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Our Sixties: An Activist's History
The social movements of the 1960s - still vital and challenging - seen through the author's experiences as a civil rights activist, a feminist, an antiwar organizer, and a radical teacher.
Today, some fifty years after, we celebrate - or excoriate - "the Sixties." Using his wide-ranging experience as an activist and writer, Paul Lauter examines the values, the exploits, the victories, the implications, and sometimes the failings, of the "Movement" of that conflicted time. In Our Sixties, Lauter writes about movement activities from the perspective of a full-time 1964 Mississippi freedom schools; Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); the Morgan community school in Washington, DC, which he headed; a variety of antiwar, antidraft actions; the New University Conference, a radical group of faculty and graduate students; The Feminist Press, which he helped found; and the United States Servicemen's Fund, an organization supporting antiwar GIs. He got fired, got busted, got published, and even got tenure. He honed his skills writing for the New York Review of Books among other magazines. As a teacher he created innovative courses ranging from "Revolutionary Literature" and "Contesting the Canon" to "The Sixties in Fiction, Poetry, and Film." He led the development of the groundbreaking Heath Anthology of American Literature and remains its general editor.
Lauter's book offers both a retrospective look at the social justice struggles of the Sixties and an account of how his participation in these struggles has shaped his life. Social history as well as personal chronicle, this account is for those who recall that turbulent decade as well as for those who seek to better understand its impact on American politics and society in our current era.
Today, some fifty years after, we celebrate - or excoriate - "the Sixties." Using his wide-ranging experience as an activist and writer, Paul Lauter examines the values, the exploits, the victories, the implications, and sometimes the failings, of the "Movement" of that conflicted time. In Our Sixties, Lauter writes about movement activities from the perspective of a full-time 1964 Mississippi freedom schools; Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); the Morgan community school in Washington, DC, which he headed; a variety of antiwar, antidraft actions; the New University Conference, a radical group of faculty and graduate students; The Feminist Press, which he helped found; and the United States Servicemen's Fund, an organization supporting antiwar GIs. He got fired, got busted, got published, and even got tenure. He honed his skills writing for the New York Review of Books among other magazines. As a teacher he created innovative courses ranging from "Revolutionary Literature" and "Contesting the Canon" to "The Sixties in Fiction, Poetry, and Film." He led the development of the groundbreaking Heath Anthology of American Literature and remains its general editor.
Lauter's book offers both a retrospective look at the social justice struggles of the Sixties and an account of how his participation in these struggles has shaped his life. Social history as well as personal chronicle, this account is for those who recall that turbulent decade as well as for those who seek to better understand its impact on American politics and society in our current era.
300 pages, Hardcover
Published October 1, 2020
3 people are currently reading
1028 people want to read
About the author
Paul Lauter
170 books4 followersPaul Lauter (b. 1932) is Allan K. and Gwendolyn Miles Smith Professor of Literature at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He has served as President of the American Studies Association (of the United States), and he is General Editor of the groundbreaking Heath Anthology of American Literature, now in its sixth edition.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 16, 2022
Paul Lauter's book is a highly personal, deeply felt, account of his life as a political, social, academic radical during his academic and movement career which, for him, climaxed during the period of social upheaval during the 1960's. I'm about ten years younger than he, so that his memoirs as a movement leader may have, in some ways, informed my experiences as a student throughout a lengthy college and university experience. My life circled around many of the places, people, and events of his life without my never becoming a movement radical.
For most of us who lived through that period, we now see it through a different lens than we did then, or even a decade ago. Lauter, despite having lived a highly mobile professional and very confusing personal life during this period, in retrospect depicts himself as having been an important cog in racial, gender, and anti-war struggles of that period. Certainly, he never seems to have had any difficulty gaining employment at top colleges and universities to support himself as well as to hold leadership positions in a range of radical organizations.
His writing also suggests a number of inner conflicts between his radicalism and his commitment to conventional university requirements. This is best demonstrated by his frequent calls for radical change while he ends his book by providing a Syllabus for a course on the sixties, rather than following his own calls for the continuing development from the ground up by students and teachers in collaboration of such readings.
Regardless, this well-documented, yet highly personal account of the roiling period of the sixties is very much worth reading for both people of a certain age or those interested in an era looking not too different from the one in which we live.
For most of us who lived through that period, we now see it through a different lens than we did then, or even a decade ago. Lauter, despite having lived a highly mobile professional and very confusing personal life during this period, in retrospect depicts himself as having been an important cog in racial, gender, and anti-war struggles of that period. Certainly, he never seems to have had any difficulty gaining employment at top colleges and universities to support himself as well as to hold leadership positions in a range of radical organizations.
His writing also suggests a number of inner conflicts between his radicalism and his commitment to conventional university requirements. This is best demonstrated by his frequent calls for radical change while he ends his book by providing a Syllabus for a course on the sixties, rather than following his own calls for the continuing development from the ground up by students and teachers in collaboration of such readings.
Regardless, this well-documented, yet highly personal account of the roiling period of the sixties is very much worth reading for both people of a certain age or those interested in an era looking not too different from the one in which we live.
February 3, 2022
This book was such a pleasure to read and not only because Paul was a mentor to me in my early days of academia until I left. It was wonderful to read about his history as an activist and learn how that fueled much of his academic work. I loved reading about his role in Freedom Summer during the Civil Rights Movement as well as his work with anti-war activism. Perhaps what's most special about this book is the thoughtful and smart reflection about his past and our present moment. And as a wonderful bonus - the book includes a syllabus for his working-class literature course, which pairs nicely with the textbook he published on that years ago.
January 2, 2021
Paul Lauter’s memoir Our Sixties: An Activist’s History recounts his experiences in the interconnected movements of the turbulent decade beginning with Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, continuing with fighting against the Vietnam War alongside students and GIs, and ending with his role as “a man in the women’s movement.” While the book provides an intimate eyewitness view of the historical events in which Lauter participated, it also offers readers valuable lessons for the challenges of our own turbulent time.
One of the lessons Lauter draws throughout the book is what he learned from the Mississippi freedom schools: that true education happened “only when students brought to the makeshift classrooms their genuine need to understand their own experience,” that for these students, education was “a matter of life and death and not a pleasant luxury or some job preparation” (51), and that to fulfill these students’ needs, educators had to develop new modes of teaching, including new curricular materials. The Mississippi freedom schools became a touchstone by which Lauter judged both an unsuccessful experimental school he later directed and the disastrous school “reforms” the US government has promoted over the past two decades, emphasizing “high-stakes tests of doubtful validity” (129) and leading to massive school closures in poor urban communities. On the positive side, the insights Lauter gained from teaching in the Mississippi freedom schools eventually flowered in The Heath Anthology of American Literature, which introduced a vast body of hitherto neglected works by minority writers and women and set them in conversation with recognized classics.
Other lessons emerge from Lauter’s double vision as he looks back on the 1960s from today’s perspective. He comments, for example, that the “shocking level of violence” he found in Mississippi surpassed “that even of police toward black men in 2019 America” and notes that the white practitioners of nonviolence who went to Mississippi “survived nights in rural and small-town freedom houses . . . only because armed black men guarded us from the worst excesses of the Klan and its many allies” (85-86). In a later chapter about the rage with which antiwar activists reacted to the Vietnam War’s relentless escalation, he makes the lesson explicit: “I’d been working for pacifist organizations. But now I felt that, given the opportunity, I’d lay nonviolence aside to somehow decapitate America’s warmongering leadership. I was hardly alone” (134).
Lauter recalls that when he returned to Mississippi in 1965, he found “increasing resistance to the Vietnam War among black people” (82) all over the state, well before the white liberals who supported the civil rights movement had started questioning Johnson’s war policy. His efforts to form a united front between antiwar and pro-civil rights white activists met with objections because the two groups saw their respective causes as arising from “separate intellectual and political domains” (85) and competing for scarce resources. Some even argued that by “mixing up questions of civil rights and foreign affairs,” New Left activists of the 1960s would repeat the mistakes of their Old Left Communist predecessors and “isolate [themselves] from the mainstream of American politics” (85). Lauter’s critique of this compartmentalization anticipates the concept of intersectionality that he shares with today’s activists, who recognize the common interests and common foes that link the movements for racial, economic, and environmental justice with those against white supremacy, militarism, and imperialism.
Lauter’s chapters on the antiwar movement—“The Draft,” “Resisting,” and “A Working-Class Movement of GIs”—are highly relevant to our current struggles against the endless wars to which our government has become addicted. As he points out, “The idea of [American] exceptionalism, in fact, underwrote the Vietnam War, as it does American dogma in the Middle East and Latin American today. It enabled American policy-makers to persuade themselves, as well as a majority of the population, that the bombing of straw shacks, the machine-gunning of water buffalo, the burning of Vietnamese children with napalm somehow served not merely the national interest but also a wider set of democratic and humane values, which ‘we’ were chosen to sustain. To attack the war, it became imperative to question the rationales offered for it” (99). The imperative remains, though the rationales have changed. In describing his work counseling young men on whether or not to register for the draft and on what their options were if they decided not to, Lauter acknowledges that though he at first believed the path to ending the war lay through fostering resistance to the draft, he came to realize that “the draft proved a slippery foundation on which to build an antiwar movement” (101). When President Nixon moved toward replacing conscripts with a volunteer army and American soldiers with Vietnamese, Lauter explains, he “succeeded in undercutting the effectiveness of draft resistance as an antiwar strategy” and thus in “dividing the antiwar movement” (151). This observation points toward the challenges of rebuilding an antiwar movement appropriate to our post-draft era.
Before the draft started winding down, Lauter engaged in many ways of “Resisting” it: helping to launch a “Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority” signed by hundreds of intellectuals (reprinted in his book’s Appendix); co-organizing a massive draft card turn-in at the Justice Department; joining an all-night sit-in at the Pentagon and many militant direct actions in the streets; heading the antiwar organization “Resist”; and holding forums in support of the Catonsville Nine, a group of Catholic activists who burned draft board files. Especially useful as a model for rebuilding a post-draft antiwar movement, however, is his stint running the United States Servicemen’s Fund (USSF), “an organization that supported coffeehouses near military bases, underground GI antiwar newspapers, and other forms of edgy entertainment for guys in the service” (169).
GI underground newspapers, numbering more than eight hundred, detailed not only the atrocities American troops perpetrated against the Vietnamese, but the oppression they experienced by their own army and the “forms of rebellion their disillusion and anger” sparked (172), which ranged from drug use to refusing orders to killing hated officers with fragmentation bombs. The coffeehouses provided GIs with places to hang out, express their views, read antiwar newspapers and books, listen to psychedelic music, and escape the military conditioning to which they were subject on base. Reminding Lauter of the freedom houses and freedom schools he had encountered in Mississippi, “They legitimated ways of thinking and behaving that contradicted” those inculcated by “the army and the local and national power structures” (173). Instead, “they helped GIs learn what the powerful preferred to hide, that racism and violence provided the roots for their control. Again, like the freedom schools, coffeehouses opened possibilities for connecting learning to actions for change” (174). The GI antiwar movement did more than all the other forms of resistance by US citizens to bring to an end the war that the Vietnamese were winning militarily. GI non-cooperation and sabotage spread from army bases and battlefields to navy ships, aircraft carriers, and airfields, ultimately “limiting and undermining the strategies available to the US government,” Lauter argues (177).
While hailing the successes of the antiwar movement as a whole, Lauter does not shy away from acknowledging its shortcomings and failures. Among those, sectarianism loomed large as a “disease fatal to the enterprise” (174)—a disease Lauter traces to prolonged struggle with no victory in sight. Even more fatal, Lauter judges, was the movement’s inability to fulfill its radical potential: “Where we did not succeed was in translating a movement against that war in that time into a movement against all war in every time. Nor did we ignite a movement against the depredations that inevitably spring from the capitalist organization of society” (182).
In his final chapter, “Authority and Our Discontents,” Lauter articulates the lessons he learned from the movements in which he participated. “First, all change in the United States begins by confronting racism,” he underscores (221)—a lesson we have recently relearned amid a spate of police killings of African Americans and a pandemic that has exposed the shocking racial disparities in our nation’s health care. Second, change must not be restricted to a single policy domain, because the problems our society exhibits are interrelated; hence, we cannot effectively fight racism here in the US while pursuing racist wars of aggression against foreign peoples. Last but not least, change must include assessing the cost of capitalism both to the 99 percent and to the planet and exploring socialism as an alternative. Lauter ends his retrospective on an optimistic note. Despite the disappointments of an unfinished struggle against racism, war, and capitalism, he emphasizes, “I have also seen people rising up, again and again, like sunflowers in a great field” (226).
One of the lessons Lauter draws throughout the book is what he learned from the Mississippi freedom schools: that true education happened “only when students brought to the makeshift classrooms their genuine need to understand their own experience,” that for these students, education was “a matter of life and death and not a pleasant luxury or some job preparation” (51), and that to fulfill these students’ needs, educators had to develop new modes of teaching, including new curricular materials. The Mississippi freedom schools became a touchstone by which Lauter judged both an unsuccessful experimental school he later directed and the disastrous school “reforms” the US government has promoted over the past two decades, emphasizing “high-stakes tests of doubtful validity” (129) and leading to massive school closures in poor urban communities. On the positive side, the insights Lauter gained from teaching in the Mississippi freedom schools eventually flowered in The Heath Anthology of American Literature, which introduced a vast body of hitherto neglected works by minority writers and women and set them in conversation with recognized classics.
Other lessons emerge from Lauter’s double vision as he looks back on the 1960s from today’s perspective. He comments, for example, that the “shocking level of violence” he found in Mississippi surpassed “that even of police toward black men in 2019 America” and notes that the white practitioners of nonviolence who went to Mississippi “survived nights in rural and small-town freedom houses . . . only because armed black men guarded us from the worst excesses of the Klan and its many allies” (85-86). In a later chapter about the rage with which antiwar activists reacted to the Vietnam War’s relentless escalation, he makes the lesson explicit: “I’d been working for pacifist organizations. But now I felt that, given the opportunity, I’d lay nonviolence aside to somehow decapitate America’s warmongering leadership. I was hardly alone” (134).
Lauter recalls that when he returned to Mississippi in 1965, he found “increasing resistance to the Vietnam War among black people” (82) all over the state, well before the white liberals who supported the civil rights movement had started questioning Johnson’s war policy. His efforts to form a united front between antiwar and pro-civil rights white activists met with objections because the two groups saw their respective causes as arising from “separate intellectual and political domains” (85) and competing for scarce resources. Some even argued that by “mixing up questions of civil rights and foreign affairs,” New Left activists of the 1960s would repeat the mistakes of their Old Left Communist predecessors and “isolate [themselves] from the mainstream of American politics” (85). Lauter’s critique of this compartmentalization anticipates the concept of intersectionality that he shares with today’s activists, who recognize the common interests and common foes that link the movements for racial, economic, and environmental justice with those against white supremacy, militarism, and imperialism.
Lauter’s chapters on the antiwar movement—“The Draft,” “Resisting,” and “A Working-Class Movement of GIs”—are highly relevant to our current struggles against the endless wars to which our government has become addicted. As he points out, “The idea of [American] exceptionalism, in fact, underwrote the Vietnam War, as it does American dogma in the Middle East and Latin American today. It enabled American policy-makers to persuade themselves, as well as a majority of the population, that the bombing of straw shacks, the machine-gunning of water buffalo, the burning of Vietnamese children with napalm somehow served not merely the national interest but also a wider set of democratic and humane values, which ‘we’ were chosen to sustain. To attack the war, it became imperative to question the rationales offered for it” (99). The imperative remains, though the rationales have changed. In describing his work counseling young men on whether or not to register for the draft and on what their options were if they decided not to, Lauter acknowledges that though he at first believed the path to ending the war lay through fostering resistance to the draft, he came to realize that “the draft proved a slippery foundation on which to build an antiwar movement” (101). When President Nixon moved toward replacing conscripts with a volunteer army and American soldiers with Vietnamese, Lauter explains, he “succeeded in undercutting the effectiveness of draft resistance as an antiwar strategy” and thus in “dividing the antiwar movement” (151). This observation points toward the challenges of rebuilding an antiwar movement appropriate to our post-draft era.
Before the draft started winding down, Lauter engaged in many ways of “Resisting” it: helping to launch a “Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority” signed by hundreds of intellectuals (reprinted in his book’s Appendix); co-organizing a massive draft card turn-in at the Justice Department; joining an all-night sit-in at the Pentagon and many militant direct actions in the streets; heading the antiwar organization “Resist”; and holding forums in support of the Catonsville Nine, a group of Catholic activists who burned draft board files. Especially useful as a model for rebuilding a post-draft antiwar movement, however, is his stint running the United States Servicemen’s Fund (USSF), “an organization that supported coffeehouses near military bases, underground GI antiwar newspapers, and other forms of edgy entertainment for guys in the service” (169).
GI underground newspapers, numbering more than eight hundred, detailed not only the atrocities American troops perpetrated against the Vietnamese, but the oppression they experienced by their own army and the “forms of rebellion their disillusion and anger” sparked (172), which ranged from drug use to refusing orders to killing hated officers with fragmentation bombs. The coffeehouses provided GIs with places to hang out, express their views, read antiwar newspapers and books, listen to psychedelic music, and escape the military conditioning to which they were subject on base. Reminding Lauter of the freedom houses and freedom schools he had encountered in Mississippi, “They legitimated ways of thinking and behaving that contradicted” those inculcated by “the army and the local and national power structures” (173). Instead, “they helped GIs learn what the powerful preferred to hide, that racism and violence provided the roots for their control. Again, like the freedom schools, coffeehouses opened possibilities for connecting learning to actions for change” (174). The GI antiwar movement did more than all the other forms of resistance by US citizens to bring to an end the war that the Vietnamese were winning militarily. GI non-cooperation and sabotage spread from army bases and battlefields to navy ships, aircraft carriers, and airfields, ultimately “limiting and undermining the strategies available to the US government,” Lauter argues (177).
While hailing the successes of the antiwar movement as a whole, Lauter does not shy away from acknowledging its shortcomings and failures. Among those, sectarianism loomed large as a “disease fatal to the enterprise” (174)—a disease Lauter traces to prolonged struggle with no victory in sight. Even more fatal, Lauter judges, was the movement’s inability to fulfill its radical potential: “Where we did not succeed was in translating a movement against that war in that time into a movement against all war in every time. Nor did we ignite a movement against the depredations that inevitably spring from the capitalist organization of society” (182).
In his final chapter, “Authority and Our Discontents,” Lauter articulates the lessons he learned from the movements in which he participated. “First, all change in the United States begins by confronting racism,” he underscores (221)—a lesson we have recently relearned amid a spate of police killings of African Americans and a pandemic that has exposed the shocking racial disparities in our nation’s health care. Second, change must not be restricted to a single policy domain, because the problems our society exhibits are interrelated; hence, we cannot effectively fight racism here in the US while pursuing racist wars of aggression against foreign peoples. Last but not least, change must include assessing the cost of capitalism both to the 99 percent and to the planet and exploring socialism as an alternative. Lauter ends his retrospective on an optimistic note. Despite the disappointments of an unfinished struggle against racism, war, and capitalism, he emphasizes, “I have also seen people rising up, again and again, like sunflowers in a great field” (226).
February 19, 2021
I found this book such an open reflection of the work done by the author and those around him, deepening my knowledge and some memories of the past. It holds not only the history of that time, but allows you to understand how to use the mechanics to build successes in movements today. There is a lot of useful gems within these pages, along with a story I found very engaging.
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