Jackson Lears: Aquarius Rising
Revisiting the Sixties
leads to a sobering conclusion: everything has changed, and nothing has
changed.
Certain years acquire
an almost numinous quality in collective memory - 1789, 1861, 1914. One of the
more recent additions to the list is 1968. Its fiftieth anniversary has brought
a flood of attempts to recapture it - local, national, and transnational
histories, anthologies, memoirs, even performance art and musical theater.
Immersion in this literature soon produces a feeling of déjà vu, particularly
if one was politically conscious at the time (as I was).
Up to a point,
repetition is inevitable. Certain public figures and events are inescapable:
the tormented Lyndon Johnson, enmeshed in an unpopular, unwinnable war and
choosing to withdraw from the presidential stage; the antiwar candidacies of
Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy; the intensifying moral challenges posed by
Martin Luther King; the assassinations of King and Kennedy; the racially
charged violence in most major cities; the police riot against antiwar
protesters (and anyone else who got in their way) at the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago; the emergence of right-wing candidates - George Wallace,
Richard Nixon - appealing to a “silent majority” whose silence was somehow
construed as civic virtue. And the anticlimactic election: the narrow defeat of
Hubert Humphrey by Nixon, who promised to “bring us together” without
specifying how.
What togetherness
turned out to mean was an excruciating prolongation of the war in Vietnam,
accompanied by an accelerating animosity toward dissent. The effort to satisfy
the silent majority by exorcising the demons of 1968 would eventually lead to
the resurgence of an interventionist military policy, the dismantling of what
passed for a welfare state, and the prosecution of a “war on drugs” that would
imprison more Americans than had ever been behind bars before.
Revisiting this story
is important and necessary. But difficulties arise when one tries to identify
who those demons actually were. The conventional accounts of radical protest
all feature the usual suspects: Tom Hayden, Mark Rudd, Abbie Hoffman, the
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Black Panthers, the Maoists, the
Yippies, the devotees of Che. According to this narrative, nearly all the white
protesters are privileged draft dodgers from a northern tier of universities
that stretched from Cambridge and New York through Ann Arbor and Madison to
Berkeley. As hopes for electing an antiwar president fade, they descend into
pseudo-Marxist posturing and self-destructive fantasies of violent revolution.
A few hapless Weathermen, sectarian spinoffs from the SDS, provide a coda
to this story by blowing themselves up in a Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970.
This account provides
a comforting balm for supporters of status quo politics, but it misses the
larger meanings of radical protest—its pervasiveness, its heterogeneity, above
all its religious roots and significance. The religious dimension of American
radicalism was what separated it from the student uprisings in Paris and other
European cities during the spring of 1968. American radicals lacked the
anticlerical animus of Europeans; priests, rabbis, and ministers enlisted in
the front ranks of the civil rights and antiwar movements. King’s decision to
bear witness against the war was central to legitimating resistance to it,
while provoking government counterattacks as well as denunciations from both
liberals and conservatives.
“Religion” may be too
solemn a word for many 1960s radicals, but it helps to capture the depth of
their motives: above all their longing for a more direct, authentic experience
of the world than the one on offer in midcentury American society. What made
radicals mad, what drove their deepest animus against the war, was their sense
that it was a product of the same corporate technostructure—as John Kenneth
Galbraith called it in The New Industrial State (1967)—that
reduced everyday life to a hamster cage of earning and spending. The tribunes
of the technostructure were men like Robert McNamara, who shuttled from the
Ford Motor Company to the Defense Department to the World Bank, and who seemed
to know everything about managerial techniques but nothing about their ultimate
purpose, if indeed there was one. Elite managers were the high priests of an
orthodoxy with a blankness, a vacancy, at its center... read more:
