The Bad Sixties

Hollywood Memories of the Counterculture, Antiwar, and Black Power Movements

Kristen Hoerl

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781496817242
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the 2018 Book Award from the American Studies Division of the National Communication Association Ongoing interest in the turmoil of the 1960s clearly demonstrates how these social conflicts continue to affect contemporary politics. In The Bad Sixties: Hollywood Memories of the Counterculture, Antiwar, and Black Power Movements, Kristen Hoerl focuses on fictionalized portrayals of 1960s activism in popular television and film. Hoerl shows how Hollywood has perpetuated politics deploring the detrimental consequences of the 1960s on traditional American values. During the decade, people collectively raised fundamental questions about the limits of democracy under capitalism. But Hollywood has proved dismissive, if not adversarial, to the role of dissent in fostering progressive social change.Film and television are salient resources of shared understanding for audiences born after the 1960s because movies and television programs are the most accessible visual medium for observing the decade's social movements. Hoerl indicates that a variety of television programs, such as Family Ties, The Wonder Years, and Law and Order, along with Hollywood films, including Forrest Gump, have reinforced images of the "bad sixties." These stories portray a period in which urban riots, antiwar protests, sexual experimentation, drug abuse, and feminism led to national division and moral decay. According to Hoerl, these messages supply distorted civics lessons about what we should value and how we might legitimately participate in our democracy.These warped messages contribute to "selective amnesia, " a term that stresses how popular media renders radical ideas and political projects null or nonexistent. Selective amnesia removes the spectacular events and figures that define the late-1960s from their motives and context, flattening their meaning into reductive stereotypes. Despite popular television and film, Hoerl explains, memory of 1960s activism still offers a potent resource for imagining how we can strive collectively to achieve social justice and equality.

CHAPTER ONE

The Sixties in History and Entertainment Memory

To appreciate how popular film and television have constructed selective amnesia of late sixties-era protest movements, it is important to review the broader history of dissent that Hollywood has largely forgotten or dismissed. The dissident movements that have come to stand in for the entirety of the sixties were part of a second wave of protest that followed on the heels of earlier civil rights, free speech, and antiwar activism. Whereas the first wave of activists sought to reform the corruption within American institutions, the second wave viewed injustice as embedded in the nation’s fabric. While Black Power activists, the student antiwar Left, and the counterculture differed in important respects, they all repudiated mainstream or “establishment” norms and values. These groups at times overlapped as they often shared mutual critiques of racism, sexism, and the Vietnam War. The escalation of the Vietnam War drove much of the decade’s radical dissent. In 1967, Martin Luther King concluded that Vietnam was a symptom that showed that the United States was deeply ill and described the country as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world” (para. 11).

Anticolonial struggles in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean Islands also propelled revolutionary activism in the United States. Drawing connections between the struggles of people of color in the United States and the Global South, many activists recognized Western imperialism as the common source of poverty, discrimination, and brutality facing nonwhite peoples worldwide. Armed struggles for national independence in Africa and the revolutions in China and Cuba affirmed that revolutionary change was possible. Furthermore, the writings of Mao Zedong, Franz Fanon, and Régis Debray offered resources for radicals in the United States to theorize and strategize their own resistance (Young 2006).

Brutal repression against civil rights and antiwar protesters fueled activists’ growing alienation from mainstream politics and society.¹ The Democratic Party’s refusal to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation during the 1964 national convention was seen as a betrayal of justice from the perspective of students who witnessed the violent repression of voting rights activists in the state. The confluence of these events demonstrated that the United States had not lived up to its promise of democracy. Thus, sixties-era radicalism refers to those activists who believed that US capitalism, party politics, and traditional social values were fundamentally flawed and must be transformed.

BLACK POWER AND THIRD WORLD ACTIVISM

The Black Power movement developed in response to black freedom activists’ disenchantment with national politics. Disillusionment among organizations including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) was kindled by ongoing racial violence and harassment of civil rights workers after President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, making it illegal for states to compel formal racial segregation. A few weeks after the law was passed, civil rights activists James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi, by local Klan members.² Numerous arrests of activists and the racist abuses within the criminal justice system also fueled growing radicalism within the black freedom movement. As rhetorical scholar Lisa Corrigan (2016) argues, the experience of imprisonment was critical to Black Power’s development because it presented resources for incarcerated dissidents to invent new forms of black identification that resisted hegemonic constructions of whiteness and civil rights discourses.

Stark economic disparities, housing discrimination, and police harassment of black people in northern cities also exposed racial injustice as a national issue that existed well beyond the southern states and fueled race rebellions in cities across the country including Los Angeles, Detroit, Harlem, and Chicago. In a series of speeches delivered to northern black audiences throughout the country in 1964, former Nation of Islam minister Malcolm X pointedly argued that the entire political system was responsible for the exploitation and political repression of black people in the United States. Influenced by Franz Fanon’s anticolonial philosophy, Malcolm X asserted that they had a right to defend themselves “by any means necessary” (X 1992). After Malcolm X’s assassination on February 21, 1965, his rhetoric continued to inspire black and white radicals throughout the remainder of the decade. By the late sixties, Martin Luther King had also expressed more radical views about capitalism as the source of racial and class inequality. During the last year of his life, he helped organize the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, DC, which was a multiracial effort to put economic justice on the national political agenda. Public officials in the White House including President Johnson dismissed King due to his growing concerns about the inherent injustices impeded within the US economy.

In contrast to the more moderate civil rights movement, Black Power activists advocated for self-determination, self-defense, and solidarity among black people worldwide. Black Nationalist strands of the movement called for the political and economic liberation of black people independent from whites. Overall, the movement signaled a new political consciousness among African Americans. SNCC members first introduced the slogan, “Black Power,” during the 1966 March Against Fear that traversed the state of Mississippi. The march picked up where civil rights activist James Meredith’s own march ended when he was shot by a sniper. SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael announced the organization’s departure from civil rights’ strategies by declaring, “The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power” (Joseph 2006, 2).

The Black Panther Party (BPP) was the decade’s most prominent Black Power organization.³ Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California, in 1966 with a broad-ranging community empowerment agenda, including an end to police violence against black people. The group garnered news media attention by carrying arms with them as they monitored police officers and marched on the California state capitol in Sacramento in 1967 to advocate for their rights to armed self-defense. In response, the California state legislature passed the Mulford Act that repealed the law allowing citizens to carry loaded firearms. The BPP dropped “Self-Defense” from their name the next year as their political ideology shifted to embrace what they referred to as inter-communal socialism, which asserted international solidarity with people who were exploited by capitalist imperialism. The Panthers’ bravado attracted young members, and the organization grew rapidly during the late sixties. By 1970, the BPP had thirty chapters and ten community centers across the country. However, disagreements over strategy created conflict within and outside of the organization. Huey Newton emphasized survival programs that might recruit new members to the organization and soften its image, including free breakfast programs for children, sickle-cell anemia testing, and meetings to raise awareness about racism in the United States. By contrast, Eldridge Cleaver emphasized police confrontations. Violent encounters with police led to casualties on both sides, including the shooting death of party treasurer Bobby Hutton.⁴

In addition to internal weaknesses, Black Panther Party members were targets of extraordinary political repression. In 1967, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover instructed field agents to engage in a covert and illegal operation to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, or otherwise neutralize the activities” of civil rights and Black Power organizations.⁵ That year, Huey Newton was arrested on charges of murdering a policeman, charges that were dismissed after two trials ended in hung juries. The Panthers’ nationwide campaign to have Newton released drew large multiracial audiences that attested to growing enthusiasm for black radicalism. As radicals’ support for the Panthers swelled, so did Hoover’s commitment to disabling the organization. The FBI launched 295 operations against the Panthers between 1967 and 1971 (Self 2006, 45). On December 4, 1969, Chicago police used information provided by the FBI to raid Chicago Panther headquarters and kill leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. As a consequence of intense repression and internal strife within the organizations, the Panthers’ national presence dwindled.

Although the Panthers are the most widely remembered, a variety of radical black political organizations sought liberation and justice for people of color. In 1968, the Republic of New Africa sought to form an independent state for African Americans in the United States, and in 1969, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers organized in Detroit against the inhumane working conditions for blacks laboring in the automotive industry. Other Third World radical organizations challenged Western exploitation of communities of color including Chicanx groups (the Brown Berets and Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, or MEChA), Puerto Ricans (the Young Lords), Asian Americans (I Wor Kuen), and Native Americans (the Indians of All Tribes).

The late sixties and early seventies also witnessed coalitional efforts to resist US colonialism and empower communities of color worldwide. Amiri Baraka led the Congress of African People to advocate for African liberation, national independence, and NGO status in the United Nations (Woodard 2006, 75). With multiple chapters nationwide, the African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC) mobilized 100,000 demonstrators across thirty cities for African Liberation Day on May 26, 1973 (Elbaum 2002, 84). Black Power organizations also formed coalitions with other radical anticolonial groups. Before his death, Fred Hampton organized the Rainbow Coalition with members of the Brown Berets, the Young Lords, I Wor Kuen, and the Young Patriots (a white radical organization).

Activism for the rights of Chicanx groups flourished in the American southwest. In 1968, twenty thousand high school students participated in organized walkouts of East Los Angeles high schools to protest academic prejudice and substandard facilities. The Brown Berets took direct action against police brutality and for Chicanx self-determination. The group also organized the Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War in 1970, drawing together thirty thousand demonstrators to East Los Angeles. In Texas, La Raza Unida challenged the predominantly white two-party political system in an effort to foster greater political autonomy to Mexican Americans in the state. Activism for the rights of Mexican American and Filipino farmworkers also gained the national spotlight during the late sixties when Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers led a strike and boycott movement to protest low wages and poor working conditions. The strike ended in 1970 when farm growers signed contracts with the workers’ union.

THE STUDENT NEW LEFT AND ANTIWAR MOVEMENT

The brutal treatment of civil rights activists and growing consciousness about the interconnections between colonial wars abroad and racism at home also spurred white student activism. After 1965, the white movement expanded as the government continued to commit troops to the seemingly endless war in Vietnam. The New Left, and its most recognizable organization, the Students for a Democratic Society, is a routine feature of most Hollywood depictions of antiwar dissent. In actuality, the New Left had a broader agenda including the promotion of participatory democracy, civil rights, and various university reforms. After 1966, the movement turned much of its focus toward ending the war. Certainly, the New Left did not comprise the entirety or even the majority of the antiwar movement; however, their confrontational demonstrations and the violent responses by law enforcement attracted considerable media attention that overshadowed larger and tamer protest gatherings.

Violent repression of antiwar activists in 1967 and 1968 propelled student radicalism. Police beat students and protesters during the October 16–20 Stop the Draft Week protests in Oakland, California, after some protesters threw rocks at police. During that week, between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand protesters including middle-class liberals, student radicals, and civil rights workers gathered in Washington, DC. In a protest tactic that has become an iconic image of pacifist, countercultural dissent, several protesters who had gathered at the Pentagon placed flowers in the troops’ rifle barrels. Later that day, paratroopers and US marshals kicked and clubbed the seated crowd.

Events in 1968 amplified tensions between the state and dissidents. The Vietcong’s assault during the Vietnamese New Year, Tet, signaled that the US military was not close to winning the war, prompting many activists to campaign for war critic and senator, Eugene McCarthy. When Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4, black communities in one hundred cities revolted by looting stores and setting downtown areas on fire. Later that month, student activists occupied multiple buildings at Columbia University to protest the school’s expansion that removed nearby apartments occupied by lower-income minority tenants. After several days, the police ended the sit-ins by attacking the student protesters and arresting seven hundred of them.

Demonstrations during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago put the tensions between dissidents and law enforcement in sharp relief. Ten thousand activists gathered in the city despite Major Daley’s adamant refusal to issue parade permits for them to march. Instead, Daley sent his police force of twelve thousand officers and six thousand Illinois National Guardsmen to control the crowd. The Chicago activists were a coalition of pacifists and radicals, including the irreverent Yippies led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. City officials did not appreciate that the Yippies’ threats to lace the city’s water supply with LSD during the convention was merely a “put on,” and police intervened when the Yippies performed their own election of a pig for president by confiscating the pig. Police responded to activists’ defiance by launching tear gas indiscriminately into the crowds and clubbing both protesters and news reporters covering the event. Although most people who witnessed the events at home sided with Mayor Daley, the crackdown on activism in Chicago further radicalized many young people alienated by mainstream politics.

Popular sentiment continued to turn against the war. Members of the Resistance, an antidraft organization, publicly declared their willingness to go to jail rather than fight in Vietnam. In October 1969, millions of people participated in local demonstrations across the country, and in November, the Mobilization Against the War, or MOBE, brought over 500,000 protesters to Washington, DC, to comprise the single largest march in US history up to that point (Anderson 1995). After President Nixon announced that the United States had expanded the war to Cambodia in the spring of 1970, student strikes and protests shut down campuses nationwide. That May, over 100,000 people rallied in Washington, DC, and thirty ROTC buildings were burned or bombed (Gitlin 1996). Kent State University became shorthand for tragedy caused by antiwar dissent after National Guardsmen fired their rifles into a crowd of rowdy protesters and killed four students. Antiwar organizations such as the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) grew in membership during the early seventies. The VVAW’s 1971 demonstrations in Washington, known as Operation Dewey Canyon III, drew public attention to returning veterans’ horrific experiences. Lieutenant John F. Kerry spoke out against the war before a televised national audience and a thousand veterans publicly tossed their Vietnam combat medals out. That week, half a million people visited Washington to protest the war (Zaroulis and Sullivan 1985).

Although outspoken radicals made headlines by calling for revolutionary violence, the New Left’s revolution was mostly symbolic. As historian Terry Anderson (1995) notes, very few segments of the antiwar movement resorted to physical violence. However, most citizens, journalists, and public officials did not acknowledge the distinction. Mainstream press attention to revolutionary violence was aided by a visible minority of militant activists, several of whom engaged in deliberate destruction of property and street fighting with police. Between September 1969 and May 1970, hundreds of bombings and bomb attempts were linked to the white Left. (The proliferation of campus bomb threats gave fodder to numerous comedic Hollywood depictions of bomb threats on high schools and college campuses designed to salvage the reputations and GPAs of many fictional underachieving students.)⁶ The real-life repercussions of such political violence were not humorous. To protest the deaths at Kent State, a group calling themselves the New Year’s Gang bombed the Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, accidentally killing a graduate student.

The Weathermen, a splinter group that emerged after the SDS disbanded, are the most widely recognized militant New Left organization. As the antiwar movement burgeoned, SDS fractured and isolated themselves from the mass movement. The Weathermen organization led the sparsely attended Days of Rage protests in Chicago to protest the city’s devastating response to the Democratic National Convention demonstrations during the previous year. In 1970, the group made headlines after a failed bomb-making attempt exploded a Greenwich Village townhouse, killing members Ted Gold, Diana Oughton, and Terry Robbins. Weeks earlier, the group had firebombed the New York City home of John Murtagh, the judge presiding over a case against Black Panther Party members who were eventually acquitted. After the townhouse explosion, the entire organization went underground and pledged to solely target inanimate structures. Over the next seven years, the renamed group, Weather Underground, bombed over twenty additional government and corporate structures including the New York City police headquarters, the US Capitol, and the Pentagon (Berger 2006). Weather Underground members saw themselves as freedom fighters within the United States and argued that their actions were far less damaging than the consequences of the war and Western imperialism; however, their actions also alienated the mainstream public and the moderate antiwar movement (Anderson 1995, 2007; Berger 2006; Dohrn, Ayers, and Jones 2006; Jacobs 1970; Jacobs 1997; Varon 2004). Duri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Selective Amnesia in Hollywood’s Imagined Sixties
• Chapter One The Sixties in History and Entertainment Memory
• Chapter Two Growing Up from the Counterculture in Family Ties and The Wonder Years
• Chapter Three Good Citizens, Ambivalent Activists, and Macho Militants in Forrest Gump and The ’60s
• Chapter Four Traumatic Victimhood or Black Rage? Contrasting Visions of Black Power
• Chapter Five The Criminalization of Late Sixties Militancy in Television Police Procedurals
• Conclusion Contestation over Sixties Memory in the New Millennium
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index