No matter the region of the country being studied, histories of the counterculture are set within the paradigm of the Cold War. In the post-World War II world, the United States, a capitalist nation, and the Soviet Union, a communist nation, emerged as competing global superpowers who both possessed nuclear weapons. Also, Mississippi was immersed in civil rights drama. Out of this political and social disorder, student activism and a distinct counterculture emerged in the 1960s. However, there were clear differences between activism in Mississippi and in other regions of the United States.  

 

John C. Stennis, the Mississippi Senator from 1947 to 1978, was influential in the White House. As a Democrat who expressed traditional southern values and patriotic sentiment, Senator Stennis supported the Vietnam War and, according to historian Michael S. Downs, played a significant role in the expansion of the Vietnam War.[1] Additionally, the power and influence of Stennis is underlined by the fact that he was one of only two senators that President Lyndon B. Johnson briefed about the secret and controversial bombings conducted in Cambodia during the Vietnam War.[2]  

 

Senator Stennis was angry and bitter in his rhetoric against anti-war protestors. He referred to anti-war protestors as a "pest on society" and rejected the counterculture entirely.  Stennis experienced “culture shock” as a result of the presence of long haired hippies, a foreign concept in Mississippi.[3] While the nation was fighting an ideological war against communism, the countercultural movement in Mississippi was fighting against the conservative and traditional ideology of the South. Some argued that the state witnessed “young people fighting against 60 year old politicians and bureaucrats as if the two groups [were] separate countries with separate cultures struggling over control of the same geographic area.”[4]  The South’s situation is unique since “southerners were…the only Americans to taste defeat in war.”[5] This could have influenced Stennis' opinion on the war in Vietnam.

 

Despite this, members of the countercultural movement announced with a sense of pride that the “freak community” at Ole Miss was steadily growing in spite of the “hostile environment provided by the bastion of all that is meaningless and oppressive in Mississippi.”[6] Fights between those who embraced the counterculture and those who didn’t were numerous, and one individual complained that, “the rednecks and meatheads got worse and worse, and "blacks and freaks were afraid to go outside alone after dark.”[7]

 

 

 

[1] Michael S. Downs, “Advice and Consent: John Stennis and the Vietnam War, 1954-1973,” The Journal of Mississippi History 55, no. 2. (1993). 96.

[2] Ibid. The Journal of Mississippi History, 102.

[3] ibid,The Journal of Mississippi History. 100.

[4] David Doggett, “American Revolution II,” The Kudzu, September, 1970. From Mitchell Memorial Library Special Collections, Mississippi State University.

[5] Michael S. Downs. The Journal of Mississippi History.113.

[6]David Doggett, “American Revolution II,” The Kudzu, September, 1970. 

[7] ibid. The Kudzu, September, 1970.