tag:theconversation.com,2011:/id/topics/1960s-13461/articles1960s – The Conversation2024-03-11T13:10:44Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2246802024-03-11T13:10:44Z2024-03-11T13:10:44ZHow alternative communities have evolved – from pacifist communes to a solution to the ageing population<p>People have sought solace and strength in communal living for thousands of years. But unlike traditional villages bound by kinship or geography, “intentional communities” are deliberately constructed by people who choose to share not just space, but also a specific set of values, beliefs or goals. Such forging of a collective path is often in response to times of social change. </p>
<p>Here are three instances where people have turned to intentional communities to seek sanctuary, purpose and alternative ways of living. </p>
<h2>Second world war</h2>
<p>As the war raged across Europe, one particular group of people was looking for alternative solutions. Conscientious objectors were people who refused to fight for moral or religious reasons. </p>
<p>It is <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwy002">estimated</a> that there were around 60,000 male conscientious objectors in Britain. Some took up non-combatant roles, such as medics, but others sought out less conventional opportunities. With farming identified as an exempt occupation, some conscientious objectors joined pacifist “back to the land” communities. </p>
<p>One such community was <a href="https://www.littletoller.co.uk/shop/books/little-toller/no-matter-how-many-skies-have-fallen-by-ken-worpole/">Frating Hall Farm</a> in Essex. It provided a safe haven for those who did not wish to fight in the war. As well as farming, the community lived, ate and worked together. </p>
<p>Another such community was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/dec/05/conscientious-objectors-lincolnshire-collow-abbey-farm-play-remembrance">Collow Abbey Farm</a> in Lincolnshire. This was a farming cooperative set up by a different set of conscientious objectors. Again, the principles of pacifism, farming and community brought individuals and families together in a time of need. </p>
<p>Many of these communities dissipated after the war ended, having served their purpose as safe havens for pacifists. </p>
<h2>1960s</h2>
<p>Still in the shadow of the second world war, the 1960s blossomed into a more permissive era which allowed for a freer sense of self and expression. This decade heralded a sense of social change with movements such as civil rights and women’s rights emerging. As the decade progressed, so did the different types of intentional communities. </p>
<p>The 1960s commune movement has been described by some experts as a <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780203615171-18/sixties-era-communes-timothy-miller">hotbed</a> of free love, drug taking and loose morals. But others <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/mono/10.4324/9780203790656-7/collective-profile-communes-intentional-communities-yaacov-oved">argue</a> they embodied something much more important and were representative of the social changes under way at the time. </p>
<p>In an attempt to escape “straight” society, many young people sought out spaces that allowed them to experiment with alternative forms of living and identity. These were communities that often embraced the non-nuclear family alongside other “counter cultural” ideas such as veganism and non-gendered childrearing. </p>
<p>One well documented example of this is <a href="https://www.braziers.org.uk/buildings-and-land/main-house/">Braziers Park</a> in Oxfordshire. It was a community that formed in the 1950s but flourished in the 1960s and 70s. Braziers was initially set up as an educational community. </p>
<p>Its alternative nature attracted the likes of Rolling Stones frontman, Mick Jagger, and his then girlfriend <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Faithfull/wLGpJ_8I6WYC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover">Marianne Faithfull</a>, who had lived there during her early life.
She described it as “otherworldly” in her memoir. Braziers still exists today and now offers courses, workshops and retreats.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/four-reasons-to-consider-co-housing-and-housing-cooperatives-for-alternative-living-99097">Four reasons to consider co-housing and housing cooperatives for alternative living</a>
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<p>Another example was <a href="https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-a-beautiful-way-to-live-1971-online">Crow Hall</a> in Norfolk, which was founded in 1965. Although they denied they were a commune, it had all of the marks of being one, with elements such as shared accommodation and collective child rearing. The community operated an open door policy, inviting others to “come find themselves”. It eventually dispersed in 1997. </p>
<p>Like Braziers, some communities set up during the 1960s are still in place today such as <a href="https://www.postliphall.org.uk/">Postlip Hall</a> near Cheltenham, or the <a href="http://www.ashram.org.uk/">Ashram Community</a> near Sheffield. But many others ended as society moved on. Experts who have <a href="https://westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk/item/911v7/nineteen-sixties-radicalism-and-its-critics-radical-utopians-liberal-realists-and-postmodern-sceptics">reflected</a> on this period describe it as both a time of freedom and, for others, mistakenly liberal.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">New Ground Cohousing in High Barnet, north London.</span></figcaption>
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<h2>Today</h2>
<p>The <a href="https://diggersanddreamers.org.uk/#">communities scene</a> continues to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jan/17/is-the-boom-in-communal-living-really-the-good-life">flourish</a> but this time under new challenges such as an ageing population and climate change. It’s difficult to estimate how many such communities exist in the UK, as nobody keeps official figures. </p>
<p>Arguably, some of the same generation who were “tuning in and dropping out” in the 1960s are now seeking equally alternative solutions for their older age. For some, this is to be found in the phenomenon of <a href="https://cohousing.org.uk/news/how-the-rise-of-cohousing-is-enriching-seniors-lives/">“senior cohousing”</a>. These are intentional communities run by their residents where each household is a self-contained home alongside shared community space and facilities. </p>
<p>One example of senior cohousing is <a href="https://newgroundcohousing.uk">New Ground</a> in north London. This is a community of older women, founded in 1998, who took their housing situation into their own hands. Defying some of the more traditional models of housing for older people, such as sheltered accommodation, New Ground is an intentional community for women over 50. They live by the ethos of “looking out for, rather than looking after each other”.</p>
<p>For others, the solution involves joining an intergenerational community such as <a href="https://www.oldhall.org.uk/old-hall-community/">Old Hall</a> in Suffolk where octogenarians live alongside children and adults under one roof. This is a community of around 50 people who farm the land, share their meals and manage the manor house in which they live.</p>
<p>As society evolves, so too do the forms that intentional communities take.
While the specific challenges may change, the human desire for connection and a sense of belonging remains constant.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/224680/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kirsten Stevens-Wood does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>From conscientious objectors to hippies and seniors, intentional communities offer refuge and purpose for people seeking a different way of life.Kirsten Stevens-Wood, Senior Lecturer, Cardiff Metropolitan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2143672023-10-03T04:36:46Z2023-10-03T04:36:46ZMy Sister Jill: Patricia Cornelius’ new play is a blistering post-war social and cultural commentary<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551612/original/file-20231003-22-sjuwc0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=12%2C6%2C4236%2C2816&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sarah Walker/MTC</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Emerging from one of Australia’s most enduring and significant theatrical partnerships between director Susie Dee and playwright Patricia Cornelius, My Sister Jill is a contemporary homage to George Johnston’s classic 1964 Australian novel My Brother Jack. </p>
<p>Both these works are set in post-war suburban Australia in the 1960s. But instead of the longing for the classic values of an older Australia that valorise war heroism and stoic masculinity, My Sister Jill centres the perspectives of those impacted by this narrative. </p>
<p>Parents Jack (Ian Bliss), a war veteran and prisoner of war from Changi on the Thai-Burma railway, and Martha (Maude Davey) have five children. Jill (Lucy Goleby), the eldest daughter, is intelligent and fierce. Johnnie (James O'Connell) frequently experiences his father’s violent ire as he is deemed “soft”. Door (Benjamin Nichol) and Mouse (Zachary Pidd) are twin brothers with mental telepathy and a joyful desire to be physically close at all times. </p>
<p>Christine (Angourie Rice), the youngest, plays the narrator. She seeks to connect with and understand her father through his stories of the horrors of war, sometimes biting off more than she can chew when the tales become deeply bleak and disturbing. </p>
<p>In a blistering post-war social and cultural commentary, My Sister Jill disrupts ideas of colonial glory with a troubling depiction of family violence, PTSD, homophobia and the ruinous intergenerational impacts of patriarchal oppression on everyone.</p>
<h2>The volatility of trauma</h2>
<p>The show is set in and around the family’s weatherboard home, and the set design by Marg Horwell features a beautifully restored 1953 FX Holden on stage. </p>
<p>It is a pared back, familiar landscape of dry yellow light, lino tiles, fading wallpaper and porch chairs, and the site of a cultural identity permeated by patriarchal violence from the perspective of White Australian culture. </p>
<p>As the story progresses, the children grow up under the volatility of their father’s trauma. They are frustrated by their mother’s fear and inaction. We witness Jack’s anger and violence toward his wife and children, his alcoholism and failure to hold down a job, his nightmarish memories and the anti-therapeutic 1960s attitude towards mental health. In one scene we watch Martha diligently “change the subject” to bring Jack back from the emotional edge as his memories of war threaten to overwhelm him. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551613/original/file-20231003-26-eqmv5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A weatherboard house." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551613/original/file-20231003-26-eqmv5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551613/original/file-20231003-26-eqmv5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551613/original/file-20231003-26-eqmv5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551613/original/file-20231003-26-eqmv5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551613/original/file-20231003-26-eqmv5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551613/original/file-20231003-26-eqmv5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551613/original/file-20231003-26-eqmv5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The set is a pared back, familiar landscape.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sarah Walker/MTC</span></span>
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<p>Jack’s story about surviving a torpedoing of a Japanese freighter by clinging to a raft while covered in thick black oil is taken from aspects of Cornelius’ own father’s life. The harrowing details of this particular scene as Jack recalls this moment of survival to Christine are profound and unsettling. </p>
<p>On stage, Christine is deeply impacted by this story, its retelling taking her into an imagined reality too frightening to contemplate. War is hell, the play reminds us, an indiscriminate false moral vacuum full of deep harm. Any notion of national pride that persists constitutes a dangerous narrative that whitewashes the violence of colonisation in our own backyards and homes. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/from-shell-shock-to-ptsd-proof-of-wars-traumatic-history-37858">From shell shock to PTSD: proof of war's traumatic history</a>
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<h2>Idealism and false promise</h2>
<p>Throughout the play, Jill emerges as a resistor to her father, incapable of holding back her fury at his behaviour. </p>
<p>Jill carefully looks after Johnnie when he returns to bed with urine-soaked pyjamas after being beaten. We see her refusing to wait inside the freezing cold FX Holden with the others when Jack leaves his family for hours outside the pub. Ultimately Jill is unable to “cut her father some slack”, as her mother suggests. She continually confronts her father, is forced to leave school and find work and ultimately moves out of home and becomes an organiser of anti-war demonstrations. </p>
<p>Christine travels from undying support of the wonderful father hero and a desire to head to war herself, to becoming the only child left in the family home. At this point, as she describes her father yelling at her mother all day long, she begins to echo her sister Jill’s intolerance of her dad and we see the full circle impact of intergenerational trauma. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551614/original/file-20231003-21-zqq5eo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The family look out as if watching television." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551614/original/file-20231003-21-zqq5eo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551614/original/file-20231003-21-zqq5eo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551614/original/file-20231003-21-zqq5eo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551614/original/file-20231003-21-zqq5eo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551614/original/file-20231003-21-zqq5eo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551614/original/file-20231003-21-zqq5eo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551614/original/file-20231003-21-zqq5eo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">We see the full circle impact of intergenerational trauma.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sarah Walker/MTC</span></span>
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<p>Christine reunites with Jill as a young adult, about to head to university, the first of the family to attend. Jill is proud of her, and promises she, too, will attend university one day. We are reminded of what has been lost for Jill. Christine speaks to the audience one of the last lines in the play “She will, won’t she, My Sister Jill? She will. Will she?” </p>
<p>Wrapped up in this moment is the idealism and false promise of the late 1960s Australia. </p>
<p>My Sister Jill raises the spectre of the question about what has changed in Australian culture since that time and what harmful narratives we continue to deny – or are we now able to collectively address? </p>
<p>One can only hope the answer to Christine’s question “will she?” is, like the answer to other questions aimed at addressing the ongoing impact of colonial violence on our national culture, a huge resounding yes.</p>
<p><em>My Sister Jill is at the Melbourne Theatre Company until October 28.</em></p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/more-than-half-of-australians-will-experience-trauma-most-before-they-turn-17-we-need-to-talk-about-it-159801">More than half of Australians will experience trauma, most before they turn 17. We need to talk about it</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/214367/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sarah Austin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>My Sister Jill disrupts ideas of colonial glory with a troubling depiction of family violence, PTSD, homophobia and the ruinous intergenerational impacts of patriarchal oppression on everyone.Sarah Austin, Lecturer in Theatre, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2081432023-06-28T12:35:20Z2023-06-28T12:35:20ZThe New York Times worried that publishing the Pentagon Papers would destroy the newspaper — and the reputation of the US<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534167/original/file-20230626-5693-i6hmnh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C17%2C2975%2C1808&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The New York Times resumed publication of its series of articles based on the Pentagon Papers in its July 1, 1971, edition, after it was given the green light by the Supreme Court. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/PentagonPapersInTheTimes/61378866a8224e64be95556e7b29dcb5/photo?Query=Pentagon%20Papers%20New%20York%20Times&mediaType=photo&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=1247&currentItemNo=0&vs=true">AP Photo/Jim Wells</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The late <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/16/us/daniel-ellsberg-dead.html">Daniel Ellsberg</a> was a former government contractor who leaked the classified history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. </p>
<p>In doing so, Ellsberg, who died on June 16, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/06/18/1007573283/how-the-pentagon-papers-changed-public-perception-of-the-war-in-vietnam">accelerated a shift in public opinion</a> against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and, some historians argue, led the Nixon administration to become ever more paranoid and secretive, eventually leading to the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation. </p>
<p>But perhaps the most lasting effect the publication of the Pentagon Papers had was on The New York Times, which had been a solidly pro-establishment newspaper. </p>
<p>The Times almost chose not to publish the papers, since the editor and publisher worried about being sued or prosecuted by the federal government. But they also worried about ruining the international reputation of the U.S., which had reached new highs after World War II. </p>
<p>The leadership of the Times in the early 1970s was a generation older than the <a href="https://upress.missouri.edu/9780826222886/provoking-the-press/">younger reporters who agitated for change</a> from within and from without. They saw the stodgy, institutional Times as unable to accurately portray the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s and pushed for the paper to reform itself to better speak to younger readers.</p>
<p>The decision to publish did not destroy the Times or the global standing of the U.S. It did begin to chip away at the hidebound paper’s reluctance to change too quickly or to damage political ties to the establishment. </p>
<p>While The New York Times is still slow to change, even more than 50 years after the Pentagon Papers affair, the incident did demonstrate that the paper was willing to jeopardize its connections to other powerful institutions, including the government, in order to serve the greater good – the public interest.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534172/original/file-20230626-33139-1gwq8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A cover page of a publication, labeled 'Top Secret - Sensitive' and entitled 'United States - Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534172/original/file-20230626-33139-1gwq8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534172/original/file-20230626-33139-1gwq8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=805&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534172/original/file-20230626-33139-1gwq8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=805&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534172/original/file-20230626-33139-1gwq8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=805&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534172/original/file-20230626-33139-1gwq8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1012&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534172/original/file-20230626-33139-1gwq8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1012&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534172/original/file-20230626-33139-1gwq8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1012&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The cover page of ‘The History of U.S. Decision-making Process on Vietnam,’ otherwise known as the Pentagon Papers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://nara-media-001.s3.amazonaws.com/arcmedia/research/pentagon-papers/Pentagon-Papers-Part-I.pdf">US National Archives</a></span>
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<h2>The conservative New York Times?</h2>
<p><a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gJ-kc4sAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">I</a> am a historian of American journalism who has studied the turbulent 1960s and early 1970s and the turmoil it created in news organizations, and <a href="https://www.pennpress.org/9780812248883/media-nation/">I have written about the Pentagon Papers</a> and The New York Times’ publication process. I based this research on the journal of A.M. “Abe” Rosenthal, who was the top editor at the paper during this period. Rosenthal’s journal is held at the <a href="https://www.nypl.org/locations/schwarzman/manuscripts-division">New York Public Library</a>.</p>
<p>To those who charge – wrongly – that The <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/public-editor/liz-spayd-the-new-york-times-public-editor.html">New York Times is a left-wing mouthpiece</a>, it may come as a surprise that The New York Times of 1971 was a conservative institution, unwilling to make waves or make itself the story. The paper’s editorial and business leadership was also fairly politically conservative.</p>
<p>Harrison Salisbury, who was then an associate editor at the paper, recalled the politics of the paper’s executives and top editors in his 1980 memoir. None of the editors could “have won a prize in a flaming liberal contest,” he wrote. And Rosenthal was “the most conservative editor on the paper.” According to Salisbury, Rosenthal chafed at the counterculture and positioned himself “firmly against what he saw as shapeless anarchy swirling up from the streets.”</p>
<p>In the pages of the Times, this manifested as pro-establishment stories. </p>
<p>Times reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner <a href="http://www.davidhalberstam.com">David Halberstam</a> criticized his employer for choosing the government’s version of events in Vietnam over what Halberstam knew from his reporting to be true. </p>
<p>J. Anthony Lukas, another Pulitzer Prize winner for the paper, fought to characterize the trial of <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-trial-chicago-7-180976063/">the Chicago 7</a>, a prosecution of political agitators at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, as a political show trial. The Times insisted that Lukas take the trial at face value, as the government presented it, which agitated Lukas enough that <a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1970/11/17/chicago-the-barnyard-epithet-and-other/">he wrote a book about it</a>.</p>
<p>The Pentagon Papers were the government’s version of the early days of the Vietnam War, but they were a version that the government had not released to the public. The Defense Department had commissioned a secret history of the Vietnam War in order to avoid making the same mistakes it had made in that war in the future. </p>
<p>This study was highly classified because the story it told was not the same story that President Lyndon Johnson’s administration had told to the public, to news organizations or even to Congress. Instead, the papers showed that the government had systematically lied.</p>
<p>When reporter <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/us/pentagon-papers-neil-sheehan.html">Neil Sheehan photocopied all of the documents</a> that Ellsberg had pilfered and made available to him, he did not immediately inform the Times’s top editor, or even Ellsberg himself. Sheehan knew that the papers were an explosive story, but he also knew that they were classified and that merely possessing them, let alone publishing them, would be a federal crime. </p>
<p>Ellsberg was certainly at risk of going to prison for smuggling them out, and the Times might also face substantial legal penalties. Rosenthal first heard of the papers in April 1971, at least a few weeks after Sheehan obtained them and long after Sheehan knew of their existence. </p>
<p>In his journal, Rosenthal wrote that the Times was “involved in one of the biggest, most voluminous and probably one of the saddest and most damaging stories it has ever confronted journalistically.” </p>
<p>Rosenthal immediately realized just how important the handling of the Pentagon Papers would be to the Times and for the country. In his journal, he ruminated on his loyalty to the Times and the risk that publishing the Pentagon Papers might damage or even destroy the paper if the government prosecuted individual reporters or editors – or successfully sued the Times out of business. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534179/original/file-20230626-5418-rq42h7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A dark-haired man in a suit and tie, wearing glasses and sitting down, looking happy." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534179/original/file-20230626-5418-rq42h7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534179/original/file-20230626-5418-rq42h7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=747&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534179/original/file-20230626-5418-rq42h7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=747&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534179/original/file-20230626-5418-rq42h7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=747&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534179/original/file-20230626-5418-rq42h7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534179/original/file-20230626-5418-rq42h7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534179/original/file-20230626-5418-rq42h7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Abe Rosenthal in 1965. He joined The New York Times in 1943 and worked there for 56 years, until 1999.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/AbeRosenthal/c50b3644ffc545368fc4cad4bc1075d8/photo?Query=Abe%20Rosenthal&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=1&currentItemNo=0">AP</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Challenging the establishment</h2>
<p>The Times was not the only institution that might be damaged by publication. The reputation of the entire nation was at stake, and this caused Rosenthal more worry than protecting the paper. </p>
<p>He wondered if loyalty to country lay in “adhering to a set of long accepted rules and laws, designed not only to protect politicians in general but, to the minds of many, to protect the country itself? Or did it lie in facing a decision to break those rules and laws?” In other words, would breaking the government’s rules on classification make the United States stronger by forcing the country to publicly grapple with its shortcomings?</p>
<p>Rosenthal even worried for a time that the Pentagon Papers were fake, concocted by a student activist group to lure the Times into legal peril and public disrepute.</p>
<p>Rosenthal rented first one, and then two suites at a hotel in New York so that the writers and editors could work in total secrecy away from the paper’s newsroom, sorting through the papers and making sense of them. Editors, executives and lawyers debated over whether stories about the papers could or should be published at all.</p>
<p>Despite his own doubts, Rosenthal eventually decided to move ahead. He had to persuade the publisher, Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger, that the paper should run the stories, and Sulzberger agreed – against the advice of the paper’s law firm. </p>
<p>Rosenthal told Sulzberger that “it would make a mockery of everything we ever told reporters, because how could we possibly ask them to go out in search for the truth at a time when the ultimate truth, the biggest story ever presented to The Times, had been placed in our laps and we turned away from it out of fear of the consequences of publication?”</p>
<p>Ellsberg himself only learned the Times would publish their series on the Pentagon Papers when the pages of the first installment had already been set in type and prepared for publication. At that point, even the source of the documents couldn’t stop the presses.</p>
<p>For the Times, the Pentagon Papers stories were an early reform of many that would come under Rosenthal and his successors. The reforms tried to address the concerns of the younger generation of reporters who were better in touch with a changing United States. They included expanded arts and cultural coverage, better treatment of women’s issues, and accountability measures such as <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2017.12059156">a daily corrections box</a>.</p>
<p>Rosenthal, and ultimately the Times as a whole, recognized that as the nation and world changed, so must the Times, to fulfill its duty to the public – and the public interest.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/208143/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kevin M. Lerner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The New York Times’ publication of the Pentagon Papers showed the paper was willing to jeopardize connections to other powerful institutions, including the government, to serve the public interest.Kevin M. Lerner, Associate Professor of Journalism, Marist CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2029072023-04-21T12:42:02Z2023-04-21T12:42:02ZBlack students in Washington state played key role in the Civil Rights Movement, new book states<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522174/original/file-20230420-29-ne9bdl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=40%2C102%2C6692%2C4444&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A protest led by the Black Student Union at the University of Washington at Seattle, 1968. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://depts.washington.edu/labpics/zenPhoto/uw_bsu/pitre/photo12.jpg">Emile Pitre Collection</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>When it comes to civil rights history, the focus is often on the marches, boycotts, sit-ins and other protests that took place in the South. In “<a href="https://nyupress.org/9781479810406/washington-state-rising/">Washington State Rising</a>,” Marc Arsell Robinson, assistant professor of African American history at California State University, San Bernardino, takes a look at the civil rights protests that occurred in a lesser-examined region of the United States: the Pacific Northwest. The following Q&A is about what Robinson found for his forthcoming book, which is set to be published in August 2023.</em></p>
<h2>Why write a book on Black student activism in the Pacific Northwest?</h2>
<p>As an African American born and raised in Seattle, I was curious to learn if and how my hometown was connected to the protests of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. I was pleased to learn the city, and region, was deeply connected to these larger movements. I felt a responsibility to share what I had learned. </p>
<p>Also, studies of Black protests from the 1960s tend to focus on the South. And even studies of civil rights events and groups outside the South position the Pacific Northwest as marginal. This pattern holds true of research on 1960s Black student activism, such as the studies of nationwide protest by <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/black-campus-movement-black-students-and-the-racial-reconstitution-of-higher-education-1965-1972/oclc/744287241">Ibram X. Kendi</a> and <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520282186/the-black-revolution-on-campus">Matha Biondi</a>. </p>
<p>My book shines light on Black Power’s reach beyond major cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. It shows Black Power’s impact on higher education, and it details how some Black student activists used community organizing and interracial alliances to create change.</p>
<h2>What was one of your most interesting discoveries?</h2>
<p>The Black Student Union, or BSU, at the University of Washington helped connect the Black Panther Party to Seattle. The group formed in fall 1967, and later several of its members helped co-found the Seattle Panthers in April 1968. This includes Aaron Dixon, who <a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/421-my-people-are-rising">confirms in his memoir</a> that he was in the Black Student Union at UW before being appointed by Bobby Seale as Captain, or leader, of the Seattle Panthers.</p>
<p>Moreover, as detailed in “Washington State Rising,” Dixon and other Seattle activists were introduced to the Panthers through BSU activities, including a trip to Oakland and San Francisco in April 1968 for a Black political conference, and the BSU’s network of local campus chapters and allied groups.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="A book cover featuring a black and white photo of two Black men and one Black woman sitting at a table." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521726/original/file-20230418-20-tb6yny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521726/original/file-20230418-20-tb6yny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521726/original/file-20230418-20-tb6yny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521726/original/file-20230418-20-tb6yny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521726/original/file-20230418-20-tb6yny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1123&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521726/original/file-20230418-20-tb6yny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1123&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521726/original/file-20230418-20-tb6yny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1123&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Washington State Rising’ tells the little-known story of the civil rights struggle in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://nyupress.org/9781479810406/washington-state-rising/">Marc Arsell Robinson/NYU Press</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What is the legacy of the Black Student Union in Washington state?</h2>
<p>Examples of the Black Student Union’s legacy are the Black studies courses and programs that were established in the 1960s. Prior to this, very few, if any, classes or assigned materials included the perspectives and experiences of Black people. Today, students and faculty continue to study Black history, even if names of programs or departments have changed to <a href="https://theconversation.com/california-vetoed-ethnic-studies-requirements-for-public-high-school-students-but-the-movement-grows-148486">ethnic studies and so forth</a>.</p>
<p>Similarly, ongoing efforts to recruit and retain diverse students, faculty and staff are part of the Black Student Union’s legacy. The most prominent example is the <a href="https://www.washington.edu/omad/">Office of Minority Affairs and Diversity</a>, known as OMAD, at UW. This initiative was a direct outcome of the Black Student Union’s <a href="https://depts.washington.edu/civilr/BSU_beginnings.htm">1968 sit-in</a> of the UW president’s office and negotiations with campus officials. The BSU was protesting UW’s small population of nonwhite students and faculty, along with related concerns. Today, the OMAD continues to offer African American and other minority students academic advising, cultural support, tutoring, leadership development and more.</p>
<h2>What does Black student activism in Washington state look like today?</h2>
<p>Black Student Unions are active at numerous colleges and universities in Washington, including the two schools featured in my book, the University of Washington and <a href="https://dailyevergreen.com/tag/black-student-union/">Washington State University</a>.</p>
<p>Like their 1960s counterparts, progressive Black students today continue to push their institutions to create, maintain and expand initiatives to graduate Black students, hire Black faculty and fund Black studies and related curricula.</p>
<p>In recent years, Black students across the Pacific Northwest have <a href="https://www.dailyuw.com/news/keep-the-pressure-on-uw-blm-continues-to-protest-for-unmet-demands/article_d1e7828e-ba7f-11ea-a0e5-9735552dd63b.html">organized in support of Black Lives Matter</a> and against the killings of unarmed Black people, often using social media as a tool for communication and public education. Overall, today’s Black student politics and struggles for greater equity continue the legacy of the Black Student Unions of the 1960s.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/202907/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marc Arsell Robinson received the 2022 Mellon Emerging Faculty Award. He was also previously a student and employee of the University of Washington and Washington State University.</span></em></p>Washington isn’t a state that typically comes to mind in discussions about student-led protests from the Civil Rights Movement. A Black history professor seeks to change that with a new book.Marc Arsell Robinson, Assistant Professor of History, California State University, San BernardinoLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1881972022-09-16T12:17:16Z2022-09-16T12:17:16ZThese high school ‘classics’ have been taught for generations – could they be on their way out?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/484952/original/file-20220915-25735-8jjzi8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C34%2C5734%2C3794&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">High school students have studied many of the same books for generations. Is it time for a change?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/william-shakespeare-royalty-free-image/168625734?adppopup=true">Andrew_Howe via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>If you went to high school in the United States anytime since the 1960s, you were likely assigned some of the following books: Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” “Julius Caesar” and “Macbeth”; John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”; Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”; and William Golding’s “The Lord of the Flies.”</p>
<p>For many former students, these books and other so-called “classics” represent high school English. But despite the efforts of reformers, both <a href="https://eric.ed.gov/?q=multicultural+canon&id=ED371401">past</a> and <a href="https://disrupttexts.org/">present</a>, the most frequently assigned titles have never represented America’s diverse student body.</p>
<p>Why did these books become classics in the U.S.? How have they withstood challenges to their status? And will they continue to dominate high school reading lists? Or will they be replaced by a different set of books that will become classics for students in the 21st century?</p>
<h2>The high school canon</h2>
<p>The set of books that is taught again and again, broadly across the country, is referred to by literature scholars and English teachers as “the canon.” </p>
<p>The high school canon has been shaped by many factors. Shakespeare’s plays, especially “Macbeth” and “Julius Caesar,” have been taught consistently <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/1488191">since the beginning of the 20th century</a>, when the curriculum was determined by college entrance requirements. Others, like “To Kill a Mockingbird,” winner of the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, were ushered into the classroom by current events – in the case of Lee’s book, <a href="https://time.com/3928162/mockingbird-civil-rights-movement/">the civil rights movement</a>. Some books just seem especially suited for classroom teaching: “Of Mice and Men” has a straightforward plot, easily identifiable themes and is under 100 pages long.</p>
<p>Titles become “traditional” when they are passed down through generations. As the education historian Jonna Perrillo observes, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/09/12/todays-book-bans-might-be-more-dangerous-than-those-past/">parents tend to approve</a> of having their children study the same books that they once did.</p>
<p>The last period of significant change to the canon was during the 1960s and 1970s, when the largest generation of the 20th century, the baby boomers, went to high school. For instance, in 1963, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/810053">a survey of 800 students</a> at Evanston Township High School in Illinois revealed that “To Kill a Mockingbird,” first published in 1960, was by far the “most enjoyed book,” followed by two books that had been published in the 1950s, J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” and Golding’s “The Lord of the Flies.” None of these books were yet traditional, yet they became so for the next generation.</p>
<p>A comparison of national surveys conducted in 1963 and 1988 shows how several books that were introduced to the classroom when the boomers were students had become classics when boomers were teachers.</p>
<p><iframe id="UU1gm" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/UU1gm/3/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>During the 1960s and 1970s, teachers even reframed “Romeo and Juliet” as a contemporary work. Lesson plans from the era referred to its adaptations into “<a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/811316">West Side Story</a>” – a musical that <a href="https://www.westsidestory.com/1957-broadway">initially came out in 1957</a> – and Franco Zefferelli’s <a href="https://eric.ed.gov/?q=zeffirelli+romeo&id=ED026386">risqué 1968 film version</a> of Shakespeare’s story of star-crossed lovers. It became the perfect hook for ninth graders in a study of Shakespeare that would conclude in 12th grade with “Macbeth.”</p>
<h2>Efforts to diversify</h2>
<p>English education professor <a href="https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED309453">Arthur Applebee observed in 1989</a> that, since the 1960s, “leaders in the profession of English teaching have tried to broaden the curriculum to include more selections by women and minority authors.” But in the late 1980s, according to his findings, the high school “top ten” still included only one book by a woman – Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” – and none by minority authors.</p>
<p>At that time, a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/23/opinion/the-mosaic-and-the-melting-pot.html">raging debate</a> was underway about whether America was a “melting pot” in which many cultures became one, or a colorful “mosaic” in which many cultures coexisted. Proponents of the latter view argued for a multicultural canon, but they were ultimately unable to establish one. A 2011 survey of Southern schools by Joyce Stallworth and Louel C. Gibbons, published in “English Leadership Quarterly,” found that the five most frequently taught books were all traditional selections: “The Great Gatsby,” “Romeo and Juliet,” Homer’s “The Odyssey,” Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”</p>
<p>One explanation for this persistence is that the canon is not simply a list: It takes form as stacks of copies on shelves in the storage area known as the “book room.” Changes to the inventory require time, money and effort. Depending on the district, replacing a classic <a href="https://ncte.org/statement/material-selection-ela/">might require approval by the school board</a>. And it would create more work for teachers who are already maxed out. </p>
<p>“Too many teachers, probably myself included, teach from the traditional canon,” a teacher told Stallworth and Gibbons. “We are overworked and underpaid and struggle to find the time to develop quality lessons for new books.” </p>
<h2>The end of an era?</h2>
<p>Esau McCauley, the author of “Reading While Black,” describes the list of classics by white authors as the “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/07/opinion/what-should-high-schoolers-read.html?searchResultPosition=1">pre-integration canon</a>.” At least two factors suggest that its dominance over the curriculum is coming to an end.</p>
<p>First, the battles over which books should be taught have become more intense than ever. On the one hand, progressives like the teachers of the growing <a href="https://disrupttexts.org/">#DisruptTexts movement</a> call for the inclusion of books by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-bipoc.html">Black, Native American and other authors of color</a> - and they question the status of the classics. On the other hand, conservatives have challenged or successfully banned the teaching of many new books that deal with gender and sexuality or race.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/484967/original/file-20220915-6106-4kq0zl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Toni Morrison wears her hair in gray locks under a cream-colored hat." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/484967/original/file-20220915-6106-4kq0zl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/484967/original/file-20220915-6106-4kq0zl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484967/original/file-20220915-6106-4kq0zl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484967/original/file-20220915-6106-4kq0zl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484967/original/file-20220915-6106-4kq0zl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484967/original/file-20220915-6106-4kq0zl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484967/original/file-20220915-6106-4kq0zl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Conservatives have sought to ban books written by Toni Morrison.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/toni-morrison-american-writer-novelist-editor-italy-news-photo/1129511612?adppopup=true">Leonardo Cendamo via Getty Images</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>PEN America, a nonprofit organization that fights for free expression for writers, reports “<a href="https://pen.org/banned-in-the-usa/">a profound increase</a>” in book bans. The outcome might be a literature curriculum that more resembles the political divisions in this country. Much more than in the past, students in conservative and progressive districts might read very different books.</p>
<p>Second, English Language Arts education itself is changing. State standards, such as those <a href="http://www.nysed.gov/common/nysed/files/912elastandardsglance.pdf">adopted by New York in 2017</a>, no longer make the teaching of literature the primary focus of English class. Instead, there is a new emphasis on “<a href="http://www.nysed.gov/curriculum-instruction/teaching-learning-information-literacy">information literacy</a>.” And while preceding generations of teachers voiced concerns about the distractions of <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/42832830">radio</a> and then <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/42799566">television</a>, books may have an even smaller share of students’ attention in <a href="https://countercurrents.org/2021/04/impact-of-social-media-on-our-attention-span-and-its-drastic-aftermath/">the age of cellphones, the internet, social media and online gaming</a>.</p>
<p>“We no longer live in a print-dominant, text-only world,” the National Council of Teachers of English proclaims in <a href="https://ncte.org/statement/media_education/">a 2022 position statement</a>. The group calls for English teachers to put less emphasis on books in order to train students to use and analyze a variety of media. Accordingly, students across the country may not only have fewer books in common, but they also may be reading fewer books altogether.</p>
<h2>Why teach literature?</h2>
<p>Over generations, English teachers have voiced many reasons to teach books, and the canon in particular: to instill a <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/816405">common culture</a>, foster <a href="https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED027289">citizenship</a>, build <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/820324">empathy</a> and cultivate <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4128931">lifelong readers</a>. These goals have little to do with the skills emphasized by contemporary academic standards. But if literature is going to continue to be an important part of American education, it is important to talk not only about what books to teach, but the reasons why.</p>
<p><em>This story has been updated to correct the year that “West Side Story” appeared as a musical.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/188197/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrew Newman has received funding from John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.</span></em></p>An English professor takes a critical look at why today’s students are assigned the same books that were assigned decades ago – and why American school curricula are so difficult to change.Andrew Newman, Professor and Chair, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York)Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1883432022-08-06T23:27:13Z2022-08-06T23:27:13ZVale Judith Durham, the cuddly Aussie ‘girl-next-door’ whose soaring voice found international fame<p>Judith Durham, one of Australia’s most recognisable voices, has passed away at 79. </p>
<p>An icon of the Australian music industry as lead singer for The Seekers and a solo artist, hers was an enduring female voice in an industry still dominated by men. Georgy Girl, A World of Our Own and The Carnival Is Over are just a few of the songs that will always ring best with her vocals.</p>
<p>Her artistry and approach was an alternative to the swinging 60s in popular music. There were no gimmicks to her art – just a soaring voice delivered with precision. </p>
<p>Born Judith Mavis Cock in the Melbourne suburb of Essendon in 1943, she studied classical piano at the University of Melbourne Conservatorium. Through connections at the university and in the local scene, she continued as a gifted musician and developed a following in the jazz community. </p>
<p>Using her mother’s maiden name she released her first EP, <a href="http://www.judithdurham.com/about-judith/biography">Judy Durham</a>, with Frank Traynor’s Jazz Preachers. The liner notes introduced her as “the most promising and talented vocalist today”. She was 19.</p>
<p>Around this time Durham also began an office job where she met Athol Guy. After a quick introduction, Durham was invited to play with Guy, Keith Potger and Bruce Woodley at a local coffee shop. </p>
<p>From here, The Seekers were born. </p>
<p>For a short time Durham recorded with both Frank Traynor and The Seekers for W&G Records, providing, as jazz historian Bruce Johnson described in <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_Oxford_Companion_to_Australian_Jazz.html?id=l5EYAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">The Oxford Companion to Australian Jazz</a>, an important link between jazz, folk and what would become pop mainstream.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-australian-music-vault-moves-the-canon-beyond-pub-rock-89361">The Australian Music Vault moves the canon beyond pub rock</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The Seekers</h2>
<p>Originally considered a folk and gospel group, The Seekers sound soon became distinct – in A World of Our Own, as their 1965 song declared. </p>
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<p>Their debut album, Introducing the Seekers, was released in 1963. In 1964, the group travelled to the UK. </p>
<p>Soon after arriving, The Seekers recorded the single I Know I’ll Never Find Another You at Abbey Road Studios. When it was released in 1965 it made them the first Australian act to gain <a href="https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/the-seekers-feted-with-australian-honor-judith-durham-on-the-mend-1565070/">number one in the UK</a>. </p>
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<p>When The Seekers’ impact was examined by the National Film and Sound Archive, curator Jenny Gall quoted another Australian popular music legend, Lillian Roxon, who <a href="https://www.nfsa.gov.au/collection/curated/ill-never-find-another-you-seekers">described the band</a> as “one cuddly girl-next-door type […] and three sober cats who looked like bank tellers”. </p>
<p>Like journalist Roxon, Durham was a pioneering woman making it in and for Australian music in the epic pop culture centres of the US and UK in the booming 1960s. </p>
<p>Although apparently unassuming, she was not just “the girl next door”, but a fundamental talent who worked hard for her achievements. </p>
<h2>International fame</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjoSLPRkspI">Durham said</a> the band had originally only planned to go overseas for “an adventure […] with no idea we would stay in England and become popstars”. </p>
<p>Intentionally or not, they became some of the biggest artists in the world during the 1960s. When they won the 1965 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NME_Awards">NME award</a> for Best New Group they beat The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. </p>
<p>In the US they earned similar attention. Georgy Girl became the number one single in the US in 1967, beating Tom Jones, The Supremes and The Monkees. </p>
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<p>The band were named Australians of the Year in 1967. In 1968 Durham respectfully called it quits. </p>
<p>A goodbye concert, Farewell the Seekers, was broadcast live on the BBC. It was watched by <a href="https://www.theseekers.com.au/about-us/the-60s">more than</a> 10 million people. Their inevitable “best of” album appeared on the British charts for 125 weeks.</p>
<p>In the 1970s Durham continued as a solo artist, often recording standards and covers. </p>
<p>She returned to jazz as part of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hot_Jazz_Duo">Hot Jazz Duo</a> in 1978 with husband Ron Edgeworth. </p>
<p>The pair continued to work together in the years to come on a variety of projects until he died of motor neurone disease in 1994. </p>
<p>Since that time Durham has been a patron of the Motor Neurone Disease Association of Australia and continued to fundraise for the organisation. It was one of many charities she supported. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-is-there-so-little-space-for-women-in-jazz-music-79181">Why is there so little space for women in jazz music?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Musical storytelling</h2>
<p>She returned to The Seekers periodically for anniversary tours, as well as continuing to record her own work and with others. </p>
<p>From jazz to folk to classical and even contemporary pop as a cameo on silverchair’s B-side English Garden, even after a stroke in 2013 she continued to work. </p>
<p>Her last release, the single <a href="http://www.judithdurham.com/latest-news">All in a day’s work</a> with Lance Lawrence in 2020, was yet another display of a love of musical storytelling.</p>
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<p>In an industry that often demands specific types of sparkle in women especially, she was physically small with a voice that loomed large. </p>
<p>A constant in so many households of a certain age, there was nothing quite like hearing Turn Turn Turn, Morningtown Ride or The Carnival is Over on an old radio or well loved turntable. </p>
<p>When I was lucky enough to finally see her live a few years ago it was like we were all little kids singing along for the sheer joy. Her enthusiasm and skill, even in her later years, radiated off the stage and out of the speakers. </p>
<p>May she rest well at the never ending carnival in the sky.</p>
<iframe width="100%" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eJSER2hFqKM" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/188343/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Liz Giuffre does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Judith Durham was lead singer of The Seekers and a solo artist. One of Australia’s most recognisable voices, she has passed away at 79.Liz Giuffre, Senior Lecturer in Communication, University of Technology SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1823352022-05-23T04:26:20Z2022-05-23T04:26:20ZBarbara Trapido’s ‘undeniably sexy’ novel of academic bohemia still dazzles at 40<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/463243/original/file-20220516-22-9vwtpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">arno smit iI r gSwWY unsplash</span> </figcaption></figure><p>Barbara Trapido’s debut novel, <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/brother-of-the-more-famous-jack-9781526612656/">Brother of the More Famous Jack</a>, is one of those books that seems destined to reach its readers in roundabout ways. </p>
<p>Like American novelist and Trapido fangirl Maria Semple, who has written the introduction to Bloomsbury’s new 40th anniversary edition, you could be lucky and stumble across it in a library sale bin, or a friend will press it into your hands.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido (Bloomsbury)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>And if by chance you’re asked to review it, you could start by scratching your head because you’ve never heard of this book with its distinctive title – even though it’s been around more than half your lifetime. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/462961/original/file-20220513-16-8y7kx8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/462961/original/file-20220513-16-8y7kx8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/462961/original/file-20220513-16-8y7kx8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462961/original/file-20220513-16-8y7kx8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462961/original/file-20220513-16-8y7kx8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462961/original/file-20220513-16-8y7kx8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462961/original/file-20220513-16-8y7kx8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462961/original/file-20220513-16-8y7kx8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Few books survive four decades of near-obscurity and still dazzle, but Trapido’s book does just that. It shimmers among this year’s company of books like some brightly coloured, sharp-witted, mini-skirted dolly bird from the 1960s who has gate-crashed a stuffy dinner party. </p>
<p>Irreverent and sweary, undeniably sexy, this coming-of-age novel plunges ahead unselfconsciously and with unusual candour. Its young protagonist, Katherine Browne, admits to compensating for her natural timidity “with odd flashes of bravado”. </p>
<p>A dozen pages in, and it feels as if an unknown hand has casually flicked on every light in the house, inadvertently blowing all the fuses. Semple describes the book as “<a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/brideshead-revisited-9780241472736">Brideshead Revisited</a> meets <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047437/">Sabrina</a> in bohemian 80s London”, and on the back cover, Meg Rosoff also mentions Brideshead, and places it in the 1970s. Neither have nailed its period, though Rosoff comes closest. </p>
<p>To anyone who lived through the years spanned by this book, the first part screams 1960s, from Katherine Browne’s little crocheted hats and thigh-high dresses, to the narrative’s pervasive, overt, and at times slightly perverse sexuality. </p>
<p>Comparisons with Brideshead Revisited occur because 18-year-old Katherine falls for a family, the Goldmans, but there is no whiff of the doomed melancholy that hangs over the tortured cast of <a href="https://theconversation.com/bloody-fool-evelyn-waughs-life-as-a-1920s-oxford-aesthete-57317">Evelyn Waugh</a>’s book. On the contrary, Trapido’s novel is funny and endearing; it is sometimes sad, but most of all it is unashamedly sexy, even lewd.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/463248/original/file-20220516-17-vjfht8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/463248/original/file-20220516-17-vjfht8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/463248/original/file-20220516-17-vjfht8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=253&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/463248/original/file-20220516-17-vjfht8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=253&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/463248/original/file-20220516-17-vjfht8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=253&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/463248/original/file-20220516-17-vjfht8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=318&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/463248/original/file-20220516-17-vjfht8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=318&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/463248/original/file-20220516-17-vjfht8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=318&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Matthew Goode and Ben Whishaw in Brideshead Revisited (2008)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">IMDB</span></span>
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<p>If it is to be compared with any other book, it might be Nancy Mitford’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-pursuit-of-love-9780241991848">The Pursuit of Love</a>, with its large, eccentric family, the Radletts of Alconleigh, and its sharp young women. But while Mitford’s delightfully dotty Radletts belong to the British upper classes, Trapido’s Goldman family are firmly middle-class, left-wing intellectuals.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/beyond-oxbridge-and-yale-popular-stories-bring-universities-to-life-we-need-more-of-them-in-australia-168943">Beyond Oxbridge and Yale: popular stories bring universities to life — we need more of them in Australia</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Risque, razor-sharp and politically incorrect</h2>
<p>One of the many reasons we read fiction is to satisfy what Jeanette Winterson calls, in her essay “Writer, Reader, Words”, our “mirror of life” longings. And yet, novelists have never written so cautiously, never self-censored so assiduously, in an effort not to cause offence. </p>
<p>They routinely employ sensitivity readers to tease out knots of privilege, highlight clumsy cultural gaffes, race, gender, and age-demeaning stereotypes and clichés. The result is more inclusive fictional worlds than the real world most of us are living in – the world as it ought to be, rather than as it actually is. </p>
<p>Weeding out undesirable social “isms” is necessary work, and yet it could be argued that such adjustments create a false “mirror of life” reflection, at the same time giving free speech a very considerable knock. </p>
<p>What blows some of those fuses when reading Trapido’s novel – aside from the razor-sharp dialogue – is its absence of political correctness. </p>
<p>Sensitivity readers were not a thing when Brother of the More Famous Jack was written. Anyone who was an adult (or almost adult) during the 1960s will immediately recognise its risqué air of permissiveness, its tendency to talk back to authority. They will recognise, too, a string of sensitivity misdemeanours that may prove slightly shocking to any 21st-century shaped sensibility. </p>
<p>Most of the shocks, though not all, are administered by Jacob Goldman, the larger-than-life Jewish philosophy professor, hairy, boisterous, and opinionated father to the Goldman’s six-strong tribe of children. Jake unapologetically asserts his masculinity, his role as head of the Goldman family, and his near constant state of lust for his wife, Jane, this latter even in front of small children and weekend guests. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“What have you been hatching,” Jacob says, noticing the glow on her cheeks. He puts his hands over her breasts. He has no restraints about laying hands on her in public.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Jacob Goldman’s habit of groping his wife appears not to discomfit Jane, and she is, as he asserts, his lawful wife. Most reviewers love Jacob unreservedly, and perhaps if I had read this book 40 years ago I would have too. Back then, his shameless chauvinism would have seemed like muscle-flexing in the face of second-wave feminism. </p>
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<span class="caption">Barbara Trapido (photographed by Tony Kaplan)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
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<p>All this time later, the domineering male feels rather less lovable – not that Jane doesn’t stand up to him, or his children, for that matter. But Jake’s groping of his wife, his carping about her playing the piano, are less readily digested in the era of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/is-the-metoo-era-a-reckoning-a-revolution-or-something-else-176565">#MeToo</a> movement, so that some of these scenes are a little squirm-making. </p>
<p>In Jacob’s defence, he does not grope other women, and is otherwise kind and protective towards Katherine, who in the early part of the book is one of his first-year <a href="https://theconversation.com/philosophy-obsession-and-puzzling-people-julian-barnes-new-novel-explores-big-questions-179092">philosophy</a> students. And late in the book, when Katherine most needs it, his innate goodness will surface.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/sex-is-neither-good-nor-bad-but-writing-makes-it-so-51722">Sex is neither good nor bad, but writing makes it so</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Open sexuality and plaited onions</h2>
<p>As the only child of a greengrocer and a stay-at-home mother, raised in a quiet suburban brick bungalow notable for its cleanliness, and for its china ducks on the wall, Katherine is enchanted by the Goldmans. Arriving at their rambling and none-too-clean house in Sussex for the first time:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The house, as it presents itself from the road, is like a house one might see on a jigsaw puzzle box, seasonally infested with tall hollyhocks. The kind one put together on a tea tray while recovering from the measles.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Katherine has been whisked away for the weekend by stylish architect John Millet. John is an older <a href="https://theconversation.com/noted-works-after-homosexual-29336">gay man</a> who is devoted to Jane Goldman, yet not, it transpires, deterred by either of these facts from having designs on Katherine’s virginity. He is only diverted from sleeping with her in the Goldmans’ guest room at Jacob’s dogged insistence on separate rooms.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I will not have this old faggot come here to my house in order to indulge a sideline in female children. Not with my pupils. Not with Katherine here. Is that clear to everyone present?”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Katherine perceives a world of difference between Jacob’s calling Millet “an old faggot” and her mother calling him “queer”. She had cried into her pillow over the latter, whereas Jacob’s pronouncement is made with none of her mother’s prim moral censure.</p>
<p>To Jacob, John says challengingly:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Hey, Jake, your wife is pregnant. What’s the matter with you people?”
“We like fucking,” Jacob says. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The word drops like a rock on Katherine’s uninitiated sensibilities, but does nothing to shake Jane’s composure, or John’s.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/464692/original/file-20220523-13-yw5ujw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/464692/original/file-20220523-13-yw5ujw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/464692/original/file-20220523-13-yw5ujw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464692/original/file-20220523-13-yw5ujw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464692/original/file-20220523-13-yw5ujw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464692/original/file-20220523-13-yw5ujw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464692/original/file-20220523-13-yw5ujw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464692/original/file-20220523-13-yw5ujw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Katherine is enchanted by the Goldmans’ bohemian house, and rumpled, wellington-clad domestic goddess Jane Goldman becomes her role model.</span>
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<p>Like so many useful confrontations, Katherine’s exposure to the openly declared sexuality between Jacob and Jane causes her to reconsider past; in particular, her own parents. </p>
<p>Jacob’s habit of blatantly inviting Jane to accompany him upstairs in the middle of the afternoon helps Katherine to think more charitably of her parents’ demure twin beds “with their matching candlewick spreads”. It helps her to conclude that “passion might go on even under candlewick. Even with the Eno’s Fruit Salts on the table between the beds.”</p>
<p>The Goldman family are ready-made for Katherine – who loves to knit – to fall into, and she quickly knits her way into their hearts. Jane, a “neglected Burne-Jones […] in wellingtons”, invites her into the garden to help plait onions, and soon becomes Katherine’s role model. When she first met Jacob, Jane explains, she was an</p>
<blockquote>
<p>upper-class Christian, buttoned up in cashmere. The product of a Scottish nanny and a girls’ boarding school. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>She had soon discovered that Jacob was much more fun. </p>
<p>Jane encourages her family to “make chamber music of the ‘Yellow Submarine’ on the flute, violin, piano and descant recorder”, and it is by her persistent efforts that the Goldmans’ eldest son Roger becomes a gifted violinist, and the next eldest, Jonty, pushes on with his flute playing. They sing together, too, and so breathtakingly that Katherine exclaims: “The songs cause me ever after to speak the name of John Dowland with reverence.” </p>
<p>Later, when Katherine knows the Goldmans better, she will scrub the kitchen floor for Jane as an act of pure devotion. </p>
<p>Towards the end, in a long moment, Jane makes a feisty feminist statement in front of her assembled family, telling Katherine what she must demand for herself in motherhood and marriage. That Katherine really doesn’t want to hear what Jane has to say is, sadly, all too believable. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-female-eunuch-at-50-germaine-greers-fearless-feminist-masterpiece-147437">Friday essay: The Female Eunuch at 50, Germaine Greer's fearless, feminist masterpiece</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Plunging into 1960s London</h2>
<p>When it was published, Brother of the More Famous Jack was the recipient of a Whitbread Special Prize for Fiction. Its author, born in South Africa, had migrated to England in 1963, when she was in her twenties. There she settled into life as the wife of an Oxford professor and raised children. Somewhere in the 1970s, she began to dream up the characters for this book.</p>
<p>Barbara Trapido’s experience of being plunged into 1960s London perhaps goes some way towards explaining the brilliance of this debut. The writing crackles and fizzes with all the clarity of vision and keen ear for dialogue of the observant outsider, deftly delivering what Maria Semple describes as “a daisy bomb of joy”. </p>
<p>Trapido went on to write six more novels. Some of them share characters, and one – <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/travelling-hornplayer-9780747594727/">The Travelling Hornplayer</a> – revisits, among other characters, Katherine Browne in another, later phase of her life. If you have not yet read Barbara Trapido, Brother of the More Famous Jack is the place to start.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/182335/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Carol Lefevre does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>This brainy feminist romp of a novel, loved by Rachel Cusk and Maria Semple, is often compared to Brideshead Revisited. But Carol Lefevre says it’s more like a sexy, sweary version of Nancy Mitford in 1960s London.Carol Lefevre, Visiting Research Fellow, Department of English and Creative Writing, University of AdelaideLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1812132022-04-14T11:55:01Z2022-04-14T11:55:01ZAndy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe portraits expose the darker side of the 60s<p>“If you remember the ‘60s, you weren’t really there”. This <a href="https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/07/remember-1960s/">famous quip</a> says much about our rose-tinted nostalgia for the decade. The fun-loving hedonism of Woodstock and Beatlemania may be etched into cultural memory, but Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe portraits reveal a darker side to the swinging 60s that turns our nostalgia on its head.</p>
<p>Warhol’s iconic Marilyn Monroe portrait <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/21/arts/design/christies-andy-warhol-marilyn-monroe.html">Shot Sage Blue Marilyn</a>, due to go on sale at Christie’s in May, is expected to fetch record-breaking bids of $200 million (£153 million), making it the most expensive 20th century artwork ever auctioned. Nearly 60 years after they were first created, Warhol’s portraits of the ill-fated Hollywood star continue to fascinate us.</p>
<p>According to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/21/arts/design/christies-andy-warhol-marilyn-monroe.html">Alex Rotter</a>, Christie’s chairman for 20th and 21st century art, Warhol’s Marilyn is “the absolute pinnacle of American Pop and the promise of the American dream, encapsulating optimism, fragility, celebrity and iconography all at once”. </p>
<p>Hollywood stars were great sources of inspiration for the <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/pop-art">Pop art</a> movement. Monroe was a recurring motif, not only in the work of Warhol but in the work of his contemporaries, including James Rosenquist’s <a href="https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/james-rosenquist-marilyn-monroe-i-1962/">Marilyn Monroe, I</a> and Pauline Boty’s <a href="https://www.artfund.org/supporting-museums/art-weve-helped-buy/artwork/11953/colour-her-gone">Colour Her Gone</a> and <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/boty-the-only-blonde-in-the-world-t07496">The Only Blonde in the World</a>.</p>
<h2>Mourning Marilyn</h2>
<p>Born Norma Jeane Mortenson but renamed Marilyn Monroe by 20th Century Fox, the actress went on to become one of the most illustrious stars of Hollywood history, famed for her roles in classic films like <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045810/">Gentlemen Prefer Blondes</a> and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053291/">Some Like It Hot</a>. She epitomised the glitzy world of consumerism and celebrity that Pop artists thought was emblematic of 1950s and 1960s American culture.</p>
<p>While Rotter’s statement may be true to some extent, there is also a sinister edge to the Marilyns because many were produced in the months following her unexpected death in 1962.</p>
<p>On the surface, the works may look like a tribute to a much-loved icon, but themes of death, decay and even violence lurk within these canvases. Clues can often be found in the production techniques. One of the collection’s most famous pieces, <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/warhol-marilyn-diptych-t03093">Marilyn Diptych</a>, uses flaws from the silkscreen process to create the effect of a decaying portrait. Warhol’s <a href="https://news.masterworksfineart.com/2019/11/26/andy-warhols-shot-marilyns">The Shot Marilyns</a> consists of four canvases shot through the forehead with a single bullet. In this, the creation of Warhol’s art is as important as the artwork itself.</p>
<h2>Death and Disaster</h2>
<p>At a glance, the surface level glamour of Warhol’s Marilyn immortalises the actress as a blonde bombshell of Hollywood’s bygone era. It is easy to forget the tragedy behind the image, yet part of our enduring fascination with Marilyn Monroe is her tragedy. </p>
<p>Her mental health struggles, her tempestuous personal life and the mystery surrounding her death have been well documented in countless biographies, films and television shows, including Netflix’s documentary <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19034332/">The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes</a> and upcoming biopic <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1655389/">Blonde</a>. She epitomises the familiar narrative of the tragic icon that is doomed to keep repeating itself – something that Warhol understood all too well after surviving a shooting by <a href="https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/who-was-valerie-solanas-andy-warhol-1202689740/">Valerie Solanas</a> in 1968. </p>
<p>The death at the heart of Warhol’s Marilyns is not just rooted in grief but is also a reflection of the wider cultural landscape. The 1960s was a remarkably dark period in 20th century American history. A brief look at the context in which Warhol was producing these images reveals a decade plagued by a series of traumatic events.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.life.com/">Life Magazine</a> published violent photographs of the Vietnam War. Television broadcasts exposed shocking police brutality during civil rights marches. America was shaken by the assassinations of John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Footage of JFK’s death captured by bystander Abraham Zapruder was repeatedly broadcast on television. Celebrated Hollywood stars were dying young and in tragic circumstances, from Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland to Jayne Mansfield and Sharon Tate.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A man and woman in a convertible car driving through a crowd." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/458156/original/file-20220414-20-8uscit.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/458156/original/file-20220414-20-8uscit.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/458156/original/file-20220414-20-8uscit.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/458156/original/file-20220414-20-8uscit.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/458156/original/file-20220414-20-8uscit.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/458156/original/file-20220414-20-8uscit.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/458156/original/file-20220414-20-8uscit.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">President John F Kennedy in the limousine in Dallas, Texas, minutes before his assassination.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_John_F._Kennedy#/media/File:JFK_limousine.png">Dallas Morning News/Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This image of the 1960s is echoed by the postmodern theorist <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/466541">Fredric Jameson</a>, who describes the decade as a “virtual nightmare” and a “historical and countercultural bad trip”. Stars like Monroe were not as flawless as they may appear in Warhol’s portraits, but were “notorious cases of burnout and self-destruction”.</p>
<p>Warhol understood this more than anyone. His <a href="https://publicdelivery.org/andy-warhol-death-disaster/#:%7E:text=Andy%20Warhol%20created%20a%20series,repetition%20to%20communicate%20his%20ideas.">Death and Disaster</a> series explores the spectacle of death in America and affirms the 1960s as a time of anxiety, terror and crisis. The series consists of a vast collection of silkscreened photographs of real-life disasters including car crashes, suicides and executions taken from newspapers and police archives. Famous deaths are also a central theme of the series, including portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Kennedy – all of whom are associated with significant deaths or near-death experiences.</p>
<p>Death and Disaster came about in 1962 when Warhol’s collaborator <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Andy_Warhol/-sotEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Maybe+everything+isn%27t+always+so+fabulous+in+America.+It%E2%80%99s+time+for+some+death.+This+is+what%E2%80%99s+really+happening.&pg=PT32&printsec=frontcover">Henry Geldzahler</a> suggested that the artist should stop producing “affirmation of life” and instead explore the dark side of American culture: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Maybe everything isn’t always so fabulous in America. It’s time for some death. This is what’s really happening. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>He handed Warhol a copy of the New York Daily News, which led to the first disaster painting <a href="https://artimage.org.uk/6123/andy-warhol/129-die-in-jet--plane-crash---1962">129 Die in Jet!</a>.</p>
<p>The recent hype around the auctioning of the Marilyn portrait reveals as much about our time as it does about our nostalgia for the 1960s. We choose to remember the decade in all its glorious technicolour, but uncovering its darker moments provides room for reconsideration. Perhaps Warhol’s Marilyn is not just a symbol of the swinging 60s, but an artefact from a time that was as turbulent and uncertain as our own.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/181213/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Harriet Fletcher does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Not the bright and optimistic period that pop art at first glance would suggest, a lot of Warhol’s work is about death and destruction.Harriet Fletcher, Lecturer in Media and Communication, Anglia Ruskin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1777022022-03-30T12:40:07Z2022-03-30T12:40:07ZBlack college presidents had a tough balancing act during the civil rights era<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/450793/original/file-20220308-13-wpmmsm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C5442%2C3351&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Some Black college presidents stood at the forefront of the civil rights movement. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/portrait-of-7th-president-of-morgan-state-university-martin-news-photo/513374749?adppopup=true">Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Historians have documented <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/civilities-and-civil-rights-9780195029192?cc=us&lang=en&">again</a> and <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9780807856161/ella-baker-and-the-black-freedom-movement/">again</a> how college students contributed to the civil rights movement. Less attention has been paid to the role college presidents played in the fight for equality. Here, Eddie R. Cole, author of the book “<a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691206745/the-campus-color-line">The Campus Color Line</a>,” discusses various ways these leaders contributed.</em></p>
<h2>1. What pressures did college leaders face in the civil rights era?</h2>
<p>College presidents between 1948 to 1968 had to deal with different segments of society that were at complete odds with one another.</p>
<p>On the one hand, they oversaw schools where students were increasingly protesting segregation. But they also had to deal with segregationist politicians who controlled state funding for their institutions. Some of those politicians were not shy about their opposition to the civil rights movement. For instance, on March 3, 1960, North Carolina Gov. <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691206745/the-campus-color-line">Luther H. Hodges urged</a> public college leaders to direct students not to participate in civil rights demonstrations.</p>
<p>For the most part, Black college presidents ignored such requests. </p>
<p>But not always. For instance, as president of Kentucky State College – which is now Kentucky State University - <a href="https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813118567/a-black-educator-in-the-segregated-south/">Rufus B. Atwood</a> expelled 12 students for participating in a sit-in at a local lunch counter in Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1960.</p>
<h2>2. What was their position on boycotts and sit-ins?</h2>
<p>Most Black college presidents supported student sit-ins. </p>
<p>For example, Cornelius V. Troup, the president of Fort Valley State College - which is now Fort Valley State University - in Georgia, invited Martin D. Jenkins, president of Morgan State College - which is now Morgan State University - from Baltimore on Oct. 10, 1960 to be the keynote speaker at the university’s founders’ day celebration. During his speech, Jenkins expressed support of sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. </p>
<p>“We are witnessing in this country, and indeed throughout the world, an almost revolutionary movement against racial segregation and discrimination,” Jenkins said in his speech. “This movement has many facets. Certainly one of the most interesting of these, and one which may turn out to be of considerable long-term significance, is the so-called ‘sit-in’ or ‘sit-down’ developed by college students, chiefly Negro college students … This is a good movement, and it has surprisingly beneficial results.”</p>
<p>Other university presidents did more than just speak against segregation. Willa B. Player, the president of Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, boycotted the <a href="http://libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/ref/collection/CivilRights/id/764">Meyer’s Tea Room</a>, a restaurant in 1960 that had prohibited Black people from sitting in the dining area.</p>
<h2>3. Did college presidents ever compromise?</h2>
<p>At the time, Southern states like Maryland were so opposed to integration that – rather than desegregate their all-white universities – they funded <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/02/08/biden-has-unique-opportunity-undo-years-education-inequality/">out-of-state scholarship programs</a> for Black residents to go to college somewhere else.</p>
<p>However, these scholarship programs were typically underfunded.</p>
<p>Despite the racist intent behind Southern states paying for programs for Black students to be educated in other states, some presidents of Black colleges and universities saw an opportunity to expand educational options for their students.</p>
<p>That’s why presidents of Black colleges, such as Jenkins, the Morgan State president, met with their respective state officials to increase funding to support these out-of-state scholarship programs. These programs helped students continue their education, especially at the graduate level, at desegregated schools.</p>
<p>Ultimately, not all Black college presidents were on the front lines of the civil rights movement. But many of those who weren’t still contributed to expanding educational opportunities for Black students from behind the scenes.</p>
<p>[<em>More than 150,000 readers get one of The Conversation’s informative newsletters.</em> <a href="https://memberservices.theconversation.com/newsletters/?source=inline-150K">Join the list today</a>.]`32</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/177702/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Eddie R. Cole has received research funding from fellowships with the Spencer Foundation, National Academy of Education, and Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.</span></em></p>College presidents worked both at the forefront and behind the scenes in fighting for African Americans’ civil rights in the 1960s.Eddie R. Cole, Associate Professor of Higher Education and History, University of California, Los AngelesLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1470692020-11-13T14:00:17Z2020-11-13T14:00:17Z200 years ago, people discovered Antarctica – and promptly began profiting by slaughtering some of its animals to near extinction<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/363986/original/file-20201016-23-n65p2x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C9%2C3072%2C1945&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Workmen dissecting a whale carcass in Antarctica, circa 1935</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/workmen-dissecting-a-whale-carcass-in-antarctica-news-photo/3310716">Hulton Archive via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Two hundred years ago, on Nov. 17, Connecticut ship captain <a href="https://doi.org/10.2307/210532">Nathaniel Palmer spotted the Antarctic continent</a>, one of three parties to do so in 1820. Unlike explorers Edward Bransfield and Fabian von Bellingshausen, Palmer was a sealer who quickly saw economic opportunity in the rich sealing grounds on the Antarctic Peninsula.</p>
<p>In the two centuries since, Antarctica has seen a range of commercial, scientific and diplomatic developments. While <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/frozen-empires-9780190249144?cc=us&lang=en&">some countries attempted to claim territory on the continent</a> in the first half of the 20th century, today the region is governed through the international <a href="https://www.ats.aq/index_e.html">Antarctic Treaty System</a>. </p>
<p>Although the treaty claims to govern Antarctica in the interests of all “mankind,” some countries have gained greater benefits from the region than others. While mining is currently banned under the Antarctic Treaty and the days of sealing and whaling are over, Antarctica’s marine living resources are still being exploited to this day.</p>
<h2>Fur and blubber</h2>
<p>Palmer was followed by a rush of other sealing ships, mostly from the United States and Britain, that methodically killed fur seals along Antarctic beaches, <a href="https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000684110">swiftly taking populations to the brink of extinction</a>. Seal fur was used for clothing in the 18th and 19th centuries in many parts of the world and was an important part of <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=27054">U.S. and European trade with China</a> in the 19th century.</p>
<p>Fur sealing had a real boom-and-bust quality. Once a region was picked over, the sealers would move to more fruitful grounds. Before 1833, at least <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Sealing_in_the_Southern_Oceans_1788_1833.html?id=kkyfuAAACAAJ">7 million fur seals were killed in the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic</a>. As early as 1829, British naturalist James Eights lamented the loss of the fur seal on the Antarctic peninsula: “<a href="https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000684110">This beautiful little animal was once most numerous here</a>.” </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/363782/original/file-20201015-17-1fdyso8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Watercolor painting depicting an Antarctic landscape with a man in the foreground swinging an ax into the bloody carcass of a seal." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/363782/original/file-20201015-17-1fdyso8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/363782/original/file-20201015-17-1fdyso8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=446&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363782/original/file-20201015-17-1fdyso8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=446&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363782/original/file-20201015-17-1fdyso8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=446&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363782/original/file-20201015-17-1fdyso8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=560&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363782/original/file-20201015-17-1fdyso8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=560&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363782/original/file-20201015-17-1fdyso8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=560&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘The Antarctic Butcher’ painted by Standish Backus, 1956.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/art/exhibits/exploration-and-technology/antarctica-operation-deep-freeze-i-1955-56/life-in-camp/the-antarctic-butcher.html">U.S. Naval Art Collection</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Elephant seals were also hunted, but for their blubber, which could be converted into oil. It was not difficult for hunters to drive them to the beaches, lance them through the heart (or, later, shoot them in the skull), drain their blood and remove their blubber. “We left the dead things, raw and meaty, lying on the beach,” <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/South_Latitude.html?id=a-Nzlo95OrsC">according to one sealer</a>. The <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Sealing_in_the_Southern_Oceans_1788_1833/kkyfuAAACAAJ?hl=en">birds would pick the skeletons clean within days</a>. </p>
<p>Sealing rapidly declined in the 1960s, owing to a mix of evolving cultural sentiments and changing availability of other materials, such as plastics, that could be made into warm synthetic clothing and petroleum-based lubricants. </p>
<p>The broadcast of <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/new-rules-to-protect-seals">footage showing Canadian sealing in the early 1960s</a> scandalized North American and European citizens and <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=oCSQDwAAQBAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s">prompted a quick shift in attitudes toward sealing</a>. The Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals was signed in 1972, regulating the large-scale slaughter of seals for all nations in the region. Today, the population of <a href="https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/2058/66993062">fur seals has rebounded</a>, with a <a href="https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/2058/66993062#population">colony of over 5 million</a> on South Georgia alone, though numbers have declined since 2000. Elephant seals, too, have largely rebounded, with an <a href="https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/13583/45227247">estimated stable population of 650,000</a> since the mid-1990s. </p>
<h2>Blood-red water</h2>
<p>The whaling grounds off Antarctica were so rich they drew fleets from many nations. First came Norwegian and British companies, later to be joined by others from Germany, Russia, the Netherlands and Japan. Whaling had occurred in the Southern Ocean in the 19th century, but it wasn’t until the first half of the 20th century that <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_History_of_Modern_Whaling.html?id=-miE3r5DgPUC">whales were hunted to near extinction there</a>. </p>
<p>In the 19th century, whale oil was used primarily for lamp fuel. But after 1910, <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_History_of_Modern_Whaling.html?id=-miE3r5DgPUC">new uses were found for the oil</a>, including <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_History_of_Modern_Whaling.html?id=-miE3r5DgPUC">as industrial lubricants and edible fats</a>. </p>
<p>Whaling became extremely lucrative for a small group of companies, including <a href="https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-margarine-made-of">Unilever, whose early fortunes were built from margarine made with whale oil</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/363989/original/file-20201016-13-1hrvkq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Three whale carcasses in various stages of dismemberment are on the deck of a large ship with men working on them." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/363989/original/file-20201016-13-1hrvkq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/363989/original/file-20201016-13-1hrvkq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=735&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363989/original/file-20201016-13-1hrvkq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=735&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363989/original/file-20201016-13-1hrvkq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=735&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363989/original/file-20201016-13-1hrvkq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363989/original/file-20201016-13-1hrvkq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363989/original/file-20201016-13-1hrvkq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Aboard a Japanese whaling ship near Antarctica, 1962.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/south-pole-a-japanese-whaling-1962-news-photo/1182685696">Marka/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>At first, whales killed at sea had to be brought to a shore station to be processed. <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Great_Waters.html?id=lyMGwgEACAAJ">In 1925, an observer wrote</a>, “What an appalling stench it is…The water in which the whales float, and on which we too are riding, is blood red.” From the late 1920s on, these <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo9845648.html">shore stations were replaced by pelagic whaling stations</a>, where whales were processed more efficiently on factory ships at sea.</p>
<p>In 1946, some international efforts were made to protect whales. The goal of the <a href="https://archive.iwc.int/pages/view.php?ref=3607&k=">International Whaling Commission</a> created that year was “to provide for the proper conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry.” </p>
<p>But, again in the 1960s, public attitudes toward whales, like seals, began to change when environmentalists revealed they were highly intelligent, sociable creatures that <a href="https://www.npr.org/2014/12/26/373303726/recordings-that-made-waves-the-songs-that-saved-the-whales">sang in the ocean depths</a>. Most nations ceased whale hunting in the Antarctic by the end of the 1960s – because of this consciousness and also because there were inexpensive alternatives to whale products. </p>
<h2>Fishing</h2>
<p>Antarctica’s rich marine life continues to be exploited today. <a href="https://www.ccamlr.org/en/organisation/fishing-ccamlr">Krill and toothfish began to be fished in the 1970s</a>. </p>
<p>Krill, <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/invertebrates/group/krill/">a small shrimp-like crustacean</a>, is used in nutritional supplements and pet foods. <a href="https://www.ccamlr.org/en/fisheries/krill-%E2%80%93-biology-ecology-and-fishing">Norway, China, South Korea and Chile are its biggest harvesters</a>. Toothfish, which has been marketed as Chilean sea bass, is on menus worldwide. </p>
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<p>Since 1982, the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources has managed these fisheries with the overriding goal of maintaining the whole ecosystem. Whales, seals, birds and other fish rely on krill, making them essential to the Antarctic marine ecosystem. </p>
<p>While krill and toothfish are currently both plentiful in the Antarctic, it is unclear how much the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-05372-x">reduction of sea ice and the changing migration patterns of predators</a> who feed on these species are affecting their populations.</p>
<p>Historically and currently, only a small number of people have profited from Antarctica’s living resources, at the great expense of animal populations. Even if sustainable harvesting is possible now, climate change is rapidly undermining Antarctic’s ecological stability. </p>
<p>While major <a href="https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/victories/creating-the-world-park-antarctica/">environmental campaigns try to raise awareness</a> of Antarctica’s fragility, most consumers of its products likely do not even know their provenance. Whale and seal populations continue to recover from past overexploitation, but the future impacts of current fishing practices and climate change are uncertain.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/147069/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alessandro Antonello receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daniella McCahey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>For 200 years, a small number of countries have exploited the marine wildlife of Antarctica, often with devastating impact on their populations.Daniella McCahey, Assistant Professor of History, Texas Tech UniversityAlessandro Antonello, Senior Research Fellow in History, Flinders UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1431442020-08-26T12:20:42Z2020-08-26T12:20:42ZForced sterilization policies in the US targeted minorities and those with disabilities – and lasted into the 21st century<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/353240/original/file-20200817-18-b7q561.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1165%2C26%2C2383%2C2314&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An operation taking place in 1941 on South Side of Chicago.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.rawpixel.com/image/2301130">Library of Congress</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In August 1964, the North Carolina Eugenics Board met to decide if a 20-year-old Black woman should be sterilized. Because her name was redacted from the records, we call her Bertha. </p>
<p>She was a single mother with one child who lived at the segregated O'Berry Center for African American adults with intellectual disabilities in Goldsboro. According to the North Carolina Eugenics Board, Bertha had an IQ of 62 and exhibited “aggressive behavior and sexual promiscuity.” She had been orphaned as a child and had a limited education. Likely because of her “low IQ score,” the board determined she was not capable of rehabilitation. </p>
<p>Instead the board recommended the “protection of sterilization” for Bertha, because she was “feebleminded” and deemed unable to “assume responsibility for herself” or her child. Without her input, Bertha’s guardian signed the sterilization form.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/353451/original/file-20200818-14-mzzs17.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A 1950s era pamphlet that reads: The average feebleminded parent cannot be expected to provide good heredity, a normal home, intelligent care - to say nothing of the many other things needed to bring up children successfully." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/353451/original/file-20200818-14-mzzs17.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/353451/original/file-20200818-14-mzzs17.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353451/original/file-20200818-14-mzzs17.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353451/original/file-20200818-14-mzzs17.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353451/original/file-20200818-14-mzzs17.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=644&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353451/original/file-20200818-14-mzzs17.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=644&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353451/original/file-20200818-14-mzzs17.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=644&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A pamphlet extolling the benefit of selective sterilization published by the Human Betterment League of North Carolina, 1950.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://digital.ncdcr.gov/digital/collection/p249901coll37/id/14974/">North Carolina State Documents Collection/State Library of North Carolina</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Bertha’s story is one of the 35,000 sterilization stories we are reconstructing at the <a href="https://ssjlab.weebly.com">Sterilization and Social Justice Lab</a>. Our interdisciplinary team explores the history of eugenics and sterilization in the U.S. using data and stories. So far, we have captured historical records from North Carolina, California, Iowa and Michigan. </p>
<h2>Eugenics</h2>
<p>More than <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sterilization-united-states_n_568f35f2e4b0c8beacf68713">60,000 people were sterilized in 32 states during the 20th century</a> based on the bogus “science” of eugenics, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1051/medsci/2009256-7641">a term coined by Francis Galton in 1883</a>.</p>
<p>Eugenicists applied emerging theories of biology and genetics to human breeding. White elites with strong biases about who was “fit” and “unfit” embraced eugenics, believing American society would be improved by increased breeding of Anglo Saxons and Nordics, whom they assumed had high IQs. Anyone who did not fit this mold of racial perfection, which included most immigrants, Blacks, Indigenous people, poor whites and people with disabilities, <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674445574">became targets of eugenics programs</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/353242/original/file-20200817-14-rlngdx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="An old map of the United States showing the status of state eugenics laws in 1913. About half the states either have laws or are in the process of creating them." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/353242/original/file-20200817-14-rlngdx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/353242/original/file-20200817-14-rlngdx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353242/original/file-20200817-14-rlngdx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353242/original/file-20200817-14-rlngdx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353242/original/file-20200817-14-rlngdx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=639&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353242/original/file-20200817-14-rlngdx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=639&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353242/original/file-20200817-14-rlngdx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=639&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">By 1913, many states had or were on their way to having eugenic sterilization laws.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://collections.countway.harvard.edu/onview/files/original/3f02811d6a83b0f896c4eaa6794ecffc.jpg">Boston Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Indiana passed the world’s first sterilization law in 1907. Thirty-one states followed suit. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.114.3.776-a">State-sanctioned sterilizations</a> reached their peak in the 1930s and 1940s but continued and, in some states, rose during the 1950s and 1960s. </p>
<p>The United States was an international leader in eugenics. Its sterilization laws actually informed Nazi Germany. The Third Reich’s 1933 “<a href="https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/1933-1938/law-for-the-prevention-of-offspring-with-hereditary-diseases">Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases</a>” <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691172422/hitlers-american-model">was modeled on laws in Indiana and California</a>. Under this law, the <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674745780">Nazis sterilized approximately 400,000 children and adults</a>, mostly Jews and other “undesirables,” labeled “defective.”</p>
<h2>Anti-Black racism and sterilization</h2>
<p>The team at the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab has uncovered some remarkable trends in eugenic sterilization. At first, sterilization programs targeted white men, expanding by the 1920s to affect the same number of women as men. The laws used broad and ever-changing disability labels like “feeblemindedness” and “mental defective.” Over time, though, women and people of color increasingly became the target, as <a href="https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/fit-to-be-tied/9780813578910">eugenics amplified sexism and racism</a>.</p>
<p><iframe id="SIc36" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/SIc36/4/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>It is no coincidence that sterilization rates for Black women rose as desegregation got underway. Until the 1950s, schools and hospitals in the U.S. were segregated by race, but integration threatened to break down Jim Crow apartheid. <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/mothers-of-massive-resistance-9780190271718?cc=us&lang=en&">The backlash involved the reassertion of white supremacist control and racial hierarchies</a> specifically through the <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/155575/killing-the-black-body-by-dorothy-roberts/">control of Black reproduction and future Black lives by sterilization</a>.</p>
<p>In North Carolina, which sterilized the third highest number of people in the United States – <a href="https://journalnow.com/news/local/against-their-will-north-carolinas-sterilization-program/image_acfc2fb8-8feb-11e2-a857-0019bb30f31a.html">7,600 people from 1929 to 1973</a> – women vastly outnumbered men and Black women were <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9780807855850/choice-and-coercion/">disproportionately sterilized</a>. Preliminary analysis shows that from 1950 to 1966, Black women were sterilized at more than three times the rate of white women and more than 12 times the rate of white men. This pattern <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520299948/how-all-politics-became-reproductive-politics">reflected the ideas</a> that Black women were not capable of being good parents and poverty should be managed with reproductive constraint.</p>
<p>Bertha’s sterilization was ordered by a state eugenics board, but in the 1960s and 1970s, new federal programs like Medicaid also started funding nonconsensual sterilizations. <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/population-control-politics-women-sterilization-and-reproductive-choice/oclc/1003747011">More than 100,000</a> <a href="https://nyupress.org/9780814758274/women-of-color-and-the-reproductive-rights-movement/">Black, Latino and Indigenous women were affected</a>.</p>
<p>Many <a href="http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/no-mas-bebes/">felt shame and shrouded these experiences in secrecy</a>, not even telling their closest relatives and friends. Others took to the streets and filed law suits to protest forced sterilization. The powerful documentary “<a href="https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/no-mas-bebes/">No Más Bebés</a>” tells the story of hundreds of Mexican American women coerced into tubal ligations at a county hospital in Los Angeles in the 1970s. One of them, who became a plaintiff in a case against the hospital, reflecting back decades later said <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/no-m-s-beb-s-looks-back-l-mexican-moms-n505256">her experience “makes me want to cry.”</a></p>
<h2>Forced sterilizations continue</h2>
<p>In the years between 1997 and 2010, unwanted sterilizations were performed on <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/new-documentary-illuminates-the-forced-sterilization-of-women-in-california-prison">approximately 1,400 women in California prisons</a>. These operations were based on the same rationale of bad parenting and undesirable genes evident in North Carolina in 1964. The doctor performing the sterilizations told a reporter the <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/07/09/200444613/californias-prison-sterilizations-reportedly-echoes-eugenics-era">operations were cost-saving measures</a>.</p>
<p>[<em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>.]</p>
<p>Unfortunately, forced sterilization continues on. <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/07/roma-women-share-stories-forced-sterilisation-160701100731050.html">Romani women have been sterilized unwillingly in the Czech Republic</a> as recently as 2007. In northern China, Uighurs, a religious and racial minority group, have been <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/china-forcibly-sterilizing-uighur-women-xinjiang-abortions-contraception-ap-2020-6">subjected to mass sterilization</a> and other measures of extreme population control.</p>
<p>All forced sterilization campaigns, regardless of their time or place, have one thing in common. They involve dehumanizing a particular subset of the population deemed less worthy of reproduction and family formation. They merge perceptions of disability with racism, xenophobia and sexism – resulting in the disproportionate sterilization of minority groups.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/143144/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexandra Minna Stern receives funding from the National Institutes of Health-National Humane Genome Research Institute for portions of this research project. </span></em></p>The US has a long history of forced sterilization campaigns that were driven by the bogus ‘science’ of eugenics, racism and sexism.Alexandra Minna Stern, Professor of American Culture, History, and Women's Studies, University of MichiganLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1396232020-06-10T12:14:53Z2020-06-10T12:14:53ZHow the US government sold the Peace Corps to the American public<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/340381/original/file-20200608-176585-1bswhto.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">President John F. Kennnedy personally bid the first Peace Corps volunteers farewell.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Associated-Press-Domestic-News-Dist-of-Columbi-/34a86766cee3da11af9f0014c2589dfb/443/0">AP Photo/William J. Smith</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/international/493037-peace-corps-faces-uncertain-future-with-no-volunteers-in-field">Peace Corps</a>, a service organization run by the U.S. government that dispatches volunteers to foreign countries, is on hold because of the coronavirus pandemic. For the first time in its nearly <a href="https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/jfk-in-history/peace-corps">60-year history</a>, none of its volunteers is stationed anywhere.</p>
<p>To many Americans, the Peace Corps represents the best of <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/all-you-need-is-love-the-peace-corps-and-the-spirit-of-the-1960s/oclc/37820037">American generosity abroad</a>. That’s <a href="https://www.peacecorps.gov/about/">in line with its stated mission</a> to promote world peace and friendship.</p>
<p>But <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=tWFlecoAAAAJ">having researched</a> the Peace Corps’ backstory while studying the messages in its early advertising, I see this pause as a chance to learn more about how it came to symbolize U.S. goodwill abroad in many Americans’ minds. I’ve learned how American perceptions of the agency were shaped by ads promising heroic adventures to the volunteers who signed up.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/338994/original/file-20200601-95032-gfvgl2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/338994/original/file-20200601-95032-gfvgl2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/338994/original/file-20200601-95032-gfvgl2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=815&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338994/original/file-20200601-95032-gfvgl2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=815&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338994/original/file-20200601-95032-gfvgl2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=815&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338994/original/file-20200601-95032-gfvgl2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1025&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338994/original/file-20200601-95032-gfvgl2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1025&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338994/original/file-20200601-95032-gfvgl2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1025&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In 1968, the Ad Council cast Peace Corps volunteers as human care packages.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Peace Corps</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>New frontiers</h2>
<p>In an academic article I wrote about the publicity campaign for the Peace Corps in the first decade of its existence, I explained that <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2020.1724589">Peace Corps advertising</a> emphasized myths about heroes, adventure and the benefits of gaining worldly experience without ever mentioning the word communism. But fighting communism was among the agency’s <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/john-kennedy-and-foreign-policy">original foreign policy purposes</a>, according to many Peace Corps historians and other scholars. </p>
<p>Given the growing counterculture movement in the early 1960s, the government feared that few young Americans would be motivated to join the Peace Corps by a message that they’d be volunteering to help to fight communism. For that reason, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2020.1724589">the advertising strategy</a> focused on promoting heroism while promising adventure and career advancement to potential recruits.</p>
<p>At the time of its creation, two institutional forces shaped the Peace Corps advertising campaign – the foreign policy goals of John F. Kennedy’s administration and the <a href="https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/findingaids/adcouncil/">Ad Council</a>, a nonprofit the advertising industry created during <a href="https://www.thedrum.com/news/2016/03/30/marketing-moment-three-ad-council-sets-shop-america-enters-world-war-ii">World War II</a> to aid the U.S. government’s communications efforts. </p>
<p>Building on the image of Kennedy as a romantic superhero, as public intellectuals like the writer <a href="https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a3858/superman-supermarket/">Norman Mailer</a> described him at the time, the JFK administration positioned the Peace Corps as an opportunity that would help lead America into an audacious future.</p>
<p>The Peace Corps advertising campaign helped attract more than 14,000 American volunteers who trained or worked overseas in 57 countries from the start of the program in 1961 to November 1968. It also artfully masked one of main Kennedy’s foreign policy objectives for the program: preventing <a href="https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2010/09/22/the-peace-corps-not-so-peaceful-roots/">developing countries from adopting communism</a>.</p>
<p>To date, <a href="https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=826873">more than 235,000 Peace Corps volunteers have served in 141 countries</a>.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1123971339902169090"}"></div></p>
<h2>Cold War roots</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/red-scare">Concerns about communism</a> dominated American culture and in the popular press and media throughout the 1950s and 1960s. America also needed to counter <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/08/the-cold-war-logic-of-the-peace-corps/309483/">growing Soviet efforts</a> to place young people from the USSR who were highly trained in local languages and customs in developing countries.</p>
<p>Kennedy worried that as the Third World gained independence from colonial empires, the developing countries would be vulnerable to communist influences. This posed a threat to American and European security.</p>
<p>As the historian <a href="http://elizabethcobbs.com/about">Elizabeth Cobbs</a> <a href="https://academic.oup.com/dh/article-abstract/20/1/79/438460?redirectedFrom=fulltext">put it</a>: “The Peace Corps owed its existence to the Cold War and to Kennedy’s belief that the United States had to do better in competing with Moscow for the allegiance of the newly independent countries of the Third World.”</p>
<p><a href="https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/jfk-in-history/peace-corps">The handbook</a> for Peace Corps volunteers instructed them to study communism “as an ideology and as an organizational weapon.” The handbook advised that “communists are against the Peace Corps and its program,” and that the communists considered volunteers to be “spies and agents of imperialism.”</p>
<p>The Peace Corps also encouraged its volunteers “to answer our detractors through hard work and accomplishment” instead of engaging with them in debates.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.smithsonianbooks.com/store/history/how-mcgruff-and-crying-indian-changed-america-hist/">Ad Council</a> sponsored the Peace Corps campaign until 1991. Earlier, it had played a key role in shaping U.S. attitudes <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-socialism-became-un-american-through-the-ad-councils-propaganda-campaigns-132335">about communism, socialism and capitalism</a> through campaigns that promoted America’s economy as the cornerstone of American capitalism.</p>
<p>The council’s 1948 campaign to “Explain the American Economic System,” which ran until 1951, and its traveling exhibition called “The People’s Capitalism,” which explained the American economy to other countries, are a few examples. </p>
<h2>The ad campaign</h2>
<p>The Peace Corps’ earliest <a href="https://archives.library.illinois.edu/about-us/program-areas/association-archives/advertising-council-archives/">promotional materials</a> never overtly raised the specter of communism. Instead a series of ads and posters called on Americans to participate in a program that would make their life more meaningful by making a difference in the world.</p>
<p>Those early Peace Corps ads encouraged volunteers to embark on a grand adventure that sounded like a fun extended study abroad program.</p>
<p>“Do you have your future mapped out?” read the copy in one 1961 print ad launching the campaign. If not, have you considered America’s exciting new Peace Corps? It’s an exciting and stimulating life, and best of all, you will be helping your own country as you help the people of other countries.“</p>
<p>By the end of the 1960s, the messages embedded in the individual ads appealed to youthful idealism, patriotism, a desire to see the world and the hero myth without references to the struggle against communism being waged in the Vietnam War.</p>
<p>In a 1968 "Human Care Package” magazine ad, a young man crouches inside a wooden box stamped “made in the USA.” The copy reads: “There is a man somewhere who has nothing … Send him the one thing only you can give him. Send him you.” </p>
<p>Americans in the turbulent 1960s wanted to believe that their country played a morally good role in the world. The Peace Corps program and its advertising helped convince them that this was true.</p>
<p>[<em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/139623/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Wendy Melillo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The agency’s earliest ad campaigns emphasized youthful idealism, patriotism and travel opportunities. That was an easier sell than urging Americans to enlist in an anti-communist operation.Wendy Melillo, Associate Professor, American University School of CommunicationLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1309802020-04-10T12:12:04Z2020-04-10T12:12:04ZInside the Beatles’ messy breakup, 50 years ago<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326989/original/file-20200409-165427-i79n2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=100%2C8%2C1658%2C1069&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Who broke up with whom?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-beatles-celebrate-the-completion-of-their-new-album-sgt-news-photo/3297187?adppopup=true">Anurag Papolu/The Conversation via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Fifty years ago, when Paul McCartney announced he had left the Beatles, the news dashed the hopes of millions of fans, while fueling false reunion rumors that persisted well into the new decade. </p>
<p>In a press release on April 10, 1970 for his first solo album, “<a href="https://www.beatlesbible.com/people/paul-mccartney/albums/mccartney/">McCartney</a>,” he leaked his intention to leave. In doing so, he shocked his three bandmates.</p>
<p>The Beatles had symbolized the great communal spirit of the era. How could they possibly come apart? </p>
<p>Few at the time were aware of the underlying fissures. The power struggles in the group had been mounting at least since their manager, Brian Epstein, died in August of 1967. </p>
<h2>‘Paul Quits the Beatles’</h2>
<p>Was McCartney’s “announcement” official? His album appeared on April 17, and its press packet included a mock interview. In it, McCartney <a href="https://www.beatlesbible.com/1970/04/10/paul-mccartney-announces-the-beatles-split/">is asked</a>, “Are you planning a new album or single with the Beatles?”</p>
<p>His response? “No.” </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/325794/original/file-20200406-104477-gkg4w8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/325794/original/file-20200406-104477-gkg4w8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=795&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/325794/original/file-20200406-104477-gkg4w8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=795&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/325794/original/file-20200406-104477-gkg4w8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=795&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/325794/original/file-20200406-104477-gkg4w8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=999&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/325794/original/file-20200406-104477-gkg4w8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=999&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/325794/original/file-20200406-104477-gkg4w8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=999&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Daily Mirror took McCartney at his word.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Daily Mirror</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But he didn’t say whether the separation might prove permanent. The Daily Mirror nonetheless framed its headline conclusively: “Paul Quits the Beatles.” </p>
<p>The others worried this could hurt sales and sent Ringo as a peacemaker to McCartney’s London home to talk him down from releasing his solo album ahead of the band’s “Let It Be” album and film, which were slated to come out in May. Without any press present, McCartney <a href="https://www.beatlesbible.com/1970/03/31/paul-mccartney-ringo-starr-letter-john-lennon-george-harrison-let-it-be/">shouted Ringo off his front stoop</a>.</p>
<h2>Lennon had kept quiet</h2>
<p>Lennon, who had been active outside the band for months, felt particularly betrayed.</p>
<p>The previous September, soon after the band released “Abbey Road,” he <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/why-the-beatles-broke-up-113403/">had asked</a> his bandmates for a “divorce.” But the others convinced him not to go public to prevent disrupting some delicate contract negotiations. </p>
<p>Still, Lennon’s departure seemed imminent: He had played the Toronto Rock ‘n’ Roll Festival with his Plastic Ono Band in September 1969, and on Feb. 11, 1970, he performed a new solo track, “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZQny1XxOdI">Instant Karma</a>,” on the popular British TV show “Top of the Pops.” Yoko Ono sat behind him, knitting while blindfolded by a sanitary napkin. </p>
<p>In fact, Lennon behaved more and more like a solo artist, until McCartney countered with his own eponymous album. He wanted Apple to release this solo debut alongside the group’s new album, “<a href="https://www.thebeatles.com/album/let-it-be">Let It Be</a>,” to dramatize the split. </p>
<p>By beating Lennon to the announcement, McCartney controlled the story and its timing, and undercut the other three’s interest in keeping it under wraps as new product hit stores.</p>
<p>Ray Connolly, a reporter at the Daily Mail, knew Lennon well enough to ring him up for comment. When I interviewed Connolly in 2008, he told me about their conversation. </p>
<p>Lennon was dumbfounded and enraged by the news. He had let Connolly in on his secret about leaving the band at his Montreal Bed-In in December 1969, but asked him to keep it quiet. Now he lambasted Connolly for not leaking it sooner. </p>
<p>“Why didn’t you write it when I told you in Canada at Christmas!” he exclaimed to Connolly, who reminded him that the conversation had been off the record. “You’re the f–king journalist, Connolly, not me,” snorted Lennon. </p>
<p>“We were all hurt [McCartney] didn’t tell us what he was going to do,” <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/lennon-remembers-part-one-186693/">Lennon later told Rolling Stone</a>. “Jesus Christ! He gets all the credit for it! I was a fool not to do what Paul did, which was use it to sell a record…”</p>
<h2>It all falls apart</h2>
<p>This public fracas had been bubbling under the band’s cheery surface for years. Timing and sales concealed deeper arguments about creative control and the return to live touring. </p>
<p>In January 1969, the group had started a roots project tentatively titled “Get Back.” It was supposed to be a back-to-the-basics recording without the artifice of studio trickery. But the whole venture was shelved as a new recording, “Abbey Road,” took shape.</p>
<p>When “Get Back” was eventually revived, Lennon – behind McCartney’s back – brought in American producer <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Phil-Spector">Phil Spector</a>, best known for girl group hits like “Be My Baby,” to salvage the project. But this album was supposed to be band only – not embroidered with added strings and voices – and McCartney fumed when Spector added a female choir to his song “The Long and Winding Road.” </p>
<p>“Get Back” – which was renamed “Let it Be” – nonetheless moved forward. Spector mixed the album, and a cut of the feature film was readied for summer. </p>
<p>McCartney’s announcement and release of his solo album effectively short-circuited the plan. By announcing the breakup, he launched his solo career in advance of “<a href="https://www.beatlesbible.com/albums/let-it-be/">Let It Be</a>,” and nobody knew how it might disrupt the official Beatles’ project. </p>
<p>Throughout the remainder of 1970, fans watched in disbelief as the “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0HfT_a3bIw">Let It Be</a>” movie portrayed the hallowed Beatles circling musical doldrums, bickering about arrangements and killing time running through oldies. The film finished with an ironic triumph – <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/01/30/beatles-played-london-rooftop-it-wound-up-being-their-last-show/">the famous live set on the roof of their Apple headquarters</a> during which the band played “Get Back,” “Don’t Let Me Down” and a joyous “One After 909.”</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/NCtzkaL2t_Y?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The Beatles played their last live show in a January 1969 concert staged for the documentary ‘Let It Be.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The album, released on May 8, performed well and spawned two hit singles – the title track and “The Long and Winding Road” – but the group never recorded together again.</p>
<p>Their fans hoped against hope that four solo Beatles might someday find their way back to the thrills that had enchanted audiences for seven years. These rumors seemed most promising when <a href="https://longreads.com/2019/06/24/took-you-by-surprise-john-and-pauls-lost-reunion/">McCartney joined Lennon for a Los Angeles recording session</a> in 1974 with Stevie Wonder. But while they all played on one another’s solo efforts, the four never played a session together again. </p>
<p>At the beginning of 1970, autumn’s “Come Together”/“Something” single from “Abbey Road” still floated in the Billboard top 20; the “Let It Be” album and film helped extend fervor beyond what the papers reported. For a long time, the myth of the band endured on radio playlists and across several greatest hits compilations, but when John Lennon sang “The dream is over…” at the end of his own 1970 solo debut, “<a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/john-lennon-plastic-ono-band-108294/">John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band</a>,” few grasped the lyrics’ implacable truth. </p>
<p>Fans and critics chased every sliver of hope for the “next” Beatles, but few came close to recreating the band’s magic. There were prospects – first bands like Three Dog Night, the Flaming Groovies, Big Star and the Raspberries; later, Cheap Trick, the Romantics and the Knack – but these groups only aimed at the same heights the Beatles had conquered, and none sported the range, songwriting ability or ineffable chemistry of the Liverpool quartet.</p>
<p>We’ve been living in the world without Beatles ever since.</p>
<p>[<em>Insight, in your inbox each day.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=insight">You can get it with The Conversation’s email newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/130980/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tim Riley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Unbridled ambition and bruised egos created an irreparable fissure.Tim Riley, Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director for Journalism, Emerson CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1128162019-06-04T12:42:37Z2019-06-04T12:42:37ZThe racist roots of American policing: From slave patrols to traffic stops<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/277436/original/file-20190531-69095-14chox3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A new slogan for an old problem</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Nationwide-Protests-Ferguson/98026cc4d4b14bfa9f2d7c6627d6634d/3/0">Photo/Lynne Sladky </a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This article was updated on <a href="https://theconversation.com/george-floyds-death-reflects-the-racist-roots-of-american-policing-139805">June 2, 2020</a></em>.</p>
<p>Outrage over <a href="https://www.aclu.org/other/racial-profiling-definition">racial profiling</a> and the killing of <a href="https://policy.m4bl.org/">African Americans</a> by police officers and vigilantes in recent years helped give rise to the <a href="https://blacklivesmatter.com/">Black Lives Matter</a> movement. </p>
<p>But tensions between the police and black communities are nothing new. </p>
<p>There are many precedents to the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/17/black-lives-matter-birth-of-a-movement">Ferguson, Missouri protests</a> that ushered in the Black Lives Matter movement. Those protests erupted in 2014 after a police officer shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown; the officer was <a href="https://www.law.columbia.edu/news/2014/11/michael-brown-case-fact-sheet">subsequently not indicted</a>. </p>
<p>The precedents include the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Los-Angeles-Riots-of-1992">Los Angeles</a> riots that broke out after the 1992 acquittal of police officers for beating <a href="https://www.biography.com/people/rodney-king-9542141">Rodney King</a>. Those riots happened nearly three decades after the <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/1960s/watts-riots">1965 Watts riots</a>, which began with <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-08-19-me-2790-story.html">Marquette Frye</a>, an African American, being pulled over for suspected drunk driving and roughed up by the police for resisting arrest. </p>
<p>I’m a <a href="http://50.57.204.193/content/hassett-walker-connie-phd">criminal justice researcher</a> who <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/15377938.2010.526868">often focuses</a> on issues of race, class and crime. Through my research and from teaching a course on diversity in criminal justice, I have come to see how the roots of racism in American policing – first planted centuries ago – have not yet been fully purged. </p>
<h2>Slave patrols</h2>
<p>There are two historical narratives about the origins of American law enforcement. </p>
<p>Policing in southern slave-holding states had roots in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/10511250500335627">slave patrols</a>, squadrons made up of white volunteers empowered to use vigilante tactics to enforce laws related to slavery. They located and returned enslaved people who had escaped, <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/did-african-american-slaves-rebel/">crushed uprisings</a> led by enslaved people and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/10511250500335627">punished enslaved workers</a> found or believed to have violated plantation rules. </p>
<p>The first <a href="https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/history-policing-united-states-part-1">slave patrols</a> arose <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/10511250500335627">in South Carolina</a> in the early 1700s. As University of Georgia social work professor <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=yrO6KIMAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra">Michael A. Robinson</a> has written, by the time John Adams became the second U.S. president, every <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0021934717702134">state that had not yet abolished slavery</a> had them.</p>
<p>Members of slave patrols could <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10511250500335627">forcefully enter anyone’s home</a>, regardless of their race or ethnicity, based on suspicions that they were sheltering people who had escaped bondage.</p>
<p>The more commonly known precursors to modern law enforcement were <a href="https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/history-policing-united-states-part-1">centralized municipal police departments</a> that began to form in the early 19th century, beginning in Boston and soon cropping up in New York City, Albany, Chicago, Philadelphia and elsewhere. </p>
<p>The first police forces were overwhelmingly <a href="https://cops.usdoj.gov/html/dispatch/02-2017/african_americans_in_law_enforcement.asp">white</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alice-Stebbins-Wells">male</a> and more focused on responding to <a href="https://plsonline.eku.edu/sites/plsonline.eku.edu/files/the-history-of-policing-in-us.pdf">disorder</a> than crime.</p>
<p>As Eastern Kentucky University criminologist <a href="https://justicestudies.eku.edu/recent-scholarship/dr-gary-potter">Gary Potter</a> explains, officers were expected to control a “<a href="https://plsonline.eku.edu/sites/plsonline.eku.edu/files/the-history-of-policing-in-us.pdf">dangerous underclass</a>” that included African Americans, immigrants and the poor. Through the early 20th century, there were <a href="https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/50819_ch_1.pdf">few standards</a> for hiring or training officers. </p>
<p>Police corruption and violence – particularly against vulnerable people – were commonplace during the early 1900s. Additionally, the few <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/the-long-history-of-black-officers-reforming-policing-from-within/547457/">African Americans</a> who joined police forces were often assigned to black neighborhoods and faced discrimination on the job. In my opinion, these factors – controlling disorder, lack of adequate police training, lack of nonwhite officers and slave patrol origins – are among the forerunners of modern-day police brutality against African Americans. </p>
<h2>Jim Crow laws</h2>
<p>Slave patrols formally dissolved after the Civil War ended. But formerly enslaved people saw little relief from racist government policies as they promptly became subject to <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/early-20th-century-us/jim-crow-laws">Black Codes</a>. </p>
<p>For the next three years, these new laws specified how, when and where African Americans could work and how much they would be paid. They also restricted <a href="http://www.crf-usa.org/black-history-month/race-and-voting-in-the-segregated-south">black voting rights</a>, dictated how and where African Americans could <a href="https://www.history.com/news/the-green-book-the-black-travelers-guide-to-jim-crow-america">travel</a> and limited where they could live.</p>
<p>The ratification of the <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv">14th Amendment</a> in 1868 quickly made the Black Codes <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0021934717702134">illegal</a> by giving formerly enslaved blacks equal protection of laws through the Constitution. But within two decades, <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/early-20th-century-us/jim-crow-laws">Jim Crow laws</a> aimed at subjugating African Americans and denying their civil rights were enacted across southern and some northern states, replacing the Black Codes.</p>
<p>For about 80 years, Jim Crow laws <a href="http://www.crf-usa.org/brown-v-board-50th-anniversary/southern-black-codes.html">mandated separate public spaces</a> for blacks and whites, such as schools, libraries, <a href="https://sophiedaveyphoto.wordpress.com/2012/11/06/photographs-that-tell-a-story-elliot-erwitts-segregated-water-fountains/">water fountains</a> and restaurants – and enforcing them was part of the police’s job. Blacks who broke laws or violated social norms often endured <a href="http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/85472/1/usappblog-2017-10-05-from-the-slave-codes-to-mike-brown-the-brutal.pdf">police brutality</a>. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, the authorities didn’t punish the perpetrators when <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-to-heal-african-americans-traumatic-history-98298">African Americans were lynched</a>. Nor did the judicial system <a href="https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/mississippi-burning">hold the police accountable</a> for failing to intervene when black people were being <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/emmett-lynching-america/">murdered by mobs</a>. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1131268349827137536"}"></div></p>
<h2>Reverberating today</h2>
<p>For the past five decades, the federal government has forbidden the use of racist regulations at the state and local level. Yet people of color are still <a href="https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/reconciling-results-racial-differences-police-shootings">more likely to be killed</a> by the police than whites.</p>
<p>The Washington Post tracks the number of Americans killed by the police by race, gender and other characteristics. The newspaper’s database indicates that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/police-shootings-2018/">229 out of 992</a> of those who died that way in 2018, 23% of the total, were black, even though only about 12% of the country is African American. </p>
<p>Policing’s institutional racism of decades and centuries ago still matters because policing culture has not changed as much as it could. For many African Americans, law enforcement represents a <a href="https://psmag.com/social-justice/why-black-america-fears-the-police">legacy of reinforced inequality</a> in the justice system and resistance to advancement – even under pressure from the civil rights movement and its legacy.</p>
<p>In addition, the police disproportionately target <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/07418820200095291">black drivers</a>.</p>
<p>When a <a href="https://openpolicing.stanford.edu/publications/">Stanford University</a> research team analyzed data collected between 2011 and 2017 from nearly 100 million traffic stops to look for evidence of systemic <a href="https://5harad.com/papers/100M-stops.pdf">racial profiling</a>, they found that black drivers were more likely to be pulled over and to have their cars searched than white drivers. They also found that the percentage of black drivers being stopped by police dropped after dark when a driver’s complexion is harder to see from outside the vehicle.</p>
<p>This persistent disparity in policing is disappointing because of progress in other regards.</p>
<p>There is <a href="http://www.policechiefmagazine.org/creating-a-multicultural-law-enforcement-agency/">greater understanding within the police</a> that brutality, particularly lethal force, leads to public mistrust, and police forces are <a href="https://datausa.io/profile/soc/333050/">becoming more diverse</a>.</p>
<p>What’s more, college students majoring in criminal justice who plan to become future law enforcement officers now frequently take <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/10511253.2017.1409781">“diversity in criminal justice” courses</a>. This relatively new curriculum is designed to, among other things, make future police professionals more aware of their own biases and those of others. In my view, what these students learn in these classes will make them more attuned to the communities they serve once they enter the workforce.</p>
<p>In addition, law enforcement officers and leaders are being trained to <a href="https://trustandjustice.org/">recognize and minimize their own biases</a> in <a href="https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/82-fair-policing-contract-produce/68a8bf346ec3c8dc560c/optimized/full.pdf#page=1">New York City</a> and other places where people of color are disproportionately stopped by the authorities and arrested.</p>
<p>But the persistence of racially biased policing means that unless American policing reckons with its racist roots, it is likely to <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0021934717702134">keep repeating mistakes</a> of the past. This will hinder police from fully protecting and serving the entire public.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/112816/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Connie Hassett-Walker does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Half a century after the federal government voided Jim Crow laws, the criminal justice system still discriminates against African Americans.Connie Hassett-Walker, Assistant Professor of Justice Studies and Sociology, Norwich UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1114192019-03-12T10:45:56Z2019-03-12T10:45:56ZBeyond blackface: How college yearbooks captured protest and change<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263151/original/file-20190311-86678-nfkgq9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">College yearbook editors in the 1960s juxtaposed pictures of traditional campus activities, such as Greek Life, alongside images of protests and marches.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://exploreuk.uky.edu/catalog/xt73xs5j9z6w?f%5Bsource_s%5D%5B%5D=University+of+Kentucky+Yearbook+Collection&f%5Bpub_date_sort%5D%5B%5D=1969&per_page=20#page/426/mode/2up">The Kentuckian, 1968</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Ever since a photograph surfaced of someone in blackface – and another dressed in a Ku Klux Klan robe – on the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/us/northam-yearbook.html">medical college yearbook page</a> of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam in February, efforts to scour college yearbooks have focused on finding similarly racist imagery.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262981/original/file-20190309-86686-12kakpj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262981/original/file-20190309-86686-12kakpj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262981/original/file-20190309-86686-12kakpj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262981/original/file-20190309-86686-12kakpj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262981/original/file-20190309-86686-12kakpj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262981/original/file-20190309-86686-12kakpj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262981/original/file-20190309-86686-12kakpj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262981/original/file-20190309-86686-12kakpj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam speaks at a news conference after revelations that his medical school yearbook page features photos of a man in blackface.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Democrats-Zero-Tolerance/958d0b315e7b4e569feb0efbeb2ae3cf/1/0">Steve Helber/AP</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>USA Today, for instance, <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2019/02/20/how-we-tracked-down-blackface-kkk-and-other-racist-yearbook-images/2915964002/">sent 78 reporters</a> to page through more than 900 college yearbooks from the 1970s and ‘80s. The newspaper not only discovered photographs of students dressed in KKK robes and blackface, but also at mock lynchings and other blatant “<a href="https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/02/20/blackface-racist-photos-yearbooks-colleges-kkk-lynching-mockery-fraternities-black-70-s-80-s/2858921002/">displays of racism</a>.”</p>
<p>This focus on the racist reveling of college graduates from yesteryear who are today’s power elite is justified. However, as one who has <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/10/24/supreme-court-confirmation-hearings-showed-yearbooks-can-be-documents-research-well">studied college yearbooks</a> – and who has written a book about <a href="https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/going-college-sixties">going to college in the sixties</a> – I believe this narrow focus on racist imagery obscures a similarly important element of college yearbooks that began to appear during a critical turning point for higher education in the United States.</p>
<h2>Black representation</h2>
<p>One of my biggest concerns with the current focus on racist imagery in college yearbooks is that in the search for images of blackface, journalists and others are overlooking the importance of the faces of black students. Black representation is important to consider because it wasn’t until the latter half of the 20th century that many of America’s colleges and universities began to accept black students.</p>
<p>Because of the topic of my book, I’ve mostly studied yearbooks from the 1960s – some 20 years before Northam graduated from medical school. During this time period, in the <a href="http://www.secsports.com/">Southeastern Conference</a> – where a <a href="https://ussporthistory.com/2015/06/29/confederate-iconography-and-southern-college-football/">Confederate legacy still loomed</a> – the first African-American student on a varsity basketball team was Perry Wallace of Vanderbilt during the 1967-68 season when he was a sophomore. Wallace appears on five different pages of the 1969 edition of The Vanderbilt Commodore, the college yearbook at Vanderbilt University. Perry majored in electrical engineering. He graduated from Columbia Law School and went on to become a distinguished law professor at George Washington University.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262982/original/file-20190309-86713-1nxhp56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262982/original/file-20190309-86713-1nxhp56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262982/original/file-20190309-86713-1nxhp56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=765&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262982/original/file-20190309-86713-1nxhp56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=765&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262982/original/file-20190309-86713-1nxhp56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=765&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262982/original/file-20190309-86713-1nxhp56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=962&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262982/original/file-20190309-86713-1nxhp56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=962&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262982/original/file-20190309-86713-1nxhp56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=962&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Vanderbilt’s Perry Wallace (25) scoops the rebound down from the Kentucky basket, in 1968, in Lexington, Kentucky.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Watchf-AP-S-BKC-KY-USA-APHS88431-U-Of-Kentucky-/f403487c8ce24e71b4393c843d4a646e/5/0">H.B. Littell/AP</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The 1968 and 1969 editions of The Kentuckian – the college yearbook at the University of Kentucky where I teach – are also interesting case studies.</p>
<p>The University of Kentucky is home of the first African-Americans to play football in the Southeastern Conference: <a href="https://www.wymt.com/content/news/Greg-Page-A-dream-cut-short-but-a-legacy-that-shines-bright-367994241.html">Greg Page</a> and <a href="https://theundefeated.com/features/nate-northington-the-first-black-football-player-in-the-sec-finally-understands-his-place-in-history/">Nate Northington</a>, later joined by <a href="https://ukathletics.com/hof.aspx?hof=51">Wilbur Hackett</a> and <a href="https://www.owensboroliving.com/features/10022/">Houston Hogg</a>. The 1968 edition of the university’s yearbook – The Kentuckian – focused on a team <a href="https://www.wymt.com/content/news/Greg-Page-A-dream-cut-short-but-a-legacy-that-shines-bright-367994241.html">tragedy</a> – Page’s death. “Page had lain paralyzed for over a month due to an injury suffered in preseason practice,” an entry in the yearbook states. “But as it had to be, football continued.”</p>
<p>The appearance of black students in college yearbooks during this time period serves as a historical reminder that even though many colleges had become racially desegregated earlier, campus activities were still often racially exclusive. Black students were first admitted to the University of Kentucky in 1949 but were not allowed to participate in many student activities until much later – <a href="https://www.kentucky.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/mark-story/article176106916.html">1967</a> in the case of varsity sports. That’s a long delay. It indicates that admission did not necessarily mean full citizenship within the campus community.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263137/original/file-20190311-86717-gi41yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263137/original/file-20190311-86717-gi41yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263137/original/file-20190311-86717-gi41yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263137/original/file-20190311-86717-gi41yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263137/original/file-20190311-86717-gi41yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263137/original/file-20190311-86717-gi41yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263137/original/file-20190311-86717-gi41yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263137/original/file-20190311-86717-gi41yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jim Green, the first African-American track and field athlete at the University of Kentucky, who went on to win NCAA championships, was honored in the 1969 Kentuckian as one of the university’s ‘Pacesetters’ for outstanding contributions in 1968-1969.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://exploreuk.uky.edu/catalog/xt73xs5j9z6w?f%5Bsource_s%5D%5B%5D=University+of+Kentucky+Yearbook+Collection&f%5Bpub_date_sort%5D%5B%5D=1969&per_page=20#page/5/mode/1up">The Kentuckian</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>An era of protest</h2>
<p>My other concern about the focus on racist imagery is that it distracts from the fact that, particularly during the late 1960s, college yearbooks helped chronicle an era of student protest and campus activism. Sometimes, college yearbook editors deliberately put images of traditional campus events alongside images of demonstrations and protests.</p>
<p>That’s what Gretchen Marcum Brown, editor of The Kentuckian had in mind during her stint as editor for the 1969 edition, which is particularly noteworthy for the amount of material that reflects black culture and politics. For instance, the 1969 yearbook features speakers such as civil rights activist Julian Bond, The Supremes, and extended photo caption information about a black history course and the Black Student Union. In a recent interview for this article, Brown told me she wanted to document the intense political events taking place on and off campus during the 1968-69 academic year.</p>
<p>In her acknowledgments, Brown credited the influence of Sam Abell, her predecessor who went on to become a <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/contributors/a/photographer-sam-abell/">renowned photographer for National Geographic</a>. Abell had advised Brown to start the 1969 yearbook with a photo essay in which traditional campus events, such as a Greek life prom in which students were dressed in Confederate regalia, would be placed alongside or near images of student groups seeking to uproot the status quo.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263163/original/file-20190311-86690-12gmhlb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263163/original/file-20190311-86690-12gmhlb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263163/original/file-20190311-86690-12gmhlb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263163/original/file-20190311-86690-12gmhlb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263163/original/file-20190311-86690-12gmhlb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263163/original/file-20190311-86690-12gmhlb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263163/original/file-20190311-86690-12gmhlb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263163/original/file-20190311-86690-12gmhlb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A student shown in a 1969 University of Kentucky yearbook examines African art in one photograph, while in another photograph in the same book, a student dances while draped in a Confederate flag.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://exploreuk.uky.edu/catalog/xt73xs5j9z6w?f%5Bsource_s%5D%5B%5D=University+of+Kentucky+Yearbook+Collection&f%5Bpub_date_sort%5D%5B%5D=1969&per_page=20#page/5/mode/1up">The Kentuckian, 1968-69</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The yearbook included extended coverage of controversies within student government. This included the house speaker of the student government telling the 40 black students present to “protest his bill requesting that 'Dixie’ be played at athletic events, that the song was not racist.” </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263167/original/file-20190311-86713-1plp5qc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263167/original/file-20190311-86713-1plp5qc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263167/original/file-20190311-86713-1plp5qc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263167/original/file-20190311-86713-1plp5qc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263167/original/file-20190311-86713-1plp5qc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263167/original/file-20190311-86713-1plp5qc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263167/original/file-20190311-86713-1plp5qc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263167/original/file-20190311-86713-1plp5qc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A student government house speaker challenges black students to protest a bill he brought forth to have ‘Dixie’ sung before sporting events.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://exploreuk.uky.edu/catalog/xt73xs5j9z6w?f%5Bsource_s%5D%5B%5D=University+of+Kentucky+Yearbook+Collection&f%5Bpub_date_sort%5D%5B%5D=1969&per_page=20#page/5/mode/1up">The Kentuckian, 1969</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Imagining a better future</h2>
<p>At the end of a lengthy section on Greek life, the yearbook editor quoted fraternity leaders who invoked the importance of “brotherhood.” But she didn’t just let the brotherhood claim go unchecked. Instead, Brown broached the sensitive issue of racial exclusion. “Brotherhood is cheering together at a football game. Brotherhood is hanging together when the going gets tough. Brotherhood is borrowing your roommates’ clothes. Brotherhood may or may not be a ‘Caucasian only’ clause in your constitution.”</p>
<p>This wry observation showed awareness of both inclusion and exclusion in campus life. </p>
<p>The yearbook concluded with a photograph of a campus demonstration in which a student holds a placard that asked the University of Kentucky campus, “Will You Grow Up?” The editor’s final comment was, “This book is dedicated to those who have the courage and foresight for true reappraisal.”</p>
<p>The Kentuckian was not unique in its attention to social change. A review of yearbooks from Louisiana State University, North Carolina State University and the University of Mississippi shows a similar emphasis on student awareness of the political climate at the time, balanced by coverage of traditional campus life activities. </p>
<p>Yearbook editors challenged readers to reconsider what college education was about and what a university should be. For example, the <a href="https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/agromeck1969nort#?c=&m=&s=&cv=91&xywh=-369%2C0%2C5919%2C3509">1969 Agromeck yearbook</a> of North Carolina State University, stated: “N.C. State’s heritage is essentially like that of any other predominantly white, southern technically oriented institution. The virtues which the school extols are Discipline, Patriotism, Hard Work and Good Grades.” </p>
<p>However, the yearbook editor continued: “There are changes afoot. From the past comes a dual tradition of technical and liberal education and the factors have clashed openly in the present.” Its major photographic essay presented themes of conflict and change within the university.</p>
<p>College yearbooks were built to last. They were also meant to commemorate the worlds that students created. This means that in 2019 alumni, and now the public, can look back at the blackface parties of 1984, the year of Gov. Northam’s medical college yearbook – but also at the student protests of 1969.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/111419/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John R. Thelin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Recent blackface scandals that involve college yearbooks have overshadowed how yearbooks also chronicled important turning points in the history of US higher education, a historian argues.John R. Thelin, University Research Professor, University of KentuckyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/933782018-03-15T09:47:00Z2018-03-15T09:47:00ZTears: Ken Dodd record outsold everyone but the Beatles in the 1960s<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210519/original/file-20180315-104676-1f3tark.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C56%2C1884%2C1448&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KEN_DODD.jpg">David A Ellis </a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Among all the nostalgic recognition of Ken Dodd’s comic genius following his recent death, it is too easy to overlook the fact that he was also a successful pop singer with no fewer than 18 Top 40 hits to his name, four of which made it into the Top 10. His <a href="http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=13976">1965 release Tears</a> was the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_singles_of_the_1960s_in_the_United_Kingdom">third highest-selling</a> single in the UK across the entire 1960s.</p>
<p>You might want to read that again, slowly. In a decade that produced countless hits for The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley, Tom Jones, Frank Sinatra, Cliff Richard and many more, Ken Dodd’s track outsold them all – except for two songs by The Beatles: She Loves You and I Want to Hold Your Hand, both released in 1963.</p>
<p>There is, of course, a statistical sleight of hand here. Singles released towards the end of a decade have less time to rack up sales within that decade than those that have been available longer. Nevertheless, it is a remarkable achievement, particularly if one considers that singles released before Tears include hits such as It’s Now Or Never by Elvis Presley (1960), It’s Not Unusual by Tom Jones (1965), Can’t Buy Me Love by the Beatles (1964), and so on.</p>
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<p>Why was Tears so successful? Dodd was certainly an accomplished baritone. He sustains a smooth vocal line, pitches the slightly tricky melody accurately, and like other crooners of the time – think Dean Martin or Andy Williams – he uses vibrato effectively. He also has a tasteful approach to portamento – sliding gently between certain pitches to enhance musical feeling. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210507/original/file-20180315-104673-4amjtj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210507/original/file-20180315-104673-4amjtj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210507/original/file-20180315-104673-4amjtj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210507/original/file-20180315-104673-4amjtj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210507/original/file-20180315-104673-4amjtj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210507/original/file-20180315-104673-4amjtj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210507/original/file-20180315-104673-4amjtj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Tears of a clown: bigger than Satisfaction or Can’t Buy Me Love.</span>
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<p>It is perhaps no coincidence that when Dodd <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009405v#play">appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs</a> in 1990 his musical choices included Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Perry Como – the last of whom he nominated as his overall favourite among his eight discs. These were the singers who he admired – and perhaps to some degree emulated – and their crooning style very much provides the context for his own.</p>
<h2>Music and Meaning</h2>
<p>Is there something about the song itself that also made it particularly popular? The melody is characterised by a descending chromatic line – that is, you couldn’t play it entirely on the white notes of a piano, you’d need some black notes, too. Descending lines of this kind are often associated in classical music with heightened emotional states, especially of grief and sorrow, and particularly if the melodies are coloured by these half-step (semitone) chromatic inflections.</p>
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<p>In Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas (written sometime in the 1680s) Dido’s famous dying lament, When I Am Laid In Earth, is underpinned by a repeating bass line characterised by downward half-steps. Bizet’s well-known <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ_HHRJf0xg">Habanera</a> from his opera Carmen (1875), provides one of the most famous examples of a descending chromatic melody, although here it serves to introduce the title character as a feisty gypsy girl asserting her independence, declaring that: “Love is a rebellious bird that none can tame.” </p>
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<p>In <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgr4parx-rU">My Heart Opens to Your Voice</a> (Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix) from Saint-Saëns’ opera Samson and Delilah (1877), Delilah supposedly reveals her love for Samson upon hearing his voice, only to betray him later in the opera. The opening phrase of Dodd’s Tears uses exactly the same descending five-note pattern as the second part of the Saint-Saëns melody. Whether the songwriters <a href="https://www.allmusic.com/artist/frank-capano-mn0001304596">Frank Capano</a> and Billy Uhr were aware of this connection is unknown, but the overlap can be clearly heard.</p>
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<p>Tears was first released by the bandleader and singer <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/04/obituaries/rudy-vallee-30-s-singing-idol-and-vagabond-lover-dead.html">Rudy Vallee</a> in 1930, although in its original version it has a waltz-like three beats to the bar feel. Dodd’s version is slower and has the more conventional four beats to the bar – and halfway through the recording (at about 1’38") the entire song modulates up a semitone. This “semitone shift” is relatively common in popular music (less so in classical music) as a way of introducing variety in a piece without introducing new material.</p>
<p>It also heightens tension. Later examples include Michael Jackson’s Man In The Mirror (at about 2’50") or Bon Jovi’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDK9QqIzhwk">Livin’ On A Prayer</a> (at about 3’25") – but there are countless others.</p>
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<h2>Middle of the road</h2>
<p>Looking back, it is tempting to see Tears as something of a watershed moment in British popular music, the final peak of a middle-of-the-road style from singers such as Como, Williams, Val Doonican and others, before that style became overtaken by the inexorable growth of rock and roll and the many popular music styles that followed.</p>
<p>This is not to suggest that these kinds of ballads suddenly disappeared. Light and MOR music continue to have their devotees, and Dodd himself released hit recordings until the early 1980s. But none would have the extraordinary success of Tears.</p>
<p>Whatever the reasons for that success, the fact that a goofy comedian from Liverpool could outsell nearly all UK singers and bands in the 1960s – a prolific decade for British popular music – remains astonishing, almost funny. Tattyfilarious, you might say.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/93378/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephen Cottrell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Liverpool comic scored with the third-highest selling single of the 1960s.Stephen Cottrell, Professor of Music, City, University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/879922017-12-01T00:41:36Z2017-12-01T00:41:36ZCharles Manson and the perversion of the American dream<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196404/original/file-20171126-21805-ao52xg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Charles Manson leaves a Los Angeles courtroom in March 1970.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Watchf-Associated-Press-Domestic-News-Californi-/296e3fb8237b4c4c8d9987cf367d284a/94/0">George Brich/AP Photo</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When Charles Manson died in November 2017, his name carried weight even among those who weren’t alive when he committed his crimes.</p>
<p>For decades, Manson was the symbol of evil, a real-life boogeyman who loomed as the American conception of wickedness incarnate. His death ended 48 years of imprisonment for a series of murders in August 1969, some of which he committed, most of which he ordered.</p>
<p>But his death also reminds us of Manson’s obsessive longing to make a name for himself. As I was researching <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Everybody-Had-Ocean-Mayhem-Angeles/dp/1613734913/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1509465732&sr=8-1&keywords=everybody+had+an+ocean">my book on Los Angeles in the 1960s</a>, I was struck by how fame – more than art, more than religion, more than money – motivated Manson as he careened from prison, to musician, to murder. In his way, he was an early adopter of something that permeates American culture today.</p>
<h2>Becoming something out of nothing</h2>
<p><a href="http://www.groveatlantic.com/?title=Manson+in+His+Own+Words">According to Charles Manson</a>, when he was a boy, his family didn’t pay him much attention: His mother, a prostitute and small-time thief, once traded him for a pitcher of beer. </p>
<p>Manson was jailed for the first time at 13, for burglary. By the time he was in his early 30s, he’d already spent half his life behind bars.</p>
<p>As he was being released from California’s Terminal Island prison in 1967, he panicked and asked the jailer not to turn him out into the world. The guard laughed, but Manson was serious. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Everybody-Had-Ocean-Mayhem-Angeles/dp/1613734913/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1509465732&sr=8-1&keywords=everybody+had+an+ocean">Prison was the only real home he’d known</a>.</p>
<p>When the lifelong con man hit the streets, much had changed since 1960, the year he had last tasted freedom. It was the <a href="http://www.the60sofficialsite.com/Summer_of_Love.html">Summer of Love</a>, and Manson drifted to San Francisco, the epicenter of America’s cultural revolution. </p>
<p>There he found docile flower children – easy marks, even for an inept crook. He adopted the hirsute look of the tribe, recycled some of the Scientology babble he’d picked up in the joint and started building a “family” of followers drunk on his flattery. He preyed on lost and damaged young women – wounded birds – and made them think they were beautiful, as long as they followed him.</p>
<p>He sought fame. He deserved fame, he reasoned, and he needed to make the world notice him. Music would be his vehicle: He knew a few chords and could reasonably mimic the peace, love and flowers ethos in his lyrics. </p>
<p>“His followers had no idea that Charlie was obsessed with becoming famous,” biographer <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/books/review/manson-a-biography-by-jeff-guinn.html">Jeff Guinn</a> wrote. “He told them that his goal, his mission, really, was to teach the world a better way to live through his songs.”</p>
<p>He brought his “family” of damaged goods to Los Angeles and sent his women to find people who could help him in his quest. While hitchhiking one day, a couple of the girls found an easy mark: the big-hearted, generous and sex-obsessed drummer for the Beach Boys, <a href="http://www.williammckeen.com/an-excerpt-from-everybody-had-an-ocean/">Dennis Wilson</a>. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Everybody-Had-Ocean-Mayhem-Angeles/dp/1613734913/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1509465732&sr=8-1&keywords=everybody+had+an+ocean">He picked them up</a>, took them home for milk, cookies and sex, then left for a recording session. When Dennis returned home in the middle of the night, the girls were still there, along with Charles Manson and 15 other young women, all mostly nude. For a sex junkie like Dennis, it was paradise. He bragged about his nubile roommates to his rock star pals, and by the end of 1968, Britain’s Record Mirror <a href="http://www.smileysmile.net/uncanny/index.php/dennis-wilson-i-live-with-17-girls">published a profile</a> titled “Dennis Wilson: I Live With 17 Girls.”</p>
<h2>Grasping at coattails</h2>
<p>Manson saw Dennis – and his Beach Boy brothers Brian and Carl – as his entrée to the music business and international fame. Although the group’s star was dimming by the late ‘60s – they were no longer the hip boy band they had once been – it was at least a foot in the music industry’s door. Through his time as Dennis Wilson’s roommate, Manson had gotten to know record producer Terry Melcher, Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas, Neil Young and Frank Zappa. </p>
<p>Convinced he would make Manson – whom he called the Wizard – into a star, Dennis urged his brothers to record the fledgling singer at the Beach Boys studio in Brian Wilson’s home. Wherever Manson went, of course, his “family” followed. Marilyn Wilson, married to Brian at the time, had the bathrooms fumigated after every session, fearing the filthy girls were spreading disease. (And they were, though not the kind that showed up on toilet seats. Dennis ended up footing, for the Manson women, <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/beach-boys-a-california-saga-part-ii-19711111">what was jokingly referred to</a> as the largest gonorrhea bill in history.)</p>
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<span class="caption">The Beach Boys pictured in November 1966. Clockwise from left: Dennis Wilson, Alan Jardine, Bruce Johnston, Mike Love and Carl Wilson.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Watchf-Associated-Press-International-News-Ente-/6cebe0432e3243d999c5f65a92f1aa08/8/0">AP Photo</a></span>
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<p>After Dennis’s efforts bore no fruit, Manson glommed onto Melcher, who had produced the Byrds and Paul Revere and the Raiders. Melcher and Wilson introduced Manson to Los Angeles’s music society, largely through lavish parties at the estate on Cielo Drive that Melcher shared with actress Candace Bergen. At Cass Elliot’s parties, Manson played whirling dervish on the dance floor, entertaining all with his spastic monkey moves. </p>
<p>When Neil Young heard Manson <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpx4ODP35VQ&list=PLj2l6Lgg-kToX1vJaO881hGiUmqSzJ9n_">sing his compositions</a> during a drop-in at Dennis Wilson’s house, he called Mo Ostin, president of Warner-Reprise Records, to urge the boss to give the guy a listen. Young warned him that Manson was a little out there and spewed songs more than sang him. But still, Young insisted there was something there.</p>
<p>And there was. Manson’s voice was good enough that he had <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/style/charles-manson-annoying-hipster.html">a reasonable expectation of getting a recording contract</a>. His original compositions were good enough to be recorded: The Beach Boys adapted one of his songs into something called “Never Learn Not to Love,” which they performed on the supremely wholesome “Mike Douglas Show.” </p>
<p>Manson’s lyrics, unfortunately, were mostly gibberish, bad enough to justify Ostin’s rejection and for Melcher to tell Manson he couldn’t get him the record contract he so desperately wanted.</p>
<p>But it was too late to stop now. He had drunk from the trough of fame. He mingled with rock stars and thought he was entitled to be one. </p>
<h2>Manson’s American dream</h2>
<p>The American dream used to be described thus: Come to America with nothing and, with the great freedoms and opportunity offered by the country, exit life with prosperity. It has also been described as simply the ideal of freedom – of living in a free and robust society, with nothing to impede people but an open road.</p>
<p>At some point, this changed. In the post-war world of abundant leisure and instant gratification, an ethos of opportunity, hard work and the gradual accumulation of wealth fell away, replaced by a longing for instant fame and fortune. Perhaps it was a result of the conspicuous wealth so visible on the new medium of television. Maybe these new celebrities burned so much brighter because their images slipped through the cathode ray into millions of American homes, turning the house into the new movie theater. </p>
<p>Either way, for millions today, the American dream is simply <a href="https://theconversation.com/inspired-by-kim-kardashian-a-feverish-legion-of-followers-struggle-to-achieve-online-fame-51534">the delirious pursuit of fame</a>. Ask a schoolchild what he wants and <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/yalda-t-uhls/kids-want-fame_b_1201935.html">many will say to be famous</a> – by any means necessary. </p>
<p>Charles Manson was an early avatar for this new concept of the American dream. He sought fame at any cost. He tried to achieve celebrity through music and, when he didn’t reach that goal, he turned to crime. Sure, he would spend 61 of his 83 years in prison. But the cameras rolled, the papers were printed, the books were sold. No one would ever forget his name.</p>
<p>In the summer of 1969, actress Sharon Tate and some houseguests were living in a <a href="http://cielodrive.com/10050-cielo-drive.php">Cielo Drive</a> home recently vacated by Terry Melcher and Candace Bergen. Manson didn’t send his murderous family for Melcher and Bergen – he knew they had moved. Instead, he wanted to frighten Melcher and other members of the rock’n’roll elite. The following night’s murder of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca was likewise intended to breed hysteria. It worked.</p>
<p>Manson achieved his goal, becoming so famous that his name replaced those of his victims. The crimes became known as the Manson murders.</p>
<p>Look to the media today to see Manson’s ideological descendants, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/fashion/jake-paul-team-10-youtube.html">thirsting for fame</a>. Some don’t just risk humiliation, they court it. Remember the early rounds of “American Idol” with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d5eP0wWLQY">jarringly dreadful performances</a> giving the reprehensible “singers” their 15 seconds of fame? </p>
<p>Other, more deadly offspring, could be the boys who shoot up schools and coffee shops and prayer-group meetings. They might be dead, they might have left a trail of destruction in their wake and they aren’t mourned. But like Manson, they are remembered. That’s certainly more than most failed con men can claim.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, Manson did end up achieving his goal. Perhaps the best way to honor his victims is to forget his name.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/87992/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>William McKeen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Desperate to achieve fame by any means necessary, Manson was ahead of his time: Today, the delirious pursuit of fame has gone mainstream.William McKeen, Professor and Chair, Department of Journalism, Boston UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/708872017-11-20T13:28:24Z2017-11-20T13:28:24ZCharles Manson: death of America’s 1960s bogeyman<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195407/original/file-20171120-18574-1fzu580.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>So, Charles Manson <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/20/charles-manson-dead-cult-leader-sharon-tate">has died, aged 83</a>, of “natural causes”. The con-man, musician and erstwhile cult leader, who came to embody mainstream American fears of the 1960s counterculture “gone wrong”, had an easier death at Kern County hospital in California than any of the seven people whose murders he orchestrated in August 1969.</p>
<p>Manson has been largely out of the public view since his conviction for the Tate-LaBianca killings in January 1971 alongside several members of his “family” – but there has been little diminution of his grisly fame. Earlier this year it was announced that Quentin Tarantino <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/jul/12/quentin-tarantino-to-make-manson-murders-film">is making a film about the Manson murders</a>. Big names such as Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt are among those said to be lining up for parts. </p>
<p>There remains something strange about the attention that Manson generated in life and now in death. It’s a level of interest which far exceeds matters of public record. As such, it’s difficult to know what to say by way of response to the news of his passing – or even what to say for the purposes of a tentative obituary. Difficult, because it’s hard to know precisely who (or what) the name Charles Manson is being used to describe.</p>
<p>Manson, born Charles Milles Maddox in 1934, spent most of his life behind bars. Before convening the cult-like group “The Family” in 1967, he had convictions for car theft and robbery. But it was towards the end of 1969 that he really came to public attention. He was arrested and put on trial for his role as the mastermind of a total of nine murders, including those of the actress Sharon Tate and four friends, and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca over the course of the weekend of August 8-9 1969. In March 1971 he was given the death penalty which was later commuted to commuted to life imprisonment.</p>
<p>According to testimony at his trial and that of his followers, Manson was not actually directly responsible for wielding a murder weapon at either of the two crime scenes (although there’s plenty to suggest he was <a href="https://capote.wordpress.com/2011/05/14/truman-capote-interviews-bobby-beausoleil-san-quentin-1973/">involved in other murders</a> at around the same time). But the court found he had masterminded and ordered the Tate-LaBianca killings, made all the more horrific by the fact that actress Tate had been pregnant at the time of her murder.</p>
<h2>Different kind of celebrity</h2>
<p>Whether you like it or not, from his conviction to his death, Manson was a celebrity. He became a celebrity when he made the cover of Life magazine in December 1969 and Rolling Stone in June 1970 – and subsequent novels, films, recordings, interviews, t-shirts and comic books have sought alternately to shore up this status and to demythologise it.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195409/original/file-20171120-18547-144h2dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195409/original/file-20171120-18547-144h2dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195409/original/file-20171120-18547-144h2dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=787&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195409/original/file-20171120-18547-144h2dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=787&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195409/original/file-20171120-18547-144h2dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=787&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195409/original/file-20171120-18547-144h2dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=989&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195409/original/file-20171120-18547-144h2dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=989&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195409/original/file-20171120-18547-144h2dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=989&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Life magazine, December 1969.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>This Manson culture industry (which shows no signs of slowing down) has kept his name in public circulation for nearly half a century. It’s this material which invariably forms the basis of the analysis whenever Manson’s life and “career” is considered. What becomes visible is something of a schizoid split in which the name Charles Manson gains two points of reference. </p>
<p>There’s “Charles Manson” which effectively describes the life of Charles Milles Maddox, criminal – and then there’s “Charles Manson”, the potent symbol of evil, the name which in the words of one of his recent biographers has become a “<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Z5RqZqqBb44C&pg=PT14&lpg=PT14&dq=manson+metaphor+for+unspeakable+horror&source=bl&ots=W1avg5r91X&sig=UIjRZFvKUbQnOnLGWBjSUl6v6pA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwilrLPElcPXAhXsKMAKHZyADowQ6AEINDAF#v=onepage&q=manson%20metaphor%20for%20unspeakable%20horror&f=false">metaphor for unspeakable horror</a>”. </p>
<p>An early example of the latter came from the writer Wayne McGuire in 1970. Writing in his column for Fusion magazine, “An Aquarian Journal”, he speculated that at “some point in the future”, Manson would “metamorphose into a major American folk hero”. The comment was later used as the epigraph for <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13222282-the-manson-file">The Manson File</a>, a collection of Manson-related writings first published by Amok Press in 1988. The prediction was fully realised in 1997 with the inclusion of Manson in James Parks’ collection, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2199864.Cultural_Icons">Cultural Icons</a>. Here, nestling between Lata Mangeshkar, Mao Tse Tung and Robert Mapplethorpe, Manson was identified as an “American Murderer” who “channelled his peculiar cocktail of black magic, drugs, sex and rock n roll into homicidal mania”. It is this “peculiar cocktail” that underpins Manson’s symbolic status.</p>
<p>What gives his crimes – and his name – a notoriety in excess of that held by the likes of <a href="https://www.biography.com/people/albert-de-salvo-17169632">the Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo</a> and the unknown “<a href="https://www.biography.com/people/zodiac-killer-236027">Zodiac Killer</a>”, who terrorised Northern California in 1968 and 1969, is that they simultaneously interact with a matrix of other powerful symbols that carry a greater cultural resonance than the breaking of a law, however severe. </p>
<h2>Hollywood meets the crazies</h2>
<p>Tate’s murder brought into collision two heavily mediated zones: <a href="http://www.youmustrememberthispodcast.com/episodes/youmustrememberthispodcastblog/2015/5/26/charles-mansons-hollywood-part-1-what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-the-manson-murders">Hollywood and the counterculture</a>. Manson’s interest in The Beatles and use of their song title “Helter Skelter” as a blood-drenched slogan further intensified this disturbing elision of murder and popular culture. As with The Rolling Stones’ <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopfeatures/6690506/The-Rolling-Stones-at-Altamont-the-day-the-music-died.html">concert at the Altamont Speedway</a> in December 1969 – at which a member of the audience was murdered by a Hells Angel – the Manson murders, once filtered through media sensitive to their range of connections, become emblems for the “end” or even “death” of the 1960s.</p>
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<p>Whether viewed as catalyst or symptom, they are events that stand in for explanations of economic shift, geopolitical crisis and social inequality which describe the decade’s apparent decline into death, violence and what <a href="https://obscenedesserts.blogspot.co.uk/2006/08/craziness-good-and-bad-hunter-s.html">Hunter S. Thompson called “bad craziness”</a>. </p>
<p>If anything it was the Tate-LaBianca murders that carry the metaphorical currency, while the name “Manson” now probably signifies something else. It’s a name to conjure with. “Manson” brings to mind the shadow-side of the 1960s: the <a href="https://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/11217607.0002.206/--decivilization-in-the-1960s?rgn=main;view=fulltext">incipient violence</a> that lay beneath the counterculture’s day-glo optimism and the lost potential of a decade’s calls for peace and pacifism. When viewed from the vantage point of seeing the long, strange and violent life laid out, it refers also to someone who understood and was able to exploit the potency of the popular culture around him. </p>
<p>There’s very little to celebrate here, but maybe there’s something to learn about what it means to be a celebrity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70887/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Riley has previously received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for research into the writers of the Beat Generation. </span></em></p>The murderous cult leader’s notoriety has not diminished over four decades in a US jail.James Riley, Fellow and College Lecturer in English, Girton College, Cambridge, University of CambridgeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/841132017-10-09T23:15:47Z2017-10-09T23:15:47Z50 years ago, John and Yoko came to Canada to give peace a chance<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189109/original/file-20171006-25749-1t45lwg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C2%2C2000%2C1392&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">On Dec. 23, 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono went to Parliament Hill in Ottawa to meet Pierre Trudeau. The Canadian prime minister was the only world leader to meet with the peace activists.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(THE CANADIAN PRESS/Peter Bregg)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Fifty years ago this Christmas season, John Lennon and Yoko Ono came to Canada to launch one of the most unique and celebrated counter-cultural protests of the turbulent 1960s.</p>
<p>Lennon and Ono visited Canada several times in 1969, a year when the Vietnam War and the massive demonstrations against it reached new levels of intensity. </p>
<p>The famous Beatle and his new bride <a href="https://www.beatlesbible.com/1969/12/15/john-lennon-yoko-ono-war-is-over-poster-campaign-launched/">arrived in Toronto on Dec. 15, 1969</a>, as part of the launch of their global “War is Over!” billboard campaign. A few days later, the couple <a href="https://happymag.tv/watch-a-long-lost-interview-where-john-and-yoko-discuss-their-war-is-over-campaign/">sat down with Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan to discuss the billboard initiative</a>.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1107256010773798913"}"></div></p>
<p>And on Dec. 23, Lennon and Ono achieved what seems to have been among their top priorities as the leading peace activists of the era: they met the prime minister of Canada, Pierre Trudeau. According to the Beatles Bible website, it was <a href="https://www.beatlesbible.com/1969/12/23/john-lennon-yoko-ono-meet-canadian-prime-minister-pierre-trudeau/">the only time the couple was able to take their peace campaign directly to a world leader</a>.</p>
<p>Canada was a favourite place for John and Yoko in 1969. During their first visit in the spring of that year, they staged their famous “<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/on-this-day-in-montreal-john-lennon-and-yoko-ono-s-bed-in-1.3602576">Bed-In for Peace</a>” at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montréal, lying down together for eight days in front of the world’s media to publicize their message of peace and, in the middle of it all, <a href="https://youtu.be/OF91o0HenhU">recording their anti-war anthem <em>Give Peace a Chance</em></a>. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Recorded at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montréal: Dozens of journalists and celebrities attended, many of whom are mentioned in the lyrics. Lennon and Tommy Smothers on acoustic guitar.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Following Montréal, the couple travelled in June to the University of Ottawa, where <a href="http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/rock-fights-for-gun-control/">student leader Allan Rock hosted them</a>. Rock, Canada’s future United Nations ambassador, then took them in his car on a tour of the city, which included a stop at the prime minister’s official residence. Trudeau, they learned, was not in, but Lennon stood at the doorstep and wrote him a note before he returned to the car and they pulled away.</p>
<p>The second visit took place in September 1969 when Lennon, Ono and a hastily assembled version of the Plastic Ono Band (which for this gig included Eric Clapton) flew at the last minute from London to Toronto to take part in an all-day rock ‘n’ roll festival held at the city’s Varsity Stadium — and produced a <a href="https://www.beatlesbible.com/people/john-lennon/albums/live-peace-in-toronto-1969/">live recording</a>. Less than a month earlier, another <a href="http://www.woodstock.com/about/">rock ‘n’ roll festival — at Woodstock</a> in upstate New York — had taken the American youth movement to its highest peak and given it a heady, almost fantastic, sense of its own power and purpose. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189428/original/file-20171009-9731-10wst3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189428/original/file-20171009-9731-10wst3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189428/original/file-20171009-9731-10wst3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189428/original/file-20171009-9731-10wst3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189428/original/file-20171009-9731-10wst3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1090&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189428/original/file-20171009-9731-10wst3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1090&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189428/original/file-20171009-9731-10wst3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1090&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono perform in their first public appearance as the Plastic Ono Band, at Toronto’s Varsity Stadium in September 1969.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo</span></span>
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<p>In their crusade for peace, Lennnon and Ono asked difficult questions, crucially relevant today. </p>
<p>How do we effectively protest against social injustices and war? It’s easy to deplore it. How do we all come together to <em>stop</em> it? Lennon and Ono did not, of course, put an end to violence. But they thought creatively and courageously about uniting people in opposition to it, and their example can inspire us today.</p>
<h2>New hope for peace</h2>
<p>In Europe, Lennon said: “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Beatles-McLuhan-Understanding-Electric-Age/dp/0810884321">We got a lot of hope from Woodstock</a>.” If so many people could gather together for peace and not war, he said, perhaps counter-cultural forces could actually change the world for the better.</p>
<p>Their Toronto show was a fraction of the size of Woodstock, but Lennon was exhilarated by the experience. He closed his set with the song he most wanted the crowd to hear: <em>Give Peace a Chance</em>.</p>
<p>Almost three months to the day, Lennon and Ono returned to Canada, this time to announce a music festival to take place outside Toronto in the summer of 1970, billed to be far bigger than Woodstock.</p>
<p>The couple had renewed their efforts to meet Trudeau, and formal negotiations between their staff and Trudeau’s office were under way. Other world leaders — including British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and U.S. President Richard Nixon – did not want to know John Lennon. He was the dangerous Beatle, the “<a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/when-john-lennons-jesus-controversy-turned-ugly-w431153">we are more popular than Jesus</a>” Beatle. </p>
<p>Just a year earlier, he had been convicted on drug possession charges and posed naked with Yoko on the jacket of their <em>Two Virgins</em> album. A month earlier, he had returned his MBE medal to the Queen in yet another snub to “The Establishment.” </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189104/original/file-20171006-25749-u9s22w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189104/original/file-20171006-25749-u9s22w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=302&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189104/original/file-20171006-25749-u9s22w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=302&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189104/original/file-20171006-25749-u9s22w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=302&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189104/original/file-20171006-25749-u9s22w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189104/original/file-20171006-25749-u9s22w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189104/original/file-20171006-25749-u9s22w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s 1968 ‘Two Virgins’ LP Sleeve.</span>
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<p>None of this stopped Trudeau from agreeing to meet him. From a political point of view, of course, Trudeau undoubtedly recognized that posing with one of the most famous rock stars in the world was an opportunity to boost his popularity among younger voters. But it’s also easy to imagine that Lennon’s iconoclasm appealed to Trudeau, and that he saw in Lennon an ally on issues such as effective peace activism and the escalating horrors of the Vietnam War.</p>
<h2>A meeting of the minds</h2>
<p>Lennon and Ono met Trudeau on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. After introductions and a brief photo session, they were ushered into Trudeau’s office. Lennon was nervous when the meeting began but, according to Ono, Trudeau immediately put him at his ease by telling him that he liked his book (<a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/in-his-own-write-a-spaniard-in-the-works-by-john-lennon-book-review-all-you-need-is-love-of-wordplay-9920692.html">presumably either <em>In his Own Write</em> from 1964 or <em>A Spaniard in the Works</em> from 1965</a>). </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">John Lennon & Plastic Ono Band, Live at Toronto, Varsity Stadium, 1969.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Their primary topic of conversation was the Cold War. They agreed mutual trust had to be created so that “disarmament and peaceful diplomatic relations could begin.” Each of them — Trudeau and Lennon — would work “<a href="https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=jrv4ZPlub2UC&rdid=book-jrv4ZPlub2UC&rdot=1&source=gbs_vpt_read&pcampaignid=books_booksearch_viewport">in very different ways toward this goal</a>.”
Although Trudeau was more than 20 years older than Lennon and the two men came from such very different worlds, it was a remarkable meeting of minds, personalities and agendas. The meeting was supposed to last 15 minutes. It lasted 50. </p>
<p>After Lennon and Ono left Trudeau, they met the media. “If all politicians were like Mr. Trudeau, there would be peace,” Lennon told them. Later, Trudeau remarked: “<em>Give Peace a Chance</em> has always seemed to me to be sensible advice.”</p>
<p>Nine days later, the 1960s were over and a new decade had begun. Lennon, back in London in January, wrote and recorded <em>Instant Karma!</em>, one of his greatest singles as a solo artist: “Why in the world are we here? / Surely not to live in pain and fear.” By the spring, however, plans for the massive peace concert outside Toronto had collapsed, and soon after Lennon’s life was overtaken by public disputes and personal demons. </p>
<p>Trudeau, meanwhile, entered his third year as prime minister in April, and by autumn, faced the biggest challenge of his political career with <a href="http://historyofrights.ca/history/october-crisis/">the FLQ crisis and the invoking of the War Measures Act</a>. Within a year of their meeting, peace for both Lennon and Trudeau must have seemed further away than ever.</p>
<p>It’s easy to look back on Lennon’s activism and dismiss it as naive, as many did at the time and more have done since. That’s unfair. What Lennon was trying to do was to create hope.</p>
<p>Lennon looked squarely at the violence, misery and abuse that still thrives all around us. He responded with a model of peaceful protest, both on an individual level and in much larger ways, to activate the energies of resistance and to unite the popular with the political. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189229/original/file-20171006-25752-wae8b4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189229/original/file-20171006-25752-wae8b4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189229/original/file-20171006-25752-wae8b4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189229/original/file-20171006-25752-wae8b4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189229/original/file-20171006-25752-wae8b4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189229/original/file-20171006-25752-wae8b4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189229/original/file-20171006-25752-wae8b4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">John Lennon, right, and his wife, Yoko Ono, at The Hit Factory, a recording studio in New York on Aug. 22, 1980, four months before the former Beatle was murdered.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Steve Sands</span></span>
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<p>Like Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon was a peace activist who died at the hands of an assassin. Three years after Lennon’s death in 1980, Trudeau set out on the final major undertaking of his political career: his “peace initiative.” It was different from Lennon and Ono’s peace mission to Canada, yet it is possible to see in their crusade a precedent for Trudeau’s own initiative. </p>
<p>After visiting several countries on both sides of the Cold War divide, Trudeau brought his peace mission to a close with a speech to the Canadian House of Commons in February 1984. His initiative may not have accomplished all that he had wished. But as he recalled in his 1993 <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Memoirs-Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau/dp/0771085885">Memoirs</a></em>: “Let it be said that we have lived up to our ideals; and that we have done what we could to lift the shadow of war.” In 1969, and especially in their three visits to Canada, Lennon and Ono, too, did what they could “to lift the shadow of war” and give peace a chance. </p>
<p>With violence raging and political movements of intolerance and isolation gaining so much ground today, we might draw inspiration from their words.</p>
<p>It’s now commonplace for pop icons and political leaders to meet and use their respective positions to champion progressive ideals. Half a century ago, when Trudeau opened his door to Lennon, that was not the case. Their extraordinary meeting marks the first time that a rock hero and a world leader met face to face to discuss the past, the present and the future. Their 50 minutes together highlighted the importance of peace to both men, as well as their shared commitment to raising political consciousness and mobilizing the popular forces of compassion and acceptance. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan interviews John Lennon and Yoko Ono in Toronto in December 1969.</span></figcaption>
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<p>[ <em>Like what you’ve read? Want more?</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/ca/newsletters?utm_source=TCCA&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=likethis">Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter</a>. ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/84113/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert Morrison receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.</span></em></p>John Lennon and Yoko Ono visited Canada on a peace mission: They met with leaders and asked difficult questions, relevant today. How do we effectively protest against social injustices and war?Robert Morrison, British Academy Global Professor, Queen's University, OntarioLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/851872017-10-04T13:18:59Z2017-10-04T13:18:59ZTom Petty stood up for authentic rock music – and he never backed down<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/188780/original/file-20171004-6724-jxu24l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The most watched video on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s YouTube Channel – at over 46m views – is a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SFNW5F8K9Y">cover version</a> of the Beatles’ While My Guitar Gently Weeps. The performance features an all-star cast and a famous guitar solo by Prince. </p>
<p>Channelling George Harrison’s voice and lyrics, the glue holding the whole thing together is Tom Petty – simultaneously and effortlessly occupying the roles of front man, “sideman” and tribute act in the ultimate pub band. But championing a moment of rock industry celebration without collapsing into parody or contradiction is a tightrope act which – as with much of what Petty achieved – is harder than it looks.</p>
<p>Petty, who has died at the age of 66, was the scrawny, kid next door (even as an adult) with an unadorned style and lack of movie-star looks. But he was also an archetype of staunchly and self-consciously “authentic” rock. For Petty – a romantic rather than an experimenter – live performance, a core rock sound and tradition were what counted the most. </p>
<h2>Into the Great Wide Open</h2>
<p>An <a href="http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a889/tom-petty-what-ive-learned-interview/">early encounter</a> with Elvis in 1961, when Petty was ten (his uncle was working on the set of Presley’s film Follow That Dream, appropriately enough) set him on his path. But his childhood in Florida was beset by an abusive alcoholic father and quarrels about his preference for music over schoolwork. </p>
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<p>He <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tom-Petty-Rock-Roll-Guardian/dp/1780387423">wryly recalled</a> a teacher trying to steer him away from his rock ambitions, arguing: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Look at Elvis Presely – if [he] hadn’t the talent and a good manager, he wouldn’t have had a job to fall back on. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Petty said later: “I always thought Elvis was kind of a poor example to prove her point.”</p>
<p>Petty’s subsequent career was a textbook example of the rock and roll narrative. He went straight from school to playing in bands, earning money by mowing lawns and digging graves, before moving to Los Angeles. </p>
<p>Breaking through in the 1970s, he was in the second wave of the classic rock era, following on from the stars of the previous decade. But that doesn’t mean his work wasn’t original or distinctive. With his band the Heartbreakers he managed to distil a particular strand of rock writing and performance. He brought cinematic lyrics and a “rough around the edges” image of free falling and the great wide open. </p>
<p>His was a clear yet mythical America that connected the Elvis of the 1950s to the chiming counter-culture of the Byrds in the 1960s. It mixed a Californian coastal languidness with a harder edged sense of deep south tradition – all rooted in rock and roll. So it was entirely fitting that he performed with his heroes of the previous generation – George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan – in the supergroup <a href="http://www.travelingwilburys.com/">Travelling Wilburys</a>. </p>
<p>The drama of his songs’ protagonists wasn’t absent from his own occasionally hard-bitten career either, which included periods of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2015/10/07/tom-petty-was-a-heroin-addict-in-the-90s-heres-why-hes-finally-talking-about-it/?utm_term=.a16cacbaafa6">addiction</a> and business disputes. Despite his aura as an underdog, he was steadfast in his dealings with the music industry, <a href="http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/tom-petty-defies-his-record-label-and-files-for-bankruptcy">filing for bankruptcy</a> in 1979 rather than concede in a dispute when his record label changed ownership. He <a href="http://time.com/money/4966100/tom-petty-dead-net-worth-records-hit-songs-cd-price-battle/">later refused</a> to let his fourth album, Hard Promises, serve as an industry trial for a $1 price increase in CDs. </p>
<p>Staunchly protective of his creative capital, he once sued a tyre company for its use of material resembling his own <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/1987-03-08/entertainment/ca-13300_1_tom-petty">in an advert</a>. In 2000, he issued George W Bush with a <a href="http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1840981_1840998_1840937,00.html">cease and desist letter</a> for using I Won’t Back Down as a campaign song – Bush did back down – before pushing the point home by playing a private concert for Democratic opponent Al Gore. </p>
<h2>We got lucky</h2>
<p>More outspoken politically as he got older, Petty <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/tom-petty-on-past-confederate-flag-use-it-was-downright-stupid-20150714">expressed regret</a> at his use of a Confederate flag as a stage decoration for concerts promoting his album <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/southern-accents-19850523">Southern Accents</a>. “It was a downright stupid thing to do,” he commented. “It’s like how a swastika looks to a Jewish person. It just shouldn’t be on flagpoles.” </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"915072929120972801"}"></div></p>
<p>His final tour also saw him <a href="http://ultimateclassicrock.com/tom-petty-american-girl-transgender/">feature images of transgender actor</a> Alexis Arquette in stage projections of his major hit American Girl – immediately in the wake of Donald Trump’s proposed transgender military ban.</p>
<p>Petty’s idea of what being “American” means ultimately leaned more towards the emotional rather than the social or geographical. It was about resilience, sturdiness and determination. </p>
<p>Rock mythology rests on an interesting paradox. It demands accessibility and being “one of the people” at the same as having special star qualities. </p>
<p>Petty carried this off by drawing a line from his predecessors to those continuing the same path (like Dave Grohl) through melodic flair, simplicity and an appeal to the straightforward. Coasting the upper echelons of a glamorous trade, even as a journeyman, Petty was neither the first nor the last of his kind. But he typified it, at the absolute centre of modern rock music, running down his own dream.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85187/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adam Behr receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. </span></em></p>He was a true heart breaker.Adam Behr, Lecturer in Popular and Contemporary Music, Newcastle UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/837022017-09-14T01:12:26Z2017-09-14T01:12:26ZDuring Vietnam War, music spoke to both sides of a divided nation<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185747/original/file-20170912-3792-1v2qib6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Music fans gather for the Rolling Stones' 'Gimme Shelter' concert at California's Altamont Speedway in 1969.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Associated-Press-Domestic-News-California-Unite-/d32c2af99ae5da11af9f0014c2589dfb/9/0">AP Photo</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Music is central to Ken Burns’s new Vietnam War documentary, with an original score accompanied by samples of the era’s most popular musicians, from the Rolling Stones to Bob Dylan. <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/09/06/soundtrack-vietnam-rock-music-pbs-documentary/105090768/">According to USA Today</a>, the people interviewed for the film were even asked to provide their 10 favorite songs from the war years. </p>
<p>While it’s natural that a historical film would include period-specific songs, music played an outsized role in the Vietnam War era. Whereas during past wars, musicians wrote songs to unite Americans, Vietnam-era music spoke to the growing numbers of disillusioned citizens, and brought attention to the cultural fissures that were beginning to emerge. </p>
<h2>A unified sound</h2>
<p>World War II influenced an entire generation – many say the “greatest” – but few of those who came of age in the 1940s would probably call music a core component of their collective identity.</p>
<p>Music did play an important role in the war, but only as a way to unite Americans; like the films, radio reports and newspapers accounts of the era, World War II music resounded with patriotism. </p>
<p>Glenn Miller and his lively swing orchestra played hits such as “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBTYcqtaOjg">Tuxedo Junction</a>” <a href="https://www.mtholyoke.edu/%7Eknigh20c/classweb/miller.html">for U.S. troops</a>, while bandleaders such as Benny Goodman and U.S.O. entertainers such as Bob Hope reinforced the government’s promotion of unwavering patriotism to willing and eager listeners. </p>
<p>Young people embraced swing music for what historians <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=W3QYRtA13o8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=david+stowe+swing+changes&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjHo9eG8Z_WAhUK94MKHakoBI4Q6AEIJjAA">David Stowe</a> and <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Swingin_the_Dream.html?id=VcOk9mrFGJMC">Lewis Erenberg</a> describe as the genre’s democratic ethos – the way Americans of different races and ethnicities enjoyed a new kind of sound with an upbeat tempo and new dance moves such as the Lindy Hop. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185741/original/file-20170912-3748-10yf2hk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185741/original/file-20170912-3748-10yf2hk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185741/original/file-20170912-3748-10yf2hk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/185741/original/file-20170912-3748-10yf2hk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/185741/original/file-20170912-3748-10yf2hk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/185741/original/file-20170912-3748-10yf2hk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=579&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/185741/original/file-20170912-3748-10yf2hk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=579&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/185741/original/file-20170912-3748-10yf2hk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=579&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">A huge crowd fills New York’s West 52nd Street for a swing party to raise war bonds in July 1942.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Watchf-AP-A-NY-USA-APHS399709-WWII-U-S-Defense/330f22f9687f45d392b080cba03fc3f3/6/0">AP Photo</a></span>
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<p>As I argue in my book “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=VLGYcemVOAYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=black+culture+and+the+new+deal&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj9wJXD8Z_WAhVIxoMKHWJ2CYoQ6AEIJjAA#v=onepage&q=black%20culture%20and%20the%20new%20deal&f=false">Black Culture and the New Deal</a>,” the government also employed African-American musicians such as Duke Ellington and Lena Horne to boost the morale of black citizens and project democratic values on the home front and for troops. <a href="https://theconversation.com/african-american-gis-of-wwii-fighting-for-democracy-abroad-and-at-home-71780">Many African-Americans</a> hoped a battle against fascism could lead to the end of discrimination in the U.S.</p>
<h2>Songs of resistance</h2>
<p>But Vietnam was different. Unlike the 1940s – when Americans thought the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and Nazi aggression in Europe justified the sacrifices of war – young people in the 1960s were deeply suspicious of the government’s decision to go into Southeast Asia. As the military’s commitment grew and the body counts piled up, many couldn’t understand what they were fighting for. </p>
<p>Songs were able to express these feelings of anger and confusion with lyrics that could be abstract – like Bob Dylan’s “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWwgrjjIMXA">Blowin’ in the Wind</a>” – or explicit, such as Phil Ochs’s “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv1KEF8Uw2k">I Ain’t Marching Anymore</a>.” </p>
<p>Music also filled a void in the country’s media landscape. Hollywood didn’t release films that probed the complex nature of the Vietnam War until years after the fall of Saigon. While television news broadcasting became more critical after the Tet Offensive, the big networks were hesitant to promote entertainers who were vocally opposed to the war. Popular programs would censor artists who planned to perform protest music; for example, in 1967, folk singer Pete Seeger appeared on “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061296/">The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour</a>,” only to discover that his song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dangerously-Funny-Uncensored-Smothers-Brothers/dp/1439101175/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1505258301&sr=8-1&keywords=Dangerously+funny">would be later be cut due to its anti-war message</a>. </p>
<p>Because Vietnam-era musicians seemed to be the only people talking about America’s failure to live up to its democratic principles, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Woodstock-Anniversary-Limited-Revisited-Blu-ray/dp/B00JVFUNBG/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_74_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=3XJGBGCBGVTC4X9M6KET">many young people viewed them</a> as “their own.” </p>
<p>Protest music took several forms. There was The Beatles’ more tepid “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGLGzRXY5Bw">Revolution</a>” and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s everyman anthem “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7qkQewyubs">Fortunate Son</a>.” Groups like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane excoriated the hypocrisy of American values, shunned commercialism and supported anti-imperial movements across the globe. People chanted lyrics while marching, listened during gatherings like the “<a href="https://todayinhistoryblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/human1.jpg">Be-In</a>” in San Fransisco’s Golden Gate Park or simply absorbed the meaning and messages of these songs on their own.</p>
<h2>Forgotten voices</h2>
<p>Much of the power of Vietnam War-era music came from its connection to the civil rights movement. Young men and women in the black freedom struggle had, since the 1950s, broadened their call for freedom to encompass oppressed people around the world. Artists like Nina Simone, Dylan and Seeger had been chronicling the tragedies of southern violence in their music, so pointing out the wrongs of Vietnam came naturally. </p>
<p>But interestingly, Google searches for “Vietnam Era Music” yield only protest music. This disregards the many who found the protesters abhorrent, who undoubtedly listened to apolitical songs or songs that backed the military.</p>
<p>The Americans that President Richard Nixon <a href="https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/forkids/speechesforkids/silentmajority.php">dubbed</a> “the silent majority” – those angered by protesters – constituted a huge swath of the country. They had catapulted Nixon to the presidency and fueled a resurgent conservative political movement. The deep-seated resentment felt by so many Americans – against those on college campuses, those who defied military orders, those who questioned American patriotism – cannot be ignored, and they, too, turned to music that provided solace. Merle Haggard <a href="http://theboot.com/merle-haggard-okie-from-muskogee-lyrics/?trackback=tsmclip">said he wrote his 1969 hit song</a> “Okie From Muskogee” to support U.S. soldiers who “were giving up their freedom and lives to make sure others could stay free.” </p>
<p>“What the hell did these kids have to complain about?” he wondered.</p>
<p>To many, students on college campuses knew nothing about the true meaning of sacrifice. The Spokesmen’s pro-Vietnam ballad “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkGZKOgfOi4">Dawn of Correction</a>” insisted on the “need to keep free people from red domination,” while “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXNsXIxBkqs">The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley</a>,” performed by C Company and Terry Nelson, topped Billboard charts. (The song defended <a href="http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/calley-charged-for-my-lai-massacre">Lt. William Calley</a> who, in 1971, was convicted of slaughtering civilians in the Vietnamese village of Mai Lai.) </p>
<p>The popularity of these songs paints another portrait of the war; politically, the music was much more multifaceted than is often remembered.</p>
<p>Hopes for the era weren’t as simple as the Animals’ “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJVpihgwE18">We Gotta Get Out of This Place</a>,” which promised “there’s a better life for me and you.” Instead, understanding the music of the Vietnam War era requires indulging a variety of perspectives. The overseas conflict cannot be divorced from the culture war back home – a battle over who gets to define the nation’s identity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83702/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Musicians were able to connect with confused, scared and angry Americans – including those who supported the war – in a way actors, broadcasters and writers could not.Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff, Associate Professor of History, University of South CarolinaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/768492017-05-03T01:13:53Z2017-05-03T01:13:53ZWhat was the protest group Students for a Democratic Society? 5 questions answered<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167378/original/file-20170501-17287-1r3i3jm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Students for a Democratic Society was the largest – and arguably most successful – student activist organization in U.S. history.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AVietnamdem.jpg">S.Sgt. Albert R. Simpson, Department of Defense / via Wikimedia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Editor’s note: Recent events have brought student activism back into the spotlight. No student activist organization in U.S. history has matched the scope and influence of <a href="https://search.freedomarchives.org/search.php?view_collection=12">Students for a Democratic Society</a> (SDS), the national movement of the 1960s. We asked Todd Gitlin, former president of SDS (1963-1964), professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, and author of <a href="http://www.randomhousebooks.com/books/60551/">The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage</a> for his perspective on this renowned organization and the state of student protest today.</em></p>
<h2>1. What were the goals of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) when it started?</h2>
<p>SDS wanted <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07393140903492118">participatory democracy</a> – a public committed to making the decisions that affect their own lives, with institutions to make this possible. Its members saw an American citizenry with no influence over the nuclear arms race or, closer to home, authoritarian university administrations.</p>
<p>The organization favored direct action to oppose “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=0x1eAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA148">white supremacy</a>” and “<a href="http://www.sds-1960s.org/sds_wuo/sds_documents/paul_potter.html">imperial war</a>,” and to achieve <a href="http://michiganintheworld.history.lsa.umich.edu/antivietnamwar/files/original/92b384e1787664c748a39cb196c18f84.pdf">civil rights</a> and the <a href="http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt4k4003k7">radical reconstruction of economic life</a> (i.e., the redistribution of money into the hands of African-Americans in order to fight racism). SDS was increasingly suspicious of established authorities and <a href="http://www.sds-1960s.org/Care-Feeding-Power-Structures.pdf">looked askance at corporate power</a>. But there was no single political doctrine; for most of its existence (1962-69), <a href="http://www.randomhousebooks.com/books/60551/">SDS was an amalgam</a> of left-liberal, socialist, anarchist and increasingly Marxist currents and tendencies.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167395/original/file-20170501-17319-adq3mi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167395/original/file-20170501-17319-adq3mi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167395/original/file-20170501-17319-adq3mi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167395/original/file-20170501-17319-adq3mi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167395/original/file-20170501-17319-adq3mi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167395/original/file-20170501-17319-adq3mi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167395/original/file-20170501-17319-adq3mi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Several hundred people affiliated with the SDS race through the Los Angeles Civic Center in a 1968 demonstration against the Vietnam war.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Watchf-AP-A-CA-USA-APHS445390-Vietnam-War-Protest/1c2b4068c1464b41af43a0ea185fed4b/7/0">AP Photo/Harold Filan</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>From 1965 on, it was focused chiefly on <a href="https://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC30_scans/30.sds.calltostudents.marchonwashington.pdf">opposing the Vietnam war</a>. After 1967, SDS became partial to confrontational tactics and increasingly sympathetic to one or another idea of a Marxist-Leninist revolution.</p>
<h2>2. How did SDS grow so quickly, from fewer than 1,000 members in 1962 to as many as <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=zQHMCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT579">100,000</a> in 1969?</h2>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167394/original/file-20170501-17319-ulnvv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167394/original/file-20170501-17319-ulnvv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167394/original/file-20170501-17319-ulnvv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=749&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167394/original/file-20170501-17319-ulnvv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=749&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167394/original/file-20170501-17319-ulnvv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=749&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167394/original/file-20170501-17319-ulnvv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167394/original/file-20170501-17319-ulnvv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167394/original/file-20170501-17319-ulnvv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tom Hayden, president of SDS from 1962 to 1963.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Associated-Press-Domestic-News-California-Unite-/acd9a027dce6da11af9f0014c2589dfb/62/0">AP Photo</a></span>
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<p>The organization was launched with a stirring manifesto, the <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Port_Huron_Statement">Port Huron Statement</a>, and a leadership that was passionate, visionary, energetic, stylish and thoughtful.</p>
<p>Unlike most left-wing radicals and manifestos of the time, the Port Huron Statement was forthright and not riddled with jargon, thus its opening sentence:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>SDS, in language and spirit, spoke to a widely felt need for a <a href="http://www.sds-1960s.org/NewLeftNotes-vol1-no01.pdf">New Left</a> that was free of the dogmas about “class struggle” and a “<a href="https://socialistworker.org/2012/07/20/what-is-a-vanguard-party">vanguard party</a>” that prevailed in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.</p>
<p>Its growth was helped along by a structure that, for many years, was flexible enough to encompass diverse orientations and styles of activism. Its volcanic growth after the 1965 escalation of the Vietnam War was made possible by its combination of zealous idealism and pragmatic activity that made sense to students – protests, demonstrations, sit-ins and marches.</p>
<h2>3. Why did the SDS effectively dissolve in 1969? Were the Weathermen (the militant radical faction of SDS) to blame?</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167375/original/file-20170501-17313-14hbfix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167375/original/file-20170501-17313-14hbfix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167375/original/file-20170501-17313-14hbfix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=829&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167375/original/file-20170501-17313-14hbfix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=829&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167375/original/file-20170501-17313-14hbfix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=829&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167375/original/file-20170501-17313-14hbfix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1042&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167375/original/file-20170501-17313-14hbfix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1042&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167375/original/file-20170501-17313-14hbfix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1042&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Poster from the 1969 Days of Rage demonstrations, organized by the Weathermen faction of SDS.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.sds-1960s.org/sds_wuo/images/sds_bring_the_war_home.jpg">SDS-1960s.org</a></span>
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<p>Under the pressure of the Vietnam War and black militancy in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, SDS’ leadership factions adopted fantastical ideas, believing they were living in a revolutionary moment. The Weathermen were the most ferocious, dogmatic and reckless of the factions. Inspired by <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/1123-the-way-the-wind-blew">Latin American, Southeast Asian and Chinese revolutionaries</a>, but heedless of American realities, they thought that by stoking up violent confrontations, they could “<a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520241190">bring the war home</a>” – force the U.S. government out of Vietnam to deal with a violent domestic revolt.</p>
<p>On <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/bomb-detonates-greenwich-village-1970-article-1.2136142">March 6, 1970</a>, a dynamite bomb they were building in New York City – intended to blow up hundreds of soldiers and their dates at a dance that evening – went off in their own hands, killing three of their own number. The Weather Underground (as the faction now called itself) went on to bomb <a href="https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/weather-underground-bombings">dozens of government and corporate targets</a> over the next few years, but the group was incapable of leading a larger movement: Though there were no further casualties after the 1970 explosion, the vast majority of SDS’ members were put off by the Weatherman violence. As the Vietnam War came to an end, no student radical organization remained.</p>
<h2>4. What is the chief legacy of SDS?</h2>
<p>SDS tried many tactics in its effort to catalyze a national radical movement. It was multi-issue in a time when single-issue movements had proliferated: hence, the SDS slogan “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=RQ6xALay8CQC&pg=PA21">the issues are interrelated</a>.” With community organizing projects, it tried to create an <a href="http://www.sds-1960s.org/Interracial-Movement-Poor.pdf">interracial coalition of the poor</a>; it launched civil disobedience against corporations like the <a href="http://africanactivist.msu.edu/image.php?objectid=32-131-179">Chase Manhattan Bank</a>, which was seen to be supporting the South African apartheid regime; it helped launch the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-682X.00060">most effective antiwar movement in history</a>; it incarnated a generational spirit that was both visionary and practical.</p>
<p>SDS also engendered <a href="http://www.sds-1960s.org/sds_wuo/nln_iwd_1969/images/nln_iwd_1969_04.jpg">second-wave feminism</a>, though sometimes <a href="http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6916/">in a paradoxical fashion</a>. Many female members felt both empowered and thwarted – they gained skills and experience in organizing, but were angered by their second-class status in the organization.</p>
<p>But SDS’s confrontational tendencies from 1967 onward bitterly alienated much of its potential political base. In my view, the group’s romanticism toward the Cuban, Vietnamese, and Chinese revolutions – and its infatuation with the paramilitary Black Panther party – flooded out its common sense and intellectual integrity.</p>
<h2>5. How has campus protest changed since the days of SDS?</h2>
<p>Many changes that SDS campaigned for came to pass. Student life loosened up and became less authoritarian. In the decades since, students have taken on issues that were not raised – or even recognized – 50 years ago: <a href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29032017/divestment-harvard-students-climate-change">climate change</a>, <a href="https://newsone.com/3458645/students-protest-rape-brock-turner-standford-graduation/">sexual violence</a> and <a href="https://www.bu.edu/today/2016/black-lives-matter-protest/">racial subordination</a> through the criminal justice system. On the other hand, campus protest is dominated by single issues again, as it was in the period before SDS. Much of the current issue-politics rests on an assumption that racial, gender or sexual identity automatically dictates the goals of student activism.</p>
<p>I also believe that student protest has become far more modest in its ambitions. It has abandoned extreme revolutionary delusions, but at some expense. It has failed to build a tradition that’s serious about winning power: Students are content to protest rather than work toward building political majorities and trying to win concrete results.</p>
<p>I feel that student protest today often confines itself within the campus and fails to sustain organizing outside. As the right threw itself into electoral politics, student activists largely dismissed the need to compete. As a result, students of the left face the most hostile political environment in modern times.</p>
<p><em>Editor’s note: For analysis of other issues on campus protest, see our entire series on <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/campus-protest-38346">student protest</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/76849/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Todd Gitlin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Student protest has been in the political spotlight since Trump’s election. Todd Gitlin, former president of Students for a Democratic Society, shares his perspective on protest in the 60s and now.Todd Gitlin, Professor of Journalism and Sociology, Columbia UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/713112017-01-20T18:09:19Z2017-01-20T18:09:19ZThe Trump era has begun – how can we make sense of it?<p>Donald Trump is now the 45th president of the United States. </p>
<p>The country he will oversee is, to him, a dark and troubled place. In <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/20/donald-trumps-full-inauguration-speech-transcript-annotated/?utm_term=.410e1e8e4ae6">his first speech as its president</a>, he described a tragedy of “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape”. With a promise to end this “American carnage”, he built up to his signature applause line: “Together, we will make America strong again. We will make America wealthy again. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again. And yes, together we will make America great again.”</p>
<p>As Trump’s election as president in itself <a href="https://theconversation.com/after-poisoning-and-dividing-america-donald-trump-has-won-an-ugly-victory-68493">makes plain</a>, America is indeed undergoing an excruciatingly painful reinvention. We cannot yet know where it will lead, and making sense of it will be no easy task. The last time America was this confused and disturbed, it spawned a whole cultural project dedicated to simply conveying the reality of what was happening. </p>
<p>Reflecting on the 1960 <a href="http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2021078,00.html">televised debates</a> between presidential candidates Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, the novelist Philip Roth <a href="https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/writing-american-fiction/">lamented</a> that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality … The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist … on the TV screen, as a real public image, a political fact, my mind balked at taking [Nixon] in. Whatever else the television debates produced in me, I should like to point out, as a literary curiosity, that they also produced a type of professional envy.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This sense that reality was outrunning the capacities of writers to represent it was not new, but tellingly articulated by Roth as a challenge occasioned by the growth of televisual media and the transformation of politics into spectacle. His comments indicated something profound and shattering: an epochal shift in the “American reality.” Prescient stuff, given today’s laments about a “<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-post-truth-era-of-trump-is-just-what-nietzsche-predicted-69093">post-truth</a>” society.</p>
<h2>Superman comes to the supermarket</h2>
<p>It is not coincidental that Roth was writing at the start of a period of intense social and political unrest in the US. As he pilloried many contemporary American writers for failing to respond to this epochal change, he noted one exception: “There is Norman Mailer. And he is an interesting example, I think, of one in whom our era has provoked such a magnificent disgust that dealing with it in fiction has almost come to seem, for him, beside the point.” </p>
<p>Sure enough, Mailer helped fashion a “<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1972/05/notes-on-the-new-journalism/376276/">new journalism</a>” that could cope with the emerging society of the spectacle in the 1960s. In his 1960 essay on Kennedy’s election campaign, <a href="http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a3858/superman-supermarket/">Superman Comes to the Supermarket</a>, Mailer described the president-to-be as an “existential hero” who could tap into the drives that roil the national unconscious. This reflected Mailer’s very particular vision of American history:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground; there has been the history of politics, which is concrete, factual, practical, and unbelievably dull … and there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153670/original/image-20170120-5254-169fn2r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153670/original/image-20170120-5254-169fn2r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153670/original/image-20170120-5254-169fn2r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153670/original/image-20170120-5254-169fn2r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153670/original/image-20170120-5254-169fn2r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=596&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153670/original/image-20170120-5254-169fn2r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=596&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153670/original/image-20170120-5254-169fn2r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=596&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Style and substance, in balance.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:President_John_F._Kennedy_and_First_Lady_Jacqueline_Kennedy_Arrive_at_Inaugural_Ball.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>In Kennedy, Mailer saw someone who could fuse these historical currents and potentially renew the nation: “Only a hero can capture the secret imagination of a people, and so be good for the vitality of his nation.” To be sure, he recognised the dangers in celebrating a “superman” as leader, but reckoned Kennedy struck the right balance between rational substance and romantic style.</p>
<p>Later, with his hero assassinated in Dallas and the decade descending into protest and chaos, Mailer became a more jaundiced witness, if no less engaged. In <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/04/reviews/mailer-armies.html">The Armies of the Night</a>, his account of the <a href="https://www.usmarshals.gov/history/civilian/1967b.htm">1967 march on the Pentagon</a> by legions of protesters, he argued that the US had entered the “crazy house of history,” reflecting the growing absurdity of events in late 1960s America. Yet he was smitten by the “idea of a revolution which preceded ideology.” </p>
<p>In the carnivalesque figures of the protesters he saw a flicker of existential promise:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>They were close to being assembled from all the intersections between history and the comic books, between legend and television, the Biblical archetypes and the movies … the aesthetic at last was in the politics – the dress ball was going into battle.</p>
</blockquote>
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<span class="caption">The March on the Pentagon, 1967.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Public_Reactions,_The_March_on_the_Pentagon_-_NARA_-_192605.tif">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>This was to be a last hurrah for a counter-cultural politics that foundered on the mediocrity of the American mainstream. The centre held, just. Mailer’s perspective may have been perversely romantic, but this was also its power as a dissenting vision, attuned to “the dream life of the nation.”</p>
<h2>Celebrity comes to the White House</h2>
<p>American reality now seems to be undergoing another seismic shift, again in sync with a cycle of violence and civil unrest. And once again, reality appears to be outrunning American writers as they struggle to explain it, to make it credible. Step forward another Übermensch. Is Trump an existential hero in the mode Mailer described? And if he really is someone “who reveals the character of the country to itself”, what does he reveal about the character of the US today? </p>
<p>Trump has channelled the discontents of the nation, and tapped into angers and resentments that are more than political. He dares to say what should not be said, shocking the political and cultural elites, speaking to and for the “real Americans” in their language, giving voice to their inarticulate anger and thwarted dreams. He eschews the discourse of decency and decorum, bragging that he has “<a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/03/politics/donald-trump-small-hands-marco-rubio/">no problem</a>” with the size of his penis.</p>
<p>Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again” is in some part an articulation and legitimisation of what has been disavowed in the making of a liberal democracy. He promises national renewal, but not the progressive, forward-looking renewal promised by Kennedy. Instead, he offers a regressive, <a href="https://theconversation.com/donald-trumps-slogan-betrays-a-renewed-political-fixation-on-the-past-66470">backward-looking</a> nationalism.</p>
<p>For Mailer, Kennedy’s heroism was inherent in his ability to balance glamorous style with political substance. Trump displays no such ability – he displays an excess of style and a deficit of substance. His heroism, such as it is, marks a new stage in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/rock-star-tv-icon-president-but-what-is-donald-trump-67978">aestheticisation of politics</a>, in which entertainment and political life have converged as never before.</p>
<p>Trump’s celebrity is the lifeblood of his appeal. He astutely understands his currency as a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2016/apr/22/trump-im-gonna-be-so-presidential-that-you-people-will-be-so-bored-video">performer</a> – “I will be so presidential”, he promised – and as a <a href="http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterjreilly/2015/12/02/what-art-of-the-deal-tells-us-about-donald-trump-and-his-tax-views/&refURL=https://www.google.ie/&referrer=https://www.google.ie/">producer</a> – “I play to people’s fantasies … I call it truthful hyperbole”.</p>
<p>Trump is the superman unleashed as celebrity phantasm, a figure of libidinal enjoyment who leeringly embodies the obscene underside of liberal democracy. And as was his campaign, so his presidency will be shadowed by neo-fascist subtexts and authoritarian tendencies. Witness his convictions that “at the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America”, and that “we all bleed the same red blood of patriots”. </p>
<p>As in the 1960s, today’s cultural and political turmoil is playing out in struggles over identity, representation and recognition – but in a more profound sense, the American reality itself has changed. This is not identity politics as we knew it; this is the politics of “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/191795?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">wounded attachments</a>”, resentment and grievance, the politics of all-or-nothing.</p>
<p>Trump’s gift for seizing attention and peddling fantasy plugs him into the zeitgeist and bemuses those who believe lies should have consequences. For many liberal, educated Americans, Trump’s political ascension is a confusing assault on their sense of reality. For writers and intellectuals it is an affront to their abilities, à la Roth, to make credible the new American reality. </p>
<p>Maybe this new reality will find or produce its own Mailer. I hope whoever it is shares that writer’s “magnificent disgust.” Even as Trump was driven to his inauguration, legions of protesters gathered in the city, across the US, and beyond. Perhaps new armies of the night are stirring.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/71311/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Liam Kennedy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Donald Trump will preside over a new American reality as it takes shape. How can we understand it?Liam Kennedy, Professor of American Studies, University College DublinLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/709172017-01-12T13:19:23Z2017-01-12T13:19:23ZMusic has the power to rock the state, but youth movements will find the state always bites back<p>Among records recently released to the National Archives is a file from the 1980s entitled “<a href="https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2016/12/31/policing-acid-house-parties-in-1989-what-the-new-thatcher-government-papers-reveal/">Acid house parties</a>” which details the government’s disquiet over the growing phenomenon of raves, the large, open-air dance events in which thousands of young people, guided by organisers using new technologies such as pagers and mobile phones, descended upon fields to party. </p>
<p>The response was a series of laws imposing strict conditions and harsh penalties, with the <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/part/V/crossheading/powers-in-relation-to-raves">Criminal Justice Act 1994</a> infamously outlawing music “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/jul/21/criminal-justice-bill-protests">characterised by a series of repetitive beats</a>”. While many at the time may have felt immediate action was required to prevent the collapse of civilisation as we knew it, in fact this was merely the latest in a long line of moral panics over popular music through the 20th century. </p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.jerryjazzmusician.com/2014/01/unspeakable-jazz-must-go-strong-opinions-impact-jazz-american-culture-1921/">cultural mixing pot of jazz</a>, and even traditional music and ballads or bawdy songs in music halls had at some point caused anxiety among the powers that be. But it was during the rock’n’roll era that this process of music putting the fear into the state was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xgx4k83zzc">turned up to 11</a>.</p>
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<h2>Slash the seats</h2>
<p>Even before the arrival of Elvis Presley’s gyrating pelvis, fears about rock’n’roll were brewing from the transgressive collision of Afro-American rhythm and blues, white youths, and sex – all during the fraught racial politics of 1950s America. Crossing cultural boundaries and national borders, rock’n’roll became a global phenomenon, with fears for the youth of the day gripping almost every nation. The United Nations even <a href="https://www.unodc.org/congress/en/previous/previous-02.html">convened a special conference</a> in London in 1960 to discuss the problem of juvenile delinquency.</p>
<p>In Britain, the arrival of rock’n’roll in 1955 collided with a pre-existing panic over the Teddy Boy youth movement, sparked by a notorious gang-related murder in Clapham in 1953. The Teds embraced the new music and the press was filled with reports of Teds slashing cinema seats while dancing to Bill Haley and the Comets’ “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgdufzXvjqw">Rock Around the Clock</a>” from the closing credits of Blackboard Jungle – an American movie about, ironically, juvenile delinquents.</p>
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<p>But rock’n’roll cleaned up – Elvis joined the army, and squeaky clean crooners and apostate rockers like Cliff Richard took the edge off pop music. The next moral panic came with the <a href="http://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1125&context=libraries_facpub">British Beat boom</a> in 1964, when <a href="http://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_real_quadrophenia_mods_vs._rockers_fight_on_the_beaches">running battles broke out between mods and rockers</a> in seaside towns. Rockers were the descendants of the Teds, who had abandoned Edwardian frock coats for leather jackets. The mods were associated with bands like The Who, The Yardbirds and the Small Faces, with a sharp dress sense favouring suits, a clear collective identity, and an often undeserved reputation for misbehaviour. </p>
<p>The out-of-touch Conservative government under Alec Douglas-Home passed in 1964 The Malicious Damages Act and The Misuse of Drugs Act, banning the amphetamines that it was claimed fuelled the mod scene. This was the first time an explicit association was made between narcotics and pop music subcultures. From now on, the two would regularly be grouped together. </p>
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<h2>Busted</h2>
<p>Fifty years ago this year, <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/may/10/newsid_2522000/2522735.stm">police raided the home</a> of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards and arrested him, singer Mick Jagger and gallery owner Robert “Groovy Bob” Fraser. The trial was a global media event, not least for the behaviour of the judge at the trial who constantly chided and condemned the “petty morals” of the band before jailing them.</p>
<p>The response to the convictions was extraordinary. As well as the expected vocal protests of Rolling Stones fans, the editor of The Times – an “establishment” newspaper – published an incendiary editorial, <a href="https://www.iorr.org/talk/read.php?1,1755802,1756208">Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?</a>, attacking the judge for seeking to make examples of the two bandmates. Ultimately Jagger and Richards successfully appealed against their sentences, although clearing his name was a Pyrrhic victory for Richards, in the light of his subsequent life dogged by heroin addiction and many brushes with the law. </p>
<p>A cascade of music celebrity raids followed, and by 1967 a backlash had emerged against youth counter-cultures on both sides of the Atlantic, with the likes of <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/763998.stm">Mary Whitehouse campaigning for a return to “traditional values”</a>. Medical and psychiatric professionals added their voices to those of the reactionaries, as there were legitimate concerns about the proliferation of drugs: 1967 was the first “<a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/07/lsd-drugs-summer-of-love-sixties">Summer of Love</a>”, when the music and art of the era was laced with LSD. Although not all favoured prohibition there was clear evidence of harm that had to be addressed.</p>
<p>Questions linger over the establishment’s targeting of groups such as the Beatles and the Stones, and others such as Jimi Hendrix. The press almost certainly tipped off the police over drug use at Richards’ home, and there is evidence of <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1323236/The-Acid-King-confesses-Rolling-Stones-drug-bust-set-MI5-FBI.html">police collusion with the media</a>. And the establishment itself was not innocent: the Metropolitan Police’s drugs squad later had to be gutted of corrupt policemen after it was discovered that <a href="https://cathyfox.wordpress.com/2016/02/05/the-fall-of-scotland-yard/">senior officers had committed perjury</a> to defend a known drugs dealer. Were pop stars targeted to deflect attention from serious criminals who had the police in their back pocket?</p>
<h2>The moral minority</h2>
<p>Sometimes the problem was not drugs but obscenity. Even if it seems absurd today, The Beatles song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19sAewJH22I">I am the Walrus</a> was struck from BBC playlists due to the lyric: “Boy you have been a naughty girl and let your knickers down”, while The Sex Pistols were forced to argue the precise meaning of the word “<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/vb8c/">bollocks</a>” in court. Elsewhere, anarcho-punks The Anti-Nowhere League and Crass also <a href="http://www.nme.com/photos/the-songs-they-tried-to-ban-1413829">found themselves in the dock for the use of obscene language</a>. </p>
<p>The most notorious attacks on popular music on grounds of obscenity was undoubtedly the <a href="http://europe.newsweek.com/oral-history-tipper-gores-war-explicit-rock-lyrics-dee-snider-333304?rm=eu">Parents Music Resource Center</a> in the US during the 1980s, who demanded warnings on record sleeves alerting parents to explicit lyrical content. Their list of what they regarded as the most egregious examples of obscenity, known as the “<a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/pmrcs-filthy-15-where-are-they-now-20150917">filthy fifteen</a>”, contains both heavy rockers and comparatively tame pop acts.</p>
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<p>The result of a congressional enquiry was an agreement by the Recording Industry Association of America and manufacturers to add the now iconic “Parental Discretion Advised” sticker on certain records. Not only did this often act as an incentive to adolescent purchasers rather than a warning, but there is significant evidence that the industry agreed not as a sop to the moral lobby but <a href="http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1039&context=younghistorians">in return for a levy on blank cassette tapes</a>, ensuring the industry could profit from the practice of home taping records. </p>
<h2>Folk devils</h2>
<p>Sometimes it was not the musicians but their fans that worried the authorities. The skinhead, punk, rasta and raver scenes have all been viewed as, <a href="http://www.underground-england.co.uk/news/mods-v-rockers-traditional-english-seaside-entertainment-2/">in the words of the sociologist Stanley Cohen</a>, “<a href="https://infodocks.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/stanley_cohen_folk_devils_and_moral_panics.pdf">folk devils</a>”: those who seemed to champion disorder. Authorities struggled with the question of whether bands are responsible for the actions of their fans. </p>
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<p>Two famous cases from the 1980s saw heavy metal legends Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest blamed for the suicides of several fans. It was claimed that Judas Priest had inserted a subliminal message into the track <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqAPVB4u9Zs">Better you than me</a>, and that Ozzy’s track <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UoPYv0Kq-0">Suicide solution</a> was an incitement to suicide – something Osbourne denied. Both court cases failed, but raised important questions about the relationship between fans and bands. Even after the end of the conservative-dominated 1980s, the 1997 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6moDcEkSnY">blamed on Marilyn Manson’s music</a> in much the same way.</p>
<p>The last decades of the 20th century were the high tide of moral panics over popular music, with almost every development in musical subcultures generating unease and outright hostility from the authorities, morality campaigners, and opportunistic newspapers editors looking for the next trend to decry and sensationalise. </p>
<p>In recent years the potential for music to shock or generate controversy seems to have lessened. Even members of boyband <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2637722/ONE-DIRECTION-EXCLUSIVE-Joint-lit-Happy-days-Watch-Zayn-Malik-Louis-Tomlinson-smoke-roll-cigarette-joke-marijuana-way-tour-concert.html">One Direction escaped largely unscathed</a> from tabloid exposure about recreational drug use, which a generation earlier had <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/friday_review/story/0,3605,461173,00.html">ended the careers of the likes of East 17</a>. </p>
<p>Certainly, there is greater toleration or acceptance of the harder edges of musical cultures. But the passing of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-did-the-mind-boggling-new-drugs-bill-make-it-through-parliament-53612">Psychoactive Substances Act 2016</a> shows that anxieties about youth culture and behaviour are still part of the political landscape. And it takes only a fraught atmosphere, the search for a scapegoat, and ill-judged responses from popstars to turn a headline into the next moral panic.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70917/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Clifford Williamson works for Bath Spa University.</span></em></p>The 20th century saw battle lines drawn between music-driven youth movements and the state like none before.Clifford Williamson, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary British and American History, Bath Spa UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/689612017-01-09T01:32:56Z2017-01-09T01:32:56ZChicago 1969: When Black Panthers aligned with Confederate-flag-wielding, working-class whites<p><em>Editor’s note: This article was published on Jan. 8, 2017.</em></p>
<p>In the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump won the white vote across all demographics except for college-educated white women. He did especially well among working class white voters: <a href="http://college.usatoday.com/2016/11/09/how-we-voted-by-age-education-race-and-sexual-orientation/">67 percent of whites without a college degree voted for him</a>. </p>
<p>Some post-election analysis marveled at how the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-the-white-working-class-votes-against-itself/2016/12/22/3aa65c04-c88b-11e6-8bee-54e800ef2a63_story.html">white working class could vote against its own interests</a> by supporting a billionaire businessman who is likely to support policies that cut taxes for the rich and weaken the country’s social safety net. Since the New Deal, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/28/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-voters-republicans-democrats">the Democratic Party has been seen as the party of working people</a>, while Republicans were considered the party of the elites. Donald Trump was able to flip this narrative to his advantage. Election 2016 balkanized issues and made it seem impossible to work on racism, sexism, poverty and economic issues all at once. A core question moving forward for social justice advocates and the Democratic Party <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/how-democrats-rebuild-2016-214533">is how they can move beyond identity politics and attract working-class voters of all races</a>, building stronger coalitions among disparate groups. </p>
<p>One place to look for inspiration and instruction might be 1960s social movements that understood the power of alliances across identities and issues. During this period, a radical coalition formed that might seem impossible today: A group of migrant southerners and working-class white activists called the Young Patriots joined forces with the Black Panthers in Chicago to fight systemic class oppression. </p>
<p>So how did this alliance form? And how can its lessons be applied to today’s political moment?</p>
<h2>An unlikely alliance</h2>
<p>In the post-civil rights era, a militant Black Power movement emerged, with the Black Panther Party for Self Defense <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/27-important-facts-everyone-should-know-about-the-black-panthers_us_56c4d853e4b08ffac1276462">forming in 1966</a>. Inspired by Malcolm X and other international black thought leaders, the group embraced armed struggle as a potential tool against organized racial oppression – a radical break from the philosophy of nonviolent protest. A large faction of the group developed in Chicago, where one of the party leaders was a young man named <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/black-panther-fred-hampton_us_55e8929ce4b0aec9f3569514">Fred Hampton</a>. </p>
<p>Chicago in the 1960s was a brutal place for poor people. Black, brown and white people all dealt with poverty, unemployment, police violence, substandard housing, inadequate schools and a lack of social services. Ethnic and racial groups each <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/ct-young-patriots-organization-hideout-jon-langford-ent-0209-20160208-column.html">created their own social service and activist networks</a> to combat every kind of oppression. </p>
<p>One was the Young Patriot Organization (YPO), which was based in <a href="http://www.redneckrevolt.org/single-post/2016/09/24/Revolutionary-Hillbilly-An-Interview-with-Hy-Thurman-of-the-Young-Patriots-Organization">Hillbilly Harlem</a>, an uptown neighborhood of Chicago populated by displaced white southerners. Many YPO members were racist, and they flaunted controversial symbols associated with southern pride, such as the Confederate flag. But like blacks and Latinos, the white Young Patriots and their families experienced discrimination in Chicago. In their case, it was because they were poor and from the South.</p>
<p>In his short time as a Black Panther leader, Fred Hampton wanted to advance the group’s goals by forming a “Rainbow Coalition” of working class and poor people of all races. </p>
<p>Former members of the Chicago Panthers and YPO tell different versions of the same story of how the groups connected: Each attended the other’s organizing meetings and decided to work together on their common issues. Over time, the Black Panthers learned to tolerate Confederate flags as intransigent signs for rebellion. Their only stipulation was that the white Young Patriots denounce racism.</p>
<p>Eventually, Young Patriots rejected their deeply embedded ideas of white supremacy – <a href="http://www.redneckrevolt.org/single-post/2016/09/24/Revolutionary-Hillbilly-An-Interview-with-Hy-Thurman-of-the-Young-Patriots-Organization">and even the Confederate flag</a> – as they realized how much they had in common with the Black Panthers and Latino Young Lords. </p>
<p>Assumed to be natural enemies, these groups united in their calls for economic justice. In the Aug. 9, 1969 issue of The Black Panther newspaper, the party’s chief of staff, David Hilliard, <a href="https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/sds-bpp-2.htm">admiringly called the Young Patriots</a> “the only revolutionaries we respect that ever came out of the mother country.” Recalling his work with the YPO, former Black Panther Bobby Lee <a href="http://www.redneckrevolt.org/single-post/2009/12/05/YOUNG-PATRIOTS-AND-PANTHERS-A-STORY-OF-WHITE-ANTIRACISM">explained</a> that “The Rainbow Coalition was just a code word for class struggle.”</p>
<p>In the end, the Illinois Panthers <a href="http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/the-original-rainbow-coalition-an-example-of-universal-identity-politics">brought together various elements</a> of the black community, Confederate flag-waving southern white migrants (Young Patriots), Puerto Ricans (Young Lords), poor white ethnic groups (Rising Up Angry, JOIN Community Union, and the Intercommunal Survival Committee), students and the women’s movement. The disparate groups under the coalition’s umbrella pooled resources and shared strategies for providing community services and aid that the government and private sector would not. <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/ct-young-patriots-organization-hideout-jon-langford-ent-0209-20160208-column.html">Initiatives included</a> health clinics, feeding homeless and hungry people, and legal advice for those dealing with unethical landlords and police brutality. </p>
<h2>In 2016, a stark racial divide is exposed</h2>
<p>Almost 50 years after the original Rainbow Coalition, the U.S. electorate remains divided along racial lines. Even though Donald Trump <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/19/politics/donald-trump-african-american-voters/">asked black Americans</a>, “What do you have to lose?” by voting for him and abandoning the Democratic Party, it didn’t work: Only 8 percent of black voters (and 28 percent of Latino and 27 percent of Asian voters) <a href="http://www.cnn.com/election/results/exit-polls">cast ballots for Trump</a>. Blacks and Latinos are well-represented in the working class, and people of color <a href="http://www.epi.org/publication/the-changing-demographics-of-americas-working-class/">will become the majority in the working class in 2032</a>. </p>
<p>Much 2016 post-election attention has focused on <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/upshot/why-trump-won-working-class-whites.html?_r=0">working-class white voters</a>, who have been characterized as “forgotten” and “angry” for being left out of the economic recovery. Yet African-Americans have been far worse off; since the 2007 recession, the unemployment rate of African-Americans is <a href="http://myjournalcourier.com/news/103764/editorial-below-surface-lies-a-disparity-in-joblessness">nearly double that of Hispanics and more than twice that of whites</a>.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton was the candidate who collected the most diverse voter base – the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia looked like the Rainbow Coalition redux – and she was expected to win the election. However, that visual hid racism’s <a href="http://billmoyers.com/story/2016-election-exposed-deep-seated-racism-go/">residual and deeply entrenched place in U.S. society</a>. One of the lessons of the 2016 election is that the country is not as advanced in its work on ending racism and discrimination as most would like to believe. Donald Trump did not have to do much to capitalize on this. </p>
<p>The Rainbow Coalition members in 1960s Chicago understood how difficult it is to build coalitions across identities. Former Black Panther Bobby Lee <a href="http://www.redneckrevolt.org/single-post/2009/12/05/YOUNG-PATRIOTS-AND-PANTHERS-A-STORY-OF-WHITE-ANTIRACISM">recalled working with the Young Patriots</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“It wasn’t easy to build an alliance. I advised them on how to set up ‘serve the people’ programs – free breakfasts, people’s health clinics, all that. I had to run with those cats, break bread with them, hang out at the pool hall. I had to lay down on their couch, in their neighborhood. Then I had to invite them into mine. That was how the Rainbow Coalition was built, real slow.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The coalition, bringing together seemingly polar opposite Black Panthers and Young Patriots, showed that real interactions allow people to understand that their struggles are not essentially different. Donald Trump probably was sincere when he invited African-Americans to join his movement. He simply didn’t realize that a glib invitation would not produce the same results as real coalition-building over a period of time. </p>
<p>The lesson to learn from studying 1960s social movements is that lasting change toward economic and racial justice will probably be built brick by brick, person to person and “real slow.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/68961/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Colette Gaiter does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In this article from 2017, a look at the coordination of strategy between white and Black activists to fight systemic class oppression.Colette Gaiter, Professor, Department of Africana Studies and Department of Art & Design, University of DelawareLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.