The Rights Conscious 1960s, 1960-1973

Most Americans think of the modern civil rights movement as beginning in May 1954 when attorneys from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), led by Thurgood Marshall, won a U.S. Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, which decreed that in education, the old “separate but equal” standard was inherently discriminatory. In a unanimous decision that was skillfully orchestrated by the new Chief Justice, Earl Warren, the high court declared segregated public schools unconstitutional. The court based its opinion on the Reconstruction era “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as well as psychological and sociological research findings that segregation itself was harmful to Black children.

As moral symbol and settled law, the Brown decision would prove enormously important, but at the time, its influence was but one strand in a complex set of social movements and political transformations that made the early postwar years so crucial to the civil rights impulse. The modern Black liberation movement emerged from the World War II “Double V” campaign against fascism abroad and racism at home (see Chapter 10) and took the form of countless local struggles by local activists. After the war, this small-scale civil rights movement, with allies in labor, religious, and community organizations, continued to secure employment, housing, and political rights, especially in Northern cities. It was joined by a rising tide of civil rights activists from the South, including many longtime NAACP organizers, to form a national movement for racial equality.

Local struggles for racial equality took place in the 1940s and early 1950s in cities across the North, Midwest, and West. In New York City, the leaders of this upsurge were Black communists and their allies who had cut their teeth on the CIO organizing campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s. Linking the fight for racial equality to the recent successful battle against international fascism, this urban movement demanded not integration per se, but immediate equality from city officials, local merchants, landlords, and employers. Although city unions were crucial to the 1945 passage of the first state-level Fair Employment Practices Commission, a broad coalition of clubs, lodges, churches, and synagogues created a powerful interracial network that stretched across the five boroughs.

Jewish New Yorkers were among the key allies in this fight. Rabbi Stephen Wise, the nationally prominent leader of reform Judaism, argued that “our work is based on the premise that anti-Semitism, like all other forms of ignorance and discrimination, is a product not primarily of ignorance and misunderstanding but of complex political, social, and economic forces.” This Jewish-Black alliance was particularly effective in the late 1940s in overturning “restrictive covenants” that barred both Jews and African Americans from desirable neighborhoods and city housing projects, such as the New York City apartment complex Stuyvesant Town, which was the largest urban redevelopment project of its time, and later in Levittown, a huge new suburban housing tract in Pennsylvania and on Long Island.

Black Chicagoans also made their city a frontline in the continuing struggle for justice. In 1955, a murder in Mississippi galvanized the attention of African Americans around the country, a grim reminder of how much was at stake in the struggle for racial equality. Fourteen year-old Emmett Till, a Black Chicago native who was visiting relatives in the Mississippi delta, was accused of whistling at a white woman in the ramshackle country store where he and some friends had gone to buy bubble gum. Four days later, the woman’s husband and his half-brother kidnapped Till, beat him, shot him in the head, and tied his body with barbed wire to a metal fan, which they dumped into the Tallahatchie River.

Till was not the only Black person Mississippi white racists murdered that summer, but when his mutilated body was returned to Chicago, 250,000 outraged African Americans viewed the coffin, which was kept open at the insistence of Till’s mother. Millions more saw photographs of the boy’s mutilated body in Jet, a national African American magazine; Mrs. Till wanted everyone to see the kind of sadism that went unpunished in the postwar South. All the institutions of Black Chicago stood by her determined quest for justice. The Packinghouse Workers, an interracial union that was then at the height of its power, lent crucial support to Till’s family. The Chicago Defender, the largest African American newspaper in the country, put the Till murder and subsequent trial on its front page for weeks on end. Congressman Charles Diggs of Michigan, one of only three African American members of the House of Representatives, attended the Mississippi trial, determined that southern white violence would no longer escape the critical gaze of the northern African American community. An all-white, all-male jury acquitted Till’s assassins, but the case proved to be a landmark in the emerging civil rights movement.

After Till’s funeral, the most dramatic events in the American civil rights story would take place largely in the South. For more than a decade, the Brown decision proved a hollow victory for African Americans because neither the courts nor the government took decisive action to force school desegregation. In 1955, for example, the Supreme Court accommodated the anti-integrationists by ruling that desegregation need only take place with “all deliberate speed,” a confusing and cautious approach that President Eisenhower endorsed because “It’s all very well to talk about school integration—if you remember that we may also be talking about social disintegration.”

Federal ambivalence encouraged white segregationists to test Brown’s limits. Although Little Rock, Arkansas, school officials were prepared to desegregate in 1957, Governor Orville Faubus produced a violent crisis by sending National Guardsmen to block the entry of Black students, ostensibly to preserve “order” at Central High School. When a shrieking crowd chased six Black teenagers from the school, President Eisenhower reluctantly federalized the Arkansas Guard and sent 1,000 U.S. Army paratroopers to Little Rock. In response, Faubus shut Little Rock public high schools for the entire year. Across the South, the number of school districts that engaged in even token desegregation fell from 712 in the first three years after the Brown decision to just 49 between 1957 and 1960.

A reborn civil rights movement broke the stalemate and captured the imagination of millions of Americans, both white and Black. This upsurge was not based in the unions, as it had been just after World War II (see Chapter 10), but rather found much of its visible leadership in African American churches and the NAACP, whose attorneys’ long march through the courts had begun to dismantle the legal foundations of America’s Jim Crow laws.

The new movement was born in the heart of Dixie: Montgomery, Alabama, where the Confederate flag still flew over the state capitol building. Nothing rankled Montgomery’s Black community more than the segregated bus system. In an act of daily humiliation, African Americans had to pay their fare in the front, then get off the bus and reenter in the back. If the bus began to fill with white people, white drivers would often shout, “Niggers get back!” and Black people would have to move farther back on the bus, giving up their seats. On a cold December afternoon in 1955, Rosa Parks, a longtime NAACP activist, refused to cooperate with this degrading ritual. As white people crowded into the bus, she kept her seat. She was arrested, and the city charged her with violating the bus segregation ordinance.

Female activists in the Montgomery’s Women’s Political Council and the local NAACP were ready when Parks, an ideal test case, was arrested. The Women’s Political Council, founded in 1946, had long been involved with voter registration efforts in the Black community and had previously lobbied the city government for better treatment of African Americans on city buses. With the established connections, these firebrands were able to spread word of Parks’s arrest through the Black community; within hours, African American leaders decided to boycott the city bus system in protest.

The thirteen-month-long boycott demonstrated how a social movement both builds on the previous work of local activists and organizations and creates its own momentum. African American demands were initially modest: greater courtesy toward Black passengers, employment of African American drivers in Black neighborhoods, and an easing of—but not an end to—segregated seating on the buses. As week after week passed, Montgomery’s Black citizens grew more confident of their ability to stick together and resist white intimidation. And they found an inspiring public spokesman in the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., an Atlanta-born, twenty-six-year-old minister who was then in his first pulpit. King skillfully linked Old Testament prophecy and the legacy of African American suffering to inspire a new generation of civil rights activists. By the time the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Montgomery buses must integrate, in December 1956, a new civil rights activism had spread through the South and the North.

Although the nonviolent approach that King preached would soon gain a national following, civil rights activists in the South privately debated and sometimes publicly rejected nonviolence as a useful strategy in the face of unrelenting violence and a legal system that was unwilling to protect African Americans. Local resistance by African Americans to racist violence throughout the South (a region that had long traditions of both rural gun ownership and defending a family’s honor) often relied on armed self-defense. As one Black women’s newsletter from Jackson, Mississippi argued, since “no law enforcement body in ignorant Mississippi will protect any Negro who has membership in the NAACP . . . the Negro must protect himself.” Robert F. Williams, a NAACP chapter leader in Monroe, North Carolina, gained local renown by organizing armed defense against Klan harassment; he rose to national prominence in 1958 when Monroe police arrested two African American boys, eight and ten years old, for kissing a white girl while playing a game and sentenced them to a juvenile detention school. Williams shamed the United States by drawing international attention to the case and using the government’s Cold War rhetoric to support civil rights for African Americans. Although censured by the NAACP in 1959 for publicly advocating armed self-reliance, Williams continued his activism and gained broader attention within the civil rights movement through widely published debates with Martin Luther King, Jr., over the principle of self-defense. Williams also helped to bridge northern and southern activism as he traveled to Harlem to speak before groups of Black nationalists.

In February 1960, Black college students initiated a series of nonviolent “sit-ins,” which swept through the South and captured national attention. The protests started when four neatly dressed African American students from North Carolina A&T College violated a Greensboro segregation ordinance by taking seats at a Woolworth’s lunch counter to demand service that had traditionally been denied them. “All of us were afraid,” recalled David Richmond, “but we went and did it.” When a nervous waitress refused them service, the four pulled out their books and prepared for a long stay. The sit-in galvanized thousands of Black students, who led sit-ins throughout the upper South. “I felt at the time it was like a crusade,” Nashville sit-in leader John Lewis remembered. Although gangs of white youths often taunted and abused the African American students, at least 70,000 people participated in sit-ins in more than one hundred cities during the winter and spring of 1960.

The sit-ins demonstrated that mass civil disobedience and nonviolent confrontation were effective tactics. Activists soon organized the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which served as a vanguard within the civil rights movement. SNCC was never a large organization, but its members, predominantly young African Americans, were creative and dedicated—“commando raiders,” one observer called them, “on the more dangerous and exposed fronts of the racial struggle.” Television broadcasts and magazines put the students’ message before millions of Americans, focusing the eyes of the nation on southern racial injustice, thus prompting federal intervention.

In May 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a civil rights group that was based primarily in the North, organized a series of “Freedom Rides” to test recent court orders mandating the integration of southern bus terminals. “Our intention,” CORE leader James Farmer later explained, “was to provoke the southern authorities into arresting us and thereby prod the Justice Department into enforcing the law.” When the integrated group of Freedom Riders reached Alabama, white mobs burned one of their buses and, with the tacit approval of local police, savagely attacked the riders. But SNCC bolstered the Freedom Riders with new volunteers, who quickly filled Mississippi’s jails.

Movement activists also created grassroots organizations to serve as vehicles of empowerment within African American communities. The sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and marches opened the way for a new sense of citizenship and participation, putting African American maids, tenant farmers, laborers, and students in the vanguard of the civil rights movement. This change became clear during a year-long series of demonstrations in Albany, Georgia, in 1961 and 1962. There, SNCC activists mobilized the entire community for a precedent-setting civil disobedience campaign. Demanding integration of stores, restaurants, bus stations, and schools, African American high schoolers, farm laborers, and churchwomen filled Albany’s jails week after week. Children as young as eleven and twelve years of age were prominent in these demonstrations. Going to jail, ordinarily a shameful as well as a dangerous experience, now became a badge of courage.

The battle to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama, which began in April 1963, fully nationalized the impact of the civil rights movement. Birmingham African Americans held mass meetings for sixty-five consecutive nights, often followed by marches to the downtown business district that ended in arrest or attacks by police. City police, under the  command of a reactionary segregationist, Eugene “Bull” Connor, used fire hoses and police dogs to disperse marchers. Thousands of high school students singing “freedom songs” joined the protests, as did hundreds of African American workers from the city’s steel mills and coke ovens. Televised images of Birmingham police dogs attacking defenseless marchers helped to swing northern public opinion massively against segregation. During the summer of 1963, there were 758 demonstrations and marches, more above the Mason-Dixon line than below it, representing a diverse movement. Many of the protesters fought for economic justice as well as civil rights as they demanded more jobs for minority youths, increased funding for inner-city schools, and an end to police brutality. More than half of all African Americans who were polled by a national newsmagazine reported a sense of “personal obligation” to get involved.

A. Philip Randolph, the African American trade unionist whose threat of a 1941 march on Washington had helped to integrate World War II defense plants (see Chapter 10), now unveiled plans for a new mass demonstration in the capital to demand jobs, housing, and higher wages for Black people. Backed by the United Auto Workers and other liberal trade unions, the August 1963 “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” brought to the capital a crowd of almost a quarter-million people, at that time the largest political gathering in U.S. history. Dr. King delivered a speech that articulated a broad moral vision of the civil rights movement, a synthesis of Christian idealism and appeals to America’s highest principles of freedom and equality. “I have a dream,” he declared, “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed . . . when the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.”

Civil rights activity put federal officials on the spot. In 1960, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy had defeated Vice President Richard Nixon in the closest presidential race of the twentieth century. Kennedy’s paper-thin victory was a product of a lingering recession, which hurt the Republicans, as well as substantial support from the white South, which still maintained a traditional loyalty to the Democrats. Kennedy, the first Catholic president, was not a passionate liberal; he wanted to boost economic growth and contain Communism abroad. He once remarked to Nixon, “who gives a shit if the minimum wage is .15 or .25, compared to something like Cuba.”

Kennedy found civil rights issues divisive and embarrassing. By exposing America’s racism, the movement seemed to give the Soviets a propaganda tool and made it more difficult for Kennedy to woo the newly independent nations of Africa and Asia. And in Congress, he needed the support of southern Democrats, who held near-veto power over all legislation. Although the president supported integration, he also sought political stability, working closely with his brother Robert, the new attorney general, to this end. During the Freedom Rides, the Kennedys called on southern governors to suppress white violence, but they also urged CORE and SNCC to end the rides and focus their energies on activities that the White House saw as less disruptive: voter education and registration.

President Kennedy finally put his administration behind a sweeping desegregation bill after the Birmingham demonstrations forced civil rights issues to the top of the nation’s agenda. In a nationally televised speech on June 11, 1963, the president declared the denial of civil rights not only a constitutional problem, but also a powerful “moral issue” that required tough new laws outlawing segregation in public accommodations, integrating public schools, and prohibiting discrimination in programs receiving federal funds. That very night, the necessity for such federal law was again made clear when a sniper assassinated Mississippi’s NAACP field secretary, Medgar Evers, in his driveway.

The next year, all eyes were on Mississippi, where SNCC and CORE brought hundreds of northern white students to teach in “Freedom Schools” and conduct voter registration drives in the Black community. In mid-June, three civil rights workers were reported missing: James Chaney, an African American civil rights worker from Meridian, Mississippi; Michael Schwerner, a white CORE activist from New York City; and Andrew Goodman, a white summer volunteer from Queens College in New York City. Federal agents eventually uncovered their mangled bodies. Klansmen and Mississippi police had kidnapped the activists and beaten them to death with clubs and chains. At the Democratic convention that summer, Mississippi civil rights forces challenged the credentials of the segregationist white Democrats who composed the state’s convention delegation. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party lost the credentials battle but won a well-publicized moral victory as delegate Fannie Lou Hamer mesmerized the convention and a national television audience with her account of the violence and intimidation suffered by Black voters across the state.

The civil rights movement reopened the door to reform in American politics, a door that had been shut tight since the waning years of the Great Depression. For more than a generation, the conservative alliance between the white South and northern business for the most part successfully resisted extension of the liberal social legislation that was pioneered during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. The civil rights movement broke this stalemate by isolating southern conservatives and breathing new life into the liberal-labor coalition that had backed New Deal reforms a generation earlier.

Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Texas-born president, presided over the nation’s liberal hour. Johnson had been an ardent New Dealer when elected to Congress during the 1930s, but as a senator and then as majority leader of the Democrats during the 1950s, he became far more cautious. For this reason, among others, Kennedy chose Johnson as his vice presidential running mate in 1960 to keep Texas in the Democratic column and reassure southern conservatives.

Johnson took the presidential oath of office inside Air Force One, at Love Field in Dallas, on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, just hours after John F. Kennedy was murdered as his motorcade drove through Dallas. The assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, struck the forty-three-year-old president with two shots from a high-powered rifle. His precise motivation remains unknown because just two days later, Jack Ruby, a Dallas strip-club owner who was well known to the local police, killed Oswald.

Kennedy’s assassination had two great consequences for American politics: it put a dark question mark over the legitimacy of the nation’s institutions and the motivations of its highest officials. Although a high-profile commission chaired by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded that Oswald was not part of an assassination conspiracy, an increasingly large proportion of the American people came to think otherwise. Many saw the Kennedy years as a mythic “Camelot,” a luminous, hopeful moment in U.S. history that was transformed on November 22, 1963, into a turbulent era of social upheaval, domestic violence, and unpredictable politics. However, Kennedy’s assassination also advanced the liberal agenda. President Johnson championed the nation’s reform impulse as a way both to legitimate his unexpected assumption of presidential power and to accommodate the remarkable pressure that arose from the African American community. Johnson was determined to demonstrate to Kennedy loyalists and skeptical liberals that he had outgrown his conservative Texas roots. In January 1964, the new president declared an “unconditional war on poverty” in his State of the Union address; then, in the spring and summer, he added his considerably legislative and lobbying clout to the movement that won long-delayed passage of Kennedy’s Civil Rights Act in June of that year.

In a highly polarized contest, Johnson won the presidency in a landslide in November 1964, thereby opening the door to a brief but heady era of liberal politics during which almost every piece of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” legislation was written into law. With running mate Hubert Humphrey, a staunch liberal from Minnesota, Johnson won 61 percent of the popular vote, defeating Republican Barry Goldwater, the ideologically conservative senator from Arizona. Riding on Johnson’s coattails, the Democrats won staggering majorities in both the House (295 to 140) and Senate (68 to 32).

At the heart of the Great Society was the legal revolution in civil rights. For the first time since Reconstruction, the federal government used the full extent of its power to dismantle the racial hierarchies that local white elites had long presided over in education, business, and government. These elites were now expected to conform to a national standard mandating legal equality for minorities and women. The 1964 Civil Rights Act ended segregation in all public accommodations, including theaters, restaurants, and swimming pools. Under Title VII, an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission championed demands for equitable hiring and promotion practices in private employment. The long-prevailing practice of listing jobs in newspaper help-wanted ads for “white” and “colored,” as well as for “men” and “women,” was soon abolished.

In a similar fashion, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 gave the U.S. attorney general the right to intervene in counties where fewer than half of all eligible voters were registered. The new law sent hundreds of federal voter registrars into the “Black Belt” counties of the South; within a decade, two million additional African Americans were on the voting rolls. An equally large number of white people registered for the first time. As a result, the South underwent its greatest political transformation since the end of Reconstruction. By the 1970s, a biracial, two-party system emerged as voters elected thousands of Black officials in the South, from mayors and sheriffs to state legislators and congressional representatives.

Liberal majorities in the House and Senate allowed President Johnson to secure enactment of his broader program of social reform, which he called “The Great Society.” Since the 1930s, the benefits of New Deal era social programs and legislative reforms had been limited largely to white urban wage earners, for whom Social Security, state unemployment benefits, hospital subsidies, and the federal labor law had all been tailored. But now the sense of social citizenship that was inherent in these reforms expanded to include millions of additional Americans, those who were Black, brown, poor, aged, or employed in agriculture and service industries.

The most important and far-reaching of the Great Society programs extended government-financed medical care to the aged and the poor. Medicare, which provided health insurance as part of the Social Security program, was enacted in 1965. The next year, Congress again broadened the social safety net by passing Medicaid, which offered federal medical assistance to welfare recipients of all ages. Both programs proved popular, especially Medicare, whose beneficiaries were almost all solidly middle-class retirees. But without effective cost controls, these social programs stoked the fire of inflation in the health care system, leaving employers and individuals who were still excluded from these government programs to bear these spiraling costs. Although one-quarter of all Americans now held some kind of government-financed medical insurance, fiscal and administrative problems blocked the extension of this system to the remainder of the population.

Congress also overcame the racial and religious impasse that had long stymied a federal program of aid to schools. In the South, conservatives no longer feared that federal dollars would be used to advance racial integration, because desegregation of the schools was rapidly becoming an accomplished fact. And in the North, President Johnson accommodated Catholic advocates of federal aid to parochial schools through a school aid bill that distributed aid on the basis not of the needs of the schools themselves but of the poverty of their student populations. Total federal expenditures for education and technical training tripled in the decade after 1964.

Finally, a dramatic liberalization of America’s immigration policy proved one of the Great Society’s lasting legacies. The Immigration Act of 1965 eliminated the quota system that had favored northern European immigrants since the 1920s (see Chapter 7). In its place, the new bill opened the door to many more immigrants from Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, whose ranks would swell in the 1970s and 1980s when political instability and economic crisis swept those regions.

Even though Great Society programs doubled federal spending for social welfare, these initiatives were largely uncontroversial because both the poor and the middle class could take advantage of them. Johnson’s War on Poverty, launched in early 1964, proved far more divisive.

The War on Poverty increased some direct income support to poor people, but most of the new funding went to programs that were designed to help the poor get an education and secure a job. Head Start, the most popular of these programs, provided nutritious food and intellectual stimulation to preschoolers. Upward Bound sought to aid disadvantaged teenagers. The Job Corps retrained unskilled adults and those who had dropped out of school. VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) offered a vehicle for college-trained young people to help residents in Appalachia and other pockets of rural poverty. Such educational programs cost far less than the relief and public works projects of the New Deal. Indeed, antipoverty expenditures amounted to less than 1 percent of the federal budget during the 1960s.

Despite its relatively small budget and its emphasis on motivation, the War on Poverty proved to be highly controversial because it was linked to a rights-conscious mobilization of the poor. To encourage a new self-help attitude among the poor, the administration’s antipoverty agency, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), established the Community Action Program to encourage “maximum feasible participation” by residents of impoverished areas in programs that affected their communities. Within two years, more than one thousand Community Action Agencies had sprung up across the nation, many infused with the spirit of the civil rights movement. The new agencies challenged the way in which local officials used federal antipoverty funds, put protesters in the streets, and filed lawsuits. Such activism outraged governors and mayors, who had long controlled federal largess. “We are experiencing a class struggle in the traditional Karl Marx style,” asserted one city official in Syracuse, New York. This assessment was an exaggeration, but when these officials demanded an end to this federally sponsored challenge to their power, the White House and the OEO flinched. After 1966, funding for experimental antipoverty programs declined, and state officials assumed the right to take over any community-based agency they did not like.

Was the War on Poverty a failure or a success? Poverty rates fell in the 1960s, even if the expanding economy and low overall unemployment deserved the lion’s share of the credit. The proportion of poor people in the United States decreased from 23 percent in 1962 to 11 percent in 1973. There was a 30 percent reduction in infant mortality, a three-year increase in life expectancy, and a leap in school attendance for African American, Latinx, and low-income white people. Unemployment among African Americans remained at double the level for white people; and among inner-city youths, crime, poverty, and unemployment increased to three times the rate among their white suburban counterparts. All such comparative social indexes would worsen in the 1970s, when economic growth dropped sharply.

The problem was that Johnson administration officials ignored the structural changes in the economy that made it increasingly difficult for poor people to earn a decent living. The decline of the Appalachian coal industry threw more than half a million miners out of work. The mechanization of southern cotton production pushed millions of African Americans off the land. Economic changes in both Puerto Rico and Mexico crippled labor-intensive agriculture, forcing millions of Latinx workers with few economic resources to migrate to northern cities. These massive population movements took place at precisely the time when industry was fleeing to the suburbs, stripping central cities of more than one million blue-collar jobs. Therefore, whatever the usefulness inherent in the War on Poverty’s education and job-training programs, these structural changes sentenced millions of Americans, disproportionately people of color, to a secondary labor market that was characterized by high turnover and low pay.

By the mid-1960s, some civil rights activists chafed at the pace of change and questioned the political compromises and alliances with white liberals that mainstream movement leaders had made. In 1963, the year of the March on Washington, the civil rights movement had seemed to be the culminating affirmation of a liberal faith in the harmonious perfectibility of American institutions. But in the years that followed, the battle against racial injustice took on an increasingly bitter tone. Beginning in the summer of 1965, looting, fires, and police gunfire swept Los Angeles, Cleveland, Newark, Detroit, and other cities as African American riots focused the national spotlight on racial tensions in the North. Hundreds of people were killed, thousands were injured, and millions of dollars’ worth of property was destroyed as violent upheavals scarred more than two hundred American cities.

Newspaper headlines blamed the violence and bloodshed on small groups of radical agitators and heavily armed Black snipers. Later investigations revealed that the vast majority of casualties were African Americans who had been shot by government forces. Many of those who were injured held steady jobs and supported families, but researchers also spotlighted the social problems that lay behind the upheavals. Detroit, for example, had long been a Mecca for Black migrants; but in the 1950s and early 1960s, the auto companies built new manufacturing plants in all-white suburbs such as Livonia and Wyandotte. Although manufacturing boomed in Michigan during most of the 1960s, Detroit’s unemployment rate rarely dropped below 10 percent. As a result, the median income of African Americans remained at about 55 percent that of white people. As the city’s tax base dwindled, schools were poorly maintained, and social services began to unravel.

In the Watts ghetto of Los Angeles, the situation was even worse: unemployment remained stuck at 20 percent, and three of every five Watts residents depended on some sort of welfare benefit. On the street, teenagers bitterly resented the treatment the nearly all-white Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) meted out. The LAPD seemed to make arrests less to enforce the law than to intimidate young African Americans. One study showed that 90 percent of juveniles who were arrested never had charges filed against them. Meanwhile, Watts residents confronted other reminders that they lived in a racist society. In 1964, a huge majority of white Californians voted to repeal a state law banning racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing. In 1965, when the Watts riot erupted, involving as many as 80,000 people, one Los Angeles resident explained that it was as if the community were saying, “We’re hungry. Our schools stink. . . . It’s obvious the integration route ain’t going to work. Now we’ve got to go another way.”

Across the North, African American activists had been advocating economic self-reliance and Black nationalism since the 1930s. The most inspiring figure was a charismatic Black Muslim named Malcolm X. A drug dealer and pimp in his teenage years, Malcolm Little converted to Elijah Muhammad’s separatist Nation of Islam early in the 1950s while serving time in a Massachusetts prison. With other Black Muslims, Malcolm adopted a new last name and saw integration with the “white devil” as an illusory solution to Black problems; instead, he advocated self-reliance, Black pride, and unity. “The worst crime of the white man has been to teach us to hate ourselves, “ Malcolm X declared to the ghetto youths who were his most devoted following. “We hated our head, we hated the shape of our nose. . . . Yeah we hated the color of our skin.” By the mid-1960s, Malcolm searched for an accommodation between his nationalist ideology and the cosmopolitan spirit of the mainstream civil rights movement, but in early 1965, he was assassinated, probably by followers of Elijah Muhammad who were jealous of Malcolm’s popularity. His ideas became even more widely popular after his death, however, especially after the publication of Alex Haley’s best-selling Autobiography of Malcolm X in 1966.

This new brand of racial assertiveness won other articulate spokesmen. The young SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael popularized the slogan “Black Power” during civil rights marches in the summer of 1966. Insisting that African Americans must control their own institutions, Carmichael stirred African American crowds with the impatient declaration “It’s time we stand up and take over; move on over, or we’ll move on over you.” And the California-based Black Panther Party argued that African Americans were the vanguard of the socialist revolution they forecast for the United States. By 1969, the inflammatory rhetoric of these urban militants—“Off the pig” was a favorite insult hurled at the police—drew heavy media attention. The FBI targeted the Panthers as dangerous revolutionaries and infiltrated the organization, provoking greater violence and shootouts with the police.

Whatever its limitations as a political strategy, Black Power encouraged African Americans to take increased pride and interest in their African roots and in their history of struggle and cultural innovation. Many Black people began to celebrate African American food, fashion, poetry, prose, theater, dance, and music. And within little more than a decade, Black voters had united to elect a score of Black mayors in cities such as Newark, Detroit, and Oakland. Although the movement could not dismantle the structural inequality in the larger society, African American activists won a certain degree of local political power and an even larger sense of self-confidence within the worlds of fashion, entertainment, and literature.

An assertive rights consciousness also took hold in the workplace. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act forbade employment discrimination on the basis of race, creed, sex, or national origin and established an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to investigate and litigate such bias. As with the Wagner Act thirty years earlier, the government put its moral and administrative weight behind a new set of employee rights, which soon had a profound impact on the U.S. workplace. Newly conscious of their rights, Black and Latinx workers stiffened the backbone of union drives in janitorial services, government employment, and the garment and textile industries. “Back in the late 1960s,” remembered one union organizer, “whenever you went into one plant the first thing you looked to was how many Blacks are there working. . . . And if there were forty Blacks you could count on forty votes.”

Some unions linked themselves directly to the civil rights struggle. Seeking to organize New York City’s hospital service workers, such as orderlies and cafeteria workers, the leaders of Local 1199, the Drug and Hospital Employees’ Union, proclaimed that their campaign ran on “union power plus soul power.” To Black hospital workers such as Doris Turner, their own workplace activism was but an extension of the civil rights movement in the South. “Really and truthfully, they were one [struggle], just being waged in different places.” By the early 1970s, Local 1199 began to transform the very character of hospital work in many big cities by providing a living wage for a workforce that was predominantly African American, Puerto Rican, and female.

Two thousand miles away, in California’s Central Valley, a farm labor workforce that was composed largely of Mexican and Filipino immigrants also adopted the tactics and ideas the civil rights movement pioneered. Unlike the Birmingham civil rights activists, farm labors continued to look to unions to fight discrimination. Led by Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez, a charismatic organizer who had spent his childhood as a migrant laborer, California farmworkers struck the Delano vineyards early in 1965. Had these desperately poor workers relied only on their own resources, their union would have been smashed like other agricultural labor unions before them. Federal labor laws did not cover farmworkers, and the growers easily imported thousands of strikebreakers from Mexico. But the United Farm Workers (UFW) held on for five years by presenting their strike not as a simple union-management conflict, but rather as La Causa, an awakening of the Mexican American community to both its ethnic heritage and its full citizenship rights. UFW rallies, marches, and picket lines featured huge, blood-red banners imprinted with the black Aztec eagle that symbolized Mexican pride and power. When UFW strikers marched three hundred miles to the state capital at Sacramento to call attention to their working conditions, they sang “We Shall Overcome” in Spanish and English.

With the help of thousands of students and hundreds of priests and nuns, the UFW mounted a national boycott against California grape growers who refused to recognize the union. “We got to the point where we could track a grape shipment from California to Appleton, Wisconsin, and have pickets waiting for them at the loading docks at two o’clock in the morning,” remembered one organizer. The UFW had modest success as a union but won great influence as a political and cultural force in the West. By the 1970s, the UFW could mobilize more campaign workers than all the other unions in California combined, and in Arizona, the union registered 100,000 new Mexican American voters. As a result, Mexican Americans in the Southwest gained new respect and increased political clout.

If the burgeoning social movements of the 1960s revealed the domestic problems of post–World War II society, the Vietnam War brought to the surface the tensions that were inherent in the U.S. effort to manage the global political economy. The road to Vietnam was paved with the arrogance of American Cold War statecraft. Like Presidents Truman and Eisenhower before them, Kennedy and Johnson wanted the United States to appear strong and command respect from foe and friend to keep world markets open, maintain the international balance of power, and carefully orchestrate the pace of social and economic change, even at the expense of democracy and development. As U.S troops poured into Southeast Asia, opposition grew at home, at first among university students, but later among middle-class professionals and working-class youths. Debate over the Vietnam War polarized the nation and, in 1968, generated a political and social crisis that destroyed Lyndon Johnson’s hopes for a second term and ushered into office conservative Richard Nixon, who nevertheless promised “peace with honor.”

During his first months in office, President Kennedy faced three reversals that seemed to demonstrate a systemic weakness in the Western camp. In April 1961, a CIA-organized invasion of Cuba, at the Bay of Pigs on the island’s southern coast, failed to overthrow Fidel Castro’s young revolutionary regime. Five months later, East German Communists erected an ugly concrete wall across Berlin to halt the flow of refugees to the increasingly prosperous West. Then a pro-Western government in the Southeast Asian kingdom of Laos collapsed. These setbacks were all manageable, but they nevertheless suggested that vigilance and determination would be necessary to maintain U.S. credibility in a dangerous world.

Toughness seemed to pay off in the fall of 1962, when the Soviets installed intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. Kennedy responded with a U.S. naval blockade of the island. For a moment, the world seemed poised on the brink of a nuclear confrontation, but the crisis ended when the Soviet Union agreed to remove the missiles. Kennedy’s victory won him much support at home and gave him the political strength to negotiate in 1963 a treaty with the Soviet Union banning the above-ground testing of nuclear weapons. But the long-term consequences of the Cuban missile crisis were ambiguous. The Kremlin was determined that the United States would not outgun them again, so the Soviets began building up their naval and long-range missile forces and ended a five-year period of internal reforms. Meanwhile, Kennedy, Johnson, and their key aides concluded that they could use military force, or its threat, as an effective tool of statecraft.

This reasoning led the United States into a tragic war in Vietnam. There, an independence movement led by the Communist and nationalist Ho Chi Minh had won substantial support among Vietnamese peasants, students, intellectuals, and urban workers. In 1954, Ho’s forces defeated the French colonial army at Dien Bien Phu and won independence for the northern half of Vietnam. The United States quickly stepped in to replace France as the dominant power in South Vietnam, backing the authoritarian regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic aristocrat, who sought to build a viable political alternative to Communism in the south. But Diem’s support never spread beyond the army and a narrow circle of landlords and urban Catholics. Although aware of Diem’s weaknesses, Kennedy wanted to prove, in the words of one Pentagon analyst, that the United States was “willing to keep promises to its allies, to be tough, to take risks, get bloodied, and hurt the enemy badly.” So the United States steadily increased the number of its military advisers in Vietnam; at the time of Kennedy’s death in November 1963, they numbered more than 16,000.

Johnson also saw Vietnam as a proving ground for U.S. global power. On August 2, 1964, North Vietnamese torpedo boats skirmished with the American destroyer Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin; two days later, radar operators on the Maddox and another destroyer, the C. Turner Joy, reported another attack (though the Navy soon concluded that, as a result of stormy seas, the nervous sailors had probably generated a false report). Johnson labeled this attack an “open aggression on the high seas against the United States,” enabling him to secure congressional passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution mandating the president “to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force” to aid South Vietnam. In February 1965, the U.S. Air Force began a sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam, after which the United States sent an ever-increasing number of ground combat troops to Southeast Asia—more than half a million by the middle of 1968.

As troop levels in Vietnam rose, the military swept in to its ranks hundreds of thousands of teenagers. At first, few young men gave much thought to the politics of the war. “I didn’t have any feelings one way or the other,” one draftee remembered. “I figured it was more or less right, because why would I be going if it wasn’t right?” The military draft, or Selective Service System, was indeed selective. Because college students initially were entitled to deferments, most escaped the first years of the draft. If they ended up in the Army, they usually served as officers or in noncombat posts. In contrast, poor Americans, white as well as Black and Latinx, were far more likely to be drafted and assigned to combat. Draftees, only about one-quarter of the army, represented 88 percent of infantry riflemen in 1970 and two-thirds of all battle deaths. The Veterans Administration concluded that the disproportionate casualties suffered by American minorities was the product not of direct racial bias, “but of discrimination against the poor, the uneducated, and the young.” This represented a major change from World War II. Then, the draft had reached deep into the middle class and to men who were already established in jobs and careers.

Politics and new technology helped to shape U.S. military strategy in Vietnam. The military initially assumed that expensive technology and sophisticated organization would substitute for much of the blood and sweat of ground combat. But a massive, carefully orchestrated campaign of aerial bombing proved ineffective against the rifles and booby traps of the enemy foot soldiers who usually fought in small combat units. U.S. bombing of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia after 1970 could not stop the infiltration of personnel and supplies from North Vietnam or destroy the southern bases of the insurgent National Liberation Front (NLF). This failure led to the massive deployment of U.S. troops, who sought out the enemy in a series of search-and-destroy operations that began in 1965. But the NLF and the North Vietnamese Army avoided pitched battles with U.S. forces. U.S. military leaders therefore came to define victory not by the seizure of enemy territory or the defeat of hostile battalions but by the physical annihilation of individual enemy soldiers.

This war of attrition led to a bureaucratic fixation with the daily “body count.” Because the distinction between civilians and NLF combatants became hopelessly confused, American soldiers were soon reporting as an enemy fatality any Vietnamese who was killed by U.S. firepower. A T-shirt worn by some U.S. soldiers expressed the GIs’ frustration: “KILL THEM ALL! LET GOD SORT THEM OUT!” The consequence of such attitudes came in the village of My Lai, where an American platoon landed one morning in 1968. “When the attack started,” one sergeant recalled, “We were mad and had been told that the enemy was there and we were going in there to give them a fight for what they had done to our dead buddies.” The U.S. platoon took no enemy fire, but within a matter of minutes, the village exploded with American grenades and machine gun bursts. Soldiers murdered more than 350 Vietnamese villagers. There was one American casualty: a GI who shot himself in the foot out of disgust at what he was witnessing.

The Vietnam War was fought at home as well as abroad. Until the end of the 1960s, most Americans supported the war. But its length, cost, and character generated a growing opposition—or, rather, two kinds of antiwar sentiment. A highly ideological antiwar movement emerged out of the New Left radicalism that was present on many college campuses. But this student opposition to the Johnson administration’s Vietnam policies was accompanied by a late-blooming, far more conservative rejection of the war with the position “Win Now or Get Out.” Conservative opponents of the war considered themselves traditional patriots, and they had nothing but contempt for the New Left, but they were unwilling to bear the costs of what seemed an endless struggle. By 1968, antiwar sentiment on both the left and the right had become so great that continued escalation of the war was no longer tenable.

The New Left came to life on college and university campuses in the early 1960s, when many contemporary observers still bemoaned a “silent generation” of youthful, career-minded conformists. Early New Left activists identified with the civil rights movement, which promised to restore moral vision to American life, and with the university, which seemed to be a place where ideas could have immediate and beneficial consequences. Unlike the “Old Left” of the Depression era, most Sixties leftists rejected Marxist ideology and the need for well-structured political organizations. And unlike most working-class students, whose urgent desire to find a secure job often shaped their social outlook , middle-class students in the prosperous 1960s were “free” for a few crucial years to reflect skeptically on the gap between the liberal promise of American life and social reality.

The 1962 Port Huron Statement, a founding manifesto of the leading New Left organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), called on America to live up to its highest democratic ideals. SDS urged activists to respond not only to issues of poverty, but also to the problems of modern life, from alienation and bureaucratic impersonality to the threat of nuclear war. “A new left,” SDS proclaimed, “must give form to the feelings of helplessness and indifference, so that people may see the political, social, and economic source of their personal troubles and organize to change society.” Early New Leftists saw the civil rights movement as proof that students, intellectuals, and racial minorities in the United States could spark a transformation of the society. “SDS seemed hip and bold,” recalled Jeremy Brecher, an Oregon student in the early 1960s. “It had an enthusiasm for direct action, an attitude of defiance towards the establishment, and a constant looking for points where change could be stimulated and supported.” From 1963 to 1966, SDS sent groups of students to Chicago, Newark, and elsewhere to organize “interracial movements of the poor.”

The early New Left adopted radical tactics to advance a set of classically liberal ideals. At the University of California, Berkeley, students formed a Free-Speech Movement (FSM) in 1964 when conservative politicians and businessmen persuaded university officials to crack down on campus civil rights activism. Students were outraged when campus police prohibited the collection of funds for civil rights work or the distribution of political literature on campus. In response, FSM activists waged a nonviolent, disruptive, and, in the end, largely successful struggle against paternalistic university officials. FSM leader Mario Savio, who had worked for civil rights in Mississippi, asserted that in Berkeley and the Deep South, “[t]he same rights are at stake in both places, the right to participate as citizens in democratic society and the right to due process of law.”

Conflicts over university governance spread to hundreds of schools, but a fierce debate over the politics and morality of the Vietnam War soon overshadowed campus reform issues. After President Johnson ordered massive air strikes and troop deployments in 1965, a generation of radical students moved into the forefront of the antiwar movement. A few were pacifists who opposed the use of organized violence for any purpose. Others came to sympathize with, and even glorify, the NLF as heroic nationalists. Most agreed that the war—and America’s role as global policeman—violated the ideals of democracy and freedom. Antiwar marches, which had drawn only a few thousand in 1965, rapidly grew in size; by 1967, a million protesters marched in the streets of New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.

For young Americans, the draft stood as a prime symbol of the war. Millions of young men tried to evade it. Some fled to Canada; many feigned physical or psychological problems in hopes of winning deferments; others, on the left and right, used family connections to gain safe berths in the National Guard. A few thousand took public stands as draft resisters, burning their draft cards and challenging the government to imprison them. Catholic priests Philip and Daniel Berrigan inspired a wave of clandestine attacks against local draft boards, in which files were burned or drenched with blood. By the late 1960s, draft resistance—organized and unorganized, overt and covert—was so widespread that the nation’s legal system could no longer effectively handle the flood of cases.

The antiwar movement won thousands of working-class recruits after 1968. By then, nonelite universities such as Wayne State in Detroit, Kent State in Ohio, and all-Black Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had become centers of movement activity. Long hair, marijuana, and rock music spread to factory night shifts, construction sites, and mail rooms staffed by young workers. The radicalization of working-class youths had a direct effect on the military. After 1967, drug use among soldiers and sailors soared, desertions quadrupled, and hostility toward officers took on a political coloration. A growing anti-war mood built in the U.S. military, culminating in the founding of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1967, which grew to number 30,000 GIs at its peak. Peace symbols and Black Power fists appeared on GIs’ helmets. “Almost to a man, the members of my platoon oppose the war,” explained one sergeant in 1971.

The American labor movement was an ideological casualty of the Vietnam War. Leaders of the AFL-CIO were staunch anti-Communists, so they backed the war. But to many student activists, the white working class itself seemed to have bargained away its radical potential. “The next time some .90-an-hour AFL–type workers go on strike for a 50-cent raise,” exploded Berkeley activist Marvin Garson in 1967, “I’ll remember the day they chanted ‘Burn Hanoi, not our flag,’ and so help me, I’ll cross their picket line.” Instead, many activists looked to the Black Power movement or to the Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions for models of how social changed might be instigated in the United States.

Repressive police activity advanced the hothouse radicalism that was becoming characteristic of the late 1960s New Left. While state and local police attacked marchers and harassed demonstrators, an FBI counterintelligence program spearheaded a nationwide effort to “expose, disrupt, and otherwise neutralize” civil rights and antiwar activity. Government intelligence agents joined some radical groups as agents provocateurs whose faux militancy discredited antiwar activism and individual radicals.

The New Left self-destructed in 1969 and 1970. One SDS splinter group known as the Weathermen identified themselves as urban guerrillas waging underground warfare as part of the global struggle against the “Amerikkkan” empire. Between September 1969 and May 1970, police recorded at least 250 bombings that were linked to U.S. radical groups. Campus Reserve Office Training Corps buildings and draft board headquarters were favorite targets. The spate of bombings slowed in 1970 after three Weathermen accidentally killed themselves when a homemade bomb exploded in their Greenwich Village townhouse. Although hundreds of thousands of people, adults as well as students, still turned out for antiwar protests, the New Left fragmented at the very moment when broad layers of the American people might have been most receptive to its political and moral arguments.

The impact of the New Left was cultural as well as political. Millions of Americans sought new forms of community, questioning traditional forms of monogamy and family, suburban life, the headlong pursuit of material possessions, and the value that society placed on scientific rationality and emotional repression. The rise of rock music, the end of many sexual taboos, and the growing use of marijuana and psychedelic drugs represented only the most obvious indications that American culture was in the midst of a great change.

Music was central to the 1960s counterculture. Early in the decade, folk musicians such as Bob Dylan set the tone for the era’s political idealism by reviving such songs as Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” which celebrated a democratic, populist America. By 1963, however, the year of the Birmingham demonstrations and President Kennedy’s assassination, Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” reflected impatience with a liberalism that was turning sour. About the same time, soul singers such as Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin, Motown stars such as Marvin Gaye, and British rock-and-roll groups such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were renewing rock-and-roll’s connection to its African American roots. After 1965, San Francisco bands such as the Grateful Dead, which performed routinely at protest rallies, enlivened the robust Bay Area radical culture. Popular music now seemed to spread the messages of social criticism and possibility. “The music and the world it created,” recalled one former activist, “helped give us a sense that we were defining the culture, and the whole society was following.

The counterculture pioneered a new form of journalism as well. Hundreds of “underground” community newspapers celebrated rock music and the drug scene, publicized movement protests, and experimented with a journalistic style that was intensely personal and highly critical of established institutions. Many of these papers flourished only briefly, but they had a lasting influence on the mainstream news media, redefining the meaning of “news” and helping to open the door for a new generation of investigative journalists.

The impact of the counterculture spread to almost every segment of society. American Catholicism, for instance, underwent a surprising transformation, in response both to the reformist Second Vatican Council of 1962 and to the new social movements of the era. Among the laity, obedience to church authority declined, and as poplar mores changed, millions of Catholics came to ignore church teachings on sexual matters. By the mid-1970s, three-quarters of all Catholics who were polled said that if necessary, they would have an abortion or advise their wives to do so; and in Chicago, two-thirds of Catholics under age thirty who considered themselves pious approved of premarital sex.

The year 1968 witnessed one of dramatic and unexpected events as the nation’s Cold War consensus seemed to break apart. Although the Vietnam War would drag on for seven more years, it had become clear by the end of 1968 that Americans were no longer willing to pay the price of “winning” that bloody conflict. Lyndon Johnson’s presidency disintegrated, Richard Nixon succeeded him in the White House, and modern American liberalism went into sharp decline.

Late in January, during Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, the NLF launched a massive offensive that put its combatants inside almost every Vietnamese town and city. Nightly news broadcasts brought graphic, painful pictures to the American public, including scenes of a gun battle inside the American embassy compound in Saigon. The bitter fighting, which raged through February and March, killed thousands of NLF soldiers. American generals claimed victory, but the Tet offensive actually dealt President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam policy a political deathblow. Until then, most newspaper and the television network coverage had favored U.S. government policy. The Tet offensive shattered that optimistic story line. “To say that we are mired in a stalemate seems the only realistic, if unsatisfactory, conclusion,” reported respected news anchor Walter Cronkite. Thereafter, the news media greeted official government pronouncements with skepticism and gave antiwar activity increased coverage and respect.

The NLF offensive also shook the Democratic Party. Until Tet, party liberals had hesitated to criticize President Johnson; in late 1967, when antiwar Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy announced that he would challenge the incumbent president for the 1968 Democratic nomination, his prospects seemed marginal. After Tet, however, the news media spotlighted McCarthy’s effort, student volunteers poured into his campaign, and he startled Johnson with a near-upset in the New Hampshire primary. New York senator Robert Kennedy, the former U.S. attorney general, sensed Johnson’s vulnerability and declared his own presidential candidacy, calling for a halt to the bombing and a revival of the War on Poverty. In a series of hard-fought primaries during the spring of 1968, McCarthy and Kennedy battled each other and the Democratic Party establishment, demonstrating the breadth of public sentiment that was committed to a de-escalation of the war.

Meanwhile, Tet precipitated a reevaluation of the war by the elite lawyers, bankers, and State Department officials who had presided over U.S. foreign policy since World War II. The war generated disquiet on Wall Street and complaints from America’s allies in Europe. By 1968, the costs of the war had spiraled well beyond those that had been forecast just two years before, superheating the economy, generating inflationary pressures at home, and weakening the value of the dollar abroad. To men such as Dean Acheson, a corporate lawyer and Truman’s secretary of state, the war was an open wound that sapped America’s global strength. Acheson told Lyndon Johnson: “We need to stand back and get our priorities right. Enemy number one is Russia. . . . The vital strategic areas in their proper order are Western Europe particularly Germany, Japan, the Middle East, Latin America—and only then Southeast Asia.”

President Johnson caved in. On March 31, he announced that he would stop bombing North Vietnam, cancel a planned troop increase, and end his reelection campaign. The antiwar movement had split the Democratic Party and forced a powerful president to repudiate his own foreign policy and renounce another term in office. These dramatic developments might well have opened the way for America to make a decisive turn to the left, toward a new foreign policy and a more radical program of social reform at home. Yet 1968 proved to be a turning point that did not turn. Within little more than two months of Johnson’s announcement, the two most visible opposition figures in American politics, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., lay dead.

King was the first to fall. Convinced that the Black movement had to take up the demand for economic as well as political justice, King had gone to Tennessee to help organize support for striking Memphis sanitation workers. Marches, demonstrations, and arrests gave this sixty-day municipal sanitation strike much of the flavor of the early civil rights movement; the slogan boldly printed on their picket signs, “i am a man,” spoke as clearly about the real meaning of the conflict as did the union’s demand for higher wages and a contract. On April 4, hours before King was to lead another mass march on City Hall, a white ex-convict named James Earl Ray shot him from ambush. After King’s death, African American neighborhoods across the United States exploded in riots, signaling a bitter end to the once-hopeful civil rights era.

After helping to lead the mourning for King, Robert Kennedy returned to the primary campaign. On June 4, with enthusiastic support from California Latinx and African American voters, he won the Democratic primary in that crucial state. But after Kennedy made a triumphant speech to California campaign workers in Los Angeles in the early morning hours of June 5, a Palestinian nationalist, Sirhan Sirhan, shot him as Kennedy returned to his hotel room. “I won’t vote,” one Black New Yorker later told a pollster. “Every good man we get they kill.”

The murders of King and Kennedy eroded the sense of legitimacy and democratic fairness that were the prerequisite for the nation’s political institutions to work. They were brought into question yet again at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where liberals within the Democratic Party felt deprived of an antiwar standard-bearer and resentful of party rules that unfairly limited the representation of dissident views. Meanwhile, outside the convention center, Mayor Richard J. Daley encouraged police officers to harass and beat antiwar radicals who were protesting in the streets. Inside, with solid backing from Lyndon Johnson, conservative Democrats, and organized labor, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey captured the Democratic presidential nomination, leaving his party still bitterly divided.

Humphrey’s Republican opponent was Richard Nixon, the former vice president. Nixon was a Republican centrist, an opportunist who was remarkably adept at manipulating the political passions of his era. In a carefully scripted campaign, Nixon denounced the campus upheavals, the ghetto riots, and many Great Society reforms, aiming his message at what he called the “silent majority” of “forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators.” But Nixon also went after the peace vote, declaring that he had formulated a plan—never spelled out during the campaign—to bring “peace with honor” in Vietnam.

Third-party candidate George Wallace compounded Humphrey’s difficulties by stepping into the void that liberalism’s disarray had created. Wallace, a former governor of Alabama, was a Vietnam hawk and a racist who had learned to substitute new code words, such as “law and order,” for the old segregationist cant. At the end of September, polls gave Wallace 21 percent of the national vote; his greatest strength was among Democratic voters in the white South, in the lower middle class, and among blue-collar workers in the industrial Midwest. Wallace attracted many supporters by tapping a deep vein of alienation and social resentment among working-class Americans. He appealed, in his own words, to the “average man,” who was “sick and tired of theoreticians in both national parties and in some of our colleges and some of our courts telling us how to go to bed at night and get up in the morning.”

Frightened by the Wallace phenomenon, the AFL-CIO and other unions deluged their members with leaflets and pamphlets pointing out Wallace’s antiunion, proemployer record. This appeal worked, and Humphrey won the votes of many northern workers who had once favored Wallace. In the end, the Alabamian took only 13.5 percent of the national vote, mostly in the South. Humphrey also won back the support of some on the antiwar left when he belatedly broke with Johnson’s war policy and pledged to halt the bombing of North Vietnam. But Nixon and his vice presidential running mate Spiro Agnew, the governor of Maryland, squeaked through in November 1968, capturing the White House with but 43.4 percent of the popular vote and 56 percent of the electoral college vote.

Richard Nixon sought to diffuse Vietnam as a domestic political issue to give his administration more political space in which to maneuver, both at home and abroad. Like Johnson, Nixon believed that rapid, unilateral withdrawal of American support from South Vietnam would lead to the domino-like fall of all the countries of Southeast Asia to the Communists. His “peace plan” therefore turned out to mean a “Vietnamization” of the war: a slow reduction in the combat role played by U.S. troops, accompanied by the more active engagement of the South Vietnamese military, an intensification of the U.S. air war, and dramatic incursions into neighboring Cambodia and Laos.

The political contradictions that were inherent in this policy were demonstrated in May 1970, when U.S. troops invaded Cambodia. In response to this unexpected escalation, hundreds of American college campuses erupted in the most massive, disruptive set of antiwar demonstrations of the entire Vietnam era. At Kent State University in Ohio, four undergraduates were killed when the National Guard troops fired rifles into a crowd at an antiwar rally; and at Jackson State University in Mississippi, police killed two more students. As hundreds of thousands of antiwar demonstrators converged on Washington, the Nixon administration was forced to announce that U.S. ground troops would be withdrawn from Cambodia within a few weeks. Shortly thereafter, an angry Democrat-controlled Senate repealed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and forbade the further use of American troops in Laos or Cambodia.

U.S. troop levels and battle deaths thereafter declined. From a peak of 540,000 in 1969, the number of U.S. soldiers stationed in Vietnam dwindled to about 60,000 three years later. A new lottery system made the draft more equitable, and the emergence of a smaller, all-volunteer military ended conscription outright. Meanwhile, many high-profile political figures, inside and outside the Democratic Party, began to demand an immediate U.S. withdrawal, a sentiment that had once been associated only with the most radical New Leftists. After 1971, there were no major antiwar demonstrations in the United States.

Nixon’s search for a politically acceptable end to the Vietnam War led his administration to seek the cooperation of China and the Soviet Union in brokering a peace settlement and in reducing tensions among the great powers. Advised by the brilliant but devious Henry Kissinger, who headed Nixon’s National Security Council and later became Secretary of State, the president sought a balance-of-power “détente” with these erstwhile enemies. When he visited “Red” China in February 1972, Nixon seemed to repudiate twenty-five years of Cold War invective against the mainland Communists. The U.S. rapprochement with China soon led to a new set of arms and trade agreements with the Soviet Union, which feared a Chinese-American alliance. The Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, signed by Nixon and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev in a May 1972 Moscow ceremony, did little to slow the qualitative escalation of the arms race, but the agreement itself, which limited the total number of missiles and bombers, ratified elite accommodation, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, to the geopolitical status quo.

Despite the cordiality in Beijing and Moscow, Nixon could not find “peace with honor” in Vietnam, even after years of negotiations in Paris. When Henry Kissinger announced that “peace is at hand” in a 1972 election eve press conference, America’s Vietnamese allies in Saigon objected to any agreement that left Communist troops in the South. Nixon and Kissinger sought to break this stalemate in December with a massive B-52 bombing campaign that, for the first time, targeted Hanoi itself; but little changed, and when the Paris peace accords were finally signed early in 1973, the North Vietnamese military advantage remained intact. The United States won the release of several hundred airmen who had spent years in North Vietnamese prison camps, and the Hanoi government waited two years before launching its war-winning military offensive in the South. By that time, the South Vietnamese no longer had the will to fight, and Congress refused to authorize further bombing or funding for the Vietnamese war effort. As Communist tanks rumbled into Saigon late in April 1975, U.S. officials and their Vietnamese civilian supporters left in humiliating disarray.

What diverse approaches and assumptions have historians brought to studying the Vietnam War?

Richard Nixon had one overriding goal at home: to build a Republican majority based on a new conservative coalition that accommodated the racial and cultural interests of the heretofore staunchly Democratic white South. His administration therefore pursued a “southern strategy” that downplayed desegregation of schools and jobs, sought a more conservative tilt to the Supreme Court, cut back Great Society social programs, and demonized both the New Left and Democratic Party liberals. Nixon appealed to what he called “the silent majority,” seeking a curb on government activism and a return of spending power to the business and political elites that were so influential at the state and local level.

Nixon’s strategy would eventually prove to be a political success, but during most of his first term, it was a policy failure. The Senate refused to confirm Nixon’s first two nominees to the Supreme Court; both Clement Haynsworth and G. Harold Carswell were southern conservatives with a segregationist past. Nixon also could not stop the rapid, court-ordered desegregation of southern schools. The president succeeded in abolishing the Johnson era Office of Economic Opportunity, but Democrats saved many other Great Society social programs. The Nixon administration escalated the government’s clandestine war against New Left activists, but government prosecution of prominent radicals such as Benjamin Spock, Jerry Rubin, and Tom Hayden ended in acquittal or mistrial.

Nixon appointed four mainstream conservatives to the Supreme Court, including Warren Burger, who replaced Earl Warren in 1969. But the Burger Court continued much of Warren’s activist tradition, especially on racial matters. In Alexander v. Holmes (1969), the Supreme Court unanimously decreed that it was “the obligation of every school district to terminate dual school systems at once.” It strengthened this ruling in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971) by ruling in favor of the use of busing to achieve racial balance in the schools. Thus, fifteen years after Brown v. Board of Education, integration was finally becoming a reality for a majority of African American schoolchildren in the South. The Burger Court also struck a blow against discrimination in hiring and promotions when it decreed, in Griggs v. Duke Power (1971), that employment tests and standards that had a “disparate impact” on Black people and other minorities were inherently racist. Finally, in Roe v. Wade (1973), the Burger Court helped to push forward a social revolution by declaring that a woman’s right to privacy invalidated most state laws forbidding abortions.

Because social and economic liberalism remained powerful during the early 1970s, Nixon often accommodated himself to this ideological current if he thought it politically advantageous. He approved congressional efforts to boost spending for Medicaid, food stamps, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children; he also signed the costly legislation that indexed Social Security to inflation and brought impoverished elders and people with disabilities into the system. Nixon even tried to link the interests of the Republican Party to the urban civil rights community when, in 1969, he endorsed the “Philadelphia Plan,” which required construction unions in Philadelphia to set “goals and timetables” for the hiring of Black apprentices when they were employed on government contracts. Within a year, this controversial affirmative action idea was incorporated into regulations governing all federal hiring and contracting, thereby covering more than one-third of the entire national labor force. Affirmative action programs were politically advantageous to Nixon. They appealed to middle-class African Americans, cost practically nothing, and exacerbated tensions between unions and Black people, both of which were core constituencies of the Democratic Party.

Whatever the merits of Nixon’s clever statecraft, American politics, culture, and social expectations still bore the democratic imprint of “the Sixties.” The giant Woodstock music festival in August 1969 and massive antiwar protests in November 1969, May 1970, and April and May 1971 demonstrated that a self-conscious youth culture and a new capacity for political mobilization had spread far beyond the campuses that had first spawned radical thought and action. In the early 1970s, both middle-class environmentalists and blue-collar workers demanded that the country take notice of their concerns. Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and a new women’s movement expanded the definition of full citizenship. The Watergate crisis brought the growing polarization of American politics into sharp relief, making that scandal the last act of the Sixties drama.

The environmental movement, which overnight became a major political force in the 1970s, was an offspring of the nation’s new participatory political culture. Ecological awareness had its roots in the early-twentieth-century conservation impulse that had helped to establish the national park system. However, this movement had dwindled during the midcentury decades when depression, war, and the rush to suburbia absorbed so much energy and imagination. By the 1960s, however, the growth of America’s high-consumption, “throwaway” economy had begun to generate a new environmental awareness, especially among many affluent suburban white people. During the 1950s and 1960s, the California-based Sierra Club transformed itself from a hiking group into an influential national organization that blocked the construction of new dams on several western rivers; and in 1962, Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring aroused widespread public concern about the effect of insecticides, such as DDT, on the everyday environment. Then, in early 1969, a major oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara hit the evening news, with dramatic film of thousands of dead seabirds and blackened coastal beaches. President Nixon signed legislation setting up the Environmental Protection Agency early in 1970. But environmental consciousness truly became a national preoccupation three months later, on April 22, 1970, when hundreds of thousands of Americans participated in a set of “Earth Day” demonstrations.

The environmental movement borrowed direct action tactics from the New Left and resonated with the back-to-nature ethic of the counterculture. Ecology groups held sit-ins and demonstrations but also became effective participants in local politics and Washington lobbying. In the 1970s, environmentalists blocked a new round of urban freeways, stopped development of a noisy supersonic transport plane, and slowed the spread of nuclear power. For many people, this new movement rechanneled some of the passions that had been aroused by opposition to the Vietnam War. “Our life-styles, our industries, and our population growth are leading to the extinction of more and more species, to the poisoning of our air, water, and food,” asserted one group of activists, “This growing destruction threatens the continued existence of the human species.”

Although environmentalists and unionists often clashed over industrial regulation and infrastructure construction in the 1970s, millions of workers also became increasingly conscious of their right to a safe and healthy workplace. The industrial boom of the 1960s and early 1970s pushed industrial accident rates and health problems up nearly 50 percent, and in 1970, the Labor Department estimated that 2.2 million workers were disabled each year from job-related health problems, proportionately far more than in Western Europe or Japan.

Before the early 1970s, neither workers nor their unions had made health and safety top issues. “In the past,” noted one labor official, “the union practice . . . was to trade and barter its safety and health demands for a couple of cents an hour in wages.” “When it came to safety, the older guys would say ‘If you die, you die,’” recalled one construction worker. For other workers, including utility linemen and hard rock miners, the dangers of the work sustained their pride in the skill that was needed to do the job. But these sentiments changed in the 1960s, as male workers could find little “manliness” in being exposed to lead and mercury poisoning, asbestos, cotton and coal dust, pesticides, and radiation. Unions in steel, coal, and oil pressured Congress for health and safety laws.

In response, Congress passed the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), which created a new set of workplace rights and, like the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, helped to legitimize a grassroots struggle. Although OSHA had many limitations, including a cumbersome regulatory mandate, it did offer union activists a new tool with which to assert employees’ rights to a healthy workplace. At the Olin Corporation’s Film Division works in North Carolina, unionist James Reese used his chairmanship of the plant safety committee to confront management over the safe use of many chemicals. Proudly, he memorized the OSHA standards for each. “For once,” he explained, “I had something that they had to listen to. I finally had a law to back me up.”

Passage of the OSHA law caught industrialists unaware, but once they saw how it empowered workers, they lobbied Congress for cuts in inspection funds, exemptions for small firms, and delays in implementation of health standards. Governmental action to ensure safe working conditions proved to be dependent on the extent to which workers in each industry forcefully pressed their claims. In the coal fields, where the respiratory disease known as black lung sickened thousands of miners each year, a dynamic movement led by miners, antipoverty activists, and liberal doctors forced Congress to establish the Mine Safety and Health Administration, which was better funded and more sympathetic to workers than OSHA was; accident rates in the coal fields declined sharply. In contrast, workers in the largely nonunion textile industry gained little from OSHA. There, employers dominated the debate over the extent to which factory cotton dust generated the respiratory malady known as “brown lung”, so textile operatives with disabilities went largely uncompensated by insurance companies and local workers’ compensation boards.

Since the New Deal era, cultural pluralism in the United States had been an important element of the country’s unofficial creed, but in the early 1970s, a multicultural sense of the nation’s ethnic and racial diversity took on a far more tangible reality. Latinx Americans were the fastest-growing minority group in the United States, about 5 percent of the population. Miami was home to more Cubans than any other city except Havana, and more Mexicans lived in Los Angeles than in any other urban place except Mexico City. The Miami Cubans—middle-class, entrepreneurial, and intensely anti-Communist—were among the most politically and culturally conservative of all Americans, but many Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans, especially the youth, had been inspired by the American civil rights movement and the farmworkers’ struggle.

In the spring of 1968, Chicanx (Mexican American) students in Los Angeles and other cities held a series of school boycotts, or “blowouts.” Poor-quality education was a key issue for the whole community, according to participant Carlos Vasquez. “Chicano students became radicalized,” he recalled, “when they asked, ‘Why are our schools the way they are?’” The student protests spurred a broader movement that sought increased power for the Mexican American community. Meanwhile, the same dynamic unfolded across the continent as Puerto Ricans flexed their activist muscles. In Chicago and New York City, the Young Lords, an organization that drew members from urban street gangs as well as from college campuses, proved to be an important catalyst. According to Pablo Guzman, a Young Lords leader in New York, “We tapped an intense nationalistic fervor among Puerto Rican people. In this way we were able to cut across all ages and types and reach a broad segment of the population.”

The pluralistic effervescence of this era also encouraged a movement among Native Americans. By the 1960s, Native Americans' lives had reached a crisis: life expectancy was twenty years below the national average, unemployment was ten times higher, and suicide among Native youths had reached epidemic proportions. But in the rights-conscious spirit of the 1960s, Native people sought not only federal antipoverty aid, but also recognition that Native Americans constituted separate peoples with a distinctive cultural and legal claim to their heritage and land.

In 1964, the Puyallups in the state of Washington held “fish-ins” to protest state court decisions that denied them their treaty-guaranteed fishing rights. Then in the spring of 1969, the Dinés (Navajos) and Hopi attacked Peabody Coal Company mining operations in the Southwest, asserting, as one Diné elder put it, that “Peabody’s monsters are digging up the heart of the earth, our sacred mountain, and we also feel the pain.” Later that year, a group of 78 Native Americans, calling themselves “Indians of All Tribes,” occupied Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, turning the site of a notorious federal prison into “liberated” territory for some eighteen months.

An even more dramatic confrontation came in 1973, when 300 Oglala Lakota (Sioux) seized the town of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, where the U.S. cavalry had massacred hundreds of Native peoples in 1890. These militant, youthful American Indian Movement activists demanded a democratization of reservation governance and U.S. adherence to long-forgotten treaty obligations. Scores of heavily armed FBI agents laid siege, but Native activists held out for seventy-one days before agreeing to a cease-fire and a court trial of the principal leaders. The occupations at Alcatraz and Wounded Knee provided an ideologically charged backdrop to a wave of Native American lawsuits that reestablished land claims and Native institutions from Maine to Alaska. By the 1980s, Native American poverty was still widespread, but no one doubted Native peoples’ claim to cultural and political recognition in a multicultural America.

How did the American Indian Movement resist assimilation and revitalize Indigenous culture?

The women’s movement was by far the largest and most influential of all the social movements of the early 1970s, for it touched almost every fiber of American life. The stunning rebirth of American feminism emerged in part from the New Left’s probing of the political dimension of personal life. As an ideology and a social movement, feminism flourished in the years before World War II. It was reborn in the late 1960s as a result of the merger between the self-emancipatory impulse of the New Left and the political agenda that had long been put forward by an older generation of women reformers.

Beginning in the late 1950s, a small group of well-placed American women sought to achieve equality between the sexes in much the same way that the NAACP used the courts and Congress to fight racial discrimination. Prodded by such veteran liberals as Eleanor Roosevelt, President Kennedy appointed a Commission on the Status of Women in 1961, but women’s issues won popular notice only with the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s best-selling book The Feminine Mystique.

Friedan’s commitment to women’s rights had been shaped during her decade of left-wing union activism in the 1940s, but now she offered an even broader critique of women’s status at home and at work. According to Friedan, a “feminine mystique” stifled millions of women whose suburban imprisonment unnaturally deprived them of creativity, careers, and their very humanity. In 1966, Friedan and 27 other professional women established the National Organization for Women (NOW) “to take action to bring American women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now.” NOW prodded the federal government to enforce the ban on sex discrimination in employment and public accommodations included in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The feminist impulse might have remained confined to these relatively elite women had their ideas not been given a dynamic moral vision and intense personal meaning by the explosion of feminist consciousness within the New Left. Young women joined the political movements of the 1960s with fervor and dedication. But many were dismayed to discover that their male comrades did not think of them as equals. At SDS meetings, remembered one participant, “Women made peanut butter sandwiches, waited on tables, cleaned up, got laid. That was their role.” This gap between radical vision and discriminatory practice drove tens of thousands of young women out of the antiwar and student movements. Bringing with them skills, networks, tactics, and a language for describing their oppression, these young women built an explosive and ultimately massive movement for women’s liberation. As one woman remembered, “In the Black movement I had been fighting someone else’s oppression. Now there was a way I could fight for my own freedom, and I was going to be much stronger than I ever was.”

Flowering in the early 1970s and continuing to grow throughout the decade, the women’s movement sent shock waves into every recess of American society. Hundreds of thousands of women took part in consciousness-raising groups, where they discussed every aspect of their lives, ranging from discrimination on the job to the destructive results of competition over men to failed sexual relationships. Feminists argued not only that men should share in the responsibilities of child rearing, but also that government should fund a universal system of child-care centers. Feminists used petitions, picketing, and legal action to demand wage parity with men and opportunities to advance in professions, such as law, medicine, academia, journalism, and architecture, in which women had been systematically marginalized. The Women’s Equity Action League brought class-action suits against nearly three hundred colleges and universities, forcing them to agree to change their employment and admission policies.

Feminists also sought to change the ways in which women were represented in the larger culture. In August 1968, a group of women startled the nation by disrupting the Miss America pageant, charging that beauty contests encouraged the notion that women were merely objects for men’s sexual pleasure. Believing that language was crucial to the formation of attitudes, feminists attacked the use of such demeaning labels as “chicks” and “girls” and urged women who married to keep their own surnames as symbols of their individuality. Feminists challenged television producers and newspaper editors to portray women in a more diverse and realistic fashion. Arguing that traditional scholarship ignored women, feminist authors wrote women back into American history and demanded an end to gender stereotyping in educational materials.

Feminists frequently linked the transformation of U.S. health care to the campaign for the legalization of abortion. Before 1970, this procedure was illegal in virtually every state. Women who wanted to end unwanted pregnancies were forced to seek out illegal abortions or to self-induce miscarriages; thousands of women died each year as the result of botched operations. Arguing that a woman had a right to “control her own body,” feminists joined population control advocates in lobbying state legislatures for legislation that would legalize abortion. They made slow, state-by-state progress until 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision guaranteed women access to abortions in the early stages of pregnancy.

The women’s movement proved highly controversial, and many Americans resisted both the concrete reforms its activists demanded and the feminist ideology that stood behind them. But most polls in the early 1970s recorded a steady shift in public opinion toward feminist positions on such issues as pay equity, child care, and abortion. The movement spread from the white middle class as African American and poor women made links between racism, sexism, and economic injustices. Even those who rejected feminism embraced the transformations that it wrought. As one secretary put it, “I’m no women’s libber, but I believe women should get equal pay.” Millions of women office workers helped to transform the work culture: they refused to serve coffee to male coworkers, wore pants to work, insisted on being addressed as adults, and demanded the right to promotions and better pay.

The feminist challenge to traditional sex roles also encouraged the growth of a gay and lesbian rights movement. Throughout the postwar years, many men and women had kept their sexual orientation secret, fearful of job loss or public humiliation if they openly acknowledged it. But a dramatic change took place after queer customers of the Stonewall Inn fought back after a raid by New York City police in June 1969. The Stonewall Rebellion sparked a wide range of political and cultural gay organizations and publications. Queer people raised the demand for “Gay Power,” consciously linking their struggle for dignity and sexual freedom with that of African Americans and other “oppressed minorities.” Although transgender men were active in the fight at Stonewall and in the new organizations, they were often marginalized within a movement that prioritized the rights of self-identified gay people.

Much the same dynamic took hold among lesbians. Many lesbians who had long hidden or denied their sexual orientation found that the women’s movement provided them with a broader community in which they could openly profess their sexuality and fight for their rights. Queer men and women denied that same-sex attraction was a crime or a sickness and publicly “came out,” holding marches, pushing for legislation to end decades of bias and discrimination, and calling for “gay liberation.” The effort paid off: in 1973, the American Psychiatric Association ended its classification of "homosexuality" as a mental disorder, and by the mid-1970s, a slight majority of Americans opposed job discrimination based on sexual orientation.

American unions had many things going for them in the 1960s. The AFL-CIO had a cordial relationship with presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and its leaders supported the Great Society programs of the mid-1960s and the occupational health and safety legislation of the early 1970s. The unions enjoyed the longest era of sustained high employment since World War II. Because of cost-of-living adjustments, many blue-collar workers won real wage increases even in the inflationary years after 1966. Most big unions won employer-funded health insurance, higher pensions, and increased vacation pay.

At the same time, a democratic sensibility surged through the nation’s factories. Workers sought respect, equality, and a sense of workplace citizenship from their employers. “The worker wants the same rights he has on the street after he walks in the plant door,” asserted Jim Babbs, a twenty-four-year-old white worker at a Ford plant outside Detroit. “This is a general feeling of this generation, whether it’s a guy in a plant or a student on campus, not wanting to be an IBM number.”

Union leaders faced a rebellious rank and file. Contract rejections, a rarity before 1962, soared after 1965; wildcat strikes reached a postwar high. In the steelworkers’, miners’, teachers’, and postal employees’ unions, top union leaders who seemed too complacent were not reelected. Between 1961 and 1973, every national autoworkers’ contract the UAW signed pushed at least a score of local workers to strike to humanize conditions.

This new working-class mood had its greatest impact among public employees, especially those who worked for the 80,000 units of state and local government. Before World War II, public employment meant secure, high-status jobs, which were often reserved for those with close ties to the city machine or the local ethnic political club. But by the 1960s, civil service employees’ wages had fallen well behind those of organized labor, while overcrowded classrooms, deteriorating public transit systems, and teeming welfare offices reduced the quality of public employees’ work life. Public employees therefore unionized rapidly and sometimes struck. Their work stoppages grew nearly tenfold in the decade after 1965. Because many of these strikes were illegal, public sector unionism had the feel of an underground movement, a consciousness-changing social crusade. In Hamtramck, Michigan, in 1965, junior high school teachers defied state law and staged a twenty-four-hour-a-day “prolonged teachers’ meeting” to force the local school board to recognize their union. Leaders of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) frequently courted arrest and jail during their still-illegal strikes in the 1960s.

The most startling expression of the new militancy erupted in the postal system in March 1970, when 200,000 workers struck urban post offices across the North and West. Postal employees had once been mostly older white males, but by the late 1960s, the workforce in this huge bureaucracy resembled that of the nation. As the Post Office Department mechanized, many of the half-million postal workers bridled under the factorylike discipline. Their strike amounted to a revolt—not only against their employer, the federal government, but also against their own union leaders, who had long functioned largely as Capitol Hill lobbyists. President Nixon countered by sending troops to sort the mail, but the strike succeeded in forcing Congress to raise wages and reorganize the postal system.

Despite growing worker militancy, the labor movement did not hold its own in the 1960s. Unions recruited two million additional members in the decade, largely in public sector employment, but the proportion of all workers who belonged to unions declined from 29 percent in 1960 to 23 percent fifteen years later. Organized labor failed to grow because it failed to link itself to the dynamic social movements that had emerged in those years. On the two great issues of the 1960s—race and Vietnam—unions stood divided and hesitant. While some organizations, such as Hospital Workers Local 1199 and the United Farm Workers, took advantage of the idealism and energy of the New Left and the civil rights movement, no major trade union leader was prepared to give 1960s era radicals the kind of backing Communists and Socialists had briefly enjoyed in the 1930s.

When it came to civil rights, unions were as much a part of the problem as they were part of the solution. Since the 1940s, the trade union movement had been the most integrated major institution in American life, and in the early 1960s, Black and minority workers made up about one-quarter of total union membership. But the AFL-CIO lacked the will to combat racial discrimination within its own affiliates. George Meany, labor’s top officer, disliked socially disruptive civil rights demonstrations, including the 1963 March on Washington.

Throughout the civil rights era, craft unions in the construction trades, which limited membership tightly, remained almost all white. “We don’t take any new members, regardless of color,” asserted one building trades leader. When apprenticeships did open up, many construction workers believed that union cards should go to their sons and relatives as a sort of patrimony, much as in a family-run business. Such exclusionary practices naturally offended urban African Americans, who often saw white workers from the suburbs earning good pay on construction projects just a few blocks from the ghetto. Although the Nixon administration’s Philadelphia Plan targeted discriminatory recruitment patterns among these craft unions, it proved relatively ineffective because a recession in the early 1970s cut employment and intensified job competition between white and Black people.

Racial tensions were not confined just to the traditionally conservative wing of the union movement. An even more ominous conflict emerged in 1968 as the New York City AFT local fought a decentralization plan that offered parents a limited form of community control of the schools. The AFT claimed that Black nationalists who were hostile to Jewish teachers dominated some local school boards, so the new plan would give these activists the power to ignore seniority rights and grievance procedures. Community-control advocates, on the other hand, argued that the AFT was unwilling to share power with African American and Puerto Rican parents and their increasingly assertive leaders. This bitter conflict, which began in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville school district in Brooklyn, generated four strikes in the fall of 1968 and drove a wedge between groups that had long been allies in the fight against discrimination.

Even the UAW, whose progressive leaders put money and muscle behind the civil rights movement, found itself at odds with Black activists. By the early 1960s, 200,000 African American workers made up more than one-fifth of the total UAW membership. They were confined largely to the most grueling work in the most dangerous and dirty departments. Black activists, many veteran union organizers from the 1930s and 1940s, fought Walter Reuther and other white UAW leaders for more African Americans in high union office, a more vigorous union fight against workplace racism, and political power in Detroit. But the explosion of Black nationalism and workplace militancy that swept Detroit factories in the aftermath of the city’s 1967 riot surprised UAW pioneers of both races. Tension declined only after the auto corporations rushed hundreds of African Americans into the supervisory ranks, the UAW hired more Black staff, and the recessionary layoffs of the early 1970s purged Detroit factories of some of their most militant workers.

Vietnam proved just as problematic an issue for the labor movement as race. Under the leadership of George Meany, the AFL-CIO steadfastly defended U.S. conduct of the war, even after business leaders had begun to waver. Meany called opponents of the war a “coalition of retreat,” even though leaders of a number of traditionally liberal unions, such as the UAW, the Packinghouse Workers’ Union, Local 1199, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, criticized the war and Meany’s hawkish politics. In New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, local unions participated in mass antiwar marches; and in 1968, Walter Reuther, who had grown frustrated with Meany’s knee-jerk anti-Communism, pulled the UAW out of the AFL-CIO. With the Teamsters, the UAW formed the Alliance for Labor Action (ALA), which Reuther hoped would revitalize the labor movement. But the ALA disintegrated in the early 1970s, after the Teamsters raided the United Farm Workers in California and endorsed President Nixon for reelection in 1972.

Conflict between the social movements of the 1960s and organized labor was not confined to top-level disputes over foreign policy or civil rights legislation. In his 1968 campaign, George Wallace demonstrated the extent to which white working-class discontent with high taxes, declining neighborhoods, Black militancy, and student radicalism could be turned toward a populism of the Right. In the years that followed, most workers remained liberals when it came to such welfare-state programs as Social Security, unemployment compensation, and job training, and they grew increasingly hostile to the Vietnam War. But on other social issues of the era—affirmative action, school busing to achieve racial balance, a woman’s right to an abortion, and a defense of the symbols of American patriotism—white working-class men grew increasingly attracted to a new kind of politicized social conservatism.

This became clear in New York City on May 8, 1970. Antiwar demonstrators had gathered at a federal building near Wall Street to protest the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. Suddenly, a shining wave of yellow and orange surged through the crowd. A contingent of 200 construction workers wearing bright plastic hard hats and armed with pliers and hammers pounced on the “longhairs.” To the chant of “All the way with the USA,” the “hard hats” roughly elbowed the young protesters aside and returned the building’s flag, which had been lowered to half mast in homage to the four antiwar students just slain at Kent State University, back to full height.

The White House and the conservative leaders of the New York building trades had actually orchestrated the hard-hat demonstration, but a new social stereotype was born: the tough, prowar, blue-collar worker; a hardworking taxpayer who was hostile to African Americans on welfare; a family man who spurned marijuana and the liberation of women. The hard hats seemed to stand for working-class anger and resentment against all the social changes and political innovations of the 1960s. Although white blue-collar workers increasingly opposed the war, they also resented the college students who led antiwar protests and publicly denounced the draft. At issue was not a difference over foreign policy, but class antagonism. Working-class opponents of the Vietnam War hated antiwar demonstrators even more than they disliked the Southeast Asian conflict. One worker whose son was serving in Vietnam lamented the inability of poorer boys to “get the same breaks as the college kids. We can’t understand how all of those rich kids . . . get off when my son has to go over there and maybe get his head shot off.”

The women’s liberation movement sparked similar patterns of reaction and resentment. Many Americans, male and female, felt threatened by the renewal of the women’s movement and its challenge to cherished traditional values. Although increasing numbers of women were entering the paid labor force, most held routine jobs that offered few psychic or emotional rewards. To many such women, the role of mother in the traditional family seemed more likely to provide a sense of security and dignity. Seeing “women’s libbers” as privileged professionals, many working-class women interpreted feminist criticism of traditional women’s roles as a threat to their own sense of self-worth. President Nixon appealed to this antifeminist reaction in 1971 when he vetoed federal support for day-care centers, arguing that they would undermine the nation’s “family centered traditions.”

This new attack on social liberalism and New Left radicalism bolstered support for a conservative movement that had been growing for several years. Although the 1960s are generally remembered as a decade in which left-wing activism characterized the political commitments of a whole generation, ultraconservative groups such as Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) and the John Birch Society had begun to recruit many ardent followers well before the rise of the New Left. They directed their hostility toward the entire legacy of the New Deal and thought even John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon insufficiently anti-Communist. As early as 1961, for example, the YAF drew more than 3,000 people to a New York rally that celebrated antiunion employers, conservative intellectuals, and congressmen whose efforts to eliminate Communist influence in government and the professions had never flagged. Despite his loss in the 1964 presidential election, Barry Goldwater remained a conservative icon, but many conservative activists transferred their loyalty to actor Ronald Reagan, who was elected governor of California in 1966. His denunciations of New Left students and environmental activists won him an enthusiastic following.

President Nixon drew on the energy of all streams of conservatism in his 1972 reelection campaign. His acerbic vice president, Spiro Agnew, targeted radicals, hippies, Black activists, and welfare mothers as the causes of America’s problems. Nixon himself conducted a “Rose Garden” campaign, staying mostly in the White House instead of going out on the campaign trail, to emphasize his personal commitment to world peace and stability. Nixon’s opponent was Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, a staunch liberal who urged the nation to “come home” from Vietnam. But the Democratic campaign proved inept and disorganized, and because of his dovish stance on the war in Indochina, the AFL-CIO refused to endorse McGovern. Meanwhile, Nixon won the allegiance of many former supporters of George Wallace, whose candidacy ended when a would-be assassin’s bullet paralyzed and nearly killed him in May 1972. Nixon easily won reelection with more than 60 percent of the popular vote, including many southerners and blue-collar workers who normally voted Democratic.

Nixon’s reelection seemed to mark the consolidation of conservative power. But his second term unraveled quickly as the constitutional crisis known as “Watergate” ignited public passion and consumed the administration’s energy. The origins of the crisis, which forced a sitting president from office for the first time in American history, were threefold: the rapid growth of unfettered presidential power during the Cold War era; the polarization of the political process that arose out of the debate over the Vietnam war; and the secretive, resentful character of Nixon himself.

Like so many presidents before him, Nixon claimed that in the interest of national security, the White House had the right to take extraordinary action against its opponents. Thus, during his first term, Nixon not only had escalated covert police activity against Black power and antiwar activists, but also had begun using government spies against an “enemies list” of elite journalists, Democrats, and even some dovish Republicans. This mentality soon saturated Nixon’s own Committee to Reelect the President, which took in millions of dollars in illegal contributions and funded a variety of “dirty tricks” that were designed to sabotage the election efforts of their Democratic opponents.

The June 1972 break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex was one of many such actions; this time, however, a security guard caught the intruders, two of whom had been White House security consultants. Nixon’s press secretary dismissed the break-in as a “third-rate burglary attempt,” but the White House’s effort to cover up these illegal activities proved to be Nixon’s undoing. “Play it tough,” Nixon ordered his top aide H. R. Haldeman right after news of the Watergate break-in became public. Nixon arranged to pay the burglars almost 0,000 in hush money from secret reelection committee funds. The president also tried to get the CIA to stop an FBI investigation of the affair, a deliberate obstruction of justice.

The Nixon White House successfully managed the Watergate scandal all through the 1972 campaign, but the cover-up unwound rapidly in 1973. John Sirica, a tough federal judge, was unwilling to let justice stop with jail terms for a handful of low-level operatives, and two young Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, doggedly pursued the Watergate money trail back to Nixon’s reelection committee and his top White House aides. Mark Felt, second-in-command at the FBI, secretly aided them in this effort.

In the spring and summer of 1973, televised hearings by a select Senate investigating committee revealed the White House’s role in an ever-expanding network of deceit and unconstitutional governance. Nixon fired Haldeman and other top Oval Office aides in a vain effort to purge officials whom the Watergate cover-up had tainted. Nixon’s own criminality soon became the central focus of the Senate probe, especially after the stunning news, in July 1973, that the president himself had ordered the secret taping of all conversations that took place in the Oval Office. The White House lost even more credibility in October 1973, when Vice President Agnew abruptly resigned after evidence surfaced that he had accepted bribes and kickbacks while serving as governor of Maryland and as vice president. Meanwhile, an investigation of Nixon’s own financial affairs revealed a set of criminal irregularities in his tax returns. Then, on the night of October 20, after the president’s own two top Justice Department appointees had resigned in protest, Nixon fired Archibald Cox, the Harvard Law School professor he had appointed as an independent special prosecutor in the Watergate matter. This generated a firestorm of public indignation, forcing Nixon to appoint a new independent prosecutor.

Congressional sentiment, public opinion, and the federal courts now turned decisively against Nixon. When the president himself released a heavily edited version of the White House tapes late in April 1974, they proved embarrassing, incomplete, and self-serving. In July, a unanimous Supreme Court forced the release of all the tapes, including a devastating conversation of June 23, 1972, in which Nixon ordered his aides to obstruct an FBI investigation of the break-in. Faced with certain congressional impeachment for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” Nixon resigned the presidency on August 7, 1974. Although President Gerald Ford, whom Nixon had appointed vice president to replace Agnew, soon pardoned Nixon, twenty-five other members of his administration, including several top advisers and the attorney general, served time in prison.

Nixon’s downfall marked an end to the long “Sixties.” The nation’s drift toward what historian Arthur Schlesinger called an “imperial presidency” moderated because the memory of Watergate put in place a set of sturdy warning signals against greater centralization of executive power. Likewise, even after the fragmentation of the civil rights movement and the New Left, the experience of the 1960s left in place a far greater sense of rights consciousness than had existed at any time during the previous century. In law and in practice, at work and at play, for women and men, and among white, brown, and Black Americans, the United States could never go back to the unexamined assumptions that had governed social intercourse and workplace hierarchy in the 1950s and the years before. A new freedom had been enshrined not only in the civil rights laws of the 1960s, but also in the pervasive transformation of American political culture itself. But rights consciousness is not an abstraction; it must have a very concrete social and economic foundation. In the coming decades, the greatest threat to American liberties would come not from an overweening executive or racial bigots, but from an economic earthquake that was reshaping the world of work, both at home and around the globe.