VLVL2: _The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s_

Sun May 9 12:10:19 CDT 2004

Robert Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik, eds. The Free
Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. xix +
620 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $19.95
(paper), ISBN 0-520-23354-9.

[...] 

The basic story is familiar: soon after the fall 1964
term at UC Berkeley began, administrators--perceived
to be pressured by conservative Republican William F.
Knowland--banned the right of student groups to hand
out informational leaflets, to set up recruiting
tables on campus, and to organize off-campus political
activities. The reaction was unexpected--a huge
coalition, ranging from the sectarian left to the
Young Republicans, and including the vast middle of
the politically unformed, came together to oppose the
administration. At one point ten thousand students sat
all night around a police car, from the top of which a
succession of speakers discussed the nature of
education and citizenship, the role of the university,
and the function of civil protest. On December 2, over
1,000 students walked into the three-story
administration building, as Joan Baez, in particularly
glorious voice that day, sang the anthem of the times,
"We Shall Overcome." Ten hours later, 824 students
were manhandled into Alameda County sheriff's buses,
hauled off to Santa Anita Prison, and into history as
the largest mass arrest in the United States.

What emboldened students to defy the university, and
to create a movement that animated college students
across the country, is the primary subject of The Free
Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s.
At the heart of this book--as of the movement--is
Mario Savio, as unlikely a leader as ever there was: a
shy, rumpled philosophy major, who stuttered in
private conversation but, when addressing thousands,
had the extraordinary ability to lead people through
his reasoning process into their own clarity and
commitment. It was his famous line--"there comes a
time, when the system becomes so odious, that you
can't take part, you can't even tacitly take
part"--which set the tone for the uniquely personal
and moral nature of the movement. That in turn set in
motion the massive civil disobedience of December 2,
which led a heretofore reticent faculty to side with
the students and vindicate their cause.

[...]

In the opening essay, co-editor Reginald Zelnik, a
Russian history scholar who in l964 was a first-year
assistant professor at Cal, reminds us that the larger
story of "speech and academic freedom issues at
Berkeley dates back at least to the bitter Loyalty
Oath Controversy of l949-50." Then the faculty had
been the target of the university's capitulation to
McCarthyism as rigid rules about who could speak on
campus were enforced. By the early l960s, however,
students had learned to circumvent those rules and had
begun putting up recruiting tables at the entrance of
the campus to organize protests against the House
Committee on Un-American Activities, capital
punishment at San Quentin Prison, and racial
discrimination in employment and housing in the Bay
Area. But it was the civil rights movement, and
particularly the role of students who had participated
in the eventful 1964 Freedom Summer, that fueled the
FSM and gave it a unique spirit and moral toughness.
Essays by Jo Freeman and Waldo Martin discuss how the
experiences of participation in those
struggles--whether in Mississippi or across the Bay in
San Francisco--had built a sense of empowerment that
was now directed to power relations on the campus and
within the university "system."

[...] 

Perhaps the most compelling articles wrestle with the
language and vision of the emerging New Left in the
days before the Vietnam war protest and the
counter-culture revolution began. Jeff Lustig argues
that the FSM "burned off the fog of Cold War
repression." He also concludes that the movement
"reveals something important about the sixties as a
whole--that it was 'radical' before it was left. The
nature of radicalism is what made the later left
'new.'" At the same time, Robert Cohen observes that
the majority of the rank and file were not radical or
even liberal. Using letters that the sentencing judge
required of arrested students to explain their
actions, Cohen shows that a majority "did not
apologize for sitting in, but that University
intransigence had left them no alternative."

The l960s has become mythic--shorthand for a period of
greater authenticity--and my students often become
misty-eyed when contemplating that storied decade.
Some express their wish that they could have lived in
those hot times. The Free Speech Movement: Reflections
on Berkeley in the 1960s goes a long way towards
dispelling some of the nostalgia. Recent scholarship
has created a series of dualities that distinguishes
between the good sixties and the bad, the early and
the late, the tame and the wild, the morally
clear-eyed and the rabidly sectarian. As discussion on
H-1960s illustrates, embedded in such categorizations
is an effort to situate movement culture and politics
within broader themes in U.S. history. Thus essays
here by historians William Rorabaugh and Doug Rossinow
are a welcome contribution to seeing a more nuanced
and complex history that predated the FSM and
continued as a part of the larger movement for social
justice. Ronald Reagan may have promised "to clean up
the mess at Berkeley" as part of his successful
campaign for governor in 1966, but his brand of
conservatism had hounded liberal politics since the
late l950s and would reappear in his assault on "the
evil empire" in the 1980s. A similar moral dogmatism
within the New Left may have limited its effectiveness
and led to its splintering into identity politics.

[...] 
In the preface to this outstanding work, Pulitzer
Prize-winning historian Leon Litwak asserts, "History
teaches us that it is not the rebel, it is not the
curious, it is not the dissident, who endanger a
democratic society but rather the unthinking, the
unquestioning, the docile, obedient, silent and
indifferent." The FSM was one of those rare and brief
times in history when a wide coalition of diverse
interests engaged in intellectually thoughtful and
morally driven political action formed a critical mass
that successfully confronted a power structure and
brought about democratic reform. In our own era, no
less than that heroic time, the conditions are ripe
and people seem ready for significant change.

[...]
Citation: Lisa Rubens. "Review of Robert Cohen and
Reginald E. Zelnik, eds, The Free Speech Movement:
Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s," H-1960s, H-Net
Reviews, March, 2004. URL:
http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=189431084098191.

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