Reading the GD thread “Did the Vietnam War destroy the 50s culture and values?” I had a flash back memory, long dormant (I’m now 56), of reading or hearing about much unrest and rioting in American universities during the latter half of that decade. Nothing I’ve read or heard since supports that memory.
The question: Were American universities peaceful during the decade of the 50s?
There was no unrest and certainly no rioting on U.S. campuses prior to 1964.
The earliest event (aside from Spring break) would have been the Free Speech movement that started on the Berkley campus of the University of California in 1964. It began with students who had returned from civil disobedience activities in the South setting up informational and fund-raising tables at one entrance to the campus on what was perceivedto be city property. The university made the point that they were actually on university property, that no fund-raising was permitted on campus (aside from the school chapters of the Republican and Democratic Parties) according to existing rules, and that they were going to have to close down their “information tables.” Based on their experience in civil disobedience in the South, a number of students tried first to negotiate better deals and later resorted to sit-ins and protests.
(A search of Wikipedia and the web on “Free Speech movement” will bring up a ton of history on the topic.)
Earlier than that, the only riots I could recall were those in 1962 when people outside the University of Mississippi (although I’m sure it included students) protested the Federal order to permit James Meredith to enroll and attend classes.
(It should be noted that there were Southern schools that were desegregated prior to Ole Miss. I think the University of Virginia began to (grudgingly) accept blacks in 1955. Associated with those enrollments were occasional bouts of violence, generally directed at the students, but they were individual actions, not school-wide activities.)
Campuses were centers of the of the anti-War Movement.
Here is an overall link butUniversity of Michigan and Berkely were all iconic protests.
There was campus protetsts across most of the Country and Bush at Harvard seeing the protests (he favored the war) was given as an important moment in his life in the film of his life given at teh Republican National Convention in 2000.
Really though the shootings of protestors at a small univeristy, Kent State in Ohio was the best place to think about the campus protests in a GQ way because After Kent State there was a National Campus strike invoving 200 colleges, tear gas used at many places including at the University of Maryland. Kent State didn’t start campus unrest it but it was an important campus event
That’s certainly not true. Students at Harvard rioted in 1849 during the inauguration of President Sparks.
True, but the question was in regards to unrest in the 1950s.
The earliest protests against the Vietnam War did not occur until 1964. In June of 1963, the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, committed suicide by burning himself alive in Saigon, protesting anti-Buddhist persecution by the Catholic Diem brothers. Following that act, South Vietnamese began to publicly protest the Diem regime (not the war) and by that fall, the U.S. allowed that regime to be overthrown. From that point, voices in the U.S. began to question our involvement, but the first actual (small and peaceful) protests (more often essays than speeches) only began to appear in the summer of 1964 and did not become active protests (sparked, in part, by Berkley’s Free Speech Movement), until the summer of 1965.
Of course, '49 was also before the '50s, whioch was the question in the OP.
There have actually been separate riots at various college campuses throughout U.S. history, but they were rarely national in character–note that your example addressed only the president of Harvard–and none of them were part of any serious movement in the 1950s.
Tomndebb mentioned the 1964 Berkeley free speech movement. Here’s a bit of background on that:
Free Speech Movement
The 50’s and early 60’s were were odd times indeed on US campuses.
You are right I misread the OP in light of the links reference to Vietnam. Nevermind.
Social protest at universities does have a long tradition. Joseph Lash’s accounts of his friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt mention her efforts to bring about an accord between far-Left student groups and the New Deal (Lash started out as one of the student protesters.) However, an assortment of writers across the spectrum suggest that 1950s American campuses were peculiarly uninterested in any sort of activism.
That said, there was a significant change in American attitudes towards established institutions and values starting around 1965, and associated as time passed with opposition to the war in Vietnam.
So in one sense Flying Dutchman’s memory (and my own; I have only a couple years on him) is accurate – but in the larger historical scale of things: (a) The 1945-65 period was an unusual quiet period in what had historically been a minor tradition of college social activism, and (b) what followed it was unusually widespread, unusually strongly pressed, and leading to a rather unprecedented change in attitudes and values.
There’s a wonderful book by Thai Jones called A Radical Line. His family has been on the vanguard of lefty social protest for about the past 80 years.
There has always been an element of radical protest at colleges and universities (Defenestration of Prague, anyone?), but it didn’t become a staple of the pop culture zeitgeist until the mid-late 60s.