British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Dissenting Voices: Popular Protest in a Conservative Age
Dr Simon Hall
Dr Simon Hall is Senior Lecturer in American History, School of History, Universty of Leeds. His principal areas of interest is the post-war social and political history of the United States, and in particular the civil rights and Black Power movements; the student radicalism of the 1960s; and political dissent during the 1970s and 1980s. The Dissenting Voices project looked at the social protest movements and political dissent across the political spectrum in the USA that began in the 1960s and how they have affected the rhetoric of both the Democratic and Republican parties since then.
The Dissenting Voices project examines the dramatic changes that have taken place in American political culture in the post-1960s era. The focus of the project is on six social protest movements:
- the continuing struggle for black equality;
- second-wave feminism;
- the gay rights movement;
- the anti-busing protests of the mid-1970s;
- the anti-abortion struggle; and
- the tax revolt.
By moving away from a ‘top-down’ focus on presidents and public policy and the well-worn terrain of malaise, stagflation, Reaganomics and triangulation, Dissenting Voices casts social movements and the ordinary people who created and sustained them – housewives, welfare mothers, African Americans, small businessmen, evangelical Christians, students – as key political actors. Fascinating in their own right, these movements were also critically important – driving policy, shaping the character of the Democratic and Republican parties, and altering the nation’s political landscape.
Dissenting Voices explores the important legacy of the 1960s for both progressive and conservative social movements during the 1970s and beyond. Indeed, it is striking how activists in all of the movements looked at took inspiration and claimed legitimacy from the 1960s – particularly the civil rights and anti-war struggles – when deploying direct-action tactics such as marches, sit-ins and boycotts, engaging in civil disobedience, adopting street theatre, and invoking the language of 'rights'. Conservatives also followed the New Left in breaking down divisions between the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres, by organizing around issues such as schooling and birth control, and arguing that the ‘personal was political’. Moreover, conservatives promoted grassroots organisation, a favoured tactic of the New Left, with relish and used the language of participatory democracy in attacking ‘big government’ and the power of (liberal) elites. Historians have long recognized the importance of the civil rights, New Left and anti-Vietnam War struggles to subsequent progressive movements for social change, particularly the gay rights movement and second-wave feminism. It is only more recently, however, that scholars have begun to pay attention to influence of the sixties movemetns on conservative activism during the 1970s and 1980s. Dissenting Voices builds on this work to show how gay rights protesters, second-wave feminists, Black Power militants, opponents of busing, property tax protesters, and anti-abortion activists can all be considered ‘children of the sixties’.
The second major focus of this project is the ways in which these movements sought to invoke the nation’s founding ideals (‘equality’, ‘freedom’, ‘liberty’) in service to their respective, if very different, causes. We see how appeals to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and America’s Founding Fathers were made by activists from right across the political spectrum – from gay rights leaders to anti-abortion protesters. Much of the divisiveness that characterized American political culture during the last three decades of the twentieth century stemmed, then, from a conflict over the very meaning of the nation itself. Dissenting Voices also attempts to bridge some of the segmentations – between political and social history, histories of radicalism and conservatism, and national and local studies, for example – that have characterized recent historical writing on post-war America.
Ultimately, Dissenting Voices seeks to tell the story of countless ordinary people who, inspired by the activist outpouring of the 1960s and the promise of American freedom, sought to remake their nation.
The British Academy funding enabled me to undertake a number of major research trips to the United States. These included archival work at both Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island) and the University of Kansas at Lawrence. Both of these institutions hold important collections (respectively, the Hall Hoag collection of dissenting and extremist printed propaganda and the Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements) which contained pamphlets, flyers, newsletters relating to a wide range of protest movements.