Who owns the 60s

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, and it fell to Maurice Isserman, a historian at Hamilton College, to explain why the original Woodstock was superior. Another historian, however, begged to differ.

Isserman, now forty-nine, had been a reveler at Max Yasgur's farm and a member of Students for a Democratic Society. Sugrue, who is thirty-three, says his most powerful Sixties memory is of watching National Guard tanks roll down the riot-torn streets of his Detroit neighborhood; he was five years old at the time. 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of the Sixties, and they are contending over the interpretation of a decade that remains among the most powerful historical reference points in American politics.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 s -- the generation gap -- has come to Sixties scholarship, and it has come to stay.

His first book, Chicago '68 Chicago, , presented that year's tempestuous Democratic National Convention from three different sympathetically presented perspectives: the protesters who came to Chicago to disrupt the convention, the cops who beat them, and the Daley administration officials who presided over the whole mess. When Farber's book was published, a review in the Village Voice by baby-boomer novelist Carol Anshaw brooked no such revisionism.

Next to sidebars of dewy Sixties reminiscences by Voice staffers "I was plotting the overthrow of my high school," began one , Anshaw argued that "perhaps [Farber] wasn't the person to write this book. At the Barnard cafeteria, Farber recalls snatches of this seven-year-old review verbatim: "She said that the book was 'dangerous' for 'giving the establishment its due.

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, Farber argued in a polemic in The Chronicle of Higher Education, "has been complicated Not surprisingly, many of the tenured radicals beg to differ.

But he finds Farber's assault on his elders in the Chronicle to be "reeking of resentment," and rooted in a mythologization of its own: "It's conventional for young people today," says Gitlin, "to say that the Sixties people, whoever they were, had all the fun, and none of the AIDS, and were cushioned by endless prosperity. 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 In , the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills boasted in his "Letter to the New Left" that, after decades of left-wing doldrums, radicalized students were finally turning the political tide against an entrenched liberalism.

A book published the same year by M. Stanton Evans concurred, sort of. In Revolt on Campus, Evans argued that students' frustrations "with the conformity of liberalism" promised that the Sixties would be the decade of student conservatism. By the early Seventies, though, 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 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. All three books related the story of the Sixties in terms of the inspiring rise and tragic fall of the student protest movement.

They were sympathetic to student radicalism but sober-minded about its consequences. And, with their rich detail and acute analyses, they set a standard for the writing of Sixties history that has yet to be equaled.

The insider accounts of the Sixties kept on coming; more than a score appeared in alone. And, for the most part, they followed the Gitlin-Miller-Isserman narrative arc, which has become known among historians as the "declension hypothesis. At the beginning of the Sixties, students went south to fight for civil rights with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and came back to elite universities with the audacious goal of changing the world.

They created new kinds of political organizations, foremost among them SDS, which were driven by a vague ideal called "participatory democracy. Meanwhile, in a haze of marijuana smoke, the counterculture tested the limits of personal freedom.

At first, the hippies maintained an arm's-length relationship with the politicos. But as the Vietnam War escalated, the line between activist and Aquarian began to blur -- to the detriment of each.

Writers sympathetic to the counterculture believe it self-destructed under the pressures of politicization; New Leftists see their movement folding under a crush of countercultural hedonism. Both agree that the Movement ended five years before the Vietnam War did, in a blaze of numbskull adventurism and Maoist masquerade.

Take the case of SDS. In the accounting of Gitlin, Isserman, and Miller, the radicals who built Students for a Democratic Society were, like their historians, secular, well-off denizens of elite universities like Harvard and Michigan, often Jewish, and typically refugees from either suburban ticky-tacky torpor or Old Communist Left families.

Doug Rossinow, a Johns Hopkins Ph. Rossinow is twenty-nine, and his attraction to his subject has little to do with any residual memories: "I never heard about SDS until I was in college. I got interested in this topic because I came across some reference to it in books, and there didn't seem to be a lot of scholarship.

When Rossinow set out to study the New Left, he chose to use a methodology born of the Sixties: he would write political history from the bottom up, from the experience of the rank and file rather than the leadership.

With this point in mind, Rossinow presents the antiwar movement as one in a long line of Protestant reform movements stretching back to the American Revolution. 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.

And Kent State. Heineman challenges the conventional wisdom on the Ohio National Guard's massacre there. Conventionally, it was Kent State that brought the Sixties to the blue-collar belt. The university, remarks Todd Gitlin in The Sixties, "was a heartland school, far from elite, the very type of campus where Richard Nixon's 'silent majority' was supposed to be training.

The only problem with this interpretation, Heineman points out, is that Kent State was the movement's vanguard. Kent Staters protested for the right to organize on campus a full year before the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley supposedly gave birth to white student activism. The Ohio school's first antiwar group was founded a year ahead of Berkeley's.

Kent State also raises 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 after the shootings, wrote James Miller, "the New Left collapsed, plummeting into cultural oblivion as if it had been some kind of political Hula-Hoop".

In a article in American Quarterly, Doug Rossinow challenges this downbeat assessment: "It is difficult to see how one can view the post Left as a complete disaster unless one is unsympathetic or unaware of the women's liberation movement, which first emerged in Most palpably, it changed in its gender arrangements -- a shift in which the New Left and the counterculture played an important but limited role.

And the New Left pretty much does go up in flames. Even so, I think the only way that women could have their own movements, and black people and gay people" -- whose struggles likewise produced real changes in the structure of American society -- "was, unfortunately, outside the larger movement. 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? They had very small memberships. But these laws did not solve the problems facing African Americans: They did not eliminate racism or poverty and they did not improve the conditions in many black urban neighborhoods.

Many black leaders began to rethink their goals, and some embraced a more militant ideology of separatism and self-defense. Just as black power became the new focus of the civil rights movement in the mids, other groups were growing similarly impatient with incremental reforms. Student activists grew more radical. They took over college campuses, organized massive antiwar demonstrations and occupied parks and other public places.

Some even made bombs and set campus buildings on fire. At the same time, young women who had read The Feminine Mystique celebrated the passage of the Equal Pay Act and joined the moderate National Organization for Women were also increasingly annoyed with the slow progress of reform.

They too became more militant. The counterculture also seemed to grow more outlandish as the decade wore on. That year, the brutal North Vietnamese Tet Offensive convinced many people that the Vietnam War would be impossible to win.

The Democratic Party split, and at the end of March, Johnson went on television to announce that he was ending his reelection campaign. Richard Nixon, chief spokesman for the silent majority, won the election that fall. Martin Luther King Jr. Police used tear gas and billy clubs to break up protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. And the urban riots that had erupted across the country every summer since continued and intensified. In the summer of , more than , young people trooped to the Woodstock music festival in upstate New York, a harmonious three days that seemed to represent the best of the peace-and-love generation.

By the end of the decade, however, community and consensus lay in tatters. Start your free trial today. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!

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