Several months ago, The American Experience on PBS screened a superb documentary, The Hard Hat Riot. It explored a unique episode in the Vietnam war protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s. After major revolts and building occupations at Berkeley (beginning in 1964), Cornell and Columbia (1968), and Harvard (1969), campuses around the country erupted in May 1970 after President Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia and the deaths of four students at Kent State at the hands of the National Guard followed. More than fifty campuses around the country were shut down by protests and never reopened until the fall, and hundreds of others--including Harvard and other Ivy League institutions--canceled exams and encouraged students to use their free time to mount more antiwar protests. Just days later, on May 8, a huge antiwar demonstration in downtown Manhattan was interrupted by hundreds of construction workers, who began beating the demonstrators. The confrontation moved to the mayor's office at City Hall Park, where Mayor John Lindsay had ordered the lowering of the flag to half staff in honor of one of the dead Kent State students, who came from Long Island, and the angry construction workers first forced city officials to raise the flag, and then set upon students at Pace University, across the street. The documentary includes only a few talking heads, led by David Paul Kuhn, who wrote the book upon which it is based. It draws overwhelmingly from interviews with participants on both sides, and with a couple of Nixon White House aides. It tells the story of a cultural and political split that continues to this day, and it occurred to me that it is a brilliant representation of the great cultural turning point that my generation was leading the nation into at that time, with fateful consequences.
The great changes then underway, we can now see, overturned a cultural and political order that had grown up in the United States and most of the developed world in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. It was an era of very strong institutions, led by national governments, that commanded the loyalty of the great mass of the population and demanded, and received, enormous sacrifices from them. The United States in particular had abandoned a more libertarian tradition to mobilize millions of young men in three stages: for the First World War in 1917-18, for the Second World War in 1941-5, and then for the Cold War, beginning in 1950 and continuing, really, all the way to 1970. The military draft had ended in 1919 and again (effectively) in 1946, but it had continued for 20 years in 1970, now feeding the Vietnam war. The great mobilizations also led to unprecedented economic demands upon the population, including marginal tax rates that topped out at 91 percent by 1945 and had dropped only to 70 percent in 1965. Meanwhile, the New Deal had transformed the role of the federal government, making it the employer of last resort, tightly regulating financial institutions, establishing the rights of organized labor, and passing Social Security. That in turn had led to the passage of Medicare in 1965. A significant minority of Americans had always opposed this expansion of the federal government's role, but the election of 1964, in which New Dealer Lyndon Johnson overwhelmingly defeated unreconstructed libertarian Barry Goldwater with more than 60 percent of the popular vote, showed the extent of the national consensus.
The first two-thirds of the century were also an era of strict social mores. The United States before 1968 was not, as many people now seem to believe, a real-life version of The Handmaid's Tale, but gender roles were quite strict in all economic classes of society. Divorce was quite stigmatized and was barely legal in several states, and homosexuality was prohibited by law. The marriage rate for US adults had peaked at 72 percent in 1960 (it is now 50 percent.) Crime rates were relatively low. Meanwhile, the population was becoming better educated at an extraordinary rate. While only 30 percent of 18-22 year-olds attended college in 1950, 50 percent of them were in college in 1969--and there were far more young people in that age group in 1969 than in 1950 because of the baby boom.
The United States seemed to be progressing on many fronts in 1965, most notably with respect to civil rights for black Americans, now protected for the first time by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But Lyndon Johnson's Administration triggered a great turning point in American life in the middle of that year when it embarked upon a long large-scale conflict in Vietnam. That conflict gave a substantial part of the new Boom generation, born from 1943 through 1960, the target for a revolt that became a more general rebellion against fundamental aspects of the mid-century era.
As The Hard Hat Riot shows, one must not overgeneralize about the Boom generation. The events of the 1960s looked very different to different social classes, different races, and ultimately to the two different sexes, and in 1972, the first election in which very large numbers of Boomers could vote, their vote divided evenly between Nixon and McGovern. Boomers were the most pro-Trump generation in 2016 and 2020, losing that honor to Gen Xers in 2024, and Trump himself will obviously go down in history as the most important political leader that my generation has produced. Yet the minority of Boomers in elite institutions who turned the academic and political world upside down in the late 1960s had, I believe, an extraordinary long-term influence, because of the nature of its revolt. To understand this, I return to the 1990s works of my contemporaries, William Strauss and Neil Howe.
In The Fourth Turning (1997) Strauss and Howe defined the Boom generation as a Prophet generation. Such generations are children in the wake of the last great crisis in national life--in our case, the Depression and the Second World War--and grow up in relatively stable, comfortable circumstances. As you adults, however, they take over a now-vacant role: society's moral stewards, who propagate their own views of good and evil. As a very young and acute student of Strauss and Howe pointed out just a few years after that book was published, one finds the same story in the Book of Genesis. Adam and Eve are living in the rich paradise the lord has created for them, but he has commanded them not to eat from the Tree of Good and Evil, which will allow them to make their own moral judgments. Naturally, human nature being what it is, they immediately do so. In Genesis the lord expels them from paradise; in history, such generations tend to redefine paradise and make their vision come to life. The Boomer campus activists of the late 1960s opposed the Vietnam War and anything connected to it because it was evil. Nothing, in their eyes, could justify it: not that it had been decided upon by a duly elected president and duly elected legislators, not that it initially commanded a consensus of opinion among the foreign policy establishment, and not that (until 1968) a majority of the American public supported it, with many arguing that we should fight harder. And because the war was evil, and continued despite their opposition, any institution that collaborated with it in any way--including colleges and universities with ROTC programs and Defense Department contacts--was evil as well, and must be brought to a halt. These views are on display both in The Hard Hat Riot and in another great documentary, Berkeley in the Sixties. And by 1970 many activists had taken a further step, claiming that our whole society was criminally implicated not only in the Vietnam War, but in racism and sexism, and that its laws were unworthy of respect. Like their contemporary Donald Trump today, they were guided only by their own morality.
The student revolt grabbed the attention of many colleges and universities, of the elite media, and, by 1970, of an increasing number of liberal politicians in both parties. In subsequent decades, as I have often argued here, their essential approach to politics--an emphasis on defining what is morally right, and insisting that reality must conform to their view--became very influential and even dominant in those same sectors. At the time, however, they provoked intense opposition among many (though not all) of their own parents, who had succeeded in life by playing by the rules. As as the interviews in The Hard Hat Riot demonstrate beyond question, they also aroused enormous anger among their less wealthy working class contemporaries, who had gone into demanding occupations instead of going to college, who had thereby remained subject to the draft, and who had fought, and sometimes been killed or wounded, in Vietnam. They, like their parents, had played by the rules, and they resented the college students who didn't have to and who now claimed the right to chart the nation's destiny. And already, the student revolt, combined with general dissatisfaction over the Vietnam War, inflation, and white racial resentment, had started a critical national political realignment.
Lyndon Johnson in 1964 had won 61 percent of the popular vote; Hubert Humphrey in 1968 had won just 43.4 percent, losing to Richard Nixon with 43.4 percent, while George Wallace won 13.5 percent of the vote. The next two Democrats to win a majority of the popular vote would be Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Barack Obama in 2008. And a parallel drama had played out in the city of New York, one that is not sufficiently explained in The Hard Hat Riot. John Lindsay, a very handsome and charismatic liberal Republican Congressman, had won the mayoralty in 1965 with 45 percent of the vote, compared to 41 percent for regular Democrat Abe Beame and 13.4 percent for conservative journalist William F. Buckley Jr. The documentary makes clear that Lindsay had had a difficult first term, losing repeated confrontations with the city's municipal workers' unions. It does not mention that in 1969 Lindsay had lost the Republican nomination to John Marchi in the primary, while a conservative Democrat, Mario Proccacino, had defeated a slew of liberal Democratic candidates. Running on the Liberal Party ticket, Lindsay had won a narrow victory with just 42 percent of the vote. But Lindsay remained a darling of the liberal media, and by 1970 he had joined a number of other liberal politicians in essentially taking up the cause of the war protesters against the war. So it was that in the week that a large body of construction workers decided to beat up antiwar student demonstrators in downtown Manhattan, Lindsay had ordered that the flag over City Hall be lowered to half staff--not in honor of the week's casualties in Vietnam, but in honor of a single Kent State student killed by the National Guard who happened to hail from Long Island. At the height of the second phase of the riot, the hard hats intimidated Lindsay's staff into raising it again. They still believed in the positive symbolism of the American flag, not that of the Vietcong flag which so many protesters carried.
By 1972, the war had wound down, draft calls had fallen and the end of the draft was imminent, and campuses were quiet. Meanwhile, George McGovern, an early opponent of the war and the favorite of the new Democratic left, had won Democratic nomination. Nixon carried every jurisdiction but Massachusetts (where I proudly soldiered in the McGovern campaign) and the District of Columbia, with 60.7 percent of the popular vote, and the era of Republican majorities--briefly and narrowly interrupted by Jimmy Carter in 1976 after Watergate--had begun.
I am now convinced that the leftwing Boomer revolt of the late 1960s was the first step in something much bigger: a general revolt touching every major group in American society against the strict discipline and spirit of sacrifice for the common good that had dominated the middle third of the twentieth century. In subsequent decades that revolt led to lower taxes, less government regulation, and the overturning of virtually every social taboo that had shaped American life hitherto. That revolt secured basic rights for women and gays, on the one hand, but freed business from the regulatory hand of the federal government, on the other. It encouraged the better off to use their power to become even better off--not only business people and financial interests, but professionals in law, academia, and medicine as well. It was closely related the increasing inequality of income and wealth that began in the 1970s and reversed the trends of the previous 30 years, for both white and black Americans. It destroyed the loyalty of both Democrats and Republicans to their party establishments and thus paved the way for Donald Trump. And all this proves, to me, that the extraordinary discipline of the midcentury period that allowed institutions to do so much--sometimes for evil, but more often for good--represented only one side of human nature, and provoked, as Newton would say, an equal and opposite reaction.
In 1941 an historian from the previous Prophet generation, a Harvard professor named Roger Merriman who had taught an introductory history course to students including Franklin Roosevelt and John R. Kennedy, gave his last lecture before retiring. He emphasized that history was a succession of alternating periods, one tending towards more centralized power, the next towards anarchy. He could not have known then, anymore than we did in 1965, that the next turning point in that long story was only a few decades away. I did not, because of certain intellectual changes in academia that are also part of the story I have been telling, have the opportunity to play the role that he did at Harvard or anywhere else, but thanks to my friend William Strauss (d. 2007) and his co-author Neil Howe, I have been able to revive the tradition to which he belonged. The students of the late 1960s did not on their own cause the changes we have lived through, they played their key role in an historical drama that was written many millennia ago, and which no generation can control. We are in another climactic drama now--and however it ends, it will not be the last. Such is the way of history.
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