #3

“Developing Community Leadership”, Ella Baker

Ella Baker – works in early 1940 with the NAACP as an assistant field secretary; becomes a national director of branches eventually
Participant in SNCC after SCLC
Not making a contribution – functioning where you need to function
In the south, NAACP membership could get you killed
Routinely travel to the South to organize membership campaigns
Local problems necessitate organization with /in the NAACP
Interesting point on individuals and how to understand their own place:

My basic sense of it has always been to get people to understand that in the long run they themselves are the only protection they have against violence or injustice… People have to be made to understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but to themselves.

Problem of de facto segregation – achievement levels of black people go down instead of up when they enter public school
People who cntrol things – no belief that they will pay the price of itnegration
Not insisting on a title at the SCLC
SNCC born out of conference in 1960
SUpporting role – do it for the young people. No difficulty relating to young people.
No paid relationship with SNCC
It is a handicap for oppressed peoples to depend so much on a leader – a leader is a leader because they have been recognized as such by media institutions, etc.
Movement of the fifties and sixties – carried much by women from church groups; women as a supportive role; Black women carrying this role. Younger women insisting on equal footing
What is important is not so much people being interested in leaders as developing leadership

Ecology and Revolutionary Thought, Murray Bookchin (1964)

Every development of revolutionary thought grows in parallel with a branch of science
- Copernicus and Gaileo – rationalism and naturalism
- Mechanics and mathematics – Enlightenment
- Biology and anthropology – overthrow of the Victorian era
- Freudian psychology – Marx
Growth of psychology
Modern science has lost its ‘critical edge’, its ‘liberatory estate’, but there is a savior: ecology, relation between the animal and its spheres; the balance of nature

The Critical Nature of Ecology

Critical edge of ecology comes from man’s sovereignty over man and his activities
Human parasitism
Imperialism and the despoliation of the environment: CO2 emissions, pollution of watewrways, , etc.
Man as a highly destructive parasite – sure. But this reflects a disruption in the ecological situation. And this is of the ‘social ecology’
Organization into extreme belts and industrialized, swollen apparatuses
The question of the ecological ‘breaking point’
SImplification of the environment – encroachment of the synthetic on the natural: the cultural dimension of manipulation and ideological influence
- Quantiative, statistical abstraction over free expression and complexity
- A false claim, I might propose, in that the great contradiction is that these are held together
Reformulation and mechanization of agriculture as a machine to be optimized: flat landscapes
Division of labor, to an exaggerated point – natural beauty sacrificed by cold concrete – undoing of organic evolution (really?) – eliminating local difference
Ecology has a necessarily social dimension (I don’t know how much this applies only to ecology…)

The Reconstructive Nature of Ecology

Attempts to resolve contradictions of centralization and stratification – “progress”.
Anarchist: social outcast, false dreams for decentralization and humanism
History validates anarchist thought
Balanced community, face-to-face democracy, decentralized society, humanistic technology – not just dreams, but necessary
- ‘Intuiting’, a feeling, of anarchism among the youth
- A reaction against modern instituted comformity
Ecology redirects nihilist rejection of centralization to an affirmation of life and a humanistic society: diversity – balance and harmony, respect of the web of dependence. More room for spontaneity, biological forces
A deindustrialization or postindustrialization of agirculture and land: descaling
Nuclear fuels – not ‘ecological’ – first apply ecological principles, do not try to engage in technological determinism & progressivism. Rather a localized method of energy sources. Highlight local potentialities
We need a new kind of geopolitics, a new kind of relating and community
Decentralization: logistical problems cannot be solved top-down
- What is the border between anarchism and laissez-faire capitalist libertarianism? Perhaps the latter still retains the state structure necessarily
- Diminishing variety in the natural world destroys its harmony and unity
- Man is certainly of nature: social ecology
- Unity by differentiation
The anarchist seeks to elaborate and express possible social experience
Electronic devices should be used little to mediate relations between people – all members should have contribution for collective decisions – we must humanize humanity
General education
Rotation of responsibilities – self-development and generality

Observations on “Classical Anarchism” and Modern Ecology

Anarchism must apply basic libertarianism to new historical principles
In revolution there is concentration
Is anarchism ‘classical’?
Anarchists must grasp changing historicity in the backdrop of static libertarian principles
The anarchist finds themselves:
- Post French revolution
- Industrial proletariat
- Now – widespread peasant discontent and undermining by modern technology
“astonishing social mobility and insecurity” – “virutal impossibility to predict the ovcational or professional future of most people int he Western world”
Technology is ripe with the promise for liberated society. Anarchism ust assimilate it in humanistic terms. Anarchism must infuse modern technology with an organic dimension.
SOcial disintegration under capitalism and after capitalism: can anarchism update itself?

“Homophile Groups Argue Civil Liberties”, The Washington Post (1964)

“second largest minority group in the US”
Equality of job rights for gay people
Government policy of dismissing creates pressure points for blackmail
Increasing public attention to gay people
Rep. John Dowdy (D) of Texas
The gay person is ‘the same as any other person’except for their sexual orientation
Removal of criminal sanctions for sexual acts in private

Letter from Birmingham City Jail, MLK Jr. (1963)

“The Sexual Sell”, Friedan

The image of women as housewives
“Why do people in books never go to the toilet?”
Women as housewives: to buy more things for the house. Women are chief customers of American business.
Not necessarily a conspiratorial, but – by materialist analysis – the outcome of economic objectives
“sexually joyless, uncreative, purposeless lives” of American housewives
American housewives can find identity in consumerism
Market segmentation
- The “True Housewife” – too dedicated to housework, will not accept new consumer products
- Career women are too critical
- The Balanced Homework is the ideal type – readily accepts mechanical appliances but has outside interests
Be a modern housewife!
Advertisers as manipulators – social science and advertising, the sinister dimension of psychology
Must emphasize creative effort
Products aren’t just selling products – selling happiness and images, and selling personal narratives
MId-50s: the Career Woman is gone – finds in housework an expression of femininity and individuality
“Creativeness is the modern woman’s dialectical anser to the problem of her changed position in the houehold. Thesis: I’m a housewife. Antithesis: I hate drudgery. Synthesis: I’m creative!”
House cleaning should be fun: achievement, granting of the ego
Participation of women in the enterprise of science?
The illusion of achievement
Possibly an algorithamitization of women?
Teenagers and young wives – insecure - convince the youth that happiness through things is entirely possible
Market reports, surveys
The remaking of consumerist femininity
A need to advance in life – satisfied in the capitalist incorporative method
“If the stores are women’s school of life, ads are the textbooks”
Privacy and individualism: personalization
Where is the missing sexual spark? – consumerism sexed the sex out of sex. So how to return the libido?
The need to develop the need for new products (Galbraith)
The complexity of feminine consumerism
NOt the creation of the feminine mystique – but certainly perpetuation – flattering and reifiying the image of the American housewife. And all with the assistance of social science.
The housewife as an ‘unaware victim’
The attempt to ‘get them young’ – to put womanhood and wifery upon young girls immediately.
This is wrong, certainly. But what is wrong about it? NOt the ‘virginal purity’ of young girls.
“grooming”
“sacrifice our girls”
Ignorance of women’s intelligence and energy
A sick and/or immature society? Retreating into “that thing-ridden house”
- “thing-ridden house” – the epotime of American consumerism

Port Huron Statement, SDS (1962)

‘Bred in at least modern comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit’
Increasingly troubling developments of modernity; paradoxes and concerns in American society – hypocrisy and contradiction abound
May be the last generation of living
There is an alternative, a democratic alternative
Campus – a place of private people, going as usual. Students leave university fundametnally unchallenged in values and political orientations. Education’s real function is to impart complacency and comfortableness
The campus is a miniature of America – isolation of the individual, democracy without publics; a psychological conflict
Politics without publics: the American political system confuses individual citizens
We celebrate economic prosperity amid poverty and deprivation – the affluent society. Work is unfulfilling – the wastes of consumerist society, the entrepreneur of the self
Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex: the permanent war economy
Towards American democracy
- Abolish political stalemate
- Politicize youth and sociality
- No institutions to sifle dissent; peaceful dissent
- Coporations must be publicly responsible
- Fair distribution fo resources
- America should concentrate on ‘real’ social proprities

Letter from Birmingham Jail, MLK Jr. (1963)

In Birmingham city jail: clergymen have called activities ‘unwise and untimely’
Does not pause to answer criticism often – there is too much
SCLC: large organization, resources are shared. Invited to Birmingham to engage in nonviolent direct programs.
Interrelatedness of communities and states – there is no ‘foreign’ when it comes to justice: “justice aywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”
Look not only at the effecs but also the causes
4 steps of nonviolent campaign
1. Collection of facts
2. Negotiation
3. Self purification
4. Direct action
Birmingham – most thoroughly segregated US city; brutal treatmetn of black people
Treaties and promises don’t work.
Why sit ins and marches? Why not negotiation? Direct action creates the conditions and tensions to force negotiation – “dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored”
The nonviolent register must have the dimension of tension – not violent tension, but nonviolent tension
- Socrates – tension in the mindof individuals to see the objective world
- Monologue over dialogue – too long
‘Untimely acts’. The administration must be prodded – a segregationist is a segregation.
“History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily”
“Wait!” the Althusserian policeman – Wait too often means Never for the Black man
Inspiration from African and Asian postcolonization
poverty in an/the affluent society
What is the breaking of laws? Some laws are just, some are unjust. Augustine: an unjust law is no law at all
- A just law – ‘squares with moral law or the law of God’; a law must uplift human personality and not degrade it
- Segregation substitutes “I-it” with “I-thou”
- Not democratic
- An ordinance enforced to promote segregation is unjust
- Not breaking laws willy nilly – “that would lead to anarchy”
- We must break unjust laws openly and novingly, and to willingly accept the penalty
- Not unique: early Christians, academic freedom and Socrates
Everything Hitler did in Germany was “legal” – but here is a higher law
Grave dissapointment with the white moderate – the greatest stumbling block is the white moderate devoted to order over justice, preference for ‘negative peace’: paternalism
Tension in the South is a necessary phase of transition from obnovious negative peace towards positive peace
Nonviolent actors are not creators of tension, but in fact birng to the surface the tension which already exists
Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber
“The teachings of Christ take time” – time is in fact entural, there is no progressive determinism which guides things somehow: human progress never rolls on the wheels of inevitaiblity
Two opposing forces in the Black community: complacents and bitters (Black nationalist groups)
Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever: freedom will come (tension between making history and history being made): cosmic urgency towards the promised land of racial justice
‘facts of history’
“I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist” – Jesus, Paul, Martin Luther, John Bunyan – all extrimists. What kind of extremist will we be?
Disappointment in the white church and its leadership
Law vs moral right
“What kind of people worship here? Who is their God?”
Churh as thermometer vs Churh as thermostat
The goal of America is freedom
“Your statement has troubled me profoundly”
Nonviolence in the favor of violent ends is violent

Chapters 1 – 3 from Silent Spring, Rachel Carson

Notes

Document Collection #4

“A Time for Choosing” (Reagan), 1964

Spent most of life as a Democrat, but following a new course which transcends party lines
Prosperity is being sucked out amuck by heavy spending
The Vietnam War as a noble cause to fight for – “We’re at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind”
If America is lost, then there is no where to ‘escape to’ – the only freedom from communism
Question of self-government vs. tyranny / federal overreach
No left or right, only up or down
Resent reference as ‘the masses’
A centralized government – cannot control the economy without controlling people
Farmers’ rights and the efficiency of the free market over state planning
‘Taking from the needy and giving to the greedy’ – seizure and control of land and resources for distribution – doesn’t appear like it’s going anywhere. Redistribution efforts for money are limited and have overhead – not efficient
“War on poverty” – thinking the government is the issue and the solution, add more programs
‘Simple arithmetic’
Opposition to welfare is declared as anti-humanitarian
Adding ‘voluntary features’ to help the citizen build themselves up from their disadvantaged position
Framing of choice and agency – choosing whether you can enroll in government programs or not
Interesting – silenty supporting / not objecting to allied colonies
Irresponsible spending internationally
The Democratic Party is going down the path of the socialist labor party of England
Socialism doesn’t need big steps – it’s “already here”. Government plays with unalienable rights.
Government carelessly sending people to war (why support Vietnam war still?)
The “soup kitchen of the welfare state”
Need to be noble and stand up for injustice internationally rather than cowering over the threat of retaliation (liberating East Germany)
“We’re spirits – not animals” – duty and obligation – “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.”

Speech at the University of Michigan, LBJ (1964)

The challenge for the future – enhancing the level and quality of life
Build not a rich & powerful society, but a Great Soceity
End of poverty and racial injustice
Every child finds opportunity; community is restored; man retores his connection with nature
Quality over quantity of goods
Great Society is a continuallyr enewed challenge
Erosion of values leads to loneliness, boredom, apathy, indifference
How to make the American city a place to live the good life
Great Society in the countryside
Beauty and the aesthetic – an ugly America
Improving and modernizing education
The Great Society as a battle

Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech, Goldwater (1964)

Begins with a fucking long tirade about victory
Not to stagnate in a “swamp of collectivism”
Freedom and liberty, order
Before spreading liberty and freedom all over the place, we need to address freedom at home – Berlin, Bay of Pigs, Laos, Vietnam
We have become a nation utterly emasculate
A need to keep the streets clean – the fundamental unit of order
Living for yourself
Equality – incorrectly understood, leads to conformity, then despotism
Resistance to concentration of power – power remains in the hands of the people
Eisenhower – kept peace
Strength of the nation
Attack – the Vietnam war is purposeless, wasteful
Communism as the “principal disturber of peace in the world today”
Being united under a “mighty system”
Freedom was achieved through centuries; spreading of American freedom
Building a society which allows for both the creative and the productive – the good is a product of many contributions
Creativity – a nation of men adn women, of families proud of their role, jealous of their responsibilities
The government as a durable ally of man
Balance, diversity, creativity – free men, not conformists
“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice… moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue”
The goodness of ‘our land’ – givenness

Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin

Bayard was a troublemaker – often in banal ways
Without Bayard Rustin, the Civil Rights wouldn’t have won half of the victories it had
Why did he remain in the background
“We need in every community a group of angelic troublemaker” – to make things unworkable
The only weapon we have is our bodies
1912, born in West Chester, Pennsylvania
Rustin’s mother – Quaker, hated injustice, advocated nonviolent resistance
Music major in college – travelled in a quarter across the country
Organized a strike to improve the food, was asked to leave
1937 – lived with sister Bessie in Harlem; needed to support himself, joined a famous singer (Josh White)’s quartet
City college – met many radicals. Met many radical Communists – felt that blacks needed to associate with more radical movements
- Joined the young communist league in 48; withdrew in 51
- Communists quickly abandoned the black cause when war broke out
If you don’t begin with peace, you won’t end with it – A.J. Musty
Bayard never knew his father
Racial injustice is violence, and one should attack it wherever it exists
Traveling in Tennessee – sat in the front of the bus; the police came and dragged Byard out of the seat
“no fear” “did the bus thing before Rosa Park”
The man who believes in nonviolence is prepared to be harmed and to be crushed but he will never crush others
Had no shame about being gay
War is wrong; break the law of the state for conscription
1943: Rustin acts as chairman of the pacifist movement – encouraged burning draft cards
A Phillip Randolph – strong influence on Rustin
AJ Musty put pressure on Rustin to give up his homosexuality: saw it as a weakness
Chain gang discontinued in North Carolina after Rustin writes about it
India’s independence – Gandhi, spiritual leader – passive resistance in nationalism
Rustin came to India to visit the first world pacifist conference (but Gandhi had been assassinated by then)
“creative conflict”
David Platt – broke up with Bayard Rustin after 4 years
1953 – arrested for vagrancy as a “lewd pervert” – 60 days in the county jail in California. Turning point in Rustin’s life – Rustin was basically thrown out of the FOR (Fellowship of Reconciliation), fell into deep depression
“Sex must be sublimated if I am to live with myself”
Rustin went with MLK to Montgomery to give advice; King had limited ideas about how nonviolence should be carried out
Rustin like an ‘older brother’ – MLK was very young, didn’t have as much experience as Bayard had.
Bayard removed himself from the movement, not wanting to jeaopardize it
practicing Gandhism in the global struggle against nuclear weapons
1959, France declared testing its own nuclear weapon and exploding it in the Algerian sahara
- Rustin – a fairly powerful character
- Didn’t stop the tests
- You have to cry out against injustice even if it continues
Bayard – functioned as A Phillip Randolph’s eyes, legs, ears – was the energy that kept his ideas going
LBJ: stop Rustin. Powell – fed to the press that there were immoral elements in the Civil Rights movement.
Martin terrified by the threat of Rustin’s homosexuality
Powell produced massive Civil Rights legislation, and MLK went with Powell for tactical reasons
Bayard more upset by the personal betrayal than anything
Embarrassing the establishment
March of Washington
- Originally conceived by Randolph as a march for economic issues (Randolph – black trade unionist, mainly saw progress in economic uplift)
- Randolph concieved the first march on Washington in 1941 to give Blacks the option to work in defense industry; but it was called off. Was the first mass protest seriously threatened by Blacks.
- Extraordinary political gesture
- Newspapers and politicians (Thurmond, Kennedy, etc.) discouraged the march on Washington
- Thurmond – took the senate floor, attacked Bayard as a Communist, draft-evader, homosexual
Rustin – complicated relationship with MLK. Came back together before the march on Washington – MLK re-integrated Bayard into his group of advisors
What was needed was a moderate presentation of the Civil Rights movement – orchestrated well by Rustin, King puts the icing on the cake with the I Have a Dream speech
Woke up America, the President and his administration…
Wire tap on Bayard Rustin, November 1963. No longer so invisible – but things change after this public visibility
Bayard saw an opportunity between an alliance with Johnson and the Civil Rights movement.
Turn towards political alliances, behaving like serious political people
In protests there must never be any compromise; in politics there is always compromise
Refraining from criticizing Johnson’s war in Vietnam
Bayard held back against criticizing the Vietnam War; MLK still opposed it more consciously, made it a matter of conscience; strictly practical, no business trying to deal with the Vietnam War; risked the Civil Rights movement
MLK shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee – the second return after failed sanitation strike
After assassination, Bayard immediately flew down to Memphis and organized a memorial march
H. Rap Brown – “violence is as American as cherry pie”
Huey Newton – a Black army
Bayard reinforces nonviolence after King’s death
Rustin vs Carmichael – choosing the lesser of two evils vs. not voting for any man, period.
What is ‘Black power’? – the problem is that it is “purely psychological” – Bayard criticized as the “big gun of white oppression” – “paid pervert for the racist unions”
- Felt that Bayard was weak; Bayard always wanted to negotiate (‘sellout’)
Rustin as an enemy of Nixon
Walter Naegle – meets Bayard Rustin, partner for 10 years
- Bayard was 65 at that point
Travelled to Israel, Thailand refugee camps, Soveit Jewry – merely moving to where we started – belief that we are one human family
Died in 1987

Document Collection #5

The Black Panther Party Platform (1966)

Bill of Rights + Declaration of Independence
Created by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale
Determine the destiny of the Black people
Strong Marxist consciousness – capitalism as robbery
Decent housing and quality of life, full employment
Freedom from imprisonment and oppression by the state; justice. Exemption from military service
Belief in essentially a UBI
Cooperatives, shared work
Ending police brutality by self-armment, appeal to the second amendment
Revolution is just if the state is oppressive.

Stokley Carmichael, Black Power Speech (1966)

Stokley Carmichael named chairman of SNCC, philosophy of Black Power
“intellectual masturbation” on tehq uestion of Black Power
“All criticism is an autobiography” – Bernard Shaw
Frantz Fanon, a “pragmatic” black existentialist philosopher – man cannot condemn himself, for he would have to inflict punishment. Condemnation is a very difficult and twisted idea, intricately intertwined with interests
SNCC: white Ameircan cannot condemn itself for criminal acts against black America, so black people most do it
The ‘drug of integration’ – never fighting for integration, but rather against white supremacy
A man is born free – it is not a question of white people giving black people freedom. In fact the onus is on the white man to stop denying black people their freedom. (i.e. relocating responsibility from the black man to the white man)
- Interesting questions about natural rights
All bills have been written for white men: “you need a civil rights bill, not me”
Not only internal but also external condemnation
Trading the bible for land
The West is uncivilized
- Coming “into our ghettos” and binding to white society
- It’s not a question of who works or doesn’t work – but a question of power and legitimacy, legitimation of action
Black people must wield their collective group power
- Integration individualizes
“I am black, therefore I am”
Suppression is rationalized
Democratic Party – not representing the needs of black people. White people need to build coalition sof hcange within white communities.
White people cannot be working on the black community for ‘psychologcial ground’ – black people must be doing and articulating for themselves – “an antiracist racist”
War in Vietnam is illegal and immoral – but who/what is the higher law for?
Peace movement hasn’t gotten off the college campuses (everyone is 2S and not scared of being drafted) – how to move into the white ghettos and articulate a position for the white youth?
Those that call SNCC violent are some of the most militant organizations for Vietnam
Camus – to come alive by saying no
“American students are perhaps the most politically unsophisticated students in the world.”
We’ve moved to morality and love while political threat reigns – you have to move politically, developing political nuance. You cannot talk morality to political beasts.
Black people are in the best position to question the values of society.
Not about being part of the American pie – this is raping every country, blood money – but about remaking America.
White society has killed nonviolence – nonviolence needs to be preached to the real violent people.
An individualized narrative of poverty – poverty is “well-calculated” – and the very calculators of poverty are administrating the programs of poverty.
The white activist needs to develop a program in their own ocmmunity.
No one would get scared if it were “Negro power”
A psychological battle on the right for black people to self-define and self-oranize

James Baldwin vs William Buckley, 1965 Debate at Cambridge

Has the American Dream been achieved at the expense of the American negro?

Speaker 1: David Heycock – For

“There are more negroes in prison with me than there are on the voting rolls” – MLK, the Selma, Alabama protests
The state of the American Dream: great unbounded liberty, but not for one of every nine men
American soceity uses the labor and blood of the black people but never to give them a fair deal

Speaker 2: Jeremy Burford – Against

Not the purpose to go against Civil Rights, but rather to deny the American Dream’s dependence on black suffering, and that this has hindered the American Dream
Progress in spite of the treatment of black people, not because of it
The American Dream and the respect for civil liberties has been the main factor in improving race relations in America

Speaker 3: James Baldwin – For

There are surface-level quarrels with Burford – yes, the treatment of the Negro has hindered the American dream, other hinderances, etc.
A deeper awkwardness – what is one’s point of view and sense of reality: the proposition “is at the expense of” etc. is already loaded and one’s reaction shows one’s position in the world; assumptions that we deeply hold
Systems allow people to attach their identities: whatever people’s reactions are reveals a fundamental belief in the right of civilizations to dominate others
Leaving aside the ‘bloody catalogue’, what does this do to the subjugated? – To destroy his sense of reality. Destroy’s his father’s authority over him (Freud?). You have not seen a mirror, and you suppose you are white too (Lacan). Psychological beginnings which accelerate – what you have been through is not just the catalogue of injustices, but that you have begun to see the psychological effects pervade your niece, daughter, son, etc.
“Expense” – The harbors, ports, economy especially of the Southern states could not have been what it is now if they had not had cheap labor.
“I built the railroads, I picked the cotton, under someone’s whip, for nothing”
- What does this mean?
The Southern oligarchy
This ‘dream’ is at the ‘expense’ of the American Negro – but not only in the deep South.
What has happened to white Southerners? “I have fallen far, so far, but at least I am not black” – what is being done?
Why believe that the civil rights bill will be honored now?
White people in the South have been morally destroyed, the corruption of American sense of reality
The problem with America is that it has been integrated for a very long time – “put me next to another African and you’ll see”
Watching America from Europe
It is only since WWII that there is a counterimage in the world – Africa was suddenly on the stage of the world and Africans had to be dealt with in a way they had never been before, and gives the American Negro a sense of himself beyond the savage and the clown
What is concerning? We like to think we are civilized in this room so that we can walk out assuming that the measure of our politeness has some effect on the world. “It may not.”
Robert Kennedy said that it was conceivable that in 40 years in America we might have a black president. But they laughed bitterly in Harlem.
Betrayal by American politicians. But how to deal with people who the white world has so long ignored and who are deeply skeptical of Baldwin and King?
It is a terrible thing for white people to believe that 1/9 of their population is beneath them
Not an object of missionary charity, but one of the people that built the country. Unless this is acknowledged, there is scarcely hope for the country.
“The people who are denied participation in the American Dream, by their very presence, will wreck it. And that is a very grave moment for the West.”

Speaker 4: William Buckley – Against

Most striking criticism of America – involves the refusal of the American community to treat him other than a Negro
The American community treats Baldwin with a sort of fascination
Baldwin must be treated as a white man
Charges against America are not so much that civilization has failed Baldwin and his people but rather that America has no ideals – a superficial coating which justifies oppression, etc.
Baldwin has been treated specially because he is Black
What to eliminate psychic humiliation?
Not to eliminate statistics in a world which is closely attached to material prosperity
Everything comes at the expense of effort going into a system which grants greater material prosperity
But what is it that Americans ought to do? Is it time to abandon the American Dream?
In the US there is a concern for the Negro problem – the engines of concern are working, and Baldwin in part reflects this concern.
The situation in America is very complex: a) the effort to perpetuate discrimination by individual American citizens as a result of their lack of concern; b) the failure of the Negro community itself to make certain ‘exertions’ which other minorities (Italian, Jewish) have made. We need to ‘re-animate’ the Negro
Reaching out for radical solutions to obscure the two factors. Focusing on the fact of white discrimination and agitating a moral concern, but where to go now?
Bayard Rustin – slipping, ends up less urging the advancement of the Black man and more the regression of the white man
The problem in Mississippi is not that too few black people are voting but too many white people are voting
“Racial narcissism”
Possibly leading towards war and conflict

Baldwin wins

Document Collection #6

“Fine American Boys” to Antidemonstrate

“American” – reaffirmation of identity
Usage of Bible, classic philosophy, etc.
“Noncontroversial” stand
Moderatism, faith in free speech as a means of deliberating and changing
Possibly condescending neutrality

Report of the National Advisory Council on Civil Disorders, 1968

Lyndon Johnson’s 11-person commission on civil disorders to understand riots and policie sfor controlling them
July 1967 – chain reaction (domino theory?) in neighboring communities
Nation moving towards two separate societies, black and white – “separate but unequal”
Racial division was not inevitable; there is a choice to be made
Point is not to smother the cries of the oppressed, but a new commitment to the nation
Violence cannot build a better soceity, violence must be ended
Most white Americans are not aware of the black ghetto and their involvement in it: “White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it”

The National Organization of Women, 1966 Statement of Purpose

Written by Betty Friedan

True equality for women, full equal partnership – revolutionary language for equality
Movement beyond mere abstract debate towards concrete action
Technology has played a large part in ‘liberating’ the woman, and it is in fact now when women must participate in these fields of soceity opened up by technology
Working women are becoming more concentrated at the bottom of the job ladder. Few women get degrees. Women occupy few jobs of importance to society.
Commissions only have power to advise; they should be involved in enforcing them.
Black women are victims of ‘double discrimination’
Civil Rights movements do not speak for womens’ cause
Believe in the power of the American law and effective application
Intersectional perspective
Do not accept ‘token appointment’ – demonstrative positioning
Possibility to innovate new social institutions – America in fact lags behind the rest of the Western World in Europe (interesting play towards nationalist zeal).
Education as a important ground for equality
Man must not carry the sole burden of supporting himself, etc. – there needs to be a partnership between the sexes.
Independence from a political party
Women must speak out on behalf of their own equality and dignity, not for special priviledge but rather to dismantle the significance of sex altogether into a partnership.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion, 1967

“The center was not holding” – a sense of despair, absence, cold
US in the spring of 67 – ‘social hemorrhaging’ – missing children and hippies
Triumph over ‘donts’, doing don’ts
the fuck is a “middle-class Freudian hang-up”?
Runawaways – children reclaiming authorities
Major problems from the police’s perspective: juveniles and narcotic
“California is the beginning of the end”
Flowing in and out, the meaning of life – real metaphysical angst
Golden Gate Park
Riot in the street, unless
The Beat generation
Rape and drugs in children on Haight street – “MInds and bodies are being maimed as we watch, a scale model of Vietnam”
A sort of naivete
“God died last year”
No worries
“Woman’s trip” – the role of women in the movement of Hedonist self-love: who gets to self-love?
Caution and the law – a game, avoiding law enforcement
Symbolism, spiritualism, self-absorbment
Hare Krishna
“Ectasy” – “mundane ectasy” – the banality of ecstasy?
“make getting up in the morning a beautiful thing”
Coping, existing, living
“You can get high on a mantra, but I’m holy on acid”
“Anyone who thinks this is all about drugs has his head in a bag. It’s a social movement, quintessentially romantic, the kind fthat recurs in times of real social crisis. The themes are always the same.”
The Diggers, guerrilla tallent
“militant trip”
The attempt of “pathetically unequipped children” to create a community in a “social vacuum” – we can no longer overlook this vacuum. It is not some general cross-generation rebellion.
The rules of the game – who believes in it? What is rebellion?
the power of words to express ideas and to live out these expressions
- “waiting to be given the words”
Reproduction of power in a language context
Mime Troupe in blackface
Racial conflicts: racial integration, legal and extralegal
Street demonstrations, performative art, and simulacrum
Bizarre performative activism (?)
Street theater – “maybe it’s some John Birch thing” – political incoherence / messiness
5 year olds on acid

This essay reads like an acid trip.

“Why I am Opposed to the War in Vietnam”, 1967

America to hear the truth about the war
One cannot maintain neutrality in a time of moral crisis
There comes a time where silence is betrayal
The apathy of conformism
Conscience and the reading of history: a moving to a higher plane of diffense
A difficulty: some seek to equate dissent with disloyalty
Connecting Vietnam and the Civil Rights war
An emerging hope for the black and white poor destroyed by drawing into the Vietnam War
$500k to kill each enemy soldier; $53 for each poor person
War as an enemy of the poor
Guaranteeing liberties in Southeast Asia which they have not been granted in America
Using violence to solve its problems
King knows that he must speak against the violence of the government before the violence of the oppressed
Applause of the public media – applaud on the Freedom Rides, at the sit-ins, so noble in its praise. The press is deeply wrong – be non-violent towards Bull Conner, but not the Vietnamese
Christianity – the best step to know the people and their cries in southeast Asia and Cuba
Supporting General Khahn – fought with the French against the Vietnamese and praised Hitler.
Shifting from thing-oriented to person-oriented
Racism, militariam, economic exploitation
True compassion is not merely charity, but a revolution of values
Globalist capitalism
Western arrogance and paternalism
Spiritual death
The Western world has become the anti-revolutionaries
Recapturing of the revolutionary spirit
Eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism
Ecumenical rather than sectional values
Loyalty to global mankind to preserve the best of individual societies
Dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world
“I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America”
God stands before nations with judgement

Document Collection #8

“Trip Without a Ticket”

“Nembutals” vs “Normal”
Advertising; manufacturing of attention
“How many TV specials would it take to establish one Guatemalan revolution?” radical equivalences of the commodity, a certain dirty air – the critical power of advertising and automated circuits – the nuclear button
Somnambulist – sleep walking – the living dead, the undead
Theater is territory – existing outside of the established boundaries of conduct and activity
Gueririlla theater brings audiences to liberated territory – “a cast of freed beings”

Free store / property of the possessed

Human beings are the means of exchange; everything is free.
“If someone asks to see the manager, tell him he’s the manager”
What would you have?
The radical concept of a free store

Street event – birth of haight / funeral for $ now

“Pop art mirrored the social skin”
People, cultures, mixing, events, life, an excess of reality – cofnrontation of free beings

Who paid for your trip?

Industrialization in 19th century ecology
“Wars against ecology are suicidal”
“The US standard of living is a bourgeois baby blanket for executives who scream in their sleep”
Computers incorporate the principles of wage labor – technology will free us – “turn the factors over to the androids”
“Give up jobs so computers can do them!”
Other revolutions are humanistic industrialization
Chaos, joy, laughter, a sort of postmodern Deleuzian body without organs going on.
“Theater is fact/action”
Defend against property

Woodall Letter, 1968

Letter from Sergeant Phillip Woodall
Memphis looks bad to the rest of the nation
Black platoon leader from New York was killed
No gain that can be seen – an exchange of lives, a war of attrituion
Not mourning for MLK – moruning for the “real sacrifice” like Scott
As the nation mourns, they mourn a bourgeois mourning.
“This war is all wrong”
A lot of complex tensions throughout here. Maybe a sent of resentment and bitterness? A sense of fragility and death? A sense of patriotism still infused here, even if it is a totally formal and empty patriotism?

No More Miss America!

Women from all different movements encouraged to jion the movement – protesting the image of Miss America, “an image that oppresses women in every area in which it purports to represent us”
Boycott of demeaning commercial products
Reject male authority, male policemen, male reporters
“We will reclaim ourselves for ourselves”
Ten points
- Protest the “boob-girlie”, body-materialism
- “Racism with Roses” – whiteness. Never a true Miss America (American Indian)
- Miss America functions as a military death mascot, the lady back home from which the nostalgia for returning home from war brings
- A consumer shill
- Win or you’re worthless – beauty meritocracy, commodification of people
- Woman as pop culture – young, juicy
- Madonna-Whore
- Woman as mediocrity
- Miss America as a false dream for women
- Miss America as Big Sister

“We are Living in a State of Anarchy”: Radical Assessments and Agendas in the Year 1968

Hayden Exhibit No. 2 at HUAC

American society is being destroyed by an unrepresentative government; out of touch state; democracy is in a false state
In 1960, Americans supported peace in Vietnam and social reform domestically
1968, a virtual race war
Resolution of Vietnam and racism. “Our country’s future peace and honor depend on a successful resolution of these two problems” (! could be important for essay)
Political parties fail to peacefully address social problems. The Democratic Party is not so clean and exempt.
A useless structure of petty politics; rise of giant bureaucracies
What is the future for the Democratic Party?
A populist appeal / stick with the people
Take initiative in laying the foundation for a new radical force – the Democratic party must go with the anti-war and Black movements
The “mockery of democracy”
Events
1. Apr 21 - 30; spring days. Expose structural contradictions of the Democratic party.
2. Summer: period of intense organizing and demonstration
3. End of summer: demonstrations, disruptions, marches
Distancing from LBJ
Machinery is needed to clarify demands
When there is no democratic machinery, young people need to resist it.
Legality is dubious
Draft board – in fact this is a state of anarchy facing the individual
A calculating movement, not merely romantic or existential

“The Iron Butterfly”

“Sex and the Single Girl”
What do women want (“want”)? How to give it to them?
Ana ggressively subjective and autobiographical approach
Female advertising: sexuality and liberation. To what extent did capitalism play an important role in helping to liberate woman?
Work and the gbirth of the girl-boss?

Co-ed Disciplined by College Becomes a Dropout at Barnard

Linda LeClair – lives with her boyfriend off campus
Lied to college about address; disciplined for doing so
‘Bewilderment’ and ‘embitterment’ of control
Do not believe in marriage
Communal farms
“The city is a dying thing. We’re killing ourselves off slowly here with smoke, noise, anger, guns, everything.”

Father Despairs of Barnard Daughter

Paul LeClair – father
Influencing others to follow immoral paths – wrong
A great ‘individualist’
A lot of support for “strict disciplinary action”

Richard J. Ford III Recounts the War and Racism

The libertine attitude towards weapons
“When we got to Vietnam there were no athiest”
A sense of immortality
Nha Trang – like a “resort”
Don’t take it serious
Racial conflcit domestically

Document Collection #9

“Gay is Good”, Martha Shelley (1970)

Disruption, blaspheming – a sense of pleasure in disrupting normality (particularly institutionalizations of normality) and disgusting the mainstream morality
Distaste with moderatism which claims to disregard homosexuality but which does not really accept it
- Reminiscent of MLK’s War on Vietnam Speech – disavowal of the ‘white moderate’

“We want… something more than the tolerance you never gave us”

Really playing into ‘personal is political’ – attacking even an internalized liberal moderate sense of superiority to the deviants of society
Possibly still playing into a binary system of gender (“We are women adn men who…”)
Possibly an essentialism of sexuality – resistance “from the time of our earliest memories”, maybe not the same sense of sexual fluidity which has been developed recently.
Physical violence is sparing; but the real violence is epistemic
What is the truth of sexuality?
Very confrontational and even militant tone – against liberal unease

“But the really important part about being gay is that you are froced to notice how much sex role differentiation is pure artifice, is nothing but a game”

A sense of breaking through the thin veils/appearances of traditional soceity
Strong sense of separation, attack
“Homosexual bodies” – we should bring Foucault in here, this is an interesting idea

“I tell you, the function of a homosexual is to make you uneasy”

“We will never go straight until you go gay”

“We are one with you”

A sense of conflicting messages – more than anything, a sense of bitterness but also optimistic revolt. And even while the direction of revolt is kind of confused, there is a very clear exposition of the attack.

“You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows”, SDS Meeting (1969)

International Revolution

Contradiction pointing towards the pathway of liberation
Where do you stand in relation to the US as an oppressor nation?
Solving contradictions
Reclaiming the wealth of the oppressed people who have created this very wealth
The US exploits the Third World
World communism as the goal of the destruction of US imperialism
Internal struggle will be necessary but the revolution must be global. Socialism is a fraud.
Imperialism needs brute force and authoritarianism to hold together a decaying social fabric; it is youth rebellion which will kill it off once and for good
Gender and race

The RYM and the Pigs

The pigs tie together struggle around the state as the enemy (!!!) – unified in opposition
“Pigs really are the issue”
A standard liberal understanding, or a more structural understanding?
Creation of a mass revolutionary movement willing to participate in violent struggle.
String inspiration from Mao and China – an authentic people’s revolution, against centralized revolution

Long live the victory of people’s war!

Occpation of Alcatraz, Indians of All Tribes (1969)

the “Great White Father” – some sort of Freudian paternity?
Ironic play with history – reversal of power
Dripping with sarcasm
Buildings for memorial, education, ecology

“What’s Wrong with Equal Rights for Women?”, Phyllis Schlafly (1972)

The American woman is more privileged – most rights and rewards yet fewest dutiees
Woman bears the sex act, so man must bear other responsibilities
Biological essentialism
Most important right of a woman: to be a parent
Tying woman to her child – an investment which provides security
Christianity has endowed woman with inherent respect
Chivalry is good for woman
Capitalism is good for women – it frees them from the burdens of domestic work
The victimization of American women is the ‘fraud of the century”
Women would become subject to the draft
Abolish woman’s right to child support and alimony
“Lowering themselves” to equal rights
Women’s liberation – dangerous radicals
Most women want to be wife
A ‘loveless’ home
Attack on family and motherhood
They do not speak for us – the mass woman

Soy Chicana Primero!, Enriqueta Longeaux Vasquez

The Chicana is trapped between the white women’s liberation movement and the echoes of the Chicano movement
If you are a radical Chicana, do you lsoe some of your feminity?
Femininity and radicalism are not necessarily exclusive – in fact the most feminine act might be a radical one
A strong spirited woman – “she comes from good clay”
What does it mean?
How to relate the Chicana to the women’s liberation movement
Identifying the women’s movement as particularly the white women’s movement
Whiteness as materialistic and competitive – incongruent with Chicana values
Elevation of male and female
A colonized people – we cannot blame men on oppression of women: it is rather the colonial structure
More complex interplay with race and gender

We can not allow negative attitudes in regard to our physical capacities

Woman can work
Woman must be a Chicana first (but of course Chicana is already imbured with a feminine sense) – not just the standard ‘race/colonization over gender’

“In Retrospect”, Robert McNamara

Communist aggression during the cold war was “real and substantial”, even if it was exaggerated – its own power
The South Vietnamese “were incapable of defending themselves” – dynamics of responsibility
Should have withdrawn from South Vietnam in late 63 after Diem’s assassination
Elvent causes for the disaster in Vietnam
- Misjudged the North Vietnamese
- Misjudged the South Vietnamese
- Underestimated the power of nationalism
- Ignorance of local history, cutlure, politics
- Failed to recognize limits of modern, high-tech military equipment
- Failed to be honest with the American people before the war
- Failed to be honest with the American people during the war
- Put too much power into leaders
- Ignored the internaitonal community
- Wanted to fix every problem which exhisted
- Failure to organize the executive branch effectively

“We do not have the God-given write to shape every nation in our own image or as we choose.”

“These were our major failures, in their essence. Though set forth separately, they are all in some way linked: failure in one area contributed to or compounded failure in another. Each became a turn in a terrible knot.”

Westmoreland, the US Could Have Won (1976)

Took issue with graduated response, halts, ceasefires
Political considerations will never allow total independence
A commander must live with difficulties
The possibility of resigning did not seriously enter his mind except once, in 1968
In the end, the US abandoned South Vietnam
Failed to react to “gross violations” of the North Vietnamese or to match/quell/address the larger Communist powers
Kennedy: “Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place.” (1961)
Graduated response is no way to win, a ‘handicap’
War could have been ended with the Tet Offensive in 68 – but the press and television “created an aura not of victory but of defeat”, timid officials collapsed.
- Television made the war
Policy of blanket educational draft deferments which created a working man’s war
Strong control of the conduct of War – comes out of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 61
- “demonstrates the perils of decentralization
- Succesful ahdnling of the Cuban missile crisis – centralized command is needed
- Westmoreland’s wet dream is central hierarchal command with no bureaucracy
Paranoid fear of confronting the Soviet Union and the Chinese – tried to be too cautious, wanted to have their cake and eat it.
Johnson’s guns and butter
Contributed to a credibility gap
Johnson relied too much on the Gulf of Tonkin resolution for domestic political assurance
A long undeclared war will become a political issue
Johnson didn’t manage the public’s opinion well enough, and didn’t present the right image of himself

“it was perhaps a situation beyond the mastery of any man”

“Vietnam Veterans against the War”, John Kerry (1971)

Raping of Vietnam – the ravaging of war, the community of feeling
What has the country made them do? – responsibility
Winter Soldier Investigation
What threatens America is not Communism but the crimes which are committed in the name of defeating it
South Vietnam is insignificant
Most people want to work in rice paddies without war – sided with whatever military force was present
American taxes going to corrupt dictatorship
Pride and arrogance
Someone has to die so Nixon won’t be “the first President to lsoe a war”
How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?
Racism, hypocrisy
Changing with Vietnam means

Roe v. Wade (1973)

Deep convictions about abortion
Jane Roe: unmarried and pregnant, wished o terminate pregnancy by abortion; Texas statues are unconstitutionally vague; abridge right of personal privacy
Abortion up to recognizable movement was generally acceptable but was greatly restricted up to the fifties
Right to personal privacy includes aobrtion and should be considered
Texas cannot override the rights of the pregnant woman
The State can regulate abortion after the first trimester

“The Forgotten American”, Peter Schrag (1969)

Lower middle class, the blank, no good way to describe him – the forgotten man, the most alienated person in America. No one really fits exactly
Elitism
White employed male: a working American.
Heavy statistical description – the majority
The malaise lacks a language
A counter-revolt: people who aren’t compalining and consider themselves well-off even though they don’t have much
Stability and conservatism matters – a Roosevelt’s man
Wealth is invisible, and so, now is poverty.
Places and attitudes
University seminars and policyd ebates become conditions of trauma for the great middle
White kids can’t get a job; blacks are hired first

Somebody has to say no

liberal wisdom has little place for the working man – hard work, order, authority, self-reliance
Don’t all of us discriminate? Why eliminate discrimination – a false hope
You can proclaim black power but can’t protest as aw hite man without being called a bigot
What does it take to fight a good American?

This is a sick society, a racist soceity, we are fighting an immoral war

Some of the poorest people in America are white
What upset the police at the 68 DNC was the affront to middle-class people – people who fart around in the streets and don’t work

“the cop is the new n*****”

Can the Common Man Come Back?

Institutions which are supposed to assist in social amelioration are in fact staying very problematic and suspect
Robert Kennedy was killed, so working-class people shifted to Wallace

A man who can change from a progressive democrat into a bigot overnight deserves attention

Clinton, “Letter to the Draftboard” (1969)

Thank you fro savying me from the draft
Opposing the war due to racism in America
The draft system itself is illegitimate – no government rooted in democracy can force its citizens to fight and kill in a war they oppose
Draft justified in WWII due to collective lives at stake; but Vietnam and Korea are both not such cases
In sympathy with draft resisters
Decision to not resist to maintain political viability within the system
What is service and disservice?