Right in the 60's
By Karl Zinsmeister, Dana Rohrabacher, Bruce Chapman, Evan Gahr
The Other Activists
by Karl Zinsmeister
In 1961, a book called Revolt on the Campus was published by a young writer named M. Stanton Evans. Judging from the title, one might assume this was an early take on the left-wing counterculture that burst forth prominently later in the decade. Surprise: Revolt on the Campus actually chronicles the exact opposite phenomenon—a sharp rise of conservative activity on campuses across the nation. Some excerpts:
By late 1960…presidential polls on American campuses showed students inclining heavily toward the Republicans. In the Big Ten, Vice President Nixon often achieved majorities of two-to-one over Senator Kennedy. Even in Michigan, a pro-Kennedy state, Nixon carried the votes of the collegians. In Virginia, Nixon carried almost all the campus polls, compiling a majority of 259-86 at Hampden-Sydney. Faculty members, said the Richmond Times-Dispatch, were "surprised."
There are conservative clubs almost everywhere one looks: William and Mary, Rutgers, Minnesota, Rollins, Washington, Maryland, usc, Holy Cross, Rosary, Detroit, Iowa, Wabash, Kansas, Indiana, Miami…. at Yale, the "Party of the Right" has become the most active party in the Political Union; in Cambridge, conservatives have assumed the presidency of the Student Council…. At the University of Wisconsin, young conservatives dominate campus discussion…. At Michigan State a rally for Senator Barry Goldwater is attended by 3,500 people; at college bookstores across the nation, Goldwater’s book The Conscience of a Conservative is the number-one best seller.
Writing at the same time in National Review (September 1960), William F. Buckley, Jr., observed that "the world continues to go left, but all over the land dumbfounded professors are remarking the extraordinary revival of hard conservative sentiment in the student bodies." Evans’ book climaxes with his prediction that the most lasting legacy of the 1960s will likely be the rise of a new generation of principled, populist, grassroots conservative activists in America.
At this point, you may be muttering to yourself "Conservative students in the 1960s? The only ’60s activists I remember were bombthrowers." If so, you are not alone. Most of the media attention and almost all of the historical reflection on the ’60s has focused on that era’s prominent Left radicals. The fact is, however, young conservative activists organized earlier in the decade, had a broader following, and a much longer-lasting influence (more on that in a minute).
There are three reasons ’60s right-wing activists were less visible than their left-wing counterparts. First, they weren’t as self-dramatizing; they didn’t set themselves on fire or throw bricks through windows. Second, they were briefly eclipsed by the Vietnam War protests when those came to their peak at the turn of the decade. Third and most important, right-wing ’60s kids were invisible because the press was unsympathetic and even hostile to their cause.
Conservative organizers in the 1960s often faced ostracism, reports University of California at San Diego professor Rebecca Klatch in her forthcoming book A Generation Divided: The New Right, The New Left, and the 1960s. Conservative activist Linda Bradley notes that the New York Times always used "modifiers or descriptions about us, calling us ‘self-proclaimed’ or ‘hot-eyed radicals.’ I thought, ‘My God, they’ve never met us!’" Student leader Lee Edwards recalls that "to be a young conservative in the ’60s was to be an untouchable, a pariah, a Jew in Syria, a black in South Africa…. We were dismissed. So we fought back." Even the Republican party was sometimes suspicious. "Although most of us were Republicans, the party didn’t exactly welcome us with open arms," says Bradley. "We were sort of considered to be off the beaten path. We were carrying the flag of conservatism at a time nobody really understood what that meant."
The result of all this has been a warped understanding of recent U.S. history. Thanks to wholesale mythologizing, important social developments have been misunderstood or missed altogether. As Mary C. Brennan put it in Turning Right in the Sixties, a book recently published by the University of North Carolina Press: "Beginning in the 1960s and continuing in the succeeding years, a one-dimensional view of the ’60s as an era of radical movements drew the focus away from other important developments occurring during that time. Journalists and scholars, by spotlighting only the protesters, students, hippies, and demonstrators, ignored the action taking place at stage right and therefore presented a lopsided view of the decade."
A younger, more disinterested generation of revisionist scholars is beginning to recognize that the left-wing baby boomers—who up to now have painted most of the nation’s pictures of the 1960s—have been presenting incomplete images. Thomas Sugrue of the University of Pennsylvania, for instance, (who was seven when the ’60s closed) recently argued in Lingua Franca magazine that the radical counterculture wasn’t a particularly important part of our recent history. "Think about the Black Panthers as an example, or sds," he says. "They had very small memberships. They were made a big deal of in the media in the 1960s. But if you think about the long-term consequences of those groups in building political organizations, their power isn’t as great as it appears."
Even some former radicals are beginning to acknowledge this point: "The New Left collapsed, plummeting into cultural oblivion as if it had been some kind of political Hula-Hoop," admits James Miller, a biographer of ’60s leftists. "In terms of the political history of this country, the New Left just isn’t an important story."
The germination of the New Right during those very same years, however, has had consequences. The conservative activists who first organized themselves in the early 1960s were the force behind the rise of Barry Goldwater, the election of Ronald Reagan as governor of California, the takeover of the Republican party from the liberal wing that controlled it for decades, the election of Ronald Reagan as president, and the reversion of Congress to Republican control for the first time in 40 years.
Following are several short essays that help explain how this hidden ’60s revolution began and then proceeded. California Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who was a kind of right-wing hippie in the ’60s, explains the appeal of the conservative activist group Young Americans for Freedom (yaf) to many kids of his generation. Following Rohrabacher we provide some data on the very different backgrounds of the right-wing kids and left-wing kids who were ’60s activists.
Next, Bruce Chapman sketches a branch of non-Left ’60s activism somewhat more obscure than yaf, further illustrating the point that a lot was happening politically that never made it into Walter Cronkite’s broadcasts. Then we close with an essay by Evan Gahr which illustrates one additional reason conservatives came out of the ’60s with lots of political momentum: The decade’s left-wing activism was so excessive it set off a backlash of abhorrence and active resistance that continues to this day.
Karl Zinsmeister is editor in chief of The American Enterprise.
Us Young Americans for Freedom
By Dana Rohrabacher
Early in the summer of 1967, my buddy Paul Jenkins and I threw our gear into the back of his mom’s station wagon and headed up the California coast to Monterey. The pop arts festival there was a precursor to the more massive Woodstock event that took place two years later. At Monterey we "grooved" to some great new performers like Janis Joplin, Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane, and Jimi Hendrix.
One lasting memory of this weekend came after the concert was over. People were pulling sleeping bags out of the trunks of their cars, and a bottle of cheap wine was being passed around a circle of complete strangers. One of the wine guzzlers piped up to complain that a visual used during Grace Slick’s act suggested John Kennedy was murdered by right-wingers. "The commies killed Kennedy," he blurted out before taking another slug from the bottle. Surprise. On further discussion it turned out that everybody in our little circle turned out to be a conservative of sorts. Perhaps all the conservatives at the concert had just gravitated to the circle where a bottle was being passed around. Or perhaps the common stereotypes weren’t accurate.
The media coverage of these rock ’n roll events and other happenings in the 1960s created a flawed view of the youth attending them. First and foremost, the kids at the concerts were not all leftist radicals. The gang I hung out with were anti-Left, pro-American, and most of us believed in God. Most of us were also fans of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, the Doors, the Grateful Dead, the whole gamut. After all, we were kids. The political views of the singers were not compelling to us. Besides, songs about peace were not immediately considered an attack on America. Who the heck wants war? Some kids in Young Americans for Freedom (yaf) wore buttons that proclaimed "Peace through superior firepower." We believed that, and so did the American people. Superior firepower is exactly why we had peace most of the time. It wasn’t until Vietnam that willpower (or lack thereof) overcame firepower.
Though no one in the media reported it, there was a growing conservative trend among America’s youth in the 1960s. In the fall of 1964, for example, what would you guess was the largest, best organized, most active, and creative organization on college campuses coast to coast? If you said any group on the left you were way off. It was Youth for Goldwater. "Barry’s boys," and girls, were hustling and organizing, passing out campaign material, planning rallies, and waving flags. I had 100 kids in Palos Verdes High School walking precincts on weekends. Nearby schools in Torrance and in Los Angeles County’s South Bay had similar activist groups. We got a lot done. All we didn’t get was press coverage.
The press was predisposed to portray American youth as Peace Corps volunteers, pacifists, and civil rights activists. There was, of course, nothing wrong with being any of those, but that wasn’t what most young Americans were all about. We were unabashedly patriotic, anticommunist, and a little suspicious of civil rights leaders (perhaps to a fault, in retrospect).
The Vietnam War undid a lot of conservative progress, at least temporarily. It was a war that went on and on—twice as long as World War II. Conservatives ended up supporting Lyndon Johnson out of respect for the commander in chief, even though he had foolishly decided on a slow war of attrition, which is both immoral and unwinnable when one’s adversary is a totalitarian regime with lots of helpful allies and little regard for the lives of its people.
What got ground down in Vietnam was the will of the American people. Well into the war, contrary to stereotypes, most Americans, including young people, supported taking a stand in Vietnam. The media painted the anti-war movement as being led by pacifists and idealists—an untrue stereotype. By and large, the organized effort against the war was steered by hardcore Marxists. These folks wanted not peace but a communist victory in Vietnam, and in the Cold War as well. The news media steadfastly ignored the philosophical commitments of the organizers of the "peace movement," and rarely showed the communist and Viet Cong flags that were flapping in the wind at every rally. Of all the personalities who emerged in the 1960s, it’s worth noting that only Joan Baez really was and remains an anti-war idealist, pacifist, and humanitarian.
While the media softened the ideology of left-wing activists, they ignored the conservatives altogether. Conservatives and libertarians were united by Goldwater’s pro-freedom, pro-America message. And after the 1964 election many of us active in Barry’s effort shifted into Young Americans for Freedom, which had been launched from Bill Buckley’s backyard in Sharon, Connecticut, in 1960. While the 1962 "Port Huron Statement" penned by the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society (sds) is regularly advertised as a landmark political proclamation, the Sharon Statement that founded yaf is perhaps the finest manifesto of freedom ever penned by American youth. (See box nearby.)
It’s significant that the youth organization of 1960s conservatives was named Young Americans for Freedom. Conservatives are nearly unstoppable when they rally behind a positive, pro-freedom message. Unfortunately, as the Vietnam War dragged on it became hard to maintain an idealistic pro-freedom agenda. Who can get excited about marching in a parade headed by Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon?
Nevertheless, yaf did yeoman work in the late 1960s, battling the unrelenting message from the media that the Left was riding the wave of the future while conservatives were rich bigots. We had our own demonstrations, against ibm’s trade with communist countries for example. We served as the advance guard for Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial campaign, and again in 1968 during his first faint-hearted try at the Presidency. We had debates, confrontations, and touch football games with our leftist counterparts.
By the time Reagan won the presidency in 1980, veterans of yaf were ready to assume influential positions in his administration. When I first ran for Congress, my secret weapon was the high-quality support I received from friends who had been politically active with me since the late 1960s. As far as the media was concerned we didn’t exist, but in the long run we won.
You see, those weren’t all lefties sitting on the grass out there listening to the music.Dana Rohrabacher represents Orange County, California, in Congress.
Flaming Moderates of the ’60s Move Right
by Bruce Chapman
We made up political buttons that said, "I am an Extreme Moderate." Our antagonism to big government was genuine, but more, well, moderate than those of our friends and adversaries on the gop right.
Tender of years in the early 1960s, we at Advance magazine and, later, the Ripon Society seldom got much media attention, unless we were criticizing the gop leadership. The shuffling gop regulars were harried on all sides—including by Advance, which termed them The Stupid Party. We wanted innovations like a volunteer military, bomb shelters, an end to the old country-based immigration quotas, and federalism that would return power to the states.Advance began with George Gilder and me at Harvard College in 1960, then moved to Washington, D.C. In 1964 it drowned in Goldwater. The failure of Advance showed just how weak moderate Republicanism really was, even near its high-water mark.
The Ripon Society, formed about 1963 (also at Harvard), was named after the Wisconsin town where the gop was first organized. It was set up to study issues and write papers. Campus chapters were established around the East and in New York City.
There was no attempt to build a grass roots movement, and I don’t imagine there were more than about 150 Ripon members scattered around at any one time. But Advance and the early Ripon Society, before they lost many of us to more conservative causes, furthered a number of useful arguments—including the central one that a party needs ideas as well as principles and workers. Our position in favor of civil rights was quickly embraced by the Right. Everyone in the gop found they could back federalism. The volunteer military was enacted as law by Nixon.
But Ripon also changed, and to some extent there was something wrong with it from the beginning. What was wrong was the tendency on the part of many moderates to define themselves not by objective standards but by the sheer feeling of moderation. That isn’t hard—just find out where the Left and Right are at any given moment and take a position between them. Conviction politics of the Reagan and Thatcher variety is a proper antidote to such wishy-washy wetness in the center, as well as to the politics of feeling promoted by the Left.
Specific issues also changed, of course. It was one thing, in the comparatively simple ’60s, to contend that government could be made to work fine if only Republicans were in charge. It was another to hold such optimism after Richard Nixon had not only institutionalized the Great Society but expanded it.
Then there were the social issues. When several of us joined Martin Luther King’s March on Washington in 1963, it was for equal opportunity, not for affirmative action quotas and mandatory school busing. Similarly with the new issues of gender. George Gilder was editing the Ripon Forum in the mid-1970s when his book Sexual Suicide made him "the most dangerous man in America" to Betty Friedan. Eventually, terminal ire in the budding feminist faction at Ripon terminated him at the Forum.
Then there was the matter of the federal income tax. By the 1970s, inflation was pushing more and more of the middle class into higher brackets. Richard Rahn, then Ripon’s president, met economist Art Laffer at a Ripon function and helped set up the first supply-side econometric model. Gilder, among others, made the supply-side case famous in his 1981 book Wealth and Poverty.
By the late 1970s it was clear to many of us that Ripon was an idea whose time had come and gone. Ripon continues on, a few alumni have turned left, but most of the founding braintrust have long since shifted to mainstream conservatism. Many have been influential. In addition to the individuals named above and a few elected congressmen, John McClaughry has become a libertarian theorist in Vermont, Chris DeMuth is president of aei; Patricia Lines is one of the nation’s experts on home schooling, vouchers, and charter schools.
More ’60s kids grown up and changing the world. But not the way George McGovern had in mind.Bruce Chapman, former director of the U.S. Bureau of the Census and aide to President Reagan, is president of the Discovery Institute in Seattle.
The Revolt That Revolted
by Evan Gahr
I was still a pre-schooler when the ’60s closed, and it actually wasn’t until five years ago that I came to understand just how repugnant a time they were.
My crash course in the decade started out as a routine magazine assignment. In 1992, I went to Yale to investigate Hillary Clinton’s days as a law student there. I wanted to see if Hillary had taken part in demonstrations or written something that conflicted with the centrist pose she had adopted for her hubby’s presidential campaign. At the time, the campaign was trying to depict Bill and Hillary as Middle America’s biggest friends since Ozzie and Harriet.
The research was tedious but straightforward—sifting through old student newspapers, day by day, page by page, year by year, for Hillary’s entire tenure at the Yale Law School, which began in 1969. Once I opened the bound volume from Hillary’s first year on campus I was engulfed by the Age of Aquarius. The whole epoch was on display, and it wasn’t subtle.
The 1969 academic year began with a hearty band of students camping out on the university lawn in a bid to fight Yale’s "uptightness.’’ One student explained, "People haven’t had the opportunity to see other people live like human beings in public places.’’ When not busying themselves with deep endeavors like these, student radicals expressed their common identity with welfare mothers, or held seminars on "radical politics and guerrilla theater."
Other students compiled a report blasting the Pentagon for overemphasizing defense. They warned that the U.S. is "becoming a national security state," the Daily News reported. Somehow, the long tentacles of the national security state were noticeably absent at Yale, though: Students disrupted classes with impunity.
Many of the demonstrations were connected to the New Haven trial of various Black Panther members. The campus was embroiled in anti-war demonstrations, too. There were also visits from representatives of the terrorist Japanese Red Army, and speeches from such New Left stalwarts as defense lawyer Leonard Weinglass. He delighted students by praising the governments of workers’ paradises like China, North Vietnam, and North Korea for trying to "effect meaningful social change.’’
As I burrowed my way through four years’ worth of Yale’s news record at the archive I came across lots of tidbits that gave a flavor of the times, like the items on students denouncing marriage as a "patriarchal institution’’ before joining forces with feminist groups ranging from the Society for Cutting Up Men (scum) to the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (witch).
Everyone was so damn angry. Never mind that the students lived amid unprecedented affluence and freedom, waited on hand and foot. Picture after picture showed students with clenched fists. And, of course, the hair: shoulder length for everyone—except a few feminists who endeavored to look as mannish as possible.
The men all sported mangy beards. Ironically, the Daily News had an advertisement for Norelco electric razors. Talk about not knowing your market.
What a relief it was to leave that office, and the fever swamps of the late 1960s, to return to 1992. This brief but intense immersion in radical Yale was so revolting it actually shifted my own politics rightward. With each turn of the page, there was more arrogance, vileness, and pretension. If these were the high holy days of the Left, I wanted to be somewhere else, and I wanted the rest of my country to avoid that world too.
And all of this just from reading the newspapers. So it’s not hard for me to understand why many of the people who actually lived through the 1960s moved sharply in the conservative direction. That was the right reaction.Evan Gahr is a frequent contributor to The American Enterprise.
