1968: The Year That Changed America (by Stephanie Williams)

 

                        Davis Hall, Wellesley College October 1966

I'm eighteen years old in 1968, a sophomore at Wellesley College. As girls of the time, our childhood had been spent in the sheltered 1950s. We were demure, conservative, and gently reared. We arrived at college to be educated in the liberal arts—as the world began to change around us. 

 

We were rule-bound: curfew at 11 pm, men permitted in your room only on Sunday afternoons, dress code for football games requiring suits, heels and white gloves. Sunday mornings, girls poured over the engagement columns in the New York Times. But three undercurrents were rising—women's rights, civil rights, and the war in Vietnam—and 1968 would be the year they crashed together.

 

Winter: hope rises
It is election year.

By early 1968, almost half a million American troops were fighting in Vietnam. Every month 40,000 boys were being drafted. Undergraduates could still defer, but draft deferments for graduate students had just been cancelled. The system protected the privileged—those who could afford four years of college—while working-class boys were sent to war. The men we knew were drawing closer to being drafted.

 

Eugene McCarthy campaign poster 1968

All of us were canvassing the streets of New Hampshire in support of Eugene McCarthy—a Democratic senator from Minnesota challenging President Lyndon Johnson on a peace platform. Through mushy snow, we knocked on doors, handed out leaflets for McCarthy. On March 12, he secured 42.4% of the vote to Johnson's 49.5%. The primary should have been a shoe-in for Johnson. We were jubilant. Days later, Bobby Kennedy, much more well known, who'd watched from the sidelines, declared his candidacy.

Two weeks later, on Sunday evening, March 31, President Johnson delivered his famous address to the nation, withdrawing from the race. He declared he would not seek the nomination and would begin to de-escalate the war by halting the bombing of North Vietnam. He invited Hanoi to join him in moves towards peace. The next day he announced he would meet Bobby Kennedy and work together towards national unity. By Wednesday, the North Vietnamese were ready to talk peace.

It was all wonderful for 24 hours.

Spring: everything shatters

On Thursday, April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated.

Johnson cancelled his flight to Hawaii. Hanoi cancelled plans for talks. Fierce riots broke out in Washington, Baltimore, New York, Boston. All the momentum toward peace—gone in an instant.

The weather was beautiful that spring of '68, but the violence kept escalating. At Columbia University in New York, 1,000 students invaded five campus buildings protesting the university's involvement in weapons research and plans to encroach on Harlem. Police were called. The campus exploded. Unrest spread to Chicago, to Paris and the Sorbonne.

Columbia protests, April 1968
Hugh Rogers Photography/ /Columbia College Today

 Night after night on TV, grainy scenes from the jungle showed wounded men on stretchers being run to hovering helicopters. Footage came straight from the battlefield, uncensored, deeply traumatizing. The crump of bombs, the walls of flame cascading over grassy villages. Wailing children fleeing barefoot. The war was morally indefensible, and we were culpable.

 

Guiding a medivac helicopter to pick up casualties, near Hue, April 1968
AP Art Greenspan/Alamy

Not long after Christmas the year before, I'd had breakfast with Hillary Rodham, who lived across the hall from me. She was talking about the National Organization for Women, formed just the previous October.

"What do you think," Hillary said to me, "should Wellesley join?"

"I think the basic question is: are we feminists?"

I suppose I am fortunate to have first heard the term from Hillary Rodham Clinton.

By the following spring, something had shifted in us. We realized we had been raised in a world that turned entirely on men and their view of things. The childhood activities thought appropriate for boys rather than girls. The stories and films in which the male is in charge, noble and dominant; the female a possession, passive, unable to negotiate the world alone. We were waking up.

Summer: the second assassination

We had hardly got home for the summer holidays when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles on June 5.

Two murders in two months. Two leaders who represented hope for peace and civil rights, gone. The violence wasn't theoretical anymore—it was consuming the people trying to end it.

August: Chicago

My roommate Anne traveled to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Everyone knew the city was armed to the hilt. A peaceful anti-war demonstration was planned for the last afternoon. Young men offered up draft cards like communion chalices to burn before the crowd. The crowd chanted, "Hell no, we won't go."

Burning a draft card, Grant Park, 28 August 1968.
Anne Trebilcock

 Kennedy's assassination had left nearly 400 delegates uncommitted. McCarthy was still in the race. But Johnson's favorite, Hubert Humphrey, was trying to pave a middle way. By nightfall, it was cold. Everyone knew the Convention had slipped away from the peace candidates. The Vietnam war would go on. Nothing would change.

Outside in the park, Anne was exhausted. There were so many people. Floodlights glanced off police helmets. All of a sudden—no one knows why—huge armored cars barreled down the street. The National Guard fired tear gas. Police with clubs moved in a line and began to run, swinging left and right. Canisters popped. Smoke rose. The air burned. Sirens wailed. Protesters seized trash cans and hurled them back. Anne's eyes teared up. She couldn't breathe. She covered her mouth and nose with her McCarthy scarf and ran. There was a shriek as a baton cracked hard on someone's head. A girl was dragged by her hair and tossed into a paddy wagon. People were screaming.

All of it, seventeen minutes, was broadcast live on television around the world.

The whole world was watching the American government turn violence on its own citizens who were calling for peace.

Fall: a new view of the world

By fall 1968, there was a new vibe on campus. Hemlines were mid-thigh. Girls went about with no makeup, their hair long and loose. Some Black girls adopted Afros—emulating Angela Davis. Everyone talked of the relief of not wearing bras.

Over the summer a group called Cell 16 had set up a "female liberation front" in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Women had had enough of listening to men on ego trips, of being assigned to take minutes and make coffee, of being treated as objects to be possessed. The scales fell from our eyes. The term male chauvinist was coined. 

In November, the Democrats lost the election. Richard Nixon was elected president. The war would continue.

All the things we had been raised to believe in, all the systems we had taken for granted—the structures of government, not perfect, but relatively benign—all of it now known to be corrupted and degraded. Two-thirds of government resources devoted to war and outer space. Basic human dignity denied to Black citizens. Our own role as women of no consequence. The planet threatened by pollution and nuclear annihilation.

Who could you trust in authority anymore?

The echo across decades

In the winter of 1967, I had stayed with Yale's chaplain, William Sloane Coffin—one of the Freedom Riders arrested in 1961, a man Martin Luther King had bailed out of jail. Over drinks, the talk was electric. About conscience—and the role of civil disobedience.

William Sloane Coffin on his arrest Montgomery Alabama,
25 May 1961

How far are you prepared to let something go before you stand up to be counted?

Looking back across nearly 60 years, I see 1968 as the year America broke open. In twelve months we went from hope to despair, from believing in our institutions to watching them fail us, from trusting authority to questioning everything. We watched two assassinations destroy the peace and civil rights movements' momentum. We watched police violence broadcast into living rooms. We watched a war grind on despite massive opposition.

The patterns feel disturbingly familiar in today's America. Deep divisions. Struggles for civil rights taking new forms. Women fighting again for control over their own bodies. The sense that institutions meant to protect us have been corrupted.

The question Bill Coffin posed that electric night remains: how far are you prepared to let something go before you stand up to be counted?

Each generation must answer for itself.

Stephanie Williams is a historian and writer who lives in north London. 

 
Her latest book, telling the story of her four years as a Canadian, convent-educated girl at an elite American women's college is The Education of Girls -- coming of age in 4 years that changed America, 1966-1970.

 

'A rich and stirring history of a moment when everything was changing for women in higher education.' Hillary Rodham Clinton

1968, looking back, by Leslie Wilson

Robert Schediwy

On this day in May 1968, 'Les evenements' were in full swing. Left-wing workers and students together were challenging the stuffy status quo of postwar France; that was all my fifteen year-old self knew, but I was deeply excited. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the French student leader, had been evicted from France, but rumours were rife that he would be nipping back across the border. In the Quartier Latin, tear gas was swirling round and students - among them my brother's French penfriend Yvon, were throwing cobble stones at the police, or rather the CRS riot force, and chanting (with some justification) 'CRS, SS!' and 'We are all German Jews' (Nous sommes des Juifs Allemands) because a right wing politician had dismissed Cohn Bendit on the grounds that he was a) German and b) Jewish.

I was supposed to be revising for my O Levels, but spent more time reading novels from the library, slipping them under my duvet (having a German grandfather, I had one, ahead of everyone else) when my parents entered my bedroom to demand if I was working. I was almost sixteen, and in many ways rather young for my age.

I lived in Nottingham, and at the university, there were 'sit-ins' and demonstrations, to the ire of our family friend who was Reader in classics there, a gentle, scholarly man. He took me to watch the award of an honorary degree to JRR Tolkien (I was crazy about Tolkien's work), but nothing could be heard at all because Lord Seebohm was getting an honorary degree that day, and students were demonstrating against his involvement in South Africa. I remember them climbing up to the window and shouting through it. I was disappointed not to hear Tolkien, though I felt vaguely guilty for resenting the demonstration, and also bad that I was inside with the uncool adults while the committed people were outside.

It felt as if the world was changing, and would never be the same again. As if people were standing out against hypocrisy and for freedom, and against war. The Vietnam war was going on, and in America students were burning draft papers; also offering people flowers and saying 'peace, man,' generally in a fume of pot. Hippy fashion, of course, percolated down to us, even such girls at my school as were deeply conservative.

Enoch Powell made his 'rivers of blood' speech, and one of my teachers said he was 'a voice crying in the wilderness.' At tutor time, I got into an argument with another girl, who told me she was racially prejudiced and proud of it; others weighed in against me. I argued against prejudice, with nobody to back me up, and the form tutor accused me of being intolerant and argumentative. I probably was argumentative, and I was certainly intolerant of racism. Teenage girls are sharp-edged; they don't see many shades of grey, in general. I was quite sure my teacher was unfair, and I still am.

That summer, in the heavenly, relaxed time after the exams, I lay in the grass of someone's garden, at a UNA youth group event, alongside a Czech student called Jiri, who'd come to England in the Prague Spring. We all knew that Communism was being transformed in Czechoslovakia, and I somehow expected Jiri to be living in the bliss of a new heaven and a new earth, but he was rather stressed, probably homesick. Something about him was deeply familiar to me, having lived up with people who'd been traumatised by living under dictatorship, though it's only now, looking back, that I can see this. He was very attractive, I seem to remember, with very dark curly hair, long of course, because all boys and young men were growing their hair long. Beards weren't allowed at school; they had to wait for university to grow. John Lennon was the template.

'Hey Jude' came out that year, but the summer, for me, was Yellow Submarine and All You Need is Love, and, of course, still Sergeant Pepper. I sang Joan Baez, my brother was keener on Bob Dylan. We sang 'We Shall Overcome' rather a lot.

Meanwhile, De Gaulle survived a vote of no confidence, and our friend Yvon quit the 'Evenements' when he saw the CRS seize a woman student and bang her head on the pavement. I felt a little disappointed and cast down about that, but now I can see his point of view.

Robert Kennedy, Wikimedia Commons

I have no idea where I was when I heard of John Kennedy's assassination, but I do know exactly where I was when I heard about Robert. I was in the kitchen with my mother; it was a lovely day and the dining table, in the next door room, glowed in the sunlight. My father came in and said: 'Terrible news. They've killed Bobby Kennedy.' He said it was a dreadful day because Kennedy had been 'the great hope of the black man in America.' What I can't remember  is Martin Luther King's assassination, which was arguably a much worse day for black people in the States. Possibly this is, I'm embarrassed to admit, because Robert Kennedy was definitely dishy, as we used to say in those days. He did also seem to stand for anti-racism, for the breaking down of barriers, for liberal values.

But Dubcek and Svoboda were still standing up for Communism with a human face in Prague.
After my O Levels, I was sent off to stay with Yvon's family, the Dufours, in France, who had become close family friends of ours; my dear friend Francoise, who'd also stayed in the family, became my adopted big sister. Having split from her husband, she'd come back with her little girl Jeanne to live with her parents, and she talked to me and entertained me and drove me up to Paris to see the graffiti from the Evenements before they were all washed away. It had all come to an end in the Quartier Latin then. I remember streets of earth where the cobbles had been grubbed up, tidy piles of cobblestones, buses of police and tourists with cameras. It felt rather like the aftermath of Reading festival, and I had an overwhelming sensation of emptiness.
The Dufours drove me down with them to Roaix, in Provence, where my parents were to join us for a camping holiday, in the bumper-to-bumper traffic of the annual French exodus. The campsite was fun: all the young people got together to enjoy themselves. One hot, cicada-noisy night, we danced to a gramophone on an empty threshing floor and the farmer turned up, fired a shot, and drove us away. It was on that holiday that a van arrived and sprayed the trees with pyrethrin (I think, remembering the smell). I don't know what the purpose of this was, but I remember the silence the following night. There were no more cicadas. When later I read Carson's Silent Spring, I remembered that, with deep sadness.

My brother went on a language course in Kiev that year; he was studying German with Russian at Cambridge. On the way back from Kiev, his train had been held up for hours at the frontier while trainloads of tanks went through on the way to Brest-Litovsk. The talks were going on at Bratislava, and there was a bad feeling. The Russians were losing patience.
I remember how the news came through of the Russian invasion. We cried. For me, it felt as if everything was collapsing; there had been a frost that had destroyed the hopes of May. The cicadas had stopped singing, and maybe there was no point in singing 'We shall Overcome' any more. My father said it was the fault of the Czechs, who would have got the freedoms they wanted if they'd only been patient. I was shocked to hear him say so, for earlier in the year he'd been saying quite different things.

One of the tanks that rolled into Prague: Gerritse at Dutch Wikipedia

In the autumn, I went to Germany to spend the first term of the 6th form in a school in Traunstein, Upper Bavaria. I forgot all about politics for a while and just enjoyed the food, the wonderful landscapes, learning to talk Bavarian, and my friendship with Gaby, the girl whose family I stayed in and whose class I was in.
It's fashionable now to say that the 1968 generation became the selfish Thatcherites of the 80s. I know a lot of people my age who are anything but (though I was a very young member of that generation). For me, 1968 lit a flame which has never been extinguished, a belief, in spite of Russian tanks, pesticides, the CRS and De Gaulle, that change is possible, though I guess the year showed me that talk of ground-breaking revolution is often premature.
Twenty years later I was one of 62 peace protestors who got over (in my case round) barricades to mark the outside of the MOD with ash (barbecue briquettes) in an Ash Wednesday protest against nuclear weapons. I already had a criminal record for cutting a strand of the fence at the Burghfield nuclear bomb factory the previous year. I was a regular day visitor at Greenham Common. Unlike my 16 year-old self, I knew exactly what this was about; a life for my children, and every living person on the planet for starters; but Greenham taught us all to 'make the links', showing how inequality and neo-colonialism fuelled war all over the earth. I was committed to non-violence; no cobblestones and Molotov cocktails flying through the air for us peaceniks. But I had no problem with taking a hacksaw blade to the Burghfield fence, or to the courageous campers at Greenham scissoring the fence apart with businesslike bolt cutters.
One gets older; one learns to understand how complex things are. Complexity seems a cause worth campaigning for nowadays, where memes on social media are demonstrating how destructive they can be. Truth is another crucial value, and women's rights, which weren't considered particularly important in the '60s. But for me, 1968 doesn't represent a fixed ideology, rather a year when hope blazed high, a year that made me aware, alive.