Interview with Dr. Kevin Boyle

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Kevin Boyle
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: Lynn Bijou
Date of interview: 22 June 2022
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(Start of Interview)

KB: 00:00
My neighborhood, grade school and high school. And then for undergraduate, I went to the University of Detroit, where I graduated in 1982. So I was there in the late (19)70s and early (19)80s. And then went to graduate school in, at the University of Michigan, where I completed my PhD in 1990. And I would love to have a really exciting story about why I became a historian, but I do not. I really, always gravitated, even in high school to that. I enjoyed most history classes. And when I got to college, I thought that I was going to be, go to law school, I have an older brother, who was going to law school, so I thought that I should do that. And then, I had the wonderful experience of going to a place that was small, and where people, the faculty knew you. And I remember so distinctly a faculty member taking me aside at one point and said, "Have you ever thought about graduate school," and it was like light bulbs going off, you know that someone would think I could do something like that, and have that sort of life that I saw that these faculty members had that seemed wonderful to me, you got to read books, you got to write, you got to teach classes. And so by, say, my junior year of college, I thought, that is the path I would pursue. I had no idea what that meant. My parents were high school graduates, but they had not gone to college. And, I had no idea what that meant. But, it sounded like a very good life. And that is what I did.

SM: 01:48
Now, where have you taught over the years?

KB: 01:52
I, my first job out of graduate school was at the University of Toledo, which was part of the Ohio University System, the public at bio system. And I taught there for three years. But then I moved to UMass [University of Massachusetts] Amherst, which I loved. I taught there for eight years, then, I just sound like I cannot keep a job. Then, I moved to Ohio State where I taught for 11 years. And then in 2013, came to Northwestern.

SM: 02:23
Those are some great schools that you taught at, of course. I went to one of myself, Ohio State. [crosstalk] I was, I went to higher education and student personnel work. So, it kind of set me on my way, for a career in higher education. The book itself, that you, why did you write, "The Shattering?"

KB: 02:47
For a number of reasons, my first- my dissertation and my first book, a lot of it dealt with the 1960s. So, this was an era that I had been immersed in for a very long time. I was at Ohio State, I taught a course on the 1960s, which was one of my favorite things to teach. And I really felt as if, in teaching that course, I felt as if there were some wonderful overviews of the 1960s, books that tried to do, or kind of sweep up the 1960s. But none of them really worked for me. So when I taught that course, I would never had a textbook that I used, for a variety of reasons, there were wonderful books that just were not right for me. And I felt that, I would like to give a shot of writing the sort of book that I would have liked to have seen available, to kind of take that I wanted to take on it. And that is, was the origin of "The Shattering."

SM: 03:46
When you look at that period, 1960s and 1970s, (19)75, what, not just of your book, but what is it about that period that fascinates you, [crosstalk] that, sparks your interest that your, your antenna goes up?

KB: 04:03
I think there is a number of things. And this, actually will tie back one of the main things, will tie back to, growing up in Detroit in the 1960s and 1970s. I was first drawn to the (19)60s as, because of the, really profound moment of racial change. And I think that, that experience is so deeply ingrained in anyone who lived in Detroit, which was such a center of racial conflict and racial tension in that period. That was, so that was kind of the origin point, that here is a period where in all sorts of complicated ways the United States confronted its duty of division. Now it did not solve that division, [chuckles] but it did confront it in multiple ways. And that is, I think, one of the most important stories of the American experience, not just the 1960s, but the American experience. And then, it expanded out from there to the other complex of issues that I think are so decisively important in that period, really dramatic impact of Vietnam War in multiple ways, and the intimate experience of the Vietnam War. The, what I do in the book, that really dramatic expansion, that dramatic confrontation over the government's role in the public role in the regulation of sexuality. But other issues as well, that did not make it into the book, because I did not want to have the book sprawl out in so many directions that it kind of lost the sense of depth and focus. Here is a period for the United States, it embraces the challenge or is confronted with a challenge, I think, is a better way of putting it, of its fundamental promise, its fundamental promise of equality, its fundamental promise of opportunity. It is here that those issues come bursting to the forefront. And I really am, I have literally been drawn to the ways in which that confrontation plays out, and some mixed results of that constitution. I think that is what makes the (19)60s so fundamentally important, and the fact that we are living with those issues in a really direct way to this day.

SM: 04:20
Yeah, I agree. What you do in your book in the area of civil rights and issues dealing with African Americans is, goes way back, and you do a great job of connecting the dots, I always call them, I was a history major too. And connecting the dots between this period, and this period, and this period. And, you know, talking about, you know, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, that there were people that were fighting for equality and justice, and, and there was white supremacy and that whole thing, but what is interesting when you talk about that era of the 1950s, that we always talk, as many people talk about is the age of innocence. It was not so innocent, because-

KB: 06:40
Oh my god, no. [chuckles]

SM: 06:47
-because African Americans were already activists and trying, and you know, and you talked about Little Rock, you know, you talk about what happened at Montgomery bus boycott? Could you talk a little bit about that, the perception that many Americans have, before he talked about the (19)60s, that (19)50s, which was so important for the (19)60s?

KB: 07:50
Yeah, I think to me, there is kind of two really key points that you are really hitting on both of them. One is that, one of the challenges of writing a 1960s book now is that there is this very imposing body of literature that has extended the periodization of movements like the civil rights movement, that movement does not start in Montgomery in 1955. It does not start with Brown v Board of Education, in 1954. It has got this long history, that the Civil Rights Movement has of the (19)50s and (19)60s has to be embedded. That is one of the challenges of writing the book is you got to give people that backstory, because I think that is the story, that there is a continuity, not a break. But then to your more immediate point, 1950s has this kind of, it has, it has been wrapped in this kind of power of nostalgia, it is kind of like you said, Age of Innocence, and Age and, of Complacency. And that is nowhere near the complexity of that, of those years, there is a kind of political coalition that is formed, that takes form in the 1950s, that Dwight Eisenhower is really central inbuilt. It is a political coalition that plays to the benefit of a large swath of Americans, to middle class Americans, to the upper end of the working-class Americans, which is overwhelmingly white, to people in suburban America, but it is a political coalition, and its aim is to provide for those people. And it does that really effectively, and that is for millions and millions of people. It is really important. But there is also this huge number of people, and African Americans obviously are kind of the key group who are shut out of that system. But that system is set up in a way to exclude them, and they are demanding entry into that system. That happened throughout the 1950s, some of them, Little Rock is a perfect example of that. It is one of the most explosive moments of civil rights period, because it is a fundamental constitutional crisis. That is not simply the confrontation out on the street in front of Little Rock High School, though, of course centralized. So of course, that is one key part of it. But it is also a fundamental constitutional crisis. This is about the right of a governor to defy through the National Guard, through the force of the military, constitutional law. And that is 1950 suffrage. The culture front, there is fundamental issues going on, in generations in American culture in the 1950s. So, the idea that somehow America was an innocent place that suddenly lost its innocence in the 1960s, as the [inaudible] read it, of American history, Americans love the idea that we were innocent people. We do it all the time, something dramatic happens in the United States, the first thing people say is, "Ah, we were innocent before September 11. You know, we were innocent, before John Kennedy was assassinated. We were innocent before this, and that," it is a cliché, it is a trope.

SM: 11:26
And what is interesting as a little boy, when I was very young, I was sitting in the T.V. room, and my mom was working in the kitchen, and McCarthy was on, it was the McCarthy hearings. And so I am, I am a little, I am a little boy in 1950. I did not quite understand it. But I did not like him. I did not like that voice. I did not like that man. And then, of course, as I start finding out, my parents talked about him too. You know that is, that is not an innocent period. That is certainly not an innocent period. And certainly the Cold War, the whole concept of Russia, and the nuclear bomb. That is not an innocent period. So, there is a lot-

KB: 12:02
No, definitely.

SM: 12:03
-going on leading into the (19)60s. So, for sure.

KB: 12:05
Yeah, that is a great example. I wish I had thought of it, a terrific example.

SM: 12:11
When, I have a question here, too, regarding your, the knowledge of the (19)50s, (19)60s, and (19)70s, and looking back and forward, as a historian, this is just your technique, and writing is so good. You go back to periods, and then you, you know, in the area of the Vietnam War, or foreign policy, in the area of civil rights, in the area how government overseas, or sexuality. Did when, when you saw that picture in that book-

KB: 12:44
[laughter]

SM: 12:45
-of the, Cahills were you thinking all of this at the very beginning? Or were you just fascinated by that picture? And by the way, I have that book. [laughter]

KB: 12:56
No, I had, I was just fascinated by the picture, there was something about that photo, that, and I cannot even tell you what it was that really hooked me. When I, you have the book, you know that the caption does not even tell you, it says, "Patriotic American on the west side of Chicago, 1961," that is all it says. There is no mention of Cahill, there is no mention of who these people are, does not say where on the west side of Chicago. I was just fascinated by that picture. And then when I started teaching, over the years, of teaching that course, that I mentioned at Ohio State, I kept being pulled back to that picture. And at some point, or another, I thought, man, it is kind of embarrassing that I am showing these kids this picture. And I have no idea who these people even are. And so that is when I started to look for their story, that was a completely random search for a story because it started with this picture. And it was only as I started to learn who they are that I started to see [inaudible]. These people really are emblematic of a really kind of key dynamic of the 1960s that gets almost no attention. And that so, they became something, that their story became something that I could hang a bigger analytical point on. But no, it all started with looking at that picture, God knows when, and thinking, man, that is interesting.

SM: 14:23
You know, you used two words or two ideas, and they are so important in this book, and particularly when you are talking about the person you just talked about, but you are also talking about my parents, and you are talking about the post-World War II generation, the people that came home from the war, and that is that issue of security, and upward mobility.

KB: 14:42
Yeah-yeah.

SM: 14:43
I mean, that is so, that is so truthful. He talked about truth. That is truth. That was the truth.

KB: 14:50
I really appreciate that. Yeah, and that was the key for me, with that photo once I started putting, getting some information about it. Because it is, in many ways, it is a simple matter of math. That when you see Stella Cahill in the back of that photo, right, tucked away in the back. And I cannot, let me see, it was 1961. She was born in 1960. Right? So she would have been 44-45, because she was 44 at the time because senator birthday. And all you got to do is the math, if you were 44 in 1961, what that means is that you were born at a time, you lived through some of the greatest upheavals of the 20th century, right? You lived through the Great Depression, you lived through World War II as a young adult, kid in the Depression, a young adult in World War II, I had no idea that they had also lived through the terror of the Spanish flu, where she lost her father, and the poverty of the working class, of the lower end of the working class. I had no idea that was the story I was going to find that was just what I came up with. But, the point is that this was a woman. Like your parents probably, like, my friends, they do it a little different because they did not grow up in the United States. But does not matter, the point is that all, these millions and millions of people in the United States who had lived these lives of profound insecurity, and that they finally have this chance to have a life, that is not spectacular, there is nothing extraordinary about the Cahill story. But, that is the beauty of it, see is that they are able to build the safe, stable sense of, you know, of kind of boring lives that I really admired to that. The problem is that those were lives that were bounded by these other forces, right? That their life out on that, very ordinary side street, way out on the west side of Chicago, was bounded by race. There was not a single Black person in that picture in a city that was a quarter Black by 1968. [crosstalk]

SM: 17:06
Go ahead, no you go ahead.

KB: 17:09
Obviously, they did not think about that. It was not like they were, they owned that house since the (19)20s. This was not the case, their story was not the case of white flight. My guess is it never crossed their mind much about whether Black people lived in their neighborhood or not, it was a naturalized thing. It so happened that the Cahill family and again, this is just wind block, made their living on a firm that relied on the military industrial complex. Now they did not make big bombs, they made coffee yearns for the military, [chuckles] but they were tied in military industrial complex. They grew up, their kids grew up in very parochial worlds, those Catholic schools, and their Catholic parish. So, they lived in a society that was bounded by all these restrictions that often-excluded other people, or that played on power relations, relied on power relationships. Those are the very things that get challenged in the (19)60s.

SM: 18:09
When you, those same categories again, when you get into the (19)60s, and you talk about the Vietnam War, you talk about the Civil Rights Movement, and of course, the issue of sex, you know, the Roe vs, versus Wade, and all the other things. It is, that creates a tension of its own.

KB: 18:27
Yep.

SM: 18:27
You know, civil rights creates tension in the, in the racist community who are white people who believe in white supremacy, you got, you know, Vietnam War, when people are coming home, you know, how they were treated when they got home. You know, veterans had a hard time, they were not treated well-

KB: 18:44
Right.

SM: 18:44
-when they returned from the war. So you really hit it, you really hit it very well. I one of the most important things in this book, and you bring it up to is talking to ordinary Americans. You know, we can talk-

KB: 18:59
Yeah.

SM: 18:59
-we all know about a lot of the civil rights leaders, the Black Power leaders, the politicians in Washington, and leaders who are elected, well known leaders of movements, but it is your ability to talk to the ordinary person like the Cahills and, and others. Could you talk about that, how important that is in the history of any era?

KB: 19:20
Yeah, that is really fundamental to me. There is no doubt that powerful people, presidents, and Supreme Court justices, and major civil rights leaders, major movement leaders are important that they shape history, they do. And I think that we are fooling ourselves if we somehow claim they do not. So I think things that are fundamental parts of the story, of the 1960s. But it is also important to see how ordinary people shape and are shaped by large historical forces. To me that is the, that is the part of history that I really love dealing with. I mean, my wife will tell you that I maybe just got a little more fixated, and I should have been a Cahill. [laughter] You know, because I found it so fascinating to dive into an ordinary person's experience, and a huge part of the (19)60s history, about the ways that ordinary people intersect with these large stories. And so, one of the things I have tried to do, the Cahills were the biggest example. One of the things I tried to do throughout the book was weave in the stories that other people swept up in the moments of the 1960s that I think are so pivotally important. So it was important to me to talk about Elizabeth Eckford, walking down the street in front of the troops in front of Little Rock High School in 1957. It was important to me to talk about the Roe v. Wade story through Norma McCorvey in Roe, you know, whose life is very complicated, because ordinary lives are very complicated. And I wanted to get a sense of that story out to, or what I see, as you know, that really fundamental tragedy of Alison Krauss at Kent State, you know, and of course, we know about the events at Kent State it is not like I am uncovering something that has not been written about a million times. But I wanted to do was to find an angle on it that got the human story of Kent State through. And so, I what I did was tried to talk about the reporter going back to her high school to find out what he [inaudible] about her, after her killing, after her murder at Kent State, because I wanted the sense of the tragedy of that event. And the way you get at that is to the experiences, the intimate experiences of ordinary people.

SM: 21:57
Yeah, I actually go to Kent State, I have been to 14 remembrance events at Kent State. And- -and I, you kind of get the feel that you know, all four of the people that died there. You get to know who they were-

KB: 22:03
Wow. I bet.

SM: 22:11
-even though you never met them. And of course, the nine that were wounded, but also how important it is that they have never forgotten at Kent State, those that died at Jackson State, which, a lot of America has forgotten, but certainly at Kent State they have not. And so, when you look at the, the three areas that you talk about in the book where "The Shattering," took place, I have interviewed a lot of people. And I asked a question regarding what was the watershed moment of the (19)60s.

KB: 22:15
Oh, yeah.

SM: 22:42
Watershed event, a one event that defined the period or you feel had one of the greatest impacts on that decade or the, plus the early (19)70s. And, and of course, there is civil rights, there is Vietnam. But for you, I am talking about you as a historian, I know you have picked three, but is there, Is there one that stands out above everything else?

KB: 23:15
Yes, absolutely, it is really a great question. And I know keep saying that, but actually, these are terrific questions. The pivotal event of the 1960s, in my mind, is the Children's Crusade in Birmingham in the spring of 1963. Because what that does, is that is the moment in that event, that "The Shattering," really takes place. It is there that the political alignments that have defined American, the American public life for decades and decades just get shattered open. In that moment where the president of the United States was finally forced to decide which side am I on. And it is at that moment, that the political space of the 1960s that the political realignments of the 1960s are created. So it is, I am not saying that, that event shapes everything that follows, but it creates a new context for everything that follows.

SM: 24:22
Very good, you know, that march on Washington in (19)63 was something and-

KB: 24:28
That is, I think that is one of the great misunderstood events. I mean, now there has been a lot of good scholarly work on that, though, I am not sure how far it reaches. But the thing that, now I am going to get sort of preachy, [chuckles] kind of literally, I think. What I, one of the things I found most difficult in teaching the course, and I try to do with the book as well, is not simply to say and this is the way scholarship has gotten to say, you know, this was about much more than civil rights. It was about the fusion of civil rights and economic troubles and that is absolutely true, and that is really important. What I find maddening, understandable, but maddening is the way that people dismiss [Dr.] King's, "I Have a Dream," speech. And the problem is that as Americans, we have heard it too often, and so it has become a cliché, it has become a string of clichés. And because of that, it is impossible to hear how radical a speech that is. It is impossible to hear the point of that speech that what King is doing in that speech, is he is holding up in the most powerful and public of moments, this radical vision of the beloved community. And one of the things I really try, I do not know how effectively I did, but it was really important to me is to restore, well, let me put it this way, one of the things that scholarship has done, and it is a good thing that scholarship has done, not being critical of that is it is tried to revive the radical king, the king who talked about fundamental economic change. And that is really important. And I agree 100 percent, with the value of doing that. The problem for me in that is that what we have, underplayed and sometimes really are quite dismissive of, is the radicalism of his religious vision. He was first and foremost a religious figure, that there is a profound radicalism in the religious vision that he is presenting to the United States. And I would love to see more of an emphasis on that. But when he talks about when he talks about passive resistance, when he talked about radical love, when he talked about these fundamentally religious topics of redemption, what he was doing was presenting Americans with an alternative way of living, of conceiving their relationship to each other, and to the nation. And why we see, why we dismiss that is just kind of ridiculous idealism, and embrace as radical, an economics agenda is because we are too locked into a very strict sense of what counts as radical. Now, of course, the economic agenda is radical, but so is this vision where he was saying to Americans, "You can, in fact, we replace hatred with love," that is a radical vision. That is a radical reconstruction of the ways that the nation operated and that human beings related to each other. And yet, somehow, we see that it is just kind of rhetoric.

SM: 27:42
Dr. King, was an amazing human being in so many ways. You know, he created not only tension, he created tension within his own group, within the African American community. He did not-

KB: 27:54
Oh yeah.

SM: 27:55
wave like a, "I am going to go to Chicago, there is a lot of racism up north." While he got there, many people in the, in, you know, other civil rights leader says "No, it is in the South," no, it is also in the north. And he went north and knew no one, you were explaining it in your book. Then, of course, his speech on Vietnam. Oh, no, you know, you do not give a shit about Vietnam. You know, it is, you know, you got to deal with civil rights issues at home. And, and then, the challenge of Black power when Stokely Carmichael or H. Rap Brown, you know, you represent more gradualist approach, we are going to, you know, we are just going to do it.

KB: 28:08
Yep. Yeah-yeah.

SM: 28:34
Everything King was doing was creating tension in not only communities that were racist, but also in communities that supported what he was doing, but did not like the techniques that he was using.

KB: 28:49
Yeah, absolutely. I think that is absolutely right.

SM: 28:53
Yeah, in the four presidents that you talk about in the book, you did a great job on all of them. And you give a lot on Eisenhower, which I am glad you did. Because, when you are talking about the (19)60s, oh, he is he is meeting John Kennedy, the day of the election, and talking about Vietnam, and all this other stuff, but it was much more than that. Of the four presidents, when you think of the (19)60s, it is Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. Which one do you feel had the greatest impact on the (19)60s?

KB: 29:25
That is a great question. I keep saying that [chuckles], but I am really fascinated by that. You know, I think it depends on which angle you look at it from. I was, I was surprised myself how important Dwight Eisenhower turned out to be. But and how it kind of, he hovered over the (19)60s as this kind of model that people were, firstly Richard Nixon wanted to emulate. But I think I would argue that it is a balance between Lyndon Johnson for the dramatic moment, the ways in which he actually embraced change, and by the forces of reaction that he originally or even getting there so that he unleashed that I think particularly of the backlash against civil rights, and the kind of more conservative critique of the Vietnam War. And Nixon, who I think to this day has a really enduring impact on American society, and it is one of the ironies of the 1960s, is that here is this period of deep and profound change that results in a kind of conservative reconstruction of American society. And Nixon is a fascinating figure in that reconstruction. Which is, [crosstalk] so, given Kennedy, kind of the least, importance in the 1960s.

SM: 31:18
Do you-

KB: 31:18
Which is also surprising.

SM: 31:20
-yeah there was, there was thoughts also that there were 2 (19)60s. Now, I have read this in books. There were 2 (19)60s, there was a period 1960 to (19)63, and then there was a period (19)64 to (19)75, because a lot of people talk about the (19)60s as the early (19)70s, too. Your thought on that, and of course, it revolves around the assassination of President Kennedy, and the impact that had on America, and the world.

KB: 31:49
I think I do believe that the (19)60s periodization, pushing, definitely pushes into the early (19)70s. I used, once upon a time I think, people, this is a long time ago now, people had a tendency to kind of cut things off in 1968. I think that, that really ruptures important continuity. So I agree with the extension of the period into the (19)60s into the early (19)70s. I am a little less inclined to see that really sharp distinction in the 1960s. I think there is a lot more. There is, it is not just it is not continuity, but I think that the break is not as sharp as that concept of two 1960s suggests it is, I think there is more of a coherent narrative between those periods. There is, there is clearly changes (19)65, I think, is a really important, transformational moment in that, that is the point where the war escalates, that is where voting rights is secure, that is where Griswold was handed down. That is why I devote a chapter to what I called, "The Revolutions of 1965." But I do not, I am a little less convinced by the idea of our kind of (19)60s, the early idealism, and then the divisions later on, the divisions were pretty deep in the early (19)60s too, and the 1950s, as well.

SM: 33:16
I think some people try to, who were believing in those 2 (19)60s. We were saying that, well, there was violence in the, well, it all started with the violence against J.F.K., and it just continued. It was violence, and but there was violence going on before that [chuckles] in the south.

KB: 33:36
Exactly-exactly.

SM: 33:37
So they are generalizing kind of. Now, some of the, I like your thoughts too on the civil rights organizations of the (19)60s. Certainly Snick was a very important one, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Corps, the Urban League, the Black Panthers, the NAACP. Could you talk about, about some of these organizations, and the impact that they had on the (19)60s? And age had a lot to do with some of these too, because Snick were mostly young people. And, but the-

KB: 33:40
That is the SCLC. I mean, it was, so was SCLC-

SM: 34:16
Huh?

KB: 34:16
-you know, I mean, one of the things that is so startling to my students is how young Martin Luther King was, you know, when the Montgomery Bus Boycott started, in (19)55, he was what, 25?

SM: 34:16
Right. Yes. [laughter]

KB: 34:28
You know, he always seemed older, but he is, but in any case. So in creating the breakthrough moment of the civil rights movement, that moment that runs from the Children's Crusade in (19)63 through Selma in (19)65. That is really good at this critical breakthrough moment. There is no doubt that Snick and SCLC are the driving forces. because they are the organizations that are pushing the direct confrontation of nonviolent protest in the American south, without their pushing that, then the breakthrough moment would not have happened. And that is a really dramatic and challenging moment in a lot of ways. Children's Crusade in (19)63 is an incredibly complex thing to think about because it was about risking children's lives. And there is a serious moral question that runs through that decision to bring kids as young as 8, 9, 10 into the streets of Birmingham, knowing they have could have been killed. But Snick and SCLC [inaudible] two civil rights activism of that period. That get, they are challenged more and more by this long tradition, that runs through the nation of Islam stretches back to Garveyism to the nation of Islam, and then through its movement, Black nationalism, over to Snick in the mid-1960s. The division, the long-standing divisions in Black political life, come to the forefront in the mid-1960s, first with Snick's turn to Black Power in (19)66, (19)65-(19)66 with it is breakthrough in (19)66. And then with the rise of the Black Panthers, really in (19)68, so the Panthers had theirs-

SM: 34:42
Right.

KB: 34:46
- in (19)67-(19)68. With so, with the rise of Black power, and here is one of the things to me, that was really important to me, in writing the latter parts of the book. The NAACP, everybody in kind of moderate wing of the movement, I think has the most radical moment of the rights activism in the entire 1960s. And that is the movement towards the integration of public schools in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s via busing, that is the most radical social experiment of the entire 1960s racial movement. Because what that does, but the NAACP does with that part of the Civil Rights is it says, no longer should it be completely on the shoulders of Black people, particularly Black, young Black people, children to bear the burden of racial change. Now, it's got to be shared by white families as well. And what that does is it pushes the civil rights movement into parts of white America that it had never touched before. There was a huge swath of white suburban America in the 1960, that, of course, saw the civil rights protests on T.V., but of course, saw it in the newspapers, but it did not touch their lives. They did not have Black people living in their neighborhoods, there was nobody sitting down at a lunch counter anywhere in suburban Chicago or suburban Detroit. And then suddenly, what the NAACP does with the busing movement, is it says, oh, no, you are part of the solution too. That is the most radical moment of civil rights activists in the 1960s. At the same time, I am not trying to diminish the Panthers. But, here were the Panthers who were talking about radical change, but whose primary program was a free breakfast program for poor kids. I am not saying there is anything wrong with the free breakfast program. I am simply saying, that is a pretty mild program you got going on there, when you are talking about the revolutionary change. Here is the NAACP that everybody thinks of as racial moderate, who defined themselves as racial moderates, for a good part of the 1960s who are pushing change that is going to bring racial change directly into the homes of millions of white people across the country. And that is fascinating to me.

SM: 39:07
Snick, the people that were in Snick, the leaders that came from this is unbelievable.

KB: 39:14
Oh.

SM: 39:15
I was looking at the list just last week, there is about 60 names of people who went on to become, you know, in all walks of life, leaders of organizations, running for office heading-

KB: 39:26
Yeah.

SM: 39:26
-you know. Julian Barnes, just one of them. I mean, one other thing and just, I have heard this today, where are the leaders? Where are the Black leaders that used to be the leaders of the (19)60s and when you when you think about it, there is some truth. You had a Roy Wilkins, you know, Martin Luther King, you had a James Farmer, you had a Whitney Young, you had a Roy Wilkins. You had young people like John Lewis, and Robert Moses, and Stokely Carmichael, and Panthers like Bobby Seale, and you know, Fred Hampton, who was murdered, and-and Huey Newton, and then you think of Malcolm X, the Muslim, Muhammad Ali, [inaudible] with the young. It is just, they were on the news all the time they, you saw them there. They mean they were known. I do not, today, I do not really see that many. And, where are they?

KB: 40:24
I think the media landscape has changed so dramatically. You know that here was, one of the really important I wish I had done more about this really, aspects of the 1960s was the novelty. The still novelty of television, you know that the idea of having T.V. news in your home was still 10 years, was new to a huge number of Americans, it did not have a history longer than about 10 years, in the early 1960s for most Americans. And in some ways that is comparable to the world that we now live in, where the generation that, of young people today are living with a technological world that they think of as natural, but is actually more than 10 years old, you know, the idea that you are having your news delivered to you on these multiple platforms that you carry around with you. And I think what that is done to a certain extent is that it is dissipated our sense of political movements. So that, you know, there were only three networks in most of America in the 1960s. They had the ability to kind of create public figures in a way that the more diffused media landscape does not, but that it has not changed, I think, the movement, the ability of a movement to build, if anything that I think it's accelerated it. You know, one of the things that I have stressed with my students lately is that, as a percentage of the nation, more people marched in the protests after George Floyd's murder, in the summer of 2020, then marched at any point in the course of the 1960s. So of course, when in the 1960s, about 10 percent of the population, participated in at least one march or protest, somewhere in the course of the 1960s. Ninety percent of Americans never joined a protest anywhere in the course the 1960s. In the summer of 2020, somewhere about 14 percent of Americans joined at least one march.

SM: 42:45
Wow.

KB: 42:48
It can still be there. But I think like you said, the sense of kind of key personalities at the start of them. That is changed.

SM: 42:58
That word, that comes up in the (19)60s all the time, the word about freedom.

KB: 43:04
Yeah.

SM: 43:05
When you think, I, you look at some of the main events and Freedom Summer, which was so historic in 1964, you had-

KB: 43:13
Yeah.

SM: 43:13
-you had the Freedom Rides early in the (19)60s, you had the free speech movement at Berkeley, which is a historic happening. And of course, the man who led that movement at Berkeley was one of the young people at Freedom Summer, Mario Savio. Your thoughts on the word, "freedom," with respect to all the things that were happening in the (19)60s, in terms of the three categories you are talking about and how important that word is?

KB: 43:42
Yeah, it is, it is a fundamentally important word that had different meanings for different people. So that when the civil rights activists of Freedom Summer, or the activists have the Freedom Rides used that word, they meant freedom from oppression, freedom from the oppression of the Jim Crow system. Free speech is connected, as you said, that there is a direct line from Mississippi to Mario Savio up to Berkeley that fall, but there is an expression of freedom from structures of, kind of, university structures of mass education. And then you get to the politics of freedom that runs through say Haight Ashbury in the Summer of Love, there it is freedom from constraint. And that is a really, very different sense of freedom, you can do as you want to do, was a very different sense of freedom than John Lewis on a bus challenging the segregation of bus stations.

SM: 45:01
Right.

KB: 45:02
That is a very different concept. And it is one of the tensions that went through the (19)60s, and that runs through, that, individuals should be free to do as they choose. And another to say, individuals should be free from systems of oppression. That is a really, very different things.

SM: 45:27
The birth of beats played a very important role in the (19)60s too, in terms of, they were ahead, ahead of their time in the (19)50s. But they all had, they had an influence too, and they were, everything and everything they were about is freedom. [chuckles]

KB: 45:42
Yeah.

SM: 45:42
Do it, do it my way. [chuckles]

KB: 45:44
And that is another really good example of the (19)50s as being a much more complicated period than we think of it as being, right.

SM: 45:53
Yeah. What is the, you know I have, I have been amazed and I have thought about this ever since I was in college, and now I am in my early (19)70s. And that is, why does Vietnam, this war, it was not World War II, it was not World War I, it was not Korea. It was not the Gulf War, while the Gulf War was not that big, but it was not the, the wars in the Middle East. What is it about this war from (19)59 to (19)75, that has really shaped this nation, not only his foreign policy, but in everything? Why-why has the Vietnam War continue to have such an effect on our society? George Bush in 1989 said that, "The Vietnam syndrome was over," when I heard that I said, "Where has he been?" And, [laughter] that was, that was in 1989. But just your thoughts, why does Vietnam still, to this day affect us in so many ways?

KB: 46:58
I think there is multiple reasons for that. One really obvious one, is that and it ties back to something we were talking about a couple minutes ago, Vietnam was the first, in some ways almost the last, televised war, so that suddenly what Americans could see who had never been to war. So, you are not talking about World War II veterans, but their families or younger families, could actually see if what war actually looks like, and war is a horrific thing to see. So I do think that was one key piece of it. For the first time, you know, Americans, the American government censored World War II, and obviously, the means of communication were different, to a really dramatic degree, so that Americans could see, you know, the war movies where nobody bleeds, it is a whole different thing to see the footage of someone getting shot in the head on the streets of Saigon, or the young girl running down the street, down the road, being napalmed, to the photos from me live, to see the horror, that war actually is, is one key part of that. Another key part of it is the really, really deep effects that the war has, in turn, and I think we still underplayed this, in terms of domestic economic policy. And I do try to play a bit more about this, the war has an absolutely destructive effect on the American economy that gets replayed over and over again in the United States, in the decades since with the triggering of inflation, with the destruction of the post-war international economic order, so I do think that is a key part of it, as well. And then there is this fascinating thing that happens with our sense of the anti-war movement it is two fascinating things, because there is, of course, a massive anti-war movement, or as I try to suggest in the book, there are multiple anti-war movements in the United States. One of the things that is odd about our sense of the anti-war movement, is that when we tend to think of World War II is the standard by which we measure American wars, when in fact, World War II is the anomalous war, Americans have always had strong protest movements against wars. They just come in different forms. There is a massive anti-war push against the Civil War. There were strong oppositions to World War I. There were strong oppositions to the Philippine Wars and the Spanish American War. There was massive opposition in particular forms to Korea. The popularity of the Korean War just absolutely plummeted in the course of that war and it certainly fueled the rise, not the creation, but the rise of McCarthyism. But somehow, we see the anti-war move into the night of Vietnam, as somehow really new and different. Now, they are in their form, they are very large, and that is certainly traumatic. But I think that is kind of lodged, that is that Vietnam syndrome, right.

SM: 50:23
Right.

KB: 50:23
Somehow the United States government is complicit in a disastrous war, which of course, the United States government was complicit in disastrous war. That is what we have to shake, that we are going to make the military strong again, and beloved again, then we are going to prove the United States could be a world power that it was before Vietnam. It is just funny that we tend to think of it as anomalous when in fact, it is in the American tradition. That is what Lyndon Johnson was terrified of, not afraid of [inaudible], of the left but of the anti-war movement of the right, which he assumed he was going to get slammed by, which was what had destroyed Harry Truman and Korea, it is the anti-war movement of the right. And we actually see that playing out today, where it is a great criticism of U.S. involvement in Ukraine is from the right. And that ran through Vietnam as well. So, I think Vietnam has an outsized influence, because of the visuals of it, because it did in fact, have an outsized effect on society. And because of that anti-war movement, that, or anti-war movements that were so fundamental to the polarization of American politics.

SM: 51:47
The war, not only those who participated in the war, we knew what was going on over in Vietnam. What was happening in civil rights in America was actually happening with a lot of the African American soldiers in Vietnam.

KB: 52:00
That is right.

SM: 52:01
The experience they have and they were certainly dying in large numbers too, with their names that are now on the Vietnam Memorial. But-

KB: 52:08
Yeah.

SM: 52:08
-it is also the fact that when-when they came home, there was no welcome for the Vietnam vets.

KB: 52:14
Yes, yep.

SM: 52:15
And it took the building of a wall in 1982, to, for the first time the Vietnam vets, they were welcomed home, and tried to heal the nation, but no other war, that I can think of, had where Americans just kind of said nothing, or looked down on this.

KB: 52:36
Yeah, I agree completely. And I think the American soldiers experience in Vietnam, not all-American soldiers, obviously, but the American soldiers experience in Vietnam was for them, I think so profoundly disillusioning because of the way the war was fought. And then they come, they came home to a sense that what they had done, was not recognized was not valued, was some cases, seen as in fact, complicit in war crimes. And, it is devastating because I will give you a really small example, I lived, when I was teaching at UMass, I lived in a small town. I did not live in Amherst, I lived in a small town outside of Amherst, I could not afford Amherst. And every Memorial Day, there would be the Veterans of Foreign Wars would do a little parade. And, veterans refused to allow the Vietnam vets to march in their parade, this is, you know, the late 1990s. Because, and so they barred the Vietnam veterans from our little town to participate in the parade on Memorial Day.

SM: 53:53
Wow.

KB: 53:54
And you know, I guess that would be the more conservative version of disrespecting those soldiers experience and those soldiers sacrifice.

SM: 54:06
Yeah, I am. One of the individuals I interviewed, John Morris, who is a Vietnam vet from the Westchester area, when he came home somebody took them to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Office and they told him to leave because, because he was a Vietnam vet, and yes, John is unbelievable. Before I ask my next question, there is something here regarding John Kerry's speech too that I thought was very important during the war, when Vietnam Veterans Against the War threw their, you know their-their medals away, and then John Kerry spoke before the Foreign Relations Committee. I think that is a powerful speech, a very powerful-

KB: 54:46
It is.

SM: 54:47
-very powerful speech, but the man who allowed that, that hearing to take place Senator William Fulbright, he had written several books that were classics on the Vietnam War, you probably We read them. But he, I mean, yeah, we ended up bringing, I took a group of students to see William Fulbright before he died down to Washington. And, and he was, he wanted to know why, I knew Senator Gaylord Nelson, so we actually talked about the war. And I took pictures, and then I took pictures of him with our students, and then I had put it in my office. And we invited Harry Edwards to campus, you know, Dr. Harry Edwards from Berkeley who was- -and of course, he was the one of the leaders of the protests at Cornell in (19)69, and the (19)68 protests in the, and everything. And Dr. Edwards came in and said, "What is that picture doing here? Why do you have a picture of that cracker?" [laughs] Yeah, in your office, and I explained to him, "Well, I know that, you know that Senator Fulbright was not good in the area of race relations, but he was really good in the area of foreign relations and, and, and he had already apologized for what he had done in the, in the one area, but he was powerful in the other area, trying to save lives." But I just want to throw that as an anecdote. [laughs]

KB: 55:29
Yes. Yeah. And you know what it says to me, the world is a complicated place. We all do better to recognize it. [chuckles]

SM: 55:38
Yeah. [chuckles] One, one very powerful moment you talk about in your book, too, is when Black power came to be. When Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, you know, he was really, he was really to the extreme left but, but it was Stokely and his challenge of Dr. King, Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, young Louis Bebo, all the loss and all the civil rights leaders who believed in non-violence. That was, the Dr. King's beloved community versus Black power. Could you talk about that? Because that was powerful happening.

KB: 56:56
Oh, yeah. So, I think this comes back to something we talked about a good bit ago now. That, the tradition of Black nationalism, Black power, is very deep in the Black community. So it stretches back at least to the 19, late 19th century, this argument that essentially says, "Look, people are never going to agree, just surrender their power, we have to force them to, and we have to do it, or we have to separate ourselves out from the Black, the white community as the only way to build to safety and security for our community." That is a long tradition. And one of the things that happens in the 1950s, and particularly in the 1960s, is that whites are confronted with that tradition for the first time. So, they see Malcolm X and they think this is coming out of nowhere. It is not, it is coming out of this long political tradition, but it is a minority political tradition inside the Black community. It always was, it is in the course of the 1960s. And so when Stokely Carmichael embraces, creates that phrase of "Black power," and nationalizes that phrase it causes massive media attention. The other side of the, the Black political traditions, the sides that is represented by the NAACP, or by Dr. King, or by John Lewis. They have their, Rushton is probably the smartest analyst at this moment in my mind. They say, "We know this, this, it is not like we have never heard of this idea before. This is part of the political tradition in our community. But whites are going to be terrified by it." And as Rushton says over and over again, "We are in minority community. And so we cannot have, we cannot afford to have a politics that alienates whites, because they have got, they have got the real power here." And his great fear, and he is coming from another, a different political tradition, is great fear is what Black power is going to do, it is going to intensify the white backlash, and it does. So, the truth of the matter is that while Black nationalism is not new, while it is a powerful expression, and powerful critique of white society, and I think, in my mind, a really important critique of white society, politically, it is got disastrous consequences, because white support for civil rights was always dead. And what King had done is he had managed to build up enough white support to push through these fundamental changes in the law, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. And, but he knew how thin it was at the height of the nonviolent movement in 1963, about half of white Americans think that it is a violent movement. [chuckles] Because they are so ingrained with the idea that Black people are violent. And it is such a troupe of American racism. King knows how thin it is and what Black power does is it plays to that. It said, it plays on that idea of what you, you think I am about, you are right. But, it is your fault. And that is a really dangerous politics to play in the United States. Because as Rushton realizes, losing white support is so harmful to a movement, to a minority movement in American society, in some ways what, this is the kind of odd turn and I am not sure I would even stand by it. So, let us see how this goes. In some ways, King's side of the movement, Rushton's side of the movement, NAACP's side of the movement, they actually might have understood the depth of white racism better than Black power does. Because Black power has at its heart, one piece of itself that seems to think that whites aren't going to assert the power they have, whereas King, knows they will.

SM: 56:58
Yeah. Yeah, that was a great analysis there, excellent. And I know, Malcolm X was one of the required readings in the sixth. I went to Binghamton University, and I remember reading the book on Malcolm X, and by "any means necessary," was kind of a scary term. [chuckles] We will do anything-

KB: 1:01:44
Yep.

SM: 1:01:44
-or we will shoot if we have to, that was kind of the, but-but-but if you know, Malcolm, you know, he grew and evolved over time. And that the last two years of his life, he was changing, I think, in much better ways. And then sadly, he was murdered. And, we never will know those ways that he would have gone.

KB: 1:02:06
Yeah.

SM: 1:02:08
The other thing here is, during the (19)60s, there were many movements. I know, you have made mention in your book that, you know you concentrated on civil rights, but they are, the (19)60s was about the movements to as well. It is not just the civil rights movement, but the gay rights, the women's movement, the environmental movement, Native American movement, Chicano movement, even the farmworkers movement. And of course, the Vietnam veteran’s movement. And so, your thoughts on that? Was not, but I think civil rights movement was the model that most of them used.

KB: 1:02:43
Yeah, absolutely. Civil rights is both, it is, you said, it is both the models that they used, the inspiration for those other movements. And it is the pathbreaking movement, as I said, you know, as we were talking, maybe half an hour ago, I said, since that, that sort of, march from 1963 is so fundamentally important, because it opens up that space, it opens up the space for other movements to then step in as well. You know, take the women's movement, for instance, National Organization of Women is founded out of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which is a creation of those children in the streets of Birmingham. So, that case is kind of a direct line. The united farmworkers movement comes out of grassroots organizing that is very much tied to the King model, you know, it runs through [inaudible] in Chicago, but it is very much tied to King models, a shortcut that is for safe, kind of grassroots activism, that people like Ella Baker was so important in defining. So, one of the painful things for this bucket, and I mentioned this in the introduction, one of the painful movements, things about this book is say, I am going to leave important stories out, right, because what I want to do is I want to have these tight focus on what I think are the really critical, the most important of all those important movements. And, you know, it pains me I mean, it is I was finishing the book, especially on Latino politics. It really pains me to leave that out. But, I do agree that civil rights is the standard by which other movements are set.

SM: 1:04:31
Yeah, and it is a well-known fact that people that were involved in the anti-war movement, used the civil rights movement as their model.

KB: 1:04:39
Absolutely-absolutely.

SM: 1:04:39
And over and over again. And you talk also, you know, when Black power came, and challenged of nonviolent protest. That-that happened in the anti-war movement too, when the weathermen, you know Students for Democratic Society.

KB: 1:04:41
Yep.

SM: 1:04:43
You know, they, people would quit SDS, if they had, they had to go all the way of the weathermen.

KB: 1:05:02
Yeah.

SM: 1:05:03
That violence was not the way, because you know, violence in the end, never solves anything.

KB: 1:05:08
Well, and on top of that, you know, the federal government is, wields, has at its disposal, a level of violence power that is so greater than any social movement is going to have. Now, I am not trying to say that the federal government is inherently a violent organization. It just has greater power. This is wonderful moment. Remember the old "Eyes on the Prize," series. There is this great moment in the episode that deals with Mississippi, University of Mississippi crisis in (19)62. And they are interviewing, the filmmakers are interviewing Burke Marshall, in the Justice, Kennedy Justice Department. And he says this really fundamentally true thing. He said, "You know, these people down in Mississippi," and he is talking about white people in Mississippi, "They can fund the federal government. But in the end, the federal government is going to win. Because if the federal government wants to it can send the battleship down the Mississippi River." And that is fundamentally true, the weathermen could talk about staging days of rage. But in the end, if it came to it, they were not going to topple the federal government, you know, when the urban rebellions hit in cities like Detroit, in the end, they were repressed by massive force, and people were killed. That is the challenge of movements that embrace violence, but it is, it can be even an understandable decision, right? That you have tried the nonviolence it does not seem to be making the changes you want to see. But in the end, the federal government or state and the state government, for that matter, have way more violent capabilities.

SM: 1:05:41
Oh, yes. I remember that, you may remember this too. There was a paper back that came out I think it was in the (19)70s by Ovid Demaris called "America the Violent." [laughs] So and, it goes into the, that violence is all bad.

KB: 1:07:19
Yep.

SM: 1:07:20
But, America is very used to it.

KB: 1:07:23
Very, yes.

SM: 1:07:24
Yeah. Colonel Harry Summers, I do not know if you have heard of him. He is the, he is the man, the original editor of Vietnam Magazine, and he was an author- -of a couple of books on strategy in Vietnam, once told me we were trying to get him to come to speak at Westchester University to be, for our, when we bought the traveling Vietnam memorial, and we did a four-day event, and we had Vietnam War programs the entire semester. And sadly, he died of cancer before he could come. But he told me over the phone, that college professors who teach courses on the (19)60s on the Vietnam War, rarely talk about the war from a military point of view, mostly from the protester's point of view, or the politician's point of view. So, think tank point of view. Your thoughts on that? Because he was adamant on that, and he was the founder of Vietnam magazine. And, he was actually writing a speech. And I said, when he died, I tried to say, "Can-can I get that speech from his wife," wife said, "No." But he had written a speech to present and I am sure the wife has also passed away. But your thoughts on that, that the universities that have been concentrating on teaching courses on the Vietnam War and on the (19)60s, rarely present the military point of view?

KB: 1:07:32
Oh, yes. Yeah, I think that is actually a valid criticism. I think that is fair. You know that, I mean, obviously, I cannot speak for everybody who teaches a course. But, that certainly would be my impression as well. And, I think I probably do quite a bit of that myself. And I think that is probably a valid criticism.

SM: 1:09:08
Yeah, I just bought two books from a used bookstore, and it is the U.S. Army books on the Vietnam War, so. [laughs] And they were expensive. [crosstalk]

KB: 1:09:19
Like that, you know, those federal government histories that come out of the Department of Defense, or they come out of other, they are great, you know, they are very particular kinds of history, but they are really useful.

SM: 1:09:33
Well I, that three of them just came to this, and they were $50 apiece. I bought them.

KB: 1:09:39
Oof.

SM: 1:09:39
I, because I want them, I have never seen them before. So anyway, one of the other things is you talk about the ordinary people, could you list maybe a few more, not so well-known people from your book that people may not know, but their-

KB: 1:09:55
Sure, so.

SM: 1:09:56
-experiences are just as important as well-known people?

KB: 1:09:58
Well, because we are talking about Vietnam, I talked about, I tell the story open the chapter on Vietnam, actually with this story of James Farley, who is an ordinary soldier in Vietnam in 1965, who ends up being featured in a Life Magazine story about the war. So, this sounds an awkward thing to say, I hope it does not sound jerky to say this. But the passage in the book that I am actually most proud of where I feel like strongest about is in that chapter, where I talk about ordinary soldiers who were killed in the war, 1966 to 1967. And I kind of list, people whose names I pulled randomly. Well, not randomly, but I pulled from the Vietnam War Memorial, from different parts of the country, and about their bodies coming home, and the flags being presented to their families. That is really important to me to talk about the ordinary soldiers, you know, who were drafted or who volunteered, and ended up as frontline troops in Vietnam. I mentioned talking about Norma McCorvey, that was really fundamentally important to me. All the way through, I try to bring in as many people as I could, whose story is people that maybe they know the events, but whose stories they do not necessarily know, so protesting against the war, like this, the folks or the kids at Kent State. I just think it is, again, I guess I am repeating myself, just so they feel like fundamentally, the one, both, the import, those powerful, important people we know, and those ordinary folks down in the neighborhoods, or down in these horrible moments.

SM: 1:11:53
Very good. One of the things you say in the book, you quote Daniel Bell early in the book.

KB: 1:12:02
I asked. [chuckles]

SM: 1:12:03
Dan, and I actually interviewed Daniel Bell, he was not well, but I interviewed him up at Harvard. And the thing is, could you talk about that, what he said?

KB: 1:12:15
Yeah, so this is one of the kind of classic senses again, it kind of takes us back to the 1950s, that you know we had entered into an age of consensus, that each was the great causes of the past had been set aside, and that we had created a consensus society and needless of that, I am not a big fan of increasing consensus society. And I just think that is, you know, I am a great admirer of technical writing, but it is fundamentally wrong, I think, to say that we are, the 1950s was a period, post-war period, is a period of consensus, is to say that, is to miss all those people that the consensus excluded. And, it is a huge portion. [chuckles] It is a substantial portion of American society, because it was not a consensus. The Civil Rights folks did not believe that there was a consensus in the United States, the beats, did not think we have a consensus in the United States. What happened in the 1950s was that Dwight Eisenhower, who was a brilliant politician, portrayed himself as a hapless one. This brilliant politician, managed to create a political coalition that pre-sagged the Republican majority, he was building the modern American Republican majority, not the one that exists now but, the one that would consolidate under Richard Nixon in 1972, was ticking away, it would already broke solid south, it carried most of the upper cells in both of his elections, he consolidated the white vote, white vote becomes Republican in the United States in 1952. And it has remained that way in every single election since then, except for 1964. But it actually starts in (19)52. He consolidated the connection between the upper end of the working class and the American middle class, particularly in suburban areas, he was building a Republican political coalition that, then gets and that is the, that is what we call a consensus is, in fact, a particular political alignment that was committed to certain things. Pursue a Cold War, but do it off the front pages, maintain racial segregation, but without the kind of brutality of the Jim Crow stuff, which is the democratic political order. We maintain middle class, middle brown culture that Dwight Eisenhower perfectly embodied that excluded people like gay and lesbian Americans. That is a political construction that Daniel Bell and other commentators in the 1960s, called a consensus. Well, it was not the consensus. It was a political culture that arranged particular groups of people, a lot of them in a particular order. And then the (19)60s, cracks that open, and what Richard Nixon tries to do, was his goal really, is to put it back together again.

SM: 1:15:29
Yeah.

KB: 1:15:30
Because he is in fact, trained by, in politics, by Dwight Eisenhower, he thinks of himself as trying to fulfill, to recreate what Dwight Eisenhower created. The problem, of course, is that he was not. He was no Dwight Eisenhower, [laughs] and that the changes of the (19)60s were not reversible in the way that Richard Nixon imagined them to be. So, that is why I think, you know, I start with Daniel Bell, because Daniel Bell sets that standard. We are a consensus society, the end of the ideology, but it is, it is wrong.

SM: 1:16:03
Yeah, it is interesting when, when I did speak with him one, one name that came up that really drew his attention was Mark Rutte. [laughs]

KB: 1:16:14
Hm, interesting.

SM: 1:16:14
He had a lot, he had a lot of thoughts to say on Mark Rutte so, at Columbia University, so.

KB: 1:16:21
Yeah.

SM: 1:16:24
When you look at the Boomer Generation what, just your general thoughts on the Boomer Generation? Yeah, I-I asked this question early on in my interviews about the, you know, when I was young, even on this campus at Binghamton, there was this feeling, this aura of we were living in different times, and it was great to be young and, and all this other stuff, and we were going to be the change agents for the betterment of society. And it was, it was a youthful feeling. But, you know, we know the history now. Now, the boomers are now the oldest generation, per se.

KB: 1:17:00
Yeah.

SM: 1:17:01
And we are all reflecting on what really has been done. And in knowing that, in terms of those who participate, you talked about numbers, those who participated in any kind of an activity or protests or, you know, society's issues, it might have been 7 or 8 percent of that 74 or 76 million. Just your overall thoughts on the boomer generation, we are the most, the most unique generation in American history?

KB: 1:17:30
No. [laughter]

SM: 1:17:30
Okay.

KB: 1:17:33
Really, no, that was not. That was a bit quick. Let me expand on that a little bit. I do think that what you said a minute ago, I think you said a couple of really important things a minute ago. Yes, there was a uniqueness to the Boomer Generation in that, that was a generation that grew up, that turned out to be this relative, this very brief period of stability and security for millions and millions of ordinary people. So, I think of, they grew up in the world fundamentally different than the one their parents grew up in, because they have that sense of security that their parents, in particular, my mother never had. That is important. And, when Tom Reid supports you on statement, that is one of the first things he says, right? We are the generation raised in comfort. So, I do think that makes it an unusual generation, an unusually lucky generation. I also think that you are absolutely spot on, to point out that the activist portion of that generation was never as big as people have come to think it was, and as boomers themselves have a tendency to think it was. And it is an understandable thing, I do not mean to be critical about it. But, memory has a way of turning everybody brave. There were massive numbers of young people who never joined the protest movement, who went to their classes, who got the degrees, if they were lucky to go, enough to go to college, which over half of them did not, who got the opportunity, you got married, you had children, who lived completely ordinary lives. I do not mean that as a criticism. I have great admiration for ordinary lives. But, it is not the story that people tend to tell themselves. I have given a lot of talks over the years on civil rights activism, and particularly, I cannot tell you how many white people in particular have told me they marched with Dr. King. Now I am sure some of them did-

SM: 1:19:48
Right.

KB: 1:19:48
-but a lot of them is that many white people were following Dr. King, every time he walked out the door that would have been a crowd of white people around. It is just the way that we tend to think of the past. We tend to, you know, there is clear studies of this. We tend to think of ourselves as always being on the right side of history. That is [inaudible]. So one of the things and we have talked a bit about ordinary people, I would have loved a bit more to tell you the truth on the Cahills, and they were the Cahills's children and their reasons that I did not follow that. I had more information that the Cahill family asked me not to use, and I honored that. It is about order, the boom, the Boomer Generation did have the great fortune of living in that particular moment of stability and security. But, they also lived ordinary lives, many-many of them. And yes, the minority were central to those changes, there was also a very strong conservative sentiment inside Boomer generation, a lot in the 1960s. A majority of college students, at least in (19)65, (19)66, (19)67, fully supported the Vietnam War. You know that is, that sentiment changed over time. But, support to the Vietnam War actually increased with educational level, except for those with graduate degrees. So, the more college education you had, the more education you had, high school to college, college to graduate school, or professional school, the more likely you were to support the Vietnam War. That is not surprising, given the dynamics of part one and looking at people understood, they were stuck with the war, in the way that people with higher education were not. That is one of the dynamics of the war.

SM: 1:21:47
Yeah, and also, when you are teaching the (19)60s, another thing, if you are talking about the criticism, of what I talked about earlier, the conservatives, also were involved in the anti-war movement, and there was a-

KB: 1:22:05
Yeah.

SM: 1:22:06
-young America, I think it is Young Americans for Freedom or whatever. Definitely, Edwards has written about this, and that he is very concerned that if, you know, he teaches a course, I think at a Catholic school in Washington, D.C., and he teaches on the Vietnam War, and he makes sure that the conservative point of view is also part of the (19)60s-

KB: 1:22:26
Yep.

SM: 1:22:26
-because we you know, William Buckley, he is an important figure, I mean, his T.V. show with all the people he brought on. I mean, he is a very important figure because he brought everybody on that he opposed-

KB: 1:22:38
Yep.

SM: 1:22:38
-as well as people that he supported. And, and he had young people in the audience that were conservative and liberal. But I think talking a course on the (19)60s has to have the also the conservative point of view and the, you know, the student organizations that were against the war.

KB: 1:22:54
Yeah, I think, I tried to get across it in the book is I think there were three anti-war movements. So it was a radical anti-war movement, one that we tend to think of as the anti-war movement.

SM: 1:23:07
Yep.

KB: 1:23:08
There was a liberal one that operated on different premises, you know, that did not see the war as a sign of the evil of American imperialism, that thought is a mistaken application of Cold War policies, the wrong place to be fighting on the right principle, and then there is a conservative anti-war movement. And that movement, wanted actually the escalation of the war, because they wanted, they believe U.S. was not using its power to its full effect. They wanted the 20 percent of American people in the 1960s, in (19)67, wanted the U.S. to use nuclear weapons on North Vietnam. And that movement and it had mass marches, there was a mass pro-war- -march in New York City in the spring of (19)67. There were massive marches, pre-war marches, or at least anti, anti-war marches in response to the march on the Pentagon in 19- [crosstalk] I think they call it the Hard Hat March. Was that the Hard Hat March or something like that?

SM: 1:23:55
Right.

KB: 1:24:08
And the hard hats in (19)70, which is tied with Cambodia invasion.

SM: 1:24:16
Yeah, yep.

KB: 1:24:17
That is a huge movement. And it just does, and people do not even know it is there. It plays in the polls enormously. You know, and they hate the war because what they hate it the way that the United States is pursuing the war. They do not like the way that it is a war of containment, instead of-

SM: 1:24:36
Right.

KB: 1:24:36
of a war of victory, and that it is killing American [inaudible].

SM: 1:24:41
I got four more questions.

KB: 1:24:43
All right.

SM: 1:24:44
The Vietnam Memorial opened in 1992, and its purpose was to, to heal the veterans, and their families. Those who served in the war and the families of those who lost loved ones in the war. It's done a pretty good job. I have witnessed that in person over the years. But the bottom line is this: Jan Scruggs wrote a book around the time the wall was, no 10 years after the wall was, sort of, called to heal a nation. Do you feel that Vietnam Memorial that is the second most visited memorial in Washington has healed our nation from this war?

KB: 1:25:20
I think it helped America. A memorial can heal, can do all of that work. But I think it has helped. Like you I have been, like millions of Americans, I am not claiming anything exceptional. I have been to the wall, where you see veterans, touching the wall, putting personal tributes at the wall, and you realize what a powerful, you know, there was an awful lot, is it? Well, no, not a lot of controversy about the form that the memorial took. But I think it was, turned out to be a beautiful expression for veterans and their families. So, you know, I am a great admirer. As I think a lot of veterans are the beauty of that memorial.

SM: 1:26:13
And also the Women's Memorial that opened in 1993. You know, the women had to fight for representation as well.

KB: 1:26:21
Yeah.

SM: 1:26:22
So, it is like everything connected to the (19)60s, there is battles [laughter] in everything and, and there has been some and they had, the three-man statue was a battle. I mean the, so in the course now there is thinking of a group that wants to do, pay honor to the dogs who served in Vietnam. Well, they put a stop to that. But-

KB: 1:26:44
Yeah, that is probably a step too far, and I am a great dog lover. Oh, Rustin is fundamental. Because what Rustin does is, well, first of all, because he is a key component of one other strand of the civil rights movement, which is the strength of the civil rights movement that connects activism, racial activism, with radical pacifism, and with socialist politics. So, he is a bridge between various pieces of the movement between a piece of the movement that is tied to a Philip Randolph unionization, socialism, and to the radical pacifist tradition, which is a tiny little tradition in the United States. And it is through valve two connections, actually, that he becomes the, one of the architects of King's rise to prominence. You know, it is Rustin, who makes King, the national figure that he becomes after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, you can just see it in the newspapers, it is Rust, as he is taking this local, dramatic local story and turning it into a national story because he was a brilliant, brilliant political organizer. And it is Rustin, who then serves as the kind of organizational anchor along with Ella Baker, who is a friend and colleague of his-

SM: 1:26:47
Yeah, one of the, I am very pleased that you talked a lot about Byard Rustin in your book. There is a long time that he was kind of a forgotten man, he was bad. Some people thought he was a bad man, because he was a communist. He was gay, I mean all this other stuff. And he is from Westchester, which is where I live. And, and so and we had a national tribute to him when I was working at Westchester University. But you, you did a great job of putting him in his role, not only with the march on Washington, but in other areas. Could you talk to us a little bit about why Byard Rustin is important when you talk about the (19)60s?

KB: 1:28:47
-in New York City political circles, who then give the substance to the organizing work that the civil rights movement, King's brand, strand of the Civil Rights Movement does. King is a, not a great organizer, but he had really great organizers behind him, and Rustin as a theorist of the movement, and as an organizer of the movement really gives that southern movement much of its shape. Excellent. Yeah, he is, they named the high school after him in Westchester but the battle, the name that, was a battle.

SM: 1:28:47
Right.

KB: 1:29:23
I can imagine what do you think was the bigger part of the battle, his radicalism or the fact that he was gay.

SM: 1:29:28
I think it was, that he was, some people, I think it was because he was gay, and also because he was a communist. And, and but finally I-I went to some of the meetings. I actually stood up once and said some things, but I just sat there. I was in amazement that, but they finally did it and, and, and now Brother Outsiders are being shown all over the country, you know, the film.

KB: 1:29:54
Yeah.

SM: 1:29:54
And Walter Nago, who I am close friend of, it was his partner and Walter goes, to film and shown. And so he is finally getting the recognition he deserved 40 years ago, so-

KB: 1:30:06
Yep, exactly.

SM: 1:30:08
Now, two last questions up. Was there one person in the (19)60s that you personally liked above everybody else? And is there one that you dislike?

KB: 1:30:20
Oh, that I dislike? [laughs] I think I mean, I know this is a cliché answer. But, it is worth acknowledging, I will just acknowledge that I have just such enormous admiration for Martin Luther King. And I think, and I think it is because he was a flawed human being who, but who also upheld these kind of extraordinary principles. And so, you know, I know that is a cliché answer, but I think it is an honest one. Someone who I really, really dislike, hm, and there is a lot of candidates for sure.

SM: 1:31:11
[laughs]

KB: 1:31:14
Who would I put at the top of that list? Oh, that is a tough question. I do not know, I would have to think about that one.

SM: 1:31:23
All right. Well, if had come up with it let me know. [laughter]

KB: 1:31:26
You have got a deal.

SM: 1:31:27
One thing, when we started the interview, I think, we did not, something cut off at the very beginning, which was when you were talking about, could you just redo again, your growing up years, I got your college experience-

KB: 1:31:39
Oh, sure.

SM: 1:31:40
-just your-your growing up years, and that, that early years, those early years?

KB: 1:31:44
Sure, so as I mentioned before, I was born in Detroit, Michigan, in October of 1960. To be exact, I was born on the same day as the second Nixon Kennedy debate. And I grew up in Detroit, in an all-white neighborhood in Detroit that was kind of lower middle class, upper working-class neighborhood. I went to the, my neighborhood's parochial schools for grade school and high school. I did not mention that. But I will add that when I was in my teenage years, the neighborhood that I thought of so much as, as my home, underwent the dramatic racial change of white flight. And living through that I think, also had a really big, left a really big mark and my sense of the racial, the cost of American race, one part of the enormous cost of American racism.

SM: 1:32:44
All right, and my very last question is this. And I have been doing this now for my last 15 interviews.

KB: 1:32:49
[chuckles]

SM: 1:32:50
And what is a message you would like to relate to people who listen to this lecture, who will be hearing it 50 years from now, for generations yet unborn, long after we were gone? What would you like to say to them?

KB: 1:33:07
I think what makes the 1960s such an important and compelling period in American history, is that maybe a minority of, undoubtedly a minority of Americans believed enough in the promise of this nation, to demand that it be, that promise be fulfilled. And, they did not manage to do that. They did not manage to make it all the way to fulfilling that promise. And in some ways, the dynamics of the 1960s helped in the long run to move America even farther from that promise. But they believed enough in this nation, to take seriously the promise that it made in its founding documents, and to believe that they could through their own acts of courage, and sometimes enormous sacrifice, make the nation, move the nation closer to that promise. And that is an enormously important thing.

SM: 1:34:23
Very good, Dr. Boyle. I want to thank Dr. KB: for being interviewed today about his book, "The Shattering: America in the 1960s." It is a winning book. And I think I mentioned to you, Dr., Dr. Boyle that Dr. Nieman who was the Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost who is going back to the history department in a year, he is writing a book right now. So he will be away for a year but, he is pushing this book to be one of the books that is going to be used for the (19)60s course.

KB: 1:34:59
Oh, cool, as he should.

SM: 1:35:00
I am not sure if I have not seen Dr. Nieman since he announced he was leaving as Provost because he is working on his own book now but you know, I do not know if you know Dr. Daniel Nieman he is, race is a very big issue in his career. He is, you can look him up. He is a tremendous scholar. He loves Abraham Lincoln. And he, he was the dean of the school at the time, we started this Center for the Study of the (19)60s. So well I want to thank you again, I am going to turn this off and then give you final instructions. Thanks.

(End of Interview)

22 June 2022

Stephen McKiernan

Dr. Kevin Boyle

Dr. Kevin Boyle, a native of Detroit, Michigan, is an author and the William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University, with a particular interest in modern American social movements. Dr. Boyle is the author of The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945-1968, and Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, as well as several books and articles. He is currently at work on The Splendid Dead, a micro-history of political extremism and repression in the early twentieth century. He received his Bachelor's degree from the University of Detroit, and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

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22 June 2022

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Boomer generation; Movements; 1960s; Vietnam war; Anti-war movement; Activism; Americans; Civil Rights Movement, Radicalism, Martin Luther King.