Introduction

1. Crosscurrents: The Age of AnxietyVietnam, Civil Rights, & the Woman’s MovementImage Courtesy University Archives, Arizona State University

2. Introduction The anxieties that rumbled in the 1950s erupted in the 1960s, a decade of turbulence and societal tumult. American culture and long-held American values were challenged. A rising counterculture took to the streets in protest, which too often turned violent. The civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the antiwar movement forever changed American culture. Women and minorities would have more opportunities and choices, and the American government could never assume the absolute trust of the American people again.

3. Key Dates 1963 ▪ University of Alabama desegregation crisis ▪Medgar Evers is murder in Mississippi. ▪In August, more than 200,000 demonstrators march on the Mall in Washington, D.C., for the largest civil rights protest in the nation’s history. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech, and Bob Dylan performs. ▪ President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas; Lyndon Baines Johnson assumes the presidency. ▪ Betty Friedan publishes The Feminine Mystique.

4. Key Dates 1964 ▪ President Johnson announces his ambition to eradicate racial injustice and poverty and create the Great Society. ▪ The Civil Rights Act barring discrimination in public accommodations (e.g., lunch counters, bus stations, hotels) is passed. ▪ Race Riots occur in Harlem and Rochester, NY. ▪ National Wilderness Preservation System sets aside 9.1 million acres of wilderness to remain “forever wild.”

5. Key Dates 1964 ▪ The Free Speech Movement begins at the University of California at Berkeley. ▪ Lyndon Johnson elected president in a landslide victory. ▪ Martin Luther King, Jr., wins the Nobel Peace Prize. ▪ The “British Invasion” reshapes rock music and American youth culture.

6. Key Dates 1965 ▪ Malcolm X assassinated. ▪ North Vietnamese forces attack an American military base at Pleiku. ▪ Voting Rights Act, outlawing restrictions on voting (including literacy tests), is passed. ▪Watts riots in Los Angeles. Thirty-four persons die in the week of violence. ▪“Teach-ins” held on college campuses ▪ Cesar Chavez organizes migrant laborers into the United Farm Workers. ▪ By the end of the year, 180,000 American troops are in Vietnam.

7. Key Dates 1966 ▪ National Organization of Women (NOW) formed. ▪ Nation is divided between Hawks and Doves. ▪ By the end of the year, 360,000 American troops are in Vietnam. 1967 ▪ Antiwar demonstrations are widespread. ▪ The Black Panther Party calls on African Americans to arm themselves against police harassment. ▪ By the end of the year, over 500,000 American troops are in Vietnam.

8. Key Dates 1968 ▪ Tet Offensive. Communist forces attack, without much success, American strongholds throughout Vietnam. Much of the Tet Offensive is broadcast on American television with the result that opposition to the war increases. ▪ President Johnson does not seek reelection. ▪ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated. ▪ Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated as he campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination.

9. Key Dates 1968 ▪ Riots break out at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. ▪ Largely ineffective peace talks to end the Vietnam War begin in Paris. ▪ Richard M. Nixon is elected president. ▪ U.S. troops in Vietnam peak at 536,000.

10. Key Dates 1969 ▪ American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first men to walk on the moon. ▪ The Woodstock Music and Arts Festival attracts 400,000 young people. ▪ President Nixon announces the withdrawal of 60,000 American troops from Vietnam.

11. Key Dates 1970 ▪ Nixon sends troops into Cambodia to destroy North Vietnamese bases there. ▪ Kent State and Jackson State: In May, four college students were killed when the National Guard opened fire on antiwar demonstrators at Kent State, Ohio. Ten days later, police killed two black students during a demonstration at Jackson State in Mississippi. ▪ Recession creates “stagflation”: unemployment rises, but wages and prices also rise. 1971 ▪ Nixon imposes wage-price controls. ▪ Former Defense Dept. official Daniel Ellsberg leaks the Pentagon Papers to the press.

12. Key Dates 1972 ▪ Nixon visits China. ▪ Nixon visits Moscow to arrange the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I). ▪ The North Vietnamese launch the Easter Offensive, their largest offensive since Tet. ▪ Burglars break into the Democratic National Headquarters in Washington’s Watergate apartment complex. ▪ President Nixon is reelected in a landslide. ▪ Nixon orders the “Christmas bombing” of North Vietnam, the most destructive air raids of the war.

13. Key Dates 1973 ▪ Vietnam peace treaty ends the war. Between 1961 and 1973, over 57,000 Americans were killed in the war. ▪ Roe vs. Wade decided, a Supreme Court ruling that allows women legal access to abortions in the first three months of pregnancy. ▪ Vice President Spiro Agnew resigns when evidence reveals he solicited bribes as governor of Maryland and as vice president; Congressman Gerald Ford replaces Agnew.

14. Key Dates 1974 ▪ Nixon resigns. Evidence revealed that Nixon knew within days of the Watergate break-in that the burglars had White House ties, thus linking Nixon to the cover-up. ▪ President Ford grants Nixon “a full, free, and absolute pardon” for any crimes that he may have committed during his presidency. 1975 ▪ South Vietnam falls to the North Vietnamese. American and South Vietnamese officials flee in confusion and humiliation.

15. Key Issues By the 1960s, as the works in this section of Crosscurrents reveal, anxiety had become a national epidemic. All values, traditions, and conventions were openly challenged, and passions on all sides were intense. As Bob Dylan sang “the times they are a-changin’,” and while many took to the streets with their demands, many resisted the changes. The works in this section focus on the questioning of American culture and the passions that questioning aroused.

16. Key Figures: Bob Dylan • Bruce Springsteen explained Bob Dylan’s importance to the 1960s youth culture and rock music when he inducted Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988: I knew that I was listening to the toughest voice that I had ever heard. It was lean and it sounded somehow simultaneously young and adult. Dylan was a revolutionary. Bob freed your mind the way Elvis freed your body. • Dylan was influenced by the folk protest music of Woody Guthrie, who wrote on his guitar, “This Machine Kills Fascists,” and by the rock and roll of Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and Little Richard.

17. Key Figures: Bob Dylan “Masters of War” • Dylan wrote “Masters of War” before the escalation of the Vietnam War. Very rarely did Dylan include direct references to cultural events in his songs, realizing that such specificity would limit and date the song. • “Masters of War” is a diatribe against those who profit from war. Consider how Dylan expresses rage through tone and vocal certainty. • Listen, if possible, to Dylan’s performance on The Freewheelin’ Dylan. Note the lack of musical variables. There is basically one melody line, a limited chord progression, and virtually no chorus or bridge. There is nothing to distract the listener from his harsh words. • Consider “Masters of War” (pp. 2040–41) with Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (p. 1500–8), Cummings’s “Plato Told” (p. 1668), Dos Passos’s “Body of an American” (pp. 1710–14), and Eisenhower’s “[Military Industrial Complex]” (pp. 1836–37).

18. Key Figures: Martin Luther King, Jr. • The major figure in the civil rights movement, MLK promoted racial equality through nonviolent protest and passive resistance. He was influenced by Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” (pp.545–60) and Mahatma Gandhi’s success in India. • King’s rival for leadership in the black community was Malcolm X, who disagreed with King’s nonviolent strategies. Malcolm X advocated armed self-defense and the rejection of white allies, a position he later renounced. • Malcolm X mocked MLK’s ideology at times: “The only revolution in which the goal is loving your enemy is the Negro revolution.” • King thought Malcolm was doing the black community a disservice by urging them to arm. Violence, King said, “can reap nothing but grief.” • Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965 and King in 1968. Many consider King a martyr for justice and equality.

19. Key Issues: Martin Luther King, Jr. Consider the following in King’s “I Have a Dream” Speech: 1. Does King reveal any anger in the “I Have a Dream” speech? 2. Does he threaten America when he says he holds a “bad check” and that America “will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual”? Is this statement prophetic in any way? 3. What is King’s vision for America as stated in the “I Have a Dream” speech? 4. Note King’s rhetorical strategies. Consider his ability to appeal to the intellect, emotion, and imagination; his use of specific images and references to specific events and places; and his use of repetition. 5. Compare King’s speech to the poems of Langston Hughes, specifically those from Montage of a Dream Deferred (p. 1683–85).

20. Key Figures: Betty Friedan • Friedan helped reshape American attitudes toward women’s lives and rights. • The Feminine Mystique has its roots in the15th reunion of Friedan’s graduating class from Smith College in 1957. Friedan conducted a survey of her classmates and found that many were dissatisfied with their lives, with the lack of opportunity to reach their potentials. Friedan’s article on the survey was rejected by women’s magazines for being too disturbing. She later expanded the article into The Feminine Mystique (1963). • Friedan was careful not to present herself and the National Organization of Women (NOW), which she cofounded in 1966, as radical. Rather, she portrayed herself and NOW as logical, moderate, heterosexual, supportive of family, and supportive of men, who were also victims of the social code. Many within the movement were upset by her moderation.

21. Key Issues: Betty Friedan Consider the following in Friedan’s “The Problem that Has No Name”: 1. What problem does Friedan identify? 2. Who or what do you think is responsible for the problem? 3. Why do you think women were not content with the life of the “suburban housewife … the dream image of the young American women and the envy … of women all over the world”? 4. Describe Friedan’s writing style. What about her style enables her to communicate her vision while making the book a best seller? 5. Consider the excerpt from The Feminine Mystique in relation to the following works: Freeman’s “Revolt of ‘Mother’” (pp. 1305–15); Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (pp. 1341–52); the poems of St. Vincent Millay (pp. 1654–59), Sexton (pp. 2053–58), Rich (pp. 2058–64), and Plath (pp. 2068–77); and Sandra Cisneros’s “Woman Hollering Creek” (p. 2074–2182).

22. Key Figures: Tim O’Brien • Tim O’Brien was drafted upon graduation from Macalester College in Minnesota. “I was walking about in a dream and repressing it all. … Even getting on a plane for boot camp, I couldn’t believe any of it was happening to me, someone who hated Boy Scouts and bugs and rifles.” He thought about deserting to Canada. He now considers it an act of cowardice that he did not. But as a twenty-two year old in 1969, he did not want to confront the disapproval of his family, friends, town, and country. • O’Brien hated his two years in Vietnam. For much of that time, he found himself in Quang Ngai province, the setting of “The Things They Didn’t Know.” O’Brien was wounded in combat. • “In a general sense, all of my books are about betrayal and loss of faith. Vietnam is an example. I mean you go over there with all these naïve ideas, believing in country and your president and your fellow man, and you find yourself disillusioned in important ways. … And that’s my terrain as a writer, that sense of loss. … Every book I’ve written is about that.” – Tim O’Brien

23. Key Issues: Tim O’Brien Consider the following in O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”: 1. In “The Things They Didn’t Know,” why did Paul Berlin think he was fighting in Vietnam? 2. How does the story reflect much of the confusion surrounding the Vietnam War? 3. Along with “The Things They Didn’t Know,” you might also read Howells’s “Editha” (pp. 1067–76), Cummings’s “I Sing of Olaf Glad and Big” (pp. 1663–64) and “Plato Told” (p. 1668), Dos Passos’s “Body of an American” (pp. 1710–14), and O’Brien’s “Night March” (pp. 2145–52). How are all these works similar?

24. Bob Dylan Martin Luther King, Jr. ReadingCrosscurrents: The Age of Anxiety—Vietnam, Civil Rights, & the Woman’s Movement(pp. 2039–47) • Betty Friedan • Tim O’Brien Additional Reading • Poetry: Adrienne Rich (pp. 2058–63), Gary Snyder (pp. 2064–68), Amiri Baraka (pp. 2077–80) • Fiction: Alice Walker, “Everyday Use” (pp. 2137–44), Tim O’Brien, “Night March” from Going After Cacciato (pp. 2144–52), Ann Beatie, “Janus” (pp. 2152–56) Ariel American • Explore the resources on Ariel for this section of Crosscurrents, which include selections with hyperlinked questions and comments, a narrated slideshow of related images, and links to useful Web resources.