1970s Counterculture
Terry Carroll discusses the 1970s counterculture and how the Vietnam War affected students' lives on campus.
Interview on 2011-04-22 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
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Well and in State's case you were introducing mixed genders too.
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We had one woman's dorm and I think it was less than a hundred.
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Anyway, there was one dorm over close to the administration building.
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Men and women weren't allowed to mix.
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You had all that going and you had kind of a Southern "Animal House."
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I mean I loved the movie because if you were kind of involved in that sort of thing there is a lot of truth in that movie.
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Then you had all the wild stuff in California
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and we were a very conservative area from my perspective at that point in time.
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And of course you had the music going on, all that was going,
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free love, I mean you got to throw that in there, streaking; all that stuff is going on.
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You had a lot of protests with the war.
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I experienced that as a soldier, I experienced that, you know, holding a rifle on other college students when I was in D.C.
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I was in service up in Quantico and, you know, you had a loaded magazine,
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and Kent State had occurred. Four people had been killed at Kent State.
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You had the gas stuff and fights and stuff breaking out there, people opening other people's gas tanks to siphon gas.
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Prices were going through the ceiling.
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People wondered about how they were going to pay their tuition, drive to campus, do these sorts of things.
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We did have some racial riots at the time,
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not when I was in office but when I was there earlier when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.
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We had martial law. I'll never forget that.
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You had curfews to be in.
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The jeeps drove up and down on Poole Ave. kind of making sure that students stayed on campus.
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I think we had like a 6:00 curfew we had to be in.
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Then of course Nixon, whom I really detested but I have learned to appreciate,
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Nixon was handed a very difficult situation.
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The world was crazy.
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There was a double standard in terms of the racial stuff.
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There was equality in Vietnam but there wasn't equality when you came home, so that was going on.
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In some ways people have said that we were on the verge of revolution.
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I don't know if we were on the verge of revolution but it was a hot powder keg.
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So you had all that stuff going on
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and you had students becoming more assertive,
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and of course a lot of it had to do with the draft
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and I dare say--and I shouldn't say this and it's politically bad to say this--
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but if we had the draft today we would be seeing a whole lot more in terms of protests and everything else, in terms of the wars that we're in.
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We don't, and I think that is--. In my opinion, and I haven't studied it or anything, but I would say that is the single biggest factor that differentiates today from late '60s, early '70s.
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