The rise and fall of an international counterculture, 1960-1975

American Historical Review

Volumn 114, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 45-68

  Suri, Jeremi ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 63049134669     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.114.1.45     Document Type: Review

References (81)

1. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963; repr., New York, 1983), 11.
2. Ibid., 33-68. For an insightful analysis of Friedan's writing and advocacy, and the limits of her vision for social change, see Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of "The Feminine Mystique": The American Left, the Cold War, and Modem Feminism (Amherst, Mass., 2000).
3. Adlai E. Stevenson, "A Purpose for Modern Woman," Women's Home Companion, September 1955, 30-31, excerpted at http://www.wwnorton.com/ college/history/archive/resources/documents/ch32-04.htm (accessed December 7, 2008).
4. Quoted in Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 21.
5. On the famous Khrushchev-Nixon "kitchen debate" of 1959, see William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York, 2003), 416-418.
6. See Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 88-130.
7. Theodore Roszak popularized the term "counter culture" in his book The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, N.Y., 1969). My use of "counterculture" draws on Roszak, but places it in a broader historical and geographic framework.
8. See Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000 (New York, 2002), esp. 341-365; Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1998), esp. 275-322; William H. Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America since World War II, 2nd ed. (New York, 1991), esp. 111-176; James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-74 (New York, 1996), esp. 10-60, 375-457.
9. The literature on this topic is, of course, enormous. See, among many others, Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago, 2002); Venita Datta, "A Bohemian Festival: La Fête de la Vache Enragée," Journal of Contemporary History 28, no. 2 (April 1993): 195-213; Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, N.J., 2007), 207-330; Eley, Forging Democracy, 201-219; Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York, 2000); Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York, 1979).
10. For excellent accounts of the connection between cultural criticism in the 1950s and the international counterculture of the 1960s, see Mark Hamilton Lytle, America's Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon (New York, 2006), esp. 44-71, 194-216; Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time: From World War II to Nixon - What Happened and Why (London, 1976), 326-352; Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York, 2005), 390-449; William Jay Risch, "Soviet 'Flower Children': Hippies and the Youth Counter-Culture in 1970s L'viv," Journal of Contemporary History 40, no. 3 (July 2005): 565-584.
11. On the importance of "authenticity," see Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York, 1998). On the alleged suicidal quality of the counterculture, see Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston, 1970).
12. CIA report, "Restless Youth," September 1968, Folder: Youth and Student Movements, Box 13, Files of Walt W. Rostow, National Security File, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, Tex.
13. On this point, see Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (New York, 2004).
14. Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley, Calif., 1980).
15. See especially Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York, 2001).
16. Rudi Dutschkes Tagebuch, 17. Juni 1967, in Dutschke, Mein langer Marsch: Reden, Schriften und Tagebücher aus zwanzig Jahren (Hamburg, 1980), 70; Ingo Cornils, "'The Struggle Continues': Rudi Dutschke's Long March," in Gerard J. DeGroot, ed., Student Protest: The Sixties and After (New York, 1998), 104-112.
17. Gerd-Rainer Horn, The Spirit of '68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956-1976 (Oxford, 2007), 1, 231-238.
18. Gerard J. DeGroot, The Sixties Unplugged: An International History of the Decade of Myth and Madness (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), esp. chap. 1.
19. See Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000); David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Life (London, 2000).
20. Notes of Cabinet Meeting, September 18, 1968, and Attachment A, Folder: Cabinet Meeting, 9/18/68, Box 15, Cabinet Papers, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, Tex. Martin Klimke offers an excellent discussion of these materials and the Johnson administration's views of the counterculture: The "Other" Alliance: Global Protest and Student Unrest in West Germany and the United States, 1962-1972 (Princeton, N.J., forthcoming), chaps. 5-6.
21. Konrad Adenauer an dem Herrn Staatssekretär, December 9, 1960, Ordnung III/50, Adenauer Nachlaß, Stiftung Bundeskanzler-Adenauer-Haus, Rhöndorf, Germany. See also Ansprache des Bundeskanzlers auf dem Festakt anläßlich der 10. Sommertagung des Politischen Clubs an der Evangelischen Akademie, Tutzing, July 19, 1963 (Unkorrigiertes Manuskript), 02.31, 1963/Band 1, Reden, Interviews, Aufsätze, Adenauer Nachlaß; Adenauer Rede in der Freien Universität, West Berlin, December 5, 1958, 16.25, 1958/Band 2, Adenauer Nachlaß; Maria Mitchell, "Materialism and Secularism: CDU Politicians and National Socialism, 1945-1949," Journal of Modern History 67, no. 2 (June 1995): 287-307.
22. Speech by Willy Brandt at the Conference of Non-Nuclear States in Genf, September 3, 1968, Box 288, Egon Bahrs Nachlaß, Archiv der sozialen Demokratie, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Bonn, Germany. See also Bahr Entwurf für Christ und Welt, February 1965, Box 9B, ibid.; Bahr an Brandt, November 15, 1966, Box 352, ibid.
23. Komsomol'skaia pravda, April 27, 1961.
24. "Molodezh ukhodit iz kolhozov v goroda," December 1, 1964, Box 80-1-497, Fond 300, Records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Open Society Archives, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. See also "Molodezh Sovetskogo Soiuza," November 5-6, 1962, Institute for the Study of the USSR, Munich, Box 80-1-497, Fond 300, ibid.; Michael Scammell, ed., The Solzhenitsyn Files: Secret Soviet Documents Reveal One Man's Fight against the Monolith, trans. under the supervision of Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (Chicago, 1995), esp. xvii-xxxv. For a superb discussion of the "Soviet Sixties," see Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2007), 163-191.
25. For the best account of the events in Novocherkassk, see Samuel H. Baron, Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union: Novocherkassk, 1962 (Stanford, Calif., 2001), esp. 1-127. On the legitimacy crisis confronting Soviet leaders in the 1960s, see Zubok, A Failed Empire, 163-191; Jeremi Suri, "The Promise and Failure of 'Developed Socialism': The Soviet 'Thaw' and the Crucible of the Prague Spring, 1964-1972," Contemporary European History 15, no. 2 (May 2006): 133-158.
26. For more on the Cold War "wise men," see Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (New York, 1986). The penetrating phrase "present at the creation" comes, of course, from Dean Acheson's memoirs, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York, 1969).
27. See Students for a Democratic Society, The Port Huron Statement (New York, 1962), esp. 1-9; Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York, 1987); Paul Berman, A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (New York, 1996).
28. Suri, Power and Protest, 213-259; Jeremi Suri, "Détente and Its Discontents," in Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), 227-245.
29. On the role of affluence, not deprivation, in the counterculture, see Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958-c.1974 (Oxford, 1998), esp. 80-95. See also Alexis de Tocqueville, L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856; repr., Paris, 1952), esp. 226-231.
30. Nikita Khrushchev, Special Report to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, February 24-25, 1956, translated by the U.S. State Department, reprinted in Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, intro., commentary, and notes by Edward Crankshaw, ed. and trans. Strobe Talbott (Boston, 1970), 612-613.
31. Ibid.
32. Nikita Khrushchev, "Report on the Programme of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Delivered at the Twenty-Second Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union," October 18, 1961, trans. Soviet Novosti Press Agency (London, 1961), 23. See also Taubman, Khrushchev, 270-299, 507-528; Zubok, A Failed Empire, 123-162; Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev's Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary (New York, 2006), 138-157, 241-262.
33. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, trans. H. T. Willetts (1962; repr., New York, 1991), 178.
34. Zhores A. Medvedev, Ten Years after Ivan Denisovich, trans. Hilary Sternberg (New York, 1973), 4,6.
35. Gregori Baklanov quoted in Cornelia Gerstenmaier, The Voices of the Silent, trans. Susan Hecker (New York, 1972), 67. For more evidence of Solzhenitsyn's enormous influence among Soviet citizens, see Leopold Labedz, ed., Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record, enlarged ed. (Bloomington, Ind., 1973).
36. See James F. Tent, The Free University of Berlin: A Political History (Bloomington, Ind., 1988), 1-176. On the American "magnet" strategy in Europe, see Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, Calif., 1992), 235-237; John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War, rev. ed. (New York, 2005), 64-69.
37. Alexandra Richie, Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin (New York, 1998), 715-716.
38. See Ulrich Chaussy, Die drei Leben des Rudi Dutschke: Eine Biographie (Berlin, 1993); Gretchen Dutschke, Wir hatten ein barbarisches, schönes Leben: Rudi Dutschke, eine Biographie (Cologne, 1996); Bernd Rabehl, Rudi Dutschke: Revolutionär im geteilten Deutschland (Dresden, 2002).
39. Rudi Dutschkes Tagebuch, 17. Juni 1967, 70.
40. Dutschke, "Rebellion der Studenten" (1968), in Dutschke, Mein langer Marsch, 68-69. See also Jeremi Suri, "The Cultural Contradictions of Cold War Education: The Case of West Berlin," Cold War History 4, no. 3 (April 2004): 1-20.
41. Dutschke, Mein langer Marsch, 122, 71-72. See also Gerhard Bauß, Die Studentenbewegung der sechziger Jahre in der Bundesrepublik und Westberlin (Cologne, 1977), 95; Bernd Rabehl, Am Ende der Utopie: Die politische Geschichte der Freien Universität Berlin (Berlin, 1988), 256-268.
42. For some of the many excellent new studies on the connections between civil rights, Black Power, and third world liberation movements, see Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting 'til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York, 2006), esp. 68-94, 276-295; Kevin K. Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006), esp. 244-273; Brenda Gayle Plummer, "Introduction," in Plummer, ed., Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1988 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003), 1-20; Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), esp. 148-222; Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), esp. 135-221; Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, N.J., 2000), esp. 203-248.
43. On the encouragement of the "rebel" image as a symbol of American freedom in the Cold War, see Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham, N.C., 2005), esp. 1-51.
44. This point follows the analysis in Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War. Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge, 2005), esp. 110-206.
45. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston, 1969), 86, 88.
46. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955; repr., Boston, 1966), esp. 21-54, 197-221; Marcuse, Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (New York, 1958), esp. 169-170.
47. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964; repr., Boston, 1991), 12; Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 197-221.
48. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, xli.
49. Ibid., 220-221.
50. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 90.
51. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 63; Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 44-45. See also Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (London, 1984), 174-189.
52. Herbert Marcuse, "Political Preface 1966," in Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, xvii.
53. Ibid., xix.
54. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 89.
55. Marshall Berman, Review of One-Dimensional Man, Partisan Review 31, no. 4 (Fall 1964): 617.
56. For the data on the cross-national increase in crime during the late 1960s, see Ted Robert Gurr and Erika Gurr, "Crime in Western Societies, 1945-1974," http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR07769 (accessed December 1, 2008).
57. Michael Stewart, handwritten diary, April 17, 1968, Box STWT 8/1/5, Churchill Archives Center, Churchill College, Cambridge, England.
58. CIA report, "Restless Youth."
59. On the discourse surrounding the "war at home," see Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s (New Haven, Conn., 1995), 292-336; Tom Wicker, One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream (New York, 1991), esp. 569-648.
60. See, among many recent books, Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao's Last Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2006); Joseph W. Esherick, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Andrew G. Walder, eds., The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History (Stanford, Calif., 2006).
61. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, viii.
62. Quotations from Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley, Calif., 2004), 21.
63. See the excellent analysis of this point in ibid., esp. 196-289.
64. See Suri, Power and Protest, 213-259.
65. See the balanced and evocative book by David Farber, Chicago '68 (Chicago, 1988).
66. See Michael W. Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York, 2005), 162-178; Melvin Small, The Presidency of Richard Nixon (Lawrence, Kans., 1999), 153-183; Suri, Power and Protest, 164-212.
67. People's Daily editorial, March 1, 1968, in Jerome Ch'en, ed., Mao Papers: Anthology and Bibliography (New York, 1970), 152; Simon Leys, The Chairman's New Clothes: Mao and the Cultural Revolution, trans. Carol Appleyard and Patrick Goode (New York, 1977), 106-107.
68. See Dmitrii Volkogonov, Sem' vozhdei: Galereia liderov SSSR, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1995), 2: esp. 41-42; Zubok, A Failed Empire, 192-226; Suri, "The Promise and Failure of 'Developed Socialism,' " 150-158.
69. Richard Nixon, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1969, in Public Papers of the Presidents: Richard Nixon, Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, 6 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1971-1975), 1: 1-2. On the "Silent Majority," see Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, N.J., 2006), esp. 225-323; Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York, 2008), esp. 445-523; Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics, 2nd ed. (Baton Rouge, La., 2000), esp. 324-414; Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York, 2001), esp. 23-117.
70. See "Mao Zedong's Comments on an Article by Commentator of Renmin ribao and Hongqi, January 1969," translated in Cold War International History Bulletin 11 (Winter 1998): 161; "Mao Zedong's Speech at the First Plenary Session of the Chinese Communist Party's Ninth Central Committee, 28 April 1969," ibid., 164-165.
71. Paul Boyer, "The Evangelical Resurgence in 1970s American Protestantism," in Schulman and Zelizer, RightwardBound, 29-51. See also Matthew D. Lassiter, "Inventing Family Values," ibid., 13-28.
72. See Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008 (New York, 2008); James Mann, Awe of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (New York, 2004), esp. 1-149; Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, N.J., 2007), esp. 205-266; Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, N.J., 2005), esp. 234-258.
73. See Marjorie J. Spruill, "Gender and America's Right Turn," in Schulman and Zelizer, Rightward Bound, 71-89; Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman's Crusade (Princeton, N.J., 2005), esp. 212-242.
74. See Jussi Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (New York, 2004), esp. 55-67; Zubok, A Failed Empire, 192-226; Robert D. Schulzinger, Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy (New York, 1989), esp. 52-74; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 272-341; Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, rev. ed. (Washington, D.C., 1994).
75. Richard Nixon, Informal Remarks in Guam with Newsmen, July 25, 1969, in Public Papers of the Presidents: Richard Nixon, 1: 548. For a fuller statement of the "Nixon Doctrine," see Nixon, Annual Foreign Policy Report, February 18, 1970, ibid., 2: 118-119.
76. Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston, 1979), 1254.
77. Ibid., 1255.
78. Memorandum of Conversation, Meeting with Fellows of the Harvard Center for International Affairs, December 7, 1971, Kissinger Transcripts, Digital National Security Archive, http://gateway .proquest.com/openurl?url-ver=Z39.88- 2004&res-dat=xri:dnsa&rft-dat=xri:dnsa:article:CKT00401 (accessed December 1, 2008).
79. Memorandum of Conversation between Leonid Brezhnev, Anatoly Dobrynin, Henry Kissinger, et al., Moscow, October 24, 1974, 11:00am-2:00pm, Folder: 11/74, Japan, Korea,USSR, Box A6, Kissinger-Scowcroft Files, Gerald Ford Presidential Library, Ann Arbor, Mich. See also Memorandum of Conversation between Leonid Brezhnev, Anatoly Dobrynin, Henry Kissinger, et al., Moscow, October 26, 1974, 7:10pm-10:20pm, ibid. These two documents are also reprinted in William Burr, ed., The Kissinger Transcripts: The Top Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow (New York, 1998), 327-355.
80. "Basic Principles of Relations between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics," May 29, 1972, reprinted in U.S. Department of State Bulletin 66 (June 26, 1972): 898-899.
81. See Jeremi Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), esp. 197-248.