Looking Back at 'My' '60s

...In the most important example, the radical demonstrations of May 1968 in Paris were immediately followed by the massive pro-government demonstration of May 30 and the Gaullist triumph in the June elections...

...For the time being, the cultural revolution of the '60s has won...

...Martin Luther King Jr...

...Even at the High Noon of the '60s, a palpable lack of popular support undermined the revolutionary Left...

...So I approached Arthur Marwick's The Sixties (Oxford, 903 pp., $39.95)—a study of popular culture and revolutionary politics in the United States, Britain, France, and Italy—with distinctly mixed feelings: Such books not only remind me of my age but also summon up an era I now see very differently...

...Since Marwick concerns himself almost exclusively with the protesters, the dialogue that destroyed the legal structures of Jim Crow takes place offstage...

...But another part of it flourished beyond the control of the majority...

...One such was John Trevelyan...

...The political background in France and Italy is presented in more detail, but on the whole the author is preoccupied with the radical and the novel...

...His approach makes more sense than Marwick's: The political aspirations of the '60s were inspired by World War II, and the "economic miracle" of 1947-60 in France and Italy (as well as relatively less important yet still impressive gains in the United States and Britain) were responsible for the following decade's prosperity...

...In the West, the exercise of political freedoms always made it clear that the revolutionary Left was a small, isolated minority...

...Yet when Clinton's personal conduct, almost universally regarded as egregious in itself, became an issue, what would otherwise have been an off-year loss of 30 to 40 Democratic seats in the House of Representatives became a gain of five seats...

...Hobsbawm himself does not treat the '60s as a unit, including them instead in what he calls the "Golden Age" (1945-73...

...Marwick tells only half of the story...

...During the early 1970s, for instance, an academic psychologist published a paper about a boy whose penis had been accidentally severed in a surgical circumcision...

...POLITICS in Marwick's four countries actually changed relatively little in the '60s...

...Herbert Marcuse held that the students, not the workers, were the revolutionary class...

...the boundaries are not based on the calendar...

...This widely influential study reported that the boy had been successfully raised as a girl...

...abortion and divorce are legal because a majority of the people, even in Catholic Italy, want them to be...

...and the Freedom Riders (not, as Marwick has it in one of his many mistakes, the "Freedom Fighters") could never have accomplished this themselves...

...Now, at last, I was a real revolutionary...

...The system, of course, was far more defensible in the Western countries...

...He is only partly right...

...That omission is all the stranger in view of the author's repeated praise for what he describes as "measured judgment"— the standpoint of "men and women of traditional enlightened and rational outlook," many of them in positions of power and influence, "who responded flexibly and tolerantly to countercultural demands...

...Certain cultural issues—those involving such legal questions as abortion and divorce—are subject to the popular will...

...In the months after my release the next morning, my lawyers kept postponing the trial...

...The author, a British social historian, sidesteps the question by focusing on a "long '60s" (1958-73) that is modeled on historian Eric Hobsbawm's "short 20th century" (in The Age of Extremes, 1914-1991...

...In addition, the cultural revolution involved behavior that was increasingly difficult for the majority to control: Minorities like feminists, gay people and New Agers could go their own way without waiting for others to join them...

...The truth, though it took a full generation to become public, is that he was miserable and insisted in adolescence on having an operation to restore his external male genitalia...

...In Britain and Italy, as Marwick observes, the challenge to authority peaked in the 1970s, which Italians call the "years of the bullet...

...The political crusades of the decade did not have majority support, while in many areas the cultural revolution did...

...As the author contends, these were conceded, largely within his period, because public opinion changed massively...

...Consider the single great political achievement of the '60s in the United States—the dismantling of racial segregation in public places and public institutions...

...Democracy, as Tocqueville predicted long ago, also proved to be deeply conservative, giving the status quo a strength it could never have in an undemocratic country...

...For several years, and more particularly since January 1998, conservatives have subsumed these emotions into the hatred they feel for Bill Clinton, the symbol of '60s excess...

...As for the Kennedy Administration, it preferred to forget about racial discrimination and would never have proposed anything like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 if not for the activists' prodding...

...Yet of his four countries, all except France under Charles de Gaulle were ruled for most of the 1960s by CenterLeft governments that were no less characteristic of the period than the radicalism we usually associate with it...

...Their anger has put abortion and gay rights at the forefront of American politics...

...Chairman Mao asserted that rural societies and not, as Marx had thought, the advanced industrial nations, would lead the world to socialism...

...But unlike the Communist regimes of later years, the democratic capitalist governments of the '60s and early '70s beat back the threat to their power...

...they often had difficulty simply getting local black communities to participate in their activities...

...Marwick, on the contrary, feels that "decline, disillusionment, unrestrained excess" are peripheral...

...Since I didn't, I soon received a summons to present myself forthwith before a certain judge...

...So could a group the author stresses: businessmen catering to the many minority markets that emerged at the time...

...Marwick, a classical English eccentric Leftist hostile to theories of any kind, wastes words attacking the "Marxism" of the thinkers who inspired some of these revolutionists...

...By the late '60s a second wave of radicalism, bent on overturning rather than influencing governments, had emerged in the United States and France...

...Eager, as he announced in his remarks, to punish a professed enemy of society, he convicted me and fined me $ 100.1 therefore have the curious distinction of being the only person found guilty of anything in connection with the 1968 events on Momingside Heights...

...But if the French theory of sexual identity was erroneous, it surely represented an individualistic, not a Marxist, current of thought...

...Some 800 students were arrested that spring...

...Why the difference...

...The central story is of the freedoms won, the movements, the innovations, and the ideas of the '60s...

...Far from accepting hoary Marxist formulas making the "superstructure" (culture in the larger sense, including personal behavior) subordinate to the "material base," many characteristic thinkers of the '60s, particularly in France, taught that personal behavior, above all sexual identities, are "socially determined...

...In the extremes to which the latter idea was pushed, it was simply false...

...Social conservatives rage against the majority that has deserted them on issues like abortion and, still more, against those who live beyond the majority's control...

...Marwick suggests simply that most of the decade's political agenda had the support only of "ultimately frustrated revolutionary minorities," while "the full significance of the '60s lies not in the activities of minorities but in what happened to the majority, and how it happened...

...The groups that successfully challenged Communism in the late '80s may have represented only tiny minorities, but in the absence of democratic institutions no one really knew...

...Nonetheless, this was not the only reason for its survival...

...By the time a firm date was finally set, I had completely stopped paying attention to the matter, and failed to appear...

...The author largely ignores the general politics of Britain and the U.S., so that we learn very little about, for instance, the impact of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations...

...For me, 'cultural revolution' is a convenient shorthand term to describe that entire process...

...It was the end of this period of growth, marked by the 1973 oil crisis, that terminated both Hobsbawm's Golden Age and Marwick's '60s...

...And of course, the usual problems of periodization suggest that the whole idea of a decade as something worthy of analysis may be an illusion arising from a numbering system based upon 10...

...the British bureaucrat who oversaw the dismantling of his country's system of film censorship...

...Culture, especially on the level of individual behavior, changed a great deal...

...All those who showed up when they were supposed to had their cases dismissed...

...In reality, the characteristic ideas of the decade might be described as anti-Marxist...

...Although less hostile to the decade's memory than Rightwing authors like Peter Collier and David Horowitz (in Destructive Generation), Hobsbawm also blames the militancy of the late '60s and early '70s for the reaction under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan...

...The part of culture that is effectively subject to majority control in the four societies is important but not all-inclusive...

...One warm evening that May I was arrested at a demonstration, taken to the famous prison known as the Tombs, and charged with disorderly conduct...

...But Marwick gives consistently short shrift to mainstream politics, so it is never clear how such people ascended to these positions...

...The emergence of these new rights went hand in hand with important changes in the behavior of huge numbers of people, above all the weakening of the institution of lifelong marriage, which Marwick rightly calls the decade's single most important development...