What
has been the legacy of the Sixties in our own lives and the life of our country? Was
it all for the better, the worse, or, as Chou En-Lai said of the French Revolution, is it too soon to tell?
Chou En-Lai’s famous but misunderstood
remark is highly apropos today’s symposium. Chou was talking with Henry
Kissinger in the early 1970s and was almost certainly referring not to the French Revolution but rather to the Paris
student riots of May 1968, whose leaders had been emphatically Maoist. According
to Chou’s biographer, Gao Wenqian, “too soon to tell”
was probably not a bon mot at all but just a throwaway, a polite way of changing the subject.
At the time, Chou was mopping up after the Cultural Revolution—still in full fury in 1968 before the Red Guards were disbanded,
which had left Chinese society and culture a shambles and piled up another million or so corpses on top of the dozens of millions
from the Great Leap Forward. So the subject of the Paris student riots would have struck very close to home and not been something he would
have wanted to talk about with a foreigner. Anyway, Chou had himself been a young
radical agitator in Paris before getting serious as leader
of the Nanchang Uprising of 1927 which launched the Chinese Civil War. Nanchang had been an exciting failure that he then followed up, and
in a way redeemed, with forty-five years of hard military leadership and painstaking diplomacy. Chou knew that after moments of revolutionary exuberance have passed there remains the world to contend
with.
I think that demography
played a trick on the college seniors of 1968 in Paris and in the United States. We regarded ourselves
as uniquely idealistic and public-spirited, as young people often do, but our idealism was coupled with an unusual sense of
self-importance. This was the headiness of power acquired when young—in
our case, of being the avant-garde of the baby-boom adults, before which our elders quaked even then. Our numbers gave us tremendous social and cultural influence, such that our youthful romanticism endured
much longer than is typically the case or than Churchill’s dictum allows. The
Spirit of 1968 (not the view of all of us by any means, but certainly the class zeitgeist) was that we were destined to make the world afresh, all in our own image, unconstrained
by whatever that was that had come before. Many of us held it like a talisman
even as we grew into careers and families and encountered the real choices and disappointments of adulthood.
It was a trick because attitude
gets you only so far. In the United
States, radicalism marginalizes itself and ultimately fails on its own terms. The story of American liberalism is the progressive extension of freedom and equality to new groups and
new circumstances. But freedom and equality are our country’s formal, founding
ideals, and many Americans are very patriotic. We have reformed ourselves not
by turning the world upside down or rejecting our past but rather by reinterpreting and enlarging our past. The founders were practical revolutionaries, realistic rather than romantic about human nature and wary
of the corruptions of power. Abe Lincoln freed the slaves by looking backward—elevating
the Declaration to the status of constitutional charter and national imperative. The
Women’s Christian Temperance Union was far more effective in the suffrage movement than Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan
B. Anthony. The Progressive Era was launched by a Republican, the union movement
was staunchly anti-socialist, the New Deal was to save capitalism from itself, and Martin Luther King Jr. made his base of
operations the Bible itself.
In
contrast, the student radicalism of the Sixties was finished as an effective political force within months of our graduation
in June 1968. Although there is room for argument around the margins (aspects
of environmentalism, local government in a few places), I would say that it has had essentially no even temporary influence
on American politics. Sixties radicalism turned inward, so to speak, and has
had a very large temporal influence within the academic world; but this, I believe, is already in steep decline. Deconstructionism in literature, philosophy, and social science is losing out to approaches that respect
text, logic, and evidence; it will probably not survive as more than a footnote. Academic
feminism has produced some interesting work but has become desiccated and insular. The
current president of Harvard and her predecessor have both gone out of their way to say nice things about ROTC. To today’s students, the Sixties is a distant and vaguely ridiculous era; John Lennon is a dead white
male and not thought any less of for that.
But there is one area of the
country’s life where the distinctive contribution of the Sixties has been profound and actually heroic and will certainly
endure. This has been in the progressive integration of women, blacks, and other
minority groups into social life and institutions—including, lest we forget, Jews when we were much younger, and of
course gays more recently. Here our great contributions were not in the political
or academic realms (the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the work of our fuddy-duddy parents including the hated LBJ) but rather
in private, commercial, and professional life. Social and legal equality was
to us a simple imperative—we simply insisted on it, sometimes at significant personal cost. Especially in our marriages, we made some big mistakes in assuming that the two-career marriages and families
that we pioneered would be natural and obvious and unproblematic. Those who have
come after us have been more realistic and more successful: they have learned from our examples and are in our debt. We also fell pray to some nasty racial politics, but now the racialism of Sharpton
is being supplanted by the Age of Obama. When young friends of mine role their
eyes at the antics of their aging hippy professors, I am amused and gratified; but when they roll their eyes at my generation’s
preoccupation with issues of race and gender, I give them a little lecture about Mississippi and Bedford-Stuyvesant in the
1960s, and my Radcliffe classmates who, I later learned, secretly took lunch from their book bags in toilet stalls in Harvard
classroom buildings.
Ours was the Normandy Landing
of social equality. We took a lot of hits and we sometimes got disoriented and
made wrong turns, but it never occurred to us to turn back, and through sheer mass we ended up securing and civilizing immense
fields of life. I won’t pause to acknowledge the remaining imperfections:
we have through innumerable personal deeds help to build, just in our lifetimes, the most successfully diverse society there
has ever been. In this respect our country is a much better place then we found
it. We would be right to take some generational pride in that achievement.
