Sixties, The

Sixties, The. Stirring restlessly in American memory, the 1960s can still rouse bitter contention. Even a brief overview makes clear why.

Political and Cultural Overview.

Politically, the decade began with a presidential election in which Republican Richard M. Nixon narrowly lost to a glamorous, young Democratic senator, John F. Kennedy. The Kennedy administration saw several confrontations with the Soviet Union, including a showdown over Berlin and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy also started the Peace Corps, signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and proposed to put an astronaut on the moon—a goal fulfilled on 20 July 1969 when Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface.

Kennedy's presidency—and his life—ended on 22 November 1963, when he was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald. Shocking at the time, the assassination would spawn myriad conspiracy theories by those convinced that Oswald did not act alone. Quickly assuming the reins of power, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson pressured Congress to enact an ambitious domestic program. Adding urgency to Johnson's efforts was a quickening pace of civil rights protest in the South and in northern cities. The 1963 March on Washington represented a moment of interracial unity, but the black freedom struggle increasingly turned to African American leaders and grew more militant under such groups as the Student Non‐Violent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panthers. In 1965 and 1966, black neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Newark, and other cities exploded in riots and arson. The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1965 and the Voting Rights Act of 1966, strongly pushed by Johnson, represented one response to the protests.

Emulating his hero Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Johnson proposed a far‐reaching reform program dubbed the Great Society, addressing health, education, and environmental issues. The 1964 War on Poverty, launched with great fanfare, included jobs programs; the Head Start project for disadvantaged school children; and VISTA, a kind of domestic Peace Corps.

Challenged in 1964 by Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, a deeply conservative Republican, Johnson won a landslide victory, in part by running as a peace candidate in contrast to Goldwater's saber rattling. Soon after the election, ironically, Johnson himself led the nation into a full‐scale if undeclared war. America's military role in Vietnam had been increasing since the French withdrawal in 1954, and in 1965, citing the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Johnson vastly escalated the U.S. commitment. As U.S. troops and hardware poured into Vietnam, the casualty figures mounted and domestic unease intensified. The January 1968 Tet Offensive deepened the opposition. The Vietnam War further unsettled a nation already torn by racial conflict. While some Americans strongly supported the war, protests mounted, particularly on college campuses, where the New Left organization Students for a Democratic Society played a leading role.

The divisions were cultural and generational as well as political. A youthful counterculture expressed its alienation in more open sexuality; long hair, and cast‐off clothing; rock music, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan; and marijuana and other consciousness‐altering substances. At Woodstock, New York, in August 1969, 400,000 young people gathered for a three‐day music festival laced with political and cultural protest.

Meanwhile, the political climate was changing. Ronald Reagan, elected governor of California in 1966, denounced campus protests. Johnson, overwhelmed by protests and challenged within his own party, withdrew from the upcoming presidential race in March 1968. Vice President Hubert Humphrey won the nomination at a chaotic Democratic convention in Chicago marked by violent street clashes between police and antiwar protesters. Richard Nixon, staging a political comeback, won the Republican nomination and went on to defeat Humphrey. Alabama governor George C. Wallace, appealing to southern and working‐class whites angered by racial protest and campus unrest, garnered 13.5 percent of the vote. The grim year 1968 also saw two shocking assassinations. On 4 April, an assassin's bullet killed Martin Luther King Jr.; riots exploded in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. In June, Robert Kennedy, John Kennedy's brother and a presidential candidate in his own right, was shot and killed in Los Angeles.

While President Nixon curbed Johnson's domestic reforms, he and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger reoriented U.S. foreign policy with overtures to the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union. In Vietnam, Nixon pursued a policy of “Vietnamization,” slowly withdrawing American forces while continuing heavy bombing, including secret raids in neutral Cambodia. Domestic protest continued, culminating in May 1970 with the killing of four Kent State University students by Ohio National Guardsmen. As antiwar protests waned, new social movements arose, including environmentalism, consumer activism, anti–nuclear‐power demonstrations, and a revived women's rights movement. The conservative backlash continued as well, contributing to Nixon's reelection in 1972 and ultimately to Ronald Reagan's election as president in 1980.

Debating and Exploiting the Sixties.

But a mere recital of dates, events, and organizations hardly conveys the complex role of “the Sixties” in subsequent American political and historical discourse. Although a commonly used historical marker, there is little agreement about what it signifies or even what time period it covers. Although the obvious answer is the years between 1960 and 1970, different formulations of a “long Sixties” usually prevail. “The Sixties” often evokes the Vietnam War, the disintegration of a liberal political coalition; and revolutionary changes in legally protected rights, social practices, and cultural forms. When associated with such political and cultural upheavals, the sixties is typically cast as emerging before 1960. One history is quite specific: The sixties arrived on 15 June 1955, when antinuclear activists protested a civil‐defense drill. Similarly, Nixon's 1974 resignation or the final U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975 are often cited as end points for the era. In historical discourse, in short, “the Sixties” may not be the same as “the 1960s.”

Mass‐culture industries, particularly advertising, have played an important role in creating images of the sixties. By the mid–1960s, the advertising industry was heralding a “youth revolution” to sell products to baby‐boomers and those who hoped to remain in the words of a Dylan song, “forever young.” The Chrysler Corporation proclaimed the “Dodge Rebellion”; the countercultural musical Hair was a hit on Broadway. Motion‐picture directors such as Oliver Stone in JFK (1991) and other movies translated the sixties into a recognizable film genre. In mass culture, then, “the Sixties” has functioned as a kind of designer label for coffee‐table photo books, hit‐music packages, retro‐clothing styles, history courses, and television programs—all of which, inevitably, helped shape perceptions of the era.

Attributing meanings to the sixties and to movements associated with it, such as the “counterculture” or the “new conservatism,” generally involves qualitative and normative judgments. Oftentimes, this process becomes intertwined with evaluations of “the Fifties,” the era against which the sixties are often measured. Explicit or implicit comparisons between these two periods, for example, often helps to draw the line between them. Trust in government and passivity among college students are commonly said to mark the fifties, while a growing credibility gap between the state and the citizenry and campus unrest are seen as characteristic of the sixties. Accounts that judge the sixties harshly generally view the fifties much more leniently—and vice versa.

There is nothing preordained about using “the Sixties” as a historical label. The “Gay Nineties” has all but disappeared as a marker for the close of the nineteenth century, and even the “Jazz Age” label for the 1920s has faded. The persistence of “the Sixties” as a historical label depends on the power and saliency of familiar background stories. At least four background frameworks have helped to organize the multitude of historical and popular accounts that have shaped public perceptions of the period.

Interpreting the Sixties: The Declension and Transformation Models.

One common background narrative orders the sixties along a trajectory of bright promise followed by disillusionment and decline. Stories in this mold trace the downward course of political liberalism as the “promise” of John F. Kennedy's Camelot (and/or Lyndon Johnson's Great Society) faded away during, or because of, the sixties. The disintegration of Johnson's presidency looms large in this narrative framework, with the year 1968 a powerful symbolic date. Stories in this “from‐promise‐to‐decline” or “declension” mode often feature the evocative image of Richard Nixon entering the White House, trouncing George McGovern in 1972, or leaving the White House in post‐Watergate disgrace.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, after two decades of “postliberal” politics, accounts based on this paradigm proliferated. Many of these narratives recounted, with a mixture of approval and nostalgia, the liberal politics of the early sixties. The civil rights movement and organized labor received credit as forces for reform; Kennedy for demonstrating deft leadership during the Cuban Missile Crisis; and Johnson for skillfully managing the presidential transition after Kennedy's assassination. But eventually, in this paradigm, the sixties ended with, or even helped to bring about, the “unraveling,” “destruction,” or “coming apart” of liberalism.

Another group of stories in this declension framework examine the “radical” challenges to liberalism such as the New Left. These accounts begin with youthful insurgents who see liberalism, even as practiced by Kennedy and Johnson, as failing to address adequately such problems as inequality, racism, and militarism. Although often critical of the “excesses” of the radical activists, these histories portray them as helping to end racial segregation, to halt U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and to articulate a new political and social agenda for the United States. But the initial promise of radicalism, like that of liberalism, declines in these stories, and appears defunct by the symbolic year 1968.

In these narratives, many interrelated forces share the blame for the decline of both liberalism and radical insurgency, including the emergence of “divisive” political agendas based on racial and gender identities, a supposed infatuation with violence and Third World revolutionaries, and the media's ability to deflect attention from political issues to cultural spectacles featuring the antics of countercultural celebrities. The sixties end with squabbling interest groups that cannot compete effectively with a powerful conservative political movement.

The declension paradigm confronts its mirror opposite in a competing paradigm of “transformation.” Histories in this vein see the countercultural values, the resurgent feminism, and the various forms of identity politics that emerged during the late 1960s and early 1970s not as the spoilers of liberalism but as its legitimate heirs and as the seedbed for a renewal of public and private life. Adopting a “long Sixties” chronology, these stories extend into the late–1970s and even well beyond.

Accounts in this transformation framework refuse to concede the political impotency of insurgency and, by expanding the definition of “political,” credit the sixties (or movements associated with this label) for promoting lasting and positive changes. Even before the sixties ended, histories that adopt this framework argue, America's social and cultural landscape had been altered: Controls over personal lifestyle choices were eroding; racial and gender hierarchies were being challenged; political and economic institutions were becoming accessible to once‐excluded groups, especially women and nonwhite ethnics; new social institutions, such as neighborhood‐development organizations and public‐interest law firms were taking root; and cultural expression, while not as exuberant as in countercultural dreams, was far more vibrant and iconoclastic.

The Bifurcation Model.

A third framework for thinking about the sixties might be termed the “bifurcation” model. Recalling the sociologist Daniel Bell's claim that different “realms” of American life began moving in very different directions during the 1960s, the bifurcation framework combines stories of both decline and transformation within a single narrative. According to this interpretation, which became increasingly popular during the 1980s and 1990s, politics began to move rightward while cultural and social life, particularly on college campuses, tracked leftward during the sixties.

Studies recounting their authors’ personal renunciation of a youthful flirtation with political or cultural insurgency often employed the bifurcation framework. Rejecting any claim that the liberals or radicals of the sixties made the United States a better place, conservative stories employing the bifurcation framework highlight many of the same social‐cultural changes for which the transformation framework credits the radicals, but from a sharply critical perspective. In this paradigm, the sixties becomes a time of frenzied opposition, simply for the sake of opposition, to worthwhile values: sobriety, hard work, patriotism, and toleration for difference. The insurgents claimed to be opening up political and cultural life, advocates of this interpretation allege, but their programs, such as affirmative action, “Balkanized” American life and encouraged, in the phrase of conservative critic Allan Bloom, “the closing of the American mind.”

Although late twentieth‐century conservatives such as Robert Bork and William Bennett employed this framework to vilify the Bill Clinton presidency, it was not advanced exclusively by the political right or cultural conservatives. A neopopulist variant, for example, praised the sixties for reinvigorating grass‐roots politics but then chastised it for fracturing the old liberal political coalition without offering any coherent alternative, spreading an avant‐garde cultural style that denigrated the tastes of ordinary people, and allowing conservatives such as Nixon and Reagan to seize the mantle of “traditional values” to advance their political agendas.

The All‐Inclusive Model.

Finally, by the end of the twentieth century, what might be called the “Big‐Sixties” interpretive framework was clearly evident. This expansive framework allowed nearly everyone to identify a part of the sixties as his or her own. Challenges to the familiar story of the Vietnam War illustrate the all‐inclusive Big‐Sixties framework. Histories of the war at home written from this perspective, for instance, find more than a binary struggle between interventionist “hawks” and antiwar “doves.” Rather, they find doubts about the war scattered throughout the population, including among the nonwhite, ethnic, and blue‐collar families whose sons were more likely to be sent into combat than were those from more affluent families who could gain student deferments or stateside positions in the National Guard. Diverse new narratives told of the young men who fought—willingly or reluctantly—in Southeast Asia or who to avoid fighting in the war simply left the United States, and about the variety of ways the war affected the lives of women. With significant immigration from Southeast Asia beginning in the late 1970s, the stories of Asian American families have been added to the Big‐Sixties framework in describing “our” involvement in a conflict that was hardly limited to Vietnam.

One can argue that the collection and interpretation of an ever‐greater number of primary sources from an ever‐expanding number of perspectives should generate “better” historical accounts. Indeed, stories based on the Big‐Sixties frame often did expand familiar stories into more complete accounts. Political narratives in the declension mode told from this more nuanced perspective, for instance, debated more precisely when and how liberal politics collapsed. Was it in 1968, when 57 percent of the electorate voted for either Richard Nixon or George Wallace? Or did liberalism remain viable, opposing Nixon's foreign policies and preserving federal spending for social programs, well into the 1970s? Did it disintegrate because of its own limitations, especially on social‐economic issues, or its excesses? Or did it fall victim to the machinations of cagy conservatives such as Nixon and Reagan?

In another sense, however, the Big‐Sixties framework, by launching a multitude of representations and by segmenting familiar stories into smaller and smaller episodes, threatened the very status of “the Sixties” as a meaningful signifier. The sheer volume of disparate accounts can undermine any coherent meaning to the term. After the 1989 collapse of the SovietUnion, for example, foreign‐policy issues associated with the sixties label, particularly those involving the Vietnam War, though dealing with events that were certainly traumatic for anyone touched by them, increasingly appeared to mark no exceptional juncture in the course of post–World War II. U.S. foreign relations.

Other familiar topics such as the civil rights movement, which had long helped to define the sixties as a unique and coherent period, also began to seem constrained by the sixties label. Many late twentieth‐century accounts represented the movement as a long‐term, multifronted battle against discrimination and inequality that included many different, not always compatible, impulses shaped by social class, gender, religion, region, and ethnicity. Microhistories of the 1940s and early 1950s argued that the intense ethnic‐racial ferment associated with the sixties, including struggles to end residential segregation and to maintain the liberal political coalition, actually emerged much earlier. Even the story of the transition from civil rights to Black Power increasingly splintered into a multitude of microaccounts involving a diversity of goals, tactics, and leadership styles.

The use of any historical label, in sum, is not a self‐evident proposition. The meaning of the sixties has been fashioned—and continues to be refashioned—through a wide variety of background narratives.
See also African Americans; Antinuclear Protest Movements; Antiwar Movements; Black Nationalism; Civil Rights Legislation; Cold War; Drugs, Illicit; Historiography, American; Kent State and Jackson State; Labor Movements; Music: Popular Music; Popular Culture; Postmodernism; Race and Ethnicity; Riots, Urban; Sexual Morality and Sex Reform; Space Program.

Bibliography

Alice Echols , Dare to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–75, 1990.
Todd Gitlin , The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, rev. ed., 1993.
David Farber, ed., The Sixties: From Memory to History, 1994.
Alexander Bloom and and Wini Breines , Takin’ It to the Streets: A Sixties Reader, 1995.
Alan Nadel , Containment Culture: American Narrative, Postmodernism, and the Nuclear Age, 1995.
Peter Collier et al. , Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties, 1996.
Gerald Horne , The Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s, 1997.
Robert D. Schulzinger , A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941–1975, 1997.
Arthur Marwick , The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958–c. 1974, 1998.
Maurice Isserman and and Michael Kazin , America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, 1999.
Howard Brick , Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s, 2000.

Norman L. Rosenberg