FREE4ALL, Part 19: A Time For Choosing

Fact Check: The revolution was televised.

It was filmed and broadcast into homes throughout the nation.

The revolution was captured in audio, and discussed on the radio. And the revolution was reported in local papers. More frequently with each passing year.

What did Americans think of the revolution unfolding around them? Most were, at best, concerned by what they saw. Many were horrified.

A few years earlier, you had probably seen news reports about non-violent protests against racial segregation in the South. And that led to major legislation: the Civil Right Act of 1964. But now you see students all across the nation protesting every aspect about the country. Including education itself.

There are newspaper stories about students burning books. More and more stories about the spread of marijuana on college campuses. And not long after, of LSD.

What had happened to the country? Why did everything suddenly go nuts?

These concerned citizens wanted answers. But more importantly, they wanted solutions. And some key political figures rose to power based on their vows to quell the spreading chaos.

And some key political figures rose to power based on their vows to quell the spreading chaos.

Put To the Test

In December, 1964, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement organized a sit-in protest inside Sproul Hall on Berkeley campus.

Once the campus closed for the night, the police were called in to address the situation, though they were unsure of how to proceed. Reporters showed up and carried news of the demonstration, which prompted state officials to plead with the governor to resolve the matter.

Given that UC Berkeley was the very first campus that had erupted into protests, it’s not surprising that the new student movement’s first arch-nemesis rose to political prominence based on the unrest there.

Interestingly, this nemesis came from Hollywood.

This was Ronald Reagan.

Reagan had been eyeing a political career for some time. After Barry Goldwater had published The Conscience of a Conservative in 1960, Reagan was inspired to fight against the many regulations of federal New Deal policies. But it was the Berkeley protests that gave him a path to power.

“We jumped on [student unrest] as an issue,” his PR specialist later recalled. “I think Reagan escalated it into an issue and it started showing up in the polls.”

Regan painted the problem as stemming from poor leadership. California’s governor and its university administration were just too darn liberal, he argued. The students were being coddled, and so they threw tantrums. Someone had to step in and bring order, and that someone was Ronald Reagan.

“This has been allowed to go on in the name of academic freedom. What in heaven’s name does academic freedom have to do with rioting? With anarchy? With attempts to destroy the primary purpose of the University, which is to educate our young people?”

That November, governor Pat Brown was defeated in a landslide.

In 1966, California residents paid about $200 per year in fees. When Reagan left office in 1974, the fees had tripled, and they’d go up and up from there.

Reagan’s first move in office was to force a vote to dismiss UC California’s president Clark Kerr.

Soon enough, the new governor set his sights on the crown jewel of Kerr’s legacy: free admission and tuition to all California residents. First he tried to raise tuition outright, proposing that the extra money go to a tax refund. When this attempt failed, Reagan put his focus on student registration fees, steadily increasing them to exorbitant levels.

In 1966, California residents paid about $200 per year in fees. When Reagan left office in 1974, the fees had tripled, and they’d go up and up from there.

Harsh stuff, to be sure. Yet there was a logic behind Reagan’s actions. A logic that his constituents understood perfectly.

Yet the recipients of those funds eventually rose up against their elders. They rose up against the military. Against capitalism. And everyday culture. And even against school itself.

In other words: the national project of higher education had broken down. Is it surprising that many investors sought to pull the funds? It makes perfect sense. Action, meet reaction.

The Right: -> To Vote

Once Lyndon Johnson increased military operations in Vietnam, students everywhere began to protest the war, and the president himself.

Johnson had won in a landslide in 1964, and was praised by the left for his historic role in securing civil rights for black Americans.

His vice president, Hubert Humphrey, ran in his place. He too was stymied due to his association with the war. The Students for a Democratic Society and other activist groups protested outside the Democratic National Convention that year. The crowds and the police there famously erupted into a riot after a protester attempted to lower an American flag at a park nearby.

Plenty of people did grudgingly vote for Humphrey in the end, but not enough. The election was won by Richard Nixon, the former vice president to Eisenhower. This man sought to escalate operations in Vietnam, saying that force was the best way to end the war. And he did exactly that once in power.

The students’ anger at President Johnson’s foreign policy decisions had been righteous, but suddenly, their worst nightmares had come true. Too late, they would learn that perfect is often the enemy of the good. And passionate ideals die whimpering in the face of cold, implacable strategy.

Like Reagan, Nixon seemed to relish his conflicts with protestors. They provided a useful enemy to rally supporters to his side.

This second group was mostly blue collar, outraged that these privileged, pampered youths would so flagrantly disrespect their own country. The race and class dimensions of our national cultural war were starting to line up

As the war dragged on, and especially once Nixon entered office, student activist groups became more radicalized. The SDS broke into rival factions, divided on whether to use violence to further their agenda.

Such mutual ramping up of student and state violence not surprisingly culminated in tragedy. The most infamous of which were the shootings at Kent State University on May 4, 1970.

Like many other demonstrations of this era, back-and-forth altercations with police at the Kent State campus eventually erupted into a violent conflict. Reagan had dealt with such unrest at Berkeley, and was the first governor to call the national guard to a campus protest to bring order. Other governors followed suit for campus unrest in their own states, including Ohio’s Jim Rhodes.

But despite the appalling legal precedent the Kent State shootings set, most other Americans thought that the fault lie with the protestors, not the guardsmen. The students had lost their minds to radical, subversive causes, and something needed to happen to bring them back in line. Maybe drastic measures were necessary to do so.

And unlike the student protestors, Nixon’s supporters were more than happy to vote with their ballots as well as with their feet. They would continue to do so.

Left In the Dust

As for what measures would actually bring order, most blue-collar voters supported notions like tougher policing. But the business elites had other, grander plans to deal with this New Left revolution.

James McGill Buchanan was a respected professor of economics, and he taught at UCLA from 1968 to 1969.

Soon after the chairman of the economics department ignored requests by the Black Student Union to hire black faculty members, a makeshift bomb was found in front of the department entrance. Thankfully, the bomb didn’t go off, but such intimidation tactics were beyond the pale to people not well versed in neo-Maoist revolutionary doctrine.

Buchanan was incensed by such rampant radicalization plaguing campus life.

College is not a public good, they argued, but a “unique industry” to train for certain sectors of the workforce. As such, students should pay the full cost of their tuition, and universities should compete for them. The best students would receive scholarships, while the rest could find some other means. The market forces of the business world would lead the way to a more stable society, free from subsidized radicalism.

Shortly thereafter, conservative businessmen would greatly broaden the scope of their plan. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce under Nixon tasked lawyer Lewis Powell–soon to become a Supreme Court Justice–to assess what steps were needed to create more robust conditions for free enterprise.

The result was a confidential memorandum titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.”

Revealingly, however, Powell doesn’t name a Maoist revolutionary as the most dangerous threat, but Ralph Nader! It seems the worst sin is proclaiming that corporate leaders who defraud their customers belong in jail.

More importantly, the Powell Memorandum provided recommendations for a conservative counteroffensive, to take the country back from New Deal labor rights groups and New Left activists. And these recommendations served as a blueprint in the years and decades to come.

The recommendations included a ramping up of corporate lobbying to influence political institutions.

It repeatedly called on conservatives to restore “fairness” and “balance” among viewpoints in the culture. Surely, these efforts wouldn’t have any deep impact on our society.

Fuming at the change wrought by the New Left’s Port Huron Statement, the New Right drafted their own revolutionary manifestos. Galvanized by the shock of student radicalization, these conservatives were themselves radicalized.

The difference was that these radicals really knew how to play the long game. This revolution was systemized.

Now, if you’ll excuse me?

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