A Fiction of the Past: The Sixties in American History
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A Fiction of the Past: The Sixties in American History
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250098344 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/22/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 282 |
| File size: | 545 KB |
About the Author
Dominick J. Cavallo is professor of history at Adelphi University. He is the author of A Fiction of the Past. He lives in Garden City, New York
Read an Excerpt
A Fiction of the Past
The Sixties in American History
By Dominick Cavallo
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 1999 Dominick CavalloAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-09834-4
CHAPTER 1
Problems in Making Sense of the Sixties
[O]ur national life has been a running argument about, and with, the sixties. George F. Will, Forward, Reassessing the Sixties
The inclination of Americans to expect and accept change is perhaps their most commonly shared national trait. But no one old enough to vote or understand the issues debated by John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon during the presidential campaign of 1960 could have dreamed how profoundly and unalterably their society would change over the next ten years. Or how deeply distressing those changes would be to so many of them. The assumptions that shaped some of their most valued, fragile or problematic relationships — those between women and men, children and parents, students and teachers, citizens and political leaders, black people and white — unraveled to one degree or another during the decade.
But few events during that whirlwind of movements, conflicts and upheavals known as "the sixties" took Americans more by surprise or enraged them as much as the insurrection of those who were young, white and college-educated. Perhaps no other movement was more maligned during the sixties. Certainly none has been more misunderstood since. In this book I explore various expressions of white radicalism during the decade with an eye toward answering two basic questions about them.
First, why did they happen? How was the initial stirring of discontent among a relatively small number of college students at the start of the decade related to their upbringing? Or, to ask the same question somewhat differently, how did the furiously chaotic sixties spring from the comparatively placid late forties and fifties? And why did millions of young people become alienated from mainstream American values by the end of the decade?
At the time, convincing answers to these questions eluded most Americans, including thoughtful radicals. In 1965 Paul Potter, the president of the radical campus group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), gave a speech to an audience of college administrators at the University of California at Berkeley. One of the most intelligent and politically astute radicals of the decade, Potter told his audience that the young white students who organized the New Left in the early sixties were the "sons and daughters of the American dream." Most were raised in "comfortable" middle-class suburbs in the forties and fifties, within what he called a "permissive" family culture. Many enrolled in the country's elite colleges and universities. Hence the mystery. "Somehow," said Potter, "and for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, this group of young people, who had everything their society could give them, found that gift hollow and rejected it."
More than three decades after Potter's speech, the reasons for their discontent remain "not entirely clear." This is so despite the estimable attempts to account for it by those who have studied those volatile years.
The second question concerns the historical significance of the radical youth culture. What can it tell us about the American experience, before and since the sixties? What were the historical precedents of the political ideas advanced by SDS, the largest radical student group in American history? Where does the hippie counterculture — that strange, paradoxical melange of communal bonding and "do your own thing" individualism — fit into the broad sweep of American culture and history? These historical questions and issues have not been systematically pursued by scholars. And to do so is to embark on a very different enterprise from simply describing the rebellions, or searching for their immediate origins in the post World War II years leading up to 1960.
For instance, both the Civil Rights revolution of the early sixties and the women's movement that gathered momentum toward the end of the decade had deep historical roots as well as tangible immediate causes. They were not only responses to blatant contemporary injustices, but had precedents in earlier reform and liberation movements. At least on the surface, that cannot be said of the cultural and political radicalism that took shape in the first half of the sixties. These movements were created by groups of relatively privileged white college students whose leaders — though by no means, of course, all their adherents — were almost invariably men. And their substantive criticisms of American society, which garnered little serious attention in the sixties (beyond their opposition to the Vietnam War) and are all but forgotten today, exist in historical limbo. Rather than being an integral part of the American saga, they remain the stuff of myth, warm nostalgia or cold disdain, depending on one's point of view. I will suggest that the most important ideas and values of the radical youth culture were firmly grounded in specific American historical traditions. Most of them originated long before the forties, fifties and sixties. Indeed, before the twentieth century.
In answering the two questions, especially the second, the book often moves back and forth in American time. And my approach is thematic rather than chronological. This is an unusual way of exploring the decade's history. It requires, therefore, an introductory chapter that describes both the problems of accounting for the rise of the radical youth culture and how I propose to connect it to the American past.
THE ORIGINS OF DISCONTENT
During and since the sixties, historians and social critics have tried to account for the origins of the radical youth culture. Much of their work is astute and insightful, and can be divided into three major themes (they are not mutually exclusive). One of them interprets the disaffection and domestic violence generated by the war in Vietnam as the major force behind the decade's radical movements. In his perceptive history of the era's numerous movements, Terry Anderson called the Vietnam War "the engine of the sixties." Without the war, "the decade would have remained a liberal reform era, not a radical decade, not 'the sixties.'"
There is, of course, a good deal of truth to this. The war in Vietnam inspired hundreds of thousands of perhaps otherwise apolitical young people to join antiwar organizations or to sporadically participate in increasingly bold and violent protests against the war. As the war dragged on in stalemate year after year, despite the optimistic predictions of military and civilian officials, it caused many Americans of all ages to question the wisdom, even the integrity, of their leaders. And it prompted a legion of young people either to "drop out" of society altogether and join the counterculture or display their alienation from mainstream America by selectively adopting elements of the hippie lifestyle. Perhaps as many as 3 million of the 45 million young people who turned 18 between 1960 and 1972 became involved with the counterculture to one degree or another, at one point or another. Tens of thousands of others joined, or identified with, radical political organizations like SDS.
But the American combat presence in Vietnam, greatly expanded by President Lyndon Johnson in the spring of 1965, did not inspire young people to create early New Left groups like Students for a Democratic Society or the Student Peace Union. SDS was organized in 1960, the SPU in 1959. Of course, the obsessive anti-communism that defined the country's Cold War foreign policy and made the Vietnam tragedy possible, if not inevitable, contributed mightily to the development of the New Left to begin with. Nevertheless, the New Left was there before the war. And though it attracted only a few thousand adherents in the early sixties, it became a conduit for political opposition once the war erupted.
The hippie counterculture was already stirring in the San Francisco Bay Area when Johnson raised the stakes in Vietnam. For the rest of the decade the counterculture, with its rock music, long hair, hallucinogenic drugs, experiments in communal living and colorful costumes, served as the main vehicle of protest for young people who sought refuge from a society they saw as equal parts violent and boring. The foundations of the New Left and counterculture were laid in the first half of the decade. The young people who created these movements were poised to rebel from the beginning, before the war made protests against the "establishment" popular. They have to be accounted for.
But so do the hundreds of thousands who joined them after 1965. The war may have been the crucial factor in their decision, but that doesn't account for their disposition to oppose it. There was nothing inevitable about the antiwar movement. Just 15 years before Vietnam, the United States became involved in another stalemated and futile Asian land war, in Korea. The two conflicts erupted under different domestic circumstances, including rules governing the draft, but similarities between the two are significant. The Korean war was just as undeclared by Congress as Vietnam. And it was just as driven by American fears (and fantasies) of a monolithic international communist conspiracy directed by the Russians and Chinese and bent upon world conquest. Korea claimed over 36,000 American lives, about 20,000 fewer than were lost in Vietnam. But it did so much more quickly, in about one-third the time. Yet Korea did not generate significant domestic opposition, from young or old. By contrast, during the sixties hundreds of thousands of all ages, especially the young, were willing to protest a war and challenge the authorities who made it. The war in Vietnam did not create either the alienation felt by many young people or their penchant to question authority, although it greatly increased both.
A second way of accounting for the rebellion of the young in the sixties focuses on how they were raised in the forties and fifties. While the emphasis differs from one historian to another, all of them agree that most alienated young people came from middle-class families, especially before the late sixties. Their parents usually had at least some college education and were professionals or business executives. Or if not themselves middle-class, they wanted their children to become college-educated professionals and raised them accordingly. Either way, the overwhelming majority of the disaffected young were middle-class by birth or aspiration. Historians target various aspects of middle-class family life as holding the key to explaining the discontent of its children.
Some trace the rebelliousness of young people in the sixties to the affluence and consumerism of the fifties. According to this theory, the quest for self-fulfillment and the outright hedonism of the sixties youth culture were legacies of the affluent forties and fifties. During those years middle-class families indulged their children by catering to their whims. Some believe affluent parents raised children permissively. They socialized them in the ways and means of a post World War II orgy of promiscuous consumption. For the children of affluence, things came too early and too easily in that time of plenty.
During the fifties, corporations saw a potential windfall in the huge new market created by the baby boom. Department store shelves brimmed with everything from toys based on Walt Disney film and television characters to 45 rpm records whose vinyl grooves spun out a new music called rock-and-roll. Parents who remembered their own deprivations during the Great Depression of the 1930s eagerly showered their children with a cascade of consumer goods. As a result, according to Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, the "requirements of work and self-discipline" were gradually undermined. By the time the children of middle-class prosperity came of college age in the sixties, they lacked the capacity for delayed gratification that characterized previous generations. What they wanted, in a word, was "fun."
A variation of this theme holds that affluent parents encouraged their children to believe that a good education inevitably led to prosperous careers, and both would make their future reasonably stable and secure. The affluence of their parents allowed children to feel secure enough about the future to indulge themselves in the present. Historian Godfrey Hodgson said the problem with hippies was that they were raised in a "no problem society — not of the United States but of the relatively privileged part of American society from which they came. They were bored because there was no problem about money, no problem about sex, no problem about college, and no great problem if you dropped out."
A final spinoff on the theme of the middle-class family seizes on its democratic, child-centered qualities. Professional middle-class parents earnestly cultivated their children's moral and intellectual faculties. They encouraged them to think for themselves. The sociologist Richard Flacks, a leading member of SDS, went so far as to suggest that the child-centered ways of the middle-class family unwittingly subverted the "bourgeois" values of the wider society. These families encouraged children to express themselves and embrace "humanism." Consequently, they became "hostile to the self-denying, status-oriented individualism of bourgeois culture."
There is at least an element of truth in all of these views. The problem is that none of them can explain why "the sixties" happened only in the sixties. The egalitarian, child-centered, status-obsessed, consumer-oriented and frequently liberal-minded professional middle class family has existed since at least the late nineteenth century, though there were then fewer such families than in the years following World War II. This version of the middle-class family continues to thrive in the 1990s, in even greater numbers than in the forties, fifties and sixties. Yet neither before nor since the sixties have significant numbers, or comparable percentages, of its children dropped out of society or become its critics. Much less have they challenged the hegemony of "bourgeois culture." More important, other than in the sixties American college students have never created major cultural and political movements to protest the status quo. Quite the contrary. And if there was a link between an American cult of consumption and the sixties counterculture, it is not as obvious as some might think. "It wasn't hard to drop out," said one hippie. "I had a lot of things to get rid of — a car, a hi-fi, a million useless things." These sentiments were common among serious members of the counterculture.
A third view about the origins of the radical youth culture is especially important. The psychologist Kenneth Keniston was probably the first to advance it, in the late sixties. Keniston said the young activists he interviewed usually fulfilled rather than rebelled against the political and moral values of their middle-class parents. According to Keniston, most of the white students who joined New Left groups, civil-rights organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or participated in antiwar protests were acting on values they had learned at home. They had been instilled with empathy for the oppressed and the poor by liberal or, more rarely, radical parents. Also, the democratic, relatively egalitarian atmosphere in professional middle-class households encouraged children to think critically and question figures of authority. Young people raised to think for themselves became disillusioned and alienated when they discovered the chasm between the America depicted by politicians, clergy or teachers in the forties and fifties and the one they encountered around 1960. The United States was not the paladin of democracy, equality, freedom and universal affluence they had learned about in their textbooks.
Without question, the young people who joined civil-rights and peace organizations in the early years of the sixties were motivated by moral outrage over the gulf that separated American ideals from American realities. Their activism was ignited when they discovered that the United States was riddled with racism and poverty. They were disturbed as well by the pervasive, irrational anti-communism that dominated American politics, stifled dissent at home and inspired a nuclear arms race that threatened human survival. I want to make it clear that I believe these issues played a major role in fostering their initial rumblings of alienation from American society.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Fiction of the Past by Dominick Cavallo. Copyright © 1999 Dominick Cavallo. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
Acknowledgements,
1. Problems in Making Sense of the Sixties,
Part One: Sources of Ferment in the Forties and Fifties,
2. The Cult of Security,
3. Middle-Class Child Rearing and the Renaissance of American Individualism,
4. New Bottles, Old Wine: An Archeology of Rebellion,
Part Two: The Sixties in American History I: The Counterculture and Rock and Roll,
5. "It's Free because It's Yours": The Diggers and the San Francisco Scene, 1964–1968,
6. Rock and Work: Another Side of Sixties Music,
Part Three: The Sixties in American History II: Students for a Democratic Society,
7. The Politics of Liberty and Community: Students for a Democratic Society, 1960–1965,
8. The Political Ferment of the Late Eighteenth Century and SDS's Failed Quest for Community,
Afterword: A Fiction of the Past,
Notes,
Index,
About the Author,
Praise,
Copyright,