The late 1960s and early 1970s, a unique period in American history. Some people welcome the struggle that is taking place, this cultural revolution. Others shy away, clinging to traditional, more comfortable values, and seeking a return to order and stability. Whatever their point of view, people are determined to be heard.
People taking their political fate into their own hands, organizing, mobilizing to the grassroots level. That model of political action, direct nonviolent action, social protest. All of those techniques would be used again and again by the movements that we most associate with the 60s.
The New Left, by the end of the 60s, the emergence of the women's movement, and in the 1970s by the environmental movement. I had been involved in some student activist organizations and I recall a bumper sticker that we used to think was quite logical. America, love it, leave it, or change it. Not only was it within our democratic rights, but it was within our democratic responsibility to try to derail our nation if it was headed towards a train wreck of putting its values and its resources and its blood and treasure in exactly the wrong causes and for the wrong reasons.
I came of age in the early 60s when the notion of having a career was absolutely alien. It never crossed my mind. I took a paid position as Secretary of Student Government at the University of Colorado. And that led to attending the big national congresses, starting in 64. That was an extraordinary experience because in those days, the people that went into student government were Phi Beta Kappas, they were active, engaged, they cared about civil rights, and they were very eloquent.
I mean, the debates I can remember snatches of to this day. The summer of 1968 caps off a series of intense confrontations between students and administrators on college campuses across the country. The most dramatic of which was the occupation for several days of several buildings by student radicals on the campus of Columbia University in New York City.
They negotiated over a variety of issues, including the university's support for the war effort, through defense research and ROTC. and especially the university's plan to try to build new facilities in a neighboring park, one that had been used by the overwhelmingly black of Harlem. The breaking up of the Columbia Uprising radicalized many students who had not been involved in and not even supported the demonstration, but were outraged by what they saw as the excessive use of force.
An older generation that had gone through the Depression, an older generation that had gone through World War II, had difficulty in seeing these broader, more expansive definitions of a citizen's right. So, yeah, those were incredibly passionate times. And Tom Hayden, one of the leaders of the radical students'movement SDS, talked about there being one, two, three, many Columbias, and that we are moving from protesting against...
What they saw as the unfit use of power by the establishment to actually taking power for ourselves. Closely related to the New Left is a youth culture that openly scorns the values and conventions of middle-class society. Young people are seizing upon things that have been changing in the 1950s and sort of making them political and making them overt. It's the ambiguity and the mixed messages that provide the energy for people to try to experiment and understand and work their way out of these kinds of dilemmas. By the 1960s, certainly the counterculture...
...becomes identified very heavily with San Francisco, with Los Angeles, as later on with rural communes. It's not that it didn't take place in other places, but it seemed very much as a Western phenomenon. The huge anti-war demonstrations in San Francisco or Los Angeles have a different tone and a different flavor than the kinds of things taking place in Ann Arbor or Madison or New York City. Whether people loved or hated the 60s, they certainly associated much of it with the West.
And even the belief then will create the reality. Because people who in fact want to be free to have different kinds of social experimentation, to alternate lifestyles, to experiments of sexuality, will tend to lessen. The success of the civil rights movement in the 1960s encourages other minorities to assert themselves.
I grew up in Miami and I was about, I don't know, eight or nine years old at the time. I was fascinated by this sign over the water fountain that said colored and I thought, That water of different colors was going to come out of the fountain. And when I went to that fountain and touched it, my babysitter came running over and said, don't touch that, that's dirty, that has germs on it, that's for colored people.
That's roughly 1961, 1962. That's the beginning of the 1960s. By the end of the 1960s, which we historians end in 73 or 74, that's something that you wouldn't find. More and more during the 1970s, groups of Americans start to discover themselves and to organize around specific kinds of group identity, to see themselves as a distinct minority with distinct grievances, rights, and needs, and to assert. proudly that form of identity.
And so you see the kind of echoes of black power, of minority cultural nationalism across the United States. Few minorities have deeper or more justifiable grievances than Native Americans. American Indians did not achieve citizenship en masse until 1924 with the Indian Citizenship Act. So from the very founding to 1924. You have a group of people who are viewed as essentially aliens or wards, essentially. That was the terminology that the United States used.
Just as the war was ending, there was talk of terminating the formal treaty and executive order relationships of the United States with the various tribes, so that there would be no government-to-government relationship. For much of the post-war period, The federal government seems determined to force Native Americans into the mainstream of American life. And the idea was to set them up with positions, jobs, so that they could become mainstream Americans and have economic opportunities. And it worked to the advantage of some Indian people, at least initially.
But what often happened was the initial job broke down and people ended up going unemployed and living in ghettos. It separated people from their families, from their languages, from their cultural events, ceremonies that took place on the reservation. So it was difficult for lots of families.
Mimicking the civil rights movement, a group of Native Americans occupies Alcatraz Island to bring attention to their plight. I remember George Horscapture saying that The landing on Alcatraz Island was like the landing of the Marines at Iwo Jima, that there was something that dramatically had changed. But then comes the incident known as Wounded Knee.
It begins with the murder of a Lakota man in Custer County, South Dakota. The decision was made that the person who had murdered this young man was going to get off very lightly, and it wasn't even going to be considered a murder. So the AIM people moved into Custer County and began threatening the county officials for what they had done. Things became very heated and the AIM people decided to retreat to the Pine Ridge Reservation to a small place that was symbolic of Native American history, a place called Wounded Knee.
Then they proclaimed themselves an independent Oglala Sioux Nation in defiance of the United States. The clash came at Wounded Knee. It ended in tragedy with some FBI people dying, but also a number of Native people dying. Latinos are the fastest growing minority in the United States. Some trace their roots to the early Spanish settlers in New Mexico.
Others are more recent arrivals. What we see in the late 1960s and early 1970s is large numbers of Mexican Americans being drafted for service in Southeast Asia. And coming back in body bags. And anti-war activism by 1968, 1969, was really overtaking many Mexican-American neighborhoods, a kind of spirit of civil rights, which would, I think, shape Mexican-American political developments in the 1970s. Among the Chicano, Mexican-American population, you begin to see a move toward ethnic nationalism.
Embodied in such efforts as Cesar Chavez's work among the farm workers in the American Southwest and Rudolfo Corky González's crusade for justice based in Denver, Colorado. By the early 1960s, Cesar Chavez would be convinced that what Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants needed in the United States was some kind of a labor union in agriculture, which would help them to find better wages and to define better working conditions for them and their families. This began as a traditional union organizing effort. The United Farm Workers and the Great Grape Strike and Boycott of the late 1960s. But it expanded into one that tried to be attuned to and celebrate and emphasize Chicano and Mexican cultural and religious traditions.
His symbolic presence, I think, was all more important. He gave someone to rally around, someone that you could say pride, and a pride not simply as a role model, but a role model of willing to challenge societal institutions for the cause of justice and equity. This emphasis on culture and heritage is adopted by many minority groups.
My grandchildren are now fifth generation American, and so my granddaughter's roots... go back to the 1890s. So we're talking about over a century of presence here. My family is not at all unusual in this sense.
And then there are people who came here as children and who see no reason why they should be forced to become assimilated in the way that European immigrants thought in the 19th century. The fact that all of these groups, blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and Asians, are attempting to forge a stronger identity for themselves Challenges the long-held idea of the melting pot. And it becomes a threat to the idea of America itself.
Because there are many other Americans who say, who are these blacks who are proclaiming their separation? And who are these white ethnics who want to talk about preserving more of their religious or ethnic heritage? This is not what America is about.
Immigrants have been free to come to this country on this condition, that they give up everything they brought with them and they become new men and women. There is at the present time a debate over whether bilingual education is an acceptable way of teaching children in the classroom or whether they should be forced to learn English as quickly as possible and then move into the mainstream. That debate, I think, has a good deal to do with our ambivalence about how to accept the different multicultural elements of the society today. I became very interested in the comparison of Frank Capra and Francis Ford Coppola, both Italian filmmakers, Capra in the 1930s, Coppola in the 1970s.
What intrigued me about Capra was his reluctance to represent his own Italian story on screen. Because there were too many questions about Italians in America in the 1930s. And so I admire his movies, but I also note the struggle to leave his Italianness behind.
And how different from that figure is Francis Ford Coppola. The first 45 minutes of Godfather are about an Italian wedding. Something that would have been unimaginable for Capra to have done. There are a lot of fears that this film is going to be a public... relations disaster for the Italian community.
And yet the American movie-going public loves the wedding scene. They love the Corleone family. And so we can see in the response of the American film-going public to this an enormous transformation in attitudes of Americans to minorities and ethnic groups in their midst.
The search for identity and for respect. goes beyond ethnic minorities. The gay liberation movement also achieves major gains in the 1960s and 70s, not only in terms of the group's political and economic rights, but in terms of acceptance. Many people who are profoundly for religious and cultural reasons opposed to homosexuality think it's a question of choice.
...choice. Somehow or other disregarding the obvious fact that to be different in our culture, particularly to be sexually different, to be homosexual in a homophobic culture, subjects you to all kinds of... discrimination and vilification and self-loathing and self-doubt, why in the world anybody would choose that escapes my reason. I had taken on everything that society says. about homosexuality, and I felt perverted and deviant and abnormal.
But at the same time, the feelings were so intense that I didn't seem to have any power over not acting on them. We have friends who came out and found all of their possessions out on their front yard. I can honestly say I really prefer people to know at this point. Although women constitute 51% of the population, hardly a percent.
minority, many women begin to identify with minority groups and demand a liberation of their own. I want the freedom not to have a husband. And women have to support their children and men help to rear them.
Many women in civil rights and anti-war and student movements who had these ideals and shared them with men of their generation but experienced discrimination, begin to question, wait a minute, if we're really going to have social justice and equality and participatory democracy, maybe it ought to start right here in this organization. And some women began to question gender hierarchy. within the new left. At the same time, Kennedy owed women's organizations who helped a narrow election victory in 1960. And his payback was a commission on the status of women.
Eleanor Roosevelt was appointed to chair one of her last public roles before she died. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, passed in 1964 after Kennedy's death, not only bars employers from discriminating on the basis of race, religion, or national origin, but also on the basis of sex. So the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was set up to implement the Civil Rights Act, non-discrimination, and lo and behold, all these women, working women, begin to complain of lower wages, exclusion from promotion, not getting jobs, discrimination of all kinds. Equal pay for doing... By the 1970s, increasingly more sort of complicated and sort of challenging forms of discrimination, for example, heightened weight requirements that were there to keep women out when there was no real...
justification for that. Labor and civil rights activists decided they needed a civil rights organization like the NAACP, and they called it the National Organization for Women. Not of women, but for women.
Men were there as well as women. And they become the liberal branch of this new women's movement. So the activists are paving the way for changes in the laws, for changes in consciousness, whether it's lesbian rights, issues of rape and sexual harassment. child care, that then links up with liberal goals of labor, and a women's movement takes off in the 70s, from which, I argue, there is no turning back. In a world in which as many marriages are ending in divorce as not, knowing that they cannot expect to be dependents all of their lives, knowing they need these rights.
Women begin to enter professional fields in greater numbers than ever before. Captain, in the first column, we want to get a voice with him. If any profession was typed male, politics had to be perhaps the highest barrier for women, even beyond medicine and law.
In a way, women were in a double bind trying to enter politics. You could say you want to clean up politics. You could run as a woman, but it would take you only so far. There was a candidate, Ruth Hannah McCormick, in about 1928. She ran for Congress. And she answered the question that every woman candidate up until recently has had to answer, and that is, are you running as a woman?
And she drew herself up and said, I most certainly am not. I'm running as the daughter of Mark Hanna, he was an Ohio boss, and the wife of the Chicago Tribune, McCormick. That says everything.
And that was not reframed until Pat Schroeder ran for president. Pat used her sense of humor to reframe the whole issue. And so when she was asked, are you running as a woman? She looked at the reporter and said, do I have an option? Patricia Schroeder is the reason.
We have the Family Medical Leave Act. She allowed herself to stand up for women's and family issues and also to try to be one of the boys at the same time to always say, but I am also a woman. And so I think there's been a shift.
The civil rights movement, feminism, a whole range of liberation movements, the sexual revolution, the gay and lesbian rights movement, the emergence of a society which is much freer and more open than it once was. I mean, this is part of what liberalism is. A lot of people don't like it, but it is an idea that rests on...
The autonomy of the individual, the ability of the individual to live his or her life as he wishes, to express his or her views as they wish, that tradition is very much alive, even if disputed. But where do you go from there? How do you then move from ending discrimination in the most blatant form to creating equality?
And liberalism floundered on that question. Do you provide special support, like affirmative action? Or is it enough to say, well, you're free to compete in marketplace?
Is a woman's right to choose a basic principle of liberalism? Well, it is for some wings of liberalism, but it's not for others. And so...
Liberalism kind of comes apart, partly because of differences, partly because of things that some liberals had never even thought about. And the Democratic Party feels compelled to abandon its earlier emphasis on uniformity and assimilation and becomes an advocate of the rights of those who want to be different. And the Republican Party, in contrast, asserts the aims of an older America.
for greater uniformity, greater moral consensus. And these become the new battle lines on which much of American politics are going to turn. You can imagine that affirmative action, let's say hiring more black firefighters into...
what had been an Italian-American or Irish-American firehouse. Those kinds of things might have caused less tension in a time of economic prosperity when there was enough to go around for everyone. But when slow growth stagnation, rising wages and prices eating away at people's savings, at their investments, caused economic insecurity, that too caused tensions within.
The liberal coalition, and then finally, of course, was the Vietnam War. Cultural conflict between an anti-war movement and its supporters, who were increasingly suspicious of the United States'role in the world. The environmental movement, like other social crusades of the 1960s, has had a long history, but little public support.
As the degradation of the environment becomes more noticeable... Alarm bells are not only sounded, but heard. After four billion years roughly of just being one more animal, in the last fifty or so years we have gotten to the point where we have changed every square inch of the surface of the planet one way or another, degrading dramatically, something on the order of a half of the land surface, and changing it so it no longer can give us what it used to give us.
The scale of the human enterprise has gotten much too large to be sustainably supported. by the natural systems upon which it depends. We are burning our natural capital.
Some of the impetus for environmental protection is quite personal. For years my child was sick. I couldn't figure it out. And then I picked up the newspaper one morning and it said there are 20,000 tons of chemicals three blocks from my home.
So I went to the Board of Education to ask for Michael to be moved to another public school, and the Board of Education said no, Mrs. Gibbs. It's dangerous for your child. It's dangerous for all 407 children who live in this community.
And we are not about to move all of those children because of one irate mother with a sickly child looking to blame her problems on someone else. So we organized politically, and we did that around the governor who was running for re-election. 1978. All 900 families who lived in the Love Canal community had the opportunity to move with their homes being purchased at fair market value. But it was a long, hard struggle and it was a bunch of sort of ordinary people who took on some very extraordinary government and corporate entities and won.
I think the greatest legacy of the 60s is one of participation. If you get on a bus in New York City today, you're as It's likely as not to see a poster up on the bus saying that there will be a public hearing about the change in bus routes. If you want to build a major project, you have to write an environmental impact statement, you have to go through a number of regulatory reviews, all of which call for public comment.
Now, we tend to take these for granted, and many of us don't really avail ourselves of these. But this... The expectation of direct public participation in decision making, even at the national level, is something that I think is very much the legacy of the 1960s and something that is, I think, overall very positive. The Unfinished Nation is a 52-part American history series.
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