> One big part of the explanation for why "the sixties" happened lies in a
> tactical mistake made by the executive to maintain the draft. This
> ensured that every male between the ages of 18 and 27 (I think),
> regardless of their circumstances, faced the possibility of getting killed
> or maimed. What this meant was that the "movement" looked like us. It was
> also completely predicatable that campuses would explode as they did and
> that all sorts of cute young people would be running around carrying signs
> and chanting.
But the 1960s movement began before anyone but a tiny handful of pacifists and Marxists were objecting to conscription. The mass insurgency began with the lunch-counter sit-ins at Greensboro in February of 1960, followed by Nashville, followed a year later by the Freedom Rides, then Albany, Georgia, then Birmingham 1963 with dogs and fire hoses, then Mississippi 1964, Selma 1965, and finally SNCC's "Hell, no, we won't go!" draft refusal sendoff, AFTER the Movement had captured the hearts of millions of [non-draftable] women and men. When I signed the Peacemakers' 1961 pledge to burn my draft card when the number of signers reach 100, we never achieved that total. The first time I picketed against the Vietnam War, when Madame Nhu came to Chicago in 1963, only a handful of protesters greeted her arrival. By the time thousands were burning their cards, my cohort of resisters had become the 1960s movement's third or fourth generation, according to Staughton Lynd's reckoning.
(Also, Halle's belief in the utopian/democratic ["every male" of a certain age] military draft is charming, but false. The "Little Groups of Neighbors" who comprised local draft boards were selected from each community's establishment pillars, virtually all white, overwhelmingly male, and rich, who assured that their class's boys were protected, while the poor, people of color, and troublemakers were drafted. See my 1970-71 pamphlet, 30 Years of Selective Service Racism.)
> When this mistake was rectified under Nixon, my vague memory is-and I
> think there is evidence to support this position-the movement went into a
> bit of a tailspin.
No, it moved toward the working class and oppressed communities. In the early- and mid-1970s, the level of industrial strike activity, both official and wildcat, reached record levels for the U.S. proletariat. People were massively radicalized as a direct outgrowth of the 1960s, which resulted in huge growth of every Marxist organization, radical feminist organization, the Black Workers Congress, and so forth, and the growth everywhere of revolutionary collectives that situated their work in poor and working-class communities and factories. Throughout the latter half of the 1970s, Puerto Rican nationalists escalated both armed and mass struggles for independence to levels not seen since the 1930s. SNCC's first internationalist mass protest was prompted by Oginga Odinga's visit to Atlanta in 1961, as I recall, followed by a 1963 picket against "Chase Manhattan Bank -- Partner in Apartheid," which was ineffectual. But in 1975, workers at Polaroid Corp. massively disrupted their employer's shipments of identity cameras to South Africa, dock workers at Burnside, Louisiana, and Baltimore refused to unload a chrome shipment from Rhodesia, forcing it to leave the U.S. with its cargo, and dockworkers in Mobile turned away shipments of coal from South Africa a year later. These actions were the fruit of 1960s protests, and occurred well after the military draft had expired, as did many other inspiring radical-staffed movements, such as Miners for Democracy.
Ken Lawrence