making sense of the sixties

Irish Association for American Studies

Making Sense of the SixtiesAuthor(s): Mark LytleSource: Irish Journal of American Studies, Vol. 10 (2001), pp. 1-17Published by: Irish Association for American StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30002230 .

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MARK LYTLE Bard College

ALAN GRAHAM MEMORIAL LECTURE

MAKING SENSE OF THE SIXTIES

Novelist John Marquand in Point of No Return, written in the late 1940s, used the phrase "everything in its place and a place for everything" to satirize the urge people often have to organize their lives into neat categories. The decade, for example, has served us as a favorite historical "place." When most of us think about the tumultuous era when the baby boom generation came of age, we call it the Sixties. The Sixties thus have joined the Gay Nineties, the Roaring Twenties, and Dirty Thirties as decades with a special cachet. But history grants decades no organizing authority and those who lived through the Sixties know that their memories do not fit neatly into a ten-year period. The era did not simply begin with the election of John F. Kennedy and end with the ringing in of the New Year on January 1, 1970.

The 1960s are not so much a neat period but a set of experiences that stretch over twenty years-a generation really-beginning somewhere in the mid 1950s and drawing to a close in the mid 1970s. Within that period American society fractured more completely than it had at any time save for the Civil War era. That fracturing seemed almost infinitely compound, as society broke along generational, racial, class, ethnic, regional, ideological, aesthetic, and gender lines. Upheaval of one kind or another touched almost every aspect of private and

public life. Ever since, historians as well as those on the left and the right have battled fiercely to determine what caused that uncivil war and what it meant. Ironically, both camps have looked back with the sense that something went terribly wrong. Veteran activists of the Sixties look with pride upon the Civil Rights movement and its extension to women, gays, Latinos, Indians, and other minorities. They applaud a host of initiatives to improve the environment, protect consumers and workers, liberate sexuality, limit censorship, and increase civil liberties. But efforts to halt the Vietnam War ended in disillusionment. Dreams of radical transformation of the nation and its consciousness crumbled. Frustration prompted extremist violence that shattered the ethos of peace and love. The Civil Rights movement dissolved into a host of essentialist crusades with little sense of common purpose.

Conservatives by contrast have waxed vitriolic in denouncing the legacy of the 1960s. Radicals, they charge, dealt a near deathblow to Western Civilization as

they knew it. During the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s conservatives tried with often ingenuous desperation to undo what they saw as the crippling attack the Sixties leveled against cultural and political authority. In book that became a

stunning best seller, The Closing of the American Mind, Alan Bloom argued that the democratic spirit that inflamed campus radicalism had tended "to suppress the

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2 IRISH JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES: VOLUME 10, 2001

claims of any superiority." He dismissed the reformist urge as "the Peace Corps mentality, which is not a spur to learning but to a secularized version of doing good works." Political polemicist and Reagan cultural czar William Bennett agreed that the loss of standards had caused "a cultural breakdown" (see Levine). Born

again conservatives Peter Collier and David Horowitz labeled the 1960s radicals "the destructive generation." It was, they suggested, "a decade whose half-life continues to contaminate our own." Whatever the ill-teen pregnancy, soaring welfare costs, urban violence, bad schools-conservatives blamed Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and the radical social agenda. Newt Gingrich told students at Georgia State that after 1965, "America went off on the wrong track." In such diatribes the conservatives perpetuated the polarization achieved by the activists of the 1960s.

That polarization has compounded the problem historians face in making sense of the Sixties. Most have addressed that problem by simplifying it. They have focused most heavily on politics. The Sixties begin with Kennedy and civil rights and fade out with Nixon, Watergate, white backlash to civil rights, and the American withdrawal from Vietnam. Along the route from Kennedy to Nixon, most historians take an occasional time out from reform and radicalism to comment on the hippies whose social zaniness at times romped into anarchy and to acknowledge the impact of writers, musicians, and other artists on the period's consciousness. Such a glancing nod to popular culture is not enough, however, for popular culture defined much of the era's politics. The preoccupations of youth culture-sex, drugs, and rock and roll-were debated from dining tables to the halls of Congress. Long hair, short skirts, Beatlemania, Afros, and the other Sixties' symbols were not simply fads like the hulahoops, poodle skirts, and bikinis of the conformist Fifties. The fashions of the Sixties struck many in authority as symbols of defiance so disturbing that they justified official repression.

To explain the upheavals of the era, a history of the Sixties must explore the interplay of political, cultural, and social trends. One way to begin is to establish a new time frame determined as much by its social and cultural as by its political phenomena. Seen that way, a single decade dissolves into three somewhat distinct phases. When the first phase began around the mid 1950s, the Cold War consensus was at its peak. Established after World War II the consensus defined the nation's mission to contain Communism at home and abroad. In this phase, the children of the baby boom generation passed into puberty and on to young adulthood. The exodus from city to suburb was well under way. Rising wages brought an unprecedented prosperity. Historian Thomas Hine commented, "the decade from 1954 to 1964 was one of history's great shopping sprees," as Americans stocked up on all the accoutrements of a consumer culture. Much that Americans bought-lawnmowers, washing machines, televisions, and ever more chrome-laden cars-went to outfit new homes and raise young families.

It was a politically innocent time. The nation had put the troubles of the



Making Sense of the Sixties 3

Depression and World War II behind. The consensus created a sense of unified purpose. Korea was over and the American phase of Vietnam had hardly begun. While the Cold War and the menace of the bomb loomed, the virulence of McCarthyism waned as the Senate censured the Wisconsin mudslinger. Worries about juvenile delinquency gave way to the celebration of youth. The grandfatherly assurance of Dwight D. Eisenhower yielded to the idealism inspired by John F. Kennedy.

Certainly, dark shadows lurked along the edges. The blinking of Sputnik in orbit overhead reminded Americans that they lived in a dangerous world. Pictures of soldiers standing guard outside Little Rock's Central High School disturbed the sense of domestic tranquility. But the missile gap and integration crisis did not define the times. Nor did the cultural critics who complained about gross materialism and the conformist pressure to "keep up with the Joneses." How bad could a society be in which a poor country boy like Elvis Presley transformed himself from a raunchy rock and roller to a neatly cropped GI and finally into a Las Vegas headliner?

Such innocence was simply too good to last. By the early 1960s the consensus began to break up on the hard rock of history. Scattered violence against civil rights activists gave way to systematic police brutality, bombings, and murder. Michael Harrington exposed the unequal distribution of prosperity when he revealed that one quarter of the nation lived in poverty. Rachel Carson warned that the same corporate culture that brought material plenty dumped toxic DDT into the food chain. In The Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan raised the voice of disgruntled women against the male sponsored image of contented suburban housewives and mothers. Vietnam began to intrude into America's consciousness. Baby-boomers had no simple way to reconcile the picture of a burning monk and the bullet-riddled body of deposed South Vietnamese President Ngo Din Diem with the idealism of the Peace Corps and Alliance for Progress. And then came Dallas. The assassination of John Kennedy forced a generation accustomed to acquiring more to live with loss that was both personal and public.

The period from Kennedy's death until the ascendancy of Richard Nixon brought on what are popularly thought of as the 1960s. In this second phase, optimism did not simply give way to pessimism. Though few baby-boomers found much to like in Lyndon Johnson, they at first shared his belief in the possibilities of a Great Society. The youthful zest of the Beatles gave voice to a spirit of celebration. When the baby-boomers first went off to college, skepticism, doubt, and cynicism had only just begun to creep into their view of the world. Lawrence Wright, one of the boomers most insightful chroniclers recalled, "Outside of Berkeley, American campuses were very much under control in 1965. For freshman [...] the word 'collegiate' was still a fashion statement. I had never heard anyone speak of 'relevance' concerning my studies, or 'imperialism' in connection with my own country. 'Oppression' and 'Third World' were ideas so




freshly coined that I hadn't tested their worth." But that innocence shattered on the mounting violence. As the reforms of

the Great Society rolled into high gear, Lyndon Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam. Closer to home Marines poured into the Dominican Republic to snuff out a popular democratic rebellion. The Watts section of Los Angeles erupted into burning, looting, and shooting. On college campuses the uprising at first took an orderly course. The "Free Speech" movement at Berkeley that brought students to surround police cars in protest was a glaring exception. It was also an omen. More common were the earnest gatherings of students at teach-ins to hear their professors debate the course of American involvement in Vietnam. The radicals in Students for a Democratic Society remained a small, though conspicuous and vocal minority. As Lyndon Johnson Americanized the Vietnam War, protest became more than academic. More troops meant higher draft calls. Suddenly, a male student, if delinquent in his studies, faced more than dismissal from college; the loss of a student deferment could also mean a trip to Vietnam. Many saw it as a potential death sentence. As Johnson raised the pressure against the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, the volume and intensity of student protest rose as well.

So did the growing war in American cities. Having gained ground in the South with non-violence, civil rights protest turned to the North and West. There, the entrenched patterns of defacto segregation and white resistance proved more formidable. Frustration turned increasingly to rage. In summer after summer, city after city, small incidents exploded into violent outbreaks of rioting, arson, and looting. The police and National Guard replied with military levels of firepower. In response, African-American leaders adopted ever more militant postures. Most strikingly the Black Panther Party from Oakland, California marched heavily armed into the State Capitol in Sacramento.

A more subtle form of protest coincided with the increasing militancy of antiwar and antiapartheid movements. Among the baby-boomers were those who inherited the sense of spiritual malaise that the beatniks dramatized in the 1950s. So did cartoonist Hank Ketchum, creator of "Dennis the Menace." In one telling Christmas image Dennis stood amidst a midden of opened packages, torn paper, and scattered loot and asked, "Is that all?" By the mid-1960s many baby-boomers had given Dennis's lament a spiritual twist. They turned their backs on the American credo that material plenty would give life meaning. That drew some to astrology and the practices of the occult. Even more turned to the great Asian religions. And yet more began to heed the call of LSD guru Timothy Leary who urged them to "tune-in, turn-on, and drop-out." From a line of Poet Alan Ginsberg, who spoke of "angel-headed hipsters" came the term hippies to describe a highly self-conscious counterculture. Unlike the civil rights and antiwar

protestors, the hippies were largely apolitical. They rejected the path to middle- class comfort in favor of alternative life styles. In search of heightened self-




awareness, they experimented freely with sex and drugs against a background of rock and roll.

Government officials, civic leaders, and parents were both confounded and concerned. As political and social upheaval spread, it divided Americans so deeply that the nation seemed to be at war with itself. To F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover this unrest was another phase in the four decades of Cold War he had waged against Communism and racial integration. His G-men, along with agents of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, infiltrated a wide range of civil rights, antiwar, and social activist groups including Planned Parenthood. Hoover was determined to see the conservative WASP establishment continue its hegemony over the nation's cultural and political life. He was not above using the tools of totalitarian control-informers, agents provocateur, wiretapping, propaganda, disinformation, even murder-to achieve victory in what was for him an all-out war.

Hoover represented only a more extreme example of the paranoia that afflicted official America. By 1968 Americans were fully engaged in their "uncivil war." It was fought in the streets, college campuses, and family dining rooms. Resolution of differences by ordinary political means was no longer possible. Assassins claimed the lives of two of the protestors' most charismatic spokespersons, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Demonstrations in Chicago in the summer of 1968 created such disorder that Lyndon Johnson decided not to attend his own party's conventions. Riots swept through the streets of Miami just blocks from where the GOP anointed Richard Nixon as the party's presidential choice. Protestors dogged Hubert Humphrey's campaign until he showed some minor inclination to distance himself from Johnson's war policies. The concession came too late to allow Humphrey to overcome the divisive appeals of Nixon and third party candidate George Wallace.

The Nixon era marked the third phase of the Sixties. Richard Nixon came to office promising to bring the nation together. If anything, protest became more strident, government repression of dissent more determined, and the divisions in society ever deeper. 400,000 hippies and rock fans gathered at the Woodstock Festival in the summer of 1969 to celebrate the counterculture. The festival marked the apogee of the Sixties as the good vibes of Woodstock gave way to sinister echoes of the Rolling Stones paean to Satanism at Altamont. The once loosely aligned coalition of civil rights and antiwar groups broke into factions. Whites split with blacks, extreme radicals with moderate radicals, feminists from traditional women and male chauvinists, and the Beatles into four solo acts. Violence assumed an ever-uglier caste. Radicals bombed a lab at the University of Wisconsin killing a graduate student; National Guardsmen fired on protesting students at Kent State University, killing four and wounding nine; the next day police killed two black student protestors at Jackson State University in Mississippi; a number of Black Panther leaders died in shootouts with police;



6 IRISHJOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES: VOLUME 10, 2001

organized crime muscled into the counterculture's drug trade. This pattern of violence introduced a sobriety alien to the Dionysian spirit

of the Sixties. So too did the systematic government harassment of dissenters. Prosecution of the Chicago Eight, the Catonsville seven, and Vietnam Veterans

against the War, pitted the meager financial and legal resources of dissent against the prosecutorial machinery of a government that did not have to win conviction to crush its opposition.

Sometime in the early Seventies the Sixties ended. That is not to say that

protest stopped completely, that rioting ended, that all hippies deserted their communes, that hair became short and skirts long, or that all dreams of a better society ended. A number of vital reform movements-environmentalists, Native Americans, feminists, consumer advocates, gay rights groups-continued to press their causes. But the sense of generational commitment was gone. For those leaving college, career choices once again superseded lifestyle decisions. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll no longer shocked especially since so many adults had taken them up in the hedonistic fashion of the times. Big business had successfully co-opted much that had given the counterculture its style. In 1973 the last American troops left Vietnam and in 1975 the North Vietnamese captured Saigon, closing the most divisive chapter of the era's history.

While those time frames suggest the flavor of the Sixties, they do not in any real way explain the causes of America's uncivil war. Historians must look at large patterns in order to understand how the conformity of the fifties exploded into the tumult of the sixties only to recede into the self-awareness movements and conservative backlash of the 1970s. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has an explanation that is seductive because it is in a way so simple. Schlesinger's father, a distinguished social historian, suggested, and the son concurred, that in alternating periods of about 30 years or the length of a generation, the United States undergoes cycles of reform. Preoccupation with private interest gives way to a concern with public purpose only to reverse again. Certainly, such a case could be made in the twentieth century, where progressivism gave way to the hedonism of the Twenties which in turn brought on the reformism of the New Deal, just as the conformist Fifties and middle of the road Republicanism preceded the New Frontiers and the Great Society. Despite his conservative impulses, Richard Nixon found that "the liberal tide of the Sixties," still running strong, shaped his early domestic legislation (qtd. in Schlesinger).

Schlesinger's formulation, while appealing, is ultimately unsatisfying. For one thing, it is excessively political in focus. The New Frontier and Great Society were certainly a central part of the Sixties. Indeed, Kennedy's appeal to idealism and Johnson's vision unleashed much of the hopeful energy upon which the Sixties fed. But much that we think of as the Sixties was either apolitical or a reaction against the government and the liberal reform tradition.

What then of the generational feature of Schlesinger's interpretation? So




often the term baby boom or baby-boomers dominates discussion of the era. Todd Gitlin, both a New Left leader and historian of the Sixties, observed that for the youth upheaval to occur "there had to be a critical mass of students, and enough economic fat to cushion them [. . .]." Such a generational explanation, while containing much truth, is not totally persuasive. Most of those who led or inspired the movements of the 1960s, Martin Luther King, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, John Lewis, Robert Moses, Ralph Nader, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, David Dellinger, William Sloan Coffin, Cesar Chavez, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Abby Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, the list could be much longer and includes Gitlin himself, were not baby-boomers. They were born before or during World War II. The baby-boomers served largely as the foot soldiers in a crusade led by that older generation.

So the generational theory explains imperfectly the timing and the direction of the 1960s. So does the economic component of Gitlin's formulation. Even if we acknowledge that prosperity has been associated with reform as during the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century, we must remember that in other prosperous eras-the Twenties and the Fifties-American society largely turned away from reform politics. In the 1930s by contrast economic adversity triggered reform. So both in prosperity and adversity Americans sometimes seek greater economic and social justice. That suggests that while the unprecedented economic growth from the mid 1940s to the early 1970s gave some Americans faith in the perfectibility of their society and the freedom to work to achieve it, other factors dictated the public agenda.

Many historians are drawn to the emergence of charismatic leaders to explain historical change: Andrew Jackson and the Jacksonian Era, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Robert LaFollette and the Progressive Era, and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Deal. It has been these inspirational leaders who have directed perfectionist ideals into political channels. Certainly the Sixties had no shortage of charismatic public figures, as the list above suggests. Their diversity also suggests the special flavor of reform in the 1960s. Most of those included were not in any sense conventional political figures or in some instances political at all. All the same most of them had come of age before the 1960s without inspiring or taking up reformist causes.

What then provoked the uncivil war that made the Sixties such an exceptional time in American History? All the factors touched on so far- generational demographics, economic prosperity, and the presence of charismatic leaders-helped shape what we think of as the Sixties. To more fully explain the timing of America's uncivil war and the directions it took, other perspectives are useful. One perspective identifies within the tumult an attack on the moral and political authority of the nation's WASP elite, which brought about a fracturing of the Cold War consensus that elite did so much to create.

In The Protestant Establishment, a prescient book published in 1964,




sociologist E. Digby Baltzell identified what he described as a crisis of moral authority. It had arisen, he argued, from the unwillingness or inability of the WASP establishment "to share or improve its upper-class traditions by absorbing talented and distinguished members of minority groups into its privileged ranks." (Had he been even more prescient he would have appended male to WASP, though his concept of minorities did not exclude women.) Baltzell's "establishment," while easily recognizable was not a precisely defined group. It was comprised prior to the turn of the century by patrician Protestants who dominated positions of political power and "set the style in arts and letters, in the universities, in sports, and in the more popular culture, which governs the values and aspirations of the masses." Drawing on de Tocqueville's analysis of the decline of the ancien regime in France, Baltzell observed that in the twentieth century America's Protestant patricians had shifted their energy largely from the management of power and leadership to the protection of privilege. The Republican Party ceased to function as an agency of opportunity and reform. By the 1930s it had lost its majority status and the authority to define the national agenda. That explains to some degree why the Liberty Leaguers and other conservatives of their ilk heaped such vituperation on Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt. Rather than restoring the prestige of the WASP establishment the Roosevelts under the New Deal opened the corridors of power and authority to Catholics, Jews, ethnics, and women.

By the 1950s David Reisman argued that the American social elite had ceased to lead. Power groups promoted their own interests rather than advancing a national agenda. "Veto groups exist as defense groups, not as leadership groups," Reisman observed. They built their defenses along the lines of prep schools, colleges, and, above all, private clubs. When in the 1950s the admissions offices at elite colleges and universities relaxed the social qualifications for entrance, the fraternity and sorority systems served to reassert the patterns of social hierarchy and exclusivity. Max Weber noted forty years earlier that "affiliation with a distinguished club was essential above all else. He who did not succeed in joining was no gentleman." Over the course of time there came to be many successful Americans who because of religion or ethnicity were denied entrance into the exclusive clubs. Baltzell used gentlemanly anti-Semitism to exemplify this growing tension of class and caste in American society. He in no way meant to suggest that Jews were the sole victims of discrimination. Rather, he used anti-Semitism to demonstrate the effort of WASP elites to preserve their privilege by making birthright rather than talent the key to position. By the 1950s Jews had achieved success in almost all sectors of American life. But that success did not readily turn into social acceptance in elite circles. Most WASP institutions either barred Jews or restricted their access. Many of the patricians who voted for

Barry Goldwater in 1964 would have denied him membership in their clubs because of a Jewish ancestor. Thus what had begun as a meritocracy in the late




nineteenth century had by the 1950s threatened to ossify into a caste system. In the class society de Tocqueville commended and Baltzell analyzed, the

aristocracy has several vital functions. It preserves traditions, which give society cohesion, and it arbitrates the issues of the day. If, however, the aristocracy ceases to represent the major elements of a society or if it becomes divided, it loses its ability to arbitrate. Or as Baltzell put it, "for an upper class to maintain a continuity of power and authority especially in an opportunarian and mobile society like ours, its membership must, in the long run, be representative of society as a whole." In the 1960s, I will argue, as did Baltzell, this was not the case. The elite was inadequately inclusive to address the aspirations of the more ethnically and socially diverse population. Groups like African Americans and women who demanded more rights, recognition, and opportunities found the paths to mobility blocked.

Baltzell's choice of anti-Semitism to dramatize his point had particular resonance for the 1960s. A number of historians have commented on the unusual prominence of Jews in the Civil Rights, antiwar, and other radical movements. So, too, Jews had a attained high visibility in the arts, the media, and academia-the very centers that had come to arbitrate public tastes and values and which, not coincidentally became the special targets of conservatives who saw the male WASP elite and the American way as synonymous. To those in the archconservative camp, an attack on one was an attack on the other. They associated dissent, not with traditional American perfectionism or egalitarianism, but with Communism. In essence they sought to preserve their power and authority not only through social institutions, but under the ideological mantle of the Cold War consensus. They frequently charged that those who would make America more pluralistic or democratic were either dupes or agents of the Communists.

In that spirit a conversation at Lyndon Johnson's Cabinet meeting in September 1968 is instructive. Not coincidentally, the group that gathered was made up largely of white Protestant males and Walt Rostow, a Jewish WASP. By then Johnson had withdrawn from the 1968 presidential race. He seemed to grope for some persuasive explanation of the forces that had so disrupted his term of office. For veteran cold warriors one conclusion seemed unavoidable: domestic unrest and Communist influence must go hand-in-hand. Unfortunately for the conspiracy theorists in Johnson's cabinet, CIA Director Richard Helms reported that his agency had found "no convincing evidence of Communist control, manipulation, or support for student dissidents." Secretary of State Dean Rusk was incredulous. "No support?" he replied. When Helms assured Rusk that was so; Johnson insisted "that there is support." But his insistence reflected more his need for reassurance that the trouble lay elsewhere than with his administration for he immediately added, "there is, isn't there?"

As always, there were those in the Cabinet ready to give the President the




assurance he sought. Secretary of Labor Henry Fowler likened the role of the Communists in student unrest to their earlier role in the labor movement. "I'm travelling around this country and all kinds of people tell me about Communist involvement in this thing," Fowler insisted. Secretary of State Rusk added mentioned that one Ivy League College trustee claimed to have "30 Communists on his faculty." Johnson followed their lead: "I just don't believe this business that there is no support.[...] I've seen them provoke and advocate trouble. I know that Students for a Democratic Society and the DuBois Clubs are Communist infiltrated, Communist led, Communist supported and aggravated." Then Johnson conceded the possibility of the indigenous roots of dissent. "Maybe they are not Communist led," he concluded, "but they are Communist agitated and

aggravated." Johnson's conclusion reflected his southern and cold warrior personas. Since the antebellum era, Southern politicians had tended to blame unrest on outside agitators, even when the causes lay in local conditions. Their villains included abolitionists, carpetbaggers, northern monopolists, labor organizers, and Communists. The paternalistic Southerner in Johnson led him

reflexively to attribute his children's unruly behavior to some sinister external influence. In Cold War America the Communist devil stood above all other evils (Cabinet Papers).

The Cabinet's preoccupation with dissent showed how in the 1960s the social and political crisis of authority had become entwined. Since World War II American political leaders, Johnson among them, had forged a consensus over the Cold War that defined virtually every aspect of America's foreign policy and much of its domestic politics as well. Official policy embraced a commitment to use American power to contain the spread of Communism anywhere in the world. The National Security Council in 1948 spelled out the assumptions upon which the consensus rested: "the ultimate objective of Soviet-directed world communism is the domination of the world." To that end, "the USSR has engaged the United States in a struggle for power, or 'cold war,' in which our national security is at stake and from which we cannot withdraw short of eventual national suicide" (NSC Reports). Architects of containment devised the Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, NATO, the H-bomb program, and NSC-68 as instruments of a Cold War crusade (NSC Reports). These programs received both popular public acclaim and bipartisan political support. There were those who might criticize a particular strategy or the effectiveness of some policy, but virtually no one publicly questioned the central tenets of the consensus.

Had the Cold War consensus enunciated by the NSC applied only to foreign policy, it would not contribute so much to our understanding of the 1960s. But the NSC defined a substantial domestic agenda as well. It included a

peacetime draft, the creation of military-industrial complex, and government propaganda or what the NSC called "'a domestic information program,' designed to ensure public understanding and non-partisan support of our foreign policy."




I oyalty programs and other Red Scare tactics would become part of a permanent policy "to suppress the communist menace in the United States in order to safeguard [. . .] against the disruptive and dangerous activities of communism." 'Ihe consensus would no longer be the subject of political debate, for dissent had become subversion. This crusade had the unqualified support of government officials and support from pulpits, lecterns, movie and TV screens, and editorial pages across the nation.

An alert reader might rightfully wonder, is not the "Cold War consensus" a

political concept? Are we not, then, merely adding another layer of politics to our explanation of the Sixties? To a large degree, the exception is well taken. The Cold War consensus did arise from political circumstances. Presidents from Truman to Reagan used it as a means to promote their own political fortunes and to assure national unity. The consensus organized support for a broad range of policies ranging from national defense to foreign aid to foreign interventions and even to the program to land a man on the moon.

All the same, the consensus took on such a broad sweep that it went beyond politics to define an American way of life. In the hands of an angry conservative like J. Edgar Hoover and opportunists like Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy the consensus became a means to proscribe new ideas and sanitize culture. In the late 1940s and 1950s, Congressional committees investigated movies, juvenile delinquency, comic books, television quiz shows, radio disc jockeys, and other seemingly non-political phenomena in order to root out what they saw as potential subversion. From our current vantage point such fears seem almost quaint or even ludicrous. What could be so menacing about a frenetic disc jockey like Allen Freed or a Batman comic book? What could Freed or Batman possibly have to do with America's war on Communism?

That was not the point. These influences arose from the grass roots of society rather than from the corporations, schools, churches, clubs, and other institutions the elite dominated. People like Elvis Presley and the creators of Mad magazine were outsiders, those with whom the elite had little contact or over whom they exercised little control. Other seemingly isolated trends also suggested that the consensus had begun to crack. These included the increase in civil rights agitation, scattered demonstrations against HUAC, the emergence of SANE and protest against the nuclear arms race, sharp intellectual gibes against the modern bureaucratic corporate culture, fascination with the Beatniks, and the rock and roll inspired teen culture. If ever so vaguely, all these trends called traditional authority into question.

-They did not, however, open the Cold War consensus to systematic attack. For that to happen, the public, or at least a prominent part of it, needed some reason to question the assumptions upon which the consensus rested. In the mid 1950s that seemed highly improbable. Even the censuring of Senator McCarthy did nothing to discredit the elite or the consensus it championed. Indeed, in




reining McCarthy in, the elite affirmed its capacity for responsible leadership. It demonstrated it would not tolerate those who threatened their authority by abusing it. Yet, in that same year, 1954, the United States embarked on the course which would fracture the elite and destroy consensus.

In the 1950s few Americans knew anything about Vietnam or Indochina. Most were vaguely disturbed to see Movietone newsreels about the heroic, but doomed resistance of French forces at Dien Bien Phu. If somehow the dastardly Communists had scored a victory, it was against the decadent French, not the United States. The public never knew that behind the scenes American leaders considered and finally rejected the use of atomic weapons. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had tried unsuccessfully to interest the British in a joint intervention. And when negotiators at Geneva agreed to armistice and peace terms, the United States, having refused to participate, also refused to sign them, though they did accept in principal "free elections supervised by the United Nations" (see LaFeber).

Republicans who blamed the Democrats for losing China in 1949 could not easily justify the loss of Vietnam in 1954. According to historian Walter LaFeber, "affixing an American signature to an agreement with Communists that would turn over half of Vietnam to Ho would not have enhanced the popularity of the Administration at home." Indeed, Eisenhower and the Republicans owed their victory in 1952 in part to their attacks on Democratic mismanagement of the Cold War crusade. The Republicans based their claim to power on their superior ability to fight Communism. Rather than admit defeat in Vietnam and possibly bring into question the nation's resolve to contain Communism, Eisenhower committed the United States to assume France's position as a colonial power. Twenty bloody years later Ho Chi Minh's successors would claim victory. They won, not because they had defeated the US militarily, but because the war had undermined the Cold War consensus. That was the dilemma Johnson and his cabinet faced in September 1968. The invocation of the Communist menace could no longer persuade Americans "to pay any price; bear any burden."

In demonstrating for or against the Vietnam War, Americans in essence testified for or against the Cold War consensus. The debate did not simply pit the outsiders against the insiders, for members of the nation's establishment stood on both sides of the Vietnam debate. The "Best and the Brightest" may have led the United States into the war, but from the nation's college campuses to the pulpits of its churches the "Best and the Brightest" also led the opposition. How then was the nation to reconcile this dispute? If those who shaped public opinion could not agree, how could the public resolve its differences? Since each side could claim to battle for what was right and good, the contest became an especially bitter one. Here lies a fundamental explanation of America's uncivil war. Historian Sydney Ahlstrom explained it as "the loss of the corporate commitment that a nation of unusually heterogeneous minorities desperately needed."




Preoccupation with the secular political arena has blinded many historians to the spiritual side of the uncivil war. That is not to say that religion triggered opposition to the war; rather numerous religious leaders became involved in part because of the moral issues the war raised and in part because they saw in the moral energy of protest a way to revitalize their churches. An even wider array of religious leaders remained steadfast in supporting the war and the Cold War assumptions that fostered it. On the secular side, many political radicals invested their ideas with an intense religiosity. Karl Marx became, if not a God, a prophet. Mao, Che Gueverra, and other revolutionaries joined the pantheon of saints. In that way debate over the war was part of a much larger religious re-examination that swept the nation in the 1960s. Such revival movements have periodically erupted since the days of the Great Awakening. And as we know, religious disputes have provoked some of the most divisive and violent of history's struggles, the Cold War among them.

In the 1950s cold warriors had made conventional religion a central facet of their consensus. The spirit of the 1950s was perhaps best captured when President Eisenhower proclaimed that "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply religious faith-and I don't care what it is." Indeed among Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish theologians a kind of religious consensus emerged stressing the unity of the Judeo-Christian faith. Religion also epitomized the celebratory side of the national consensus. As part of the catechism of the "American Way of Life", national leaders ritually explained how a capitalistic economy, democratic institutions, a free press, and above all, faith in God elevated American society above the Communists. Such pieties reflected social ritual more than religiosity. Many historians have noted that while church membership soared in the 1950s, the quality of religious life seemed to decline. The rise in church membership did not translate into higher church attendance or more rigorous religious behavior.

By the 1960s many clergy sought ways to make religion more vital. Some of the more reform minded among them, heirs of the social gospel, found their path in the Civil Rights movement. As religious historian Mark Silk noted, "Civil rights, the supreme cause of the day, was to a striking degree a religious affair." Folk singers turned songs like Bob Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind into hymns of protest In his "Letter From A Birmingham Jail" Martin Luther King confronted his detractors with the real religious issue they faced. "If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church," King wrote, "it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century."

Along with the social and political elite, the American religious establishment had also fractured by the 1960s. King represented the growing prominence of the Black churches. The "ancient Eastern Churches" [Greek, Russian and other Orthodox branches as well as the Polish National Catholic and




Armenian] had joined the ranks of the Federal Council of Churches, founded in 1908 by Protestants. This diversity, according to religious historian Winthrop Hudson, "deprived the Protestant community of its one surviving institutionalized symbol." Increasingly, Americans looked for spiritual guidance to movements outside the traditional religious denominations. Ancient faiths, the occult, mysticism, and Asian religions all attracted widespread attention. Dissenters marshaled an array of faiths ranging from Marxism to social gospel Christianity to Zen Buddhism to their causes. Sidney Ahlstrom suggested that 1960s brought an end to the reformation cycle-the Great Puritan Epoch that began in the sixteenth century. According to Ahlstrom, Americans felt deeply "the need for reexamining fundamental conceptions of religion, ethics, and nationhood."

Traditionalists reacted to this upheaval in many ways. Some resisted and like Johnson and his Cabinet associated the new movements with the nation's and the world's great enemies-Communism and Satan. Some clergy tapped into the spiritual yearnings of the counterculture as churches turned their basements into coffee houses where the young could gather. So in the argument over faith, the religious establishment, like its social counterpart, stood on both sides of the battle. This, too, helps explain the depths of the divisions that beset the nation.

One other perspective helps explain the style, if not the substance, of the Sixties. Until the 1950s the establishment that defined American values and tastes was primarily an Eastern one. Even Hollywood in its heyday had been dominated by displaced Easterners. But as early as the 1920s California's residential architecture presaged the zany iconoclasm that would evolve into a West Coast style. By the 1960s the United States had developed a bicoastal popular culture. Some of the early signs were largely symbolic. Such eastern icons as the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodger baseball teams moved to the coast. Los Angeles became the center of production for the booming television industry. As Vice President and presidential candidate, Richard Nixon reflected California's rapidly growing political importance. The beatniks made San Francisco the center of a new style that mixed elements of Asian mysticism, black urban cool, and European cosmopolitanism. So, too, soon after, would Jan and Dean and the Beachboys introduce America to the loopy world of surfers and endless summer.

By the 1960s California had a central role in defining popular and political culture. The Bay area and Berkeley, as a university and urban community, would become a major center of almost all the Sixties disparate phenomena from the Free Speech Movement to LSD to communes to vegetarian food to the Black Panthers and to antiwar protest. The West Coast style was not as cerebral or analytic as that associated with the NYC intellectuals or high culture gurus of the 1950s. Tom Wolfe defined it in the contrast between the manic antics of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters and the cool transcendental style of Timothy Leary. Imagine it as the difference between Wired and the New York Review of Books. The emergence of the West Coast and its distinctive style was yet another




way in which the nation's elite and its consensus fractured in the 1960s. What then is the "pregnant principle" of the Sixties? What, from a

perspective of 30 or more years later, can we learn from the triumphs and tragedies of that era? The answer has something to do with interplay of tolerance and intolerance. Every war produces a climate of intolerance. From the Tories of the Revolutionary War, to the hyphenated Americans of World War I to the Japanese-Americans interned during World War II, each war subjects some groups to patriotic excess. The Cold War was no exception. Even though the consensus preached a gospel of domestic harmony, the champions of the consensus brooked little dissent and generally defined civil rights and liberties as the right to preserve conventions. The gospel of harmony masked widespread intolerance towards minorities, new ideas, and human differences.

The Civil Rights movement first forced the nation to confront the open hostility that belied the unifying nostrums of consensus. And when Vietnam turned the Cold War hot, the level of intolerance rose. That was not true only for supporters of the war. The apostles of the new Sixties creeds attacked the intolerance of the consensus with their own gospel of harmony. They chanted slogans of peace and love. In time, however, their moral ardor became its own form of intolerance. Passionate pursuit of the moral good undermined the civility that is essential to social harmony. To play on a phrase, they had to destroy harmony to preserve it. Their foes were only too willing to reciprocate in kind. By the time the uncivil war ended, most Americans were chastened by the excesses of those seeking either to uphold or undermine the authority of the consensus. This then is the story of the events of the Sixties that left Americans asking themselves, "Who is the enemy? Who is the friend?" Three decades later the answer is far from clear.




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