American Experience; 1964; Interview with Todd Gitlin, Sociologist, part 1 of 2

So you've done this a million times, which is looking at me not in camera. Yeah. Gravity's always helpful. But I don't know if I do gravity. The laugh doesn't do gravity very well. Right does gravity really well? Yeah, well. It's a complete absolutist. There's very little to say. So. It's dangerous to say too much. It is. So what do you think? I'll do my best. I see 1964 as the rupture moment between the promise of the early 60s, civil rights, peace, growth of decency, youthful exuberance, hope. And the later 60s bitter were soaked, ferocious, rolling or diving off a cliff. I see August 1964 in particular as the hinge moment when we lurch from one framework,

and a style into another. Cool. That's great. Kyle? Yeah. A little left on the, uh, we're like, um, yeah, you know, so far. I'm just dipping, dipping the towel into the water. Thank you. So it's this hinge. What are the primary cross currents that are kind of, uh, rolling through the culture? Well, the political system had been locked. It had been locked by the alliance between conservative Republicans and Dixie Cratt deep southern powerhouses in the Congress. And that they had been able to forestall civil rights growth.

In return, what they got was a kind of growth stability. That was a grand bargain. Labor was strong, labor, labor unions counted at their peak more than a third of the workforce as members. Uh, capital and labor had reached some, uh, modus vivendi. They were, uh, and little by little, actually, the country was becoming more equal. I mean, for radicals like me, this was an insufferable slowness, but statistically it was the case that the country was becoming less unequal. And, uh, this great development, uh, material development had taken place after, after World War II with the suburbs and, and the gadgets, the appliances and the way of life that, uh, the growth of education.

Uh, so there was this sense under this relatively conservative cover that the country was sedate or sedated, some thought, uh, that the, uh, you know, that the sort of the path forward was clear. Kennedy said at one point when he was president that, you know, the big problems had been solved and what was left was management, what was left was tinkering. And, um, so I'm sorry, I've lost your question in all this. But just because there are these, these political and racial and cultural kind of threats that are kind of going to play a part in this pretty, pretty profound set of changes. Yeah, but I started off towards something and then I lost it. Well, I mean, I went over a cliff. I think it's, I think you have a suit yourself. Yeah. The describe that sort of city, American, just just a sort of sociological picture. Like if you took a snapshot of America in that moment, what, what's it like?

Well, you have an America in which a majority of people consider themselves middle class. They consider that the essential problem, which of course had, had ripped the country on the world apart in the 1930s, namely the failure to produce goods and to align the pockets of enough people to buy those goods. That those problems had essentially been solved. And that what was left were, you know, manageable problems for manageable people to solve. And the, in the prevailing view, America was essentially a white country with some others who probably shouldn't be thought about too much were often the margins where they belonged. It was a men's world. And it was a world which in, it was, it was a world that was dominated by a more or less mannequin division between the powers of good, the powers of light and the powers of darkness in the world. America was the leader of the free world, as was so frequently said. And the dark side was dark. But perhaps it could be tamed if we stayed, we American stayed on the ramparts and properly defended ourselves.

And, you know, sort of slow progress was at least on the surface of things, the assumption. I mean, I think there was, there were undercurrents that were darker, that were apprehensive about the potential for violence incarnate in nuclear weapons. There was anxiety about whether the newly decolonizing world was going to be our pal. There was anxiety about whether there was a point to the accumulation of all these consumer goods and whether prosperity was itself sufficiently animating ideal. But there was something of a consensus, not an absolute concept, but something of a consensus that the institutions were in play, they were in place and in play, which were capable if you just left them alone to do their work of advancing us down the right track.

Great. Great. That's a really good overview. Where were you? And what was, what were you feeling? I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I was in beginning in June of 1963. And through June of 1964, I was the president of a tiny organization called Students for a Democratic Society. I was also a graduate student in political science at the University of Michigan. I was part of the Michigan group who were the core of SDS. I had gone there to be with them. And I was reading a lot of books and chasing my rainbows. What is to jump back for a quick sec? What did Canada's assassination in terms of break?

It was a devastation and hard to fathom. It was a mystery. It was not only a devastation, but a mystery. And if you were in my circle, we spent a lot of time brooding about who might have done this and about dancing bullets and grassy knolls and so on. At the same time, because the succession to the assassination was actually a vitalized wave of reform, it wasn't like the hope was gone. It wasn't as if the promise had evaporated. It was more that there was something unaccountable and uncanny in the world. And that, however blessed you might be, however intelligent you might be, however thoughtful you might be, that there were contingencies that might just rip out of the heavens and blow you out. In some sense, there was a sort of existential threat to the benign rational vision, which was at least on the surface the prevailing ideal.

There was a reminder that devastation strikes out of the blue. So it was a challenge to this sort of incremental rationality, which was the prevailing view. Of course, there were other challenges, including racist violence and so on. But Kennedy, whatever suspicions the left had of him, and whatever hesitations he had made, did seem by November 22, 1963, to have made a choice to accentuate the reform element in his being. And moreover, he seemed to want to end the Cold War and seem quite serious about that. That was a very big concern in the early 60s, and Kennedy had sort of pointed the country in a healthier direction. So devastation was the outcome of the assassination.

Johnson takes over. Lance Leibland didn't suddenly push into this job. And the biggest issue facing him is civil rights. What does he do? He decides, Johnson decides to be the president of civil rights. And to us who were suspicious of him, especially some of our Texan people who had contended with him on the home front, he was a figure of suspicion or even a ridicule. And he was right, by the way, Johnson was right to think he was being scorned because he sounded like a rub from the sticks. There was certainly a snobbish, northern, disdain for his homey ways, folksy ways. Nonetheless, Johnson took the bit between his teeth and ran with it. He wanted to be the president of civil rights. And I think, at the time, we didn't really know just how serious he was about it.

I'm convinced by the scholarship that he was supremely serious about it. Especially after he decided to escalate the war, he seemed to have sided with the forces of stupidity and darkness. And that massively detracted from his magisterial position that he had actually earned as the president who actually delivered civil rights, delivered legislation that Kennedy either wouldn't or couldn't. But in any case, Johnson was an immensity as a force. And when he set his mind to civil rights, he was to use the word de jour awesome. I mean, to read the transcripts, which of course we didn't have access to at the time, but now to read the transcripts of his conversations with senators pulling the strings on them and holding out what are, in effect, bribes and threats to arrange for victorious coalition. To watch it, you know, the way he plays his Dixie Krat friends and wheels and deals, it's breathtaking.

Is there any water we've been given a nice thing of water? Oh, yeah, now you have to warn you not to do that. I once read a description of something similar about the microphysics of cellophane or whatever they call it. You know, that's why that's so noisy. What did that cyclone represent? Well, it was a brush fire might be a better analogy because he's a westernist. Right, burning tumbleweed. Well, it's curious. I mean, I think it was hard to read if you were a mainstream Republican, if you were an Eisenhower Republican or Rockefeller Republican, then you thought that there's something stirring here, which is virtually demonic.

It undermines the consensus, which the leadership of the Republican Party at least since Eisenhower had defeated Taft was the orthodoxy. It was an upheaval. It was a disturbance. It was perhaps a flabbergasting threat to the good order and to reason. At which it was, by the way, not a view different from the view of most Democrats. From the Goldwater people's point of view, this was the beginning of, or this was a long overdue upheaval. This was a sort of the return of the repressed. It was return of the belief that America was essentially a different culture, that it should not be part of the developed world, that it should be the developer, that it was the developed world, that it didn't wear suits.

It didn't ride, it rode tanks, but it also rode horses. It was rugged individualism, which was, in their view, the defining characteristic of the American Revolution, and that which represented the eternal America. For them, for the right, their ability to take over the Republican Party was vindication and ecstasy. I don't always have an extra grind. It was this insurgency chip on their shoulder all the time about the folks back ease to look down on them. This is an old trope in American life. These are the redskins against the pale faces. These are the people who wear jeans against the people who wear striped pants. These are the laterally organized, these are the evangelicals rather than the old line hierarchies.

This is, from their point of view, the real America, and it's the anti-collectivist America, and it's just as scornful of trade unions as of communism. In fact, these are sort of roughly equivalent forces. They were all involved in the great game of suppressing American liberty. Who were your counterparts on the Americans? Young Americans for Freedom was put together at the behest of Bill Buckley. Typically, I mean, you can't imagine a young people's organization on the left being founded at the estate of its prime mover. We didn't have the estates, and anyway, that was far too hierarchical a model for the left. But the young Americans of Freedom were spunky. They shared this sense of that sort of, they shared a sense of that with the left of being muffled, of primal moral virtues, being flattened, being ironed and being pulverized and tamped down.

They felt a commitment to market place economics as they understood it. They were devoted to that. They didn't like uppity black people or beat nicks or, I don't think they had much appreciation for the Rambunctious side of American life. They were going to button down people with intensely right-wing ideas, including the idea that communism had to be bludgeoned into non-existence, and that military means of doing so were advisable. Were they individualists, too, in the same way they shared that with the left, the sense of the corporation or the structure of society was inhibiting this libertarian individual flowering?

Yes, they were individualists in the sense that they were suspicious of a bigness. They weren't on an anti-corporate crusade, and I imagine they supported the status quo in the sense of tax policy. I'm sure they supported tax oil depletion allowance of which oil companies were getting fat. They were not, by any means, hostile to capitalism. They liked capitalism, but I think they were more, or at least my impression, as very much an outsider, was that they were more worked up in their animosities than in their affections. They hated communism. They hated big government, and they hated sort of hip secularism, which was on the rise, and they hated subversives, and anything that smacked of bringing the American century to a premature conclusion.

Vietnam is obviously this huge ticking time bomb. We're going to get through the Tonkin call, but there's this moment when Bundy or McMurray just comes back, and there's a missing of 0.34A, which was this idea of putting pressure on the north by commando rates on the open Tonkin. I was wondering whether there's a moment before Tonkin, whether when some faithful step happens, when some Rubicon is perhaps unconsciously crossed, and there's this faithful kind of slide, or whether it's just slow falling down. I don't know that I completely understand what the military thought it was doing by serving to shelter the South Vietnamese missions up the coast in order to flush out presumably the defenses of the north.

It was that game which is frequent during the Cold War and other such occasions when you sort of send out a scarecrow, you send out a scout, you probe the beehive to see what their flying pattern is. It was something like that, and the decision to press was clearly, I think, for those who knew about it, and of course we didn't know about it until the Tonkin Gulf incident, but clearly the decision to press on the north was a sign that the United States was committed to staying. It was committed to taking initiative, but I don't know that there's a Rubicon moment.

I don't know the military history well enough to know there may have been other such exercises that were designed to keep the offensive up. Why is Johnson trapped so much, even so early in 1964, for example? It's like he gets in the spot and he can't find the door out of the dark room from early on. Yeah, but you see Johnson is trapped by his bad ideas. He had bad, inaccurate ideas about what communism was in Asia. He was imprisoned within the idea that there was a unitary communism. I'm sure he never knew that the Chinese had conquered Vietnam and that they'd been at war for a thousand years on and off. I mean, there's no sign. I don't know if there are any signs that Johnson began to understand that the Cold War was not simply a matter of dominoes either standing or falling.

I think his model of how the world was developing was primitive in this respect. And so that's, I think, why he blundered ahead. He was pursuing the conventional idea, pursuing it with a vengeance. The conventional idea that communism was primarily a military problem, that if you gave him an inch, they'd take a mile. I mean, this is the tragedy of Johnson. Johnson understood that there was a major change that was virtually irresistible in the United States away from the heritage of slavery and toward equality. But he got that. I think he probably got it before he was president. He managed it as majority leader. But in a politician's way, but I think he knew that old age was over. It was finished.

But when it came to the Cold War, and when it came to the, in fact, the larger question of sort of what's what are the dynamics in the world at large. I think he was unable to see the significance of post colonial. Upheavals, I think he was unable to grasp that the economic imbalance in the world was unsustainable. I think he was, he didn't have the political social imagination to quite grasp the meaning of nuclear weapons. I think he was badly cramped in his intellectual horizon. He couldn't give it the treatment. I mean, I was part of what was, you know, what was. Hey, Mike, can you have some scissors? We have one whisker. We have a black backdrop. It just appeared.

He was saying that Johnson couldn't control the world. I mean, I think what he didn't, he was in control freak. And the world was unruly. And so he, he regressed to old imagery, you know, bring back the coonskin on the wall. He thought it was the Indian Wars. And he, whether an analysis of who knew less about their enemy, George W., Iraq. That's hard. Those two levels of ignorance. The war on property. What did it say about Johnson's economic vision? Because this is something he knew the way. Johnson hated poverty. And he had been around it. He had taught Latinos. He was a child of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. He was quite serious. That America needed to be perfected. And that gross, gross inequality was some sort of violation of the fundamental American meaning.

What does it mean when the Beatles come to America? And what made Cassius Clay such an interesting figure in that moment? Well, Rock and Roll had gone through a decadent period of derivative crooning. And so the Beatles represented freshness life. You have to remember, you know, the Beatles represented were more joyous than anything else during this period. I mean, this is, we're not yet to Eleanor Rigby or anything like. So the Beatles are, you know, our jubilation and, and, and, and freshness. You know, we see the 60s so much through the prison of what developed as a result of the acceleration of the Vietnam War.

If you imagine Johnson not having gone overboard in Vietnam and the Beatles arriving represent, I think, a cult of, an insertion of cultural vigor. And yet one more sign of, you know, of American hopefulness and possibility. Actually, I want to, I have a larger statement I want to make. I'll make here and you do with whatever, whatever you want me, that I have thought for years that absent the acceleration of the Vietnam War. We get a very different picture. We, we get a very different 60s. We get, we get a slow, smooth, not smooth sailing, but a, a slowly incremental improvement. We get a more, we get an extension of what used to be called the welfare state in a positive sense. We get a more humane country. We get a more peaceful country. And we do not get a cultural rupture. We do not necessarily get the, the sort of go for broke psychedelic wildness of the latter 60s. I think we get a very different scenario. So thus, if you imagine the Beatles without the Vietnam War, then hey, the Beatles are just, you know, the greatest thing that's come along in years.

And with their musically, with their exuberance, but they're not, they don't point to a new way of life. They're just a whole lot of fun, filling stadiums. And what about Cassius Clay? I don't know what becomes of him absent the Vietnam War, actually. I mean, he might just be a, you know, brilliant boxer, malvy guy, hero, just suspect as uppity to others. I don't know that he becomes a massive symbol of a political cultural change. And even after that, even after the fight with Liston, he says that he becomes a Muslim and the reporters are pushing him out and he says, I don't, I don't have to be what you want me to be. Well, I mean, yeah, but another way of saying that is another way of interpreting that statement is he's saying, I'm going to be who I am and don't think you've got me pegged just because I'm, you know, Mr. Badguy in your eyes right now.

Maybe I'll be Mr. Badguy on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays maybe. I mean, again, I think so much got wrenched in the political transformation that took place in the mid-60s that a lot of people would have been different in ways that are indecisive, had their lives continued under calm or circumstances. Is there a moment I know if there's a pretty important moment for you and SDS in November, you guys make a kind of important decision about Vietnam? Is there something that happened earlier in the year that you can remember or that I've overlooked or haven't looked because I'd love to locate you and your organization early in the story, in fact, narratively, but I just haven't come across a moment. It's obviously not a huge, it wasn't a huge event.

And then you remember earlier in that year, you've become president of the year before? Yeah, we decided at the end of December 1963 that we were going to put an emphasis on organizing the poor. The white poor, the black poor, into an interracial alliance, an interracial movement of the poor. And we set up a number of community organizing projects in about ten cities. I was in Chicago with one of them in the summer of 64. And we tried this and we tried that, and I don't know that I can say we made immense strides forward, but we had decided we needed to light a new fire under liberalism. And liberalism had become corrupted, institutionalized, stodgy, that there needed to be new forces. And the new forces that we're called for were the hitherto unorganized, hitherto disfranchised and marginal. And this could, over time, again, given an incremental scenario, could actually transform the political landscape, could change the political center of gravity.

So we sent, you know, about a hundred people into these community organizing projects. It didn't sound like it's not a large number, but it included a lot of the leadership of the organization. And again, had the war not heated up and called us, this would have been the center of the activity for the new left for the rest of the sixties. Another thing that happened, although I don't think we quite appreciated it until the following year, was that there were rumblings through SNCC, our southern counterparts and heroes, the student nonviolent coordinating committee. That men were dominating women and that this was wrong, unconscionable, and to be addressed. A memo appeared by Casey Hayden and Mary King to this effect was addressed to SNCC.

They were white organizers within SNCC. Casey Hayden had also been intensely involved in SDS. She was from Texas, Mary was from, I think originally from New York, I shouldn't say, I forget where she was from. I think she was maybe from North Carolina. Anyway, they sort of addressed a memo to SNCC organizers, which the next year was revised and published under their names, originally was anonymous. Women are consigned to inferior work, to low value work, they're the coffee makers, and they're not heated. At meetings, they're not valued in the office, they are actually treated in effect as a cast, as a low cast. Well, Stokely Carmichael said at one point in a meeting that the only position for women in SNCC is prune. Most of the witnesses, I've spoken to some of them, think he was kidding.

And that actually he was not the supreme male chauvinist of SNCC. Sounds too. It's not a fact too good to check in a way. Exactly. Like don't trust anybody over 30. It's misunderstood. I mean, I can tell you what we're going to do Berkeley? So why was STS kind of a vital organization in 1964? Why was it vital? Who was drawn to it? And why was it reaching a kind of, it sounds like it was reaching sort of a crossroads this year too, for an identity moment.

Well, STS was smart. It was vigorous. It was moral and brainy at the same time, moralist and strategic at the same time. It had a foot in earlier left wing phenomena in America, but it wanted to be a new left, so it was anti-communist and anti-anti-communist at the same time. It was militant, but not nuts. And it was, I don't know. There's a moment you were talking about Bill Buckley and the House and Sharon came out of here. They issued a thing called a Sharon statement.

Right. Then there's the poor Huron statement. They couldn't be more different. I don't remember. It sounds like it's an echo of the declaration. It's like a press release. But it's Jeffersonian, high, simple, clear, winging general generalizations. And the poor Huron statement is a classic kind of work of the lack at that time. Well, but not quite, because the poor Huron statement begins with a moral declaration of quite grand proportions. I think the power of the poor Huron statement is less in its analyses of the Cold War and automation and this and that. But in its decision to be fiercely, fiercely, comparatively, puristically enamored of small D democratic possibilities and the fulfillment of a vision that overlaps liberal and radical traditions. It's deeply in the American grain.

Yeah, yeah. You try one piece I read about here of yours. You talk about the tension in your generation. The affluence and the terror of loss. The nuclear world you're living in, the strange affluence of that world. How did that play out maybe in this year or in that in that moment? It was in the in the theory of conventional America, we should have been buzzing with excitement about new possibilities. We were going to build new stuff and launch new missiles and watch new television and sing new music. We should be placid and pacified.

But there were these rumbles of anxiety. The Cold War was, at least if you were paying attention, was deeply unnerving. The prospects for planetary survival were slender if you stop to think about them. The dream of chickens in every pot and cars in every garage and so on was just not that thrilling. It certainly was not spiritually reinforcing, spiritually nourishing. And if you were aware of the slaughter that had taken place during World War II, the Holocaust and ongoing wars, it was hard to feel that history was headed toward the pot at the end of the rainbow. I'm going to be some fuzz.

Fuzzing up. Driving around on their bus during 64. Any take on what that tells you about the zeitgeist? Was that 64, the bus? I had no idea at the time. I mean, yeah, you want me to talk about what it meant. If you got an opinion about it? Oh, yeah. I think that there was a wave of rambunctious sort of neo-primitivism. That was associated with drugs, with psychedelics, and which sort of offered a promise of transcendence, of breaking on through to the other side as Jim Morrison was to put it. And Kizzi's book, One Floor of the Cookusness, was quite influential.

I mean, Kizzi gave body to the traditional romantic idea that when the forces in being the combine, as he called it, are suffocating and deadening, then it's the crazies who really have it. It's the crazies who know how to live. Marijuana was moving into the circles of white affluence and it was sort of a challenge to a conventional liberal worldview that order is the nature of things, or at least is the one ideal that can be cultivated. So this wild streak, which eventually flourishes in the hippie universe, is on its way to becoming a big cultural turn.

It's a big social fact, the big cultural fact building. You have to probably be in certain places in Northern California to really get it, or Cambridge, Massachusetts, perhaps, but it's on its way. It's going to surface soon. It's coming. Do you want to put an important collier jacket down? No, it's not.