Bill Kirkpatrick: It Beats Rocks and Tear Gas (p. 2)
Winter of Discontent: The American "Crisis of Innocence" in the early 1970s
Streaking emerged as a national media event at an interesting juncture in political and collegiate history. Both the nation and the university were undergoing historical transformations; both were widely perceived to be in crisis. The university's turmoil was in many ways the nation's turmoil, with countless observers expressing a sense of lost "innocence" as they came to terms with the repercussions of the 1960s and early 1970s. At the most basic level, there was an all-too-real crisis of innocence in the nation's leadership. But the trouble ran deeper, undermining cherished myths of America as a youthful, good, and innocent nation.
To the extent that one can talk about a popular mood, the United States in early 1974 was an unsettled and gloomy nation. As Time described the zeitgeist in January 1974, "The year 1973 probably cost Americans more in terms of their self-image than any year in recent memory” (“American Notes” 8). The U.S. had just lost a major war, a defeat for which many Americans held campus activists responsible. Major social ruptures dominated popular discourse, including the gender divisions addressed by the Equal Rights Amendment. An oil crisis shook the economy, Spiro Agnew resigned, and the dimensions of Watergate became clearer (“Of Crisis” 11-12). And 1974 wasn't looking any better, opening to strikes, floods, and a spate of political kidnappings, most notably that of Patty Hearst. Commentators saw a nation driven "half mad with hunger for America the beautiful, the brave, the innocent" (Baker 43). This crisis was a common theme on both right and left, with many Americans longing for "an Age of Innocence, a time before the war, on the other side of the Generational Fault" (qtd. in Woods 356).
As the invocation of the "Generational Fault" implies, this putative loss of innocence was articulated to a perceived division between older and younger Americans. As several historians have noted, the college campus was therefore broadly implicated in this national anxiety as the key institutional framework within which the social changes of the 1960s were generated and consolidated. Indeed, one senses the almost palpable relief in the mainstream press that "militant" student activism of the 1960s might be on the decline in the 1970s as students rediscovered the "half-forgotten joys" of the 1950s. A typical reaction came from the president of Columbia, who hoped for a "nostalgic rediscovery" of the "golden optimism" of the 1950s (qtd. in Weissman 781). A spate of articles heralded this shift with headlines like "The Less Militant Campus" or "The Collapse of Activism," and provided various explanations: Activists were burned out; they had entered "the system"; they had nothing left to fight for, etc. (Weissmann 781-785). Counterintuitively, most of these articles located the source of change within students themselves rather than in social conditions, indicating an eagerness not just to explain a drop in activism but actually to redefine the nation's youth as a less threatening species. For example, the New York Times described students as "more relaxed and tolerant today than two or three years ago, less tense, less hysterical and less given to violent protest…less uptight…more willing to listen” (Sulzberger 29). At stake in this debate was less the state of student activism (which of course continued and still occasionally turned violent) than a particular understanding of students as social agents and the university as a social and political space: What kinds of politics would be practiced there and by what kinds of youth? Pessimists called the "new mood" cynical and apathetic; optimists called it "better organized and … less contaminated by the excesses of counter-culture 'spontaneity'" (Weissman 781). But all of these discourses had a common theme: by marginalizing "militant" tactics, they worked to reconfigure the university as a place where protest might occur, but it would ideally be less confrontational, less threatening, and less destructive than the upheavals of the years immediately before. The result was substantial discursive pressure to contain campus protest within less destabilizing parameters. As one administrator stated it, "There is some hope that those committed to social change will no longer use the streets as part of social change” (qtd. in Loniello 4).
This consensus that protest should be "less hysterical" (a notably gendered term) is significant, given that the focus of student activism had shifted from anti-war protests to the push for increased rights for women and people of color (Sulzberger 29). The war, which many young males had a personal interest in opposing, was effectively over, but political and demographic shifts were changing the character of the American university. Although college enrollment had skyrocketed in the 1960s, from 3.8 million in 1960 to 9.7 million in 1974, new enrollment in four-year colleges had dipped dramatically in 1972, due to a breather in the baby boom and fewer men attending for the deferment. Women increased their presence on campuses, doubling enrollment since 1966 and comprising nearly half the student body in 1974; by 1978, they would outnumber men. Furthermore, thanks in part to a growing black middle class, as well as the Civil Rights Act and affirmative action, African-Americans were attending college in unprecedented numbers, with black enrollment doubling between 1970 and 1976 (“College Enrollment” A8). In addition to demographics, this shift was felt in a variety of symbolically important ways. Women's Studies and African-American Studies programs were opening around the country, while programs like Harvard's Afro-American Cultural Center sought to increase opportunities for people of color. Perhaps even more important from the point of view of middle-class white male students long accustomed to privileged status, more schools were going coed, while all-male clubs and fraternities were being forced to admit women as well (“Baa” 10, Hines). Such innovations met with significant resistance. For example, Joan Roberts, founder of the Women's Studies program at Wisconsin, became a cause célèbre when she was denied tenure by an all-male committee; around the same time, that university's Afro Center was unceremoniously shuttered in a round of budget cuts (“Denial” 2, Weissman 784). But defenders of the white male campus (and curriculum) were clearly losing ground. Major legislation like Title IX was applying significant pressure on universities, allowing blacks and women to use the legal system to change a variety of practices and decisions. Equality activists also proved adept at more confrontational tactics. For example, Joan Roberts' supporters barricaded the members of her tenure committee in a room and forced them to watch a guerilla-theater skit; when the committee chair tried to escape through a side window, he was physically attacked and had his face smeared with lipstick ("Denial" 2). In the face of such growing assertiveness, critics such as John Simon began to grumble about the "imbecile democratization of higher education," while Columbia professor Charles Frankel complained that affirmative action for women and minorities undermined the meritocracy of the university (qtd. in Scully 6). One conservative philosophy professor, Sidney Hook, warned darkly that agitation for changes to the curriculum might plunge American campuses right back into the turmoil of the late 1960s: "Signs are multiplying that if direct threats to academic freedom from radical students are dwindling, they are gathering force once again from certain groups among faculties" (qtd. in Scully 6). The widely anticipated nostalgic rediscovery of the half-forgotten joys of the 1950s depended, it appeared, on keeping "certain groups" in check.
The important point is that the campus politics that were being contained in the spring of 1974 were precisely the ones that most threatened to consolidate and advance the gains of the previous decade in terms of opportunities for women and people of color. While many Americans were longing for the Age of Innocence of the (white, patriarchal) 1950s, the university continued to lead the way in altering the gendered and racialized relations of power on campus and in American society at large. And it was at precisely this socio-historical juncture that young white men began stripping off their clothes and running in public.
Note:
This paper is provided under a Creative Commons for-attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license. For all other uses, contact the author at mwkirkpa@gmail.com. The article will be appearing in the Journal of Popular Culture in 2008.
Please cite as:
Kirkpatrick, Bill. "'It Beats Rocks and Tear Gas': Streaking and Cultural Politics in the Post-Vietnam Era." Journal of Popular Culture (forthcoming, 2008).
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