1960s' Revolt
Matusow, Allen J.
BOOKS 1960s' Revolt THE UNRAVELING OF AMERICA by Allen J. Matusow Harper & Row. 542 pp. $22.95. For those of us drifting rapidly into middle age, the decade of the 1960s has become a nostalgic...
...As Matusow notes, most people have forgotten that President Kennedy appointed the racist judges in the South whom his civil rights cohorts were later to denounce...
...Matusow is at his best when he seeks to explain the great fears of Americans in the 1960s...
...But sex, drugs, and rock and roll constituted a poor basis for generating a national reform movement...
...Why did things turn out the way they did...
...Nor were Johnson and the liberal establishment in Washington prepared for the backlash against civil rights that had developed in America by 1968...
...Governor George Wallace, the bantam gamecock of segregation, won more than 13 per cent of the popular vote in the Presidential election that year...
...He peels back the cover on that decade and makes us take a close and sometimes disquieting look...
...Those of us who worked in the South in those days remember the segregated toilets and water fountains, the racist jeers, and the violence against the Freedom Riders...
...The black revolt in the South confronted both Kennedy and Johnson with new expectations and challenges, and neither man could resist, either politically or morally, the civil rights surge that put an end to segregation in the South...
...the care and feeding of the American corporate order took priority when the going got rough...
...Like characters in the movie The Big Chill, we ask, "What happened...
...Despite their liberal intentions, many Americans were Tory conservatives at heart...
...To Carmichael, Black Power was the only way of raising issues of vital concern to the Afro-American community...
...The howling groupies of the 1960s generation shut up as soon as the stern winds of economic recession began to blow...
...Unfortunately, his best intentions for redirecting American society were overwhelmed by the war in Vietnam...
...They hoped to lead the electorate beyond the issues of the Cold War into the new era of economic growth and reform...
...The business and racial conservative from Texas surprised us all...
...These "intellectuals" linked bad politics to the rise of mass man rather than to values fostered by capitalism...
...Unfortunately for them, the issues of inflation and civil rights would haunt the Kennedy-Johnson era, and many Americans would take to the streets to see their grievances redressed...
...John Wennersten (John Wennersten is associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, Princess Anne...
...The big story of the decade was not Watts but the explosion of economic opportunity for blacks in both the Federal Government and the private sector...
...The 1960s were also silly years, and Matusow chronicles the antics of Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, and others as they sought relief from the pressures of their time in acid tests and public theatrics...
...He fails, however, to explain how the achievements of civil rights agitation and dissent generally transformed our society during those years...
...Kennedy even tried to abort the 1963 March on Washington and relented only when confronted with the fact that 200,000 Americans were coming anyway to protest racial injustice...
...The tragedy of Camelot is that it emitted so much flash yet revealed so little substance...
...His was the most brilliant and difficult of odysseys, and our generation has not heard the last of him...
...Matusow, a historian at Rice University, focuses on the liberals of the 1960s, men in government who were suspicious of mass democracy and closely linked to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson...
...For those of us drifting rapidly into middle age, the decade of the 1960s has become a nostalgic period of high expectations, fanciful dreams, and false hopes...
...Lyndon B. Johnson's Presidency posed one of the great paradoxes of the 1960s...
...When it came to economic justice and civil rights, Matusow observes, Johnson was a reformer...
...While he alarmed whites with his ideological aloofness, Carmichael nonetheless saw that the civil rights movement by 1964 was being coopted by conservative accommodators...
...The paramount problem of the 1960s, concludes Matusow, was that middle-class Americans were unwilling to participate in any program that would bring about a fundamental redistribution of power and income in America...
...With Allen Matusow's intriguing history of American liberalism in the 1960s, The Unraveling of America, we have a guide to those amazing and troubled years, and an unusually good guide at that...
...We also remember the crusaders, the shrewdest of whom was Stokely Carmi-chael...
Vol. 48 • May 1984 • No. 5
