Understanding the Sixties
by Richard J. Moss

Americans have the peculiar habit of slicing up their past into decades. We use terms like the 1950s, the 1920s and the 1930s with an easy assurance that we will be understood. Only slightly more problematical are terms like the Gay Nineties (the 1890s). Certainly the 1960s have become not merely a decade but a concise topic over which historians and others have expended much ink. Douglas T. Miller '58's On Our Own: America in the Sixties (D.C. Heath) is a sane and non-political contribution to the ongoing attempt to make some sense of that crucial decade.
Miller, a history professor at Michigan State University, has a clearly defined point of view. He believes that the 1960s was one of the most important moments in the American past and that American life was substantially transformed between the late 1950s and 1974. The agent for this transformation was "the Movement," which Miller sees as a combination of the various protests aimed at almost all aspects of American culture. The "Movement," in protesting on so many fronts (civil rights, feminism, gay rights, environmentalism), amounted to a profound critique of the status quo in the United States. Miller also believes that we have to understand the Sixties by tracing its roots in the Fifties and by following the decade's impact on the Seventies and beyond.
On one point, Miller stands in contrast with accepted wisdom on the nature of the Sixties and especially the New Left. Several very influential books, most notably Allen Matusow's The Unraveling of America (1984), have established the idea of "coming apart" or "unraveling" as the dominant theme in the 1960s. In this view, the New Left or "the Movement" blossomed in the Sixties as traditional liberal remedies for the nation's problems proved incapable of solving long-term problems such as poverty and civil rights for minorities. By the late Sixties, the violent clash between liberalism and the New Left had left the country exhausted, anxious and divided. Miller does not reject the notion that many of the values that had tied Americans together frayed and snapped in the late Sixties, but he concludes that the "coming apart" thesis "overemphasizes the extent of America's unraveling [and] leads to a false sense that the era came to an abrupt end and thereby downplays the enormous impact and legacies of the decade." Miller would have us understand that for many Americans the late Sixties and early Seventies were not an era of despair and decline but rather a fertile period of liberation and experimentation.
While the book is exceedingly well written and is a joy to read, it is also an excellent reference to have on your bookshelf when you need to sort out your failed or failing memories of the Sixties. Miller has even included an appendix, "The Language of the Sixties," for those who have forgotten the meaning of "lid," "far out," "unreal" and "trip." Miller also has included many well-chosen illustrations that take us back to memories that hurt (a beaming Lyndon Johnson, an immolated monk in Vietnam) or that make us smile (Bob Dylan, a great image of Timothy Leary, astronauts).
I have long suspected that during the Sixties Americans became, as they had in the past, particularly sensitive to the symbolic meaning of events. To some extent fueled by an expanding media, Americans were flooded by a relentless tide of interpretations that found meaning (often ominous, often hopeful) in events large and small. In "Twilight of the Movement," one of the best chapters in the book, Miller gives a full illustration of the remarkable degree to which Americans were engaged in a complex game of attaching symbolic meanings to events. By turns, the rock concert at Woodstock meant that the age of Love and Peace was at hand, and then the rock concert at Altamont meant the end of hope and the coming of the era of Death and Despair. The symbol making went on and on; America became a nation addicted to a daily reading of the national tea leaves.
At the heart of On Our Own is a tension between this constant desire to find meaning in small events and the clear fact that in the long run, meaning was rooted in larger but often less dramatic trends such as women's liberation or environmental reform. In the end, the book allows us to understand that the Sixties was a vastly complex era that was often grossly misunderstood by the people who lived it. We are only now coming to understand its lasting significance and what it accomplished. Doug Miller's On Our Own: America in the Sixties is a fine place to get that perspective, that larger understanding of these crucial years.