Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up Page 15
As supporters attempted to supply the occupiers with food and supplies, fraternity members, athletes, and others attempted to block their way. When occupation sympathizers attempted to throw food bags up toward the windows of the buildings under siege, opponents used “an improvised air defense system” of trash can lids to bring the parcels crashing to the ground. A proliferation of armbands seemed to illustrate hardening attitudes: orange among supporters, blue among opponents, green among neutral advocates of amnesty. A campus statue of Rodin’s The Thinker soon was outfitted in all three colors as one writer suggested, “He looked as if even he was having a hard time making up his mind.”
After Columbia’s president sent police into the occupied buildings to clear out the students, and then dropped all charges against them, television and print media began a frenzied chronicle of student challenges to the Establishment, now increasingly labeled the “generation gap.” As one writer observed, “These days the more we talk, the more we know we’re a generation apart on almost everything. We’re fascinated with the problem of how to get through to each other.”
Although attitudes toward the Vietnam War were often based more on geographical location, family background, or academic major than on age, the “generation gap” itself was not necessarily a myth. Even students who differed violently on the war often agreed that they knew more about many issues than their frequently less-educated parents. Unlike twenty-first-century college students, who more often than not come from homes with college-educated parents, a startlingly high percentage of Boomer college students in the sixties had parents who had not even graduated from high school—a sure setting for heated dinner-table conversations. Most Boomers never occupied a campus building or were booked on police charges. Yet many of these young people looked at increasingly outdated Establishment rules and insisted that now was the time for reform. Amazingly, as Boomers pressed for change, authorities often backtracked, compromised, or waffled, setting up a future round of demands.
During the frigid, snowy winter of 1968–1969, female students in a prestigious suburban Philadelphia middle school confronted an uncomfortable reality in the sixties fashion revolution. School policy called for skirts or dresses, at a time when the mini-skirt was at the peak of popularity. As the school turned down thermostats to save energy, young women would enter the classrooms to sit on frigid plastic seats. A large number of these girls had older siblings in college, many of whom advised them to choose a day when every girl would wear pants, on the assumption that the authorities would not suspend all of them. On the appointed day, the vast majority took this advice and left their skirts at home. The principal initially balked but then conceded that, due to the cold weather, young ladies could wear pants as long as they were not jeans. For a time the victorious students happily complied. Then, several months later, a few girls wore “dressy” jeans. The remainder of the story is predictable. Challenging the Establishment in the sixties could mean anything from Jim Crow bars to a war in Southeast Asia to a seemingly capricious and outdated dress code. Yet if Boomer kids frequently argued over issues and tactics, virtually an entire generation agreed that “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” was a theme song they had in common.
This questioning would produce, in the short term, an escalating level of confrontation and violence. Only a year after the “summer of love” in San Francisco extolled the virtues of peace and harmony, enraged young people and angry police officers engaged in bloody skirmishes for control of Chicago’s Grant Park, which became the violent backdrop of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. As the haze of marijuana had wafted over Haight-Ashbury the summer before, the even more pungent odor of tear gas emerged as the sensory memory of Chicago. Yet if tolerance was at a premium that summer when racial and political epithets crisscrossed the bleeding nation, a new tolerance was just beginning to emerge behind the scenes. Soon white students at newly integrated Southern state universities would be lustily cheering black football and basketball players to defeat the real “adversary,” their rival schools. A progression of African-American-dominated music, from soul to rap to hip-hop, would enter mainstream culture and become the music of choice for large numbers of white teens. Americans of color would move from fringe roles in television and motion pictures to a dominant presence that would rival white actors. By the early twenty-first century, star power was largely colorblind, as for most young people plot and action trumped the racial or ethnic backgrounds of the stars.
The challenge to the Establishment that reached a crescendo of violence in Grant Park in the summer of 1968 would reach a far more peaceful and momentous climax four decades later in exactly the same location. On an unseasonably warm night in November 2008, an enormous crowd occupied Grant Park. Yet this time police officers merely acknowledged the people with smiles and waves. Unlike in 1968, the participants represented a wide range of Americans, from tiny infants to citizens who had already been middle-aged forty years earlier. African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and whites mixed easily, their most visible commonality being campaign buttons supporting a candidate for the American presidency. Then, after a momentary hush at 10 P.M. Central Time, a twenty-four-hour television satellite news channel (a media venue that would have been almost unthinkable forty years earlier) projected that the candidate favored by these onlookers had effectively won the presidency. The rock throwing and clubbing of 1968 were replaced by warm embraces, which included many of the men and women in blue. Finally, in the last hours of that momentous November 4, a rather young man who had known the sixties only as a child harkened back to the positive accomplishments of that tumultuous decade as he made his first speech as the newly elected president of a nation that had begun to grow more tolerant and accepting in the Boomer era.
10
THE SUMMER OF ’69 AND BEYOND
THE SUMMER OF 1939 was probably the most pleasant interlude in the often grim decade of the thirties, and the upbeat mood included the nation’s children and adolescents. Parents and children lined up to see The Wizard of Oz, and more than a few viewers sat mesmerized as the rather bleak black-and-white landscape of Dorothy’s Kansas was transformed into the stunning color of the Emerald City. Children at municipal pools and local swimming holes congregated to listen to Little Orphan Annie on the radio and saw the latest installments of the Andy Hardy and Nancy Drew movies in theaters that promised an air-conditioned escape from the heat.
The single largest concentration of young people on any given day that summer was in Flushing Meadows, New York, where the most spectacular World’s Fair in history had grabbed the nation’s attention. The theme of the exposition was “The World of Tomorrow,” which explored visions of American life in the distant 1960s. To reach the fair, parents, teenagers, and children boarded special runs of the Broadway Limited or Southern Crescent trains, climbed into narrow berths, or fidgeted in day coaches as the world of the late 1930s sped by. Then, almost like Dorothy’s entry to Oz, the pavilions of the World’s Fair loomed on the skyline. Boys in shirts and ties with slicked-back hair and girls with stylish hats, gloves, and Mary Jane shoes gasped in excitement as they were offered a taste of a 1960s world of television, superhighways, and monorails. Then this brief escape from the still-grinding economic downturn ended as summer gave way to a sober autumn in which Europe plunged into war. As Hitler’s legions swept across the Continent, one by one the lights of foreign pavilions darkened forever, and Americans prepared for the grim possibility of war.
Three decades later the children of those excited young people who sampled the 1960s at Flushing Meadows would celebrate the last summer of the sixties in very different ways. Transistor radios and car speakers blasted out songs that would have shocked the kids of 1939. Two of the most frequently played songs, “Hair” and “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In,” were taken from the smash Broadway musical Hair, whose suggestive language and nudity would have landed the producers and actors in jail thirty years earlier.
The chil
dren of 1969 had access to the video entertainment world promised at Flushing Meadows, but on a much grander scale than those World’s Fair visitors could ever have imagined. Most children now had access to televisions double or triple the screen size imagined in 1939, with color sets largely replacing black-and-white, and new enterprises such as cable networks and the Public Broadcasting System offering a growing variety of attractions designed specifically for children.
The sleek superhighways envisioned in 1939 were now a reality, easing travel and vacations for Boomer children and their parents. The train experience was now largely the automobile experience as the rear seat of a car replaced the day coach as a child’s vantage point for viewing the American landscape.
If Flushing Meadows was the epicenter of a young person’s imagination in the summer of 1939, two locations transfixed attention three decades later. The first event, which began on Cape Kennedy, Florida, in a large sense fulfilled the promise of the World of Tomorrow. On July 20, 1969, the U.S. spacecraft Apollo XI landed on the moon, and Neil Armstrong turned the fantasy world of Buck Rogers into a reality when he became the first human to step onto an extraterrestrial world. John F. Kennedy had begun the sixties with a call for space travel; Neil Armstrong had ended the decade with the validation of that dream. For a moment, on that sultry summer evening, the generation gap briefly ended as small children, teenagers, college students, parents, and senior citizens huddled around flickering television sets sharing feelings of trepidation, relief, joy, and excitement for the long-awaited event.
Virtually everyone in America could understand and appreciate the accomplishments of the intrepid Apollo XI crew when Armstrong, followed by Buzz Aldrin, stepped down the ladder to the moon’s chalky surface in what he called “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” If members of the Greatest Generation equated the event with the 1930s adventures of Flash Gordon, Boomers sensed it was almost like a moment from Star Trek. Both age groups could agree that this was a moment in their lives to be remembered long after the Apollo program had ended.
The location of the other defining, if more controversial, event of the summer of 1969 was a muddy farm owned by Max Yasgur near the little town of Bethel, New York. There a group of promoters planned an event that, on the surface, sounded like a miniature version of the Flushing Meadows event of three decades earlier. They advertised the Woodstock Music and Art Fair: An Aquarian Exposition, a festival that at first glance might attract visitors from a variety of age groups. Instead of offering stately pavilions for well-dressed visitors, however, the promoters hoped to attract fifty thousand young people at eighteen dollars per person to hear Janis Joplin; Jimi Hendrix; Joan Baez; The Who; The Grateful Dead; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; and numerous other groups that defined Boomer popular music at the end of the sixties.
A turnout of fifty thousand for a concert on a rural thousand-acre farm would have been an impressive social event with substantial profits. As it turned out, the organizers received both more and less than they expected. Even before Jimi Hendrix played his spectacularly edgy version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a youth pilgrimage was under way. As roads clogged in the most massive traffic jam in the Empire State’s history, the first wave of arrivals was surging onto the grounds, knocking down fences and generally avoiding paying any admission charge. Three days of sultry heat punctuated by seemingly endless thunderstorms turned the venue into a sea of mud where a crowd nearly ten times the expected attendance banged on tambourines, sang, played songs, and shared food, drinks, and more than a few varieties of drugs.
Thirty years earlier Flushing Meadows had been filled with rather formally dressed young people sharing a vision of the future with their parents and grandparents. Now, in 1969, young people had created the third-largest city in New York virtually overnight, and, sometimes without any clothes at all, they were sharing a very different vision with one another in a community almost devoid of adults.
The “Aquarian Exposition” staged at Max Yasgur’s dairy farm attracted more than ten times as many participants as expected. In some respects Woodstock was a final celebration of sixties youth culture as the realities of career choices, parental responsibilities, and the economic downturn of the seventies emerged. (Henry Diltz/CORBIS)
Woodstock became the largest single gathering of Boomers that generation would ever experience, and there is little doubt that the postwar babies dominated the event. The oldest Boomers were now twenty-three and entering a transition between childhood and adulthood that was held in suspended animation for three days. The most visible contingent of pre-Boomer-era participants was made up of the members of the performing bands who had largely become the muses of the new generation. The performers, more than a few of whom would be dead before thirty, and their Boomer audience shared a vision of a future in which technological advances seemed relatively unimportant. As singer Joni Mitchell preached, “We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” Many of those soggy pilgrims sensed that at least for a brief period they were living in a world outside adult jurisdiction and rules, where sharing a sleeping bag could also mean sharing sexual partners, and the smoky haze drifting upward would not provoke adult sanctions. Even if most Boomers could not be physically present at Woodstock Nation, the turnout was so huge it seemed that “everyone” was there, especially to adults who tried to understand such a spontaneous event.
Beyond the mystique of Woodstock, the summer of 1969 represents a seminal moment in the Boomer childhood experience. At this point the largest percentage of the generation was composed of fully aware individuals who still occupied some form of dependent state required in any definition of childhood. The largest number of Boomers that would ever be enrolled in school was now getting ready to return to classrooms ranging from kindergarten to graduate school. Soon older Boomers would be leaving school faster than the youngest Boomers would replace them, and the 1970s would become an era of laid-off teachers, closed schools, and shrinking class size. In 1969 the large families of the Boomer era were still represented in the blended six-child family of The Brady Bunch, an enormously popular representation of the entire generation. If Woodstock was an iconic moment for Boomers who were about to become adults, the adventures of Greg and Marsha and their siblings showed a continuity of the childhood and family experience that dated to The Donna Reed Show and Leave It to Beaver, with the added attraction of six kids rather than two.
The autumn of 1969 also featured a series of domestic and foreign policy initiatives that, after a final flare-up of youth demonstrations, would gradually weaken the cultural and generational divide over the Vietnam War. Richard Nixon had run his successful 1968 presidential campaign on a promise of “peace with honor,” implying that the Vietnam conflict could be ended without American defeat. In the short term, the realization that the United States would not withdraw from Vietnam in the near future mobilized the most extensive and at times most violent youth opposition to the conflict. In the summer of 1969 the national convention of Students for a Democratic Society turned into a near brawl as the organization splintered into rival factions, each proclaiming itself the true believers of a national revolution. The most radical faction emerged as the Weathermen, who took their name from the lines of a Bob Dylan song, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” By October the Weathermen had assembled several hundred members in Chicago with the promise to “bring the war home” through vandalism, running battles with police, and domestic terrorism centered on a bombing campaign of schools and agencies that were accused of supporting the war. Weathermen leaders, such as Bernardine Dohrn and Mark Rudd, went underground as SDS itself devolved into ever smaller factions.
As SDS imploded, a new anti-war coalition, the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, formed around student government leaders, clergy, and Vietnam veterans who opposed the war. On October 15, 1969, the Committee sponsored a day of protests including demonstrations, vigils, an
d teach-ins in a great many communities, which included the participation of a number of children of senior Nixon administration officials. Four weeks later nearly a half-million demonstrators descended on Washington in the largest protest of the war. Yet just as this anti-war movement reached its greatest breadth of support and legitimacy, a series of administration initiatives and legislative priorities began to dampen the mood of protest. First, Nixon announced a plan of “Viet-namization,” in which South Vietnam troops would progressively replace American forces in combat. This allowed a series of ever larger troop withdrawals along with reduced American casualties. Second, the president and Congress largely agreed to replace conscription with volunteer armed forces and to reduce the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. Finally, until the draft was fully ended a lottery system would be initiated in which young men would be subject to call for only a single year and virtually assured of exemption if their lottery number was higher than Selective Service estimates for the coming year.
On a cold, early-December night in 1969, millions of male Boomers gathered around transistor radios or watched television to learn the matchup of birthdates and lottery numbers. For perhaps a third of these young men, their low numbers were a signal to prepare for conscription, enter the National Guard, or find a career that provided exemption from the draft. The remaining two-thirds were essentially given permission to go on with their lives in a society where Vietnam was gradually receding as a focal point of the Boomer experience. These older Boomers now joined their younger counterparts in an environment in which the Vietnam War was primarily a television image rather than a personal reality.