Student Protest at Washington University

In 1968 over 10,000 Chicana/o high school students in East Los Angeles walked out of their schools in the first major protest against racism and educational inequality staged by Mexican Americans in the United States. They ignited the Mexican-American civil rights movement, which opened the doors to higher education and equal opportunity in employment for Mexican Americans and other Latinos previously excluded.

The Depression era saw the first mass student movement in American history. The crusade, led in large part by young Communists, was both an anti-war campaign and a movement championing a broader and more egalitarian vision of the welfare state than that of the New Dealers. The movement arose from a massive political awakening on campus, caused by the economic crisis of the 1930s, the escalating international tensions, and threat of world war wrought by fascism.

The traumas and controversies of the 1960s--the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the pervasive antiauthoritarian spirit so evident on college campuses--infiltrated American public high schools. Students challenging their relegation to the world of children demanded the right to express their political views and to have a voice in decisions about their education. Adopting the activist tactics of the times, they organized strikes and demonstrations, initiated petitions and boycotts, and sought recourse through lawsuits and occasional violence.

What began at colleges in the sixties as a rejection of parental authority and the Vietnam War rapidly evolved into a social movement, one with lasting influences in diverse areas of American life. As anti-Communist and Great Society Democrats lost control of the Vietnam War and the unrest in America's inner cities, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the chief organization of the campus-based New Left, gained strength, ending the decade with 100,000 members. From political protest, SDS and its faculty and intellectual allies moved to violent confrontation with university and government officials.

Using previously classified documents and original interviews, The Other Alliance examines the channels of cooperation between American and West German student movements throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, and the reactions these relationships provoked from the U.S. government. Revising the standard narratives of American and West German social mobilization, Martin Klimke demonstrates the strong transnational connections between New Left groups on both sides of the Atlantic.

Retrospectives of the 1960s routinely include the face of youth rebellion: long-haired students occupying campus buildings, young men burning draft cards, hippies dancing at Woodstock. In Younger Than That Now, Holly V. Scott explores how the idea of "youth" served as a tactic in the political and social activism of these years. In the early part of that decade, young white activists began to learn from the civil rights movement's defiance of racism. They examined their own lives and concluded that campus rules and the draft were repression as well. As a group, they were ripe for revolution, and their age gave them a unique perspective for understanding and protesting against injustice. In short, young people began to use their youth as a political strategy. Some in the New Left were dubious of this strategy and asked how it might damage long-term progress. Young feminists and people of color were particularly quick to question the idea that age alone was enough to sustain a movement. And the media often presented young people as impulsive and naive, undermining their political legitimacy. In tracing how "youth" took on multiple meanings as the 1960s progressed, Scott demonstrates the power of this idea to both promote and hinder social change.

The Veterans of Future Wars (VFW) was a short-lived student movement that came in response to the bonus paid to World War I veterans in 1936. The VFW began at Princeton University, but quickly spread across the United States, attracting attention from all groups of American citizens. It was extremely popular on college campuses, but it engendered vocal and intemperate opposition from the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, chambers of commerce, and other citizens. The student leaders were branded as Communists, Fascists, or other similar subversive groups. The group attracted attention from political leaders; some members of Congress were supportive, but others attacked the group on the floor of the House of Representatives.

A longtime agitator against war and social injustice, Lawrence Wittner has been tear-gassed, threatened by police with drawn guns, charged by soldiers with fixed bayonets, spied upon by the U.S. government, arrested, and purged from his job for political -reasons. To say that this teacher-historian-activist has led an interesting life is a considerable understatement.     In this absorbing memoir, Wittner traces the dramatic course of a life and career that took him from a Brooklyn boyhood in the 1940s and '50s to an education at Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin to the front lines of peace activism, the fight for racial equality, and the struggles of the labor movement.