Last fall I was jarred into what
I would call a time loop by the onset of the Occupy movement. A strong sense of dèjá vu propelled me
back almost fifty years to relive the days of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley,
when I was beginning my professorial career.
The
tenor of American society as it entered the Sixties needs some portrayal for
those much younger than I. If I
had to pick a word that best captures it, I'd choose "conformity." In the previous two decades the nation
had emerged from the Great Depression and gone through the traumas of World War
II and the Korean War. Veterans of
those wars wanted nothing more than to get on with their careers and their
families. The Eisenhower years
(1952-60) had brought an era of "normalcy."
Conformity
was reinforced by an anti-Communist hysteria and the blacklisting it entailed.
Many around the country, including UC faculty in the early Fifties, had been
required to sign loyalty oaths or be dismissed. Although Senator McCarthy's crusade had ended in 1955 when
his attack on the Army was derailed, the infamous House Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC) was still a force.
Fear was palpable; I remember my mother in the Fifties hiding away books
by Bolsheviks that she had bought in 1920 as a college student.
The Man in
the Gray Flannel Suit, a 1950s book and
movie, depicted conformity in business. (The title was more than
figurative; when I was interviewed in 1956 for a job at IBM I discovered that
my friends there wore only solid blue or gray suits, white shirts and
"discreet" ties.)
According to a 1950s sociological study by David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, the American middle class had become "other
directed," being guided more by outside influences than from within
themselves.
I
arrived at Cal in 1960 after a stint in industry. The university I entered was shortly to be styled in UC
President Clark Kerr's The
Uses of the University as a
"multiversity." (Ironic
that, having recently blogged about the
universe and multiverse, I should now be writing about the university and
multiversity!) Kerr wrote that the
university had become like a huge corporation: so departmentalized, so composed
of and beholden to a bevy of competing interests, as to be governable only
through a corporate model. The
book is a bit rueful, sensing a loss of something valuable: the university's
center had shifted from its faculty to its administration. "Faculty members," Kerr
wrote, "are increasingly figures in a 'lonely crowd.' " Kerr was of course referring to
Riesman's book.
The
milieu I have outlined was the background of most students in 1960. Yet a rebellion was in the offing,
partially informed by the rising, nonconformist "beat" ethic that had
strong roots in San Francisco.
Months before my arrival at Cal, some students had been participants in
a riot in San Francisco when HUAC had held anti-communist hearings. Sproul Plaza, the main venue on campus
for student activity, was a bazaar of tables where causes ranging from
left to right were advocated and organized, among them anti-segregation Freedom
Marches to the South.
In
September 1964, the "bazaar" was suddenly shut down because of
complaints by conservatives outside the University. The result was the birth of
the Free Speech Movement, an explosion of rallies and sit-ins by thousands of
students. Hundreds were jailed. It
was a unique occasion in which Maoists and Young Republicans joined forces.
The
FSM quickly morphed into a thoroughgoing indictment of the university
itself. In December, Mario Savio gave a speech
that encapsulated the students' alienation. If the university is a firm, he said, and its president a
manager reporting to a board of directors (the Regents), then the faculty are
simply "a bunch of employees" and students just raw material to be
formed into product and sold to the university's clients. This was intolerable. "There's a time when the operation
of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take
part. You can't even passively
take part. And you've got to put
your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the
apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the
people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from
working at all." (A video of the speech is
really worth watching.)
The
FSM's message ignited protests among similarly disaffected students around the
world. It defined the rest of the
Sixties as it spilled over from universities to society at large. These youngsters were saying that
everything they saw in the conformist society around them was broken,
unresponsive to "working within the system," because it was the system
itself that had to change. And change it they did. The subsequent years of turmoil
produced a new ethos for their and later generations that would have been quite
unrecognizable a decade earlier.
On
awakening from this time-loop reverie, I was convinced that Occupy is a
grandchild of the FSM. Two
generations later, Occupiers are as alienated from a broken, unresponsive
system as were students in the FSM.
In the Sixties the FSM had sprung up in a system characterized not only by the multiversity, but also by a conformist culture, stifling social mores, and racial
segregation. In the Tens, Occupy's
frame of reference is a rapacious Wall Street culture, dysfunctional
government, and a greatly inequitable distribution of wealth and income.
Despite these differences, Savio's diatribe against "the operation of the
machine," if spoken today, would no doubt strongly resonate with
Occupiers. Major changes in the
system were then and are now called for.
The
Occupy movement is now restarting after a winter lull. Last year it greatly increased public
awareness of the appalling and growing wealth/income gap in the country (see the chart below). As it reawakens, I hope Occupy will
further focus the public on that gap and other inequities.
Some
complain that Occupy has no agenda, that it is but an inchoate protest against
the status quo. I would remind
them that the FSM had no agenda either, only an irrepressible and well-founded
urge for change. As in the
Sixties, we might be in for some years of tumult. If so, as in the Sixties, our now very unbalanced and
unresponsive society will be the better for it.
 |
| Source: New York Times, April 17, 2012 |
Late Flash: As I post this blog entry, I find
that The Occupy Handbook, a
560-page compendium of articles about Occupy by noted economists, columnists and others, has been published today.
I have downloaded it onto my iPad
and am looking forward to reading it.