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The Old Left
- CP, Trotskyists, Socialists, Anarchists
- McCarthyism
Influences
- Baby Boom generation begin reaching college early Sixties not so worried about material concerns like their parents were but with raised expectations about the meaning and purpose of their lives
- Kennedy's "New Frontiers" rhetoric helps to raise these expectations -- "A new generation"; "Ask not what your country can do for you; Ask what you can do for your country."; Peace Corps
- The Civil Rights Movement
- Ban the Bomb Movement, SANE, War Resisters League
- I. F. Stone's "Weekly"
- Paul Goodman's "Growing Up Absurd"
- C. Wright Mills's "The Power Elite", "Listen Yankee"
- William Appleman Williams and revisionist Cold War historiography
- Independent socialism -- "The National Guardian", "Monthly Review", "Liberation"
- A different kind of Marxism: The Young Marx (alienation); Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School
- The Cuban Revolution (1956-59)
- The Beats, existentialism, Folk Music
The Ice Begins to Break
- first mass anti-HUAC demonstration (1960) -- with students
- HUAC "Operation Abolition" movie backfires and attracts students, youth to the Bay Area
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
- founded 1960 -- Old Left socialist roots (League for Industrial Democracy)
- "Port Huron Statement" (1962) -- Tom Hayden
- direct or participatory democracy
- students rather than workers as a possible "vanguard"; the power of a determined minority with right on its side
- critique of Cold War liberalism, the Old Left; break from anti-communism
The Free Speech Movement (1964-65)
- support for SNCC at Berkeley leads to broadbased Free Speech uprising
- students who have been supporting blacks against racism begin to feel themselves as an oppressed group, too; in loco parentis
- Mario Savio
Community Organizing (1964 -65)
- SNCC to white supporters: "organize your own communities"
- SDS's 1st generation leaves campus organizing
- Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) - Newark, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia and other northern cities
Antiwar Movement and Radicalization (1965)
- disillusionment with working through the System after Atlantic City convention; influence of SNCC moving to a more radical position; Watts Riot
- Lyndon Johnson's congressional ticket for a widened war in Southeast Asia: Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (August 7, 1964)
- 1st major bombing of North Vietnam (Operation Rolling Thunder) begins (February 11, 1965)
- 1st U.S. combat units arrive at Danang (March 1965)
- 1st big antiwar march on Washington (November 27, 1965)
- "Naming the System" (Paul Potter)
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