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In France, a near-revolution by students and workers came close to toppling Charles de Gaulle in May; its economic aftermath in November almost certainly discredited forever Gaullism's vaunted role as the power broker of Europe. In Egypt, students rampaged through the streets, burning buses and shouting against the "prefabricated slogans" of Gamal Abdel Nasser's regime.
In Pakistan, mobs cried "Death to Ayub!" in protest against their President's neglect of long-festering economic and social problems. Germany, Italy and Japan were struck by the plague.
On the eve of the Olympics, Mexico was torn apart by savage gun battles be tween soldiers and students. Two months later, Brazil's generals, archetypes of the Latin American military elite, caught a whiff of dissent and hastily imposed a dictatorship on the continent's largest nation.
Upsetting Old Patterns
Nowhere was protest more prevalent or potent than in the U.S. Though the ghettos were spared the major racial holocausts of previous years, Martin Luther King's assassination ignited disturbances in 168 cities and towns and brought arsonists to within three blocks of the White House. Nearly everywhere, black citizens demanded the right to run their own communities, their own welfare programs, their own schools; and a growing number of militant Negro groups armed to protect themselves from what they considered an incurably hostile white society.
Strikes by public employees became commonplace, and union memberships increasingly disavowed contracts negotiated by their leaders, threatening to upset a pattern of stable labor relations built up over a generation. Even the two-party system was threatened, as millions of Americans, mostly lower-middle-class voters demanding law and order and resentful of Negroes' demands, responded to the egregious slogans of George Wallace.
On the campuses, groups of radical students sought nothing less than the destruction of the university. Columbia nearly fell to them last spring, and San Francisco State College was still reeling under their attacks as the old year closed. Despite the Administration's halting steps toward peace, massive antiwar demonstrations still took place in parks and arenas, men still burned their draft cards, priests and pedagogues still faced trial for attempting to subvert the Selective Service process.
In the U.S., as elsewhere in the world, there was an undeniable legitimacy to many of the dissenters' causes. When they clamored for greater participation in academic decision making or more meaningful curricula or better job opportunities in the ghettos, colleges and corporations and city halls generally proved willing to meet their demands, at least halfway. Indeed, one of the most remarkable aspects of a remarkable year was the resilience of American society to such wide-ranging attacks on so many hitherto sacrosanct institutions.
The Clubs of August