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What Followed from the FSM
in the Campus and Local Political
and Cultural Community

Editorial note: This outline is a sketchy draft so far. We will welcome reminders of all the important developments and connections that it omits. We expect that our cooperation with the Bancroft Library will enable us to make the texts of many documents from 1965 available here by late 2000. We invite others who care, to help us make documents from later years available online. Meanwhile, we intend to elaborate this outline with useful references to published accounts and interpretations. We hope that other veterans and scholars familiar with aspects of this local history will help us gather references, source documents, and unpublished materials -- particularly their own, and of personal character -- that may be put on line, to illuminate the complex era of developments that followed the FSM.

Renewed Civil Rights activity [1965-66]

CORE restaurant project, etc.

Vietnam Day [early 65] -- Vietnam Day Committee [mid-1965-69?]

-- mass anti-war organizing [1965-1973]
-- Second Strike on campus [1966; see Campus Consequences]

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Berkeley Barb --  launched by Max Scherr on August 13, 1965

-- one of the earliest underground newspapers to serve the civil rights, anti-war, and countercultural movements in the Sixties. For 15 years, from 1965 to 1980, the Barb was a voice for a generation looking to change the world. 
-- The Barb continued to cover the FSM story right through and beyond the trial.
-- FSMers, including Gar Smith, Lee Felsenstein, Kate Coleman, and John Jekabson, wrote for the Barb.
-- It's About Time small archive

--Independent Voices Archive

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Linkage with Farmworkers organizing [1965-66]

-- 70 -- 98??
-- campus Chicano activism [1965-present]

Free University of Berkeley [1965-72?]

-- national "free university" movement [1964 (S.F. State) -- 1972]
          -- community learning exchanges [1972-- present]

Developments in campus and youth ministeries

Radical electoral activism challenging liberals

-- Scheer campaign and CNP [1966] (via VDC)
-- BBC [1966-67] -- Berkeley Citizens Action [1970? -- present]

Feminist activism sprouts locally [early 1966?]

in reaction to experiences in FSM and VDC

Publications and media:

Spider [1965] (see "Filthy Speech" controversy)
Steps [FUB; 1966?]
Bowditch Review [1965-66?]
Berkeley Barb [1965 on] -- underground papers
Snatch [1965?] -- underground comix
KALX [1966?] -- underground radio
Pacific News Service [1966?]
Berkeley Community Memory

Related phenomena of free expression:

psychoactive drug use and activism
Sexual Freedom League

What Followed from the FSM
Regionally, Statewide, and Nationally

IN SYMPATHY:

Student movements and demonstrations on other campuses

15 in Spring 1965, 50 in Fall
systematic list, with overview of issues and modes of activism/response
accounts of the FSM's reception and influence on other campuses
links and references to key documents from other campus movements
..... to campus, local, and national journalism
..... to broader histories and interpretations of the student movement

International responses and echoes

demonstrations and expressions of support [1964-65]
          -- Tienamen Square [1989] -- present

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IN REACTION:

College administrations develop protest-containment strategies [1965-72]

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State Senate Subcommittee on Un-American Activities report [1965]

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Intensified surveillance and infiltration of radical groups [1965 onward]

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Rise of prosecutor Edwin Meese in Oakland D.A. heirarchy [1964-66]

-- local systems integration of political surveillance [1966-70?]
-- national integration [1980s]
-- Attorney General under Reagan

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Media-driven reaction to FSM, VDC, youth challenging authority

-- Ronald Reagan's election as governor [1966] -- Presidency [1980-88]

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Far Reflections of the FSM's Flare

During the pregnant years and long decades after 1964, many of the FSM's participants matured to carry its core principles of democratic engagement and expression into practice in a remarkable variety of ways. Their distinctive, individual contributions have influenced the development of environmental activism, the new cuisine, progressive assets management, micro-radio broadcasting, educational reform, cybernetic information systems, and dozens of other fields. Few found the FSM to be the only experience informing their social perspectives, for its intense moment passed in a prolonged, rich cultural surround; but for most, it remained central and indelible, and for many, transformative. What we each made from the shared impulse has turned out to be no less various than our lives, and in no one's expressed completely. Yet still a certain harmony, oft-faltering but definite, may be recognized within the diversity of our works, as the democratizing legacy of the FSM.

Though no sociologist or cultural historian has yet had occasion and means to study a creature of this sort -- a large congress of a narrow cohort, unified briefly in historically-transformative experience of a social idea, bearing its biography in their own biographies, extending now half a lifetime in wide dispersal through the realms of society -- we dream of making this possible, and plan modest beginnings. Linked to the page Who Was Involved..., we will post brief accounts of noteable and interesting work by FSM veterans. The Bancroft Library's oral history project will produce many transcribed passages of reflection about the FSM's influence on people's subsequent work; we plan to make them accessible here, with interviewees' permission. We invite other participants to contribute to such dimensions of the FSM's collective biograpy. However brief be the information you share, it will prove meaningful to someone down the line, and richer reflections still more so.

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