TABLE
OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Part 1: Moblization
- On the Origins of Social Movements
by Jo Freeman.
- Mobilizing the Disabled
by Roberta Ann Johnson
- Sacrifice for the Cause: Group Processes, Recruitment,
and Commitment in a Student Social Movement
by Eric L. Hirsch
- Recruiting Intimates, Recruiting Strangers: Building
the Contemporary Animal Rights Movement
by James M. Jasper
Part 2: Organization
- The Structure of Social Movements: Environmental Activism
and Its Opponents
by Luther P. Gerlach
- The Consequences of Professionalization and Formalization
in the Pro-Choice Movement
by Suzanne Staggenborg
- Aids, Anger, and Activism: ACT UP as a Social Movement
Organization
by Abigail Halcli
Part 3: Consciousness
- The Spirit Willing: Collective Identity and the Development
of the Christian Right
by John C. Green
- Collective Identity in Social Movement Communities:
Lesbian Feminist Mobilization by Verta Taylor and Nancy
E. Whittier
- The Social Construction of Subversive Evil: The Contemporary
Anti-Cult and Anti-Satanism Movements
by David G. Bromley and Diana Gay Cutchin
Part 4: Strategy and Tactics
- A Model for Analyzing the Strategic Options of Social
Movement Organizations
by Jo Freeman
- The Strategic Determinants of a Countermovement: The
Emergence and Impact of Operation Rescue Blockades
by Victoria Johnson
- Civil Disobedience and Protest Cycles
by David S. Meyer
- The Transformation of a Constituency into a Movement
Revisited: Farmworker Organizing in California
by J. Craig Jenkins
Part 5: Decline
- The End of SDS and the Emergence of Weatherman: Demise
Through Success
by Frederick D. Miller
- The Decline of the Civil Rights Movement
by Doug McAdam
- The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: Rise
and Fall of a Redemptive Organization
by Emily Stoper
PREFACE
The
1960s was one of those rare decades that transforms
society. It was a decade that spilled over into the
seventies and eighties. Its effects are still rippling
through some of our more remote social bayous even
as the reaction to those effects dominates the societal
center. The sixties was marked, above all, by public
discontent organized into protest movements.
While
protests are common in our
history, there have been
three periods since our country's
founding in which wave after
wave of protests have reshaped
our policies, priorities
and values. The first of
these were the moral reform
movements, particularly abolition
and temperance, which preceded
our Civil War. The second
were the populist and progressive
movements between 1890 and
1920 which sought to curb
corruption in politics and
the economic power of corporations.
The sixties movements and
their progeny were the third.
While
each period has its own theme,
there are some common characteristics.
They last roughly twenty to
thirty years. While there are
a few major movements which
set the tone of the period,
there are many minor ones which
vary the theme and bring its
ideas to people who might otherwise
be unaffected. There is always
a backlash. Social movements
generate countermovements,
and sometimes they also spawn
government repression. Countermovements
can limit the reach of social
movements; they can also mobilize
new populations and stimulate
new movements. At the end of
the period there are new institutions,
new interest groups, and different
policies and priorities than
there were before, though these
are not always the ones the
initial movements aimed to
attain.
This
book is about American movements
and countermovements of the
third wave.
The
civil rights movement that
began in the late fifties was
the first of the sixties movements,
and it set the tone and style
for what was to come. Organized
by and for southern blacks,
the civil rights movement nonetheless
sought a reaffirmation of such
basic American values as equal
rights and individual dignity.
This reaffirmation by a movement
that targeted as its enemy
a practice -- segregation --
typical of a region that itself
was stigmatized by the rest
of the nation made it easy
for a population still appalled
by the atrocities of Hitler's
Germany to view the movement's
achievements as a goal and
not a threat. It was not until
black protest "went north" that
serious national opposition
appeared.
In
the meantime, the civil rights
movement captured the imagination
of a public jaded by a decade
of conformity, particularly
the post-World War II generation
attending college. The young
people who found an answer
to President Kennedy's call
to "ask what you can do
for your country" through
participation in the civil
rights movement began to apply
the concepts and values they
had learned from that movement
to other segments of society.
These values were initially
expressed in the Port Huron
Statement, adopted in 1962
by the Students for a Democratic
Society. It urged "the
establishment of a democracy
of individual participation
governed by two central aims:
that the individual share in
those social decisions determining
the quality and direction of
his life; that society be organized
to encourage independence in
men [sic] and provide
the media for their common
participation ..."
SDS
went through many changes before
finally self-destructing in
1969. But the values expressed
in the Port Huron Statement
did not die with it. These
values emphasized the politicization
of society, individual fulfillment,
and the legitimation of dissent
in a sharp break with the previous
era's stress on privatization
and conformity. Such a change
proved enduring even while
conservatives organized their
own movements in reaction to
the successes of the sixties
and seventies.
Politicization
and individual fulfillment
as values probably had their
greatest effect in the women's
movement, which expressed them
in the phrase "the personal
is political" and acted
them out in ways that began
to violate fundamental American
institutions such as patriarchy.
Although this movement began
in the sixties, it did not
become public until 1970, and
in the decade of the seventies
it reached its peak and greatest
influence. More than any other
movement of the last two decades,
it deprivatized what had heretofore
been perceived as personal
problems.
Although
the sixties is viewed as the
decade of protest, it was really
the seventies that saw the
greatest flowering of movements
on a wide variety of issues.
As waves of protest spread
throughout our society, new
segments of the population
picked up the banner of social
change. Gays and lesbians,
animal rights activists and
the disabled were just some
of the many identities that
appeared in order to demand
new laws, attitudes and practices.
Indeed "identity" took
on new meaning, resulting in
highly organized groups distinct
from traditional economic "interests." But
when protests grew larger and
more frequent, publicity waned.
Four marches on Washington
between 1960 and 1980 drew
over one hundred thousand participants:
a civil rights march in 1963,
an antiwar demonstration in
1969, an ERA march in 1978,
and an antinuclear march in
1979. While accurate figures
aren't available, there were
probably more marches and demonstrations
in the seventies than the sixties.
The
eruption of movements in the
seventies testified to the
success of the sixties' movements
in several ways. First, the
sixties' movements legitimated
dissent itself. Protesters
are no longer stigmatized as
subversive; at worst they are
dismissed as troublemakers.
Second, the use of mass demonstrations
and even civil disobedience
was perceived as effective.
Participants may have seen
few immediate benefits from
their actions, but they attracted
the attention of many others
who had neither the skills
nor the knowledge to use the
traditional methods of political
insiders. Last, but hardly
least, the gains achieved in
the sixties stimulated a backlash.
The
sixties' movements were largely
from the left. Those of the
seventies, eighties and nineties
were from the right as well
as the left, and other movements
were unclassifiable on a left-right
spectrum. The initial targets
of the countermovements were
issues that were publicly prominent:
busing, the Equal Rights Amendment,
and abortion. Soon added were
opposition to civil rights
for gays, affirmative action,
environmental regulation, health
and safety programs, and immigrants,
legal and illegal. In the eighties
and nineties the Christian
Right, which had sporadically
resisted the changes demanded
by the movements of the sixties
and seventies, organized into
a politically cohesive and
permanent opposition.
By
the end of the Twentieth Century
the third wave of protests
had long worn out, and even
the countermovements had lost
steam and direction. The third
wave left in its wake new values,
new priorities, new organized
groups and new political alignments.
It also left new conflicts,
but ones which would be fought
through the courts and the
legislatures rather than on
the streets. Protest slipped
from the headlines to the back
pages. It remains for another
era, another generation of
idealists, to see protest as
the best route to change.
INTRODUCTION
One
of the most difficult problems in analyzing social
movements is defining exactly what a social movement
is. Participants generally know that they are part
of a movement, but movements are so diverse that it
is difficult to isolate their common elements and incorporate
them into a succinct definition. Virtually all movement
theorists have differing definitions. Nonetheless,
there are some common themes and elements that recur
in case studies and theoretical analyses, although
not always with a common emphasis.
Spontaneity
and structure are the most
important elements. Scholars
writing from the collective
behavior perspective emphasized
the spontaneity present in
fads, crowds, panics, riots,
and social movements, with
the latter merely a more organized
version of these similar phenomena.
Little attention was paid to
how movements became organized,
or how the type of organization
affected the movement's goals
and participants. Resource
mobilization theorists critiqued
this perspective, emphasizing
the importance of structure
to understand social movements.
They downplayed spontaneity,
sometimes to the point of viewing
all movement actions as deliberate
and calculated.
It
is much more useful to think
of all the many forms of social
action as existing along a
continuum. At one end are those
forms marked by their contagious
spontaneity and lack of structure,
such as fads, trends, and crowds.
At the other end are interest
groups whose primary characteristic
is a well developed and stable
organization often impervious
to spontaneous demands from
their members. In the middle
are social movements that,
however diverse they may be,
exhibit noticeable spontaneity
and a describable structure,
even if a formal organization
is lacking. It is
difficult to identify the exact
amount of structure necessary
to distinguish a social movement
from a crowd or trend, and
often harder to distinguish
a social movement organization
from an interest group, but
those distinctions are crucial.
It is the tension between spontaneity
and structure that gives a
social movement its peculiar
flavor. When one significantly
dominates the other, what may
one day be, or may once have
been, a social movement, is
something else.
Conceptualizing
a social movement as the middle
of a continuum does not mean
there is a natural progression
from the spontaneous end to
the organized one, as "natural
history" theorists postulate.
As some of the case studies
in this book illustrate, the
organization can exist before
the movement. While it is unusual
for a highly formalized organization
to become a social movement
organization, it is even more
unusual for a totally unorganized
mass to become one.
A
social movement has one or
more core organizations in
a penumbra of people who engage
in spontaneous supportive behavior
which the core organizations
can often mobilize but less
often control. When there is
spontaneous behavior with only
embryonic organization, there
may be a premovement phenomena
awaiting the right conditions
to become a movement, but there
is no movement per se. When
the penumbra of spontaneous
behavior has contracted to
no more than the core organizations,
or has not yet developed, there
is also no movement. An organization
that can mobilize only its
own members, and whose members
mobilize only when urged to
action by their organization,
is lacking a key characteristic
of movements. Regardless of
whether structure or spontaneity
comes first, or if they appear
simultaneously, the important
point is that both must exist.
In
addition to structure and spontaneity
other important elements shape
the form and content of a social
movement. Whether all are necessary
to make a movement is open
to debate. But they are so
prevalent that they cannot
be overlooked.
Of
utmost importance is consciousness
that one is part of a group
with whom one shares a particular
concern. Individuals acting
in response to common social
forces with no particular identification
with one another may be setting
a trend, but they are not part
of a movement. It was said
by sixties' activists that "the
movement is a state of mind." As
Roberta Johnson demonstrates
in her analysis of the disabled,
it is a common state of mind
and a sense of identification
with others who hold similar
views that make possible the
common acts of movement participants,
even when they are out of communication
with each other. Government
agents in the 1960s often attributed
concurrent eruptions of protest
on the campus as the result
of some underlying control
by agents of a well-organized
subversive group. The real
culprit was the press, which
by publicizing the actions
of student on one campus gave
new ideas for actions to students
with a common state of mind
on other campuses. The spontaneous
activities that subsequently
occurred may not yet have been
a movement, but they drew upon
the common consciousness that
was later forged into a movement.
Alternatively,
a movement can create consciousness.
The desire to do this by spreading
the movement's message is another
key component. This missionary
impulse is not limited to social
movements but when it is lacking,
it usually indicates that the
movement has been successfully
repressed or is stagnating.
It may also mean that what
ought to be a movement has
never become one. There is
a reason social movements are
called "movements." Without
the missionary impulse they
do not move.
The
message carried is another
important element -- some would
say the most important. Highly
developed movements usually
embody their message in an
elaborate ideology that may
antedate the movement, or be
constructed by it. Such an
ideology has several parts.
It specifies discontents, prescribes
solutions, justifies a change
from the status quo, and may
also identify the agents of
social change and the strategy
and tactics they are to use.
Not all movements have a complete
ideology, nor is one necessary.
What is necessary is identification
of a problem, and a vision
of a better future. These alone
can create a belief system
of extraordinary power.
It
has become common to use the
term "movement" for
two different phenomena, and
this can cause some confusion
in understanding what a movement
is. "Movement" is
used initially for the mobilization
and organization of large numbers
of people to pursue a common
cause. It is also used for
the community of believers
that is created by that mobilization.
The first of these is a short-term
phenomenon. Movements always
decline. But when movements
cease, the community that was
created often continues. It
may even survive until the
next wave of movement activity,
and may (or may not) provide
resources and ideas for a new
generation of movement activists.
When reading about the "movement" it
is important to understand
whether mobilization or community
is the topic because the questions
asked will have different answers.
*
* *
The
sixties transformed the study and analysis of social
movements. Previously social movements was a subfield
within the framework of collective behavior. While
those grounded in this tradition did not all agree
on what a social movement was, or what the key elements
of analysis ought to be, they did share a common distaste,
often subtle, for movements and their participants.
By and large these writers came of age politically
and academically in the thirties and forties when the
prevalent movements were extremist in nature. Fascism,
communism, and other totalitarian movements shaped
their perception of social movements and the questions
they considered central to their analyses. The literature
of this period was focused on the psychology of movement
participation. It looked for the sources of discontent,
analyzed the motives of participants, parsed their
ideology, and critiqued their leadership.
Movement
scholars writing in the seventies
and eighties were influenced
by the movements of the sixties
and seventies. Unlike the previous
generation, most of these writers
were sympathetic to the movements
they studied. Many had been participants,
or had friends who were involved.
Consequently, they asked very
different questions, ones of
more immediate interest to movement
participants. Their core concerns
-- access to resources, political
opportunity, organization, and
strategy are reflected in some
of the chapters of this book.
The "resource mobilization" school
looked on movement participation
as a rational decision calculated
to obtain specific goals. It
downplayed the role of ideology
and grievances in favor of examining
actions. Scholars asked "who
did what" rather than "why."
During
the 1980s and 1990s the pendulum
swung. Analysts asked "how" political
opportunities or access to resources
led to collective action. Ideology
was restored to explain how grievances
were translated into actions
and movement culture became a
core concern. The construction
of meaning and the manipulation
of symbols became crucial to
explaining mobilization, and
assessing movement success or
decline.
Much
of the research on what we call "consciousness" --
movement ideology, culture and
collective identity -- has been
influenced by European "New
Social Movement" theorists.
They proposed that the search
for identity distinguishes the
movements of the 1970s and 1980s
from earlier class based movements.
Movement participation is seen
as a way to question all aspects
of the social order, from government
to interpersonal relationships
to organization.
In
1983 Jo Freeman published a collection
of articles on Social Movements
of the Sixties and Seventies.
The authors in that book were
largely from the "resource
mobilization" school. Their
chapters revealed its diversity
of approaches as well as its
commonality of concerns. This
book, published sixteen years
later, retains the best of those
articles, some of which have
become classics in the literature.
A couple have been revised and
updated. Most remain as they
were. To these have been added
new chapters reflecting the change
in theoretical approaches as
well as the new social movements.
Thus this book is not only about
movements, but is part of an
intellectual movement in the
study of social movements. It
illuminates the changes in the
questions asked by scholars over
the past forty years.
THIS
BOOK'S STORY:
From
BOOKPRINTS, a regular column written by Katharine Turok,
for DID YOU KNOW, the newsletter of the New York City
Chapter of the Women's National Book Association (February
1999).
WNBA
member Jo Freeman, author, photographer,
activist, and attorney, knows
how to get published "the
hard way." Next month her Waves
of Protest: Social Movements
since the Sixties (Rowman & Littlefield,
$19.95), coedited with Victoria
Johnson, will break into the
bookstores. It leaves a long
tale in its wake.
The
story really begins in 1973 at
a political science conference.
Just awarded a doctorate, Freeman
(B.A., University of California
at Berkeley; Ph.D., University
of Chicago; J.D., NYU), was walking
out of an exhibitor's booth when
she was stopped by a stranger's
outstretched arm as a voice boomed, "Stop!
You've written a dissertation
I want to publish!" The
arm and the voice belonged to
Edward J. Artinian, editor at
David McKay's college department.
He acquired her dissertation, The
Politics of Women's Liberation,
which was published in 1975 and
went on to sell 27,000 copies.
In 1975 it was awarded a prize
by the American Political Science
Association as the best scholarly
work on women in politics. (The
runner up was a book by Jeane
Kirkpatrick).
That
same year Freeman published another
anthology, Women: A Feminist
Perspective, with Mayfield,
a California publisher. Although
it had been rejected by almost
every publisher in, and out of,
New York, it quickly became the
leading introductory women's
studies textbook and is now in
its fifth edition.
Soon
McKay sold its text division
to Longman, which kept McKay's
editors and books. After a few
years Artinian left to found
his own publishing house (Chatham
House) and his assistant, Nicole
Benevento, became the editor
who signed Freeman's next book,
a projected anthology, Social
Movements of the Sixties and
Seventies, which appeared
in 1983.
In
1987 Longman reorganized its
lists, fired Benevento, and sold
or put out of print all of her
books, including Freeman's. Armed
with a reversion of rights and
the knowledge that Social
Movements was still selling
500 copies a year Freeman looked
for a publisher to reprint it.
In the meantime, Artinian introduced
her to Leo Wiegman, political
science editor at Dorsey Press.
He signed her to prepare a textbook
on women in politics. Three months
later Dorsey was sold to Wadsworth
and all its editors lost their
jobs.
Wiegman
was then hired by Peacock Publishing,
privately owned by F. E. (Ted)
Peacock, to run the editorial
side. Wiegman told Freeman he
would do a revised edition, not
a reprint, of her Social Movements book
and in March 1991, she signed
with Peacock. In 1992 Peacock
fired Wiegman and canceled his
existing contracts. Freeman begged
Peacock to reconsider her project,
but he turned it down definitively
at the end of 1993.
Freeman
wrote her contributors to explain
the unanticipated delay, and
one of them recommended that
she take the book to Westview.
After a lunch with Dean Birkenkamp,
Westview's sociology editor,
she began negotiations with him
and Jill Rothenberg. Then Westview
was sold to HarperCollins and
in early 1996 most of its editors
left. Jill was still there. After
lunch in Brooklyn, where they
negotiated terms, Rothenberg
returned to Colorado with the
proposed contract - and Freeman
heard nothing more.
In
the Spring of 1997, Artinian
phoned Freeman to tell her that
Westview's publisher had been
fired and more editors had left.
Learning that they had gone to
Rowman and Littlefield, Freeman
got in touch with them again.
This time she negotiated with
the political science editor,
Jennifer Knerr, and signed a
contract in June of 1997. Waves
of Protest: Social Movements
Since the Sixties will finally
be published twelve years after
its predecessor was put out of
print.
Leo
Wiegman, Freeman's almost editor,
ultimately ended up as the political
science editor at HarperCollins/Westview.
So if the contract had gone to
completion, Wiegman would most
likely have been Freeman's editor
again!
Copyright (c) 1999 by Katharine Turok. Reprinted by permission
of the author.
ENDORSEMENTS:
"Freeman, Johnson, and their fellow authors survey American social movements
since the 1950s with enthusiasm and perspicacity, forcing us to recognize how
movement activity has transformed American life over the past half-century."
— Charles Tilly, Columbia University
"Waves of Protest is a highly useful and empirically rich collection
that considers movements since the sixties as a protest wave. Indeed, the movements
here are a tsunami of challenge and contention that will pique the interest of
students."
— Hank Johnston, San Diego State University
"Fresh, timely, and widely useful...."
— Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin
"A 'good read' -- sorely needed to fill a gap in the political science literature
on social movements."
— Karen O'Connor, American University
"The current generation of political science students will appreciate the
useful summaries and valuable analyses of movements' political strategies within
the structures of the American political system."
— Andrew S. McFarland, University of Illinois, Chicago.
REVIEW
Perspectives
on Political Science, Vol. 29, No. 3, Summer
2000.
by Jon S. Ebeling, California State University, Chico
The
eighteen authors of these collected articles on social
movements since the 1960s have impressive academic credentials.
Virtually all are Ph.D.s teaching at the university level
or are practicing organization leaders. The book is systematic,
well written, theoretically substantive, and shows high-quality
social science analysis of the structure and spontaneity
of social movements. The editors suggest that the social
movements of the 1960s and the countermovements of the
1970s represent a third broad experience for the United
States. The first group of social movements consisted
of moral reforms prior to the Civil War. The second group
consisted of populist and Progressive movements from
the 1890s through the 1920s. Examples of the social movements
of the 1960s and 1970s are environmental activism, the
pro-choice movement, and the activities of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Students for
a Democratic Society. There is not enough space in this
review to cover all of the movements discussed in the
book.
The
seventeen articles are organized into five topics:
mobilization, organization, consciousness, strategy/tactics,
and decline. Some of the articles, now rewritten, appeared
in an earlier book edited by Jo Freeman, Social Movements
of the Sixties and Seventies (1983). Three of the seventeen
have been updated. Seven were newly written for this
anthology.
Some
of the articles deal with the
origins of social movements,
conceptualizing them as originating
in "cooptable communication
networks" (p. 6). Social
movements may be created because
of a crisis or by more direct
instrumental methods. Some
articles discuss types of organizational
structure, ranging from the
bureaucratic to the "segmentary,
polycentric, and reticulate" p.
(84). The third section covers
group consciousness in the
emergence of collective action.
The fourth section focuses
on the use of external and
internal resource opportunities
in organizing social movements.
The final section discusses
how we might conceptualize
the decline of organizations
involved in social movements.
Overall,
this is excellent social science.
It is well written, empirical,
and intellectually stimulating.
A brief example illustrates
this: "Mobilization can
then be explained by analyzing
how group-based political processes,
such as consciousness-raising,
collective empowerment, polarization,
and group decision-making,
induce movement participants
to sacrifice their personal
welfare for the group cause" (p.
47).
The
book will be useful for students
and scholars of political science,
sociology, and social movements,
and for people interested in
working in such movements.
In comparison with other sociological
treatments of organizational
behavior, the book provides
theoretical breadth, new concepts
about organizations, and substantive
empirical results. It offers
new understanding of recent
U.S. social history.
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