Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (105 page)

The reaction, as it turned out, was lasting. It affected not only Humphrey in 1968 but also liberals generally thereafter. Polls from the mid-1960s on showed that smaller and smaller percentages of the American people had faith in their elected officials or in the ability of government to do things right.
⁷⁰
Turnouts, while subject to varying interpretations, suggested the same. The turnout of eligible voters in presidential elections, having reached a postwar high in the closely contested election of 1960, thereafter dropped consistently. It fell to 60.6 percent in 1968, as compared to 64 percent in 1960 and 61.7 percent in 1964.
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Those who studied these trends, moreover, concluded that the falling off in voting—and more generally in political involvement—was disproportionally serious among poor, working-class, and lower-middle-class people, most of whom had been Democrats. Never very influential in politics, they seemed to feel ever more alienated in the 1960s and thereafter. Their disaffection with politicians contributed further to the decomposition of the parties and to the ability of special interests to play major roles in the governance of the country.
⁷²

The turbulent year of 1968 was therefore a pivotal year in the postwar history of the United States. The social and cultural antagonisms that rent the country, having sharpened appreciably since 1965, widened so significantly following the shattering experiences of Tet and the assassinations of King and Kennedy that they could not thereafter be resolved. The social and political history of the United States in the next few years witnessed mainly an extension—sometimes an acceleration—of the conflicts that reached their peak in 1968. There seemed to be no turning back.

23
Rancor and Richard Nixon

Eight months after Richard Nixon assumed office a gigantic "happening" transformed the 600-acre farm of Max Yasgur in Bethel, New York. Promoters hailed the event as "An Aquarian Exposition" and named it the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, Woodstock being the name of a nearby town. It was conservatively estimated that 400,000 people, most of them in their teens and twenties, flocked to "Woodstock" for the three-day event on August 15–17. Mammoth traffic jams prevented hundreds of thousands more from taking part in the revelry.

It rained intermittently while the young people were there, but no one semed to mind. Those who were close enough heard some of the most popular rock musicians of the era, including Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jefferson Airplane. Others settled as best they could in the mud and reveled in their freedom. Some took off their clothes and wandered about in the nude. A few had sex in the open. The vast majority smoked marijuana or used other drugs. While hundreds suffered from bad trips caused by low-grade LSD, most of those who attended remembered a wonderfully free and mellow occasion. Rollo May, a psychoanalyist, described Woodstock as a "symptomatic event of our time that showed the tremendous hunger, need, and yearning for community on the part of youth."
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Woodstock was indeed a mellow event, a high point of countercultural expression in the United States.
²
It was one of a number in 1969, a year of many ironies. In Washington, Richard Nixon, exemplar of traditional values, struggled to preserve the older ways. Elsewhere, demonstrations, protests, and rebellions against these ways seemed to flourish.
Easy Rider
, a low-budget movie starring Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson, celebrated the joys of getting high on drugs and motorcycling on the open road. It drew large audiences and made substantial profits. Rock musicians like Joplin, Jim Morrison, and the Rolling Stones stimulated wild enthusiasm among many of the young.

Significant cultural changes that had already advanced apace in the postwar era were indeed accelerating at that time, branching out to affect American society in general. In 1969, 74 percent of women believed that premarital sex was wrong; four years later, only 53 percent did.
³
In 1965, 26 percent of Americans had opposed abortion, even when the pregnancy represented a serious risk to the health of the woman; three years later, fewer than 8 percent felt that way. The more open depiction of sex, especially in magazines and in film, startled contemporaries. By 1973 Americans could watch Bernardo Bertolucci's
Last Tango in Paris
, in which (among other things) Marlon Brando grabbed a stranger, kissed her, tore off her underpants, and had sex with her standing up.

Changing attitudes toward sex may even have begun to promote slightly greater tolerance toward homosexuals. In June 1969 homosexuals at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, tired of harassment by police, fought back and set off five days of confrontations. Their activism did much to arouse group consciousness among the gay population. In 1973 the National Organization for Women, which had previously disdained lesbians (Friedan referred to them as the "lavender menace") endorsed gay rights.
⁴
In 1974 the American Psychiatric Association removed homo-sexuality from its list of psychological disorders.
⁵

The hastening of the sexual revolution was perhaps the most important cultural change to emerge from the 1960s. Yet it was but one manifestation of the grand expectations and rights-consciousness that more than ever were defining contemporary understandings of the Good Life.
⁶
Increasing numbers of Americans—especially those who were young and relatively well-off—sensed by the Nixon years that they had an unusually wide set of choices in life. They expected to enjoy greater freedom than their parents had. They need not defer gratification or sacrifice themselves to a job—or even to a spouse. Many yearned for "self-fulfillment" and "growth." This meant the chance to pursue all sorts of leisure activities, to be creative, to seek adventure, to embrace the "joy of living." Charles Reich's jejune
The Greening of America
, which treated these quests for transcendence as "rights," was serialized in the
New Yorker
and became a best-seller in 1970.
⁷

Searchers for a "meaningful" and "satisfying" life—these were key adjectives at the time—often demanded the "right" to good health and empowerment in achieving it. Many people, among them feminists, struck out against orthodox practitioners and the American Medical Association, which they said was monopolistic, racist, and sexist.
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Other Americans insisted that the government do more to fight disease, forcing through in the process funding for a "war on cancer" in 1970. Still others assailed the tobacco industry, succeeding by 1970 in requiring cigarette companies to place on packages the label "Warning: The Surgeon General has determined that cigarette smoking is dangerous to your health." Smoking ads were banned from television and radio in January 1971.
⁹

It was yet another golden age for advocates of diet reform, regarded by many as a key to better health. Counterculturalists, among others, spread the gospel of organic gardening and hailed the virtues of oats, dates, sunflower seeds, prunes, and raisins. It was especially important, many advocates thought, to avoid the adulterated fare produced by industrial civilization: better to eat "natural" food as peasant people did in Third World cultures. Thanks in part to the efforts of Ralph Nader, a free-wheeling and indomitable critic of corporate misbehavior in American life, broader "food scares"—about the dangers from additives, meat-packing, and processing—also arose in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Robert Finch, Nixon's Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, issued an order in 1969 banning the sale of cyclamate, an artificial sweetener thought to be associated with cancer. DDT, a pesticide, was banned in the same year. The American Heart Association stepped up its warnings about high levels of cholesterol. By the early 1970s it was estimated that some 50 percent of Americans regularly took vitamins or other food supplements.
¹⁰

Good health required "fitness." Dr. Kenneth Cooper's book
Aerobics
(1968) sold 3 million copies over the next four years. Health clubs proliferated, and the sale of sports equipment, including a variety of specialized sneakers, boomed.
¹¹
Fitness, moreover, came to require spiritual and psychological growth as well as physical well-being. Promoters of the "Human Potential Movement," therapists from the Esalen Institute and other meccas, and gurus of indescribable exoticism popped up like genies to lighten the burdens of America's stress-ridden civilization. Experts touted confrontational "encounter," gestalt therapy, bioenergetics, "sensitivity training," meditation, massage, breathing, drugs, and even easy recreational sex. Any or all would bring out the inherent spirituality of the self, enlarge human potential, and light up the dawn of the New Age.
¹²

Many who embarked on the road to "self-actualization" in these turbu-lent times carried heavy anti-Establishment baggage with them. Indeed, assaults against authority, which had already engaged activists of all sorts in the 1960s, gained ever-greater ground. Critics exclaimed that large and bureaucratic institutions—schools, universities, hospitals, governments, corporations—threatened the natural goodness of human beings. Crusaders for "free schools" denounced the educational Establishment and spearheaded an "open education movement" that would be informal, based on "discovery," and above all "child-centered."
¹³
Other challenges to authority seemed ubiquitous. Soldiers confronted officers, reporters balked at editors, patients challenged doctors, artists denounced curators, graduate students protested against requirements and formed unions. High school students resisted teachers and defiantly wore forbidden but-tons. Native Americans and Mexican-Americans raised banners of "red power" and "brown power." A few priests and nuns even broke with the church to marry, sometimes each other. Rights-conscious litigants sustained further expansion of the legal profession. No institutions could shut off the rhetoric of rights that rang throughout the land.

Feminists emerged as among the most vociferous of these advocates of change. Between 1969 and 1973, peak years of feminist activism, they formed hundreds of organizations including caucuses within professional groups, campus collectives, centers for women's studies, and political action committees. The Women's Equity Action League, developed in 1968, led efforts against discriminatory practices in industry, education, and other institutions. By 1974 there were scores of new feminist periodicals, most of them created in 1970 and 1971. Ms., begun in January 1972 as a one-time publication, sold 250,000 copies within eight days.

Some of the most visible feminists were radicals who professed to despise men: A bumper sticker read DON'T COOK DINNE R TONIGHT, STARVE A RAT TODAY.
¹⁴
Much more numerous, however, were those women, including millions of housewives who did not call themselves feminists, who demanded an end to unequal treatment. They were better organized and more powerful than ever before in their quest for rights. By early 1972 they affected Congress, which approved the Equal Rights Amendment by overwhelming majorities. As of mid-1973, twenty-eight states had ratified it.
¹⁵

The Supreme Court, as in the 1960s, extended an especially strong hand to the Rights Revolution. In 1969 it struck down state laws requiring a year's residence before people could receive welfare benefits.
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Earl Warren retired later in the year, to be replaced by Warren Burger, a moderate Minnesotan named by Nixon. In many ways, however, the departure of Warren seemed to make little difference. In 1970 the Burger court ruled that statutory entitlements of welfare and disability benefits could not be taken away from people without due process.
¹⁷
In 1971 it unanimously supported tough new federal guidelines concerning job discrimination, and a year later it determined in
Furman v. Georgia
that capital punishment was "cruel and unusual punishment" and therefore in violation of the Eighth Amendment.
¹⁸
This decision, decided by a vote of 5 to 4, contained loopholes that permitted states to sanction capital punishment if it was not arbitrary or capricious; twenty-nine states quickly did so. Moreover, the Burger Court proved tough concerning crime, reaching a number of judgments that weakened the
Miranda
rules. Still, through early 1973 it showed few signs that it would impose a new conservatism on the land.

In 1973 the Burger Court announced, in
Roe
v.
Wade
, that women had a constitutional right to abortion.
¹⁹
Using as a precedent the "right to privacy" that the court had enunciated eight years earlier in striking down Connecticut's law against contraception, the decision surprised a great many Americans.
²⁰
Abortion, after all, had long been driven underground in the United States. For the next two decades,
Roe
v.
Wade
aroused extraordinarily powerful emotions, which further polarized a nation that was already fragmented along the lines of race, gender, and social class.

Some of those who demanded more from life during the Nixon years were easily defrauded. "Clients" who looked to gurus for therapeutic deliverance often received "touchy-feely" sensations and little more. Other Americans seeking a New Age were simply hedonistic, caught up in the excesses of a consumer culture that seemed to know no limits. Worse, some of those attracted to the wilder excesses of drugs and acid-rock culture came to ruin. The stomping of concert-goers by Hell's Angels at the Altamont, California, rock festival in December 1969 was one of the most alarming signs that the spirit of Woodstock could go very badly amiss.
²¹
In 1970 both Joplin and Hendrix died of drug overdoses. Jim Morrison also died, probably of excessive consumption of alcohol. All were twenty-seven years of age.

New Left organizations also fell victim to excess in 1969–70. SDS, having grown rapidly in the mid-1960s, splintered badly. This process, rooted in an ever-growing rage and self-indulgence that drove true believers to extremes, became most obvious at the national convention of SDS in June 1969, where the organization broke apart along racial and ideological lines.
²²
Some of the splinters—the self-named Motherfuckers and the Crazies, for example—were largely nihilistic. Another dissident faction became known as Weatherman, after a Dylan verse, "You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows." The Weathermen stomped out of the convention chanting, "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh," and supported violence in support of foreign and domestic liberation movements. "Our whole life," Weatherman proclaimed, "is a defiance of Amerika. It's moving in the streets, digging sounds, smoking dope . . . fighting pigs."
²³
In October the group staged "Four Days of Rage" of "trashing" in Chicago that stopped only when police arrested 290 of the 300 people involved. A total of seventy-five police were hurt in the melees.
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