[BLANK_AUDIO] Hi, welcome back. This is the week in which the Cold War decays. It's already beginning to decay in the middle of the 1960s, as the Cold War settling into its second decade seems to become increasingly routine. Both sides seem to be settling down for a long conflict. They've stepped back from the brink in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and now there's almost a sense of superpowers want to regularize the conflict, make it just a constant ordinary part of everyday life. It's interesting to see the way popular culture is reacting to this by the early 1960s: books coming out beginning of the �60s like 1962, movies coming out in 1964. Take this one for example: a movie from 1964 from an earlier book. This is about a nuclear crisis, but in the crisis the Soviets aren't the villains. The American's aren't the heroes or the villains. Instead, both superpowers find themselves trapped by the malfunctions of their own thermonuclear machines. Here's another angle, taken from a 1962 book that was made into a 1964 movie called Seven Days in May. This one stars Burt Lancaster, playing an Air Force chief of staff, inspired by the example of the charismatic and aggressive general Curtis LeMay, in which Lancaster, in some ways the most formidably competent in the whole movie, is plotting to try to take over the United States with a military coup in order to keep the president from signing an arms control treaty with the Soviets. Or this movie, this classic satire, which also comes out around 1964-1965, in which the nuclear buildup is almost seen as a form of collective insanity, really only a fit subject for satire and the darkest of dark humor. In Europe, a settlement is emerging. As I said last week, the Soviets have given up efforts to change the status quo in Europe. There's a slow thaw there, that by the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, a set of agreements, agreeing to persevere the new status quo of a divided Europe. And in this routine Cold War, the dominant role is being played by the national security states of both sides. And these national security states, with their large Cold War bureaucracies, increasingly seem to blur into the managerial state, in a way that kind of managerial state that James Burnham was writing about back in the 1940s. The managerial state in which giant government bureaucracies, giant corporate bureaucracies, hierarchies are in charge of everything. This is certainly the way it feels like to a lot of people in the affluent society of the United States and Western Europe. So if you were an American in 1953, you could pick up this issue of Time magazine and there on the cover is the CEO of Procter and Gamble: Neil McElroy. You see the caption: He Duz... That's a laundry soap made by Procter and Gamble. The dishes with Tide, laundry detergent, of Joy dishwashing liquid. And Procter and Gamble is sponsoring radio and television shows and so on. So, flash forward five years later. It's 1958. You pick up another issue of Time Magazine, and wait, there's Neil McElory again, but now, he's the Secretary of Defense, with the mighty shield of American arms displayed in the background of this painting. Or Americans might have read, at the end of the 1950s, about a bold, enterprising head of the Ford Motor Company, one of the big three auto manufacturers, a man named Robert McNamara. Then, a few years later, here's the same Robert McNamara, he's now the Secretary of Defense in 1961. But flip over to the socialist countries, they also see a managerial state. Here for example is a standard depiction of the leadership of the Soviet Union in the 1960s. Any Soviet citizen from that era would recognize a photograph like that instantly. The gray, almost faceless individuals of the Soviet Politburo. Indeed you almost don't even need to know which communist government is being depicted here, photographs like this could stand in for all of them, all providing guidance to various government ministries on behalf of the party. This managerial state is being challenged in the 1960s, from several angles. It's being challenged on the communist side by the more revolutionary communism represented by someone like Mao Zedong. Mao Zedong often feels like he's leading a war, not only against the recalcitrant countryside, he's leading a war against his own powerful ministries who are sapping zeal from the revolution, that zeal captured in a poster like this one. You see all the archetypes here of Chinese Communist progress, the engineer, the soldier, the worker holding his Red Book with all the sayings of Mao Zedong. The woman worker. The graduate student or young scientist. The young student. The bridge to the future. The jet aircraft flying ahead. Meanwhile a lot of the government of China is actually being managed by men like this one, Liu Shao-Chi. In this Time Magazine illustration of 1959, you see the caption: Work, Purges, Disillusionment. Liu Shao-Chi, pensive, in the background of overseeing a whole lot of different worker ants with their wrenches and red flags. But that wasn't the only kind of challenge. There is also a challenge against the stifling hierarchies, conventions, norms of this age of managerial conformity, a desire for liberation, personal liberation, cultural liberation, a renewed push for the liberation of women, from conventional social roles. For instance, this best seller of 1962, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Heller was veteran of World War II. He'd been in a B-25 bomber squadron serving in Italy. This is, in a way, a novel based on his World War II experience. But it's, not a conventional war novel at all. The enemy never really appears. Indeed, the enemy is the military Bureaucracy: insane, plotting, throwing the bomber crews into more meaningless missions in which they might get killed. The real enemy of Heller's book is the managerial state itself. Or take this book, also published in 1962, Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. Here the young husband, young wife, wonderful couple full of dreams in college, romantic ideals. They find themselves settling in suburbia. The man's got his job working for an ad agency in Manhattan. Meaning seems to be draining out of their lives. It turns into personal crises as the structures of their society are crushing the life out of this marriage. By the way, this book was made recently into a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. When I talk about books like Joseph Heller's Catch 22, or Yates' Revolutionary Road, we're talking about social, literary, and intellectual challenges to that managerial state. Now I'd like to go past that a little bit. What I'd like to focus on now is what I'm calling a Rights Revolution, one that really starts taking off in the 1960s and then becomes much larger, expanding into the 1970s. Sometimes historians will talk about a Rights Revolution, talking about human rights and the rise of that in the 1970s. My argument is different. My argument actually is that the origins of the Rights Revolution is both domestic and international at the same time. The United States plays a catalytic role in it. And it partly has to do with all the civil rights turmoil in the United States in the 1960s, that then changes the way people think about rights in ways that spill over into world affairs too. So stay with me and let me explain a little bit more about what I mean. So you all know there was a big push to get civil rights for African Americans, especially in the 1950s and then coming to a climax during the 1960s. One of the results are laws that are passed that say that government cannot discriminate against black people based on their race. Well what do we mean by government discrimination? Well, segregation of the public schools. That's government discrimination. Segregation of the bus system. That's government discrimination. You're all clear then, civil rights and government discrimination. But what happens in the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 is the passage of a law saying that private firms, individuals, cannot discriminate against African Americans in employment just based on race. You can't refuse to hire someone because they're black. You can't refuse to hire someone because they're Hispanic. Think now about the extension of government power that's implied by such an ambitious law. Now you've passed a law saying that private individuals in their businesses, their restaurant, their barber shop, their accounting firm, their brokerage house, their unit of a big corporation, none of them can discriminate based on race. You can scrutinize their hiring decisions, their promotion decisions, their wage rates, to see if there's been discrimination. You're covering now millions of people in many situations, extending civil rights to what they have to do in their social relations with each other, the social relations that make up a lot of their lives, day in and day out. This is enormous extension of the scope of government power, it's an enormous extension empowering private individuals to litigate in courts to protect their rights. These American anti-discrimination laws will set precedents that are followed in much of the world, beginning in Europe, spreading through the 1970s. For example, Britain adopts its own anti-discrimination and employment laws pretty extensively in the 1970s, and then beyond even to parts of Asia and so on around the world. Just to show you how broad this became, in the American precedent, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, there was also a provision that said that you can't discriminate based on gender either. Based on sex. Actually, that provision was put into the Civil Rights Act of 1964 somewhat mischievously. A senator who was opposed to the bill, a Southern senator, hoped he would sabotage the bill by expanding it to prohibit gender discrimination too. He thought that that idea was so absurd that it would doom the bill to defeat in the Congress. [LAUGH] He was mistaken. The bill passed. The anti-discrimination provision against gender discrimination in employment passed as well, extending the scope of this much further. My point is not just about the literal scope of a particular bill in America. It's about the symbolic power of doing that. The sense of here are what my rights are. Here are the way I can defend my rights. Precedents that are being set and followed around the world begin to change peoples� expectations about what government should do to defend their rights. That's part of what I think is the Rights Revolution. And you can see why I see this as a kind of challenge against the concept of a managerial state in which the big state is allied with the big business, because here's now a whole set of expectations in which individuals think that they can use the power of the state as a bludgeon against big business, to force businesses to honor their rights. Now there was a huge backlash against this extension, of state power and this assertion of rights, and that backlash was felt in American politics in the 1960s and in the 1970s and even frames a lot of American politics today. Which side are you on in the Rights Revolution? Do you think government has extended its power and its regulatory scope too broadly? You think individual rights are being adequately respected? Are you grateful for the changes in society that the Rights Revolution has brought about? These are the kinds of things people argue about. My purpose as a historian is not to take a side in this argument. It's to show you though that this argument is an enormously significant development, not just in the history of the United States but in the history of the world. Another challenge to the managerial state are more formal calls for freedom, including struggles with the assertion of civil rights. Not just from black Americans but from minorities of all kinds who feel that the managerial state, whether that's corporations or big unions, are all pushing them to the margins, discriminating against them, favoring the people who are already on the inside. What's interesting is to notice the scope of this argument, this is not just a political argument, it's an argument being waged about society and its norms. About culture, about everyday life. And versions of this argument, seem to be playing out all over the world, especially in the famous year of disruption: 1968. Let's look at some scenes from 1968. This one, Prague 1968. The Czech people are trying to throw out Soviet dominated communist rule. Instead Soviet tanks invade Czechoslovakia, crush the dissident government, and reinstate the rule of orthodox communists. Or over here, in Paris, in the spring of 1968: a rebellion against the structures of the French Fifth Republic, of President De Gaulle, but it's also a rebellion against the big institutions of French life, Inspired, too, by rebellion against the Cold War itself, America and Vietnam. And America in Vietnam is certainly a cause for all the Americans protesting in this picture. And the protests are spreading against the Mexican government as well, the sense that its promise of democratic socialism has just decayed into another kind of government of cronies helping each other out, students organizing in the street, armored cars coming in to put them down. Or here, in China, Mao himself is leading the revolution against Chinese institutions, inspiring his Red Guards, his armies of mobilized youth, to attack the aging intellectuals and managers who are now, he argues, obstructing the course of the revolution. Here you see some of these individuals being paraded and humiliated before the crowds. So as you look back at all this turmoil in the late 1960s, and especially in 1968, well what are the questions about all of this? For example, I could give you an exam with this question: Describe the leading common causes of the Great Disruption. If you were going to answer this exam questions, you might have to think about this causal problem, local versus transnational. For instance, you could have a story about why there's unrest in the United States: great story in American history, all about civil rights, Vietnam war protests, unhappy youth, but what about Paris, and Prague, and London? Or are we saying those are all just completely independent phenomena and that 1968 is just a series of coincidences? So, what portion of these causes are local, what portion of them are common and transnational? It's a tough problem. Here's another tough problem. If they are transnational, if there is some connection between Prague and America, well, what is that connection? How do we define it? So let's develop some hypotheses, playing with these why questions. For instance, Hypothesis #1: We could say, you know, the situation in China, that really is different. Mao's leading this really extraordinary kind of revolution against his own government. So you have one set of causal explanations for China and then another set that applies to some of these other countries. Or try out this hypothesis: Millions of people had, as I put it here, been living on the slopes of the quiet volcano. That is, they'd been living under the shadow of potentially imminent world war for decades. Just think about the effects of that, just kind of the existential unease that would give you, and as time passes, as that becomes more routine, a reaction against that, a reaction against that kind of world of permanent conflict. Here's a third hypothesis we could bring into play: students. Oh, but notice, in a lot of these different countries, students are key actors in the revolutionary unrest. Well what is it about students that makes them such a source of unrest in the late 1960s? Well, think about that. First of all, there's just the infrastructure of a lot of new universities. Many of these universities are only a generation old. For the first time, a lot of young people are being gathered together in the tens of thousands, given the opportunities to mobilize in that structured environment. They are also being empowered with a vocabulary of mobilization. They're being exposed to a lot of ideas about alienation, about the problems of the managerial state, that allows them to form an ideology to challenge the managerial state, combined with the infrastructure that allows them to get together and do it. And it's hard for some of these societies to attack their own young people. Try out another hypothesis, a fourth one. There's a lot of turmoil in the United States: The civil rights struggle, which then develops in the mid-1960s into urban riots in major American cities, New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, a sense a public order breaking down. The Vietnam War going on all along with this. So, American turmoil. The Vietnam War becoming a catalyst that sets off broader challenges to the managerial state. People around the world, inspired by and noticing what's happening in the United States, reacting to Vietnam as a catalyst because their countries are also involved, in greater or lesser degrees, in the Cold War struggle, too. So you can look at all these hypotheses, and maybe the overall conclusion is some mixture of these, or maybe a couple of others that you're going to think of and write about that I haven't thought of. But the most interesting next chapter is that the protestors do not overturn society. In fact, what happens is that a lot of society reacts with fear to the breakdown of public order. What then happens is the societies become more polarized, as the forces of order strike back. The forces of reaction gain power. So, for instance, in China, their secret years of terror begin to get out of hand. You remember that fellow I told you about, Liu Shaoqi. The man who was doing so much to actually manage China's government. Here he is beginning of the 1960s. Here is the way Liu Shaoqi is depicted in a Cultural Revolution poster. If you're having trouble finding Liu Shaoqi in this poster, that's Liu Shaoqi right there. And what the message of this poster is saying is: Expel the renegade, traitor, and scab Liu Shaoqi from the Party. Liu Shaoqi will be expelled from the party, and then he'll die, crippled by the injuries he suffered as a result of the abuse he's received. But Mao himself begins to realize that by tearing the government apart, everything is spinning out of control. Indeed, China is veering to the point of war with the Soviet Union, clashes on the border with the Soviet Union. The Soviets, alarmed by what they see going on in China, are even contemplating the possibility of a preventive war before China, which has now tested its own nuclear weapons, gets too many of them. In the United States, there's some big decisions made about Vietnam, too. In 1968, the Johnson administration finally decides it's reached the breaking point. It can't escalate the war anymore. The requests of the generals to deploy 200,000 more soldiers to Vietnam are turned down. The Johnson administration leaves office, anti-war dissidents do not replace it. Instead, it's replaced by Richard Nixon. The dilemma Nixon faces, is how does he try to bring the war to a close. In 1969, he looks really hard at two options. One is to escalate the war, maybe even by bringing American troops up north to make the North stop its encroachments into South Vietnam. Another option, though, is to slowly Vietnamize the war: get the American troops out, turn over the war as much as possible to American-supplied troops of the South Vietnamese army. That's what his defense secretary, Melvin Laird, wants, and, at the end of 1969, that's what Nixon wants, too. He keeps trying to find some ways to get some leverage, to get the North Vietnamese to quit. He launches an invasion into neutral Cambodia. He launches intensified air attacks. But at this point, in the early 1970s, he's just trying to salvage a peace the doesn't look like a humiliating retreat for the United States. His is an administration of retrenchment, consolidation. The same goes for the administration of this man, Leonid Brezhnev in the Soviet Union. During the 1960s the Soviets hugely increased their military power. They increasingly feel that they are now roughly equivalent to the United States in military power. They want recognition as a full equal. But Brezhnev increasingly, in super power relations, wants to preserve a status quo of super power status. So Nixon adopts a Nixon Doctrine, which means that in Asia, and elsewhere, increasingly, he wants to turn over the responsibilities of local defense to local armies backed by American assistance. Brezhnev, meanwhile, is adopting his own version of the Brezhnev Doctrine: That which is part of the Soviet Bloc will remain part of the Soviet Bloc, places like Czechoslovakia that want to secede from the Empire will be forced back in. Mao too begins moving towards retrenchment. He receives a bad shock in 1971 when one of his closest revolutionary allies, a man named Lin Biao, actually seeks to defect to the Soviet Union. His aircraft mysteriously crashes in China, killing him and those on board, in 1971. Mao increasingly worried about the Soviet Union, as being a more dangerous enemy than the United States, which he see withdrawing from Vietnam, decides that he'll play the game of having an opening with the United States, building up a relationship through the United States that can offset the threat he feels from the Soviet Union. I know that in American history, this is usually portrayed as Nixon's opening to China, but the real variable in creating that opening came from the Chinese side. It was Mao's choice more than Nixon's. By the early 1970s, it looks like the forces of reaction, of restored order, are struggling to gain the upper hand. We'll see how they do with that in our next discussion. See you then.
