The Sixties: Reviewing the Decade that Rocked

By Laurence Peters and Mike Peters

Essays reflecting on the music, politics and social revolutions that shaped who we are today.  l

• Language: English
• Publisher: Changing Times Press
• Release date: Dec 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781507098080

Book preview

Reviewing the Sixties: Reflections on the Decade that Rocked the World

––––––––

Introduction

With a black president in the White House and a woman seriously considering announcing her intention to be the next US presidential candidate, it looks as if the Sixties have won. And although the decade is fading from living memory, its significance still resonates today. For many politicians and social commentators, the roots of several contemporary issues, including those around race, the position of women, the activities of corporations and the environment - to name just a few - can be traced back to the major struggles of the decade.  Furthermore, for anyone dissatisfied with the current social and political order, the period offers examples of protest and resistance that have continuing relevance. Followers of the anti-globalization or Occupy movements can and do refer back to the forms of  direct action - whether mass demonstrations, street-theatre or massive open-air concerts - practiced in the 1960s.

By 1970 although there had been significant progress in a variety of fields - the struggle for equal rights (both for black people and women) had accomplished a good deal, a series of social programs had legitimized the idea of State intervention on behalf of the disadvantaged and US political and military ambitions were considerably diminished as a result of the protests against the Vietnam War - many of the country`s key institutions, laws and customs were still in place. America was still a nation founded on capitalism and liberal democracy. There had been a good deal talk of revolution during the decade but many of the fundamentals had not  really changed - that is unless you looked into people`s heads and saw the world as they saw it. Then, the contrast with the previous period was clear.

Where before there had been deference to authority - both political and family - now there was a spirit of questioning; where once there had been a simple acceptance that a happy life was about fitting in and achieving material success, now it was about self-fulfilment and `doing one`s own thing`; where  conformity and fitting in had once been the prized human qualities now there was a greater appreciation of the value of  the instinct and fantasy. Of course, not everyone shared the new mind-set but anyone attending carefully to the culture of the time,  particularly as expressed in popular music and advertising  could not mistake that society was moving to a different vibe. Issues to do with personal morality, lifestyle and music -were now the subject to individual questioning. As the Vietnam War dragged on many of the received ideas that earlier generations had taken for granted, for example about America’s sense of moral superiority underwent radical transformation and a new kind of global consciousness about the historical role of superpowers in oppressing and exploiting third world nations emerged.

But how did all these changes occur? For sure, America was involved in a civil rights struggle at home and a war abroad and thus, with  civil and racial strife in the streets, it was impossible not to question certain time honored beliefs. What might have been reduced to a column or two in a local newspaper back in the fifties now could go  viral - or the 1960s` equivalent -  by being picked up by a TV and Radio network and given prime time national attention. But  the actors themselves in these dramas - the civil rights leaders, the peace protestors and the hippies - were responding to more significant changes in the culture - changes that artists and intellectuals helped identify and define within the context of the wider political struggle. 

Our book is an attempt to look in a granular way at the way these changes registered in the minds of people who became leaders in various fields and took over for a temporary period a much bigger stage than the ones they were used to, either as a result of the clarity of their artistic vision - as was the case of someone who is a household name like Bob Dylan, who transformed the pop and folk music of his day, or of someone who is a less  well-known figure,  like Herbert Marcuse, who taught a generation of  university students how the society they had grown up in continued to deny their human freedom and potential and gave birth to a world-wide student activist movement.  We explore why these figures continue to speak to us even through the fog of our fast-moving image dominated culture in which pop songs, TV ads and consumer items compete for attention.

It is all too easy in encyclopedic accounts of this period to gloss over the moments of inspired action and imagination that gave birth to new set of  values as part of the zeitgeist. But the individual acts of courage and creativity need to be understood in their own right because they can more powerfully help to illuminate the present as well as the  past. For example, when the poet, Robert Lowell, publicly rejected the honor of being awarded a gold medal for poetry by President  Johnson, it sent a powerful message about the immorality of the Vietnam War felt by millions of others  - intellectuals and non-intellectuals alike. Such gestures may be rare and they are not the monopoly of the Sixties but revisiting them again gives us pause about the way we may, in our celebrity-driven age, have lost sight of the way less commercial artists and intellectuals need to continue to speak truth to power.

The Port Huron Statement  also resonated through the Sixties and expressed a vision of an agenda for a generation. Historian, Michael Kazin, refers to it as `the most ambitious, the most specific and the most eloquent manifesto in the history of the American left.` In order to understand its modern day relevance you have to  grasp the way the world the authors diagnosed then - `a Politics without publics` - is still largely with us `frustrating democracy by confusing the individual citizen, paralyzing policy discussion, and consolidating the irresponsible power of military and business interests.`

Our intention in describing these key texts and events is not to become mired in all too tempting Sixties` sentimentality and nostalgia. Rather we simply want to note the creative ways that these men and women took charge of their moment  to express a range of new attitudes and feelings that continue to resonate in our everyday lives as well as throughout our institutions.

Politics were a concern of youth back then because it affected them directly not only through the draft but because many  felt as if they had a personal stake in the Civil Rights struggle as bus loads of Freedom Riders went south to join and in some cases get killed in the struggle. The great phrase of the Sixties that politics is personal is indicated in many of the struggles we write about here, as individuals feel they need to wage their battles against what they define as the machine, the corporation or just ‘the man’.  Take for example Bob Dylan’s struggle to free himself from what he considered the cloistered and easy-leftist platitudes of the old Left in his decision to go electric and reject his folk past at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival. As well as being Dylan’s break -out moment, it signaled to a whole new group of rock artists that it was OK  not just to become singer songwriters touting the usual party line of songs, whether dictated by the folk establishment or the corporate record company, but to be, as the current phrase has it, ‘edgy’ and political,  as Dylan, in abandoning his folk audience, discovered a much larger and more radically inclined global youth market hungry for the raw power of songs like Like a Rolling Stone, Mr Tambourine Man and Maggie’s Farm. 

Writers such as Paul Goodman in his ground-breaking book, Growing Up Absurd, had already compared the American high school to a prison and viewed  the adult world as almost obsessively interested in suffocating individual expression. What made Dylan the important artist he became was that he was more  interested in putting that broader social critique into unforgettable musical language than becoming a simple pamphleteer for the anti Vietnam or Civil Rights movement. By contrast we discuss how  singer P J Sloan, the author of the lyrics of the 1965 hit-song, Eve of Destruction, took a more direct and short-lived path to pop stardom and why others may have failed to follow him in his critique of  US`s arrogant exercise of military power.

But there were no shortage of other battlegrounds closer to home. We show how  such intellectuals as Paul Goodman and Herbert Marcuse began a critique of the entire system of mass society, including education, that they saw was in the business of  producing ‘one dimensional man.’  Student radicals in particular were attracted to the analysis and many of the generations’ thinkers were preoccupied with the question as to how the most advanced industrial country  in the world  could condemn large parts of the population to prison-like schools and to boot,  send them off to fight a war that was sold to them as a patriotic fight to defend liberty.  Before the critique of the wider society could fully gather steam the student movement was concerned with illustrating  some of the societal contradictions in their own backyard—most particularly by protesting repressive policies on their so called ‘liberal  campuses’  limiting free speech while imposing a white male Eurocentric view of the world.

Today’s more open campuses, where students can pursue a whole range of multicultural options as well as gender and women’s studies courses, owe a lot to these pioneering  Sixties` intellectuals.

Emerging  slowly from its roots in the Beat generation and  the West coast drug culture, the  60s` counter- culture was born as a result of the continued refusal by the establishment,  particularly the politicians of the day - from LBJ and Nixon to so called progressives, like Hubert Humphrey, -  to retreat from their failed Southeast Asian war policies.  Our essays on the Chicago 8, arrested for protesting outside of the 1968 Democratic convention, and  on Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters show how the new political cynicism engendered an  angrier and disaffected mood, interested in subversion and comedy in equal measure, to draw attention to their cause. The Occupy movement might want to examine the sophisticated street theatre and use of the media that resulted.

As the decade moved on, the counter-culture was less interested in conflict and confrontation and more in subtle subversion. For example, one essay shows the way that director Mike Nichols took a chance on an unknown actor to play the lead role in what became the largest grossing movie of 1967, The Graduate. This brilliant stroke of casting against type signaled to a worldwide audience that the younger generation was not  prepared to settle for their  parents ` hypocrisies and conception of the good life.

Mike Nichols was not alone in being able to understand the way the zeitgeist was moving.  Using different tactics  - identifying with counter cultural attitudes in certain songs, actions and performances -  John Lennon and Mick Jagger  became global rock-celebrities by the end of the decade.  LBJ, stung by the constant chant that followed him  `LBJ  how many kids did you kill today`, refused to run for a second term.  Nixon, after first trying to expand the  War was forced by anti- war activist, Daniel Ellsberg’s release of Pentagon papers ,to admit defeat in Vietnam. By 1970, the counter-culture had become mainstream, as advertisers were selling everything, from Coke to Volkswagens, by using peace signs and flowers, as well as rock music, to turn peace activists into consumers. But not everyone sold out or felt that the small house and the car were the end of their dreams. The kind of generational solidarity many experienced during the Sixties was real and was felt in organizations like the Peace Corps and the feminist and gay rights movement. This book explores some of the ways that legacy was built and why it continues to resonate so powerfully today.

––––––––

Contents

Introduction  3

About the Authors 10

Dedication 11

The Early Sixties

Freewheelin:  Dylan Finds his Generational Changing Themes and Voice 12

Herbert Marcuse:  The Man Behind the Sixties Radicals  17

Alienation and Authenticity in America: Growing Up Absurd  26

Re-imagining Education: Paul Goodman`s Compulsory Miseducation 31

The Longest Journey: The Freedom Riders and the Struggle for Black Equality  36

A Manifesto for New Times: the  Port Huron Statement  41

The