The 1960s Cultural Revolution by
John C. McWilliams
My rating:
4 of 5 stars
“Should we remember the sixties as a spirited time when exuberant and idealistic activists believed anything was possible, or were the sixties an era when naïve and overzealous agitators espousing an anti-establishment attitude, the widening of social boundaries, and the challenge of authority caused America to lose some of its greatness? Was it the decade of 'peace and love' or 'fire in the streets'? Regardless of the perception, postmortems on any historical era are difficult at best, and the 1960s were extraordinarily eventful and uncommonly complex.”
-John C. McWilliams, The 1960s Cultural Revolution. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.
I picked up a copy of this book some time ago from the library discard rack. In spite of its 2000 publication date and an anachronistic (but insightful) analogy using the example of a videocassette recorder, it doesn't belong on the discard pile. McWilliams gives us an excellent overview of the era we call the Sixties, but reminds us that it didn't just begin on January 1, 1960 and end December 31, 1969. A useful chronology at the book's beginning starts with 1946 and the Baby Boom, and ends with 1975 and the American evacuation of Saigon.
Actually, the last date on the chronology is September 1, 1975, with the last episode of the TV series Gunsmoke. Such cultural landmarks can be just as important as political or military events. For instance, the entry for December 12, 1968 mentions not only that American combat fatalities in Vietnam reached 30,057, but that “McDonald's introduces the 'Big Mac' hamburger sandwich.”
However, the book is specifically about the cultural revolution, and includes chapters on the New Left, the antiwar movement, the counterculture, and a concluding chapter “The Legacy of the 1960s Cultural Revolution.” One major omission is a chapter on the civil rights movement, which was surely a driving force of the cultural revolution. The modern feminist and gay rights, and environmental movements are mentioned, as their seeds are in the Sixties, but Americans did not really feel their impact until later.
The book includes a section of short biographies, a sampling of of documents from the era, and an extensive bibliography. The biographies bring out one flaw in virtually everyone's analysis of the Sixties—the assumption that the Baby Boom Generation was the prime mover of the cultural revolution. McWilliams seems to assume this, though his biographies disprove the point. (Tom Brokaw, whose analysis of the Baby Boom generation, Boom, makes the error in a much bigger way.) With few exceptions, the biographies are of persons from earlier generations—most from the so-called “Silent Generation,” and a two from the “G.I. Generation” (the one Tom Brokaw calls “The Greatest Generation.”). Of those profiled, Joan Baez, all four Beatles, Stokely Carmichael, Bob Dylan, Jane Fonda, Jerry Garcia and three members of the Grateful Dead, Tom Hayden, Jimi Hendrix, Abbie Hoffman, Ken Kesey, Jim Morrison, and Mario Savio are all Silents; and Timothy Leary and Pete Seeger are both G.I.s. Only Mark Rudd and four members of the Grateful Dead (two of whom joined the band in the early Seventies) were born in 1946 or later. We Boomers were, for the most part, followers, not leaders, in the cultural revolution.
The documents include an abbreviated version of the 1962 Port Huron Statement (the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society), several antiwar and antidraft statements, one of Abbie Hoffman's Yippie Manifestos, and right-wing responses by Spiro Agnew, Ronald Reagan, and Strom Thurmond. One autobiographical vignette, “Tuning In, Turning On, Dropping Out” by Jane DeGennaro is particularly heart-wrenching, as it describes the “open relationship” she and her first husband had, and how it destroyed their marriage.
The bibliography is an excellent tool for further research. The book deserves to be updated and reissued.
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