Counterculture and the New Left Chronology

1
Counterculture and the New Left Chronology

• New Left - named in contrast to the old left of
  1930s, rejected both Stalinism and McCarthyism,
  believed in social democracy, influenced by the
  civil rights movement
• Students for Democratic Society - broad
  democratic student movement, concerned with
  poverty, civil rights, antiwar protest
• The Free Speech Movement - privileged students
  critiqued the hypocrisy of the univeristy
  system, influenced by the Beats, civil rights
• The Antiwar Movement - against the war in
  Vietnam, initially students, but then became
  broader, included working class and minorities
• Counterculture - cultural expression of the New
  Left, encompassed rock music, sexual revolution,
  groups like hippies, Yippies
• Important events
• 1962 Port Huron Statement by SDS
• 1964 Free Speech Movement at Berkeley
• 1967 Summer of Love at Haight-Ashbury, San
  Fransisco
• 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago
• 1969 Woodstock
• SDS self-destructs and fragments the
  Weathermen formed as a splinter group

2
Port Huron Statement, Students for Democratic
Society, 1962
As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated
by events too troubling to dismiss. First, the
permeating and victimizing fact of human
degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle
against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from
silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact
of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of
the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves,
and our friends, and millions of abstract
"others" we knew more directly because of our
common peril, might die at any time. A new left
must consist of younger people who matured in the
postwar world, and partially be directed to the
recruitment of younger people. A new left must
include liberals and socialists, the former for
their relevance, the latter for their sense of
thoroughgoing reforms in the system. A new left
must start controversy across the land, if
national policies and national apathy are to be
reversed.
3
Mario Savio, Sproul Hall steps, December 2, 1964
4
Harvard 1969 strike (1969) and Paris School of
Fine Arts (1968) posters
5
Hippies Haight-Ashbury scene, San Francisco,
1960s
6
Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit, at Woodstock,
1969
7
Beatles in New York, 1964
8
Columbia Records Ad, 1968 and Abbie Hoffman on
cooptation
Abbie Hoffman interview Corporations were
taking the energy from the streets and using it
for a commercial value, saying, If you are in
the revolution, what you got to do is buy our
records, while we were saying, You got to burn
your draft card, you cant go to Vietnam, you
have to come to the demonstrations and the
protests It was a conflict and we called their
process cooptation They were able to turn a
historic civil clash in our society into a fad,
then the fad could be sold.
9
Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool, on
counterculture
the counterculture, as a mass movement
distinct from the bohemias that preceded it, was
triggered at least as much by developments in
mass culture (particularly the arrival of The
Beatles in 1964) as changes at the grass roots.
Its heroes were rock stars and rebel celebrities,
millionaire performers and employees of the
culture industry its greatest moments occurred
on television, on the radio, at rock concerts,
and in movies. From a distance of thirty years,
its language and music seem anything but the
authentic populist culture they yearned so
desperately to be from contrived cursing to
saintly communalism to the embarrassingly faked
Woody Guthrie accents of Bob Dylan and to the
astoundingly pretentious works of groups like
Iron Butterfly and The Doors, the relics of the
counterculture reek of affectation and phoniness,
the leisure-dreams of white suburban children
like those who made up so much of the Grateful
Dead's audience throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
10
The Vientam War

• 1964 August The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution -
  authorized Johnson to use military force in
  Vietnam
• 1968 January-June The Tet Offenstive - tactical
  defeat for the North Vietnamese but moral defeat
  for the US
• 1973 The Paris Peace Accords - ended US military
  involvement

11
Hearts and Minds, 1974
12
Vietnam War map
13
McNamara on the Gulf of Tonkin, 1964
14
US News Reports of the Tet Offensive
15
Eddie Adams's Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of
General Nguy?n Ng?c Loan executing Nguy?n Van
Lém, a Viet Cong officer.
16
My Lai massacre, March 1968 news photo
17
US Soldiers testimony, Dellums Committee
Hearings on War Crimes in Vietnam
BARNES I think that most of the high cmnd knew
about the things that were happening and the "
reasons that they didn't say too much about it or
nothing was processed through about it was that
the main thing was that the object was to go into
Vnam, and the object was to most of the high
cmnd, it was to kill. That was the thing. To come
in and - I don't mean destroy in the sense of the
word which is what they did really, but if a
couple of civilians got in the way, "Thats not a
big matter. Thats the price of war." Thats how
they considered it. If they heard of mass murders
usually it was an overpass, and it didn't have
too much effect, that type of thing. They didn't
care about it. They didn't have no feelings for
the people at all.
18
AntiWar Protests in San Fransco - from pickets to
violence
19
Kent State, May 4, 1970 - National Guard
20
John Filo's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of
Mary Ann Vecchio, a fourteen-year-old runaway,
kneeling over the dead or dying body of Jeffrey
Miller, shot in the mouth by an unknown Ohio
National Guardsman. 70 - Student Killed
21
San Jose State protest after the Kent State
incident
22
Jane Fonda in North Vietnam in 1972
23
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Vietnamese
politician Le Duc Tho signing the Paris Peace
Accords in 1973