Beyond Vietnam: The Politics of Protest in Massachusetts, 1974-1990

Introduction

introduction a tale of two sixties In 1999, during a meeting of the World Trade Organization, radical protest against corporate globalization shook Seattle, Washington. The relatively small number of young anarchist militants who smashed windows and battled riotcontrol police drew world media attention to a protest that comprised tens of thousands of nonviolent participants. Among their ranks were environmentalists , proponents of indigenous people’s rights, labor unionists, and Third World solidarity activists. Suddenly the U.S. press and media focused on the growing anti–corporate globalization movement. Media coverage of the Seattle protests almost universally framed them as the largest since the 1960s. From the news accounts of the “Battle of Seattle,” it appeared that, aftera thirty-yearhibernation, leftist grassroots political activism had just reawakened. Within a few short years, the devastating attacks of September 11, 2001, ushered in the chain of events that would lead the administration of George W. Bush to launch the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In the months that led up to the war, mass peace marches were held around the world in an impressive demonstration of global opposition to the impending war. The new peace movement quickly eclipsed the anti–corporate globalization movement, and—as they had with the Seattle protests—the U.S. press and media heralded the new wave of protests as a phenomenon unseen since the Vietnam War era. These not-since-the-sixties accounts of turn-of-the-century protest movements testify to the strength of the dominant historical interpretation of the 1960s: “The Movement,” in this paradigm, is a comet that trails brilliantly across the idealistic sky of the 1960s only to burn out upon reentry into the sober gravitational pull of the 1970s. In this view the descending arc of 1960s radical activism intersected around 1968 with the ascending arc of the conservative Right; thus, the story of the subsequent decades has largely entailed the national repudiation of the 1960s and the embrace of the new conservatism. By examining the rich activist history of the U.S. Left between 1974 and 1990—tracing the political continuity through the movement against nuclear energy, the nuclear weapons freeze movement, and the Central American solidarity movement—I challenge the prevailing view of the post-1960s Left as fragmented splinters of the Vietnam 2 Introduction War–era movement defined solely by the politics of identity. In fact, by helping to reconfigure post-1960s liberalism (which itself underwent important transformations at this time), post–Vietnam War era activism played an important role in shaping the political landscape of the 1970s and 1980s. A brief review of the politics of the 1960s highlights the continuity between the activism of that seminal decade and the decades that followed. The 1950s movement for racial freedom and equality was the spark that set off the chain reaction that swept across the United States in the 1960s. The civil rights movement awoke an idealism and commitment to democratic change that intersected with a swelling “baby boom” generation and rising prosperity to create a decade of almost unprecedented cultural and political transformation .1 The civil rights struggle helped awaken a radical pacifist movement against the cold war, the arms race, and nuclear testing. A student New Left emerged from remnants of the Old Left, which handed down a radical tradition from the 1930s.2 In an age of affluence, the New Left sought to de-emphasize the orthodox Marxism and labor focus of the Old Left in favor of a more existential search for authenticity and commitment. White college students returned from their participation in southern sit-ins, freedom rides, and voter registration drives to lead a rebellion against in loco parentis rules on college campuses and to organize the low-income population of the northern slums. By the second half of the 1960s, Black Nationalism and other minorityempowerment movements grew alongside a rising tide of opposition to the war in Vietnam. Increasingly, the political movements of the sixties generation fused into what contemporaries called simply the Movement—a sweeping challenge to what many saw as the materialism, racism, cultural repression, alienation, and social disconnectedness of modern American life. The Movement also led a frontal assault on U.S. cold war ideology and policies, which it denounced as militarist and imperialist. Running parallel to the overtly political Movement was a rapidly expanding counterculture, which promised personal and social transformation through experimentation with sex, drugs, music, meditation, communal living, and other radical changes in lifestyle. As the 1960s progressed, political and...