Financial History Issue 121 (Spring 2017) | Page 17
By Benjamin C. Waterhouse
In the fall of 1964, students at the Uni-
versity of California at Berkeley launched
a series of sit-ins, walk-outs and rallies to
protest the university’s policy prohibiting
political activism on campus grounds.
Young people, joined by like-minded allies
in the area, clashed with police and chal-
lenged the authority of university admin-
istrators and the political establishment
that ran the university system. Berkeley’s
“ free speech movement” rocked the cam-
pus and drew national attention.
Although university leaders eventually
modified their position on campus speech,
the firestorm of activism persisted and
inspired national protests in the years to
come. The critiques that the Free Speech
Movement leveled at the University of Cali-
fornia extended far beyond specific policies,
reflecting instead a fundamental — and gen-
erational — challenge to the power structure
that defined American society.
Specifically, students called out their
educational leaders for complicity in an
anti-democratic, dehumanizing corporate
machine that compelled conformity. At a
campus rally, Berkeley student and civil
rights activist Mario Savio gave voice to
the sense of oppression and helplessness
many young people felt in the early 1960s.
“We have an autocracy which runs this
university,” Savio declared. Student leaders
had asked whether Berkeley’s president,
Clark Kerr, had convinced the university’s
Board of Regents to liberalize the school’s
policies on political activism. Savio contin-
ued: “And the answer we received — from
a well-meaning liberal — was the follow-
ing: He said, ‘Would you ever imagine
the manager of a firm making a statement
publicly in opposition to his board of
directors?’ That’s the answer!”
Savio seized on that comparison
between higher education and the face-
less, bureaucratic corporation.
“Now, I ask you to consider: if this is
a firm, and if the Board of Regents are
the board of directors and if President
Kerr in fact is the manager, then I’ll tell
you something: the faculty are a bunch of
employees, and we’re the raw material!”
Savio’s analogy — which saw the univer-
sity as a corporate machine and students
as raw materials who had thrown their
Mario Salvo addresses a rally at the
University of California at Berkeley, 1965.
bodies upon its inner workings — grew
from a profound sense of unease over the
role of business corporations in American
society. Political activists in the 1960s—
from civil rights advocates to anti-war
protesters to more radical and often vio-
lent groups such as the Weather Under-
ground — viewed the business corporation
as an integral part of the “establishment”
that crippled dissent, promoted imperial-
ism abroad and injustice at home, and sti-
fled free expression. Never removed from
issues of war and social justice, business
was at the heart of the tumult of the 1960s.
Corporate executives came to under-
stand the very real threats to their politi-
cal power, social standing and economic
success that political and social unrest
augured. Business leaders responded to
what they believed were “anti-business”
politics in the 1960s and well into the 1970s
with deliberate action to bolster their sup-
port and institutionalize their influence
with policymakers. Powerful business-
people had always played an important
role in national affairs, but the turmoil of
the 1960s and 1970s created a particularly
powerful moment of mobilization that,
combined with a burgeoning conservative
political movement, had long-lasting con-
sequences for American politics.
Business and Protest
in the Late 1960s
The social unrest that engulfed the United
States had its roots in the civil rights strug-
gle, whose “high phase” of in-the-streets
activism peaked between the mid-1950s
and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. By the
late 1960s, the country had been rocked by
an onslaught of public protests, riots and
political assassinations.
America’s official military involvement
in Vietnam developed over the course of
the late 1950s and early 1960s. By 1968, half
a million American soldiers were fighting
in Southeast Asia, where 58,000 would die
before the United States withdrew com-
pletely in 1973.
The escalation of the war prompted a
powerful and pointed antiwar movement
in the United States, spreading from col-
lege campus “teach-ins” to historic protests
and marches on the Pentagon and White
House. Just as Savio had linked his opposi-
tion to Berkeley’s anti-free speech policy to
a larger critique of corporate culture, so too
did many Vietnam War protesters draw
a clear line between a war they decried as
murderous and imperialistic and the busi-
ness climate that nurtured it.
Invoking Eisenhower’s now-famous
warning about the “military-industrial
complex,” protesters charged that Amer-
ica’s most successful capitalists bore
responsibility for the carnage in Asia. The
nation’s war machine, they argued, gener-
ated military contracts for everything from
ammunition and aircraft to the napalm
that US bombers poured on the Vietnam-
ese jungles and the people who lived there.
Antiwar demonstrators aimed their pro-
tests not only at the military and the gov-
ernment, but also at corporations whom
they labeled as war profiteers. “Why…do
we continue to demonstrate in Washing-
ton as if the core of the problem lay there?
We need to find ways to lay siege to cor-
porations,” one activist wrote late in 1969.
On April 28, 1970, thousands of anti-
war activists converged on the annual
shareholder meeting of the Honeywell
Corporation, an energy-oriented con-
glomerate that manufactured, among
many other products, cluster bombs and
other weapons for the Pentagon. Facing
the jeers and accusations of murderous
complicity from the furious crowd, Hon-
eywell’s president adjourned the meet-
ing after only 14 minutes. Firms such as
Dow Chemical Company, producer of
napalm, also confronted angry protesters,
especially when their corporate recruiters
arrived on college campuses.
Perhaps most tellingly, anti-war pro-
testers even targeted corporations, such as
banks, that lacked any explicit connection
to Vietnam but represented the entire sys-
tem that put profit before people. In the
winter of 1970, protesters near the Univer-
sity of California in Santa Barbara burned
down a branch of Bank of America, whose
very name, at least to the arsonists, evoked
the hubris of capitalist imperialism.
Corporate and political leaders under-
stood that the anties tablishment angst was
particularly strong among young people.
In recent years, historians have shown that
plenty of the “baby boomers” who came of
age in the 1960s were quite conservative
and favored the war, the business estab-
lishment and capitalism in general, but
many corporate executives at the time were
convinced that generational changes were
afflicting the nation’s youth en masse. The
same types of college students who, in the
1950s, headed to stable careers in middle
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