Levi FoxPage 110/06/2018
Histories I: The Sixties, Then and Now
“Our long national nightmare is over.” These are the words spoken by Gerald Ford, newly sworn in if never nationally elected President, in reference to the Watergate scandal which paralyzed and polarized the nation for more than two years, ultimately resulting in the only Presidential resignation in American history. Yet in 1974, following a dozen years of ever increasingly violent challenges to what had long been considered fundamental social, political, and moral tenets of the great American nation, these words could just as easily been understood to refer to “The Sixties.” Moreover, for those Americans who came of age after Nixon’s fateful final helicopter ride, this image of the Sixties as a frightful dream thankfully passed and better left forgotten, whether presented in political rhetoric, on screen, or by self-reactionary parents hoping their own children won’t have make the same ‘mistakes’ they did, is often times the only available interpretation of that much disputed decade. Thus it should come as little surprise that many young Americans with no first hand experiences with or remembrances of the Sixties should still maintain a negative opinion of the decade, as well as of a counterculture which invariable plays the villain in this memorial melodrama.
From sea to shining sea, and from parent (or TV) to child, mainstream memories of a distinctionless counterculture continually circulate and reinforce the idea of a corrupted youthful elite simultaneously preaching radicalism and practicing excess, both as a means of disrupting the dominant culture. Yet in reality this opposition to the mainstream, which defined this multi-pronged movement as counter, was the only truly uniting factor amongst groups of protesters with starkly diverging goals, and often very different ideas about how to arrive at them. This chapter shall provide a brief sketch of the cultural conflict of the Sixties with an eye towards delineating the distinctions and disputes within the counterculture. Then, beginning with the Nixon’s successful attacks upon the perceived lawlessness and disorder which accompanied the movement, we shall trace the ways in which the Sixties have been politically remembered, especially by conservative rhetoricians seeking to blanketly condemn the radical political and cultural aspects of the movement, in the decades since. It shall be the overall goal of this chapter to analyze how the counterculture and the Sixties generally came to be popularly understood and remembered in certain contemporary politically consequential ways.
Before we proceed it is necessary to deal directly with two matters of analytic definition. The terms “the Sixties” and “Sixties Era” shall be used and understood throughout this work (unless otherwise indicated) to signify a ‘cultural decade’ ranging roughly from John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 to Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Though this periodization varies somewhat from the oft expressed idea of a ‘long 1960’s’ (stretching from 1960 sometimes as far up as 1976), it shares with it a concern with ascertaining and outlining those shared cultural characteristics which make such a convenient temporal construction useful even as it remains debatable. Indeed, though undercurrents of protest were present even before the thousand days of JFK, this periodization contains an implicit argument[1] that a single dark day in Dallas helped enable a chain of events which would significantly (and perhaps permanently) alter America’s relations with, and conception of, itself. Moreover, while convenient bookmarking of an end date is less precise, the resignation of Richard Nixon works effectively in large part because the period of his Presidency (which began amidst the highest tide of Sixties protest) coincided with and even fostered the gradual dissolution of those cultural traits, practices, and beliefs which had marked the Sixties. Despite its lacking a similar historiographical lineage, the term “1990’s era” will be similarly used to discuss the period between the elections of the George Bush senior and junior, though the transitional period between 1974 and 1988, during which a distinctive flavor of politicized memory of the counterculture took form and then firm hold among many, lacks any such convenient nomenclature.
It is equally important to lay out what is meant by the terms political, cultural, and moral as aspects of the counterculture. In brief, the terms political and culture and here understood to refer to those explicit challenges to the established socio-political system, and will encompass movements as divergent as women’s rights, radical theatre, and the New Left. These aspects of the movement all share an express concern with altering the extent social structure and remaking the world in an image better matching countercultural perceptions of American ideals. The term “moral” aspects of the counterculture here signifies open sexual activity and illicit drug use exclusively and is posited as a means towards better understanding the ways in which the cultural and political messages of the movement (which might otherwise find receptive audiences) have been discredited through their implied connection to activities which have been explicitly condemned among the American mainstream since Ronald Reagan. But before turning to the issue of how the Sixties have been remembered, we must first examine the contentious cultural decade itself.
---Sixties Countercultures and Social Conflict---
In express contrast to the Sixties, the decade of the 1950’s has been popularly remembered as a time of peace, prosperity, and widespread social consensus in favor of ‘traditional’ values. In this narrative the cultural conflict of the Sixties emerges almost out of nowhere, in direct response to events like the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War rather than from longstanding if formerly underlying societal divisions. Such a conception of this conflict has twofold consequences for contemporary communal memory of the Sixties. In the first place, by placing the ‘blame’ for Sixties social conflict on specific events which are now long past, it becomes considerably easier to assert that the conflict itself and the social divisions underlying it are themselves dead and buried. Yet, perhaps more significantly, such a straightforward story functions to minimize the distinctions amongst the counterculture by minimizing (or wholly extinguishing) the roles played by precursor protests in the years before Kennedy’s election. In reality, many aspects of 1960’s countercultural revolt grew out of earlier questionings of the status quo that then evolved separately into the myriad of movements united in opposition to a mainstream they had long viewed as corrupt. It is only through the recognition of a complex progression from Beat to Hippie, from Southern Christian marcher to Black Panther, from malaise stricken housewife to bra burning crusader against patriarchy, that an understanding of the Sixties counterculture in all its richness and complication can begin.
Social unrest in the 1950’s, long underecognized because of a strong mainstream drive for conformity during the period that pushed dissent outside the newspapers, public reports, and media representations which serve as the basis of much contemporary cultural and historical understanding, took a number of forms just as its decadal descendant would. The presence of an urban and more militant arm of a Civil Rights movement generally conceived of as peaceful, Southern, and Christian during the 1950’s, only to become violent later, can be scene in the literary accounts of post-war Harlem of Ralph Ellison and Claude Brown. Both Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land (1965 but chronicling the Fifties era) present images of a structurally and economically disenfranchised African-American underclass in search of identity and always just short of boiling over with frustration at white society, deep seated emotions on which 1960’s militant movements like the Black Panthers would be built. The “Hippie” culture of Grenwich Village and San Francisco, which exploded on the media scene and American historical conscious in 1965, owed a great deal to the Beatniks who had squatted in their lofts and raised similar questions about America and the status quo ten years before. Indeed, the progression from Beat to Hippie may have been as much a shift drug of choice from dexedrine and pot to peyote and LSD as it was an overall movement in social and interpersonal philosophy, from fifties public intellectuals like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg to Sixties counterculture pundits like Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary. The ultimate roots of radical second wave feminism can also be found in the 1950’s, even before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique publicly raised the issue of strict gender roles and unforthcoming if ideological expected personal fulfillment. Legal and cultural double standards, both of the straightforward gendered variety and between the ideology and actuality of women’s lives, prompted many women to question whether the problem wasn’t with themselves so much as a system which controlled women’s lives through Biblical notions of ‘morality’ and contemporarily constructed ideas about nature and femininity promulgated by a powerful patriarchy.[2] These streams, at least, of 1960’s protest had firms roots in the previous decade, exploding on the public consciousness perhaps only in the wake of divisive issues and events like Vietnam, but present and working silently counter to the cultural mainstream long before.
What they bumped up against, what can be called the American “mainstream” 1960’s had really forged its cultural identity in the years before and after WWII. For the generation that fought the war, and had grown up through the Depression years before it, ‘America’ was unquestionably the greatest nation in the world, able to do no wrong domestically, and blessed with a divine historical mission to spread democracy, prosperity, and modernity throughout the world. Having raised their children in a peaceful and prosperous world diametrically opposed to the relative poverty and widespread conflict most of them had known in their youth, they worked to pass on their values, and their unerring faith, to the next generation. Indeed, contrary to popular conceptions both then and now, a majority of Sixties youth did in fact largely adopt their parents worldviews and core values, insuring that while the cultural battles of the decade would be fought partly along generational lines, the cultural mainstream would always encompass an absolute majority of all generations of that era.[3]
This Silent Majority, which would catapult Nixon to electoral victory in 1968 (with a popular vote strikingly similar in size to that which he’d received eight years prior), was built upon a quiet resentment of guiding government elites, unappreciative civil disobeyers, challenges to traditional values, all of which supported a burgeoning New Right whose legacy may be that of the most powerful and permanent, if long unrecognized, of all Sixties social movements.[4] The ire of these individuals, who also tended to uphold dominant religious and economic ideologies of God and capitalism especially against perceived threats from communists and other ‘freedom hating’ subversives at home and abroad, would often become especially aroused by actions of protest like flag burning, which to them represented a malicious and ungrateful attack on America by those very individuals who ostensibly enjoyed its benefits. Yet it was precisely because they were acutely aware of the power of the symbol, having emerged from the same post-war cultural roots as the Sixties mainstream, that protesters burned flags. Indeed, much of social conflict of the 1960’s, and especially its ferocity, was precipitated by disputes over the precise meaning and appropriate contemporary embodiment of these shared deep cultural values, as different factions accused their opponents of hypocrisy, treachery, and the corruption of ideologically powerful if much disputed terms and concepts like ‘freedom’, ’democracy’, and even ‘America’ itself.
Many of the sharpest and most heated arguments during the Sixties over whether the dominant power structure was fostering or impeding the attainment of the high American ideals of individual freedom and responsive self government, in which both the mainstream and much of the counterculture continued to believe, centered around those twin events often scene as precipitating the decade’s societal splintering, the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. Indeed, many students of the New Left learned to see the laws and legal instruments of the state as standing in the way of, rather than aiding, the quest for true personal freedom and political power not in their Ivory tower classrooms but during summer vacation on the muddy dirt roads and church basement floors of Dixie. Returning to their classrooms, however, this Northern youthful outrage over the legal and supra-legal treatment of Southern blacks turned to socio-political critiques of cultural systems that marginalized and disempowered young people, women, and minority groups, helping to spur along disparate and formerly disorganized strands of protest. Yet even if Southern schoolroom experiences may have precipitated active critiques of extent power relations by the educated elite of various Sixties era movements, it is the Vietnam War which is most often conceived of as that watershed event on which Americans divided themselves into competing mainstream and countercultural camps.
While the explicit split between Hawks and Doves provides the most clear cut Vietnam related ideological division of the period, it is the harsh attacks on the intelligence and integrity of government officials by protesters which illuminate the deeper division between those who believed, often passionately, in the system and whose who had long since lost faith. So long as the war dragged on and the highest levels of American government faced accusations of lying outrightly to both their constituents and the world about what they knew and had ordered done, the strong consensus and sense of collectivity which had permeated Fifties culture would be lost, at least until the cessation of war abroad could allow the arrival of peace at home. Indeed, while there is some truth to this narrative of Vietnam and Civil Rights as the cause of and solution to all of the problems of Sixties America, the fact remains that while the cultural politics surrounding these events surely fostered the growth of and prompted shared foci among some Sixties protest groups, internal conflictions and divergent conceptions of these very events in many cases encouraged even further segmentation of an already complicated counterculture.
Encompassing movements as radical theatre and film making, Black power, and California countryside communes, the term counterculture itself is inherently problematic in that it “falsely reifies what should never properly be construed” as a unified front composed of individuals “who defined themselves first by what they were not,” namely an accepted member of a mainstream culture they too accepted.[5] While the shared opposition to mainstream culture, especially highlighted during culturally divisive events like those in 1964 Mississippi, 1967 Vietnam, or 1968 Chicago, did encourage exchanges of ideas and experiences between differing groups of counterculturalists, these very experiential and ideological differences, among those who might logically expect themselves to largely agree on many matters, prompted some to abandon all notions of power through coalition in favor of the emotional and intellectual authenticity of a small committed cadre. Even if, for example, Northern white liberal students may have learned to distrust authority during Southern summers, the fact that they could escape back to learn pampered dorm rooms in the fall fostered ill feelings among the African-Americans with whom they’d protested side by side and especially among those urban blacks in the North and West who saw nothing being done to combat the social and economic disenfranchisement they experienced everyday.[6] While more mainstream leaders such as Martin Luther King called for peaceful attempts at change, while appearing on Meet the Press in the wake of the 1965 Watts riots, lest the violence of a few discredit the aspirations of many with similar goals, his calls fell on the deaf ears of those who’d already abandoned his integrationist thinking for a more radical separation from the systems of their oppression.[7] The emergence of a strong women’s movement too owed much to internal conflict among young protesters in the early 1960’s, where women working side by side with their male counterparts on projects of personal liberation and political empowerment began to notice, reflect up, and then actively critique the fact that it was only these men who enjoyed positions of power within the movement while they themselves were often relegated to pseudo-secretarial duties.[8] Yet it was the divergent responses by individuals and groups united in opposition to Vietnam, a war for ‘freedom’ that they saw as actually encouraging violent abridgments of this key concept both at home and abroad, which ultimately prevented counter cultural cohesion and prompted its eventual fragmentation “into a number of cultural liberation movements during the 1970’s that were different in tone and constituency,” motivations, methods, and aims.