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The Age of Non-Conformity : 1960-1980

Political goals and action consist of a spectrum from instrumental actions, which have the general goal of obtaining power and shaping policy, and expressive action, which has no goal other than to express values. Some organizations are instrumental because they generate tangible social outcomes; they provide services and find innovative ways to address social problems. They may be expressive because they are places where individuals can manifest their beliefs and commitments by engaging in collective, voluntary actions. This dichotomy also captures whether a particular organiztion's function is primarily grounded in the market economy (instrumental role) or civil society (expressive role).

Habermas' conceptual work on the parallel processes of lifeworld colonization and cultural impoverishment, along with his counterweight notion of discursive democracy, offers a foundation for understanding this period. The system world comprises the formally organized social relations steered by money and force. The lifeworld is the shared common understandings, including values that develop through face-to-face interactions over time in various social groups, from families to communities. Perhaps in response to his critics, in his later work Habermas moderated the binary of symbolic and material reproduction and theorizes discursive democracy as an intervention of the lifeworld into the system world. Through public forms of argumentation, opinion can be integrated into institutional frameworks to change them without destroying them. If Habermas is right, social change was not to be achieved in the traditional Marxist terms of class struggle over material reproductive functions, but through ‘new' social movements operating at the juncture of the system and lifeworlds.

A tension between order and liberty is inevitable in any society. The FBI was not just "chilling" free speech, but squarely attacking it. The tactics used against Americans often risked and sometimes caused serious emotional, economic, or physical damage. Actions were taken which were designed to break up marriages, terminate funding or employment, and encourage gang warfare between violent rival groups.

Due process of law forbids the use of such covert tactics whether the victims are innocent law-abiding citizens or members of groups suspected of involvement in violence. In addition to attempting to prevent people from joining or continuing to be members in target organizations, the Bureau tried to "deter or counteract" what it called "propaganda" - the expression of ideas which it considered dangerous. In achieving its purported goals of protecting the national security and preventing violence, the Bureau attempted to deter membership in the target groups.

The former head of the Domestic Intelligence Division described counterintelligence as a "rough, tough, dirty, and dangerous" business. His description was accurate. The FBI's Domestic Intelligence Division initially discounted as an "obvious failure" the alleged attempts of Communists to influence the civil rights movement. Without any significant change in the factual situation, the Bureau moved from the Division's conclusion to Director Hoover's public congressional testimony characterizing Communist influence on the civil rights movement as "vitally important."

As the decade dawned in 1960, gas cost 31 cents per gallon, the No. 1 song of the year was the instrumental "Theme from a Summer Place" by Percy Faith. In theory, Americans were now all "middle-class consumers," with standard expectations. Television, the new vehicle of mass culture, celebrated a modern culture of consumerism. The contrast between wish and reality (the wish for a truly Great Society and the reality of conflict and division) forms an essential theme for understanding these years.

And a two-year-old space agency was launching rockets along the east coast of Florida. Project Mercury already was under way, having launched the first American, Alan Shepard, on a suborbital flight May 5, 1961 -- just a few weeks before the president's bold proclamation. On Feb. 20, 1962, John Glenn lifted off from Launch Complex 14 aboard an Atlas rocket to become the first American to orbit Earth.

The vast cross-continental network of superhighways appeared to connect cities - indeed swept through, around, or over them - without stopping to recognize their problems, character, or differences. Similarly, in both the larger society and smaller domains, there were searches for a unifying common purpose, overlying conflicts and ambiguities. Great leaders defined heroic, rallying causes: John F Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr.

By 1960, the United States was on the verge of a major social change. American society had always been more open and fluid than that of the nations in most of the rest of the world. Still, it had been dominated primarily by old-stock, white males. During the 1960s, groups that previously had been submerged or subordinate began more forcefully and successfully to assert themselves: African Americans, Native Americans, women, the white ethnic offspring of the “new immigration,” and Latinos.

Much of the support they received came from a young population larger than ever, making its way through a college and university system that was expanding at an unprecedented pace. Frequently embracing “countercultural” life styles and radical politics, many of the offspring of the World War II generation emerged as advocates of a new America characterized by a cultural and ethnic pluralism that their parents often viewed with unease.

Yet, as sociologist Michael Harrington demonstrated eloquently in his own best-seller in 1962, the highest mass standard of living in the world was definitely not shared by all. There was "another America": 40 to 50 million citizens who were poor, who lacked adequate medical care, and who were "socially invisible" to the majority of the population. Within this poverty-stricken group were more than 8 million of the 18 million Americans who were 65 years of age and over, suffering from a "downward spiral" of sickness and isolation.

By 1960, the United States was on the verge of major social changes. American society had always been more open and fluid than that of the nations in most of the rest of the world. Still, it had been dominated primarily by old-stock, white males. During the 1960s, groups that previously had been submerged or subordinate began more forcefully and successfully to assert themselves: African Americans, Native Americans, women, the white ethnic offspring of the “new immigration,” and Latinos.

Much of the support they received came from a young population larger than ever, making its way through a college and university system that was expanding at an unprecedented pace. Frequently embracing “countercultural” life styles and radical politics, many of the offspring of the World War II generation emerged as advocates of a new America characterized by a cultural and ethnic pluralism that their parents often viewed with unease.

New Leftists participated in the civil rights movement and the struggle against poverty. Their greatest success — and the one instance in which they developed a mass following — was in opposing the Vietnam War, an issue of emotional interest to their draft-age contemporaries. By the late 1970s, the student New Left had disappeared, but many of its activists made their way into mainstream politics.

By the late 1970s, many activists from the civil rights and Vietnam antiwar movements — particularly the pacifist, religious, and civil disobedience wings - re-directed their political energy into anti-nuclear work - both anti-nuclear power and anti-nuclear weapons. Anti-nuclear activists drew on a host of pacifist, non-violent, and civil disobedience tactics to bear. Many had backgrounds in progressive religious work, and pacifism was both a protest tactic and a personal philosophy. Anti-nuclear protests grew out of the environmental movement and peaked in the 1970s and across political landscapes of the United States.

From the mid 1970s campus activists participated in the national and international anti-apartheid movements. Students and faculty began to protest University’s investments in corporations that did business with the apartheid regime in South Africa. This crucial but now largely forgotten period linked the Sixties-era activism of the New Left and the civil rights movement to the international human rights and antiracist solidarity campaigns of the next generation.