Years of Hope, Days of Rage

People never find it easy to confront the past; they generally prefer to consign it to oblivion. In today’s society, the model citizen is too often one without memory. Spurious historical categories are essential to social amnesia. The notion of the decade, for example, is among the more ubiquitous of such categories. It is, to be sure, a convenience, but it also is a tool of demarcation, an ideological term used to protect the present from the past. It reduces complex events to easily digestible chunks of time: A “decade” is a collection of social forces or tastes that is inevitably discarded. Experience becomes fashion: Everything changes, nothing lasts. History is turned into a species of exorcism and kitsch.

This is especially true whenever one hears talk about “the ‘60s.” The term is, of course, a code name for the upheaval thought to have occurred in those over-oxygenated years. But it is used to hallow certain experiences while hollowing out others. The mosaic of moods and movements (musical, artistic, political) that were so much a part of that period has unfortunately congealed in the popular imagination as “the ‘60s.” This apparently innocuous term conceals, as Arthur Marwick points out in his massive new book, the fissures and frictions, the many divisions and differences, inherent in any time of social dislocation. It suggests the hegemony of particular experiences (Woodstock Nation, say) and neglects or diminishes the importance of others (the Silent Majority, for instance). It is worth recalling, for example, that there was much political conservatism and quietism in the 1960s.

The packaging of history into decades exacts a toll on collective memory. For many people, “the ‘60s” is a kind of exotic folklore (Twiggy, the Beatles, Timothy Leary, Godard, Vietnam, Huey Newton), as strange and harmless as the glittering artifacts of a Stone Age tribe displayed in a glass case in a museum. It will not surprise anyone when “The ‘60s” reappears as a prime-time series on HBO or network television. Its purpose will be entertainment, but its effect will be to trivialize history.

It is hardly possible to condemn this notion of “the decade,” as Marwick rightly does, without using it. The power it exerts is seductive. Marwick objects to its tyranny and confesses the lack of an alternative, except to posit a “long sixties,” beginning in 1958 and ending in 1974. The notion’s essential vulgarity can be glimpsed in the disagreement over the point of origin and end of the ‘60s. For some, the decade began in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a Birmingham bus; for others, in 1963 with President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. For some, it ended in 1970 with the killings at Kent State University; for others, several years later with Watergate. By the time the last American Marine was forced to flee Saigon in 1975, no one doubted that “the ‘60s” were over.

It is difficult to apprehend the legacy of what critic Greil Marcus has called the “moods of rage, excitement, loneliness, fatalism, desire” that buffeted America and the world in those turbulent years. The changes wrought in our sense of ourselves are not well understood, even now as the century draws to a close. There is little doubt, however, as Marwick convincingly demonstrates, that the social, moral and aesthetic issues first articulated then have now become acute. Controversies over race, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll became widespread, revealing, as Marwick writes, “fractures [in society] which had long existed and had been too long ignored [and which] were now being brought out into the open.” For Marwick, a professor of history since 1969 at London’s Open University, “the essence of what happened in the sixties is that large numbers of new subcultures were created, which then expanded and interacted with each other, thus creating the pullulating flux which characterizes the era.”

That “flux” saw “the growing power of young people,” “unprecedented activism on the part of ordinary citizens,” “changes in family relationships,” “new standards of sexual behavior,” which, singly and in combination with other factors, “permeated and transformed” the culture of the mainstream society in both America and Europe. While there was no political revolution, there was, Marwick argues, a cultural revolution in “material conditions, lifestyles, family relationships, and personal freedoms for the vast majority of ordinary people.” For Marwick, “the full significance of the sixties lies not in the activities of minorities, but in what happened to the majority, and how it happened.” He believes it was the “measured judgment” of a malleable establishment that both blunted the period’s excesses and absorbed its sensibility. He is convinced that “the only societies for the future are multicultural ones, societies which will exhibit to the full the vibrancy and creative potential which first bloomed in the sixties.”

There is little doubt that the horizon of opportunity for African Americans and other ethnic groups and women was dramatically widened as a direct result of the social movements of the 1960s. Ironically, the effort to enfranchise the dispossessed and the marginal would come to have unforeseen patrons. By the mid-1980s, the biggest boosters of multiculturalism and political correctness would be corporate America--a fact almost entirely missed by critics on the right. Notions of inclusion were accepted with remarkable alacrity by an American economy increasingly global in reach. As David Rieff has sensibly noted, “the market economy, now global in scale, is by its nature corrosive of all established hierarchies and certainties, up to and including--in a world now more than 50% nonwhite and in which the most promising markets lie in Asia--white racism and male domination. If any group has embraced the rallying cry ‘Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture’s got to go,’ it is the world business elite.” The steady subverting of traditional moral values is less the work of academic moles burrowing within the curricula of our universities than it is the consequence of a turbocharged capitalism.

Irreverence toward authority is now widespread. The reluctance to see the nation entangled in foreign military conflicts, the desire to preserve the planet’s environment, the skepticism over the claims of science, the general loss of confidence in the institutions of business, labor and government are probably all a result of the doubts voiced so strongly in the ‘60s. There is no question that advertising, popular music, fashion and even the language itself owe a debt to the frisky experiments of that time. The pop sensibility of Andy Warhol is now the catechism of Madison Avenue. One of the great ironies of the ‘60s is that its chief cultural manifestation (rock music) could be so easily severed from the ideological conceits so treasured by some of its more fervent purveyors and embraced by a system that was so frequently the object of contempt. Marwick is alive to this irony, observing that “most of the movements, subcultures, and new institutions which are at the heart of sixties change were thoroughly imbued with the entrepreneurial, profit-making ethic.” (For the fruit of this ethos, see Richard Branson’s Virgin enterprise, for example, or Ben & Jerry’s ice cream empire.) Some pollsters, such as Daniel Yankelovich, believe that the values of the so-called counterculture--”creativity, leisure, autonomy, pleasure, participation, adventure, vitality, stimulation, tender loving care”--have triumphed among a majority of the educated and the affluent.

In America, if not in Europe, perhaps the most startling change was the passage from a literate society to one in which half of all Americans claim never to have read a book. In 1963, television surpassed newspapers as the source of most news for most Americans. Today, in most households, the television set is on for more than six hours a day. The fetish of image became rampant. Significant structural strains also began to tear at the fabric of the nation’s economy. The majority of workers were no longer found in farms and factories. The new jobs were in services and retail trade. The importance of steel and automobiles--the backbone of America’s industrial might--began to diminish. By 1981, as Emma Rothschild has noted, “this most industrial of societies, this bourgeois El Dorado, has in fact gone further toward a service and retail economy than any other of the largest industrial economies.” Europe, too, as Marwick points out, enjoyed a sea change, emerging from the devastation of World War II into the sunshine of what struck many as an age of permanent prosperity.

Marwick’s tome goes a long way toward dispelling the fog of willful misunderstanding that envelops almost all discussions of the ‘60s. The phrase “the ‘60s” is mostly used as a euphemism for the New Left. For the sins of contemporary culture are thought by many critics to be rooted in the sensibilities of the New Left. Examining the New Left’s genesis and its fate is perhaps the best means of piercing the shibboleths that infect most talk today about the ‘60s.

Like much of the generation it reflected, the New Left was rooted in utopian romanticism. It was often tainted (especially in what Marwick calls the “High Sixties,” meaning the later years of the decade) with a disturbing streak of intolerance and messianism. It was frequently intemperate, unreasonable, arrogant--that is to say, it was a movement of the young. It was, in the words of Al Haber, a founder in 1962 of Students for a Democratic Society, a mixture of “mysticism, humanism, innocent idealism and moral urgency.” That it finally splintered into dozens of squabbling sects whose critique of American society was derived largely from a bad conscience peculiar to the privileges of the upper middle class cannot be denied. But though its grasp exceeded its reach, its original aims were, on the whole, admirable.

The canonical texts of the cultural and political movements of the ‘60s, the Port Huron Statement (1962), say, or Allen Ginsberg’s epic poem “Howl” (1956), Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” (1963) or, to select one of a number of possible examples from Europe, Guy Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle” (1967), described, often imperfectly, occasionally with eloquence, the inchoate yearnings of a generation (now middle-aged) that spent its youth acting as midwife to hopes that continue to haunt the imagination.

Those hopes today lie interred within a catacomb of caricature. Exhuming the corpse of those dreams seems almost to be an act of archeology, a salvage operation. Marwick does his best, but there is too much of the academic in his prose. One feels the hand of the mortician conducting an autopsy. For all his dedication, the book is somehow bloodless, inert, as if Marwick hadn’t actually talked to anyone but only immersed himself in the yellowing archives of libraries and newspaper morgues. It is also occasionally marred by shoddy scholarship. For instance, he describes Mario Savio as a member of SDS at the time of the Free Speech Movement and married to Suzanne Goldberg, who is said to be a member of the Communist Party. Neither is true. Savio never belonged to SDS, nor did he marry Goldberg until 1965, a year after the Sproul Hall sit-in at UC Berkeley. Nor was Goldberg a Communist. Perhaps Marwick has confused her with Bettina Aptheker, who did belong to the party, although her membership was undeclared. Such lapses are a pity since Marwick is otherwise at pains to explode the prevailing image of a period that bears little relation to the actual events in which many were proud to participate.

By contrast, David Obst, a onetime minor activist who became a literary agent and today is best remembered, if at all, for having written the movie “Revenge of the Nerds,” has penned an entirely frivolous (and often inaccurate) account of his Forrest Gump-like appearances at several of the more memorable defining events of the ‘60s: People’s Park, the Black Panthers, Seymour Hersh’s exposure of the My Lai massacre, Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers. It has been said that if you can remember what happened in the ‘60s, you must not have had a very good time. Obst seems to have thoroughly enjoyed himself (and been titillated by the prospect of revolutionary climax), but his memory hasn’t improved with the passage of years. His slim memoir is peppered with errors. He has Huey Newton accompanying Bobby Seale onto the floor of the California Assembly in May 1967, both men “carrying loaded handguns, rifles, and shotguns,” to protest proposed legislation banning the bearing of arms in public. But Newton never went to Sacramento; as Seale wrote in his 1970 memoir, “Seize the Time,” Newton was forced to stay behind in Oakland because “we felt we could not risk Huey getting shot.” Obst also egregiously mischaracterizes the speeches he heard at a Panther rally in 1969 in Oakland as “anti-white” and writes that the crowd of several thousand was made up of “a lot of angry folks with guns.” Our memories differ. One of the more attractive aspects of the Panthers was their insistence on a strategic alliance with “progressive whites.” More influenced by Marxism than by black nationalism, the Panthers were keen to distinguish themselves from such “cultural nationalists” as Ron Karenga’s US organization and Elijah Muhammed’s Black Muslims. As for guys with guns, there weren’t any. Indeed, before entering the hall at which the rally was held, people were patted down for weapons, so fearful were the Panthers about possible police provocation.

What is plain is that beginning in the early 1960s, it became increasingly clear that the world was adrift on a sea of social, economic and cultural changes. The old contest of classes that had captured Karl Marx’s imagination in the 19th century no longer served fully to explain the upheavals of the 20th. Modern industrial society had created institutions and forms of mass politics and culture and production that called for fresh thinking if they were to be understood. It is the principal value of Marwick’s work that he traces the trajectory of these changes in the United States, Great Britain, France and Italy. Automation, the growth of white-collar jobs, the service-oriented nature of capital had altered the contours of the economies of the advanced industrial nations. Traditional strategies of reform were obsolete. The archaic doctrines of past radicalism helped neither to interpret the world nor to change it.

The Old Left was rejected as morally bankrupt; its dreams had been perverted by its persistent apologetics for the Soviet Union. The lure of ideology was mostly refused, even as the search for theory and values continued. Disenchantment with the nostrums inherited from an older generation was widespread. The authors of the Port Huron Statement, for instance, regretted the “decline in utopia and hope,” acknowledging its cause in “the horrors of the twentieth century, symbolized in the gas ovens and concentration camps, [which] have blasted hopefulness.” The insensate cruelty of the 20th century called into question all ideologies. Marxism was not exempt. It came increasingly to be seen as a superstition disguised as science. It had no place for man’s capacity for irrationality and his love of the demonic, for which this century has provided a mountain of corpses.

Nonetheless, the complexity and ambiguity inherent in human affairs did not have to impose moral or political paralysis. In its early years at least, the New Left declared its belief in reason, in persuasion, in moral sobriety. It opposed the use of violence. It understood that the Left’s historic critique of power, in others and in itself, gives the longing for justice its moral foundation. It set in motion an unwieldy and diverse movement of critical reflection and action that helped to end the American intervention in Indochina, improve the lot of the poor and the disenfranchised and spark a cultural upheaval, the effects of which are still being felt the world over. For a time, the New Left advanced seemingly from victory to victory, from strength to strength. That it would falter (even collapse) at the moment of its greatest triumph--the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam--is an enduring irony.

The effort to oppose American adventurism abroad forced the New Left virtually to abandon its agenda at home. Despite feeble attempts to link the war with a more general critique of America’s political economy and society, the escalating conflict proved to be the single most powerful stimulus in the growth of opposition to the established order. Fearful of being drafted to fight and possibly to die in a war for a dubious cause in distant lands, young men--mostly students--enrolled instead in the movement to end it. Demonstrations grew larger and more frequent, and the pitch of the protest became increasingly fevered.

The government reacted at first with surprise, then with anger and finally with fright. It resorted to a variety of methods designed to limit, if not end, dissent. It is not necessary to recount in detail this familiar story of suppression: police attacks on peaceful demonstrations, the secret (and often successful) efforts to encourage extremism in order to isolate dissenters and the open campaign to crush resistance by wielding the state’s powerful legal cudgel, thus draining the Left’s always meager treasury and depriving it of its most able leaders. Such tactics gave birth to the politics of paranoia. The virtues of patience and reflection and nonviolence embraced by the early New Left fell victim to the government’s assault. An avalanche of panic swept through the counterculture. One could hear it in the music of Jim Morrison and The Doors. One could sense it in the wholesale consumption of increasingly dangerous drugs. The volatile fantasies of messianic eschatology--fantasies that are embedded in the necessarily utopian hopes of the Left--were unleashed. The logic of Armageddon was relentless: Lunacy was the result. The turn toward terrorism by some of the movement’s best and brightest activists was a tragedy from which it never fully recovered.

The attempt to define the New Left’s mission without reference to the vocabulary (if not the values) of Marxism was short-lived. The inability to invent a political language of its own exacted a penalty: It condemned the movement to a kind of ahistorical wandering, a theoretical shallowness that would prove to be its undoing. The trajectory of the New Left came to be characterized, as Russell Jacoby has written, by spurts of activity followed by amnesia and exhaustion. It was unable to muster the tenacity required by its ambition.

Sensing that something had gone awry, much of the New Left began to dabble in dogmas. Some renounced the often debilitating ordeal of activism; the eventual retreat into quietism stilled the voices of many of those who might have blazed a brave new beginning. Others, disillusioned with the cult of technological progress and the alienation it spawned and unable (or unwilling) to believe any longer in research and science--the twin gods of the post-Enlightenment West--turned toward introspection, toward the pursuit of a personal solution.

In the 1970s, the frantic search for a shelter from the storm led many young people to abandon politics altogether. The notion that human life can be redeemed through mystical self-revelation was resurrected. (It was, of course, never entirely absent; one has only to recall Leary’s notorious slogan: “Tune in, turn on, drop out.”) Many of the movements born under the sign of the ‘60s soon offered little more than simplistic recipes for salvation, doctrines of submission that employed the language of transcendence. Too often did such quests require a surrender of consciousness. Too few were willing to admit that the “mysticism, humanism, innocent idealism, and moral urgency” that had motivated the sensibility of the ‘60s could also fuel the fires of fanaticism. Too late was it seen that there is something suspect about what amounted to a therapeutic theosophy.

Still, others remained loyal to the best impulses of that hectic time, even as they pursued careers as teachers or writers or community organizers or lawyers. But the sense of excitement and movement had been lost; the original vision of making history very much dimmed.

Today there is widespread disenchantment with panaceas whether of the Right or Left. The political process remains one in which discourse is sacrificed to spectacle. The media are, as William Pfaff has written, “more interested in inconsequential scandal than the quality of the ideas which govern the nation.” They are obsessed with the rise and fall of personalities. America’s political life increasingly resembles what A.J.P. Taylor observed of Hapsburg Austria: “Grandiose, full of superficial life, yet . . . theater, not reality.” Economics seems to be less a science than an alchemy, politics but a synonym for the inability (or refusal) of politicians to deal seriously with the problems that continue to plague the country and the planet.

The fantasy of the “post-scarcity society,” dearly loved by many in the ‘60s, was punctured in the ‘70s by the realization that natural resources were finite, even if man’s capacity for greed was not. The gap between rich and poor, haves and have-nots, which grows wider with each passing year all over the world, is an abyss into which utopias of both the Left and the Right have fallen. A taste for the apocalyptic is today shared by nearly everyone, everywhere. Doomsday scenarios, despite the collapse of the Cold War, abound.

In retrospect, the generation that came of age in the 1960s was defeated by its inability to transcend the political culture it had hoped to transform. It was bound by traditional values of naivete, anti-intellectualism and messianism. Its moral credit was squandered as it grew intoxicated with ideology and increasingly forsook the virtues it had once embraced. The retreat from politics must be counted among its greatest failures. What is left is in disarray, its ambitions sapped by doubt and history.

The hope of some that by tapping the radical and populist traditions of a half-century or longer ago, a “new” New Left might be reborn is forlorn. Political renewal is never nurtured by nostalgia. Incantation cannot reawaken historical memory. The past is severed from the present, and we are more and more strangers to our own history. Moreover, it is from a glimpse of the future, not of the past, that the struggle for a better society draws its strength.

There almost always is a gap between intentions and experience. If it is very wide, we are obliged to reexamine both our expectations and our experience. For the generation whose lives were indelibly stamped by the ‘60s, such self-scrutiny has been rare. A clutch of activists (coming to very different conclusions) has sought to do so: Todd Gitlin, David Horowitz, David Hilliard, Elaine Brown, Margo Adler, Paul Berman, Tom Hayden, Mary King, John Lewis, among others. Instead, it has preferred to assign responsibility for the collapse of its hopes on “others”--Nixon, COINTELPRO, Red squads everywhere. There is, of course, a measure of truth in this. But the failure to leave an enduring political legacy has more to do with a fundamentally stunted conception of politics. It is, sad to say, a flaw that is embedded in the heart of the sensibility of the ‘60s.

Much of the activism that animated that period revolved around the idea of authenticity: an end to estrangement and the construction of community were constant refrains. (Today’s identity politics with its inherent distaste for the very notion of a common civic culture is one unhappy consequence, alas, of that idea.) The injection of moral passion was deemed a necessary antidote to rouse an America (as well as a world) whose political sensibilities had been dulled by the elixir of alienation. Politics was a form of Gestalt, a species of social psychoanalysis. Its aim was not merely reform but catharsis.

There was an implicit thirst for politics as a total art form. To shatter resignation, rebellion was decorated with symbolic acts and varnished with the jargon of “authenticity.” To the “end of ideology” was proposed a mystique of participation. To the sluggishness of reform was proposed the cult of direct action. The result, as the late Christopher Lasch so clearly understood, “imprisoned the Left in a politics of theater, of dramatic gestures, of style without substance--a mirror image of the politics of unreality which it should have been the purpose of the Left to unmask.”

Politics as a total art form embodies a terrible logic: Only by increasingly provocative spectacle can the veil of apathy be pierced. Such a politics can express itself in either harmless gesture or in violent acts. Extremism is elevated to the level of strategy. Direct action is the barometer by which commitment is measured, authenticity the result of an ordeal endured. It is a dialectic of defeat.

The ‘60s contained less a politics than a collection of extremely seductive moral sympathies. Ultimately, the confusion of the personal with the political would subvert its better intentions. The hope that unbridled passion was capable of not merely transforming society but of changing those within it, that it would give lasting meaning to otherwise empty lives, was as dangerous as it was naive.

Historical truth is always elusive; things are always more complicated than we care to remember. Lucidity depends on one’s angle of vision--and, it should never be forgotten, on one’s stake in the present. Arthur Marwick’s dense and important book, despite a prolix prose style and a certain aridity of presentation, goes a long way toward providing us with a more subtle sense of what a historical moment contains. (For a taste of the spirit of the ‘60s, Geoffrey O’Brien’s unjustly neglected gem, “Dream-Time: Chapters from the Sixties,” remains invaluable.)

Political renewal, it might be argued, lies in the spirit of the ‘60s. But it would be wrong, however tempting, to turn that time into self-serving myth. Its limits are etched in the collapse of the movements it helped to engender. And yet, one hopes that autopsy does not mean that the moment of exhausted possibilities is at hand.