The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism

Introduction: Exploding Limits in the 1970s

Barack Obama’s successful 2008 presidential campaign generated much attention to the many barriers broken by his candidacy and subsequent election. His campaign energized many people who previously had been disinterested in or, by virtue of their age, ineligible from participating in national electoral politics. Several pundits and Democratic Party insiders openly hoped, and some even proclaimed , that the ascendance of Obama—two years old when Kennedy was killed and nineteen when Reagan was elected—would herald the end of the longrunning 1960s-backlash culture wars. But the sixties era, which extended well into the 1970s, still loomed large in the election. Most directly, of course, John McCain ran on his status as a Vietnam War veteran and former prisoner of war. The decade of the 1970s in particular was also central to Republican criticism of Obama, first through the sensationalist response to the incendiary, if not especially unique, views of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and then through his association with former Weather Underground leader (now Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago) Bill Ayers, with whom he sat on a board of directors for a Chicago philanthropic organization. This combination revived two standard 1970s bogeymen : fiery black nationalists and violent New Leftists. As is often the case with the media-fueled pseudo-scandals of a campaign season, these controversies were long on shock and short on substance. Yet both Wright and Ayers proved salient symbols for a conservative attack on Obama. Controversial in their heyday, both black nationalism in general and the Weather Underground in particular were repackaged and resold as even more dangerous commodities in the days of a global war on terror.1 That these tactics failed to defeat Obama’s presidential bid should not distract us from the many ways in which the 1960s and 1970s remain malleable and potent reference points in U.S. politics. The 1970s seems not only to inform the current era but strangely to be reappearing in it. Since the turn of the century, more than a dozen partisans of 1970s Introduction Exploding Limits in the 1970s DAN BERGER 1 radical groups have been brought up on charges emanating from that period.2 The activists who have been arrested or convicted in the twenty-first-century prosecutions of sixties-era acts participated in the militant wings of the Black Power and antiwar movements, which, with increasing frequency throughout the 1970s, embraced illegal, violent, or underground tactics and strategies. Beyond these legal cases, the political and cultural context of the early twenty-first century would seem to herald the second coming of the 1970s. Barack Obama, like Jimmy Carter, campaigned for the presidency on being an outsider able to change the culture of Washington. And, like Carter, he pledged to restore human rights stripped away by a criminal predecessor (George W. Bush and Richard Nixon, respectively).3 The major issues Obama confronted upon assuming the presidency on January 20, 2009, seemed to combine several of the dominant political issues of the 1970s: war, economic devastation, and an energy crisis. And as gay marriage continued to inflame passions throughout the country, one of the most popular films of 2008 was a bio-pic of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician in the United States and a man who opposed the homophobia of the burgeoning Christian Right. Milk was murdered in 1978. Scholars searching for proof of how the country got to its current point of polarization have increasingly turned to the 1970s as “the Big Bang” moment of modern American conservatism, when many of what we now recognize to be its current dimensions came together in a coherent and increasingly coordinated force.4 Yet acknowledging the importance of the 1970s to the Right should not remove the Left from view. The Right’s emergence and success appeared after decades of organizing, done in a conscious effort to defeat the ideologies and policies of the Left—not just the New Deal and Great Society federal programs, but the initiative displayed by a myriad of grassroots social movements. Left and Right cannot be viewed in isolation from each other. This book intends to contribute to filling this gap by refocusing attention on leftwing movements in the shifting terrain of the era. All historic moments are rife with contingency, and perhaps none in recent history are more so than the 1970s. It was a decade that saw an openly imperial president preside over a range of liberal or progressive domestic...