Echoes of 1968

In 1976, on a visit to Columbia, I was surprised to spot, on a wall of the Journalism building abutting college walk, the spectral remains of the spray-painted initials “sds.” Thirty years on, those faded letters have long since vanished, but it feels to me frequently that the specter of 1968’s convulsive events still haunts the campus, dimly echoing Matthew Arnold’s “alarms of struggle and flight” where once “ignorant armies” clashed by day and night.

The campus will hear the story this spring—how, amid the horrific Vietnam War, in the fraught aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in revolt against a high-handed University administration, the black students and SDS radicals seized buildings. And after several days of occupation, the police marched in, pushing through barricades, injuring more than 140, arresting more than 700, producing spectacular images of exuberance and panic, whereupon came strikes and wounds, boycotts and polarization, swirls of chaos, reform, and “radicalization”—in the theory of some, the jump-start of a spirit of revolution.

In a culture allergic to history, we tend to pluck our collective memories out of their contexts, to strip them down to anniversary moments suitable for framing, hissing, and cheering. Understandably, many students today who yearn to transform the world to something more livable draw inspiration from what they think of collectively as “the Sixties,” an amalgam of epiphanies and confrontations that left the country freer, properly chastened, and closer to “a more perfect union.” Activists, like other mortals, engage in a search for what the literary historian Van Wyck Brooks famously called “a usable past.” If you believe, as I fervently do, that the movements of the ’60s were, on balance, morally necessary torrents of justice and reason, then is 1968 that past? More no than yes, I would say.

Columbia’s 1968, in April and May, was one episode in that year’s sequence of rising militancy and cataclysmic confrontation. In the interval between the anguish of two devastating assassinations, the occupiers of buildings felt righteous and redemptive. War research and a two-tier gymnasium were the symbolic reasons. But the issues, to borrow a slogan of the time, were not the issue. To the organizers at that moment, what was called SDS’s “action faction,” the fury of an onrushing identity was the deeper reason. They looked at the University and saw a battlefield. Conquer the University or humble it, and you moved the world—so thought the maestros of purification, riding an arc of moral giddiness toward some sort of apocalypse. Those of more complicated views were shoved aside. In the iconography of the time, hugely amplified in the country’s media capital, Columbia became a stop on the Revolution Express. But the delirium of the year was predicated on a drastic misreading of the actual balance of forces.

Anyone who wants to change the world needs to appraise the world lucidly and think of militancy as a means, not an end. The insurgent, communal moments of 1968 were giddy, moving, indelible. They were also delusory, for the militant surge masked the movement’s fractional nature and weakness. The sequence of 1968, revved up at Columbia, culminated in the Chicago Democratic Convention demonstrations of August, when the police ripped into antiwarriors who, tasting the heady and desperate power of negation, couldn’t quite decide whether they were on the brink of a police state or a revolution (or, confusingly, both at once). That week, proverbially, the whole world watched, but the whole of watchful, fretful America did not side with the demonstrators. To the contrary: they sided with the working-class police against what they thought of as overeducated brats abusing their privilege.

The tragic side of 1968 followed from the fact that the party which organized power and the movements which agitated for justice were at loggerheads. The responsibility for the fatal breach was chiefly Lyndon Johnson’s, since it was he who gambled the party’s future on a phantasmagorical war. But still, given Johnson’s grievous sins, the leadership of the movement was not wise. The confrontation politics of 1968 took for granted a decades-old Democratic consensus that was in the process of dissolving. Hell-bent on going-it-alone, it drastically underestimated the Right. The upshot was that movement helped sabotage the party, which collapsed in the November election and ushered in two generations of Republican domination. For decades since, those who have celebrated the clashes have breezily overlooked the denouement.

In a frenzy of polarization, 10 weeks later, Richard Nixon won the election by applying artful pressure on a cracked Democratic alliance. With Nixon’s election came five years plus more of war, leaving a million more Vietnamese deaths along with some 21,000 more Americans. How can there be a remembrance that does not also remember that awful denouement?

For years, observers have deplored (or celebrated!) the apparent acquiescence of America’s youth, so much less committed and colorful than the insurgents of yore. But it seems to me, more often, that the practicality of today’s students is worthy and justified, though sometimes extreme. They are self-preoccupied, true. Sometimes beyond reason or empathy, they are too cynical even if they disguise their detachment as “irony.” But there is also a graceful compensation. Most of the more idealistic activists want results more than self-expression. They gravitate toward service—a healthy impulse. But “making a difference” is largely something that individuals do when they pool their commitments. And so it is bracing to watch students reinvigorate party politics by putting movement-style energy and principle to work in institutions previously as fossilized as the Democratic Party. In 2004 and 2006, recognizing that no progress was imaginable as long as the Bush alliance of plutocrats, theocrats, and empire-builders ruled Washington unimpeded, thousands of them volunteered in favor of antiwar Democrats. Now, legions enlist in the focused insurgency of the Obama campaign.

The ’00s can’t be the ’60s and ought not to be, any more than the ’60s could be, or should have been, the ’20s. The present campaign makes plain that the commitments of 40 years ago are still working their way through our imperfect union. No wonder: what erupted then was incendiary, deep and long-burning. What was at stake, what remains at stake, were and are long-buried conflicts over American principles, over the meaning of freedom, race, nation, sex, and obligation. Since the past only exists in the present, retro politics are not what we need. We do not have ceremonies of innocence to commemorate. If we aspire to clarity and ingenuity, we do not need them.

The author is a professor of journalism and sociology and the author of 12 books including The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage and Letters to a Young Activist.