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Tuning Out the New Left and Protest Music: How American Capitalism and
Commercialism Survived the “Eve of Destruction”
In 1955, Pete Seeger asked, “Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing? Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago?” His eventual answer was that war had taken them away, as befits its nature to destroy beauty and human lives. Sixty years later, this question remains relevant if the word “flowers” is replaced with “passion for change.” Many Americans wonder how such verve for progress and social upheaval existed in the 1960s and how students found the courage to hold the dean of Columbia University hostage over policies they found unfair when today such gumption is rarely to be found on college campuses. Even through YouTube footage, the sheer power of Country Joe’s performance of “Fixinto-Die Rag” and Jimi Hendrix’s sonic painting of the national anthem at Woodstock in 1969 still resonates within modern viewers, but the enjoyment of listening to
Kanye West or the Red Hot Chili Peppers rarely translates into direct political or community action. Contemporary Vanderbilt students on the whole recognize the flaws in American society, and yet they take relatively few steps to correct these societal ills, preferring to focus on their academic success, their extracurricular hobbies, or their social circles.
The activists of the New Left and the musicians who shared their views often came from similar backgrounds to today’s collegiate elite, and so the compassion, selflessness, and worldly awareness that underlay the written manifestos and bold, radical actions of those earlier groups are especially admirable. Here were some of

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America’s best and brightest fighting—figuratively at first, and then literally—to tear down the system that had afforded them creature comforts and boundless intellectual opportunity.
And yet they did not succeed. Worse, the societal reforms for which they battled remain to this day shockingly unfulfilled. It is mysterious to wonder what happened to their energy and the messages the activists and the protest musicians sought to deliver, and why they have not flared up so explosively in the nearly five decades since the height of the protests. In the following pages, I will present my answer to these questions: that the one-dimensional limitation of thought and the forces of commercialism, the twin pillars of American capitalist society, winnowed down the messages of broad societal discontent and desire for widespread reform, broadcasting and distorting them into simple anger that could be contained within the crucible of Vietnam. The work of Herbert Marcuse will provide a basis for my analysis of this exact process, and examples of New Left thought and protest music—and how they changed over the course of the decade—will serve as evidence to support my claims.
A brief summary of Herbert Marcuse’s ideas is necessary for proper interpretation of the events of the 1960s discussed in this argument. Marcuse was referred to as the Guru of the New Left, the school of thought underlying the radical protests of the decade (Farr, “Herbert Marcuse”). In his books One-Dimensional Man and Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, he laid out a scintillating critique of modern
Western liberalism and its twin pillars of capitalism and democracy. Rather than

3 lifting humans out of oppression and poverty (as the system claims to do), it actually institutionalizes inequality, provides enough comforts to keep people unconsciousness of their own unfreedom, and limits the scope of rational discourse and criticism of the system.
For Marcuse, the basis of this false utopia lies in the use of natural law as a justification for society’s structure. Natural law is a deeply rooted liberal tenet out of which sprung such ideas as Jefferson’s “inalienable rights” and the social contract formulations of Locke and Rousseau. Marcuse, though, points out that the totalitarian governments of the 1930s used the very same naturalism to support their reigns of oppression and terror, and that natural law is a convenient way to perform an “evasive justification of a contradictory social order” (Negations 13).
When the forces of capitalism push an oligarchy of wealthy businessmen and their allies in the political sphere to the top of this order, the beneficiaries may enact an ethics that justifies everyone’s place in the social hierarchy. Such an artificial creation of natural law, formulated outside the realm of reason, then comes to destroy reason’s ability to pick the system apart, “for it leads to a reinterpretation of the irrational pre-givens as normative ones, which place reason under the heteronomy of the irrational” (Negations 15). The American capitalist system thus becomes self-sustaining, built upon the suppression of the masses’ capabilities for rational thought and criticism of their world. Conception of alternatives to the current societal structure becomes nearly impossible for most people.
With reason’s ability to conquer the oppressive capitalist system now significantly dulled, an additional disincentive for challenging the structure may be

4 introduced: the comforts and high standard of living provided by the economic structure. Marcuse writes, “With technical progress as its instrument, unfreedom— in the sense of man’s subjection to his productive apparatus—is perpetuated and intensified in the form of many liberties and comforts” (One-Dimensional Man 32).
Not only are Americans tethered to the ball and chain of materialism and individualistic visions of a good life, but they are also the creators of the instrument of their enslavement: technology. Machines seem necessary for a high standard of living, but what they really do is take away human autonomy whilst holding up the capitalist system that so represses freedom of thought and action. In this view
Marcuse builds upon the foundation of Marx, who viewed capitalism as the source of oppression of the proletariat, by saying that the very technology of capitalism has augmented the strength of this oppression:
…to the degree to which the established technical apparatus engulfs the public and private existence in all spheres of society—that is, becomes the medium of control and cohesion in a political universe which incorporates the laboring classes—to that degree would the qualitative change involve a change in the technological structure itself (One-Dimensional Man 23).
To the enslaved working and consumer classes, however, nothing seems to be amiss. Due to Western capitalist democracy’s aforementioned ability to rule out any possible alternative societal structures, the use of technology at work and in the home is merely the way of a good life in the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world. Friedrich Engels would call this type of blindness to one’s own enslavement false consciousness, a mistaken method of developing an ideology. Of

5 how this works he wrote, “[man] works with mere thought material which he accepts without examination as the product of thought, he does not investigate further for a more remote process independent of thought; indeed, its origin seems obvious to him, because as all action is produced through the medium of thought it also appears to him to be ultimately based in thought” (“Engels to Franz Mehring”).
In the 1960s, false consciousness manifested itself as the acceptance of the capitalist consumer lifestyle and the accompanying values. The strength of this false consciousness affecting the majority of Americans made it highly difficult for the
New Left to rouse them—and when a greater number of people were finally driven to action by the Vietnam conflict, their own one-dimensional thought would limit the scope of their protest. The messages that the New Left and protest musicians hoped would propel the people to grand societal change would be hopelessly diluted.
In order to gain an appreciation for the magnitude of dilution that took place, it is necessary to first examine the roots of these movements to determine what they were saying (or trying to say) at their most ideologically pure level—before they gained a large following. Only then is it possible to trace the way these ideas were corrupted or, in some cases, reformulated by their sources over the course of the tumultuous 1960s.
Any discussion of the New Left in America must center on the Students for a
Democratic Society (hereafter the SDS). The SDS was never a mainstream political organization. It emerged from the ashes of the Student League for Industrial

Democracy in 1960, and often struggled for recognition on the various campuses where its chapters convened. And yet the organization eventually came to epitomize the protest movements of the 1960s, serving as a think tank for progressive intellectuals and as a source of energy, logistical expertise, and supporters for causes that fell under the wide umbrella of its agenda for social and economic change. A few key moments in the early history of the SDS allowed for its influence to blossom. First, it appointed Alan Haber to serve the national office as
Field Secretary, charging him with building the group’s membership and sparking its energy. Haber, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, became the ideological father of the SDS and established its earliest policies and positions. To ensure that the organization would effect and abet as much social change as possible, Haber focused on the development of alliances with preexisting student groups. He helped to coordinate their efforts on a national scale and becoming directly involved in the field actions they took on behalf of their causes—protests, marches, boycotts, and the like. By tying together various disparate groups, all of whom sought some form of social change, Haber hoped to galvanize their members into a more radical mindset by helping them to perceive the interconnectedness of
America’s social ills. Once they saw their different single issues as parts of a whole, they could begin to work on creating progress at the root level of society.
Kirkpatrick Sale, an independent scholar and leftist author who wrote a seminal
1973 chronicle of the SDS, described this cultivation of radicalism as the SDS’s
“proto-ideology,” and wrote that Haber’s efforts accounted for his organization’s
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7 ability to satisfy students ideologically and band them together in the struggle for a more perfect democracy (26).
Haber also provided the energy behind the SDS’s de facto founding document, the Port Huron Statement. Written by Tom Hayden, it served as a written declaration of the SDS’s issues with, and ideals of, American society, and it laid out goals for accomplishing the organization’s vision. In broad strokes, the Port
Huron Statement pointed out that, as a state, America does not deliver on its promises to be a bastion of democracy and freedom for the world. In particular, the statement attacked American imperialism and militarism, which are seen as the basis of the economy and therefore necessarily maintained; discrimination within
America, which must be combated if the country is to be democratic; and the general apathy of Americans, and American students in particular, who seem too comfortable with their lives to care about these concerns. The statement then calls for the government to pursue disarmament, take an active role in promoting democracy abroad instead of merely propping up American economic interests, and become more involved in creating a more equal domestic social and economic atmosphere.
A few lines within the document demand closer attention. One is the description of the “outstanding paradox” of American society that “we ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present” (Hayden 2). The resolution of this paradox was, perhaps, the most important focus of the SDS: any organizational planning it undertook and any protest it galvanized was intended to build toward the vision of such an

8 alternative to the current American system. In this light, the Port Huron Statement was radical. In calling for such drastic changes as an end to the Cold War and the politically stalemated and conservative two-party system, the SDS spelled out a clear vision of its ideal future that was quite different from the reality of 1962; such views were not popular at the time, as John F. Kennedy tried to depict himself as a cold warrior and the American economy was driven by a desire to outdo the
Communist world. More important, the vision was broad-based and explicitly nonviolent; the document stated, “In social change or interchange, we find violence to be abhorrent because it requires generally the transformation of the target, be it a human being or a community of people, into a depersonalized object of hate”
(Hayden 6). The many points discussed in the Port Huron Statement aimed at constructing lasting and radical change in America, but the vision was radical only in the sense that it would affect seemingly foundational principles of our society, not in the modern sense of the word as it is applied to jihadists and terrorists.
From a Marcusian perspective, the Port Huron Statement is an indication that at least some consciousnesses were beginning to be liberated from the onedimensional thought characteristic of Western capitalist society. Its authors and adopters recognized the inherent unfreedoms built into the system, and committed themselves to the education of as many others as possible in the hopes of freeing their minds. A struggle against the overpowering might of the American politicoeconomic structure, however, would prove to be a Herculean challenge, with the mystery of how best to liberate other people’s thought the first conundrum to be solved.

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When the Port Huron Statement was issued in the spring of 1962, it marked a definitive split of the SDS from its supposed parent organization, the League for
Industrial Democracy. (This lineage was clearer before the SDS effectively took over for the Student League of Industrial Democracy—the old SLID.) As Sale wrote, the ideology represented by the document was a way of “separating [the SDS] permanently from the politics—so starkly represented by the LID—of the postwar years” (54). The LID disapproved of the manifesto’s radical language but had virtually no power to do anything to curtail the SDS, whose influence and numbers were growing on the strength of Hayden’s writing and Haber’s energies. By the summer, the latter was effectively an autonomous organization, and would soon far outpace the former in terms of recognition and impact upon the nation’s social unrest. The Port Huron Statement was the turning point and catalyst for this development, the foundational document for a decade of student-led protest, resistance, and ultimately revolution that simultaneously and paradoxically grew more widespread and more violent as its focus narrowed and the number of true radicals decreased.
Protest music in 1962, on the other hand, lacked the strong foundation that the Port Huron Statement provided the New Left. Though the genre existed at the time, its reach was extremely limited—mostly confined to New York’s Greenwich
Village folk revival scene—and it received hardly any attention from the vast majority of the American listening public, whose tastes had not changed much from the previous decade. The 1950s had been, on the whole, a decade of cultural conservatism, a decade when revolt was defined by James Dean’s shootout at the

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Griffith Observatory in Rebel Without a Cause and teenagers learning how to shake their hips like Elvis Presley. It was the height of anti-Communist paranoia, when even the slightest leftward leaning could get a Hollywood producer or musician blacklisted or subpoenaed by the HUAC. Popular music was solidly apolitical and sometimes downright culturally offensive—for instance, Jimmy Preston’s #1 single
“Running Bear” would cause outrage among Native Americans today. Rock and roll was all the craze, but songs on the radio and in the record stores weren’t supposed to have any sort of deep message. In fact, many of them were churned out like factory products in New York’s Brill Building, manufactured by songwriting teams in a nearly mechanical process. In such a homogeneous and conservative environment, protest music unsurprisingly stayed at the fringe of the cultural landscape. From its very beginnings, protest music was rooted in religion, which has long been a powerful source of social change in America. We can most clearly see the impact of religious-themed protest music in the Civil Rights Movement, where the traditional song “We Shall Overcome” became an anthem. The song was derived from a 1900 gospel song called “I’ll Overcome Someday” by Charles Tindley
(Ed Ward, “We Shall Overcome”) and while the lyrics do not explicitly mention
Jesus, the context in which the song was most widely used—in religious-based Civil
Rights rallies—lent it a spiritual tone that became inseparable from the words and music.
“We Shall Overcome” is a quintessential example of what the sociologist R.
Serge Denisoff called a magnetic protest song. Denisoff defined these protest songs as “appealing to the listener for purposes of attracting the non-participant receiver

11 to a movement or reinforcing the commitment level of adherents,” and described their structure as “such that [they] could frequently be put to familiar or catchy tunes which could be sung en masse either without instrumentation or with a simple piano and guitar accompaniment” (Denisoff, The Sounds of Social Change 17).
In essence, magnetic protest songs are intended to be sung by large groups on the ground at rallies, demonstrations, and protests as a method of uniting the individual protesters. The power of hundreds of thousands of people singing “We Shall
Overcome” at the March on Washington in 1963 surely must have been a wonder to behold. Further, this power was well regarded by labor leaders throughout the first half of the twentieth century, as their organizations adopted folk standards and wrote accompanying lyrics that decried the condition of workers and the lower classes in the United States. Denisoff states that “in the context of social movements, songs were characterized as a weapon to achieve a specific goal” (Denisoff, The
Sounds of Social Change 15), and he notes their use by such groups as the
Communist Party, which was particularly skillful at using folk music to harness a sort of proletarian consciousness and term it the will of the people. Songs written by adherents of the Party were key in developing solidarity among workers, as they served as sung rallying cries that simultaneously voiced extreme displeasure with the American economic system and brought people together in united opposition to it through tunes they already knew. Legendary figures of this urban folk movement like Woody Guthrie crafted songs that successfully transmitted Leftist ideology by way of catchy melodies. The genre they created was “national in form: and revolutionary in content” (Denisoff, Sing a Song of Social Significance 101). For

12 example, the classic Guthrie tune “This Land is Your Land” begins cheerfully enough:
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island
From the redwood forests to the Gulf Stream water
This land was made for you and me.
Yet as the song progresses, Guthrie becomes more bitter, and as he approaches the end of the song, he comes to doubt whether or not his assertion in the fourth line is correct:
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?
Most modern schoolchildren don’t ever learn this much of the song, and thus they miss the biting message of proletarian struggle. Songs like “This Land is Your Land” were built to resonate within workers who “stood there hungry” outside the relief office, and successfully developed a class consciousness among them that reinforced the labor movement.

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These songs were never popular commercially, and their writers almost universally made little money from their craft. Denisoff wrote that “the collective ethos of the period minimized the importance of the individual performer” (Sing a
Song of Social Significance 105). Indeed, the very idea of a Leftist folk singer becoming famous and standing out from the crowd was antithetical to the ideology the music preached. These artists had no desire to stand out, and in any case, the messages their songs contained did not move those who were not afflicted by the struggles of the working class and the poor. And while they were easily sung by groups of protesters, they were not the type of catchy tunes that would have moved young people to dance. Thus, there was no economic motivation to record them or disseminate them on the radio and in jukeboxes. This lack of commercialization probably allowed the songs of the Old Left to retain their original meaning each time they were heard.
The other class of protest song Denisoff describes is the rhetorical protest song, which “stresses individual indignation and dissent but does not offer a solution in a movement” (The Sounds of Social Change 18). By 1964, according to a study conducted by Denisoff, rhetorical protest songs had mostly replaced magnetic protest songs, and he discovered a concurrent decline in class consciousness, workers’ movements, and universality of song topics—the lyrics had become increasingly more issue-specific (Sing a Song of Social Significance 78). This shift in focus and style of protest music seems to occur at the same time as the rise of the
New Left and a new generation of protest singers such as Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and
Phil Ochs, among others. Even veterans of the genre such as Pete Seeger began

14 crafting more rhetorical songs. His classic “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” written in 1955, was in fact one of the first anti-war songs to chart on the Billboard
Hot 100. The Kingston Trio’s 1961 recording of it reached #21 and stayed on the
1962 chart for three months (Perone 18). A quick look at the lyrics shows that the collective spirit of the earlier protest music is not present:
Where have all the husbands gone, long time passing?
Where have all the husbands gone, long time ago?
Where have all the husbands gone?
Gone for soldiers everyone
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
The song is a general criticism of war, labeling it as destructive and deadly, but does nothing to develop any sort of unified consciousness. That said, it still sits firmly within the folk tradition, both lyrically and in terms of instrumentation—each of the most famous recorded versions, by the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul, and Mary, features three-part vocal harmonies with simple acoustic guitar accompaniment.
Riding a wave of popular interest in this musical genre, “Where Have All the Flowers
Gone?” was played frequently on the radio and sold well in record stores. Whether it would have been so successful had it more concretely called for solidarity and action on its listeners’ part is unknown. It is reasonable to conjecture, though, that the song’s lack of such a direct message enabled its connection with a wider audience, one that was sympathetic to peace sentiments but unwilling to put in the time to act on them.

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Meanwhile, events in the political sphere provided increased fodder for both the New Left and the music of protest. In August of 1964, Lyndon Johnson issued the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This was a pivotal moment in the escalation of the
Vietnam War, as it gave him the authority to increase the American military presence in Vietnam without a formal declaration of war by Congress. And with the conflict thereby beginning to affect far more people, and with the draft becoming a terrifying specter looming over the souls of the country’s young men, the opposition movement began to pick up some steam. Within a few short years, it would consume every other domestic struggle, ending the War on Poverty, Johnson’s presidency, and the possibility of meaningful and systematic change in the American political, economic, and social structures.
In 1965, the anti-war movement was just getting started, and the SDS didn’t have a very powerful voice in the protest—up to that point, the organization had devoted most of its energies to aiding the Civil Rights movement in the South. With
United States involvement in Vietnam rapidly escalating, however, the SDS began diverting increased attention to organizing opposition to the war effort. The most notable anti-war action organized by the SDS in these nascent stages of protest was a march to Congress on April 17, 1965. Having seen the effectiveness of such gatherings in the Civil Rights movement—the marches on Washington in 1963 and from Selma in 1965 live on in the national consciousness even today—it was decided that such a tactic would be far more useful than merely staging teach-ins, as the pre-Haber SDS likely would have done and as moderates within the anti-war

16 movement urged. The group’s leaders realized that these efforts at education did not go far enough in achieving its ultimate goals. Sale wrote:
They felt that the teach-ins would not draw people into a broader movement on the left and supply them with a radical politics for other occasions…[the
SDS] had by now learned bitter lessons about reformism, and it was coming to feel that only with the kind of confrontation and militancy a march represented could America be challenged (185).
Here again the SDS’s ideology lay at the core of its activities. The idea was to challenge the American system and motivate direct action to foment change, and through this encouragement of activism, to change the attitudes of participants and radicalize them on a more general level. Though the war was obviously not the only ill the SDS perceived to be afflicting the nation, it was certainly an important one, as it flew in the face of the SDS’ firm anti-imperialist, anti-interventionist stance. And it was a cause that affected a much larger and more diverse segment of American society than did the Civil Rights movement, and therefore needed to be harnessed.
Thus the SDS organized its march on Washington that April.
The march was a rousing success. It showed that the SDS had power, and that it could gain the notice of national media outlets. Its profile as the generational voice of what was even then becoming known as the New Left rose as a result of the march—and, therefore, so did backlash against its efforts and policies. Two aspects of the march are particularly important to consider. First, protest singers Joan Baez,
Phil Ochs, and Judy Collins were present. Their appearance at the gathering is another example of the important coincidence of protest gatherings and music.

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Second, the undertones of a much angrier, much more violent energy that would immolate the New Left and the anti-war movement by 1968 were already palpable.
A minority of the crowd moved dangerously close to the police line on the steps of the Capitol before SDS leaders shouted out to stop them from provoking a confrontation, while the majority of the group stood down of its own accord. The commitment to nonviolent resistance laid out by the Port Huron Statement and practiced so effectively by the Civil Rights movement held for the time being, as
“1965 was not yet a time of confrontation” (Sale 190). But as the war continued to escalate and peaceful protest proved futile and frustrating, the idea that violent resistance was the only solution gained more traction among the leaders of the SDS and the New Left. This split would eventually become a breaking point in the antiwar movement and the SDS itself—whether out of conscience or fear, the majority of protesters were unwilling to follow the most radical activists into the determined pursuit of anti-government revolution.
Tied closely to this change in strategy and force is SDS’ slow acceptance of
Communists and of socialist principles, a tolerance that alienated many people who were still wary of the Soviets regardless of their position on the Vietnam War.
Beginning in mid-1965, the organization decided to remove the clauses in its constitution that excluded Communists from its ranks, a move that rankled the LID and indicated the opening of the SDS’ collective mind to a more extreme vision of
America’s future (Sale 210). Communism is, of course, a revolutionary ideology in every sense of the word; Marx calls for a worldwide proletarian uprising in its namesake Manifesto. Even in 1965, the inclusion of card-carrying Communists in

18 the SDS—and, therefore, in the heart of the New Left—would have frightened old school liberals and further radicalized the group’s leaders, who were now more directly exposed to the thought of totally overthrowing the American system. At the same time, opposition to the war was increasing, and the SDS’ profile as a leading voice in this movement was on the rise throughout 1965 and 1966. Its numbers swelled accordingly, as did criticism and vilification of the organization by much of the mainstream American political institution—it would not be until 1968, and the perceived American defeat in the Tet Offensive, that an anti-war stance would truly be recognized as legitimate by the American media. This was a critical period for the SDS. The conflict in Vietnam had added enough fuel to the fire of malaise in the hearts of American youth that many of them had decided to take up resistance to the war, and the SDS now had enough momentum to radicalize these new recruits and create a generation of Americans dedicated to real reform, true democracy, and social equality. Unfortunately, this chance was squandered, as the group’s national leadership did not effectively craft strategy to take the reins of the anti-war movement and turn it into an all-encompassing voice for anti-imperialism. As Sale described the situation, “Here was that chance to build an American left, to go beyond the students into the other strata of America, and SDS didn’t realize it”
(214).
Much of the blame for this failure, though, may be placed upon the insidious workings of the American capitalist system, which rendered a transformation of anti-Vietnam war sentiment into a total revolution impossible. Marcuse argues that the nature of one-dimensional society creates an irrational boundary within which

19 rational discourse is limited to system-specific terminology. Any criticism of society cannot move outside these bounds, thereby precluding the ability to communicate any ideas that negate the societal rules themselves. Marcuse described this limited communication as a “unified, functional language” that is “irreconcilably anti-critical and anti-dialectical” and “absorbs the transcendent, negative, oppositional elements of Reason” (One-Dimensional Man 97). When any true issues arise with the
American capitalist system or its actions, the only possible criticism is one of the government’s specific actions or the economy’s specific injustices. These criticisms can be addressed directly and once they have been mollified, further attacks upon society at large are no longer considered warranted. In essence, wrote Marcuse, this process works by “substituting images for concepts” (One-Dimensional Man 103).
In the case of the burgeoning anti-war movement of 1965, the conflict in
Vietnam served as such an image, representative of all the discord to be found within American society. Moreover, the direct effect the draft had on a large number of young people made the war a concrete symbol of an oppression that really ran much deeper than merely the injustice of forced service in Vietnam.
Because of the limits of discourse in the realm of one-dimensional thought, however, expanding oppositional consciousness beyond the issue of the war into the realm of more abstract American problems such as economic inequality and the development of political oligarchy proved a challenge. The SDS rightly recognized its failure in finding a way to create such a negative consciousness within those people who were brought into the protest movement by opposition to the war, but it

20 is arguable that such a feat could not have been accomplished no matter what methods the SDS tried.
And so as 1968 approached, the SDS found itself the engineer of a train of which it had lost control. On the one hand, the anti-war movement continued to grow, and this was obviously a cause the SDS supported. On the other hand, because the SDS had failed to convert anti-war sentiment into true anti-imperialist thought and more general radicalism among the majority of young protesters, the split that was apparent as early as April 1965 became more pronounced still. The rising tide of anger had not only driven more people to protest the Vietnam War, but had also shifted the minds of SDS leaders, who began to see their organization as a true revolutionary body. By the fall of 1966, there was a “clear call for a new level struggle, a new perception of what the SDS could do, and be…SDS had the potential to be the crucible of revolution” (Sale 310). A little over two years later, the ideological transformation would be complete.
As this drama unfolded within the New Left, there occurred a simultaneous major transformation in the world of protest music, as songs with anti-war themes finally started to achieve commercial success. Along the way to this pinnacle, though, something seems to have been lost from the songs themselves. A discussion of a few mid-1960s compositions will point out precisely what was lost.
The next major anti-war song after “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” was
Bob Dylan’s classic “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Each song protests societal ills in broad strokes, longing for the building of empathy and a peaceful, loving world in which

21 violence is banned. And neither song offers any answers to the problems it addresses. Dylan even tells his audience, “the answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.” It is thus the epitome of a rhetorical protest song, according to Denisoff’s classification. Dylan’s lyrics nonetheless carry incredible poetic power, and are accentuated by the simple folk melody to which they are set—according to James
Perone, a professor of music history and theory at the University of Mt. Union, the tune is “based on a nineteenth-century anti-slavery song that Dylan reportedly learned while on his early travels” (21). Especially interesting is Peter, Paul, and
Mary’s recording of the song eventually reaching the #2 spot on the 1963 Billboard
Hot 100. The song catapulted the folk-revival trio to stardom. Their album In the
Wind, which featured the track, reached #1 on the album sales charts and remained there for five weeks, selling well through the end of 1964. Here was a song that was atypical of the pop material of the day somehow outselling nearly all its contemporaries. It was a testament to the strength of Dylan’s writing, and this was in fact the song that attracted the mainstream public’s attention to, and began the avalanche of critical praise for, the young man from Duluth, Minnesota. Despite the song’s elegant anti-war lyrics, though, two facts point to its limitation as a piece of protest music. First, Dylan’s recording of the song was not the version that broke through to the mainstream listening public. Perhaps this is because of his notoriously awful voice, but Dylan’s lack of ability to bring “Blowin’ in the Wind” might also be indicative of protest music’s lack of transmissibility via recorded sound. While both his and Peter, Paul, and Mary’s versions of the song were in the folk aesthetic, Dylan’s recording was far rougher and less polished—more like a live

22 performance, which was historically the setting for protest music. That being said,
Peter, Paul, and Mary more than do the song justice. In fact, Perone pointed out their use of three-part harmony to add dynamics to the song and accentuate the anti-war message through a crescendo and harmonization on the line “How many times must the cannonballs fly/Before they’re forever banned” (23). Second,
“Blowin’ in the Wind,” while staunchly anti-war and pro-equality, did not specifically call out any governmental policy or the American political institution. The song’s tone remains to this day longingly idealistic yet gentle, yearning for a better future without taking any action to bring it to fruition. As such, its message was universally appreciable, and did not alienate any listeners through fierce invective; better yet for Dylan, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and their record label, the message of peace and love sold well.
Eventually, anger also sold well. This trend began in 1965, with the release of the P. F. Sloan-penned, Barry McGuire-performed “Eve of Destruction” on August
21, 1965. The song reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming the first anti-war to reach this level of success; it is all the more remarkable that the song did so well when one considers that it was suppressed on the radio in many regions of the country. This seeming contradiction gives us a few important insights into the state of the country and of protest music at the time. The song was clearly more incendiary than its predecessors, or else it wouldn’t have attracted such vitriol from conservative censors. An analysis of the lyrics and the recording itself shows us that
“Eve of Destruction” was, in fact, more angry and direct than songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The refrain follows, “And you tell me, over and over and over again, my

23 friend/That you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.” The repetition of
“over” and the internal rhyme of “believe” and “eve” make the hook memorable—it is objectively catchy, melodically and lyrically—but these two lines also express a degree of frustration not necessarily felt in earlier commercial protest songs, and the phrase “eve of destruction” raises the stakes of the discussion the lyrics attempt to start. The singer accuses the listener of willful ignorance or even denial that will eventually lead to the end of the world as we know it. On top of the power of the refrain, we can also find direct references to the growing conflict in Vietnam in the verses; the very first line of the song is, “The eastern world, it is explodin’/Violence flarin’, bullets loadin’.” Though there is no further allusion to Vietnam specifically, the rest of the song expresses the fear and anger that was beginning to pervade
American society as the Civil Rights movement dragged on, the number of troops in
Indochina increased, and the great malaise that had plagued America throughout the 1950s finally began to bubble to the surface of society. It is easy to see why those who were comfortable with the status quo would have wanted to silence
Barry McGuire’s growling voice on the radio (a growl, incidentally, that contributes heavily to the anger expressed in the song).
And yet “Eve of Destruction” still topped the charts, largely on the strength of urban airplay. It is vital to consider this unprecedented success, which I think can be traced to a few factors. First, the song’s production fit comfortably within the folk-rock aesthetic that was gripping the country’s musical attention throughout
1965. Due in no small part to Bob Dylan’s impact on popular songwriting, rock music had turned to the acoustic-driven sound of the folk genre and also begun to

24 exhibit more significant lyricism. The Beatles’ Rubber Soul is a seminal work of the folk-rock genre, and the Byrds had ridden the wave to stardom on the strengths of their recordings of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn!
Turn!” Still, the growth of folk-rock did not come about independently, and I think this has to do with the second factor in “Eve of Destruction’s” success: a genuine rise in the feeling of discontent among America’s youth, and their subsequent search for more meaning in their favorite music. As discussed earlier, the anti-war movement was already a part of the collective consciousness by August 1965, and the SDS was becoming a household name. “Eve of Destruction,” with anger and frustration pouring from every note and every word, served as an excellent reflection of this discontent, and thus found a place within the hearts of a wide audience.
Although the song reached such a large listenership, however—and perhaps because of its ability to do so—some protest singers decried it as a pop song that masqueraded as an anti-war anthem. Phil Ochs, for example, called it a “bad introduction to protest music,” and others “suggested that the composer was less of a legitimate voice in the protest movement than a commercially successful chameleon who could cash in on current trends” (Perone 39). A study conducted by
Denisoff and collaborator Mark H. Levine provided evidence for these claims.
According to the results, only fourteen percent of the study’s sample of young music listeners fully understood the song’s message, and over two-fifths of the sample either did not understand the message or did not respond to the question, indicating a lack of engagement with the song (Denisoff, The Sounds of Social Change 217). In an additional questionnaire, participants were asked to discuss the efficacy of “Eve

25 of Destruction” as a protest song. Nearly half of the sample did not have an opinion—suggesting the song’s limited ability to provoke thought among its listeners—but of those who had an opinion, responses were fairly evenly split between approval and disapproval of the message of the song, with respondents on each side citing the objectivity and relevance of the song as their main concerns. Of this range of opinions, Denisoff wrote, “this puts forth the notion that while political statements in the ranks of popular music reach a large portion of the adolescent and young adult community, they are no more effective than a polemical column by
William F. Buckley or Walter Lippman” (Sing a Song of Social Significance 162). The results of this study, particularly the question regarding interpretation of the song’s message, seem to indicate that “Eve of Destruction,” angry though it may have been, did not significantly add to the anti-war consciousness of America’s youth. For those whom it reached at all, the song was far likelier to evoke mere anger than to create an ideological movement towards any of the New Left’s more radical stances.
Worse yet for the New Left and radical activists, the commercial success of the composition meant two very counterproductive things: first, that the song became a voice of the protest movement despite not expressing the substantive ideology of the SDS and more radical musicians; and second, that the American capitalist system was upheld and strengthened by the song’s success, as Barry McGuire’s record company and the Top 40 radio stations that played the song earned a massive financial windfall by exploiting the anger of the anti-war protesters.
In contrast to P.F. Sloan and Barry McGuire, Phil Ochs was a constant radical voice throughout the 1960s, and around 1965 he was reaching the peak of his

26 influence in the anti-war movement. Ochs had begun writing what he called his
“musical editorials” in the early part of the decade, influenced by the atmosphere of
Greenwich Village and his own leftist views, and “soon thereafter a campus cult of sorts had developed around Ochs and his music” (Perone 24). He was a ubiquitous figure at protest gatherings, particularly those against American involvement in
Vietnam, and it was in these settings that his music had its greatest impact. Indeed, his songs made almost no mark on the Billboard Hot 100, despite Ochs’ desire to be commercially successful; he told the Village Voice, “I write to make money…the roots of my songs are psychological, not political” (Perone 30). An examination of a few of
Ochs’ more popular compositions will grant insight into his message and illuminate the reasons his desire for commercial success was never fulfilled.
One of Ochs’s most famous anti-war songs is I Ain’t Marching Anymore, which provides a brief history of America’s armed struggles and expresses a refusal to continue to take part in bloodshed. The chorus of the song is not shy about placing blame for war on the country’s leaders:
It’s always the old to lead us to the war,
It’s always the young to fall.
Now look at all we’ve won, with the saber and the gun
Tell me, is it worth it all?
While the song doesn’t call out Vietnam directly—its final verse is actually directed at conflict in Cuba and labor’s conflict of interest in perpetuating a state of war for the sake of jobs—in the context of 1965 it takes on a strong tone against that conflict. More significantly, unlike other protest songs of the time (and especially

27 those that became commercially successful), “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” presents
Ochs as not just opposed to the war effort, but as flat-out unwilling to fight. As the draft increasingly affected young Americans’ lives, hearing Ochs’ refusal and active resistance may have emboldened them to take a stand against risking their lives in
Indochina. This message would have resonated particularly strongly within those who were already opposed to the war effort, the audience most open-minded to
Ochs’ pointed musical criticism and whose presence Ochs’ songs seemed to need in order for them to have any power. Such a cocktail of devoted protesters and poignant protest music would have augmented the determination of the activists present, spurring them onward to more radical opposition tactics. Indeed, 1965 was a sort of transitional period during which the anti-war movement was slowly moving from a policy of reform to one of resistance, and “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” seems to both reflect that zeitgeist and, upon performance, amplify it to all those within earshot.
A couple of other Ochs songs, though, make it clear that he was far more of an iconoclast than the typical anti-war protester. His songs “Draft Dodger Rag” and
“Love Me, I’m a Liberal” are scathing indictments of the hypocrisy in the non-radical
American public and its reactions to the conflict in Vietnam. The former is a commentary on the eponymous people who would go on to swell the ranks of the anti-war movement as the Selective Service Act continued to poach young men and ship them off to fight. According to Ochs, many of those who were dodging the draft nonetheless the war against Ho Chi Minh until their number was pulled and they had to go battle the Viet Cong personally. Only then did they oppose the war effort:

28
I hate Chou En Lai, and I hope he dies,
But I think you gotta see
That if someone’s gotta go over there
That someone isn’t me.
Unlike the New Leftists and the radicals of the SDS and other similar organizations, these young people only despised the Vietnam War so long as it was a direct threat to their lives. As the 1960s rolled on and the number of American troops involved steadily grew, the war became just such a direct threat to far more American youths.
Correspondingly, an army of draft card burners joined the hard core of the New Left in opposing the conflict. The SDS strove to use the anti-war sentiments of these people to convert them into true radicals, developing within them broad-based reformist views matching those expressed in the Port Huron Statement and the political acumen and street-level experience to act on these beliefs. It is, however, difficult to convert selfish motivation into genuine passion for the wellbeing of others—a feat that draft dodgers needed to achieve if the SDS were to properly radicalize them and create within them a desire for total societal change. The hard core’s efforts failed, and the only resulting bond that held them to the masses of terrified young people in the protest crowds was their shared anger, an anger that would come to define the movement.
Ochs seems to have foreseen this outcome in “Draft Dodger Rag.” Live performances of the song would likely have divided an audience, as radicals in the crowd would have laughed derisively at the less ideological protesters at whom the song was aimed. Ochs is similarly acerbic in his “Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” a song that

29 outlines the mainstream American Left’s halfway commitment to reform. The final stanza goes thus:
Sure once I was young and impulsive/I wore every conceivable pin
Even went to the Socialist meetings/Learned every old union hymn
Ah, but I’ve grown older and wiser/And that’s why I’m turning you in
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal.
Here, Ochs uses a fun tune and the repetition of the phrase “love me” to give his lyrics a sarcastically cheerful tone. His point is that most liberals are proud of being
“progressive” when in fact they have stopped forward progress and become part of the mainstream American political spectrum. Whether this transformation from labor warrior to lip-service reformer has taken place out of cowardice or insidious conservatism—and it could be argued that the two are the same—the old school
Left has backed down from the pursuit of true, lasting, all-encompassing societal change, even as it maintains a pride in being “liberal.” In this fashion, Ochs’ argument closely matches one made by the SDS in 1967, when the organization began to recognize that true revolution was necessary for its goals to be realized. In
Sale’s words, the argument was that “liberals operate out of other people’s oppression; the radical operates out of his own” (340). Both Ochs and the New Left’s leaders saw themselves as different from liberals, who merely wanted to mollify the worst of the American system’s wrongs, not understanding that the problems needed to be resolved at the root level. Radicals comprehended the depth of these issues, and by 1968 had come to the conclusion that only a complete overthrow of the American system could provide a solution. The SDS began to push the idea of a

30
“new working class” as conceived in “The Port Authority Statement,” an ideology that saw students as the base of the country’s increasingly service-oriented economy and sought to empower them to change the system for their benefit (338).
Despite the power of Ochs’ music at rallies and concerts, it never had much commercial success. The difference between live and recorded versions of Ochs’ protest music is best explained by Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” A discussion of the philosophical basis of mechanically reproduced art, this essay deals chiefly with film, but its ideas are applicable to the recording of music as well. Benjamin’s argument begins, “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (4). Ochs’ live performances were therefore reproductions, though typically occurred in similar enough settings that the songs delivered a nearly equivalent message to each gathered crowd. The recording of songs, however, transmutes their very essence as a work of art, changing the meaning of their lyrics and the range of effects they might have on audiences. When a song is mechanically reproduced, each copy of the song—and each time that copy is played—is a different work of art, separated from the time and context in which it was written, the ritual of actually performing the song, and the performer themselves. One factor separating the recorded song from its origin is the disruption of what Benjamin calls its authenticity: “the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced” (5). Listening to Phil Ochs sing “I
Ain’t Marching Anymore” through headphones on Spotify deviates so drastically

31 from the environment in which and for which the song was written that there is no possibility of gleaning the full meaning Ochs intended to convey. Additionally, Ochs is separated from the listener not only by time and space, but also by the very equipment of the recording studio. For instance, Benjamin writes of actors, “The stage actor identifies himself with the character of his role. The film actor very often is denied this opportunity. His creation is by no means all of a piece; it is composed of many separate performances” (16). Similarly, a singer in the studio must record many different takes of a song, and the best parts of the various vocal and instrumental takes are spliced together to create the version that is disseminated commercially. Gone are any idiosyncratic elements of the individual performance, replaced by a sort of mechanical “perfection” judged to be the best version of the song. By cutting and pasting together a performance of the song, however, the producer often compromises the integrity of the original message, creating a barrier that isolates the artist from both the work and the work’s audience. Ochs’ power stemmed from his genuine belief in the words he sang; the recording of his voice, separated from the mind that conceived of the words, cannot convey the intended meaning of the lyric as well as Ochs could in person.
There is the added matter of the different audiences for Ochs’ recordings and his live performances. The musicologist Arved Ashby writes, “A musician can only connect with a listener who shares her textual beliefs” (33). By its very nature, a commercial recording will reach more diverse ears than a live performance of the same song. The broadcast AM stations that dominated media markets in the 1960s sought to cast as wide a net as possible and therefore had a strong incentive to

32 select content that would attract the most listeners. Phil Ochs, an unabashed radical, did not agree politically with most consumers of AM radio. On the other hand, the audiences to whom he played at anti-war rallies and concert halls had all elected to attend and were thus a self-selecting crowd composed of people far more likely to connect with Ochs’ message. This audience, unlike mainstream radio listeners, also heard the songs straight from Ochs, unmediated by recording equipment that further alienated the singer from the commercial versions of his songs. Ochs’ folk-style playing, in which tradition favored the live performance over recording and emphasized lyrics over tune, also contributed to the limit of his commercial appeal—he could not and would not overwhelm his message with a melody or distorted instruments for the sake of making his music resonate with more listeners. Given the above traits of Ochs’ music, therefore, it is unsurprising that his goal of making financially successful songs was never realized.
In 1968, a series of unfortunate events stoked the fire beneath the anger and protest that had mounted slowly but steadily over the previous few years, causing the cauldron to violently boil over. Most notable among these occurrences were the
Tet Offensive and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F.
Kennedy. The former, ironically, was a military victory for American troops as they beat back the North Vietnamese assault. But United States media coverage painted the battle in a grim light. Walter Cronkite, the CBS news anchor and “most trusted man in America,” told the nation, “To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, if unsatisfactory, conclusion” (“Report from Vietnam”). With the

33 country slowly catching on to the futility of the war effort, opposition to what increasingly seemed like senseless slaughter of young men reached a new peak, and politicians like Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy became serious candidates for the
Democratic presidential nomination by running on anti-war platforms, signifying the entrance of opposition to the conflict into the arena of mainstream American discourse and granting the protest movement greater legitimacy. Such a fixation upon the Vietnam War would ultimately prove deleterious to the New Left’s broader aims.
So, too, would the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the first in April and the second in June. King, of course, was the great leader of nonviolent protest in the country, having led the Civil Rights Movement before devoting more of his time to the anti-war cause beginning in 1965. His death would serve as a symbol of the ultimate failure of peaceful resistance to create lasting change, and without him at the helm of the massive black consciousness that had become so cohesive and magnified over the past two decades, the more radical and violent voices of men like Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and Huey Newton—all more ideologically aligned with the late Malcolm X than the late Dr. King—grew louder and more influential. The passing of Kennedy had a similar and potentially even wider effect, as he was a serious presidential candidate who had promised true reform and an exit from Vietnam and was beloved by white and black Americans alike. His assassination plunged many of his supporters into despair; with Kennedy no longer able to direct progress and achieve lasting societal change through the vehicle of government, how would his ideas be brought into effect? Most of his anti-

34 war followers answered with anger at the powers that be, and so the protests continued and escalated in vitriol. The solution for the true radicals among the crowd, though, was revolution—an idea that had been slowly coming into realization.
This chaos, rage, and lack of public confidence in American institutions provides a backdrop for examining the 1968 Democratic National Convention and its bloody aftermath. That convention served as a transformative moment in the protest movement. It was the moment when violence became an established part of anti-war gatherings, when mainstream America put its foot down in the form of
Mayor Richard J. Daley’s ruthless Chicago police force, and when the radicals of the
New Left realized the existence of a impassable gulf of motive and ideology between themselves and most Vietnam War protesters. As a result, many radicals embraced the revolutionary identity toward which they had slowly drifted.
The most noteworthy account of the convention comes from Norman Mailer, who covered it for Harper’s Weekly and later chronicled its events and those at the
Republican National Convention in his journalistic novel Miami and the Siege of
Chicago. After a short background of the events leading up to the late August gathering, he introduced a central theme of his story in the following quote:
“’Politics is property,’ said Murray Kempton, delegate from New York, over the epiphanies of a drink, and never has a new science been better comprehended by a

35 young delegate” (Loc 1537) * . Over the ensuing chapters, he defined the course of the convention and the surrounding violence in terms of this simple equation. For
Mailer, it explained why Hubert Humphrey won the nomination with his pro-war views, why Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern never really stood a chance despite their supporters’ fanatical energies, and why the young people who gathered in Lincoln Park as the convention began would never be taken seriously by the mainstream Democratic Party establishment.
Who were these young people? Mailer offered us a fairly comprehensive description of them as they prepared for what everyone knew was shaping up to be a sort of explosion:
On one flank was the New Left, still generally socialist, believing in a politics of confrontation, intelligent programmatic warriors, Positivists in philosophy, educational in method, ideological in their focus—which is to say a man’s personality was less significant than his ideas; on the other flank,
Yippies, devoted to a politics of ecstasy, programmatic about drug-taking,
Dionysiacs, propagandists by example, mystical in focus. By the summer of
1968 each group had however so influenced the other on campus, via street activity and in demonstrations, that their differences were no longer significant (Loc 1997).
The New Left, of which the SDS was the primary organizational body and the driving force, had by 1968 become more or less confrontational and borderline militant.
Gone was any notion that America’s problems and the debate over the Vietnam War
* The Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader version of Miami and the Siege of Chicago uses
“locations” in the text instead of page numbers.

36 could be resolved peacefully. The hard core of radicals that showed up in Chicago came prepared to fight for what they believed. But it is also crucial to note the alliance they had forged with the Yippies, or the Youth International Party in full.
For them, the way out of the American dilemma was to render it entirely meaningless through mind-altering substances and shock politics, as the system was too absurd to be taken seriously. They preferred to show their dissent by making mockeries of the process and turning serious events into full-fledged Bacchanalian festivals. This was the group that christened a swine “Pigasus” and nominated it for the presidency during the Democratic National Convention. They were certainly no fans of the current situation, but their approach differed from that of the New Left.
As Mailer wrote, however, the two had come together by 1968 as each realized the futility of milder means of protest.
At this point, a distinction between Yippies and hippies is useful. Despite similarities in their habits of drug use and countercultural behavior, the hippies, unlike the Yippies, did not have an explicit political motive behind their turn away from American society. Rather than trying to prove a point, they were merely avoiding the issues that plagued America and turned to psychedelia and love as an escape from the miseries of the Vietnam War, racial tension, and social malaise that had the country tearing itself apart. Most importantly, it was the hippies whose culture was commodified and commercialized through the popularity of their clothing and music, and it was their image that would become embedded in the readily accessible public memory of the 1960s and the anti-war movement, not the

37 image of the battered protesters in the aftermath of the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago.
The streets of Chicago in 1968 quickly became violent. The police moved into Lincoln Park under cover of darkness and forcing people out of the area with billy clubs and tear gas. From there, the protesters moved into Grant Park, across from the Hilton where many of the convention’s delegates were housed. Still, the strife did not cease. One of the most powerful descriptions Mailer provided of the hellish week was that of tear gas seeping into the Hilton from across the street, and of that hotel as the “old fort of the old Democratic party” under siege by conflicting forces. On one side was the New Left, which sought the party’s ideological purity, and on the other was the mainstream political establishment, which had thrived under JFK and LBJ until the war had exposed its fatal hypocrisies but not dampened its thirst for power (Mailer Loc 2337). The American Left was tearing itself apart.
As Mayor Daley’s police brutalized the radicals, the so-called liberal Democratic party sought to calmly nominate Hubert Humphrey, who had pledged to retain the status quo regarding Vietnam. The entire situation came to a climax when the activists decided to march down Michigan Avenue, against Daley’s wishes, and the police attacked them mercilessly and indiscriminately. Mailer quoted reporters who were on the ground for the assault, but also provided his own birds-eye view, literally and figuratively, as he watched from the nineteenth floor of his hotel:
…it was as if the war had finally begun, and this was therefore a great and solemn moment, as if indeed even the gods of history had come together from each side to choose the very front of the Hilton Hotel before the

38 television cameras of the world and the eyes of the campaign workers and delegates’ wives, yes, there before the eyes of half the principles at the convention was this drama played, as if the military spine of a great liberal party had finally separated itself from the skin, as if, no metaphor large enough to suffice, the Democratic Party had here broken in two before the eyes of a nation like Melville’s whale charging right out of the sea (Loc 2607).
In the aftermath of the Democratic National Convention, the New Left realized its voices would not be heard and in fact would be tuned out by the mainstream
American public, even the liberals. Much of the public had sided with Daley and his police and supported the actions they took to “restore order.” America’s general sympathy with the institutional power of Daley and his police represented the final straw that broke any hope of mere resistance, protest, and education resolving the woes of American society. In the minds of some, positive change could only be achieved through a full-scale revolution.
In 1969, such a revolutionary ideology was crystallized in the seminal document “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows”
(henceforth “Weatherman”), written for that summer’s SDS convention by leaders of the organization’s Revolutionary Youth Movement wing (RYM). In comparison with the Port Huron Statement, the new manifesto was explicitly militant, Communist, and angry. Analysis of a few key passages showcases the transformation of the SDS.
First, the authors described the United States as a “worldwide monster, a country so rich from its worldwide plunder that even the crumbs doled out to the enslaved masses within its borders provide for material existence very much above the

39 conditions of the masses of people of the world” (1). Such powerful invective and rhetoric is not found in the Port Huron Statement. This was the language of furious radicals who no longer identify themselves as Americans and whose goal was “the destruction of US imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism” (2). Through their struggles over the previous decade, they had realized that reform was not possible within the structure of American capitalism and imperialism, which requires societal and global inequality. The new goal thus became the overthrow of the entire system, a much more terrifying and dangerous proposition than even the previous year’s tumult in Chicago. The writers of the document recognized the challenge of convincing others to join their revolutionary cause, and they laid out a literal battle plan whose aim was to “raise anti-imperialist and anti-racist consciousness and tie the struggles of working-class youth (and all working people) to the struggles of Third World people, rather than merely joining fights to improve material conditions, even though these fights are certainly justified” (18). The SDS had been working constantly to increase these consciousnesses and in doing so had helped build the anti-war fervor that gripped much of the country’s youth and the Left. Now, the effort needed to be even fiercer: it is one thing to oppose a specific war but a far grander proposition to oppose the system that conceived the war. Those who sought to join the new and more radical cause first needed to be convinced of their own oppression by the American politico-economic system, and then be convinced to sacrifice all of the comforts provided by the system—and potentially their freedom and their life—in the hopes of achieving a better world. Difficult though this proposal was, it was also the logical

40 extreme of Haber’s old radicalism. When every root of society proved to be rotten beyond the possibility of reform, the entire system needed to be uprooted and a new one planted in its stead.
Even within the SDS, “Weatherman” was highly polarizing. The group had begun to splinter in 1968 as various factions such as the relatively moderate
Progressive Labor party and the aforementioned RYM disagreed on ideological grounds and jockeyed for power in the national organization. By 1969, most leaders of the SDS belonged to the latter faction, the source of “Weatherman,” and under its watch that year’s national convention in Chicago disintegrated into chaos. As infighting took over and disparate chants filled the room, Sale wrote, “there was no longer any doubt what was happening in Chicago: two, three, many SDSs” (571).
Quite simply, “Weatherman” exposed a point of no return that many within the SDS were unwilling to pass. It was a complete break from the comparatively mild Port
Huron Statement, which had taken in so many young people with its messages of education, reform, and a hope for a better world achievable through nonviolence.
When these founding ideals came into question, particularly the contention that reform was preferable and possible without violent revolution, their ability to unify the SDS and young America broke and the organization was irreparably fractured.
The RYM would split off from the rest of the organization shortly thereafter, rechristening itself the Weather Underground and taking increasingly violent action against the United States. What was left of the SDS remained an organizational force in protests but lost its power as the ideological engine of the anti-war movement, which continued until the last American troops pulled out of Vietnam in 1975.

41
In light of Marcuse’s formulation of the one-dimensional society, the horror of Chicago and subsequent fragmentation of the New Left seems to have been inevitable. In his book One Dimensional Man, Marcuse makes specific reference to capitalism’s powerful rejection of communism:
As to the West: the former conflicts within society are modified and arbitrated under the double (and interrelated) impact of technological progress and international communism. Class struggles are attenuated and
“imperialist contradictions” suspended before the threat from without.
Mobilized against this threat, capitalist society shows an internal union and cohesion unknown at previous stages of industrial civilization. It is a cohesion on very material grounds; mobilization against the enemy works as a mighty stimulus of production and employment, thus sustaining the high standard of living (21).
Communism, rather than being given a chance to solve the ills of American capitalism, was demonized. The war waged against its evils provided the very economic stability that numbed the population to the possibility of alternative societal structures. In its full-on conversion to Marxist ideology and vow to combat the American system with violence, the Weather Underground was forced to identify itself as un-American and to side with an enemy that most of the country had been taught to fear and hate. The group, unable to liberate people’s consciousnesses through education and nonviolent resistance, now further alienated itself from the society it sought to correct. Meanwhile, protest against the war carried on, but next to a potential battle against the overthrow of Western

42 capitalism the Vietnam conflict seemed an easy matter to resolve, a mere political balancing act of calculated withdrawal to simultaneously mollify the protesters and keep pride in the American war effort. Marcuse wrote, “Once the personal discontent is isolated from the general unhappiness, once the universal concepts which militate against functionalization are dissolved into particular referents, the case becomes a treatable and tractable incident” (One-Dimensional Man 111). The lack of support the Weathermen received following their split with the SDS indicates that protest along the lines of the “universal concepts” went too far for most young people, who were simply trying to avoid death in the jungle. The Vietnam War was a concrete policy against which these youths could protest and against which any other anger they had at American society could be focused. With protest thus consigned to the crucible of Vietnam, the overarching American system would remain safe. The Weathermen alone could never take it down.
The protest musicians’ reaction to the events of 1968 was highly varied and indicative of the shattering of any unified consciousness in the movement. For Phil
Ochs, a true radical, the DNC in Chicago represented total defeat for his dream of protest leading to true change. In his song “William Butler Yeats Visits Lincoln Park and Escapes Unscathed,” written about the event, he delved into the depth of his disillusionment. The song is played on piano in a minor key, a stark departure from the guitar-driven major-key melodies of Ochs’ most popular anti-war tunes. The resulting sound is solemn and morose. When an accordion and strings are slowly added as the verses progress, they resemble sorrowful wails, perhaps representing the cries of the protesters as they were beaten into submission by the police or the

43 weeping of mourners at the grave of the radical anti-war movement. The lyrics are no less melancholy. Ochs repeated the refrain “In Lincoln Park the dark was turning, turning” and made references to a “blood-red moon” and “gas rolling out.”
Ochs’ use of imagery in this song is particularly interesting when compared to the more direct lyrics of “Draft Dodger Rag” and “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.” Such a change in writing style may be attributable to Ochs’ inability to fully express his horror at what transpired, or it may be that Ochs felt there was nothing left to say after the fiasco—his belief in the possibility of a reformed America might have been completely crushed. At the end of the song, Ochs made an abrupt transition into an up-tempo and cheerful rag in which his characteristic sarcasm returned. Criticizing the great body of anti-war protesters, he asked, “Where were you in Chicago?” This last section, juxtaposed so jarringly with the sorrow of the song’s main body, symbolized the magnitude of the DNC’s importance in splitting the Vietnam opposition from its ideological engine, the New Left. The majority of the movement would not go so far as the SDS and the Yippies in condemning the American system—their issue was chiefly with the war. Accordingly, the radicals who arrived in Chicago were isolated and brutalized, leaving Ochs despairing of the potential to create broad and lasting change.
On the other end of the musical spectrum lay rock music, which had steadily gained a presence in the culture of protest. Activists and folk musicians initially viewed rock and roll as a linchpin of the status quo, commercial babble with insignificant lyrics made solely for young people to dance. Therefore, when Bob
Dylan played an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, those who saw

44 him as a voice for the New Left were horrified and betrayed. The long-term effect of his electric performance, however, was to open the door for rock music to begin to address the themes heretofore only accessible via acoustic guitars in a live setting.
Denisoff wrote, “Bob Dylan’s conversion to rock and roll seemed to substantiate all the fears of both the Left and the Right…Dylan began to reach the mass of young rock fans who heretofore had only the Beatles and Rolling Stones to claim as major objects of adulation” (Sing a Song of Social Significance 127). Contemporaneously,
Barry McGuire and the Byrds were topping the charts with folk rock, and with Dylan joining the musical movement rock gained a lyrical thoughtfulness to complement its mainstream appeal. As Denisoff mentioned, both the Left and the Right were frightened of this new hybrid: the Left because of an apparent kowtowing by folkrock musicians to the forces of commercialism, the Right because of the possibility that messages of protest contained within the songs might reach and inspire far wider audiences. As it turned out, and in a seeming paradox, both fears were realized. Rock music did gain the capacity to express anti-war sentiment, but it was far more powerfully a broad representation of the anger and escapist desire that had seized young America.
Of 1968 rock songs whose lyrics dealt directly with protest and the anti-war movement, two require detailed attention. The first is “The Unknown Soldier,” by
The Doors, which peaked at #39 on the 1968 Billboard Hot 100. Perone described the song as a “mysterious, impressionistic, slow-paced tribute to the unknown solider” that develops into a “triumphant celebration at the end, complete with a faster tempo, tolling church bells, and a cheering crowd, as singer Morrison

45 proclaims that the war is over” (53). This fantastic desire—the aim of the anti-war movement—was years from being realized, but its expression through commercially successful music gave it a broader-based legitimacy than it would have had in the sole hands of radical activists. That said, the Doors’ sound fit strongly within the genre of psychedelic rock. The swirling keyboards, ambient vocals, and experimental effects speak of a sort of escape from society rather than an engagement with its problems. In this light, “The Unknown Soldier” and its impact upon young Americans take on an entirely different context: one of disillusionment with reality. Rather than speaking to the incorrectness of the war effort, Jim Morrison merely decried the death of nameless warriors and yearned for the day when they may live in peace. As such, “The Unknown Soldier” hardly matched the specific anti-war message of Ochs and Seeger, and hardly succeeded in conveying power to the protesters on city streets and college campuses.
The Beatles’ “Revolution,” written by John Lennon, it reached #12 on the
1968 Billboard Hot 100, a remarkable performance for a B-side (it was far outperformed by its legendary companion, “Hey Jude”). The song didn’t deal explicitly with war, but instead was a protest song about protest. Lennon opened the song by screaming over a heavily distorted blues guitar riff, expressing frustration that carried on through the rest of the lyric. The most important lines appear in the second verse:
You say you’ve got a real solution, well, you know
We’d all love to see the plan
You ask me for a contribution, well, you know

46
We’re all doing what we can
But if you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell you is brother, you’ll have to wait.
At first glance, and given the anti-war fervor and John Lennon’s stance within the peace movement, this verse seems to be an attack on government lies about the status of Vietnam. With this interpretation, the “real solution” refers to a way to win the war, and a “contribution” refers to either the paying of taxes or service in the army. It can be argued, however, that the lyrics also referred to the radicals of the
New Left, whose revolutionary ideology was coming into plain view. In this light, the “real solution” now refers to goals of the type that were laid out by the
Weathermen, and the “contribution” is the radical demand for young people to open their eyes, perceive their enslavement as proletarians, and engage in open warfare against Western capitalism and imperialism. The thought that unifies these two interpretations of “Revolution” is resistance to control by any outside forces, be they right wing or left wing, United States government or SDS. The overwhelming sentiment behind such an attitude is anger, an emotion that could transcend both the physical distortion of the music and the figurative distortion of its message (via broadcasting to a wide and diverse audience). As shown in “Revolution,” anger was one message that could unify young protesters—and also sold well.
Angry rock music made an appearance in Chicago at the DNC in the form of
MC5, a proto-punk band hailing from Detroit. Sarah Hill, a professor of popular music at Cardiff University, said the group’s live shows “represented the antithesis of the gentle hippie ethos of some contemporary folk music, and an unexpected

47 alignment with radical black ideology” (61). MC5 was noted for their screeching guitars, singer Rob Tyner’s harsh, shouted vocals, and the staunch radical ideology of their manager John Sinclair, whose views most closely aligned with those of the
Yippies. Norman Mailer was in Lincoln Park for the band’s performance, and described it as follows:
…it was the roar of the beast in all nihilism, electric bass and drum driving behind out of their own non-stop to the end of mind…and yet, still clinging to recognition in the experience, he [Mailer] knew they [the assembled protesters] were a generation which lived in the sound of destruction of all order as he had known it, and worlds of other decomposition as well; there was the sound of mountains crashing in this holocaust of the decibels, hearts bursting, literally bursting, as if this were the sound of death by explosion within, the drums of physiological climax when the mind was blown… (Loc
2140).
The lyrics did not even make an attempt to deal with the war. Rather, the protest here was contained entirely within the sound of MC5, which violated the ears and bled fury. The punk rock genre did not mature until the mid-1970s, but its roots were laid in the anger of late 1960s rock music. The only difference between the anger expressed in MC5’s music and the anger of commercially successful songs like
“Revolution” was the degree of regard for cultural convention. MC5 had none, and so its songs never charted. The sentiment, though, was the same across much of the soundscape of hard rock. Sarah Hill argued that “the idea of a unified front in the
United States in any sense—cultural, political, ideological—could never be made

48 real in 1968” (63), but she ignored the possibility of anger as such a unifying force.
That said, anger in 1968 was not only destructive as a unifying force, but also clouded the messages of the New Left and the older guard of protest musicians.
The music of protest carried on for another several years. Among the more popular anti-war songs of this period were Credence Clearwater Revival’s
“Fortunate Son,” Neil Young’s “Ohio,” and Edwin Starr’s “War.” All three made specific reference to some facet of the conflict in Vietnam. The first complained about the military service exemptions received by the children of America’s rich and powerful citizens; the second decried the deaths of four anti-war protesters at the hands of the Ohio National Guard on Kent State’s campus; and the third was a straightforward statement on war itself—“What is it good for? Absolutely nothin’!”
Additionally, each song paired its pointed message with a palpable degree of anger contained in the music itself. In “Fortunate Son,” the rage was expressed through
John Fogerty’s aggressive and raspy voice, howling over pounding drums and distorted guitars as he lamented, “It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no fortunate one.”
Neil Young’s vocals on “Ohio,” augmented by David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and
Graham Nash in unison and harmony variously, were reminiscent of a Greek tragedy’s chorus, wailing in grief over the dead students while simultaneously condemning those responsible. The song’s guitar tuning, drop D, further added to the gravity of the topic at hand and the depth of the resultant anger. In “War,”
Edwin Starr sounded like a preacher, shouting over bombastic brass and a chorus that backed up his staunch anti-war attitude with a defiant “Huh!” in the refrain.

49
The above three songs achieved incredible commercial success. “Fortunate
Son,” as a B-side to “Down on the Corner,” landed at #14 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1969. “Ohio” first charted two months after the tragedy that inspired it and peaked at #14 as well. “War” shot all the way to #1, becoming the most popular song in America for three weeks in late August and early September of 1970 and spending over four months on the Hot 100. Protest songs, it seemed, had finally captured the general public’s attention and begun to sell accordingly. By achieving such commercial success, however, their very nature as protest music is thrown into doubt. Denisoff wrote, “What is popular cannot at the same time be deviant or in opposition to the status quo, since popularity is the status quo” (Sing a Song of Social
Significance 39). This statement deserves some consideration and qualification. For instance, what would Denisoff say to the paradoxical notion of anti-establishment expression becoming the status quo of society? For a great number of Americans involved in the anti-war movement, anger at the government was the defining milieu of the late 1960s, and these people were wont to enjoy music expressing such sentiments. By the end of the decade, they made up a large enough percentage of the listening population to justify radio stations and record labels meeting their demand for “protest” songs like the three above, and the American system continued to thrive. An argument could be made that there existed two competing status quos, a culture and a counterculture, both contained within American capitalism.
This conclusion, though, precludes the possibility that the so-called counterculture, or at least the mainstream of the protest movement, did not ever

50 establish a different status quo at all. Most anti-war Americans, even the ones who were committed enough to attend gatherings and rallies, did not subscribe to the radical Marxist philosophy underlying the Weather Underground or other true revolutionary groups. Their cries for change echoed resoundingly, but only within the crucible of the Vietnam War. Music that amplified their protest in the commercial sphere, therefore, could only express the lowest common denominator of the anti-war movement: anger at the war itself. The conflict in Vietnam was a concrete and blatant example of the New Left’s problems with American policy. It also served as a physical manifestation of the general discontent felt by the country’s youth and provided a tangible enemy that could be combated. Any sentiments directed only against the war, and not against the structure of Western capitalism that had birthed it, were more easily communicable but also toothless in their ability to enact permanent systemic change. Moreover, the massive profits reaped by the mainstream music establishment through popular protest songs supported the very capitalist system that the New Left and thinkers such as Marcuse blamed for the oppression of free society and unencumbered thought.
With protest music thus commercialized and assimilated into the status quo—a status quo it upheld despite claiming to be anti-establishment—it could not truly protest against society. In Marcuse’s view, commercial anti-war songs are deprived of the sublimity that he defined as a necessary component of any artistic work:
The decisive distinction is not the psychological one between art created in joy and art created in sorrow, between sanity and neurosis, but that between

51 the artistic and the societal reality. The rupture with the latter, the magic of rational transgression, is an essential quality of even the most affirmative art; it is alienated also from the very public to which it is addressed (One-
Dimensional Man 63).
Art needs to be able to slice through the world of phenomena, to use Kantian terminology, and provide a glimpse at a world that does not exist. Early protest songs such as “This Land is Your Land” and the anthems sung by labor unions achieved sublimity through their messages of determination to make the American dream accessible to all Americans. The very melodic and lyrical structure of a magnetic protest song is such that it can reach the hearts of all those present at its performance and unite them in the hope of winning their cause. Even the music of
Phil Ochs, more sardonic than its forebears, pointed implicitly towards a world where the hypocrisies and injustices he observed would be torn down and replaced by a fairer society that would not need him as a gadfly.
Compared to these songs, the Top 40 stands in stark contrast as a bastion of fleeting popular opinion. Rarely does a song stay atop the charts for long periods of time—as of March 2015, only twenty-nine songs had ever remained the number one single for at least ten weeks, a scant three percent of all songs ever to reach that spot
(Trust, “The Longest-Leading Hot 100 No. 1s”). No matter how public taste fluctuates, however, the one-dimensionality of society prevents the expression of any true negative thought in such a mainstream outlet of ideas. Marcuse wrote, “the total mobilization of all media for the defense of the established reality has coordinated the means of expression to the point where communication of

52 transcending contents becomes technically impossible” (One-Dimensional Man 68).
As angry as “Eve of Destruction” or “Ohio” may have seemed at the time, and despite efforts by radio stations to limit airplay of both songs, neither of them expresses anything beyond fury at the current state of affairs. Had they done so, they never would have become popular enough to require censorship, for most of the public would have turned a deaf ear to their messages already. Indeed, all popular protest songs, by their dependence upon both the capitalist media establishment and a sympathetic listening audience, were incapable of projecting any message besides anger, which could only be effectively directed at the war. Although this rage seemed to be tearing the country apart at the time, the reluctance of most people to take steps as drastic as those of the Weather Underground—or rather the inability of most people to conceive of a world outside the current American system, as evidenced by the SDS’s failure to liberate the public consciousness of oppression— proved that the nation’s basic structure would emerge from the conflict unscathed.
The relationship between popular music and public sentiment in this era is in turn comparable to that of a song played on an amplified guitar. For instance, the songwriter’s own feelings are represented by the song itself, written into the lyrics and the melody. Though apolitical songs remained common throughout the 1960s, the turmoil of the decade inspired a wide variety of artistic reactions, from P. F.
Sloan’s angsty and apocalyptic alarm to Phil Ochs’ radical rejection of the American system rooted in the tradition of Guthrie and Seeger. Most conceivable responses to the war and calamitous social strife found a voice in a song, regardless of how

53 commonly that voice was heard in the American public. The filtering of these voices occurred during the recording and distribution of the music, which is analogous to an amplifier’s effect on a guitar’s tone. An amplified guitar grows far louder and its music can reach far more ears, but such amplification distorts the guitar’s tone to some degree and emphasizes certain frequencies more than others. Similarly, the distortion of a song’s message begins with the recording process. In addition to altering the sound through the conversion of a live performance into electrical signals, recording music alienates the artist and his or her feelings from the product that will be presented to the public. The distribution of the mediated song on the radio and in record stores further narrows the range of possible meanings of the song, as commercial success is directly tied to a composition’s ability to speak to the lowest common denominator of listeners’ sentiments. As a result, only a very limited societal perspective may be expressed through popular music. Songs that advocate for the advent of an alternate reality or the overthrow of the current paradigm can never connect with a commercial audience that is comfortable within the system, and therefore remain unpopular on the radio and in record stores.
Furthermore, milder protests take on a diluted quality the instant they are presented to the public by a capitalist media seeking to profit from a culture of anger, disillusionment, and anti-government sentiment. Although these songs might have moved thousands of listeners and even spurred them into action against the
Vietnam War, they were essentially creations of a society that was unwilling to totally throw off the Western capitalism structure held responsible for the conflict by the New Left—or unaware of the need to replace that structure. As such, they did

54 not have the power to effect true change. Any song with such a power was considered too extreme for commercial production or sale.
The SDS’s influence gradually diminished over the course of the 1970s as the organization became a shadow of its former greatness. Members of the Weather
Underground, the remnant of SDS’s hard ideological core, went into hiding and perpetrated occasional symbolic bombings, but acts of domestic terrorism somehow didn’t have the inspirational power of a grand anti-war rally. As the Vietnam War slowly drew to an ignominious close in 1975, both the New Left and protest music found themselves out of vogue as the anger of their era was replaced by the bitter hopelessness and economic hardship of the post-Watergate years, a feeling that
Jimmy Carter would eventually term a “crisis of confidence” in his 1979 “Malaise” speech. Perhaps the malaise that gripped America in the aftermath of the tumultuous 1960s was a symptom of an unresolved subconscious longing for a freer and more equal society that did not come to pass when the time was ripe. Those who had called for such a change were roundly rejected by an American public that would not trade the creature comforts of a deeply flawed imperialist-capitalist structure for an ill-defined alternative. Neither radical Leftist thought nor protest songs had the power to transcend the American system’s one-dimensional containment of societal critique and provoke anything but rage from the masses.
Therefore, as Marcuse effectively predicted, the American system prevailed.

55
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