Article contents
The Sixties' False Dawn: Awakenings, Movements, and Postmodern Policy-making
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2011
Extract
Writing in 1978 about the 1960s, William McLoughlin saw America in the midst of the fourth Great Awakening in our history. Awakenings are “periods of cultural revitalization that begin in a general crisis of beliefs and values and extend over a generation or so, during which time a profound reorientation in beliefs and values takes place. Revivals alter the lives of individuals; awakenings alter the world view of a whole people or culture.” To put it another way, awakenings are revelatory times when large numbers of people anguish over and eventually search out new self-understandings as individuals and as a society. They are like a convulsive quickening in the cultural womb.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1996
References
Notes
1. McLoughlin, William G., Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform (Chicago, 1978), 169.Google Scholar
2. Ibid., xiii.
3. “SNCC: Founding Statement,” in Albert, Judith C. and Albert, Stewart E., The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (New York, 1984), 113Google Scholar. More generally, see Burns, Stewart, Social Movements of the 1960s: Searching for Democracy (Boston, 1990), 188ff.Google Scholar; Morgan, Edward P., The 60s Experience (Philadelphia, 1991), 37.Google Scholar
4. For information on the spiritual/political quests of those who came of age in the 1960s, see Roof, Wade Clark, A Generation of Seekers (San Francisco, 1993)Google Scholar; Mc-Adam, Doug, Freedom Summer (New York, 1988)Google Scholar; and Hammond, Philip, Religion and Personal Autonomy (Columbia, S.C., 1992).Google Scholar
5. Others have occasionally and rather unsystematically applied the concept of an “awakening” to the 1960s. For example: Carson, Clayborne, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass., 1981)Google Scholar; Anderson, Walter, The Upstart Spring: Esalen and the American Awakening (Reading, Mass., 1983)Google Scholar; Ellwood, Richard, The 60s Spiritual Awakening (New Brunswick, 1994)Google Scholar; Morgan, The 60s Experience, chap. 7, “A New Awakening?” Characteristically enough, Sixties activists may remember their movement participation as “a holy time,” or a discovery time of letting their “light shine.” Quoted in Anderson, Terry H., The Movement and the Sixties (New York, 1995), 86.Google Scholar
6. McLoughlin, Revivals, p. 2.
7. In 1994 the Louis Harris poll reported the lowest level of confidence in government institutions since the question began to be asked in 1966. Other polls show those trusting the government to do what is right all or most of the time declined from 76 percent in 1964 to 19 percent in 1994. Those seeing government run by a few big interests looking out for themselves rather than run for the benefit of all the people had risen from 29 percent in 1964 to 80 percent in 1992. Lipset, S. M., “American Democracy in Comparative Perspective” (reproduced), 3 November 1994.Google Scholar
8. Dionne, E. J. Jr., Why Americans Hate Politics, 2d ed. (New York, 1992).Google Scholar
9. Cauthen, Kenneth, The Impact of Religious Liberalism (New York, 1962)Google Scholar; Davis, Allen, Spearheads for Reform (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; Reardon, B. M. G., Liberal Protestantism (Stanford, 1968)Google Scholar. It was in this turn-of-the-century intra-Protestant conflict that the term “fundamentalist” was itself coined to identify those supposedly antimodernist forces determined to do battle for the fundamentals of the faith and its worldview. Ammerman, Nancy T., “North American Protestant Fundamentalism,” in Marty, Martin E. and Appleby, R. Scott, Fundamentalisms Observed (Chicago, 1991), 2–27.Google Scholar
10. Eisenach, Eldon J., The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Lawrence, Kan., 1994), 45–46Google Scholar; and more generally, Himmelfarb, Gertrude, The De-Moralization of Society (New York, 1994)Google Scholar. This in turn recalled the spiritual quest of social reformers from the prior Great Awakening before the civil war, when New Lights were confident that “that is the only true church organization, when heads and hearts united in working for the welfare of the human-race.” Lydia Maria Child quoted in Abzug, Robert H., Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York, 1994), 229.Google Scholar
11. Surely among the more portentous seeds was the young Oliver Wendell Holmes and his war-induced skepticism toward all causes based on claims of morality or justice. His later judicial support for Progressive economic and social legislation would be grounded in acknowledging no higher law than the democratic community's demands for action, anticipating what others would embrace as interest-group liberalism. White, G. Edward, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self (New York, 1995)Google Scholar. However, for a vivid account of how at the nonelite level America was still functioning as an “ought culture” in the 1930s, see Gelernter, David, 1939: The Lost World of the Fair (New York, 1995).Google Scholar
12. The focus here is on modernity in terms of socioeconomic changes and popular thought, not on the richer philosophical discussion of modernity, modernism, and postmodernism among intellectuals and artists. Modernity in its Enlightenment guise of secular rationalism encompasses its own romantic reactions throughout the last two centuries, and these have profound relevance to the 1960s. A useful overview of the terms is in Selznick, Philip, The Moral Commonwealth (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992), 3–16Google Scholar. Philosophical accounts of modernity in the American context are reviewed in Diggins, John P., The Promise of Pragmatism (Chicago, 1994)Google Scholar, and the inner conflicts are discussed with great subtlety in Levine, Thelma, “American Philosophy, Socialism, and the Contradictions of Modernity,” in Stuhr, John, ed., Philosophy and the Construction of Culture (New York, 1992)Google Scholar, and idem, “America and the Contestations of Modernity,” in Herman Saatkamp, ed., Pragmatism and Rorty (Vanderbilt, Tenn., 1995).
13. Fowler, Robert Booth, Unconventional Partners: Religion and Liberal Culture in the United States (Grand Rapids, 1989), chaps. 1–3.Google Scholar
14. See, for example, Elson, Ruth, Guardians of Tradition (Lincoln, 1964)Google Scholar; Zimet, Sara Goodman, What Children Read in School (New York, 1972)Google Scholar; Marsden, George M., The Soul of the American University (New York, 1994)Google Scholar. The claim here runs to the presumptive self-confidence in a culture asserting such authority, not that college students have morally changed much over the centuries. Cf. Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz, Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York, 1994).Google Scholar
15. Ellwood, The 60s Spiritual Awakening, chap. 3, 104–75. Writing in 1955, Will Herberg described being Protestant, Catholic, or Jew as “the alternative ways of being an American,” with the underlying culture-religion represented by “the American way of life.” Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Garden City, N.Y., 1960).Google Scholar
16. Berger, Peter, “Religion in Post-Protestant America,” Commentary, May 1986.Google Scholar
17. Keller, Morton, Regulating a New Economy (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)Google Scholar, and Regulating a New Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).Google Scholar
18. Flacks, Richard, Making History: The American Left and the American Mind (New York, 1988), 53–67Google Scholar. For an account of how the liberal consensus emerged in the give-and-take of New Deal policy-making, see Brinkley, Alan, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York, 1995).Google Scholar
19. Sundquist, James L., Politics and Policy (Washington, D.C., 1968), 46–54Google Scholar. For typically self-confident expositions of the national agenda, see Gordon, Kermit, ed., Agenda for the Nation (Washington, D.C., 1968)Google Scholar, as well as the Nixon administration version: Report of the National Goals Research Staff, Toward Balanced Growth: Quantity with Quality (Washington, D.C., 1970).Google Scholar
20. Wood, Robert C., Whatever Possessed the President? Academic Experts and Presidential Policy, 1960–1988 (Amherst, 1993).Google Scholar
21. Jamison, Andre, Seeds of the Sixties (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994)Google Scholar; Egerton, John, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York, 1994).Google Scholar
22. Washington Post, 4 July 1994, C5. A 1969 poll found 13 percent of college students identifying with the “new left,” compared to 3 percent of noncollege youth. The largest U.S. college protest was occasioned by the 1970 Kent State shootings, and it engaged 2 million of the some 8 million students in the nation. The nonstudent, general population was even less supportive of what would become known as “sixties-type people.” After the spring 1970 U.S. invasion of Cambodia, surveys showed that three-fourths of Americans opposed protests against the government and would support restricting basic freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights to that end. Survey analysis in the late 1980s suggested that the ethics of about 30 million Americans were altered in a meaningful way (a quintessential Sixties term) by the 1960s events, particularly civil rights, women's liberation, and the Vietnam War. Some 16 million also stated that the counterculture of the time resulted in personal changes in their lives. Cf. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties, xvi–xx, 351, 422.
23. Bums, Social Movements of the 1960s, xii. For a rich evocation of this distressed passage of 1960s youth, see Cheever, Susan, A Woman's Life (New York, 1994)Google Scholar. Estimates of protest participation are from a 1989 Gallup poll of thirty- to forty-nine-year-olds, Washington Post, 24 July 1994, C5.
24. A good survey of recent thinking on social movements generally is Cohen, Jean L., ed., “Social Movements” (Special Issue), Social Research 52:4 (Winter 1985)Google Scholar. For the Sixties, see Jackson, Rebecca, The 1960s: An Annotated Bibliography of Social and Political Movements in the United States (Westport, Conn., 1992).Google Scholar
25. Viereck, Peter, Conservatism Revisited (London, 1950)Google Scholar; Buckley, William F., God and Man at Yale (Chicago, 1951)Google Scholar; Kirk, Russell, The Conservative Mind (Chicago, 1953)Google Scholar. In 1959 the first working chapters of the John Birch Society were formed, named after a young Baptist missionary turned volunteer soldier who was killed by the Chinese Communists in 1945. Circulating in the lively if nascent conservative movement of the late 1950s was a “Hymn to the Welfare State”:
The Government is my shepard/ Therefore I need not work./ It alloweth me to lie down on a good job./ It leadeth me beside still factories;/ It destroyeth my initiative./ It leadesth me in the path of a parasite for politic's sake./Yea, though I walk through the valley of laziness and deficit-spending,/I will fear no evil, for the Government is with me./ It prepareth an economic Utopia for me, by appropriating the earnings of my own grandchildren./It filleth my head with false security;/My inefficiency runneth over./Surely the Government should care for me for all the days of my life!!/And I shall dwell in a fool's paradise for ever.
26. Goldwater, Barry, The Conscience of a Conservative (Shepherdsville, Ky., 1960)Google Scholar. The sense of conservative momentum is nicely captured in the cover story in Time, 10 April 1960, and “The Great Debate of the Year: Does America's Best Hope for the Future Lie in Political Conservatism?” (a printed debate between Senators Barry Goldwater and Jacob Javits), in Hutchins, Robert M and Adler, Mortimer J., eds., The Great Ideas Today 1962 (Chicago, 1962).Google Scholar
27. Collier, Peter and Horowitz, David, Destructive Generation (New York, 1989) 262Google Scholar; Morgan, The 60s Experience, 273.
28. Evans, Sara, Personal Politics (New York, 1980).Google Scholar
29. A representative summary of the indictment in keeping with the spirit of the times is the series of articles in The New Yorker, appearing later in Goodwin's, Richard N., The American Condition (New York, 1974).Google Scholar
30. Crozier, Michael J., Huntington, Samuel P., and Watanuki, Joji, The Crisis of Democracy (New York, 1975), 74–76.Google Scholar
31. Flacks, Making History, 186.
32. John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IX, line 825. Eve is pondering the reason why not to give Adam the forbidden fruit she has eaten: “But keep the odds of Knowledge in my power without Copartner? So to add what is wanting in Female Sex, the more to draw his Love, and render me more equal, and perhaps, a thing not undesirable, sometime Superior: for inferior who is free?”
33. Burns, Social Movements of the 1960s, 199.
34. Vogel, David, “The Public-Interest Movement and the American Reform Tradition,” Political Science Quarterly 95 (Winter 1980–81)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ginsberg, Benjamin, The Captive Public (New York, 1986).Google Scholar
35. Arato, Andrew and Cohen, Jean L., “Social Movements, Civil Society, and the Problem of Sovereignty,” Praxis International 4 (October 1984): 266–83Google Scholar. The concept is argued far more fully in Evans, Sara M. and Boyte, Harry C., Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America (New York, 1986).Google Scholar
36. The same rhetoric would be repeated in the 1990s by conservatives such as presidential candidate Pat Buchanan (e.g., in his celebrated speech at the 1992 Republican convention). But in this place and time, the idea and phrase came from one of the precursors and inspirations for the Sixties' Left, Goodman, Paul: “How is it possible to have more meaning and honor in work? To put wealth to some real use? To have a high standard of living of whose quality we are not ashamed? To get social justice for those who have been shamefully left out … ? If 10 thousand people in all walks of life will stand up on their two feet and talk out and insist, we shall get back our country.” Growing Up Absurd (New York, 1956), x–xvi.Google Scholar
37. Some did try to fashion a “rational, humanist moral code” to replace traditional standards. See Harrington, Michael, The Twilight of Capitalism. (New York, 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a bittersweet account of his life in a self-described movement of “historic failure,” see Harrington, Michael, The Long-Distance Runner: An Autobiography (New York, 1989).Google Scholar
38. Thus there was virtually no Sixties “activism” at traditional religiously-based universities such as Baylor and Brigham Young; by contrast, social activism was strongly emphasized by the radical theologists of the time in their freer and more flexible “new morality,” publicized most vividly in the “death of God” writings. Flowers, Ronald B., Religion in Strange Times: The 1960s and 1970s (Macon, Ga., 1984)Google Scholar; a lively account is in Ellwood, The 60s Spiritual Awakening, 122–42.
39. Engelhardt, Tom, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (New York, 1994).Google Scholar
40. This claim takes classic form in the American narrative with Lincoln's defense of the “unreal” pretending embodied in the Declaration of Independence's lofty phrases. Stephen Douglas's modernist critique and Lincoln's premodern counter are highlighted in their sixth debate, on 13 October 1858.
41. Fraser, Ronald, ed., 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (New York, 1988); Burns, Social Movements of the 1960s, 184–85.Google Scholar
42. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, The Cost of Discipleship (New York, 1963), 46–47.Google Scholar
43. Tipton, Steven, Getting Saved from the Sixties (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982)Google Scholar; Hammond, Phillip, Religion and Personal Autonomy (Columbia, S.C., 1992)Google Scholar. According to Wade Roofs study, more than two in every three Baby Boomers raised in a religious tradition stopped attending church or synagogue during their teens or early twenties; of those, one in four would return, generally when having children of their own, only to drop out again as child-rearing ended and the already weak institutional attachments faded. Roof, Wade Clark, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (San Francisco, 1993).Google Scholar
44. Niebuhr, H. Richard, Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (New York, 1960)Google Scholar; Murray, John Courtney, We Hold These Truths (New York, 1960)Google Scholar; Marty, Martin E., The New Shape of American Religion (New York, 1959).Google Scholar
45. Gitlin, Todd, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York, 1987).Google Scholar
46. King, Martin Luther Jr., “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” in Levy, Michael B., ed., Political Thought in America, 2d ed. (Prospect Heights, Ill., 1988), 458.Google Scholar
47. Cox, Harvey, The Secular City (New York, 1965).Google Scholar
48. Sara Evans, Personal Politics, 61; Milkis, Sidney and Harris, Richard, The Politics of Regulatory Change (Oxford, 1989), 62–81.Google Scholar
49. Morris, Aldon D., The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement (New York, 1984).Google Scholar
50. Ellwood, The 60s Spiritual Awakening, 80.
51. McAdam, Doug, Freedom Summer (New York, 1988)Google Scholar; Forman, James, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Washington, D.C., 1985)Google Scholar; Raines, Howell, My Soul Is Rested (Harmondsworth, 1983).Google Scholar
52. King, Martin Luther Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston, 1968), 158–59.Google ScholarPubMed
53. Tilly, Charles et al. , The Rebellious Century: 1830–1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, Mass., 1978). Subsequent points about the identity orientation in collective action draw upon Touraine, Alain, The Voice and the Eye (New York, 1982)Google Scholar, and “An Introduction to the Study of Social Movements,” in Cohen, “Social Movements.”
54. Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass., 1989)Google Scholar; for applications to the American legal and constitutional system, see Arkes, Hadley, Beyond the Constitution (Princeton, 1990)Google Scholar, and Grey, Thomas C., “Do We Have an Unwritten Constitution?” 27 Stanford Law Review 703 (February 1975).Google Scholar
55. By the 1950s, for example, the Social Security Administration had established 15,000 local offices to promote its programs; the number of federal income taxpayers had risen from 7 million in 1940 to almost 50 million by the 1950s. Historic Statistics of the United States, Series Y, 402–11.
56. Ladd, Bruce, Crisis in Credibility (New York, 1968)Google Scholar; Goldstein, Robert J., Political Repression in Modern America from 1870 to the Present (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), chap. 11.Google Scholar
57. Kopkind, Andrew, The Thirty Years' Wars: Dispatches and Diversions of a Radical Journalist, 1965–1994 (New York, 1995).Google Scholar
58. Derthick, Martha, Agency Under Stress (Washington, D.C., 1990)Google Scholar; Wilson, James Q., Bureaucracy (New York, 1989), chap. 10Google Scholar; Cook, Constance Ewing, Nuclear Power and Legal Advocacy (Lexington, Mass., 1980)Google Scholar; Lacey, Michael, ed., Government and Environmental Politics (Washington, D.C., 1989).Google Scholar
59. Stewart, Richard, “The Reformation of American Administrative Law,” Harvard Law Review 88 (1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Melnick, R. Shep, Regulation and the Courts (Washington, D.C., 1983)Google Scholar, and Between the Lines (Washington, D.C., 1994)Google Scholar; Milkis, Sidney and Harris, Richard, The Politics of Regulatory Change (New York, 1989)Google Scholar; Hoberg, George, Pluralism by Design (New York, 1992).Google Scholar
60. Schick, Allen, “From the Old Politics of Budgeting to the New,” in Caiden, Naomi and White, Joseph, Budgeting, Policy, Politics (New Brunswick, 1995).Google Scholar
61. Ibid., 137.
62. Carter, Stephen L., The Confirmation Mess (New York, 1994).Google Scholar
63. McQuaid, Kim, Uneasy Partners: Big Business in American Politics, 1945–1990 (Baltimore, 1994).Google Scholar
64. Edelman, Peter, “The Next Century of Our Constitution,” Hastings Law Journal (November 1987)Google Scholar; and The Republican Contract with America, (November 1994), both reported on the same page in the Washington Post, 18 December 1994, C7.
65. Arkes, Beyond the Constitution.
66. McFarland, Andrew S., Cooperative Pluralism: The National Coal Policy Experiment (Lawrence, Kan., 1993).Google Scholar
67. Wildavsky, Aaron, The Politics of the Budgetary Process (Boston, 1964), 129.Google Scholar
68. Disparities between activists and nonactivists are surveyed in Verba, Sidney et al. , “Citizen Activity: Who Participates? What Do They Say?” American Political Science Review 87:2 (June 1993): 303–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
69. Johnson, Jean and Immerwahr, John, First Things First: What Americans Expect from the Public Schools (New York, 1994).Google Scholar
- 15
- Cited by