Episode 19 - 1962 Part I: Massive Resistance

We begin this episode with a look at popular culture of the early 60s, as Hollywood began making more technicolor epics such as "Lawrence of Arabia," and also increasingly addressed social issues in films like "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Judgment at Nuremberg." Folk artists like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan outcompeted rock-and-roll musicians for a place on the pop charts, but new bands such as The Beach Boys kept the spirit of rock alive. President John F. Kennedy tried to make the most of the optimistic mood of the early 1960s, but his domestic policy reforms were sometimes stifled by a conservative coalition in Congress. Among young people, new groups such as the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom and the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society questioned the centrist "Cold War consensus." We end this episode with a deep dive into the Ole Miss riot of September 1962, which was almost certainly the biggest single pro-segregation insurrection of the civil rights era. Despite the efforts of Dixiecrat politicians to foment "massive resistance" to integration, and the violence of vigilante mobs, African-American student James Meredith ultimately was able to enroll in and graduate from the University of Mississippi.

Transcript

            From Boomers to Millennials is a modern US history podcast, providing a fresh look at the history that shaped current generations, from the end of World War II to the present. Welcome to the first of two episodes covering the year 1962. This is Episode 19 of our podcast, entitled “Massive Resistance.” It’s been a while since we’ve put an episode out, so we’ll save the housekeeping for next time, and get right into the history.

            In today’s episode, we will start on the cultural front. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the state of American cinema was changing. The technology for color films had existed for some time, as evidenced by the 1939 release of both “The Wizard of Oz” and “Gone with the Wind.” However, until the late Fifties, the majority of motion pictures were still in black and white. Yet the successful Hollywood studios had been benefitting from years of strong ticket sales in an ever more prosperous America, and by the late 50s and early 60s, the movie industry was prepared to make more big-budget epics in living color. 

These efforts included films such as 1957’s World War II drama “Bridge on the River Kwai” and 1959’s Ancient Roman saga “Ben-Hur.” In 1962, the Academy Award for Best Picture went to another such technicolor epic, “Lawrence of Arabia,” which dramatized the story of British officer T.E. Lawrence and his involvement in a revolt of Arab nomads against the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Other Best Picture nominees from this era also exemplify moviemakers’ growing ambitions. Another wartime epic, “The Longest Day,” told the story of the Allied assault on the beaches of Normandy during D-Day. Unlike the other films mentioned so far, this epic was in black-and-white, and it portrayed wartime violence in a tense but less graphic manner than the more contemporary 1998 film on the same topic, “Saving Private Ryan.” The year 1962 also brought the release of the movie version of “The Music Man,” a song-filled tale of a vaudeville-era con man, which continued a strong Sixties trend of big-screen adaptations of stage musicals. Back in 1961, a much less conventional & more innovative musical film, “West Side Story” had won the Oscar for Best Picture. In addition to glamorous stars, memorable songs, and spectacular dance numbers, “West Side Story” was part of another important artistic trend emerging in the art of the late 50s and early 60s – consciousness of American social problems.

            A 1962 Best Picture nominee, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” embodied this new zeitgeist of social awareness in popular culture. This film was based on an award-winning 1960 novel by Harper Lee, which brought national attention to the problem of racial prejudice in the Deep South. The movie tells the story of fictional attorney Atticus Finch’s attempts to secure the acquittal of a black man wrongfully accused of raping a white woman in 1930s Alabama. Back in 1957, another courtroom drama, “12 Angry Men,” had also promoted a message of principled American citizens working within the US judicial system to achieve justice & overcome bigotry. That film’s plot involved a charismatic juror, played by actor Henry Fonda, helping to convince his colleagues that there was insufficient evidence to convict an immigrant youth of a violent crime. Another important social-justice-related courtroom drama of this era was the 1961 film “Judgment at Nuremberg,” which dramatized the famous Nuremberg Trials of Nazi leaders that occurred after World War II (see Episode 1A). The film brought greater public attention to the Holocaust; it was widely known to Americans at the time that Adolf Hitler had brutally persecuted the Jews, but the extent of the genocide was not fully appreciated by the American public until cultural works such as “Judgment at Nuremberg” helped publicize the scope of the Nazis’ crimes.

            Greater consciousness of social problems was also being expressed in the increasingly popular genre of folk music. After 3 promising young rock singers were killed in a plane crash on the (so-called) “Day the Music Died” in 1959 (which we covered back in Episode 14B), the rock-and-roll scene lost its cultural momentum, and folk music singers helped fill the gap on the popular music charts. Many of these folk musicians were explicitly political; artists such as Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Joan Baez consistently used their songs to express their views in favor of civil rights & against Cold War militarism. For instance, Dylan’s 1963 song “Blowin’ in the Wind” asked, “How many roads must a man walk down before you’ll call him a man,” in reference to white Southerners’ practice of referring to fully grown Black men as “boys.” Historian James T. Patterson reports that Peter Paul and Mary’s cover version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” (quote) “sold 300,000 copies in 2 weeks and became the first protest song ever to make the Hit Parade” music charts (close quote). African-American singers such as Odetta also contributed to the folk revival’s political edge; her version of the song “Oh Freedom” opened the ears of young Boomers to the Southern Blacks’ struggle for equal rights & freedoms.

            But rock ‘n roll was not dead by any means. A generation of US youth had grown up as rock fans during the 50s, and some of these young Americans were determined to keep the music alive into the 60s. These included a group from Southern California known as The Beach Boys, who released their first album, “Surfin’ Safari,” in 1962. The US history textbook Liberty, Equality, Power notes that (quote) “record companies promoted performers who exalted the pursuit of ‘fun, fun, fun’ with the help of clothes, cars, & rock ‘n roll.” Its authors argue that rock music (quote) “both critiqued & embraced the ethic of abundance” present during the first two decades of the postwar USA. While some rock musicians expressed themes of rebellion & alienation, in the early 60s rock music was primarily a consumer product that glorified “cool” material accoutrements such as flashy cars; for example, the first The Beach Boys record included “409,” a song about the “hot rod” car described in the lyrics as (quote)”my four speed, dual-quad, positraction four-oh-nine.” Rock music would quickly evolve to focus on different themes as the Sixties unfolded, but that’s a story for future episodes.

            The relatively youthful American president also hoped to capitalize on the prosperous, optimistic mood of the country, and to respond to the growing demand for social reform in the early 60s. John F. Kennedy labelled his domestic policy vision as the “New Frontier,” which evoked both FDR’s New Deal & the period’s mania for space exploration. Some political activists hoped the newly-elected Democratic president might be able to work with the heavily Democratic Congress to quickly push through a batch of new progressive legislation. Instead, according to James T. Patterson, JFK’s New Frontier ended up a more modest undertaking, closer to Harry Truman’s mildly reformist Fair Deal program (see Episode 4) than to Franklin Roosevelt’s far more expansive New Deal. Historian Patterson writes that (quote) “reformers had [just] a few successes” during the Kennedy years, although Democratic House Speaker Sam Rayburn did successfully shepherd “through a hike in the minimum wage.” 

Patterson reports that the Kennedy Administration also issued (quote) an “executive order ending sex discrimination in the federal civil service,” although he also notes the irony that JFK did not have any women in his Cabinet at this time. The US Congress also passed an Equal Pay Act in 1963 to protect women from blatant sex discrimination in the workplace. This law initially excluded employees not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, and (quote) “had no provisions for enforcement,” but Patterson indicates this new law nevertheless had some deterrent effects against the common practice of sex-based wage discrimination, & it would be expanded & more stringently enforced in the future. Many may be surprised these efforts against discrimination occurred during this early 1960s era, before the rise of so-called “women’s lib” & the sexual revolution, but these early legal changes opened the door to further, more substantive advances in equal rights for women.

            But not all of the domestic policies of the early Kennedy Administration were stereotypically left-liberal reforms. JFK courted support from businessmen & white-collar workers by pushing a tax cut through Congress that he hoped would stimulate the economy. Kennedy was not very ideological when it came to domestic policy, & he often leaned toward cautious moderation. He thought he would need credibility as a centrist compromiser if he wanted to comfortably win re-election in 1964. JFK’s successful tax cut initiative made substantial reductions to both corporate and personal income taxes, reducing the top marginal tax rates for individuals from 91% to 70% of income, & reducing corporate taxes from 52% to 48%. It’s worth noting that even these reduced Kennedy-era rates remained much higher than present-day US tax rates. Patterson states that some of the more left-leaning voices in the Democratic Party coalition viewed Kennedy’s tax reductions as an ill-advised giveaway to (quote) “upper-class interests.” For instance, economist James Kenneth Galbraith, who we profiled back in Episode 13, lamented that this change to US tax policy (quote) “mainly assisted the well off.” Economists & historians still debate how successful the first big tax cut of the postwar era was in terms of furthering American economic development; Patterson opines that the US economy (quote) “benefitted more from rapid increases in military spending during the Kennedy years” than it did from the stimulant effects of JFK’s tax reductions. 

Even when John F. Kennedy pushed progressive ideas, he was often blocked by a US Congress that was less liberal than modern listeners might assume from its robust Democratic majorities. Historians Henretta, Brody, and Dumenil note that (quote) “On such issues as federal aid to education, wilderness preservation, federal investment in mass transportation, & medical insurance for the elderly, [JFK] ran into determined Congressional opposition from both Republicans & dissenters in his own party” (close quote). According to History Professor James T. Patterson, (quote) “conservative Democrats, many of them from the South, continued as since 1938 to dominate key committees & to form informal but effective coalitions with conservative Republicans” (close quote). G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot, authors of the 2008 book The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s, observe the irony that (quote) “The party of the left [in Congress] was controlled, in nearly every instance, by its” most right-leaning members due to a seniority system that allowed seasoned pro-segregation Dixiecrats, who also tended to be more conservative on economic issues than other Democrats, to control the most powerful legislative committees. 

As a result of these Congressional obstacles, a Kennedy Administration proposal for providing government-subsidized health insurance to the elderly went nowhere in the US House of Representatives, although JFK’s successor would have more success in addressing that issue just a few years later. As always in American politics, there were also problems of wealthy special interest groups affecting legislation, which caused some successful bills to prioritize giveaways to powerful groups at the expense of more vulnerable populations. Patterson reports that (quote) “An Omnibus Housing Act passed in 1961 that offered federal support for urban renewal.” However, he argues it (quote) “did more to help developers and construction unions” than it did “to improve housing for the poor” (close quote).

The year 1962 was also a Congressional election year, and in a testament to John F. Kennedy’s relative popularity at the time, the Democrats did not experience the heavy losses that the president’s party often suffers during the so-called “midterm elections.” There was virtually no partisan change among the nation’s governors or in the House of Representatives. The Democrats actually picked up four Senate seats during 1962, and notably, most of the new senators joined the ranks of members of the party’s liberal wing, including newcomers Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, and none other than the president’s own baby brother, Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. These liberal reinforcements would help lead the Congressional Democrats in a more reformist direction by the mid-to-late Sixties.

Outside of Congress, domestic political debates became more unsettled as more young people began questioning the centrist Cold War “consensus” politics of the Fifties. In the year 1960, conservative college students created a group called Young Americans for Freedom, or YAF. Its first meeting was held at the Sharon, Connecticut home of William F. Buckley, the founder of right-of-center National Review magazine (who we profiled back in Episode 13). At that meeting, the YAF founders signed off on a statement of principles that became known as the Sharon Statement.  The conservative group’s core tenets included: (quote) “1) Individual freedom and the right of governing originate with God; (2) Political freedom is impossible without economic freedom; (3) In favor of limited government and a strict interpretation of the Constitution; (4) The free-market system is preferable over all others; and (5) Communism must be defeated, not contained” (close quote). The Sharon Statement contains the 3 main ideas that would animate the postwar conservative movement in the USA: the importance of traditional religion to public morality; advocacy of rolling back government regulations on private businesses; and a tough approach to foreign policy that wielded US military might to stand up against Communist movements around the world.

Two years later, a group of left-wing students gathered in Port Huron, Michigan to create a new organization of their own to challenge the centrist establishment from the other side of the political fence. They established the Students for a Democratic Society organization (or SDS) in 1962, and they authored a political platform called the Port Huron Statement, which mostly endorsed familiar progressive priorities of this era, such as civil rights for African-Americans. The Liberty Equality Power authors report that, in addition to espousing left-liberal policy views, the Port Huron Statement also addressed more existential questions regarding young people’s search for a meaningful life & their fight against the (quote) “loneliness, estrangement, & isolation of postwar society” (close quote). The statement’s main author was University of Michigan student Tom Hayden, who would go on to be a prominent antiwar activist during the late 60s. When SDS was founded in 1962, it had the support of mainstream liberal organizations; the student group initially received funding from the UAW & other big labor unions, which supported its agenda in favor of maintaining & expanding the New Deal welfare state. However, SDS would become increasingly radical over the course of the Sixties, and the group would turn against the American political mainstream, alienating many of its former liberal allies, but once again, that’s a story for future episodes.
 
 

Although this podcast is still a few years away from covering the campus chaos of the late 60s, one university in the USA experienced a riot during the Kennedy administration that was every bit as violent as any collegiate fracas that took place during the raucous years of the antiwar movement. This violent insurrection occurred during 1962 at a campus in the Deep South, following the news that an African-American man, who had the legal backing of a federal court ruling, was planning to enroll in fall semester classes at the University of Mississippi (which was informally known as “Ole Miss”). The man’s name was James Meredith; he was (like most Southern Blacks) the descendant of slaves, and he was also a United States Air Force veteran who had already completed a couple of years of college classes at Jackson State, a predominantly African-American university in Mississippi’s capital city. However, in attempting to enroll in all-white Ole Miss, Meredith soon faced the wrath of the Magnolia State’s political establishment, including its Dixiecrat governor, Ross Barnett (this is the same man who was responsible for the arrest & jailing of the Freedom Riders when they crossed into the State of Mississippi, as we discussed back in Episode 18). 

This podcast has covered prior incidents of resistance to the school desegregation movement by prominent white Southerners, including Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus’s 1957 collusion with angry mobs that were blocking the racial integration of a high school in Little Rock (see Episode 12). Such efforts were part of a Southern strategy of local governments doing everything in their power to oppose the civil rights movement. This coordinated effort by political leaders to protect the Jim Crow system is often referred to as “massive resistance,” which was a phrase coined by segregationist Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia back in 1956. Massive resistance involved everything from court challenges to physical intimidation in order to resist judicial rulings mandating the racial integration of schools. Some Southern county governments even went so far as to close down their public school systems entirely in order to prevent black students from being permitted to attend the same schools as white children.

In 1962, Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett intended to use “massive resistance” tactics to prevent James Meredith from ever attending classes at the state’s flagship university. The weekend prior to Meredith’s expected enrollment at the college, Governor Barnett gave a speech during the halftime of an Ole Miss football game. In the stadium stands, thousands of fans waved Confederate flags as Barnett declared, (quote) “I love Mississippi! I love her people and our customs! I love and respect our heritage!” The governor knew that most audience members understood exactly which customs he was talking about – those involving white supremacy & the separation of the races. Behind the scenes, Barnett promised his political allies that he would not allow any school in Mississippi to be integrated as long as he was governor. The tense situation had gotten onto the radar of the federal government, and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy tried to pressure Governor Barnett and other Mississippi political leaders to maintain peace & order when Meredith enrolled in classes at the university, but as usual, the promises from segregationist public officials to stop vigilante violence turned out to be worthless. 

On September 30, 1962, the same day that Meredith was due to arrive on the Ole Miss campus in Oxford, Mississippi, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech that revealed his political strategy for navigating this civil rights controversy. JFK faced the serious political challenge of keeping together the Democratic Party’s awkward coalition of Northern liberals & Southern conservatives so that the Kennedy-Johnson ticket could prevail again in the 1964 presidential election. President Kennedy’s speech about the situation at Ole Miss did not focus on the evils of bigotry, nor upon the moral necessity of racial integration. Instead, it focused on the need for all Americans to respect the US judicial system & the rule of law. Kennedy declared, (quote) “Even among law-abiding men few laws are universally loved, but they are uniformly respected and not resisted. Americans are free, in short, to disagree with the law but not to disobey it. For in a government of laws and not of men, no man, however prominent or powerful, and no mob however unruly or boisterous, is entitled to defy a court of law” (quote).

However, the people of Mississippi were apparently unmoved by the president’s speech about the importance of citizens’ compliance with unpopular court decisions. The Kennedy Administration had preemptively sent 500 federal marshals to Oxford by the time Meredith arrived at the Ole Miss campus, but that law enforcement presence soon proved to be insufficient. A mob of at least 3,000 people opposing the admission of Meredith swarmed onto the campus; historian James T. Patterson reports that the crowd (quote) “began to throw bricks & Molotov cocktails at the [federal] marshals” (close quote). Many of the segregationist rioters were Ole Miss college students – proving that not all student radicalism during the 60s was of the left-wing variety. According to biographer Larry Tye, (quote) “student demonstrators were joined by agitators from as far away as Texas and Georgia” (close quote). Patterson indicates that by the time the insurrection was over, (quote) “2 bystanders had been killed, & 160 [people had been] wounded, 28 [of them] by gunshots” (close quote). 

According to Larry Tye, US marshals (quote) “came under increasingly heavy fire and repeatedly sought permission to fire back, but the Kennedy brothers said no, not unless Meredith’s life was imperiled” (close quote). President Kennedy then scrambled to deploy well over 20,000 US troops from a Tennessee military base down to Oxford in order to stop the campus riot at Ole Miss, but by the time the soldiers finally arrived, there had already been a considerable amount of bloodshed we have already discussed. Tye writes that (quote) “a total of 166 marshals and 40 guardsmen were injured” during the melee as they attempted to hold back the angry mob. By the time the federal soldiers finally arrived, the situation was way out of control, and they were greeted with rocks and firebombs thrown in their direction. Eventually, the overwhelming number of armed soldiers were able to intimidate the violent crowd into submission, but plenty of damage had already been done, including the 2 deaths, hundreds of serious injuries, and a metaphorical black eye for the Kennedy Administration.

James Meredith luckily had not been harmed during the riot against his enrollment in the university. After the violence was finally suppressed by the reinforcements of federal troops, Meredith was able to attend classes, but he had to have protection from US marshals throughout his time at Ole Miss. Some students verbally harassed him on campus, and even those who were not openly hostile remained unfriendly. Meredith described his experience of being the only Black student at an overwhelmingly white Southern university as deeply isolating. Nevertheless, he was able to graduate with a degree in political science from the University of Mississippi in August 1963. Meredith would go on to engage in other racial justice activism later on in the Sixties, and he would pay a heavy price for his bold actions, which we will cover in a future podcast.

In a similar outcome to what occurred at Little Rock high school back in 1957 (see Episode 12), a Black student was allowed to attend and graduate from a previously all-white school only after sufficient federal forces had arrived to scare off the segregationist vigilante mobs. According to RFK biographer Larry Tye, (quote) “Rather than learning from his mistakes during the Freedom Rides of the previous year, Bobby compounded them in Mississippi” with his reluctance to send in federal troops.  According to Tye, RFK wasted too much time entertaining Governor Barnett’s arguments that sending in federal troops would be unnecessary & could be politically damaging to Kennedy’s popularity in the Deep South. Tye believes he should have preemptively sent them in (quote) “numbers overwhelming enough to quell the violence.” However, other historians argue that violent conflict over integration was almost inevitable, given the predominant attitudes in the Deep South at the time; some argue that the Ole Miss riot was one of the last gasps of massive resistance, and was such an embarrassment to Mississippi that even other Dixiecrat governors tried to avoid massive, uncontrolled incidents of racial violence in the years that followed.

Nevertheless, the events at Ole Miss in September 1962 demonstrated that white Southerners’ attitude of “massive resistance” to racial integration remained as unyielding as ever. In fact, in the months after the calamity, the Mississippi State Legislature predictably (but kind of unbelievably) conducted an investigation that blamed the federal government for causing the riot. It seemed increasingly clear that only federal legislation could end the clashes between federal court rulings & Southern state governments. Only a strong civil rights bill could end the legal ambiguity that provided some cover to the rioting white supremacists’ claim to be standing up against judicial overreach. Such legislation would be proposed by President Kennedy just one year later – but that’s a story for one of our 1963 episodes.

In our next full-length episode of the From Boomers to Millennials podcast, we will focus entirely upon the epic saga of high-stakes international tension some of you have been eagerly waiting for – the Cuban missile crisis, which without a doubt was 1962’s biggest international news story. This podcast is still co-produced by Erin Rogers & Logan Rogers. The show is written & narrated by Logan Rogers. You can send us feedback about this episode at boomertomillennial@outlook.com. You can also leave metaphorical money in our metaphorical tip jar by leaving us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts. Thanks to those of you who have stayed subscribed to our podcast feed all along, and thanks as always for listening!