SLSL Intro "The Way of Communication"

[Dave Monroe]

"It was not a case of either/or, but an expansion of
possibilities.  I don't think we were consciously
groping after any synthesis, although perhaps we
should have been.  The success of the 'new left' later
in the '60's was to be limited by the failure of
college kids and blue-collar workers to get together
politically.  One reason was the presence of real,
invisible class force fields in the way of
communication between the two groups." (SL, "Intro,"
p. 7)

>From Rick Perlstein, "Who Owns The Sixties?  The
Opening of a Scholarly Generation Gap," Lingua Franca,
Vol. 6, No. 4 (May/June 1996) ...

ON AUGUST 13, 1994, some quarter- million pilgrims
journeyed to upstate New York to experience Woodstock
II. They were searching for the spirit of the Sixties.
What they found was a messy debate over whether that
staggeringly commercialized event was a proper tribute
to the decade, or its proper burial. 

For many Sixties faithful, the commemoration was
plainly a sacrilege ....

[...]

.. Isserman and Sugrue are both historians of the
Sixties, and they are contending over the
interpretation of a decade that remains among the most
powerful historical reference points in American
politics. That grand theme of the 1960s -- the
generation gap -- has come to Sixties scholarship, and
it has come to stay. 

FEW HISTORIANS ARE MORE aware of this gap, or have
done more to widen it, than David Farber, who, at
thirty-nine, is the elder statesman of the
post-Sixties Sixties interpreters....  

.. "I think the Sixties generation of activists saw
themselves as acting in history. 'The Whole World Is
Watching' -- they were literally chanting it in the
streets. And that's the irony that's heated up this
debate so much. Because in the end, well, maybe they
weren't the historical agents of change quite as much
as they hoped."

[...] 

For Farber, this irony has powerful consequences for
his generation of scholars. The task of writing about
the Sixties ... "has been complicated...by
generational politics within the academy, as older
scholars who participated in the Sixties defend
interpretations that stem from their own experiences."

[...] 

Not surprisingly, many of the tenured radicals beg to
differ....

[...]

Whatever the merit of Farber's charges, there's little
doubt that younger scholars are challenging "myths of
the Sixties" from any number of -- often contradictory
-- angles. Some argue that the New Left was far
broader-based than previously supposed. Others suggest
that its base, and its impact, was extremely narrow.
Still others believe that the real story of the
Sixties was the rise of a grassroots,
antiestablishment movement called...the New Right. 

[...]

By the early Seventies ... a consensus about the
decade had begun to form in the scholarly literature:
A salutary upsurge of democratic promise at the
beginning of the Sixties was subverted by the dark
seeds contained within it. That unsparing thesis was
codified most influentially by Rice historian Allen J.
Matusow in his magisterial 1983 work, The Unraveling
of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s
(HarperPerennial). Matusow laid the decline of
America's grand liberal tradition at the feet of
student radicalism's excesses; and he exerted a quiet
influence on the writing of movement veterans such as
Todd Gitlin, James Miller, and Maurice Isserman....

[...]

.. as the Vietnam War escalated, the line between
activist and Aquarian began to blur--to the detriment
of each.... When it was all over, the Sixties left
behind as its bittersweet legacy an America both more
free and more divided than ever before. 

[...]

Rossinow's revisionist efforts are complemented by
those of Ken Heineman, author of Campus Wars: The
Peace Movement at American State Universities in the
Vietnam Era (NYU, 1995). Heineman, who comes from a
blue-collar family and calls himself a "reluctant
Republican," finds working-class folk conspicuously
absent from the existing historiography (excepting the
figure of Joe Sixpack, the Movement's archetypal
proletarian spoiler). Yet kids from blue-collar
backgrounds formed a large portion of the antiwar
activists at the nonelite schools he studied .... 

[...] 

.. another pointed question: Did Sixties radicalism
really implode at the end of the decade? Or might it,
in fact, have expanded its reach in the Seventies?
According to the declension narrative, Kent State and
other end-of-the-decade disasters sounded the death
knell for a broad-based popular movement to change
American society ....  In a 1994 article in American
Quarterly, Doug Rossinow challenges this downbeat
assessment: "It is difficult to see how one can view
the post-1968 Left as a complete disaster unless one
is unsympathetic or unaware of the women's liberation
movement, which first emerged in 1967-1968." ....

This argument about the broader, less visible
influence of Sixties radicalism was made most
pointedly by Sarah Evans in her 1979 book, Personal
Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil
Rights Movement & the New Left (Vintage). Alice
Echols, the author of Daring to Be Bad: Radical
Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (Minnesota, 1989),
concurs ....

ALICE ECHOLS'S GUARDED OPTIMISM about the Sixties
legacy is shared by many former activists. But what
veteran would applaud the message of another camp of
scholars, led by U. Penn's Thomas Sugrue, who argue
that the Promethean adventures of the New Left and the
counterculture aren't all that relevant to
understanding the Sixties in the first place? "There's
more to the Sixties than social movements," says
Sugrue, "a lot more....  if you think about the
long-term consequences of those groups in building
political
organizations, their power isn't as great as it
appears.... 

"Sixties historiography is still so limited," he adds,
"and Sixties veterans still have the corner on the
market." ....  "My argument" -- supported by his
research on housing riots in Detroit since the Forties
-- "is that white working-class and middle-class
members of the Democratic coalition were always very
tenuously allied to the liberal tradition." 

One of the most powerful insights of new Sixties
scholarship, then, may be that Reagan Democrats were a
long time in the making....  This is the story told by
Mary Brennan ... in her book Turning Right in the
Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP (North
Carolina, 1995), one of many new projects that takes
chronicling the rise of the new conservatism as a
central task of Sixties history. Attention to social
movements on the left, says Brennan, misses a
scorching irony of the decade: The real masters of
grassroots organizing were on the right.... 

Brennan could, of course, have written pretty much the
same thing about SDS and the Democrats. That irony has
not been lost on sociologists of political
movements....

Maybe M. Stanton Evans's quixotic prediction that the
Sixties would be the decade of student conservatism
wasn't so quixotic after all. Cadres of Young
Americans for Freedom activists ... formed the shock
troops for the right-wing capture of the GOP (and
later the nation)....

THE MYTHOLOGIZATION OF the Sixties: that, according to
David Farber, is exactly what is still wrong with
Sixties scholarship today. Is his charge fair?
Certainly many of the Sixties insiders have written
books that are fragrant with self-criticism. But are
other New Leftists manning the barricades again, this
time to fight a rearguard battle against revisionism? 

[...]

Whatever difficulties are posed by studying the
counterculture, the subject looms larger in current
scholarship than it once did. And much of the new work
is dedicated to demystification....  From the
perspective of the Woodstock II generation, the
Sixties counterculture doesn't look that radical at
all. Tom Frank, editor of the cultural criticism
journal The Baffler and a University of Chicago Ph.D.,
makes the now-familiar point that the Sixties' rebel
mystique was better suited to retailing than to
revolution.... 

[...]

ONE MIGHT ASK, then: Is a Sixties bell-bottom merely a
Fifties tail fin rendered in cloth? It's a question
that's bound to rankle Sixties veterans, of both the
reconstructed and unreconstructed varieties. After
all, was there ever a society more self-conscious
about its own historical identity, its role as an
agent of history, than America in the Sixties? In
January 1960, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in ....

At their boldest, the Sixties revisionists say
farewell to this brand of Sixties exceptionalism. They
argue that, pace Schlesinger and that Berkeley DJ, the
Sixties may not have been all that special in the
first place; that "the Sixties" can't survive
distanced scholarly treatment of the Sixties. SDS, for
all its searing drama, was not something new in the
world -- but just another religiously inflected reform
movement like the teetotalers. Liberalism began its
decline not in the Sixties but in the Forties. The
counterculture was not a blot on the American creed
but its apotheosis. 

[...]

Different generations, perhaps; but ask Todd Gitlin,
and he'll tell you that the more things change, the
more they stay the same. Those who would normalize the
Sixties may declare themselves impervious to the
decade's blandishments. But this, says Gitlin, "sounds
to me like an example of a parricidal impulse." 

"It's reminiscent," he hastens to add, in the most
piquant possible rebuttal to the Sixties revisionists'
pretensions, "of one of the least attractive features
of Sixties thinking." 

http://www.linguafranca.com/9605/sixties.html

Archived at ...

http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/sixties-l/1818.html

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