American technology has always been an American strength, a source of wonder and, sometimes, of anxiety. In 1853 a periodical called the United States Review had predicted that within fifty years “machinery will perform all work—automata will direct them,” leaving people free “to make love, study and be happy.” But as the campuses of the 1960s trembled on the verge of upheaval, John Kenneth Galbraith was less sanguine. He sensed a “danger that our educational system will be too strongly in the service of economic goals.”
***
In some way the great student upheavals of the 1960s were even more significant than they seemed at the time. Like the revolutionary fever that swept western Europe in 1848, they may never be fully understood. They cut across national orders and cultural barriers that had long intimidated older generations. Neither oceans nor even the Iron Curtain checked them; as Columbia exploded and Berkeley seethed, campuses erupted in England, Italy, Germany, Holland, Sweden, Spain, Belgium, Japan, Formosa, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. Americans were preoccupied with the disorders at home, but in at least two foreign capitals, Prague and Warsaw, the damage was more extensive than anything in the United States.
Doubtless part of the explanation for the chain reaction lies in the speed and sophistication of modern communications. The sense of world community was real and growing. Each of the emerging continents was to some degree aware of what was happening on other continents. “Establishment,” in its new sense, had been translated into the language of every industrial nation. Student activists, as the riots would demonstrate, hadn’t much use for it. This feeling was global. The antipathy was just as strong in Asia or eastern Europe as beneath the elms of Old Wabash.
Nevertheless, the American role was special. The turmoil began in the United States, the world’s most affluent nation and the one with the most strongly defined youth subculture. Undergraduates abroad were very conscious of events on American campuses (“What is happening at Columbia?” Sorbonne demonstrators eagerly asked American foreign correspondents in 1968), while U.S. students were largely indifferent to the frenzies overseas. In America, moreover, it was possible to trace the powerful currents which were stirring youth. As Tocqueville noted, Americans have always taken a distinctive, almost Rousseauistic view of youth, and they have turned naturally to education as the solution to every problem, public and private.
But now youth itself had become a problem, and a major one at that. A great source of anxiety was the new political militance. A conservative educator declared that the campuses were harboring “a loose alliance of Maoists, Trotskyites, Stalinists, Cheists, anarchists, Utopians, and nihilists.” Spiro Agnew made several memorable remarks on the subject. In St. Louis he called student demonstrators “malcontents, radicals, incendiaries, and civil and uncivil disobedients” and said, “I would swap the whole damn zoo for a single platoon of the kind of Americans I saw in Vietnam.” On another occasion he described the universities as “circus tents or psychiatric centers for over-privileged, under-disciplined, irresponsible children of well-to-do blasé permissivists.”
Parents denied that they were blasé or permissive, and those who disapproved of the demonstrations said they were the work of a minority. Gallup reported that 72 percent of all students had not participated in any of them; a Fortune poll concluded that just 12.5 percent of undergraduates held “revolutionary” or “radically dissident” views; SDS recruited just 7 percent. But Groucho Marx spoke for millions of older Americans when he remarked, “it’s no good saying that the ones you read about are a minority. They’re not a minority if they’re all yours and you have to wait for the car to get home to know your daughter hasn’t got pregnancy or leprosy.”
***
The figures were deceptive anyhow. Extremists always attract a minority. A minority of northerners were abolitionists in 1861; probably a minority of colonists really wanted independence in 1776. Sympathies, not commitments, are the best indicator of a group’s temper, and here the student pattern tells a different story. Gallup found that 81 percent of undergraduates were dissatisfied with college and university administrations. Another poll reported that more than 50 percent expressed major reservations about American foreign and domestic policies.
“The fear of being labeled radical, leftist, or subversive,” Harvey Swados observed of academe in the early 1960s, “seems to have all but disappeared.” Many, indeed, welcomed it. The undergraduates arriving on campus were often children of the middle-class liberals who had been most outraged—and in some instances had suffered most—during the McCarthy years. Their sons and daughters were determined not to be intimidated or repressed. They joined chapters of such organizations as SDS, Joan Baez’s School for Nonviolence, the W. E. B. Du Bois Clubs, and the Young Socialist Alliance. They were in dead earnest but politically inept. Before the decade ended, the tactics of their New Left would offend virtually all potential allies, including their parents—which, some thought, might have been the point.
Yet in some areas they were highly skilled. Their demonstrations were often staged for TV news cameramen with a sense of what was good theater. The picketing in support of the Mississippi Freedom Party at the 1964 Democratic national convention was one example; the October 1967 march on the Pentagon was another. It is equally true that they frequently appeared to be shocking the country for the sake of shock. In 1965 SDS repealed its ban on admitting Communists and Birchers to membership. The New Leftists proclaimed that their sacred trinity consisted of Marx, Mao, and Herbert Marcuse, and they enthusiastically embraced Marcuse’s “discriminating tolerance”; i.e., the suppression of points of view which the New Leftists regarded as unsound or dangerous. Their campaigns against ROTC, the draft, and napalm were logical, and walking out on commencement ceremonies was valid protest, but when they advocated dynamiting public buildings, even Marcuse demurred. Some SDS leaders all but salivated over violence. Of the Sharon Tate murders SDS’s Bernardine Dohrn said: “Dig it, first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!”
The New Leftists’ view of society was essentially conspirational. They saw it as dominated by an establishment which was itself manipulated by a “power elite” of industrialists, military leaders, and corporate giants. They talked darkly of revolution, yet a real revolution starts with strengthening the power of the state—which they were dead set against. Like all movements, theirs had a glossary of special terms: “dialogue,” “creative tension,” “nonnegotiable demands,” and “nonviolent” among others. But their meanings were often obscure. Nonnegotiable demands could be negotiated, for example, and throwing rocks and bottles at policemen was deemed nonviolent.
The alienation of the young militants, expressing itself in disdain for conventional careers, clothing, and politics, had begun at Berkeley in 1964. The next spring, when that campus began to tremble again, President Kerr said, “The university and the Berkeley campus really couldn’t face another such confrontation.” In fact four more years of turmoil lay ahead. Berkeley was to be but one of many disturbed campuses. In 1965 Berkeley fallout first rocked the University of Kansas when 114 students were arrested there for staging a sit-in at the chancellor’s office to protest fraternity and sorority discrimination. Then, within a few days, colleges and universities were embattled from coast to coast.
Yale undergraduates demonstrated after a popular philosophy instructor had been denied tenure. After an anti-ROTC rally at San Francisco State, five were hospitalized. At Fairfield University, a Jesuit school in Connecticut, students broke into a locked stack to put forbidden books on open shelves. Brooklyn College undergraduates booed their president off a platform. At St. John’s in New York, the nation’s biggest Catholic college, students demanded an end to censorship of their publications. Michigan students demonstrated against higher movie prices, and three deans resigned at Stanford over reading erotic poetry in the classroom. At Fairleigh Dick
inson in New Jersey students picketed as “an expression of general student discontent.” The uproar continued through 1966 and 1967, with major riots at San Jose State College, Wisconsin, Iowa, Cornell, Long Beach State College, and, once again, San Francisco State. And all this was merely a buildup for the cataclysmic year of 1968. “Yesterday’s ivory tower,” said the president of Hunter College, “has become today’s foxhole.”
For all their ardor, the militant undergraduates achieved little. Students are by definition transients; once they are graduated new students arrive, and there is no guarantee that the newcomers may not take a different line—as in fact those in this movement did. SDS, inherently unstable, split into two groups at the end of the decade: Revolutionary Youth Movement I, also known as the Weathermen, and Revolutionary Youth Movement II, which condemned the Weathermen as “adventuristic.” The students had other difficulties. One of their basic premises was absurd. “The fantasy,” wrote Benjamin DeMott, lay “in the notion that if you’re upset about Vietnam, racism, poverty, or the general quality of life, the bridge to blow is college.”
A second handicap was the students’ exaggerated sense of their own power. In 1966 they confidently challenged the gubernatorial campaign of Ronald Reagan. To their amazement, he won by a margin of almost a million votes. That same day the Republicans gained fifty congressional seats. “One of the most obvious casualties of the 1966 elections,” Hunter S. Thompson noted, “was the New Left’s illusion of its own leverage. The radical-hippy alliance had been counting on the voters to repudiate the ‘right-wing, warmonger’ elements in Congress, but instead it was the ‘liberal’ Democrats who got stomped.” Furthermore, analysts concluded that in California the New Left had actually boosted Reagan’s vote by opposing him. Having found a popular issue, Reagan then capitalized on it, forcing Kerr’s resignation on the ground that he had been too lenient with student dissidents and appointing Professor Samuel I. Hayakawa, a hard-liner, as president of San Francisco State.
Hostile reactions to politicized students were not confined to California. One Midwest legislature slashed over 38 million dollars from its state university’s budget and raised tuition fees. Bills intended to stifle student dissent were introduced in most other legislatures, and eight of them were passed. “Americans,” Oregon’s Governor Tom McCall said of the demonstrators, were “fed up to their eardrums and eyeballs.” Lou Harris reported that 62 percent of students’ parents believed that it was more important for colleges to maintain discipline than to encourage intellectual curiosity. “Reduced to its simplest terms,” Life commented, “the generations disagree on the most fundamental question of all: What is education for?”
Of course, they clashed over other issues, too. The demonstrations were one of the most visible manifestations of youth’s subculture in the 1960s, but there was more to their subculture than that. Throughout the decade publicists wrote of “revolutions” in, among others, communications, sex, and drugs. Youth was active in all of them and was partly formed by them, if only because it had concluded that the election returns were what Hunter Thompson called “brutal confirmation of the futility of fighting the Establishment on its own terms.” The generation gap had arrived, and it was an abyss.
***
“Don’t trust anyone over thirty!” said the banners and buttons displayed by the most arrogant, and it was cruel; so many Americans over thirty wanted to be young again, to share the fads and enthusiasms of youth. They slipped discs dancing the Watusi and the Swim and the Cottage Cheese, hopped about chasing Frisbees, endangered their lives riding motorcycles, laughed at The Graduate and even played with Super Balls. The Beatles having introduced long hair, the kids picked it up, and presently the middle-aged were imitating that, too. Both sexes wore wigs to make them look younger. Often the hippies set fashions for adults. “I watch what the kids are putting together for themselves,” said Rudi Gernreich. “I formalize it, give it something of my own, perhaps, and that is fashion.” Older Americans caught the discotheque bug and asked children where the action was; young wiseacres told them the Vincent Van Gogh-Gogh and the Long, Long Ago-go. Women went to plastic surgeons for eyelid lifts ($350), nose jobs ($500), rhytidectomies—face lifts—($600), face peelings ($500), dermabrasions—removing acne scars—($275), bosom implants ($165), belly lifts ($500) and thigh lifts ($650). “Being young was right,” Life observed in a special issue on the 1960s; “as everybody once wanted to be rich, now everybody wanted to be, or seem to be, young. Fashion, films, books, music, even politics leaned toward youth.”
Early in the decade half the U.S. population was under thirty. Then half was under twenty-seven, and then it was half under twenty-five, with 40 percent seventeen years old or younger and those under eighteen increasing four times as fast as the rest of the population. Even so, there were many who took a saturnine view of what one called youth’s “vinyl-mini-inflatable Disneyland of pop culture.” Defenders of the young reminded them that Socrates had written: “Our youth now loves luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect for their elders. Children nowadays are tyrants.” The implication was that since the Greeks were vexed by kids that long ago, today’s worriers were making an issue over nothing. Grace and Fred M. Hechinger countered that real questions should be, “What happened to Greece? Or to Rome? Or to any civilization once it substituted self-indulgence for self-discipline?”
At times in the 1960s it almost seemed that America was becoming a filiarchy. Adolescence, wrote the Hechingers, had “evolved into a cult, to be prolonged, enjoyed, and commercially catered to as never before.” In the new suburbs, especially, the young appeared to have been reared on a philosophy of instant gratification. Agnew, Billy Graham, and Al Capp distorted the issue, but it did exist and was debatable. “Self-expression” and “child-centered” were part of the permissive jargon; in the schools the trend frequently led to a system of “elective” subjects for pupils too young to know what they were electing. The teacher was to be regarded as a pal, not a superior being. Elementary school teachers were required to work with limited vocabularies, sometimes twenty words or less repeated endlessly. (The result was summed up in the deathless line attributed to a teacher who rammed a tree with her car: “Look look look, oh oh oh, damn damn damn.”)
Children told that they were equal to their parents in every way believed that decisions in the home should be put to a vote. This was called “democratic living.” Often it meant chaotic living. Writing in Daedalus, David Riesman noted the effect on a stranger: “As in the home of a poor peasant which is shared with goats, chickens, and other livestock, guests here may face the hazard of children who are treated as pets and who are not put away with a babysitter when company comes.”
Henry A. Murray, another Harvard contributor to Daedalus, pointed to one unexpected consequence. Most teen-age aggregates, he observed, were “bound together by an anti-authoritarian, anti-father compact.” It was a strong man who could command respect in his own house. Society seemed to be conspiring against him. One of the greatest offenders was television. TV fathers were pitiful weaklings. Make Room for Daddy’s ineffectual daddy let his wife dominate him simply because she talked the loudest. Uncle Bentley in Bachelor Father was systematically humiliated by his niece and his servant, and Mr. Anderson, the antihero of a series sardonically called Father Knows Best, invariably responded to the strange antics of his children by saying, “Let’s keep out of it and see what happens.”
Advertisers were wary of offending youth; the nation’s teen-agers were spending 25 billion dollars a year. It was ironic that student militants should take so vigorous a stand against materialism; their own generation was the most possession-conscious in history. In The Lonely Crowd Riesman wrote that in America “children begin their training as consumers at an increasingly young age,” that “middle-class children have allowances of their own at four or five,” and that the allowances “are expected to be spent, whereas in the earlier era they were often used as
cudgels of thrift.”
Advertisers courting them addressed teen-agers as “the Now Generation,” the “New People,” the “Pepsi Generation,” and the “Go Anywhere, Do Anything Generation.” John Brooks pointed out that they were the most conspicuous beneficiaries of Johnsonian prosperity: “American youth, like everybody else but more spectacularly, was getting rich. A combination of burgeoning national wealth and the settled national habit of indulging the young was putting unprecedented sums of cash in their hands.” Keeping them solvent wasn’t always easy. In 1964 the Harvard class of ’39, hardly indigents, reported that providing their children with money was the chief paternal problem for 78 percent of them. Only 6 percent said that instilling moral values in them was as hard. And they weren’t all that moral. For $12.50 a boy could buy a girl a “Going Steady” ring which looked just like a wedding band; certainly no motel manager could tell the difference. If they felt guilty next day, in some places they could pray for forgiveness at teen-age churches. The Emmanuel Hospital in Portland, Oregon, even had a teen-age wing. It was described by Frank J. Taylor in a Saturday Evening Post article, “How to Have Fun in the Hospital.” Patients enjoyed “unlimited snacks, jam sessions, and wheel-chair drag races.” Priggish nutritionists kept their distance; the teen-agers were allowed to “eat hot dogs and hamburgers day after day for lunch and supper.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 165