Students For A Democratic Society Research Articles

A Union for Appalachian Healthcare Workers: The Radical Roots and Hard Fights of Local 1199 by John Hennen

Reviewed by: A Union for Appalachian Healthcare Workers: The Radical Roots and Hard Fights of Local 1199 by John Hennen O. Jennifer Dixon-McKnight A Union for Appalachian Healthcare Workers: The Radical Roots and Hard Fights of Local 1199. By John Hennen. West Virginia and Appalachia. (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2021. Pp. x, 260. Paper, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-952271-24-3; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-952271-23-6.) A Union for Appalachian Healthcare Workers: The Radical Roots and Hard Fights of Local 1199 is an important contribution to the scholarship that examines the complexities of labor organizing. Utilizing both local and national lenses, John Hennen traces the evolution of Local 1199 from its early days as a union for pharmacists and drugstore employees founded in Depression-era New York City through the merger that joined it with the Service Employees International Union in 1989. Hennen positions the members of Local 1199’s chapters in Appalachia as some of the twentieth century’s [End Page 398] most notable organizers of healthcare workers, and he explores their radicalism and local activism. Labor scholars continue to do the work of expanding the discourse and exploring the complex nature of a history that has yet to be fully uncovered. The radical roots and contested origins of both Local 1199 and its early leaders provide a backdrop for its progress as a militant organization. It is important to note that the union’s radicalism was multifaceted. Hennen discusses the communist backgrounds of early Local 1199 leaders. Historically, the interests of communism and unionization have intersected; however, Hennen argues that this association became an obstacle that members of Local 1199 had to strategically overcome. Building on its communist roots, Local 1199 radicalized labor organizing by focusing on the plight of New York hospital workers during the 1950s and 1960s. Hennen asserts that Local 1199 organized hospital workers during a time when it was not customary to do so. According to the author, hospital workers were considered “forgotten workers” by midcentury organizers, and Local 1199 broke down barriers when they began the work of organizing this particular group (p. 18). Hennen positions the student-led activism of the 1960s and 1970s and the civil rights movement as the backdrop to Local 1199’s efforts to organize Appalachian healthcare workers. He chronicles the influence of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), “the most visible, vocal, publicized, and chastised student mass movement on the political left” of the period, and describes how its initial leftist stance on inclusion, equality, and accountability in American government later expanded to include grievances of the American working class (p. 40). SDS and Local 1199 formed new alliances in the mid-to-late 1960s around a shared concern for the plight of working Americans. Hennen also highlights the inextricable links between the labor and civil rights movements by examining Local 1199’s “Union Power, Soul Power” campaign (p. 49). The 1969 Charleston, South Carolina, hospital workers strike, the union’s first attempt at organizing in the South under this banner, and its subsequent efforts to eradicate the ills that plagued the experiences of African American healthcare workers drew criticism for the union’s attention to issues of race. Hennen argues that, despite these attacks, Local 1199 utilized its connections to student-led organizations and the civil rights movement along with the skills, tactics, and ideals ultimately born from those relationships to build successful campaigns for Appalachian workers. Critiques of this project are minimal. Hennen’s work to shed light on Local 1199 from both national and local perspectives is commendable. The author uses a wide range of sources to weave together a narrative about the complexities of local labor organizing in tandem with other broad-based movements of that era. Positioning Appalachian healthcare workers at the intersection of Local 1199’s organizing, student-led activism, and the civil rights movement offers an opportunity to examine the most critical aspects of America’s protest tradition. A Union for Appalachian Healthcare Workers is an important contribution to the scholarship. [End Page 399] O. Jennifer Dixon-McKnight Winthrop University Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

Rewriting the Chicano Movement: New Histories of Mexican American Activism in the Civil Rights Era ed. by Mario T. García and Ellen McCracken

Reviewed by: Rewriting the Chicano Movement: New Histories of Mexican American Activism in the Civil Rights Era ed. by Mario T. García and Ellen McCracken Samantha M. Rodríguez Rewriting the Chicano Movement: New Histories of Mexican American Activism in the Civil Rights Era. Edited by Mario T. García and Ellen McCracken. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2021. Pp. 288. Illustrations, notes, index.) Emerging scholars have reevaluated the Chicana/o movement by grappling with its multidimensionality. Broadening its scope and scale, with a particular focus on obscured actors and elements, Rewriting the Chicano Movement contributes to the conversations brought forth by recent works such as Maylei Blackwell, María Cotera, and Dionne Espinoza's Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era (University of Texas Press, 2018) and Mario T. García's The Chicano Movement: Perspectives from the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2014). This anthology foregrounds how murals served as social statements and shaped movement ideology; the value of testimonios (testimonies) in illuminating New Mexico activism and female leadership in educational reform; how fostering cultural memory, a sense of belonging, and potent symbols are just as valuable as political victories; and the ways public art spoke back against racist tropes targeting Chicanas/os in cinema and television. The articles on Texas further reveal the movement's multiple layers. Mario T. García extends his generational framework to highlight how the 1936 El Paso school strike was a forerunner to the educational blowouts in Texas and California in the 1960s and 1970s. The strike at San Jacinto School is notable for the use of direct action at a time when the League [End Page 596] of Latin American Citizens (LULAC) leveraged court rulings to combat injustices. As García notes, the student walkout refuted the idea that Mexican Americans were passive and inferior. As with the later blowouts, both Chicana/o students and their parents fought to get demands met. This multigenerational approach raises questions about the permeability of activist epochs. Generational cross-fertilization is also reflected in Tiffany Jazmin González's piece on Chicanas in the Texas political arena. Seasoned fighters such as Martha Cotera and Virginia Muzqúiz worked alongside younger activists such as María Elena Martínez and Irma Mireles not only to bolster the La Raza Unida Party (LRUP), but also to demonstrate the importance of the Latina/o vote. González charts Chicanas' interventions in both the Texas and National Women's Political Caucuses (TWPC, NWPC), and the corresponding political capital generated in the Mexican American Business and Professional Women's Association. Contentious fights over representation in TWPC and NWPC ultimately did not deter Chicanas; rather, they galvanized women such as Irma Rangel and María Cárdenas to break down gender and racial barriers in higher education as well as in local and state government. As González rightly points out, Chicanas laid the groundwork for effective Latina political organizing. Chicana involvement in LRUP was central to honing the skills and the political pressure necessary to maneuver the electoral arena. Without such third parties, how limited are Latinas in continuing this political legacy? The other work on the Texas Chicana/o movement in this collection addresses the multiethnic nature of resistance. Jesús Jesse Esparza analyzes the Chicana/o Moratorium in Houston to demonstrate motivations for resistance and to illuminate the strengths and limitations of coalitionbuilding. For many Chicano/a and African American youth, the military draft was a racist and classist system facilitated by the lack of college opportunities and the denial of deferment applications. As Esparza notes, excessive war casualty rates shared among Chicanos and African Americans allowed the two groups to come together and form alliances with White anti-war activists. Under the umbrella of the Houston chapter of the National Chicano Moratorium Committee, the Mexican American Youth Organization and the Brown Berets played a key role in facilitating massive protests, which included African Americans and Whites, in Chicana/o neighborhoods. Aligned with other groups, Chicanas/os were able to amplify their demands and raise consciousness. However, Esparza reveals that the Houston Chicana/o Moratorium waned as the Students for a Democratic Society...

Voice Lessons by Alice Embree

Reviewed by: Voice Lessons by Alice Embree Melissa Hield Voice Lessons. By Alice Embree. (Austin: Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, 2022. Pp. 300. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Voice Lessons is the passionate memoir of a lifelong advocate for social justice, in Austin and at the University of Texas, from 1963 to 2020. Embree’s activism began with 1960s civil rights demonstrations and protests against the Vietnam War, continued in the 1970s in the women’s liberation movement, moved through the 1980s and 1990s with her “working eight to five” (a chapter title) and with neighborhood coalitions, then came to rest with her becoming “a retiree activist” (another chapter title) in the 2000s. Significantly, Voice Lessons is the first account of the 1960s and 1970s in the Lone Star State by a Texas woman who was there. Her point of view fills a gap in the movement narrative, and her book preserves the stories of many activists who have been left out by others. It is also a way for Embree to share her transformative experiences, her voice lessons, with a younger generation. Her first lesson occurred early. Embree grew up comfortably middle class in 1950s Austin with parents who supported school desegregation at a time when there were few African American students in the schools she attended. In 1961, on a field trip with the Austin High School drill squad, she sat in a restaurant with the only two Black members of the squad, who were refused service. As a result, Embree insisted on leaving, and the three left, but no one else did. Shocked that none of the other students or supervising adults joined them, Embree later recalled the event as “an early voice lesson,” one about the need for other voices (29). As a student at the University of Texas at Austin, Embree helped launch and wrote for the underground newspaper The Rag, and joined the newly formed Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), whose members voiced their opinions about issues through direct public demonstrations. In a 1967 anti-Vietnam War rally in front of the Texas Union, Embree was one of six students who spoke out. Administrators put the students on disciplinary probation, thereby sparking the University Freedom Movement and putting Embree “at the center of the storm” (73). UT Board of Regents Chair Frank Erwin labeled her the “Embree girl” when displeased with her (86). She and her partner moved to New York City later that year, where he launched an underground newspaper that Embree named The Rat and [End Page 392] for which she wrote. She also worked for the North American Congress on Latin America, founded by activists who supported the SDS, and through it she met the feminist poet Marge Piercy, who introduced Embree to the New York women’s liberation movement. By 1969, she said, “women’s liberation got very personal,” and when she heard her partner using “derogatory words for women,” her reaction was “volcanic, molten anger” (112). Embree left him and returned to Austin. There she “embraced women’s liberation, and . . . was transformed by it” (117). In 1971, shortly after being among 7,000 antiwar activists arrested in Washington, D.C., Embree and other women, who considered Lyndon Johnson the architect of the Vietnam War, protested the opening of the LBJ Presidential Library by dressing as witches and putting a hex on the library. They were arrested the next day when they continued their hexing downtown. In 1973, she learned how to use a printing press, became a printer, and joined other women to start the Fly-By-Night Printing Collective, which later became Red River Women’s Press. In 1980, Embree married artist Carlos Lowry, a Chilean expatriate living in Austin, and they had two children. To support the family, she worked in the Child Support Division of the Texas Attorney General’s Office and shifted her activism to neighborhood issues, including the “Move It” campaign to move the Austin airport. In 2008, after retiring, she began collaborating on social justice issues with other retirees and young people. In 2017, she was arrested in Austin at a protest of the U.S. Senate vote to repeal the Affordable...

Exceptional Whites, Bad Jews: Racial Subjectivity, Anti-Zionism, and the Jewish New Left

Abstract: It is often assumed that the 1967 Arab-Israeli War led to the "wholesale conversion of the Jews to Zionism," as Norman Podhoretz famously phrased it. This "conversion" is equally, if often less explicitly, said to coincide with the end of the era of Jewish marginality in the U.S. and West more broadly, as Jews of European descent were half-included, half-conscripted, into normative structures of whiteness, class ascension, and citizenship. While this epochal shift in Jewish racial formation and political allegiance is undeniable especially in the context of large Jewish secular and religious institutions, at the time this "conversion" was seen as anything but inevitable. Many Jewish liberals, including Irving Howe, Seymour Lipset, and Nathan Glazer, and reactionaries such as Meir Kahane, saw Jewish overrepresentation and hypervisibility in New Left organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society, the Youth International Party, and the Socialist Workers Party as a sign that Jewish youth rejected Zionism as well as the Jewish rise into the middle class. That retrospectively we see Jewish racial formation and political alignment after 1967 as a fait accompli often relies on the erasure not only of mass Jewish participation in the New Left, but also the erasure of the New Left's anti-imperialist political commitments, including critique of expansive Israeli militarism and the settler colonial assumptions underlying Zionism. Looking at memoirs, pamphlets, histories, and original interviews with Jewish participants in the New Left, this article excavates the political alignments of Jewish New Left activists, exploring opposition to the U.S.'s new support of the Israeli state as well as the changing Ashkenazi Jewish racial assignment. Rather than finding Third World and Black Power critiques of Israel antisemitic, it was precisely the Jewish New Left's politics of international and multiracial solidarity that encouraged their support for Black Power critiques of Zionism. In this way, Jewish members of the New Left also attempted to critically challenge their own whiteness, aligning support for Israel after 1967 with support for the racial and economic structures of militarism and capitalism at home.

Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties

Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties

Recasting the Global South

Recasting the Global South

Haunted Across the Political Spectrum: The Specter of Communism in Two Midcentury American Organizations

Organizations operating in midcentury America experienced a period of relative economic prosperity and global power. While political tensions existed between the United States and the Soviet Union since the culmination of the World War II, when the Soviet Union conducted its first nuclear test in 1949 and then successfully launched Sputnik 1 in 1957, these political tensions became more pressing concerns to American organizations. In fact, the perceived existential threat posed by communism became an observable rhetorical justification for organization and action within the United States. Through the use of corpus linguistics techniques, a comparative analysis was conducted on the foundational documents of the rightwing, John Birch Society and the leftwing, Students for a Democratic Society. Relative word frequencies, collocations, concordancing and statistical analyses were conducted around the use and context of the keyword communism. The results suggest that while these radical and reactionary groups perceived a common threat, multifinality exists in terms of organizational response. This insight is useful to those engaged in strategy development and rhetoric for political and business organizations.

Review Essay: Kent State at Fifty

Review Essay: Kent State at Fifty

Foreigners' Historical Research and Life in the Soviet Union

Foreigners' Historical Research and Life in the Soviet Union Dietrich Beyrau Translated by Georg Wurzer Sheila Fitzpatrick, A Spy in the Archives: A Memoir of Cold War Russia. 346 pp. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2015. ISBN-13 978-1784532956. $29.95. Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Stuck on Communism: Memoir of a Russian Historian. 202 pp. Ithaca, NY: Northern Illinois University Press, 2019. ISBN-13 978-1501747373. $27.95. As a rule, historians do not lead a very exciting life in comparison with other professions, inasmuch as they do not suffer from censorship or other reprisals or become witnesses of interesting events.1 It is more, if anything, about intellectual adventures, about the thrill of researching in archives and libraries, and sometimes about controversy and interpretive authority. Sheila Fitzpatrick, born in 1941, and Lewis H. Siegelbaum, born in 1949, are contemporaries of the Cold War. They developed very different attitudes for dealing with this political constellation, in spite of sympathies for the Soviet Union, or respectively for some Soviet milieus. While the memoirs of Siegelbaum provide a retrospect of his entire life till 2018/19, those of Sheila Fitzpatrick concentrate on her study years in Oxford and her research in Moscow on the topic of the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment under A. V. Lunacharskii (1918–29) at the end of the 1960s. She tells about her life in Moscow in the circle of Igor´ A. Sats, a former collaborator of Lunacharskii, who was on the editorial staff of the journal Novyi mir in the 1960s, and under the care of a daughter of the people's commissar, Irina [End Page 420] Anatol´evna Lunacharskaia. They both helped her with her research into the people's commissariat. ________ To remain "stuck on communism" more than 30 years after its downfall, one must be pretty devoted. Siegelbaum underlines this by referring to himself as a "Russian" historian. (Sheila also calls herself "a Soviet historian" on several pages in her book.) However, Lewis Siegelbaum is a US citizen, and his father Martin was born in New York in 1915 as well. His grandparents were originally from the Pale of Jewish Settlement in Russia and Austrian Galicia. His Jewish origin is of negligible importance for the author: he calls himself a "non-Jewish Jew" following Isaac Deutscher (33). His interest in (Soviet-) Russian history stemmed less from his family's origin and more from his admiration for the Russian Revolution. It was a remote love. This love cannot necessarily be linked to the witticism of Moshe Lewin: according to Lewin, the American Left knew what it disliked—American capitalism; it liked what it didn't know—communism (15). This may be valid for Siegelbaum's teenage years but not for the decades in which he devoted himself to Soviet and Russian history and got to know the reality of communism. His love of communism was closely connected to his lifelong attachment to his father, who was a member of the Communist Party of the United States and was made to pay for this. In the McCarthy era he was dismissed from his position as a schoolteacher and stayed afloat as a sales manager for computer firms. Even after his retirement, Lewis felt dedicated to the ideals both of his father and of Rosa Luxemburg, despite his privileges as a "white male" (168) and scholar, notwithstanding some reservations against the Soviet Union. His leftist orientation meant participation in anti-Vietnam demonstrations in his young years. He was a member of the radical SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and participated actively in demonstrations at Columbia University. The end of Siegelbaum's revolutionary activities was largely due to Stephen Cohen, whom he admired as his mentor and who remained in dialogue with the leftist students. His system-critical and leftist attitude coincided with his later antipathy to the upper-class attitudes of the dons at Oxford University. He had this in common with Sheila Fitzpatrick, who hid her difficulties of adaptation as an Australian and leftist by learning to "mimic the Oxford style" (103). She also descended from a family that was embedded in the leftist milieu in Australia. For Fitzpatrick, this was an obligatory legacy...

A Dialectical Taxonomy of Resistance

Working from Adorno’s notion of negative dialectics, this essay charts a dialectical course of resistance toward a horizon of universal freedom. Rather than propose relations between ideal types of resistance, it emphasizes the ineliminable historical dimensions of not only real-world resistance movements but also the philosophical and political theorizing that attempts to make sense of them. In doing so it brings out certain conceptual relations that emerge or recede as the context of resistance shifts. The first moment considers the dichotomy between reform and revolution, the second moment delves into modes of reform, and the third looks to modes of revolution. Along the way the essay discusses the work of such varied figures and organizations as Rosa Luxemburg, John Rawls, Martin Luther King, Jr., Candice Delmas, Robin Celikates, Kimberlee Brownlee, Emma Goldman, Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground, and the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. In the end, the essay is written in the service of understanding the stakes and presuppositions of resistance, in theory and practice.

The Ideologic Evolution of the Organization “Students for a Democratic Society” in the USA in the 1960s

The Ideologic Evolution of the Organization “Students for a Democratic Society” in the USA in the 1960s

Anarchists, Marxists, and the New Left: Culture and Conflict in Students for a Democratic Society, 1960-1969

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the preeminent organization of the American New Left, is understood by scholars to have led resistance to the Vietnam War up until the split between the Maoist Progressive Labor (PL) and Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) at the 1969 convention. Countercultural anarchist participation in non-student chapters of SDS during the late 1960s, and the organization’s civil rights coalition that included anarchists during the early 1960s, remain under-studied. The New Left’s major project, globally, was the search for new answers to ongoing revolutionary questions by returning to – and reinventing – radical traditions from the past, such as anarchism. This essay argues that countercultural anarchism had a formative influence on SDS’s early history, radical evolution, and coalitions outside the campus, and consequently helped define the New Left as a whole.

A History of Latinx Immigrant Activism

A History of Latinx Immigrant Activism

Meaning in the Use of Freedom: The <em>Free Press Underground</em>, the University of Missouri, and Students for a Democratic Society

The Free Press Underground was an independent newspaper edited and published by University of Missouri students in the 1960’s. Four students were arrested for distributing a February,1969 edition of the paper. One of those students was ultimately expelled. Her name was Barbara Papish. She and the ACLU took the MU’s Board of Curators to court, and ultimately made it to the Supreme Court in 1973. Papish’s expulsion was ruled unconstitutional. A deeper analysis of the historical context surrounding this incident will reveal the ongoing power struggle and antagonism shared between the University and the student publishers, and draw lessons for contextualizing free speech incidents. This will be shown as necessary for seeing the underlying purpose, intent, and meaning buried beneath the oft over simplified struggle for public opinion surrounding morality and freedom, as exemplified by this incident.

Land of Tomorrow: Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism. Benjamin Mangrum. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. x+203.

<i>Land of Tomorrow: Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism</i>. Benjamin Mangrum. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. x+203.

The New Left and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in the United States

The youthful activists who made up the New Left during the 1960s were largely in accord in their opposition to the Vietnam War and their support for the black freedom movement. By contrast, they were deeply divided about how to approach the Arab-Israeli conflict. Some left-wing youth championed the Palestinian cause as another example of support for anti-imperialist struggles in the Third World. Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party (BPP), and famous Youth International Party (Yippie) figures Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin felt this way, as did certain members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Other members of the New Left balked at calling Israel an imperialist oppressor and pushed back, including some in SDS, but also groups like the Radical Zionist Alliance. The result was bitter conflict and invective that was worsened by the fact that left-wing Jews, who were present in disproportionately large numbers in the New Left, were represented on both sides of this issue.

The Past/Present Vietnam War

The Past/Present Vietnam War Roger Chapman (bio) GENE BASSETT'S VIETNAM SKETCHBOOK: A Cartoonist's Wartime Perspective. By Thom Rooke. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015. LOOKING BACK ON THE VIETNAM WAR: Twenty-first Century Perspectives. Edited by Brenda M. Boyle and Jeehyun Lim. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016. Because I'm still in SaigonStill in SaigonI am still in SaigonIn my mind —Dan Daley (but sung by the Charlie Daniels Band), "Still in Saigon" (1982)1 I had to coax Thang and Hau—and later, my other relatives in Vietnam—to reminisce about the war, which had become distant to them. They preferred to focus on the present … —Duong Van Mai, a Vietnamese American (1993)2 [End Page 19] The year 2025 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon and by that time there may be nothing left to say about the Vietnam War. Piles of books have been published on this conflict. As Thom Rooke explains in the preface of Gene Bassett's Vietnam Sketchbook, the books (as well as articles) written about Vietnam "are enough … to fill a C-130 Hercules transport plane" (xi). He should have suggested the larger C-5 Galaxy, but his point is understood as he continues: "It seems that any lesson Vietnam can teach has, in some fashion, already been taught" (xii). Meanwhile, the longest American war is no longer the longest, as it was superseded by the "War on Terror" (specifically the "forever war" in Afghanistan, which in 2019 was in its eighteenth year).3 So lessons taught may have been lessons forgotten, though Heraclitus might say, "No nation ever steps in the same quagmire twice, for it's not the same quagmire. …" It would seem that the events following September 11 would relegate the Vietnam War to the dustbin of academic inquiry, but according to editors Brenda M. Boyle and Jeehyun Lim, in the preface of their anthology Looking Back on the Vietnam War, "renewed academic conversations on the legacies of the Vietnam War … have emerged with the opening of previously inaccessible archives and the comparisons drawn between the Vietnam and Iraq wars" (5). Why that "old crazy Asian war"—to borrow from a classic country hit by Kenny Rogers—has long been a fixation of American culture, including academic inquiry, is a question yet to be definitively answered.4 Rooke's interest in Vietnam turned out to be happenstance. He befriended an older man, Gene Bassett, who in 1965 spent several months in Vietnam as an editorial cartoonist for Scripps Howard News Service. One day Bassett casually shared with Rooke about his seventy or eighty sketches he did while touring Vietnam and Rooke got inspired to put together a book. Rooke attended the University of Michigan, the birthplace of the antiwar Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), but he was of the class of 1978, the first "post-draft" class (xii). He feels that because he was younger, he "was left with a relatively unbiased perspective" (xi). Probably this is less the case than he realizes, considering that his tabulation of "consequences" of the war includes American war dead (60,000) and American wounded (300,000) while offering no tally of the fatalities and casualties of the other side. The volume by Boyle and Lim, however, turns attention to the lasting impact "on ordinary people" (5) or "the people who experienced the Cold War as a balance of terror" (6). Bassett's sketches, it can be noted, do at least include some imagery of the Vietnamese. The chapters offered by Boyle and Lim tend to be heavily focused on the Vietnamese diaspora. In actuality, these two quite different works are emblematic of the approach taken in remembering the Vietnam War. Rooke is focused on the war from an American perspective and seeks to preserve a body of memory—the Bassett sketches are primary documents and represent a reproduction of a type of archival material. Boyle and Lim, on the other hand, narrow "ordinary people" to generally exclude American GIs while seeking to remember the war from the vantage point [End Page 20] of Vietnamese in the years of aftermath. When the...

Political Hippies and Hip Politicos: Counterculture Alliance and Cultural Radicalism in 1960s Austin, Texas

Political Hippies and Hip Politicos:Counterculture Alliance and Cultural Radicalism in 1960s Austin, Texas John A. Moretta* Click for larger view View full resolution University of Texas students affiliated with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) protest the Vietnam War at the Texas State Capitol. Mariann Wizard Papers, di_06907, The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin. [End Page 266] In recent decades, residents of Texas's capital city have been enjoined to "Keep Austin Weird." Although this slogan evades precise definition, it does capture something important about the city's collective identity.1 It has long been a haven for the offbeat, and its progressive politics often put it at odds with much of the rest of Texas. While several recent books have challenged the idea that Austin has lived up to its progressive self-image, especially in terms of racial equality, urban development, and conservation, there is at least some truth that Austin is defined by its "weirdness," even as the city's tech-oriented economy booms and its population swells.2 It is the city Willie Nelson and others put firmly on the [End Page 267] nation's cultural map with the "outlaw country" music scene of the 1970s. However, that scene did not come out of nowhere; it was built on a foundation largely established in the 1960s.3 It was during that decade that the blend of progressive politics and cultural experimentation that still makes Austin "weird" was defined on the campus of the University of Texas (UT), the result of the unlikely alliance of hippies and New Left politicos. UT's hip/radical coalition transcended the antagonisms between these two groups evident in countercultural centers such as the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City and forged an enduring identity for Texas's capital city. To be sure, Austin was not the only college town in 1960s America defined by the blending of radical politics and cultural libertinism. From Madison, Wisconsin, to Norman, Oklahoma, and many other places in the American Midwest and on the Southern Plains, the "prairie power" student movement within the New Left proved to be a more open, less uptight, spontaneous, and more action-oriented alternative to the more doctrinaire New Left traditionalism of the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts—indeed, it also helped to give some of these "heartland" places a progressive identity that still endures.4 But as Austin has grown to be a much larger city than these other centers of "prairie power," it might be argued that its national—perhaps even international—influence and reputation is that much greater. With apologies to Portland, Oregon, among other places, Austin is the "weird city," par excellence. Austinites have fully embraced both their dissident past and current political and cultural singularity, often viewing their city as "a progressive island in a sea of intolerance" and a "liberal Mecca in a desert of conservatism." The roots of the city's eccentricities were planted in the late 1960s when a rebellious and contentious spirit emerged from the radical fusion of the University of Texas's Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and their community's hip counterparts. Together they transformed Austin from a "sleepy, beautiful little town" to a city "vilified by the rest of Texas as the long-haired, hippie, pot-smoking, hell-raising Gomorrah of the Western [End Page 268] world."5 Indeed, for many Austin natives, the sixties and early seventies was the city's Golden Age, a time "Old hippies … blather endlessly about while picking dope seeds out of their dentures. … It was a good time to be in Austin … [when] it was cooler to be a hippie than be in a frat. It was really like what you read about. And it allowed for more weird things to happen … and that gave you time to do something weird."6 The alliance of UT student radicals and Austin's hip community challenges most standard interpretations of the era that contend that SDS affiliates, such as the one at UT, who welcomed the hippies as fellow rebels, contributed to both the New Left's and SDS's eventual demise by...

The Local Is Global: Philadelphia's Weatherwomen Bring the War Home to Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT Local and state histories need not be parochial. This article examines the intersection of Pennsylvania with swirling global revolutionary winds in the 1960s and 1970s, especially the Weathermen (later called the Weather Underground). It further studies how Philadelphia produced a radical pacifist, direct action, prefigurative political impulse within the New Left. Led in the Keystone State by Philadelphia-educated women, or Weatherwomen, the movement intersected with global revolutionary actions. The Weathermen, a splinter group of the Students for a Democratic Society, were the products of a relatively sophisticated and systematic set of transnational revolutionary ideas. Philosophically led by the young French radical Regis Debray and Latin American revolutionaries Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, these globally minded radicals built and promoted a revolutionary program aimed to topple Western liberal capitalism.

Sociocultural Discourse Analysis of the “New Left” in the USA by Tom Heyden: Linguistic Characteristics and Socio-Cultural Viewpoints

Sociocultural discourse analysis is a methodology for studying the use of language for collective thinking. It was specifically designed for studying the talk of children working together in a group in a classroom, but it has also been used for studying talk amongst adults. In addition, the developing analysis was augmented by SD–informed approaches that dealt with discourse data at word-level and that looked to make apparent any patterns across the body of the discourse data. Tom Hayden was a leader of the “New Left” organization “Students for a Democratic Society” (SDS) and an author of their main document the Port-Huron Statement (1962), an anti-war activist, a defendant in the case of “Chicago Seven” in 1968, a lawmaker with 18 years of experience and an initiator of major social, interracial and economic programs, a university professor and an author of more than 20 books of articles, a member of the Advisory Council of the “Progressive Democrats of America”, belonging to the left wing of the US Democratic Party. Hayden began journalistic activities early. We conclude with some comments about the value of this methodological approach for examining professional discourse more widely.