Contenu du sommaire : Retour sue les Sixties : les Etats-Unis des années 1960

Earl Warren and Lyndon B. Johnson served together at the top of the federal government, one in the Supreme Court (1953-1969), the other in the White House (1963-1969) ; both contributed to the strengthening of civil rights. They had apparently little in common : Warren was a Californian, discrete and with strong principles ; Johnson an oversized Texan, politically rather cynical. Nevertheless, both men worked welltogether and both were unable to cope with minorities demonstration. This paper demonstrates that Warren and Johnson were not liberal icons, as they have been portrayed, but both came from progressivism and defended an American universalism reinforced by a strong federal state. They were educated in the first half of the twentieth century and were able to implement social legislation in a progressive way, but were unable to understand Black Power and other identity movements.

The 1960s were Richard's Nixon years in the wilderness. He had to face t wo resounding defeats in 1960 and 1962, against John F. Kennedy and California's governor Edmund G. Brown. Most political pundits then wrote his political obituary and declared him politically dead. But Nixon rose from his ashes to become President of the United States. This paper deals with Nixon's political resurection. How did he manage to take adavantage of the “unravelling of America” in historian Allen Matisow's words ? How did he build his so-called “Silent majority” on the ruins of the liberal consensus ? Did he help to heal the wounds of a bitterly-divided nation or did he cynically take advantage of those divisions and make them worse ? Last but not least, what conclusions did he draw from his numerous trips around the world ? How did they help him to shape his ideas in the field of foriegn policy ?

This essay attempts to suggest new ways of looking at American liberals in the 1960s. For ideological reasons, American historians have tended to neglect the issue of liberalism, focusing mainly on the New Left and conservatism. A more systematic use of social sciences such as socio-logy, anthropology and demography will bring about fresh interpretations of the origins, development and exit of liberals in the 1960s.

In 1965 the United States adopted a new immigration law that put an end to the national origins quota system. This article offers a synthesis of the political and institutional factors that help account for the adoption of this law. Although the quota system had been under attack since World War II, the domestic and international conditions for its elimination materialized only in the mid-1960s. Given the dramatic effects of the 1965 reform, historians have pondered the reformers' true intentions. Did they expect or desire the increase in, and diversification of, immigration that followed ? Or did they mostly want to eliminate a law whose discriminatory nature could no longer be tolerated in the 1960s, as is suggested by most experts ? The article underlines the ambiguity of the reformers' discourse, focusing alternatively on continuity and a break with the past, and suggests that it is due to the political compromises that were necessary for the passage of the new law.

This paper discusses the ambivalent reactions of Japanese Americans to the mass civil rights movement among African Americans during 1963-64. Although groups of Nisei, notably the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), had long worked alongside Blacks in lobbying and legal campaigns for racial equality, the mass civil disobedience campaigns sparked concern among Japanese Americans who saw the movement as —at best— something that did not concern them, and at worst a wedge to divide them from white allies. This tension led to a series of confrontations. In mid-1963, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. invited the JACL to send representatives to join the March on Washington, local chapters protested, and the issue was resolved only by the intervention of national leaders. Meanwhile, Nisei newspapers published letters containing both praise and criticism of black protesters. A second crisis arose the following year when Nisei in California split over a ballot measure to repeal a Fair Housing Ordinance.

From the mid 1960s to the end of the 1980s, the American Jewish community conducted a multi-faceted mobilization on behalf of Soviet Jews' right to emigrate. So far historians have only studied the establishment's mobilization, disregarding that of so-called grassroots organizations. This article shows that the latter's role was decisive despite the scarcity of their resources and their lack of a national political network. Their local action contributed to setting the plight of Soviet Jews on the agenda of American foreign policy. Grassroots organizations also designed the linkage that should force the USSR to allow Soviet Jewish emigration, a linkage later recuperated and adopted by the American Congress. This article therefore reveals the largely unknown influence of local political actors who were in all respects outsiders in Washington.

Recalling the relatively long history shared by the black and white branches of the student movement, and, in particular, the influence of the Civil Rights Movement on Students for a Democratic Society, this article examines the challenge that the spread of Black Power ideology among black students posed to the whole student movement. Arguing against the dominant tendency of the historiography of the 1960s to view this ideological shift as the death knell of interracial cooperation, this article will demonstrate that despite ideological differences and racial tensions, this period witnessed the development of new forms of consciousness about the possibilities of collective action, as well as new sensibilities among white students about the need to support the struggles being waged by Latinos and African Americans. Rather than dividing the movement, the ideological currents associated with Black Power facilitated the formation of a broadbased interracial movement on the municipal level that represented a significant challenge to the administration of Mayor Daley.

This article deals with the paradoxical fate of capital punishment in California during the 1960s. It details the specificities of the death penalty in this State and underlines its rare and symbolic character. Executions have become non-events. Subsequently, the rise of capital punishment as a political question is told. Finally, the article explains how abolitionist lawyers obtain from federal courts the suspension of executions while public opinion, shaped by “law and order” discourses, remains largely in favor of capital punishment.

Focusing on the growth of American tourism in France between 1945 and 1970, this article shows how the French and US governments cultivated and shaped the American masses, in order to advance their own foreign policy agenda. The Marshall plan's campaign to improve American vacations in France, Charles de Gaulle's agressive promotion of American tourism, the development of American consumerism, the making of the American middle class and the fabulous rising of air transportation industry (particularly Pan Am), broke down the Kennedy and Johnson efforts to reverse this trend. They wanted to cut down the American balance of payments deficit. They failed. In matter of transatlantic affairs, it is clear that we can no longer separate mass tourism from foreign policy.

The 1960s bore witness to a new context completely different from the tense years in the aftermath of the war. This decade was the time when the French cinema struggled to get back on its feet, in an environment made rough and tough by the Hollywood producers. National financial support, along with the rise of the Nouvelle Vague, got the French cinema back into competition, in order to contend with the American film-making industry. The latter also fell victim to the rise of new generations which changed the structures and characteristics of the great studios. The period of fierce competition was followed by a truce which was reinforced by an opening of the business to the international film-making industry, the latter being itself primed by the growing number of new means of showing films, such as film-clubs, or arts cinemas. Suffering from major ideological differences, the opposition between French and American cinema is slowly disappearing, leaving room for a new cultural approach. No matter what the origin of films is, what is at stake is the nature of cinema itself, and thus, the huge gap between blockbusters, and cinéma d'auteur. In this global world, which is no longer one of separate nations, some common values are shared, which are home to the world of the cinema. Hence the new, different way inwhich French audiences see American films.

As far as American cinema is concerned, the sixties were in fact a transition period standing between the upheavals of the fifties caused by the Paramount decree as well as the arrival of television in US homes, and the near completion of Hollywood's restructuring in the seventies. The paper shows that for the Hollywood Majors, the sixties represented the middle of that restructuring period when, faced with an ever-declining audience, the studios tried to keep their audience or at least to limit its decline by switching to another target audience. This however weakened them financially and made them prey to take-overs by big conglomerates, thus paving the way for a production system that has resulted in the present-day blockbusters.

For those who are interested in the various resources of the BDIC that relate to the 1960s in the USA, using the computerised catalogue alone is not sufficient. The old card catalogues, especially the subject index, are particularly useful. Consultation of some of the documents preserved within the BDIC's archive collections are also to be recommended.