THERE WERE 180 MILLION people living in the United States in 1961. The Shattering starts with a handful of them posing for a picture on the Fourth of July.
A number so small can’t represent a nation so large, but they weren’t a bad match. They were urban people in a nation dominated by cities and their surging suburbs, working people in an economy dominated by factories, native-born Americans in a country where immigrants’ share of the population had tumbled to its lowest point in more than a century. They were husbands and wives in a country where 72 percent of adults were married, the younger couples raising their kids together at a time when 88 percent of parents with school-age children lived with their spouses. Every one of them was white, as were 85 percent of Americans. And they were to a striking degree safe and secure.
Then the sixties cracked their nation open. What follows is a history of that crack-up.
The idea is hardly new. For almost fifty years historians have seen the 1960s and early 1970s—what they’ve come to call the “long sixties” 1—as the pivotal point in the fracturing of modern American public life. Over time their analyses have grown increasingly sophisticated, but the broad outlines have remained much the same. The United States emerged from World War II the most powerful nation on earth, the argument runs, its diplomatic reach genuinely global, its economy three times the size of its closest competitor, and its military capabilities almost beyond imagining. For a few postwar years politicians and policy makers struggled to make sense of the nation’s new position. In the late 1940s they began to reach an understanding of what needed to be done. Having failed to stand against Nazi Germany in the 1930s, they decided that the United States would now stand against its rogue-state successor, the Soviet Union, as it tried to spread Communism across the wounded world. The expansion of the nation’s international commitments dovetailed with a drive toward domestic tranquility. The Cold War crushed American radicalism, while the nation’s unparalleled prosperity convinced the Republican Party finally to support the liberal reforms of the 1930s and the Democrats to stop pushing for more. “The ideological age has ended,” wrote the brilliant social critic Daniel Bell in 1959, the old passions of the Right and the Left having been replaced by a relentlessly moderate consensus. A “middle way,” he said, “for the middle-aged.” 2
But not for the young. In the standard history the shattering started with the idealism of a new generation unwilling to accept the compromises the consensus required. Bell had caught hints of it in 1959, though he thought it nothing more than young intellectuals’ yearning for a cause to believe in. By the time his essay appeared, in April 1960, it was already coursing through the South in a wave of sit-ins inspired by four college freshmen, the oldest of them barely nineteen. Over the next few years it surged across the country, pulling young pacifists into the Freedom Rides, young organizers into Mississippi, young protesters into Birmingham’s mean streets, young liberals into government service, young hipsters into the avant-garde, and young radicals into the open. In the rush of events that followed, they swept away the measured politics their elders had embraced.
Precisely when the postwar accord collapsed remains an open question. Some versions date its fall to the latter half of 1963, when the civil rights movement broke the white South’s grip on the Democratic Party; others to the tensions that cut through the election of 1964; yet others to the summer of 1965, when Lyndon Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam and a portion of South Central Los Angeles—a neighborhood called Watts—went up in flames. From there the story lines shift: first to the agonies of the Left, then to the resurgence of the Right, and ultimately to the intertwining of the two in the fiercely polarized politics of the Nixon years, a world removed from the 1950s. “A nation that had believed itself to be at consensus instead becoming one of . . . two loosely defined congeries of Americans, each convinced that should the other triumph, everything decent and true and worth preserving would end,” says Rick Perlstein in his marvelous history of Richard Nixon’s rise. “That was the 1960s.” 3
It’s a powerful story, often beautifully told. But for a while now the best scholarship on postwar America has been moving in ways that challenge its central premises. How does a story that begins with consensus explain the rounds of repression and violence historians have uncovered in the 1950s, from the federal government’s institutionalization of homophobia to whites’ repeated assaults on African Americans who dared to move into their neighborhoods? How does a narrative that pivots on generational change incorporate historians’ recent emphasis on the long histories of civil rights activism and modern conservatism? What happens to the polarization that closes the story, now that historians have developed a more subtle reading of the red/blue divide? How are we to understand the sixties, now that so much history has changed?
The first step, The Shattering argues, is to set aside the consensus politics and put in its place the particular interests of the postwar era’s rapidly expanded middling classes: ordinary Americans with jobs to keep, kids to raise, pensions to build, mortgages to pay, and memories of harder times to put behind them. There the dominant politicians of the 1950s made their stand, in defense of that swath of the nation Dwight Eisenhower called “the common man.” 4 That commitment helped to give his foreign policy the mix of caution and aggression he believed the middling classes wanted to see. And it defined the intense focus on security at home, anchored by the warfare state Ike came to fear, the middling culture he loved, and the quiet extension of the nation’s racial regime.
Even at its mid-fifties peak, that political order was a fragile arrangement, its boundaries repeatedly tested and occasionally broken. In the first half of the 1960s they were fully breached. The young played a pivotal part in their wreckage, as the standard story says. So did older activists steeped in traditions the previous decade’s politics had marginalized: people like Ella Baker, the radical democrat who gave the civil rights movement its vanguard organization; Estelle Griswold, the birth control advocate whose singular act of defiance won Americans a right they’d never had; Bayard Rustin, the radical pacifist who brought a quarter million Americans to the Lincoln Memorial on a brilliant summer day in 1963 to demand jobs and freedom; and Lloyd and Dolores Herbstreith, the veteran McCarthyites who on a snowy night in 1964 decided that Alabama’s racist governor, George Wallace, ought to be president of the United States. As important as they were, though, activists alone didn’t bring the order down. It also cracked from within, as some of its key constraints were stripped away by a transformative series of Supreme Court rulings, Lyndon Johnson’s willingness to confront the nation’s original sin, and his calculation that the country ought to fight a war he knew it couldn’t win.
As the barriers fell, the forces they were meant to contain surged forward, some of them moving precisely as the 1950s’ leading men had feared they would, others in directions they’d never imagined. It’s true that the tumult plunged the Left into crisis and reinvigorated the Right, a process made plain in the chaotic summer of 1968, when millions of Americans responded to the violence engulfing the Democratic Party by taking up the Herbstreiths’ dream of a Wallace presidency. But that November three times as many people voted for the candidate who’d painstakingly positioned himself as the champion of the embattled center, a politics he’d learned from the president he’d served. With that vote the 1960s took their final turn, not to the polarization of left and right—though during the Nixon years there were moments so divisive reasonable people feared that the nation was coming undone—but to a bitter, often brutal struggle between an administration determined to reconstruct the order the decade’s upheavals had shattered and those forces the shattering had released: a struggle for the nation’s future shaped by the enormous weight of its past, as the rest of the sixties had been.
That story can be told in any number of ways. I’ve given it a narrative form shaped from the intertwined histories of three of the 1960s’ defining challenges: one shaped by the African American struggle to bring down the United States’ long-standing racial system, another by the nation’s foreign policy and the devastating war it produced, the third by the government’s right to regulate its citizens’ sexuality. My focus on those challenges inevitably crowds out others. I barely touch on the Latino, Asian-American, and Native American movements that developed during the decade. I give only passing attention to the campaign the resurgent women’s movement waged to break gender discrimination in the workplace. And I spend no time at all on the United States’ deepening role in the Middle East and environmentalism’s remarkably broad-based challenge to corporate America, though the first Earth Day in April 1970 outdrew the era’s largest anti-war protest by a margin of ten to one. Those were agonizing choices to make. But I’m convinced that the sixties are best revealed by diving deeply into those three defining struggles.
Much of the narrative revolves around the massive political, economic, and social structures that by the 1960s had come to dominate American life. I’ll argue, for instance, that it’s impossible to understand the course of the Vietnam War without seeing how it became entangled with the financial order that connected the United States to the rest of the Western world. History isn’t shaped by structures alone, though, no matter how powerful they may be. Individual actions matter too, as do the complex mix of experiences, beliefs, and emotions that lie behind them. That is why The Shattering burrows again and again into the lives of activists, politicians, and policy makers, and why it opens with a small group of people the postwar order was meant to serve, posing for a picture on Eddy Street.