VLVL background: book review

[pynchonoid]

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-California at h-net.msu.edu (December
2003)

Robert Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik, eds. _The Free
Speech Movement:
Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s_. Berkeley:
University of
California Press, 2002. xx + 618 pp. Illustrations,
bibliography,
index. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-520-22221-0; $19.95
(paper), ISBN
0-520-23354-9.

Reviewed for H-California by Joseph Palermo,
Department of History,
California State University, Sacramento

U.C. Berkeley in 1964: Free Speech and Civil
Disobedience

Scholars of America in the 1960s have long looked to
1968 as a
pivotal year that forever changed the nation.  Events
such as the
Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin
Luther King
Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and the fiasco for the
Democratic Party
at the convention in Chicago have loomed large in the
historiography.  But a few recent works have looked
back four years,
to 1964, for deeper consideration; 1964 was the "last
innocent
year," a recent title suggests.  In 1964, there was
also a set of
pivotal events--the Freedom Summer voter registration
drive in
Mississippi, the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the
Gulf of Tonkin
incident, the silencing of the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party
delegation, and equally important, the Free Speech
Movement
(FSM)--which exploded on the U.C. Berkeley campus that
fall.

Robert Cohen and Reginald Zelnik have compiled a
superb set of
essays that shed new light on the significance of the
FSM.  An
active group of students at Berkeley had an awakening
after
participating in various capacities in the
African-American civil
rights movement that had swept the South since the
Montgomery bus
boycott began in late 1955. They threw themselves into
organizing
for social justice only to meet stiff resistance from
University
administrators, the UC regents, and vocal members of
California's
ascendant right wing.  What started at Berkeley was a
struggle that
would ultimately transform university relations on
campuses
nationwide.  In _The Free Speech Movement: 
Reflections on Berkeley
in the 1960s_, Cohen and Zelnik have succeeded in
combining a range
of perspectives responding to the fact, as Leon
Litwack points out
in his preface, that the FSM "meant and came to mean
very different
things to many different people" (p. xv).  The student
activism on
the Berkeley campus touched on something fundamental
to the American
notion of "liberty":  freedom of speech.  And the
conflict energized
a student body that, aside from the civil rights
volunteers, had
been largely docile and complacent in the 1950s.

This volume contains a lengthy and informative
introduction by
Robert Cohen in which he sets up each piece with care,
and
underscores that it is a "transitional" work, "an
attempt to begin a
passing of the torch of historical memory from
movement veterans and
their opponents to historians" (p. 4).  This anthology
is not
another baby-boomer nostalgia trip, but rather, it is
a set of
scholarly writings which seamlessly juxtaposes
movement memoirs with
lucid interpretative essays.  The book is divided into
five parts:
"Roots," "Experience: Fall 1964," "Legal and
Constitutional Issues,"
"Aftermath," and "Thoughts About Mario Savio." The
highlights of
this work include a talk Mario Savio gave on November
15, 1995, at
the University of California, Santa Cruz, entitled
"Thirty Years
Later: Reflections on the FSM."  The Savio transcript
sets up the
pieces that follow, including the final part that
consists of essays
remembering and honoring Savio's leadership of the
movement.  A
consensus has emerged in recent years within the
general
historiography of the era which points to Savio as a
uniquely gifted
orator and youth leader who came to personify the
idealism of
students in the 1960s.  This set of essays adds
greatly to our
understanding of Savio's ideology and his role as a
movement
organizer.  Savio's thoughtful and sensitive
reflections, always
intoned with a sense of outrage against social
injustice, give this
book a wonderful point of departure.  It is clear that
with regard
to the FSM, Savio cannot be separated from the
movement.

In his November 1995 speech, Savio links his awakening
to the civil
rights movement and the value of freedom of speech to
the searing
events he recalled from his childhood:  the legacies
of World War
II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bombings.  The
gravity of these
events of the mid-twentieth century informed Savio's
unequivocal
political stands.  He had the rare ability to
challenge people and
to move them to take action against social wrongs that
had been long
tolerated but could not be ignored.  Savio led the FSM
with
intelligence, moral certitude, and humor.  "We had to
work like
crazy," Savio recalls, "disrupting the University,
taking over
buildings, having sit-ins, marches, all this sort of
thing to just
open up a little space where people would have a real
debate.  That
was America"  (p. 69).  This transcript of Savio's
talk, which was
sadly given less than a year before his death at
fifty-three years
of age, along with the fascinating pieces interpreting
his persona
and role as a leader by Doug Rossinow, Lynne Hollander
Savio,
Suzanne Goldberg, Wendy Lesser, Greil Marcus, and
Reginald Zelnik,
make this work the most comprehensive exploration of
Savio's legacy
as an activist that has yet to be published. This
aspect alone would
make the book a substantial contribution to the
scholarship of the
1960s, but it also includes some twenty-four other
short essays that
all shed new light on these pivotal events.

The pieces from former activists and participants such
as Jackie
Goldberg, Bettina Apthecker, Margot Adler, Martin
Roysher, Henry
Mayer, Steve Weisman, David Hollinger, and Kate
Coleman are succinct
recollections that move away from nostalgia and "story
telling" to
focus on the significant social change that the FSM
wrought.  A
particularly noteworthy piece from this section comes
from Jeff
Lustig, who does a fine job relating the significance
of the FSM to
the wider vision of the New Left.  At a time when the
historiography
of the New Left seems to be moving toward a narrative
of
degeneration and decline, Lustig aptly places the FSM
in the context
of the struggle for social justice, and the general
sense of
political mobilization that will forever characterize
our
interpretation of America in the sixties.  "No one who
confronted
authorities and risked arrest in 1963 or 1964 knew
that there would
be a 'sixties,'" Lustig points out.  "They could not
explain their
rebellion or anchor their identities with reference to
a decade that
had yet to be created" (p. 216) With much of the
historiography of
the sixties focused on the protests as if they were
premeditated
events unfolding "naturally," it is refreshing to see
such a sober
account.  Cohen and Zelnik's anthology should be
praised for not
pandering to the popular histories of the period with
embroidered
portraits.  (Even Savio does not come across as a
"hero" in the
traditional sense, but rather, he appears to be a
sensitive
individual who was influenced by his times and in turn
influenced
them himself.)  Also praiseworthy is the fact that
Cohen and Zelnik
have chosen to include an interesting scholarly essay
from former
University of California president Clark Kerr.  Kerr
provides a
unique perspective that brings to life elements of the
story that
are often overlooked in the standard narratives which
tend to
oversimplify some of the political decisions and
constraints that UC
administrators such as Kerr faced and could not avoid.
Kerr concedes
that he might have been an apparatchik of sorts for
the university,
but he was no Stalinist in his battles with the
students.  The piece
by Kerr fits nicely with an excellent essay from
Lawrence Levine
that shows that the movement influenced far more on
campus than
simply freedom of speech, and ultimately seeped deep
into the
cultural interstices of university life.

This compilation of essays is an outstanding
contribution to our
understanding of the dawn of the modern student
movement.  Any
history course with subject matter relating to America
in the
sixties would benefit from including this volume. 
Students will
enjoy reading the recollections of participants and
also come away
with a broader understanding of the issues at stake in
Berkeley in
1964:  the student mobilization against social
injustices, the
successes and failures of the movement, and the human
beings who
were part of it. Through reading these essays,
undergraduates can
come to better understand that young people have "made
history" not
too long ago by standing up against injustice,
organizing their
peers, and employing the tactics of nonviolent civil
disobedience in
creative and powerful ways.  What started at UC
Berkeley in 1964 led
eventually to the institutionalization of student
political activism
on campuses from coast to coast.  Cohen and Zelnik
have pulled
together the single best volume on the FSM that has
yet been
published.


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