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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
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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
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.
Harvard 1969 strike (1969) and Paris School of Fine Arts (1968) posters
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 can’t 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.”
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.”
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
Eddie Adams's Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing Nguyễn Văn Lém, a Viet Cong officer.
US Soldier’s 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.
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
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Vietnamese politician Le Duc Tho signing the Paris Peace Accords in 1973
