Social Movements of the 1960s
Contents
The Rhetorics of '60s Movements
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America in the 1960s
The most active period of social movement rhetoric in the 20th century
was the 1960s. This period roughly begins with a build-up from the Brown
v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court Decision of 1954. This
desegregation decision began the Civil Rights movement. By 1960, multiple
movements are gathering steam in the United States. After 1970 and the
Kent State killings, social movements began to decline and by the fall
of Saigon that ended the Vietnam War in 1975 the most active period was
over. Of course, movements continue to our day just as there have always
been some active reform movements in America. But the most active period
was over.
Conditions Given Voice in 60s Movements
The rhetoric of the 60s movements had several conditions of the society
that it attempted to convert into power for the movement.
- American Apartheid. Despite the ending of chattel slavery in
1865, American culture -- particularly in the South -- had reestablished
a cultural system based in racial superiority. Discrimination against non-EuroAmericans
and even some ethnic EuroAmericans was common social practice established
and promoted by discursive practices. Many movements sought to confront
this system.
- Disparity in Wealth. In 1960, one in five Americans lived in
conditions described by the federal government as "poverty."
Many movements were egalitarian movements seeking to convert this disparity
into support for social change.
- Institutional Terror. In the midst of the Cold War, large amounts
of resources went into building military power. In his Farewell Address,
President Eisenhower had warned in 1960 of a "Military-Industrial
Complex" dedicated to absorbing the wealth of the society into a non-productive
weapons of war. The conditions of quasi-War also encouraged attention to
quasi-military structures within established power structures. Movements
attempted to identify this military power and what they called the diversion
of resources into destructive ends. They depicted "Amerika" as
a militaristic world power, too quick to suppress dissent at home and abroad.
- Materialism. The movements of the 1960s were not simply movements
uniting the lesser endowed classes of American society. The children of
the American middle and even upper classes were eager participants and
often the leaders of these movements. They found that the material satisfactions
of their wealthy status did not produce satisfaction with their lives.
Many movements addressed non-material issues and framed motivation for
movements in alternatives to the central place of materialism.
The Dominant Rhetorics of the 1960s
We focus here on the established rhetorics of the time that formed the
cocoon of discourse within which the movements developed.
- The Rhetoric of the Cold War. A dominant rhetoric supported
the efforts to oppose Soviet expansion that was the Cold War.
- The Rhetoric of Social Engineering. This pervasive rhetoric
controlled the activity of government. It was characterized by: (1) a quasi-scientific
discourse stressing precision of definition and quantification in describing
problems, (2) use of cause-effect logic to locate the cause of problems,
and (3) using carefully controlled and monitored response, by government
or other institutions, to manipulate outcomes and achieve goals. This rhetoric
talked of problems as solvable with understanding, financed elaborate schemes
to convert dissatisfactions into bonafide social engineering problems,
and justified governmental programs designed to manage the problems toward
solution.
- The Rhetoric of Materialism. The mass media was dominated by
consumer oriented narcicism. Advertising attempted to create demand for
ever more elaborate material goods. These focused most intensely on the
American home, the automobile, and clothing or fashion. Consumption was
linked with pleasure and with sexual gratification. Happiness was depicted
in terms of material acquisition.
Remember that the last two of these rhetorics continue even up to our
time. So don't work too hard to understand something extra-experiential
about them. At the same time, they may be hard to sense as rhetorics because
they are so pervasive we think of them as "just the way things are"
rather than as identifiable rhetorics.
The Rhetorics of 60s Movements
Goals of Sixties' Movements
The 1960s were the richest era of social movements since the 1830s.
There were many significant movements active in the decade that dramatically
changed many aspects of American life and altered the direction of American
political activity. Members often were members of multiple movements, but
there were also intense followers of particular causes. Among the significant
movements were:
- Movements for African American identity and power. In two basic
movements -- one for identity and one for integrative power -- African
Americans sought public voice. The Black Power Movement was a search for
a distinctive identity as Black Americans and creating the place for socializing
the common experience of oppression. The Civil Rights Movement sought to
provide access to the ballot box and the economic world that were the sources
of power in established American power.
- Peace Movements. In the midst of the Cold War, with the advent
of nuclear weapons and the stark reality of body bags returning from Vietnam,
a cluster of movements sought to oppose the use of institutional violence
by political power. This cluster began with the "Ban the Bomb"
movement of the 1950s, and with the increased American involvement in Vietnam
gained massive power in opposition to the war.
- Women's Movements. Most dominantly, feminism, this cluster of
movements moved women ought of the privacy of the home as their domain
and into public life. The commonality of women's expreriences became the
basis of an identity movement. The unsuccessful Equal Rights Amendment
movement became an integrative movement for women's access to the economy
and to government.
- Lifestyle Movements. A loosely controlled movement based in
music and lifestyle liberalized the rigidity of American culture, created
multiple new forms of expression, and changed many of the ways Americans
lived their lives from living arrangements to clothing styles. Many of
these movements were about the rules by which communication could be transacted
in the culture. But basic issues of what sort of deviant cultural practices
would be tolerated were also at stake.
- Institutional Reform Movements. From churches to the system
of higher education, the sixties were marked by many movements that sought
fundamental change in the power relationships in institutions beyond politics.
A traditional source of such movements in the past -- labor -- was left
out, but change swept through most of the other major institutions of American
life. Many of these changes were egalitarian, opening the power structure
of the institutions to broader participation.
- Movements for Voice. In the atmosphere of the decade, the attraction
of a crowd and the power of a bullhorn transformed common experiences of
all types into new identities. So strong was the pattern of the social
movement that by the 1980s, even those who had opposed the social movements
of the 1960s -- such as the fundamentalist church -- embraced the form
and sought to enhance their own power and identity by declaring themselves
movements.
Sixties' Movements used diverse media
- Music. The relatively cheap production of phonograph records
and later tapes, and the potential for gathering people at a concert, meant
that music was a important media for this movement. Songs such as Bob Dylan's
"The Times they are a'changin'" were key rhetorical artifacts
supporting 60s movement activities. The joint performance of music was
a powerful ritual uniting members of a movement.
- Mass Rallies. Diverse arrays of speakers appeared at mass rallies.
Voices enhanced by bullhorns and public address systems diffused the words.
Chants of slogans, singing of songs, and call-response (audience reaction
to speeches) provided communicative experiences that united the movement,
developed pride in its power and celebrated the rhetoric that energized
its members.
- Institutional Sites. Two institutional sites were particularly
important to diffusion of the rhetoric of movements in the 1960s. The Black
churches of the South provided an institutional home for the civil rights
movement, and to a lesser extent the Black Power movement. These churches
provided both a public space where meetings and rallies could be held,
and a leadership structure that could maximize the power of the movement
to organize energies of its members. The college campuses were a second
institutional site. This site was important because it provided a concentration
of movement activists, maintained an idealistic commitment to free speech
and novelty of ideas, and a focus for resistance. Unlike the Black churches,
the leaders of colleges and universities resisted the movements of the
60s and in many cases were targets of the movements. But the geographical
and institutional campus was not easily controlled and movements, even
those attacking their administrations, thrived in the atmosphere.
- The mass media of minor importance. Sixties movements did not
generally use the mass media to diffuse their messages. American mass media
were controlled by institutional powers and did not provide access to leaders
of the movements. Even mass media that tried to provide such voice often
selected their own leaders to present to the public at large, and these
leaders often had no authority within the movement. Where the media
were important in movements, was television's ability to disseminate
stark visual images that expanded the limits of "direct" experience
that rhetors for the movement could talk about as a common experience for
their members. For example, a famous photograph of a naked Vietnamese child
running down a road in Vietnam with the flames from an American napalm
bomb burning her flesh was stark image of American use of military power.
Such images, seen by everyone, became a part of common experience and the
stuff of rhetorical proof.
The movements focused discontent well
The movements of the 60s were particularly adept at focusing discontent.
- Discrimination against minorities. Movements succeeded in depicting
the stark brutality of discrimination. Southern political leadership responded
to the Civil Rights movement with strategies of suppression. Violence was
a common response. The images of this response served to support the rhetorical
conceptualizations of the moral bankruptcy of the dominance of society
by EuroAmericans.
- Vietnam War. Teach-ins, demonstrations, and news reports combined
to present an image of American failure in Vietnam. Americans of the time
split on whether American policy in Vietnam was bankrupt because we should
not be involved in their "civil war" or we should not be limiting
the power we used against North Vietnamese aggression, the together these
dichotomous viewpoints created a dramatic opposition to American policy.
The movements succeeded in demonstrating the brutality of American strategy
against civilians and the inappropriateness of the policy to the situation
in Vietnam.
- Urban Riots. The urban riots and the rhetoric which surrounded
them provided a vivid image of the despair of urban life. The riots were
generally not examples of disciplined movements, they were neither disciplined
nor focused on specific grievances, but rhetors for the movements successfully
framed the riots to highlight issues of disparity of wealth, callous materialism,
and patterns of discrimination.
The Movements generated a Rhetoric of Confrontation
The movements succeeded in countering the cooptation and suppression
strategies of the dominant order through three characteristics:
- Physical Confrontation. In both violent and non-violent ways,
the movements challenged the legitimacy of the established orders. Peaceful
lunch hour sit-ins challenged white power, threatened vigilante violence
from resisting white citizens, and would lead to police violence. In the
process, that laws kept people from the simple act of eating at a lunch
counter were demonstrated. Images of Black Panthers patrolling the streets
with automatic weapons and ammunition belts created such fear in law enforcement
that they would invade an apartment in the middle of the night and kill
panthers lying asleep in their beds. Such actions not only prevented cooptation
of members of the movement who felt under siege, they also served a proof
that the movement's charges of militarism and violence against the dominant
order were given validity in the images.
- Rhetorical Confrontation. Such strategies as name calling (calling
police officers "pigs"), polemic rhetoric (a construction of
the established order as the "enemy"), and a totalizing rhetoric
of exaggeration (painting the enemy with a broad brush as if there were
no variation of opinions within the dominant order) polarized agents of
the dominant order and those in the social movement. Rhetorical confrontation
made compromise with the dominant order unthinkable for those in the movement,
and inflamed the agents of the dominant order thus inducing the over-response
of the dominant order in physical confrontation.
- Moralistic Identity. The moral rhetoric characteristic of American
social movements when combined with rhetorical confrontation and the violence
of the dominant order created a moral distinction between movement and
dominant order. Such a dramatic drawing of moral distinction, ofttimes
with the dominant order's own values, gave fervent commitment to those
in the movement. It also made the compromise appropriate in cooptation
seem irresponsible and even wicked.
The perfection of strategies of confrontation in the sixties was a great
power of the movement.
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