***WHEN TO BE YOUNG WAS VERY HEAVEN -THE SIXTIES: YEARS OF HOPE-DAYS OF RAGE

 

BOOK REVIEW

THE SIXTIES: YEARS OF HOPE-DAYS OF RAGE, TODD GITLIN, BANTAM BOOKS, NEW YORK, 1987

Over the last several month this writer has alluded several times to the 1960’s movements for social change –the defense of the Cuban Revolution, the fight for nuclear disarmament, the centrally important black civil rights fight, the struggle against the Vietnam War and the emerging struggles for women’s and gay rights. And ultimately, for a few (too few) of us, the necessary struggle to change the social organization of American society-the fight for socialism. In short, all the signposts for that part of a political generation, my generation, which in shorthand I will call the Generation of ’68. Let us be clear, nostalgia and the ravages of time on the memory on the part of this writer aside, this was a short but intense period that he believes requires serious study. Militant leftists today face many, if not all, of the social problems that confronted the generation of ’68. Thus, reading the book under review  written by a literate participant in many of those struggles, although then as today a political opponent of mine, can help today’s militant leftists learn the lessons of that experience.

While it is entirely possible for today’s militant leftist youth to start fresh and ignore what for all of them is at best a mythical experience- that would be short-sighted.  I agree, due to the lack of a critical mass of militant leftists who could have assimilated and transmitted those experiences, that a militant movement today could get along without knowing anything about the 1960’s. However, at some point the issues, the conflicts, the struggle for a victorious strategy to fight the monster (otherwise known as American imperialism) will be replayed. Believe me it is never fruitless to learn something from the past.          

Professor Gitlin has written in the currently reviewed volume what is probably the definitive general survey of the central events that roiled American (and eventually, much of Western society) in the 1960’s. That said, we are not talking about the working class 1960’s, we are not talking about the 1960’s of the mainly middle class parents of the generation of ’68. We are most definitely not talking about the Vietnamese people’s 1960’s. In fact we are not talking about an experience that most of the people during that period experienced except as media events or at the margins. What we are talking about is the youth explosions of the 1960’s, their repercussions, effects and legacies. This is the area of Professor Gitlin’s intimate personal experience and therefore is a good place to start. 

In the usual case this writer spends his book reviewing time describing and analyzing events that occurred before his time. Things like the American, French and Russian Revolutions.  It is therefore with certain amount of pleasant, if not nostalgia, that he can review a book that deals with events that made up not only the author’s but my youth. All the signposts of my youth are described and analyzed there from the ‘beats’ through Cuba to the civil rights movement and eventually through the struggle against the Vietnam War. That said, the author and this reviewer have very different interpretations of the meaning of the events at the time and the inevitable lessons to be drawn from then. 

Professor Gitlin takes us through the necessary influences which formed the basis for the 1960’s revolt. It is always problematic whether the general cultural climate or particular prior events had much influence on what followed later. It is easier to see both influences in hindsight and to over-analyze their importance. Nevertheless he takes us through the trials and tribulations of the ‘beats’, the rise and mainstream commercialization of the original rock and roll movement and the initial youth culture rebellion through such figures as James Dean, Marlon Brando, the work of Tennessee’s Williams and other cultural figures. It strikes me that such figures rather than, let us say, Che Guevara, acted as a catalyst to more away from the mainstream society and not change it. The rise of the counterculture movement bears witness to that effect. It is easy enough to challenge the orthodoxy of the 1950’s it is another to have seen a way out. None of these phenomena pretended to or sought to do so.

Professor Gitlin gets closer to the core of the influences upon the sixties generation when he discusses the Kennedy Administration, particularly after the Bay of Pigs fiascos. Two issues galvanized youth- the struggle against nuclear war and the struggle for black civil rights. The pretensions of the Kennedy administration to form a liberal society  were the legitimate and logical target for the increasing numbers of young who wanted to take the Kennedys at their word- the need to rollup your sleeves and change society. However, the Kennedys did not expect that change to start with them as the targets. The early movement started with that love/hate relationship with the liberals-it never really got resolved (and still hasn’t today).  

The central organizational expression of the student/youth rebellion and the key to Professor Gitlin’s political perspective then, especially on the campuses, was Students for Democratic Society (SDS). Professor Gitlin was an early president of that organization and therefore can and generally does present the political and organizational ups and downs of SDS accurately and with a certain amount of insight. A couple of caveats though- he is very wedded to the notion that early SDS and its ‘old politicos’ network was something of Golden Age  tarnished by the later craziness of Progressive Labor and Weatherman interventions that brought about the demise of the organization in 1969. In short, he takes a fundamentally social democratic side on the reformist vs. revolutionary question. Professor Gitlin also suffers from a belief that the student movement by itself could have then led the fight for social change as some kind of ‘new class’ to lead a new society. If nothing else the history of the last forty years of campus life has cruelly placed that theory in the shade. Nevertheless read this book and learn why we would both agree that in the 1960’s ‘to be young was very heaven’.