The FSM was both unimaginably successful and not by any means successful enough
This past weekend was the 50th reunion of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley. At the beginning of the fall term of 1964, the university administration imposed a series of strict regulations limiting the right of students to engage in political soliciting on campus. Berkeley students had for several years been active in opposing the House Un-American Activities Committee, pro-labor, and anti-racism protests and demonstrations throughout the Bay area. This picture of the university as a hotbed of political activism was undermining the carefully honed image being disseminated by the state of California as the leader in public higher education: in the conservative post-war period, Berkeley was being touted as not only a world class research university but at the forefront of preparing a modern elite meritocratic student body primed for corporate and governmental leadership.
What the university administration failed to consider was the fact that many activist Berkeley students had embraced new levels of commitment to political organizing by participating in Freedom Summer, an initiative by radical civil rights organizations in the South to mobilize black Americans to challenge segregation and demand voting rights. After resolutely confronting white segregationists and racist – often violent – local public officials as full-fledged democratic activists, a university administration seeking to curtail their political expression and ignoring their insistence on the urgency of social change struck these battle-tested students as demeaning and even infantilizing.
Even more decisively, these acts implicated the new model university as the central institution in integrating younger generations into the corporate, hierarchical, expansionist values increasingly driving American society. It suddenly became clear that the degree was being marketed not for any educational value but as a ticket punched to the higher levels of this post-war order and to material success, social status, and a suburban lifestyle widely being identified as the American dream.
University Action Shifted Dynamic, Brought Politics Home
Once the university intervened, in other words, the political dynamic shifted. What had begun as an effort to support other movements for social equity and integration quickly shifted before everyone’s eyes to a demand for the liberation of students and youth and the democratization of the institutions shaping their lives as a prelude to broader social transformation. This is the Free Speech Movement (FSM) whose message spread throughout the U.S. and beyond, catalyzing and exposing generational tensions and revealing the compliance-oriented program of American socialization.
I came to Berkeley as a neophyte, a completely apolitical and uninformed undergraduate, just days before the campus controversies began. And because the events of the next couple of years became the defining experience of my life about which I have written and taught ever since (trying to make sense of it), this reunion gave me an unparalleled opportunity to reflect on and rethink that experience in conversation with this unique community of participants in this defining moment.
The weekend of intensive group discussions, panels, and informal interchange helped me to expand on and fine-tune my (always provisional) conclusions. At the time, the heavily politicized students with developed analyses of American political shortcomings, systemic racism, labor inequities, and foreign adventurism appeared to have come from another planet. They were impassioned and determined which contrasted strikingly with my confusion about the issues, uncertainty about what to do, and doubt that big picture issues even mattered. As I worked tirelessly over the next years to overcome the most glaring deficiencies in my political and cultural education and to formulate a beginning social activist agenda and vision of cultural change, I sensed that this journey I took with many other undergraduates led me to a different place than the FSM activists.
All these years later, I was able through the reunion weekend to gain new clarity about these differences. Long ago, I had divided the alternative Berkeley students (others of course cared more about the Greek system and football, but they went to Cal and not Berkeley) into three, though somewhat overlapping, groups: the committed politicos, the more theoretically minded intellectuals, and the lifestyle experimenters widely called hippies. I found myself drawn to the intellectuals, and while participating in protest activities (and some lifestyle experimentation) I never got intensively involved enough with political organizing to fully discern their orientation.
This weekend, attended overwhelmingly by politicos, was enlightening. The most committed FSM participants were graduate students. Born before or during World War II and coming of age in the late Fifties, their political ideals had been formed not in the just emerging upheavals of the counterculture but in the quiescent era before. Their inspiration, evident in the group sing-a-long late Saturday night of protest folk songs of the Weavers and others and anthems from progressive summer camp and peace school experiences, was anti-McCarthyite and social justice mobilizing extending back to the radical populism of the pre-war social movements.
The expectation was that political organizing was a long, hard, rarely successful march against dominant and intransigent institutions, and few of them were prepared for the collapse of the Berkeley administration’s policies and legitimacy in the face of student demands. These participants, true to their early self-definitions, have since then sustained lives of activism in diverse progressive causes, and these made for great and inspiring stories. At the same time, they have returned to the view that progressives rarely win big, though one can retain the joy of principled fighting against the beast on fronts everywhere and in savoring victories when they occur. One can also take heart from movement solidarity for refusing to buckle as others, perhaps even their own families of origin and so many today, often do.
Understanding the Important Role of Counterculture In Social Movements
And yet, connected with one of the two other groups that only arose with the emerging counterculture after the terrain of controversy shifted to youth politics and the quality of middle class life being portrayed as the universal dream, I could see where the FSM diverged from what came later. The politicos took as their immediate precursors the civil rights and to a lesser degree labor organizing movements, the causes prominent among left activists as they came of age. Occasionally the rhetoric, as with the now deceased FSM leader Mario Savio, identified the particular repressions in the university, yet the tendency was to include students as one dispossessed group demanding a voice with the others. What I gathered from numerous conversations and group discussions is that they did not really appreciate – or perhaps regard as significant – how the counterculture radically altered the political-cultural landscape.
One reason that the Sixties in its full counterculture profusion broke out first (and more extensively) in Berkeley and the Bay area is that this region of northern California had served for decades as a place of immigration for refugees from mainstream culture, beats and bohemians and idealists and iconoclasts of all kinds. It had been evolving a new lifestyle and value orientation, affirming more self-actualizing, self-expressive, anti-bureaucratic, libidinally open, artistic and less workaholic and role dependent lives than the places those arriving had come from.
Once the attack on university rigidities and in loco parentis regulations was successful, the way was cleared for students to begin asking questions about and in turn simply reject the repressively conformist American lifestyle. They now had permission – or were without opposition – in seeking new answers for themselves by experimenting in every aspect of their daily and collective lives. This experimentation became the catalyst for the hippie culture, while the deeper questions about why this presumably freest of presumably all free societies could not handle – or even entertain – the demand of its most educated and aware younger generation for, precisely, genuine freedom gave birth to a new kind of intellectual cohort. This latter group was eager to challenge the reigning assumptions of the industrial age about work, consumption, status, conformity and self-repression as a substitute for freedom and selfhood, as well as to open up the dynamic of post-industrial affluence, automation, declining work, social redistribution, and cultural independence. Moreover, the underlying issue of how and why a self-proclaimed free society had turned out to contain such ubiquitous structures of repression led many to investigate and to interrogate the historical and conceptual roots of the American project. Out of this the Sixties moved into high gear.
In several conversations about the legacy of FSM some of these complexities surfaced. The politicos for the most part were concerned with how a more effective mass movement of the economically marginalized could be organized and broadened to include others such as victims of the prison-industrial complex and the exclusionary voting regulations as well as women suffering from the new attacks on women’s rights. There was little discussion of whether the society this would produce would be a good and worthwhile achievement or simply integrate these groups into the corporate and conformist lifestyle, in large part because these are on-going battles that no one expects to win.
Dominant US Culture Still Stuck In Materialism of the American Dream
The main speaker who addressed the cultural issues and the dangers of mere oppositionalism was Michael Lerner, the founder-editor of Tikkun magazine and one of the leading spokespersons during FSM Lerner discussed the need for a broader positive vision beyond continually reacting to the (endless) venal actions of the corporate-governmental system that would mobilize citizens to a politics of change. He further insisted that a progressive movement needed to address the spiritual crisis of materialism and unfulfilled lives in mainstream America, but did not offer more than a bare outline of what this process would entail. Lerner’s suggestions were thoughtfully received but led to no further discussion.
Since my scholarly and activist work has been dedicated to the psychocultural issues raised by the counterculture, offered a couple of statements evoking the world that the radical Berkeley intellectuals and hippie communards long ago first imagined. I suggested that in thinking about legacies (on everyone’s mind) the FSM was both unimaginably successful and not by any means successful enough. The movement critique pointed out the emptiness of the dream that Americans are induced to crave and consume, and did so in such vivid and dramatic detail that people connected with the vacuum in meaning at a deep level of recognition and self-doubt. This is a challenge which American society has never even begun to rebut, simply (as Mad Men portrays it) selling it more seductively and imposing it more insistently. Americans as a result have since then felt if inchoately the presence of an iron cage, which they live in out of compliance rather than a sense of conviction experienced by citizens in the past.
The burgeoning movement also opened up the possibility of new ways of living a more self-actualizing personal journey and forming more mutually validating communities and institutional commitments than allowed by consumer capitalism. What participants did not realize, having just reached the frontier of a historic social transformation from the industrial to the post-industrial age, is the scale of internal and collective work involved in producing such a new civilization. A more empowered selfhood nurtured by new forms of child rearing as the source of new political, economic, community, educational, and family institutions would have to be evolved through long trial and error.
Because no one was ready for these challenges, Americans of all political persuasions have retreated since the Sixties into the shell of the old ways, which survive now primarily on inertia and fear. This was by no means the fault of FSM or the broad movement of youth and students that followed, but one of the unavoidable consequences of historical transition.
A number of people came up to me afterward and during the weekend to support and add their reflections to these comments. This was immensely gratifying, and suggested a set of issues worthy of pushing forward at the next reunion.
In the meantime, a number of veterans of the struggle that I met related their experiences in new forms of community, particularly in the western states, communities that they live in or had lived in or live near and work with, and I was grateful for the invitations they extended to visit and spend time in these new social experiments. Engaging these evolving dreams and their dreamers, which seemed so palpable as the movement first took wing in a Berkeley that reached to the future, should keep me busy for a while.
Jim Block teaches Political Theory and Political Culture at DePaul University, and writes for truthout and Huffington Post on contemporary political and cultural transformation. He has written two books, A Nation of Agents (2002) and The Crucible of Consent (2012) and is writing a third volume on the emerging crisis of American society in the twentieth century, and lectures and conducts workshops on creating sustainable psychological and social change.
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