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For a decade that accomplished so little, the 1960s attract considerable attention, most recently from the six-hour PBS series that aired last week.
In politics, the major effect of the 1960s was to launch Ronald Reagan's political career. Eminently popular, Reagan ran illegal wars, presided over widespread corruption, rebuilt the military-industrial complex, and launched the greatest transfer in history of wealth from wage-earners to capitalists -- the T-bill holders who get a chunk of your paycheck every week.
The other political effects of the '60s were just as opposite to the activists' goals. Again there are 400,000 American soldiers on the other side of the world. Despite all that civil rights work, the leading destinations for young black men are jail and cemeteries. Taking the mentally ill out of institutions just put them on cruel streets, with no support. And of course, there is the War on Drugs.
One could argue that at least the '60s changed American culture, but it would be a foolish argument.
Clothing? My dad always wore T-shirts and blue jeans to work, and so do I. If you have the misfortune to toil in a corporate office, the modern Power Outfit can't be much of an improvement on the traditional Gray Flannel Suit.
Personal appearance? William Henry Quillen, my Populist great-grandfather, boasted more beard and hair than I ever will. Back-to-the-land movement? My maternal grandfather, Byron Wollen, homesteaded in the middle of Wyoming in 1919, and until his death in 1965, he lived 17 miles from the hamlet of Bill without running water, electricity or a telephone.
Anti-war protests? There were huge draft riots in New York during the Civil War, and people went to jail for opposing the Mexican War. General activism and domestic violence? What of 40 years of labor wars in our mining camps, the Wall Street explosion in 1920, Coxey's Army, the Bonus Expeditionary Force, the agrarian revolt a century ago? Rural communes -- what of Brook Farm and the Union Colony experiment?
The more you look, the more it appears that '60s were actually a fairly normal American decade. It was the '50s that were weird.
That was the only time in history when most Americans
apparently believed that the entire world wanted to live in
sanitized income-scale suburbs, that if you showed up for
work every day then the company would take good care of
you, that any dissenter was a Russian agent, that there was
one right way for everyone to live, and you could learn it
just by watching Ozzie and Harriet.
Otherwise, America was always a nation teeming with agitators, drug abusers, malcontents, organizers, protesters, troublemakers, suffragettes, do-gooders, free-love advocates, rabble rousers, communards, socialists, pacifists, draft dodgers, crackpots, greenbackers, single taxers, anarchists, prohibitionists, libertarians, moralizers and reformers.
That has been gloriously true throughout the American experiment, except during one decade, the 1950s. There's the aberrant decade, and that's the one the historians should scrutinize instead of wasting more time on the counterproductive counterculture of the '60s.
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