CHICAGO: A far-away war seen as increasingly futile and savage, two assassinations at home, bitter racial tensions and blood and fire in the streets: 1968 was one of the most turbulent years in US history.

Forty years later the Iraq war like US involvement in Vietnam is equally contested. The gap between rich and poor has widened and race has emerged as the subtext of the hottest contest for the US presidency in decades.

Yet protests remain largely peaceful and the college campuses, the hotbeds of rowdy radicalism in the 1960s, are generally quiet. The elimination of the draft which was a catalyst for anger in ’68 because every healthy young man was at risk of being shipped off to fight has dampened the intensity of anti-war protests.

The major achievements won by the civil rights movement have also made issues of social injustice more nuanced and harder to organise around, analysts said.

A dramatic change in police tactics has also stemmed much of the violence.

Peaceful protestors were routinely attacked with clubs, tear gas and water cannons in the 1950s and 1960s.

“Police are now there to facilitate the safe exercise of free speech,” said Mark Sawyer, a political science professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“Protest has become ritualised in the United States. The protestors understand they can only do certain things or they’ll lose public support.” The 1960s were a unique period in US history and around the world.

The civil rights movement had achieved major legislative gains in dismantling legal frameworks of racial segregation. These successes led to a spirit of optimism that change could be achieved, and young people, tasting the first freedoms in an era of sex and drugs and rock n’roll, were radicalised.

Protests against the Vietnam War escalated as casualties mounted and unprecedented television coverage brought the mayhem and massacres into family living rooms.

It all seemed increasingly hopeless a mood confirmed in 1975 when the last Americans pulled out and the US faced its first wartime defeat.

A growing anger started eroding the initial optimism of the decade.

‘THINGS CAN CHANGE TO MOBILIZE’: More than 100 cities erupted in race riots in the days following the assassination of black civil rights leader Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968, including Chicago where the mayor notoriously ordered police to ‘shoot to kill’ arsonists.

A few months later, presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy brother of the assassinated President John F. Kennedy was also assassinated. And riots broke out at the Democratic National Convention after Chicago police attacked anti-war activists.

Sporadic incidents of civil unrest continued through the turbulent 1970s but have tapered off in recent years, in part because there have been fewer sparks to ignite any violence.

While the underlying social conditions which tend to precipitate race riots have remained relatively constant, it takes a major event to trigger street violence, Sawyer said.

“Were you to have something the equivalent of a Rodney King beating and an acquittal or a King assassination, I wouldn’t doubt that we might quickly end up in the same kind of beast,” Sawyer said, referring to the acquittal of Los Angeles police officers videotaped in 1991 beating the black cab driver.

A long history of public hostility towards radicalism and activism has restrained widespread protest in the United States, said Michael Dawson, who studies race and politics at the University of Chicago.

The mythology of the American dream led many to believe that those who were not doing well here were “not trying hard enough” and that protesters were manifesting for “unfair benefits”, he said.

There has also been “a celebration of being unquestionably patriotic” which intensified in the wake of the Sept 11, 2001 terror attacks on US soil, he said.

Dawson conducted a public opinion survey in the days following the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and found that 56 per cent of white Americans thought it was “unpatriotic” to protest the war.

Widespread pessimism has also dampened protest, Dawson said, citing a recent poll which showed 81 per cent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track.

“You have to believe things can change for the better in order to mobilise people, or have your back so far against the wall that you have to do something,” said Dawson.—AFP