INTRODUCTION
The Seventies
The Great Shift in American
Culture, Society, and Politics
By BRUCE J. SCHULMAN
The Free Press
Read the Review
The Sixties and the Postwar Legacy
The Seventies began, of course, in the wake of "the Sixties" and have remained
ever since in their shadow — the sickly, neglected, disappointing stepsister to
that brash, bruising blockbuster of a decade. "The sober, gloomy seventies," as
one journalist put it, "seemed like little more than just a prolonged anticlimax
to the manic excitements of the sixties." Sure, pundits constantly debate the
era's parameters, suggesting that the "real Sixties" did not begin until the
escalation of the war in Vietnam, the riots in Watts, or the Summer of Love, or
that they lasted until Nixon's resignation, the fall of Saigon, the breakup of
the Beatles or release of "The Hustle." But they agree on a common portrait —
the same mug shot of the Sixties as a time of radical protest and flower power,
polarization, experimentation, and upheaval. Depending on one's point of view,
they are the source of everything good or everything evil in contemporary life.
If one date delineated the end of the Sixties and the beginning of the
Seventies, it was the year 1968. It struck many observers, then and now, as a
revolutionary moment. Nineteen sixty-eight marked simultaneously an annus
mirabilis and an annus horribilus, a year of miracles and a year of
horrors. For many it seemed to be the Year of the Barricades, to quote the title
of one book on the tumultuous events of 1968. Certainly, violent confrontations
between the generations erupted around the world. In France, left-wing students
occupied the University of Paris. Led by a man known simply as Danny the Red,
students seized parts of the Sorbonne and clashed with police on the streets of
the Latin Quarter. On May 13, huge crowds marched in protest against the sitting
government, against university regulations, against the distribution of wealth
and power in French society. Prime Minister Georges Pompidou warned that "our
civilization is being questioned — not the government, not the institutions,
not even France, but the materialistic and soulless modern society." He compared
the chaotic scene to the "hopeless days of the 15th century, where the
structures of the Middle Ages were collapsing."
Rebels manned a different sort of barricade a few hundred miles to the east. In
Prague, the capital of communist-dominated Czechoslovakia, student protests in
late 1967 had blossomed into the Prague Spring — a buoyant, defiant, just plain
ballsy challenging of the Soviet-backed regime. The Prague Spring offered a
small dose of political opening and a cultural renaissance, inspired by rock
music and avant-garde poetry. And then, horribly, Soviet tanks trampled those
hopes, rumbling into Czechoslovakia to re-install a hard-line communist
dictatorship.
Across the Atlantic, the United States would not prove immune to violent
confrontation. An explosion of racial outrage after the assassination of Martin
Luther King, Jr., brought smashed windows and tense confrontations between
police and protesters within a few blocks of the White House. A few weeks later,
radical students at Columbia University in New York City brought the barricades
into the ivory tower. The Columbia unrest unfolded at a time of growing student
protest across the country — against the war in Vietnam, against restrictive
campus policies, and against traditional curricula and courses. At Columbia,
violent protests led to the cancellation of final exams and an early end to
spring semester. The campus revolt also convinced many Americans that revolution
was at hand — that young radicals had moved from mere protest toward power.
They would seize control of "the machine," if it would not cease to pursue
inhumane ends.
The Sixties appeared as a historical divide, a decade of turmoil with the future
hanging in the balance. But the era, and its climactic twelve months, have also
been recalled, as "the Year the Dream Died" — the year, to quote one
journalist, "when for so many, the dream of a nobler, optimistic America died,
and the reality of a skeptical conservative America began to fill the void."
In April, an assassin murdered Martin Luther King, Jr., the man most closely
associated with such noble dreams. After King's death, his vision of racial
harmony — even the modest hope of the races living side by side in peace —
evaporated. 1968 marked the fourth consecutive year of massive racial violence
in America's cities. The end was nowhere in sight, and indeed a race war on the
nation's streets seemed a real possibility.
Certainly African Americans displayed growing frustration at the slow pace of
reform. Militance bubbled through the nation's black neighborhoods, fueled by
the radical black nationalism of organizations such as the Black Panther party
and leaders like Stokely Carmichael. "When white America killed Dr. King,"
Carmichael warned after the shooting in Memphis, "she declared war on black
America and there could be no alternative to retribution....Black people have to
survive and the only way they will survive is by getting guns."
At the same time, white backlash mounted in the nation's cities and suburbs, a
seething resentment most powerfully revealed in the enthusiasm for the
independent campaign of George C. Wallace. In 1968, the Alabama governor famous
for his stand-off with Martin Luther King during the Selma marches launched a
third-party campaign for president. Wallace combined his hostility to civil
rights with a populist contempt for the high and mighty. Champion of the little
guy, he denounced "briefcase totin' bureaucrats," pointy-headed intellectuals,
and federal judges who wouldn't mind their own business. Crowds roared approval
as the governor mocked "Yale Ph.D.s who can't tie their own shoelaces,
hypocrites who if you opened their briefcases you'll find nothing in them but a
peanut butter sandwich."
In September 1968, national polls showed Wallace with the support of nearly 25
percent of American voters; the Alabama governor was running strong not only in
the white South, where his defense of racial segregation had made him a hero,
but also in the urban North. In Rustbelt cities, Wallace's advocacy of law and
order, contempt for antiwar protesters, and opposition to further civil rights
advances won him the admiration of many working-class white ethnics. The early
Sixties vision of peaceful, nonviolent reform — of ending poverty and racism —
evaporated.
In their distress, many Americans looked to a leader who could heal the nation's
wounds. They found their man in Senator Robert F. Kennedy, out on the campaign
trail for president. On the night of King's assassination, Bobby Kennedy
rejected his wife's advice to cancel his scheduled appearance in Indianapolis
and instead addressed the crowd. Kennedy paid tribute to King's life and work
and then appealed directly to his audience. "For those of you who are black and
are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an
act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the
same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed." But, the candidate
pleaded, "we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather
difficult times....What we need in the United States is not division," Bobby
concluded. "What we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the
United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom and compassion
toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer
within our country, whether they be white or they be black."
Kennedy resuscitated the hopes for peaceful, meaningful reform. His campaign,
after tough fights across the country, faced its decisive test in the June
California primary — the contest that would likely decide whether he could win
his party's nomination for president. Kennedy won the primary, addressed the
cheering crowd in his campaign hotel, and headed toward the press room for
interviews. On the way, a young man fired a snub-nosed revolver at Bobby from
point-blank range. He collapsed onto his back. Five others fell in the hail of
bullets. All of them would survive. But the next day, after three hours of
surgery and other heroic efforts to revive him, Robert Kennedy died.
If those assassinations did not extinguish the extravagant hopes of the era, one
small, historically insignificant event in the fall of 1968 signaled the end of
the optimistic, liberal 1960s. On October 20, thirty-nine-year-old Jacqueline
Kennedy, widow of the martyred president, married a sixty-two-year-old Greek
shipping magnate, Aristotle Socrates Onassis. The mystery of this event — why
would she? how could she? — shocked the nation for weeks. Comedian Bob Hope
made light of it. Referring to Spiro Agnew, the Greek-American governor of
Maryland running for vice president on the Republican ticket, Hope jested,
"Nixon has a Greek running mate and now everyone wants one." For most, it was no
laughing matter but the tawdry end of Camelot. The shining knight had died, and
now the swarthy villain carried off his noble lady. The dream that was the
1960s, it seemed, had died. The stormy, uncertain Seventies had begun.
The End of "The Great American Ride"
Its drama aside, 1968 should not be torn from the fibers and wrappings of
history; its real significance lay as a cultural divide. The last days of the
Sixties signaled the end of the post-World War II era, with its baby boom and
economic boom, its anticommunist hysteria and expansive government, and the
beginning of another age, the long 1970s, which defined the terms of
contemporary American life. After two decades of postwar prosperity, Seventies
Americans took for granted a set of political assumptions, economic
achievements, and cultural prejudices. But after 1969 Americans entered a
disturbing new world. The experiences of the postwar generation would offer
little guidance.
During the postwar era America enjoyed unchallenged international hegemony and
unprecedented affluence. The boom ushered ordinary working Americans into a
comfortable middle-class lifestyle; millions of blue-collar workers owned their
own homes, garaged late-model cars, and sent their children to college. The
economy hummed so smoothly that the nation had enough left over to fund a
massive war on poverty. A series of federal programs essentially eliminated want
among previously hard-hit populations, like the elderly, and reduced the overall
poverty rate from more than 20 percent in the late 1950s to 12 percent by the
early 1970s.
The postwar years also established a pattern of expansive government. The
national government provided Americans with subsidized home mortgages and easy
terms on student loans. Strong federal support for unions offered high wages and
job security for industrial workers, not to mention lucrative employment in
defense and aerospace plants. Washington built a system of interstate highways,
opening previously isolated areas to travel and commerce. The federal government
permeated nearly every aspect of American life in the 1950s and 1960s —
guaranteeing civil rights and voting rights for African Americans, sending
astronauts to the moon, subsidizing farmers, regulating air travel, and
uncovering the dangers of smoking.
The continuous expansion of the federal establishment, even under Republican
president Dwight D. Eisenhower, pointed to a key element of the postwar era: the
liberal consensus that made big government possible. From the mid-1940s through
the mid-1960s, little disagreement emerged over the fundamental principles for
organizing American life. Most Americans accepted the activist state, with its
commitments to the protection of individual rights, the promotion of economic
prosperity, and the establishment of some rudimentary form of political equality
and social justice for all Americans. Few real conservatives and only a handful
of genuine radicals exerted influence in the 1950s and 1960s.
The liberal coalition in turn relied on northern regional ascendancy. The
national policy establishment, the party elites, and the most potent political
machines resided in the Northeast and industrial Midwest. The old manufacturing
centers, what would be called the Rustbelt, still dominated American economic
life, supplying the nation's most prominent business leaders and labor
chieftains. New York City remained the undisputed cultural capital; Hollywood
was just a place of crass upstarts, who earned money hand over fist but looked
"back East" for legitimacy. The South barely occasioned a thought in the
corridors of power, except to elicit smug head shaking over its economic
backwardness, gothic politics, and barbaric racial caste system. The cotton
fields of Alabama seemed scarcely less foreign than the jungles of Vietnam or
the steppes of Russia — and no less un-American.
By the end of the Sixties, all of these defining features of post-World War II
America had broken down. The cold war had begun to thaw. True, tensions between
the free world and the communist bloc remained high; the brutal crushing of the
Prague Spring left no doubts in American policymaking circles about the
ruthlessness of the Soviet Union. And a hot war still raged against communism in
Vietnam. But the rigid, dangerous cold war — the scary state of all but war
that had existed in the 1940s and 1950s, when many Americans truly feared
nuclear annihilation — was giving way to a more stable form of co-existence.
In July 1968, U.S. president Lyndon Baines Johnson signed with the Soviets and
more than fifty other nations the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear
Weapons, banning the spread of nuclear technology, materials, and knowledge.
Such an agreement would have been unthinkable just ten years earlier, when it
was widely accepted that Americans could never trust, could never negotiate with
or even have normal contact with the reds. The treaty was but one of eight
agreements LBJ signed with the Soviets, ranging from cutbacks in the production
of nuclear materials to establishing commercial air service between the United
States and the Soviet Union. The nation and the rest of the world were pointing
toward what Richard Nixon would soon call the era of détente.
But if the relaxed international tensions offered some hope, the seeming loss of
U.S. global hegemony remained deeply unsettling. The United States, the world's
strongest nation with the most powerful, technologically sophisticated military,
found itself locked in a confusing, bloody stalemate, half a world away in
Vietnam. Victory was always around the corner the nation's leaders endlessly
proclaimed, but the American people were growing restless.
Then, in the wee hours of January 30, 1968, during Tet, the celebration of the
Vietnamese New Year, communist commandos blasted a hole in the protective wall
surrounding the U.S. embassy in Saigon, the most visible symbol of the American
presence in South Vietnam. For six hours, nineteen guerrillas fired mortars into
the building. The audacious raid, captured by television cameras, formed only a
tiny part of a simultaneous assault on every major region in South Vietnam.
Enemy forces took the Americans by surprise, seized the city of Hue, and struck
at more than one hundred targets throughout Vietnam. U.S. troops eventually beat
back the offensive, recapturing the cities, inflicting horrific casualties on
the Vietcong, and maintaining the South Vietnamese government's precarious hold
on the country. Elated by the communists' breakout into open battle, U.S.
commanding officer General William Westmoreland claimed a major victory.
Tet turned out to be a decisive engagement — not on the battlefields of Vietnam
as General Westmoreland hoped, but in the living rooms of America. The offensive
made clear that there was plenty of fight left in the enemy, that it could
attack at will; even the U.S. headquarters in Saigon were at risk. Support for
the war drained away instantly; Tet vividly demonstrated that U.S. strategy had
failed. Immediately before the offensive, despite years of antiwar protests,
only 28 percent of Americans opposed the war effort. Twice as many, 56 percent,
told Gallup pollsters that they supported it. One month later, hawks and doves
each tallied 40 percent. Tet had changed millions of minds.
Other setbacks around the world highlighted the nation's frustration in Vietnam.
The United States sat helpless while Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring.
Meanwhile, North Korea seized the U.S.S. Pueblo, claiming it had
violated their territorial waters. The crisis, and the sailors' captivity,
dragged on for months. Despite its vast power, the United States could do
little.
Disturbing as that was, the loss of global economic hegemony and the bursting of
the postwar boom might have been even harder to accept. Since World War II, the
dollar had been the world's currency, the global economic stabilizer. But by
1970, the all-powerful greenback faced sustained attack as foreign investors
dumped dollars, driving down its value and forcing the United States to take
extraordinary steps to preserve the international monetary system. In 1968, the
Federal Reserve Board raised interest rates to 5 1/2 percent, their highest
level since 1929, the eve of the Great Depression. Inflation accelerated; prices
rose at the then-alarming rate of 4 percent per year. Sixty percent of Americans
warned the Gallup organization that the high cost of living was the most urgent
problem facing them and their families.
The shocking financial news hinted at the approaching end of that greatest of
great rides, the long postwar boom. That phenomenal economic growth — the
nation's vaulting advances in productivity, output, and wages — had allowed
Americans to accomplish unprecedented achievements. The United States fought the
cold war and rebuilt Europe and Japan. It incorporated millions of working
Americans into a home-owning, college-educated middle class. And it still had
enough left over to lift millions of Americans out of desperate poverty and to
establish the social safety net for all citizens.
By 1970, all that was fading into memory. The economic struggles of the postwar
decades had centered around the problems of an affluent society — around the
tensions spawned by vast economic growth and pockets of poverty amid plenty. The
Seventies would grapple with the problems of stagflation — the crippling
coupling of high rates of inflation and economic stagnation, the seemingly
impossible combination of rising prices with high unemployment, slow growth, and
declining increases in productivity. For the first time since the Great
Depression, talk of limits and diminishing expectations filled presidential
addresses and dinner table conversations.
This new economic regime drastically altered American attitudes about taxation.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Americans not only experienced the most rapid
advances in investment, productivity, income, and national wealth; they paid the
highest taxes in U.S. history. The corporate income tax accounted for nearly
double its current share of tax receipts. The steeply graduated personal income
tax reached a top rate of more than 90 percent. The bite on wealthy taxpayers
convinced some movie stars, like the young Ronald Reagan, that it was not worth
making more than two movies a year. After 1969, Americans would resent these
burdens and launch a sustained revolt against taxation.
Cracks in the Consensus
By 1970, the great American ride had stalled. Even more troubling, the dominant
liberal consensus had started to crumble. White backlash against civil rights
and taxes revealed mounting resentment among previously loyal members of the
liberal Democratic party coalition. For years, urban white ethnics had expressed
discontent with the changing faces of their neighborhoods — the seeming
encroachment of minority communities, the construction of housing projects and
garbage dumps, the rising crime rates and disrespect for police. Often they had
punished liberal politicians in local elections, gravitating toward
law-and-order candidates who combined a conservative social agenda with a
working-class touch. Still, they had remained loyal soldiers of the liberal
coalition in state and national elections, supporting the Democratic party's
stance on civil rights in the South and social spending in northern cities. By
the end of the Sixties, many such voters had grown disaffected with national
liberalism. Ready to abandon their old champions, they drifted unmoored through
the currents, unwilling to hitch themselves to a conservatism many still found
elitist or extremist.
In the wings a renascent conservative movement waited to make the most of that
discontent. Still, conservatism remained weak, neither well organized nor well
respected by ordinary voters. In the Sixties, the most potent attacks on the
liberal consensus came not from the right but from the political left — from
radicals who assailed the liberal establishment. Young radicals, members of a
self-described New Left, dismissed liberal reform and asserted the necessity of
direct action. Liberals believed the political system gave voice to individuals;
they just needed to vote, participate, stand up and make themselves heard. New
Leftists bristled at the naiveté of that faith. Bureaucracy, corporate
power, and the inhumane machine-like operations of American institutions, they
asserted, stifled creativity and the expressive potential of individuals and
groups. Liberals assisted the poor through paternalistic aid programs; radicals
wanted to empower poor communities to reform themselves. While liberals had
supported the war in Vietnam as a noble and necessary fight for freedom against
tyranny, radicals increasingly saw it as an act of imperialist domination and
repression.
In 1968, the radical challenge to liberalism crested around the world and across
the United States, most pointedly at Columbia University in New York. Responding
to the growing unrest, Grayson Kirk, the sixty-four-year-old president of
Columbia, denounced the younger generation's disrespect for established
authority. "Our young people," Kirk declared, "in disturbing numbers, appear to
reject all forms of authority, from whatever source derived, and they have taken
refuge in a turbulent and inchoate nihilism whose sole objectives are
destructive. I know of no time in our history when the gap between the
generations has been wider or more potentially dangerous."
Kirk soon received his response from Mark Rudd, leader of the Columbia chapter
of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the principal radical students'
organization. Already known as a firebrand, Rudd had taken time off from school
to visit Cuba, had denounced the national leadership of SDS as too moderate, and
had briefly taken over President Kirk's office in a protest against the
university's participation in cold war arms research. Rudd responded to Kirk's
speech in an open letter that clearly sketched the differences between radicals
and liberals: "While you call for order and respect for authority, we call for
justice and freedom." Demonstrating that the New Left placed liberation above
formality, order, and due process, Rudd deliberately adopted the shocking
vernacular of the emerging counterculture. "There is only one thing left to
say," he concluded. "It may sound nihilistic to you, since it is the opening
shot in a war of liberation....Up against the wall, motherfucker."
The words would soon seem prophetic. Columbia announced plans to construct a new
gymnasium on nearby parkland, in the heart of Harlem, an African American
neighborhood. Responding to what they perceived as a racist encroachment on
traditionally black public space, Rudd and other student radicals occupied the
administration building and seized the dean of the college. Eventually black
students and neighborhood activists joined the protest, convincing the white
students to leave the building and turn the demonstration over to them. But
instead of disbanding, they marched into President Kirk's office. The protesters
released the captured dean, but over the next few days students occupied several
other campus buildings. As the crisis continued, the students broadened their
focus. They demanded not only the cancellation of the gym project, but steps to
combat racism and to terminate Columbia's ties to the military and the war in
Vietnam. Finally, after lengthy negotiations failed, 1,000 New York City police
officers poured onto the campus, bodily removing the protesters from five
buildings. Some students resisted, sparking violent confrontations with the
police. Columbia students launched a general strike; the administration canceled
final exams and shut down the university.
Columbia seemed to mark, in one New Leftist's words, "a new tactical stage in
the resistance movement." As protests closed campuses around the nation,
radicals appeared ready to confront the establishment directly. Student
radicals, SDS leader Tom Hayden asserted, had escalated from "the overnight
occupation of buildings to permanent occupations, from mill-ins to the creation
of revolutionary communities, from symbolic civil disobedience to barricaded
resistance." Hayden foresaw the possibility of actions "too massive for the
police to handle." We "are moving toward power," he concluded, "the power to
stop the machine if it cannot be made to serve humane ends."
Writing in the Washington Post, Nicholas Von Hoffman concluded that "the
condition of youth has changed in important ways. College is no longer a
voluntary business. You go to college or you go to war; you get your degree or
you resign yourself to a life of low-paying jobs." Students barely resembled
"the rollicking adolescents of the old rah-rah collegiate culture." They might
lack maturity, Von Hoffman conceded, "but they are serious people who take
questions of war and peace, wealth and poverty, racism and emancipation
personally and passionately. They do not agree with the way their universities
deal with these questions. As a practical matter, they cannot leave the
universities, so they are fighting for a part in the decision-making process."
But while students fought for various reforms, they primarily struggled against
something: the established order. And, this new way of thinking, this
countercultural ethos, extended well beyond the relatively small number of
self-conscious radicals on the nation's campuses. As even professional men
discarded their fedoras and gray flannel suits, the entire culture opened up.
Curse words ceased to shock; many moved into the accepted lexicon. Legal
restrictions on personal behavior softened as states relaxed or repealed
obscenity laws, abortion restrictions, and regulations prohibiting the sale of
contraceptives.
The new laws reflected broader, more informal shifts in sexual mores, living
arrangements, dress, food, and social behavior. Young people shunned
long-accepted routes to social and professional success. More and more young
people chose to "live together without benefit of matrimony" or even just to
share dwellings with groups of unrelated men and women on an entirely platonic
basis. They challenged the parietal rules that governed the personal behavior of
students on campuses — single-sex dorms, curfews, prohibitions against single
women living off-campus. In 1970, University of Kansas students initiated a plan
for coed dorms. "I believe that segregation of the sexes is unnatural," one
sophomore wrote in support of the new system. "I would like to associate with
women on a basis other than dating roles." Another student argued that coed
housing would encourage men and women to "meet and interact in a situation
relatively free of sexual overtones; that is, the participating individuals
would be free to encounter one another as human beings, rather than having to
play the traditional stereotyped male and female roles." The students admitted
that such arrangements allowed freer and more common premarital sex, but they
called for policies that would allow liberated individuals to form their own
relationships, sexual and otherwise, on their own terms.
The experiments in living arrangements pointed out broader changes in sex roles.
Many women were demanding, as the newly formed National Organization for Women
insisted, admittance to the rights and privileges of citizenship in truly equal
partnership with men. Others sought an even more thoroughgoing reconstruction of
American institutions along nonpatriarchal lines. These radical feminists burst
onto the national scene in September 1968 with dramatic protests at the Miss
America Pageant in Atlantic City. Demonstrators crowned a live sheep Miss
America and paraded her down the boardwalk to protest the ways contestants —
and all women — "were judged like animals at a county fair." Some chained
themselves to a giant Miss America puppet, mocking women's submission to
conventional standards of beauty. Others hurled "instruments of torture to
women" into a "Freedom Trash Can": high heels, girdles, bras, copies of
Ladies Home Journal and Cosmopolitan, hair curlers, false
eyelashes. (They had planned to burn the contents but never did.) Inside the
convention hall protesters disrupted the pageant with cries of "Women's
Liberation" and "Freedom for Women." These inspired acts of guerrilla theater
won national attention for the emerging women's movement; they showed that even
the nation's cherished assumptions about gender and the family might soon be up
for reappraisal. The women also aroused considerable consternation in and
hostility from the media because the demonstrators refused to speak with male
reporters, forcing newspapers to reassign women reporters from the society pages
and gossip columns.
No single event, however, so vividly showcased the smashed remains of the old
consensus — the sense that Americans, however much they might disagree on
specifics, shared fundamental values and could solve disputes peaceably — than
did the disruptions at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. As
thousands of demonstrators descended onto the streets and filled the parks of
Chicago, the city's fabled boss, Mayor Richard Daley, girded for action. "As
long as I am mayor of this city," Daley vowed, "there is going to be law and
order in Chicago." To keep his promise, the Boss assembled a force of 12,000
Chicago police, 6,000 armed National Guardsmen, 6,000 U.S. Army troops, and
1,000 undercover intelligence agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI), the CIA (which was, according to its charter, forbidden from surveillance
within the United States), the army, and the navy.
This imposing force determined to rein in a large phalanx of protesters. The
motley crew of radicals included thousands of activists organized by the
National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. Led by SDS leaders
such as Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis, the MOBE, as it was known, planned a series
of demonstrations. These New Leftists tried to keep order among the protesters
and, at least initially, to deploy them in effective demonstrations against the
Democratic party and American intervention in Vietnam.
Then there were the Yippies. Led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, the Yippies
planned not a protest but a Festival of Life — music, nakedness, drugs. They
would not so much protest the war in Vietnam as dramatize a more fundamental
internal conflict: the confrontation of a liberated, authentic culture with the
phony, straitlaced, inhibited, greedy one that had brought on the war. The
weekend before the convention started, the Yippies nominated their own
presidential candidate — a huge sow they named Pigasus — and demanded that the
porker receive Secret Service protection and a White House policy briefing. They
filled Chicago's Lincoln Park and clashed repeatedly with police determined to
uphold the city's regulations against camping in the parks and organizing
without permits.
For an entire week, the protesters and the Chicago police skirmished, on
national television, with the whole world watching. Finally, on Wednesday —
nomination day — 15,000 people moved into Grant Park in the heart of downtown
Chicago for a MOBE rally. During some speeches, a shirtless, long-haired man
began to lower the American flag (planning, it was later reported, to turn it
upside down in the international symbol of distress). But as he removed the
flag, the police suddenly snapped. They charged into the crowd, swinging billy
clubs indiscriminately, seizing demonstrators, clubbing them, and tossing them
into paddy wagons.
Eventually the rally resumed, and demonstrators marched away from the park
toward Michigan Avenue (Chicago's Main Street), specifically toward the Conrad
Hilton Hotel, headquarters of many candidates and their supporters. What
happened — later called the police riot — shocked bystanders. Television
cameras broadcast the ugly scene directly into the convention hall and into
living rooms around the country. For roughly half an hour, from 8:00 to 8:30
P.M., law and order disappeared entirely on Michigan Avenue. The police broke
discipline and assaulted the marchers with clubs and tear gas; marchers fought
back with rocks and insults. Someone hurled MOBE leader Tom Hayden through the
picture window of the hotel bar. Tear gas drove Senator Eugene McCarthy, the
leading antiwar candidate after the death of Bobby Kennedy, out of his hotel
room. McCarthy rode the elevator to the fifteenth floor, where his staff had set
up a rudimentary first aid station. McCarthy pitched in to help the injured and
muttered, "It didn't have to be this way."
Even Patrick Buchanan had to shake his head in amazement. Sent by Richard Nixon
to observe the convention, the young conservative firebrand conceded that "the
police had had enough, and deliberately went down that street to deliver some
street justice."
After Chicago, gloom descended onto the New Left. To be sure, opposition to the
conflict in Vietnam did not flag after the battle of Michigan Avenue. Indeed,
the antiwar movement mounted large protests in 1969 and 1970; many establishment
figures, members of Congress, organizations of housewives, even veterans, joined
a now-respectable opposition. But the New Left, the radical movement envisioning
real change, fizzled after Chicago.28 Many activists embraced new concerns —
ecology, ethnicity, women's liberation. Others literally headed for the hills,
building new communities and alternative institutions undefiled by the corrupt
mainstream with its napalm and aerosol spray. Even those who remained active
lost the optimism and sense of revolutionary potential they had brought to
Chicago. In those heady days, the pop-rock quartet Crosby, Stills, Nash, and
Young had released a song about Chicago brimming with confidence about the
possibilities for peaceful reform. But just two years later — after Richard
Nixon had faced down protesters and expanded the war into Cambodia, after
National Guardsmen had killed four student protesters at Kent State, after the
war dragged on despite ever larger and more successful demonstrations — the
prospects for remaking the world grew dim. Instead, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and
Young sang about finding the "cost of freedom."
The Legacy of Woodstock
After the Chicago debacle, many young Americans, those politically active and
those not, found both protest and going along with the system equally
undesirable. The prospect of a genuine counterculture, a real alternative to the
corrupt, violent, greedy, tactless mainstream, exerted powerful appeal. Only a
small part of the Sixties generation had succumbed to the "hippie temptation";
during the fabled 1967 Summer of Love, the best estimates placed the number of
hippies at roughly 100,000 young Americans. But that small, if rather
boisterous, minority blossomed, in the words of one chronicler, into a "garden
of millions of flower people by the early 1970s."
During autumn 1968, a Village Voice reporter asked Country Joe McDonald,
lead singer of Country Joe and the Fish, to "rap about the revolution." Country
Joe's most famous song, "Feels Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag," had directly
attacked the war in Vietnam ("It's one, two, three, what are we fightin' for,"
the song demanded). But McDonald assured the interviewer that "there isn't going
to be any revolution." To carry out a revolution, he explained, "you have to
control things and most of the people I know aren't ready for that. They want a
leaderless society."
The Voice reporter remained dissatisfied. "What about the guerrillas?" he
demanded. "I don't know any," Country Joe explained. "I know a lot of people
wearing Che Guevara stuff...a bunch of tripped-out freaks." Then Barry Melton,
Country Joe's guitarist, chimed in: "The revolution is just another word for
working within the community." But the interviewer wasn't having it; he wanted
to write about honest-to-goodness revolutionaries. "Hell," he protested, "you
are the Revolution." No, concluded Country Joe, shaking his head. "I'm just
living my lifestyle. That's what you should be doing."
On the surface, Country Joe's renunciation of revolution and embrace of
"lifestyle" sounded apolitical — even antipolitical, as if it rejected
political action altogether. Certainly, looking back to the mid-1960s, it would
not have been farfetched to demarcate a firm split between the student radicals
— the New Left or antiwar movement — on the one hand and the counterculture or
flower children on the other. A lack of understanding divided the Berkeley
radicals intent on shutting down the draft induction center in Oakland and the
Haight-Ashbury hippies staging the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park. The same
palpable tension separated the SDS radicals occupying the president's office at
Columbia and the Yippies throwing dollar bills onto the floor of the New York
Stock Exchange. There was even something of a difference in style; mid-1960s New
Lefties looked well scrubbed, with crewcuts, ties, and serious, even earnest
demeanors. Certainly, they looked different from the emerging counterculture
with its long hair, beads, psychedelic fashions, and experiments with
mind-altering drugs.
But the lines between the two always remained murky and amorphous, and after
1968, they vanished. Young radicals, even those most straightforwardly political
— in the sense of trying to stop the war or directly influence government
policy — had embraced the wider cultural critique of the counterculture. And
the counterculture developed an essentially political edge — a rejection of the
values, beliefs, and priorities of mainstream America. At Woodstock, Country Joe
introduced "Fixin' to Die" by leading the assembled mass in an obscene chant:
"Give me an F, Give me a U, Give me a C, Give me a K, What's that spell!" The
F-U-C-K chant, with its deliberate attempt to shock sensibilities by rejecting
established, repressive standards of propriety, asked why Americans could find
such language profane, but not the war in Vietnam. It suggested an alternative,
more liberated, and supposedly more honest and authentic way of being. The
obscene chant was as much a political protest as the antiwar song that followed;
political protest and countercultural sensibilities went hand in hand.
In 1969, one SDS leader estimated that three-quarters of the organization's
membership could be classified as hippies. "Now the talk has shifted to cultural
revolution," pundits reflected. "Gentle grass is pushing up through the cement."
Several broad forces fed into this widening of the counterculture after 1968.
Frustration certainly contributed — the growing sense that straightforward,
organized political protest had failed. The war dragged on, Nixon became
president, GIs invaded Cambodia, and students died at Kent State. "It was not
that we disagreed with the radical interpretation of America," one antiwar
protester explained after he dropped out and moved to a commune in New Mexico.
"It was that by the Nixon era that message was irrelevant." Young people
concluded that protest had to evolve, somehow become more fundamental. If you
could not convince the older generation to change its beliefs, to stop the war,
you could refuse to participate.
In fact, a general alienation from mainstream America, not just disillusionment
with politics, fed the counterculture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many
young people grew disgusted with the nation and its basic values. This
discontent filled both veterans of Sixties radicalism and millions of young
Americans who had never demonstrated interest in political protest. "I learned
to despise my countrymen, my government and the entire English speaking world,
with its history of genocide and international conquest," one disgruntled New
Leftist wrote after decamping to the Vermont woods. "I was a normal kid."
"America," another young man reflected in 1969. "Listen to it. I love the sound.
I love what it could mean. I hate what it is."
Polls revealed widespread disenchantment among American youth. In 19701971,
one-third of America's college-age population felt that marriage had become
obsolete and that having children was not very important. The number identifying
religion, patriotism, and "living a clean, moral life" as "important values"
plummeted. Fifty percent held no living American in high regard, and nearly half
felt that America was "a sick society." In this setting, many young Americans no
longer saw any reason to heed established conventions about sex, drugs,
authority, clothing, living arrangements, food — the fundamental ways of living
their lives.
So what could you do if you found yourself in such a supposedly sick society?
Country Joe had the answer: "You take drugs, you turn up the music very loud,
you dance around, you build yourself a fantasy world where everything's
beautiful." Frustration and alienation pushed Americans toward the
counterculture, but also exerted a strong pull of its own: the conviction that
it was possible to drop out of the polluted, corrupt mainstream and live
according to one's values. Young Americans believed they could do it right,
without the phoniness and hierarchy, the profit and power, the processed food
and three-piece suits, the evening news and the suburban ranch house. They could
build alternative institutions and create alternative families — a separate,
authentic, parallel universe. "We were setting up a new world," Barry Melton,
the Country Joe guitarist, recalled — "a new world that was going to run
parallel to the old world but have as little to do with it as possible. We just
weren't going to deal with straight people."
Fed by these diverse streams, the counterculture burgeoned in the early 1970s.
The senior portraits in any high school or college yearbook display its broad
influence. A 1966 edition, or even 1967 or 1968, shows clean-cut faces, ties,
and demure dresses; they resemble stereotyped images of the 1950s. But the 1972
or 1974 yearbook reveals shaggy hair, beads, granny glasses. Of course, no one
could precisely measure the counterculture, or distinguish the dedicated freak
or head from the fellow traveler or counter-consumer, who simply adopted a style
without much content. As one tie-dyed anthropologist put it, "There were no
hippie organizations, no membership cards, no meetings, no age limits....One did
not have to drop out to 'qualify' as a hippie, or have to take drugs,
participate in sex orgies, live in a commune, listen to rock, grow long hair. No
minimum requirements. No have to." The movement is "not a beard," a
University of Utah student explained. "It is not a weird, colorful costume, it
is not marijuana. The hippie movement is a philosophy, a way of life." It
implied rejection of the dominant culture and a decision to practice alternate
lifestyles.
Certainly the counterculture embraced several salient features: dope, as an
entry way to expanded or altered consciousness, heightened awareness, and
communal experience; freer sexual mores and living arrangements; a new
relationship to nature; distinctive dress and foodways; and a commitment to
communal living. Freaks rejected capitalist materialism, especially the grind of
workaday jobs and the emphasis on property and acquisition. They constructed
alternative institutions — food co-ops, underground newspapers, free medical
clinics. In most cities and university towns, hip neighborhoods emerged, with
natural food restaurants, head shops, Zen bakeries, independent record stores.
The counterculture also relied on music as a means of communication, a communal
ritual, a gathering of tribes. After the success of the Monterey Pop Festival in
1967 (featuring the first major performances of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin),
rock festivals spread around the country. They offered a potent mix of
counterculture and capitalism, barefoot hippies and big-bucks event promoters.
One hundred thousand people gathered for the Atlanta Pop Festival. In Seattle,
helicopters dropped flowers on the assembled revelers.
But it was Woodstock that would transform the nature of the rock festival,
create its mythology, raise its most extravagant hopes. Like all of the other
festivals, Woodstock began as a commercial venture. Four producers offered
farmer Max Yasgur $50,000 to use his farm near Bethel, New York. They hoped
50,000 rock fans would pay $18 each for three days of performances by more than
twenty acts, including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, The Grateful Dead,
Jefferson Airplane, John Sebastian, Sly and the Family Stone, Arlo Guthrie,
Country Joe and the Fish, and Richie Havens.
Yet Woodstock became something much, much bigger. Before the first band came
onstage, a massive pilgrimage of young people clogged the roads, forming the
most massive traffic jam in U.S. history. They crashed the gates; eventually
400,000 people camped on the grounds, frolicking in the mud, listening to the
music, cooking and eating together, even giving birth. The logistical problems
were daunting: inadequate sanitation facilities, insufficient food and water,
delivering medical supplies. But somehow it worked. Even the promoters, who took
a financial bath, thought a new society had been born.
The real festival, organizers told one journalist, would not end with Woodstock.
The concert marked "this generation and this culture's" departure from the old
generation and the old culture. "You see how they function on their own —
without cops, without guns, without clubs, without hassles. Everybody pulls
together and everybody helps each other and it works." No matter "what happens
when they go back to the city, this thing has happened and it proves that it can
happen." Singer-songwriter John Sebastian agreed. Mounting the stage, he called
the scene "the biggest mindfucker of all time." Sebastian had "never seen
anything like this. There was Newport," he remembered, referring to the annual
folk festival in Rhode Island, "but they owned it. It was something different."
Woodstock fueled ecstatic hopes that a new generation had emerged, that an
alternative to the corrupt mainstream could be, was being, constructed. A few
months later, another massive outdoor concert opened at Altamont, California,
with the Rolling Stones as featured act. Anxious for "Woodstock West," the
audience of about 300,000 remained generally peaceful, the mood celebratory. But
close to the stage, the scene grew ugly; brawls and bad acid trips led to a
number of ugly scenes. In a particularly ill-advised move, the Stones offered
the Hell's Angels $500 worth of beer to guard the stage. As the crowd pushed
closer, the Angels began beating people, busting pool cues over their heads.
Eventually, four people died at Altamont including a young black man, beaten and
stabbed to death by the Angels as he danced too close to the stage.
If Woodstock seemed idyllic, the birthplace of a new culture, Altamont swept
into the open all the ugly features of the counterculture — "the greed, the
hype, the hustle," to quote one observer. At Altamont, the Woodstock generation
learned that its fondest hopes, its most ambitious objectives would not be
easily met; it would have to confront the darker realities of the age.
Among those harsh truths was the concerted opposition of the establishment. The
mainstream press attacked the hippies and the festivals as harbingers of dope,
debauchery, and destruction. And the opposition fired more than harsh words.
Vandals bombed Trans-Love Energies Commune in Detroit; others shot out the
windows at the offices of the Street Journal, an underground newspaper
in San Diego. When Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda made the cult classic Easy
Rider (1969), they encountered violence while filming the movie in the
South. They had expected the taunts: "Look at the Commies, the queers, is it a
boy or a girl." But they were stunned by the stories they heard "of kids getting
their heads broken with clubs or slashed with rusty razor blades." Patrons in
one bar jumped the longhaired filmmakers themselves. "Don't be scared, go and
try to change America," Hopper concluded, "but if you're going to wear a badge,
whether it's long hair or, or black skin, learn to protect yourself."
The film itself dramatized this resistance, tracing the motorcycle journey of
two drug-dealing hippies across the South. Persecuted by rednecks and hounded by
police, the sojourners cannot get service at a restaurant or a room at a motel.
Their brand of freedom, the alcoholic lawyer played by Jack Nicholson explains,
threatens the complacency of ordinary Americans. The bikers' very existence
mocks their constrained lives, dramatizing the compromises they have made and
the shackles they endure.
Despite the resistance from outside and its own contradictions and difficulties,
the counterculture expanded in the Seventies, spreading a less formal, more open
and freewheeling way of life. But the real efforts at cultural revolution, at
creating a sustainable alternative, collapsed or became diluted. Communes
drifted apart; underground papers mainstreamed or failed; free clinics applied
for government funding. Standing on a hill in the desert in 1971, gonzo
journalist Hunter S. Thompson recalled the feelings of imminent change he had
experienced a few years earlier — "that sense of inevitable victory over the
forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that.
Our energy would simply prevail." But now, "with the right kind of
eyes," he could almost see "the high-water mark — that place where the wave
finally broke and rolled back."
The wave seemed to crest at the end of the Sixties. The Democratic party left
Chicago in turmoil. The broad liberal coalition that had been its foundation,
forming the bedrock of American politics for a generation, lay in ruins. The
nation was divided, confused, seemingly in uproar. In the winter of 19681969,
the nation turned its longing eyes toward California. There, rested and ready,
if never tanned like T-shirts and bumper stickers would one day proclaim, waited
Richard Milhous Nixon. On Election Day, he promised to heal a wounded people.
But he had other plans.
(C) 2001 Bruce J. Schulman All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-684-82814-6
