Beware the caption writers of the sixties. They lump it all as a decade of protest and malcontent, which it of course was. But to sloganize the whole slurs the very parts that make it understandable. The beginnings of the domestic wars of the sixties were considerably different from the end—as different in their way as the 20s from the 50s, goldfish swallowers from Joseph McCarthy followers.
In the beginning, we all believed. We believed in many things, but mostly in America. If the decade must be summarized, it could be said that the youth of America, who had so recently studied it in civics classes, tested the system—and it flunked.
It was the peculiar nature of my initiation into the disappointments of the decade that, for me, the bloom was first to come off the rose of the Catholic Church. But the early sixties were, for the most part, a study in progressive disillusion. Almost everyone started off believing in something —moral persuasion, civil disobedience, education, gradual progress, voting rights, effective new laws, good will toward men—but those beliefs all ended as rumpled illusions.
It is not oversimplifying the history of this country to suggest that the system had really never been tested before the sixties. The past great debates in American politics, such as they have been, took place within the framework of what is fashionably called the “consensus”—a figment of political theory similar to, but far frailer than, the social contract, and as difficult to locate as the Garden of Eden—which was the textbook basis of liberal democracy: The idea was that interest groups are supposed to trade off issues, like haggling housewives at a garage sale. But in the 1960s two moral issues arose, tornadoes through the dust bowl of theory, that proved to be beyond the capacity of the atrophied “consensus” to cope with: the demand for racial equality, and the war in Vietnam. It is fair to observe that perhaps nobody on either side of these battles knew the system couldn’t handle the problems; probably, everyone was surprised.
The protest movement of the early sixties was permeated by the overall sense of good feeling that one was helping one’s fellows (or, subconsciously, one’s lessers). It thrived on the optimism which is the blood plasma of liberalism—confront evil authorities and evil laws, show the people the wrong, and with adequate political pressure and education, the right law will be passed to correct the evil.
If that summary of the ethic of the early sixties sounds patronizing, it is not meant to be; that is simply the way we thought then. It is now easily forgotten that the beginnings of the New Left were as liberal and innocent of the ways of power as Doris Day is presumed to have been of the ways of sodomy. Even the feared Students for a Democratic Society crawled from under a liberal rock. Tom Hayden’s 1962 Port Huron manifesto launching SDS reads today more like Eisenhower’s farewell address than a revolutionary tract; it even warns against the military-industrial complex and calls for a program to abolish poverty.
As late as 1964, when myopic television coverage of the Free Speech Movement was giving adult viewers the erroneous idea that four and ten letter words were coming from the mouths of babes on campus, SDS was still hanging in there with the system, opting to go at least “part of the way with LBJ” against the Hun, Barry Goldwater.
In 1964 Ramparts magazine ran an election cover, which we thought daring at the time, portraying Goldwater as a rattlesnake. But Lyndon Johnson had barely got his automatic root beer machine and triple TV screen installed in the oval office than he turned and, viperlike, bit us all sorely in our collective liberal ass. The cynicism and despair in the democratic process that began to hang over the land like a tule fog were only partly of LBJ’s immediate doing. They were the residue of lessons I had learned while banging about the country for several years as a domestic war correspondent.
That John Kennedy’s, then Lyndon Johnson’s much ballyhooed civil rights legislation amounted to a ton of horse feathers; that legislation without enforcement was Camelot without Merlin; that electing a peace President could get you a bigger war; that people in power would use the most reasonable arguments for the necessity of order and stability to maintain the most inequitable imbalance in a status quo of which they owned a piece, or hankered to…
While we whites in our fashion were learning these and other lessons, the blacks had already suffered the results. And at a point, somewhere after Selma and before Watts, a curious bump was reached in the roller coaster politics of the sixties. Just as it appeared that many white activists were psychologically and politically prepared to join with more radical blacks in revolutionary approaches to political change—there was suddenly no more room left at the inn. While white students had been learning the hard way that there was little difference between the ways of power in Birmingham and Berkeley, the more oppressed black militants had abandoned the civil rights desk entirely to the likes of the NAACP.
The early sixties “We Shall Overcome” thing of black and white together was but nostalgia after Watts. There was considerable confusion and bleeding of hearts among white liberals by the ensuing period of “Thanks, but no thanks” to Whitey. The roots of that tension are deep, and were apparent earlier in SNCC, when black men began to take reasonable umbrage at well-meaning and well-stacked white coeds from Columbia and Brandeis who came South to help their movement by running their act. This black and white trauma occurred at a time when activist whites were undergoing the now popular phenomenon of being radicalized, and it is anyone’s guess what would have happened next had not Lyndon Johnson, the deus ex machina of the Pedernales, intervened to reprogram white activists by escalating the war in Vietnam from a tea dance to a Wagnerian opera.
Along with a lot of Vietnamese over there, LBJ managed to kill off civil disobedience here. (That on the face of it is not something which the National Review might wish to cheer, as the idea of civil disobedience entailed an acceptance of the legitimacy of the institutions which the civilly disobedient were seeking by their example to change.) Sacrificial arrest made sense only as long as the people getting arrested thought the system could eventually effect the redress of their grievances. By mid-decade, it had become apparent to most that there just wasn’t any give left in the old girl’s girdle. It was a twice-told story, seemingly new to America, of the failure of the orderly process giving rise to the disorderly.
Warren Hinckle died in 2016.
“It is not oversimplifying the history of this country to suggest that the system had really never been tested before the sixties.” I guess his ghost was unaware of the Civil War.