In Greetings (Brian De Palma, 1968), twenty-something Lloyd Clay (Gerrit
Graham) is a Kennedy assassination enthusiast who also happens to be a hippie and draft avoider. He spends his days pouring over photographs of Dealey Plaza and analyzing the Zapruder film. Lloyd is obsessed with proving the “second gunman” conspiracy theory correct. In a scene meant to be funny, he charts the coroner’s description of the
president’s fatal wounds onto his sleeping girlfriend. She is turned into a living diagram of Kennedy’s gruesome death, a memento mori of sorts, as Lloyd painstakingly copies the markers of the president’s murder on to her naked body. Speaking directly to the camera, he talks the audience through his “autopsy,” explaining how bullet trajectories and carefully measured entrance wounds prove that Lee Harvey Oswald could not have acted alone.
What Lloyd does not do in these scenes is speak of the dead president as anything other than that, a dead president—John F. Kennedy’s persona is excised. The question of why Lloyd is obsessed with Kennedy’s assassination is never answered. In Greetings, Kennedy exists in Lloyd’s paranoiac realm, where the president’s violent death extinguishes all other discourse on the man and what he may have represented to the nation and, most especially, Lloyd’s generation. There is no reference to the president’s politics, no talk of the New Frontier or the Peace Corps; and there is no mention, or allusion to, Kennedy’s position as the exemplar of Cold War masculinity and early hero of the New Left. Kennedy’s association with American youth, particularly with young
men, is effectively disconnected in a film aimed at New Left and countercultural audiences.
This gulf between the young New Left and the liberal leaders of only a few years gone by is echoed in the thoughts of Students for a Democrat Society (SDS) president Tom Hayden. Recalling he first met Kennedy at an impromptu speech for students in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Hayden remembers the then-presidential candidate talked of
community-mindedness and the powerful potential of youth in creating national change.1 Hayden was intrigued by the Peace Corps, and hopeful about Kennedy’s presidential campaign.2 In the early 1960s, Kennedy and his circle were supportive of the burgeoning student movement, giving it legitimacy via the New Frontier, the Peace Corps and the National Student Association (NSA). Yet for Hayden and many of his Movement comrades, disenchantment set in when it was discovered the CIA underwrote the NSA. Hayden came to believe the president and his advisers had had an ulterior motive: “what he was doing, or the forces around him were doing, was trying to take advantage of the discontent of youth and channel it into certain directions that could be beneficial to the image of the U.S.”3 The young activist was not persuaded by Kennedy’s call to action for American youth as a method for checking Soviet advances. The disillusion was so
complete that when Hayden heard of the president’s death, he was not crushed by the news. “The reason I wasn’t so shattered by the killing of Kennedy himself,” Hayden said
1 Tim Findley, “Tom Hayden: Rolling Stone Interview, Part 1,” Rolling Stone, October 26, 1972, 38. 2 Tom Hayden, Rebellion and Repression: Testimony by Tom Hayden before the National Commission on
the Causes and Prevention of Violence, and the House Un-American Activities Committee (New York: Meridian Books, 1969), 22.
in 1972, “is that a certain distance had set in between a lot of us and Kennedy that came from the experience from 1960 to 1963.”4
Coming of age in an era of liberal ascendancy, young men of the New Left like Tom Hayden were exposed to the triumph of liberal elite masculinity and were a party to its consequences. For Hayden and his cohort, the Vietnam War would quickly become the touchstone for all that was wrong with liberalism, the American system—and American manhood. Along with the war, the nation’s socio-cultural and political climate
concretized the fault lines between Cold War liberals and their New Left sons. These sons took up the project of challenging their fathers’ Cold Warrior ideals. The New Left— male and female—philosophized on the nation’s ills and established a countrywide movement that worked to see their methods, and hopes, come to fruition.
This chapter focuses on the male New Left’s apparent rejection of the prevailing models of Cold War masculinity. The New Left’s pursuit of authenticity sparked a challenge to traditional gender roles. The generational and ideological foment which emerged in the 1960s provided an opportunity to explore different articulations of American masculinity.5 These new masculine narratives created at least two possible paths. The Civil Rights movement inspired the first route. The embrace of nonviolence by the Civil Rights movement was a powerful inspiration for New Leftists, both in strategy and philosophy. Concomitant to Civil Rights activism, the pacifist stance of the anti-war movement provided the structure for a general critique of violence. In this convergence
4 Findley, 40.
5 Linda E. Boose, “Techno-Muscularity and the ‘Boy Eternal’: From the Quagmire to the Gulf,” in
Gendering War Talk, ed. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 91.
lay the possibility for a truly radical interrogation of gender ideology. A second path for the male New Left narrative was equally viable. Not all men in the New Left affirmed the legitimacy of nonviolence, and not all were prepared to renounce violence as a
component of their desired definition of New Left manhood. These men often shared the Cold War liberal view of gender relations and the necessity of violence. This constancy was based on a need to prove or maintain a foothold in the traditions of American manhood via compensatory violence. It was also seen as the ostensibly “natural”
expression of a masculinity that thrived on aggression and virility. This path was strongly influenced by the men some in the male New Left chose as their hero-mentors, including radical, Left-leaning writer Norman Mailer, as well as militant, hypermasculine voices coming from the Black Power movement such as Eldridge Cleaver.
The chapter begins by briefly considering the Civil Rights, anti-war and draft resistance movements. The Civil Rights movement’s articulation of nonviolence inspired many New Leftists to action. It foregrounded the connectedness of violence, power and, in particular, white manhood by calling attention to the racialized masculinism
emboldening the cruel and inhumane treatment of Civil Rights protesters. The anti-war movement and its critique of violence are avenues to identify the ways in which some males in the New Left considered new masculine narratives. This includes a short overview of the draft resistance movement as a place where anti-violence sentiment and the challenge of confronting traditional masculine identities often clashed. This reveals the sexism and heteronormativity that undergirded the Movement even as new definitions of New Left manhood were sought.
Several case studies will follow the thread of the liberal-New Left gender-violence continuum. Author-journalist Norman Mailer was a controversial but important figure in radical and mainstream circles. Investigating Mailer’s interaction with young radicals and some of his works, especially The Armies of the Night (1968), shows the centrality of violence and virile masculinity as vital themes that connected with a number of New Left males.6 The second case study follows the first, in that it looks to the writings of New Left leaders such as Tom Hayden (Rebellion and Repression, 1969), Abbie Hoffman (Revolution for the Hell of It, 1968) and Jerry Rubin (Do It!, 1970).7 Reading their contemporary words against the grain will lay bare these men’s thoughts on violence, their own gender and sexuality, and the character of their interactions with women. The chapter concludes by revisiting Greetings. The film will be considered from the point of view of its intended audience: New Left and countercultural youth. As a reflection of its audience, Greetings represents the casualness of the era’s sexism and the place of violence in the life of many young American males.
The Male New Left and Masculinity
In 1966, actor-turned-Republican-gubernatorial-candidate Ronald Reagan quipped to a crowd in Milwaukee: “We have some hippies in California. For those of you who don’t know what a hippie is, he’s a fellow who has hair like Tarzan, walks like Jane and smells like Cheetah.”8 This is exactly how much of “straight” America sized up the men
6 Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night: History as Novel, The Novel as History (New York: Plume, [1968]
1994.
7 Abbie Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It (New York: Dial Press, 1968); Jerry Rubin, Do It: Scenarios
of the Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970).
in the New Left and counterculture.9 Long hair, love beads and non-traditional, colourful apparel were the hallmarks of the youth movement in the 1960s—for women and men alike. These cosmetic alterations from the staid Establishment norm of crew cuts, sports jackets and button-downs were enough for one contemporary cultural critic to be concerned for the “dubious masculinity” of those young men wearing “frilly Edwardian clothes,” and warnings of the possibility of widespread societal turmoil from the
“depolarization of sex roles.”10 Indeed, the daisy-bedecked Love Child seems to have become the vainglorious avatar for the Movement in public memory and popular culture, usurping, to a certain degree, the historical narrative of anti-war/peace activists and radicals—each with their own influences and couture.
Many in the male New Left looked nothing like the debonair figures cut by John F. Kennedy and Cary Grant only a few years before. These young men were more Tarzan than Roger Thornhill, and they knew it. Long hair was revolutionary, argued Jerry Rubin, a New Left and Youth International Party leader: “Long hair is the beginning of our liberation from the sexual oppression that underlies this whole military society.”11 Adopting longer hair lengths, paisley prints and billowy clothes was one of the easiest ways to repudiate the Establishment’s unbending association of manliness with
9 In a 1968 Chicago Tribune piece, members of several of the city’s psychedelic rock groups discuss their
eccentric, countercultural clothing styles, noting that their masculinity is not determined by their attire, but that strange looks from the public were not outside the norm. Sel Erder Yackley, “Sure, They’re Colorful— But, Why Not?,” Chicago Tribune, April 14, 1968, E1.
10 David Allyn, Make Love Not War, The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History (Boston: Little, Brown
and Co., 2000), 159.
“whiteness and suburban respectability.”12 Androgynous styles were a powerful
expression of this rejection, an obvious challenge to gender roles and the deeply ingrained heteronormativity of mainstream U.S.A.13
The unmistakeable act of participating in the Movement’s ideological fashion revolution raised the possibility of a deeper confrontation with masculinism and the violence inherent in American manliness. However, in many respects, the
“transcendence” androgyny offered could be marred by what for many in the male New Left and counterculture were attendant fears of emasculation. This could be especially worrisome for young men whose refusal to follow their fathers’ martial journey to
manhood left their manliness and patriotism in limbo.14 Thus, while dressing the part was the simplest way to challenge gender norms, it was also the most obvious and superficial, and not always the most sincere.15
The quest for racial equality in the post-World War II United States proved to be a wellspring of inspiration for a host of other groups and movements, each fighting for their own version of social and political justice. Having been restricted from traditional
avenues of voicing dissent at the political and legislative levels, African Americans developed alternative strategies to fight for racial equality. At the heart of the Civil Rights
12 Tom Hodgdon’s Manhood in the Age of Aquarius: Masculinity in Two Countercultural Communities,
1965–83 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 40.
13 Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (Garden
City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983), 107; David Savran, Taking It Like A Man: White Masculinity, Masochism and Contemporary American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 124.
14 Savran, 124; Allyn, 159.
15 The contradictions between the male New Left’s articulation of masculinity and the masculinity many in
movement’s ideology and methodology was an “egalitarian individualism” based on nonviolence and direct action.16 Pacifists like A.J. Muste and Bayard Rustin had used non-violent direct action to contest segregation during World War II and carried this strategy forward into the Civil Rights movement of the sixties. Much of the philosophy behind nonviolence was influenced by the teachings of Mohandas Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and bolstered by a growing literature on nonviolent direct action, which by the mid-1960s included instructions for direct action in Civil Rights protest and for nonviolent demonstrations in general.17 Non-violent direct action was put into practice through boycotts, civil disobedience, mass marches and sit-ins, all of which would be adopted by the New Left, and utilized by the anti-war and draft resistance movements in the mid-to-late sixties.18
Many early members of the New Left, like Tom Hayden and his wife, Casey
Hayden, cut their activist teeth working with Civil Rights organizations and had first hand knowledge of the philosophical tenets embraced by key groups such as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a founding institution in the student movement and New Left, was clearly
16 Van Gosse, Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretative History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005),
28.
17 Charles DeBenedetti, An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1990), 42; Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), 86. See Martin Oppenheimer and George Lakey, A Manual for Direct Action: Strategy and Tactics for Civil Rights and All Other Nonviolent Protest Movements (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1964).
18 DeBenedetti, 23; Melvin Small, Antiwarriors: The Vietnam War and the Battle for America’s Hearts and
influenced by the Civil Rights movement. This was reflected in SDS’s Port Huron Statement, written by Hayden in 1962. The organization’s manifesto advocated for “participatory democracy” based on equality, nonviolence and community.19
The New Left had a particularly close bond with SNCC. As the youth wing of the Civil Rights movement, SNCC heavily influenced its white student counterparts. Founded in 1960 as an offshoot of the SCLC, SNCC’s Statement of Purpose underscored the group’s adherence to nonviolence in its work towards a “social order of justice:”
Through nonviolence, courage displaces fear; love transforms hate… Peace dominates war… Love is the central motif of nonviolence… love goes to the extreme; it remains loving and forgiving even in the midst of hostility. It matches the capacity of evil to inflict suffering with an even more enduring capacity to absorb evil, all the while persisting in love.20
Hayden understood that African-American SNCC members had, and would continue to, face more peril than any white student activist, and that this fact must be remembered: “[T]hose Negroes are down there digging in, and in more danger than nearly any student in this American generation has faced…”21 The ties binding SNCC and the New Left were moral and strategic. The white New Left looked to their African-American
associates for guidance and affirmation. This meant heading off to do nonviolent battle in the South under the leadership of SNCC organizer Stokely Carmichael. Yet, it also meant
19 Savran, 111; Gitlin, 128; Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the
1960s, 3d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 177–79.
20 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Statement of Purpose (1960), National Humanities Center
Resource Toolbox, The Making of African American Identity, vol. 3 (1917–68). Accessed September 22, 2014. nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai3/protest/text2/snccstatementofpurpose.pdf.
many would assent to SNCC’s new direction in 1966 when Carmichael announced the group’s strategy in Northern urban ghettos: armed self-defense.22
Self-defense as a revolutionary strategy for Black activists did not gain traction until the late 1960s when government foot-dragging and increasingly violent pushback tested activists’ tolerance and patience. Until that time, nonviolence held potent moral capital on the world stage. Nonviolent direct action put brutal scenes of white hatred on display in such a way that the moral dilemma for white America was how it could ignore the viciousness launched at innocent protesters. Fire hoses and police dogs showed that “black innocence [was] at the mercy of white violence.”23 For African-American men entering their adult years during the days of the Southern Civil Rights campaigns,
nonviolent activism turned into a right of passage into manhood. Working to overcome a vilified and diminished definition of black manliness, African-American male activists looked beyond traditional markers of masculinity, like power and control, to embrace the tenets of participatory democracy and nonviolent action. Reverberating in the words of SNCC’s Statement of Purpose (and echoed in the Port Huron Statement), manhood could be tolerant and humanist, open to “love thine enemy” and sharing leadership duties with female participants. Nonviolence was not passivity—it took fortitude. Frustrating the
22 Isserman and Kazin, 182. Soon after his championing of armed self-defense, Carmichael argued for the
removal of whites from SNCC’s ranks.
23 Laura Browder, Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
violence that was the hallmark of white masculinism, so essentialized by Southern segregationists like Bull Connor and Orval Faubus, was courageous and manly.24
Pacifism, the refusal to engage in violence for any reason, was the lifeblood of the Civil Rights movement and it informed the anti-war movement as well. The pacifist tradition in the United States has long roots, going back as far as Quaker conscientious objection during the American Revolution.25 With such a deep-rooted history, it is not surprising that the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War era was really a broad coalition connecting a wide array of groups and demographics—from Catholic Workers, Old Left communists and New Left radicals, to anti-war veterans and liberal doves. The breadth of the Vietnam War made it an issue with tendrils that reached into every