I came of age in the late 1960s, at the apogee of that tumultuous time in American history. In the spring of my junior year in high school, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated and revolution convulsed the streets of Paris. A few months later Mayor Daley’s police busted the heads of anti-war protesters at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. When I entered Yale University in 1969, as part of the first class of undergraduate women, breaking that gender barrier seemed tame compared to manning the barricades.
On May Day 1970, demonstrators converged on New Haven to protest against the trial of Black Panther leader Bobby Seale for the murder of an alleged FBI informant. When news broke of the secret US bombing of Cambodia, the protest expanded to include the bloody war in Southeast Asia. Yale’s president Kingman Brewster opened the university’s gates to feed and house thousands of young people who came from across the country. Meanwhile, the Nixon White House dispatched 4000 National Guard troops to join the ranks of armed state troopers in the city.
The day before the protest was scheduled to begin, President Nixon upped the ante, announcing the invasion of Cambodia and denouncing domestic dissidents in a televised speech to the nation. “My fellow Americans, we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home,” he warned. “We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last 500 years. Even here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed.”1
Speaking the next day at the Pentagon, he was even blunter. “You know, you see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses. Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world and here they are, burning up the books, I mean, storming around about this issue, I mean, you name it. Get rid of the war, there’ll be another one.”2
The May Day demonstration in New Haven went off relatively smoothly, but things got scarier that night. Street skirmishes drove protesters to seek refuge in our dorms as tear gas wafted through the windows. We got off lightly. On May 4, Ohio National Guardsmen shot four students dead at Kent State University and wounded nine others. Less than two weeks later, two more students lay dead and eleven were wounded at Jackson State University in Mississippi. The killings galvanized a national student strike movement and classes were suspended at many colleges and universities, including Yale. It felt like I was living on the edge of a revolution.
Personal transformations were in the air, too. I became a feminist, and then, after spending a year working in India in 1971–72, a believer in third world peasant revolution. During my last year of college, two close friends, my boyfriend (now my husband, Jim), and I began to talk about going back to the land.
The prospect of nuclear annihilation added to our sense of urgency. For the most idealistic of my generation, the task was nothing less than saving the human race and the planet. We would build sturdy arks to survive the apocalypse. Our music reflected our hopes and fears. In 1965, a tune called “Eve of Destruction,” recorded by Barry McGuire, hit the top of the pop charts. I was 14 years old and knew all the verses by heart. At Woodstock in 1969, Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills & Nash both played the haunting song “Wooden Ships,” in which a young man and woman from enemy sides stumble upon each other after a holocaust, munch on purple berries, and float peacefully away as others perish around them. “We are leaving, you don’t need us,” goes its refrain.
The specter of the bomb knit together the diverse utopian experiments of the 1960s and ’70s. The 1962 Port Huron Statement that launched Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) captured the mood: “Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living.” If so, why not experiment? Maybe a new revolutionary millennium was to come—maybe it had already been born in Maoist China, still hidden from the world by the bamboo curtain. It was imperative to devise new ways to live in harmony with each other and with nature. We would strike the right balance between manual and intellectual labor, work and leisure, communal solidarity and individual freedom, escaping as much as possible from the capitalist world’s cruel hierarchies of class, race, and gender.
On graduating from college, Jim and I received grants to go to Bangladesh, so we put the back-to-the-land dream on hold. Our friends moved to make the dream a reality. They lived rent-free in an abandoned farmhouse in West Virginia until they scraped together enough money to buy 70 acres along with another couple. The house that came with the land had been grand in its time, but now it had no windows, electricity, heat, or running water. It was being used to store hay.
We returned from two years in Bangladesh in serious culture shock and reeling from the political violence we’d witnessed there. We needed a place to live cheaply where we could write our book about the village. Though we’d grown enormously during our time away, we hadn’t outgrown the back-to-the-land dream. Our friends invited us to join them in West Virginia and to build a cabin on their land. When my grandfather counseled against building on property we didn’t own, I bristled at his bourgeois values.
And so we bought an old Dodge Dart for $150, packed it with our belongings, and headed to Appalachia in the fall of 1976. After the crowded cities and highways of the northeast, driving into West Virginia was pure liberation. We floated over rolling waves of green hills, and from their crests glimpsed tantalizing views of steep meadows and pastures. The John Denver song, “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” was our anthem. It did seem “almost heaven,” this West Virginia he celebrated, though his geography was a little off—the Shenandoah River and Blue Ridge Mountains the song extolls are further east in Virginia. It didn’t matter. The map we were following led more to a dream than to any specific locale.
Countless others took such journeys. Some went back to the land, others formed urban communes or joined the political underground. The ’60s, or whatever one chooses to call the era since it stretched well into the ’70s, were heady times. In our youthful zeal to transform the world, few of us realized that we were acting out a much older American apocalyptic tradition. Had we understood this, we might have better prepared ourselves for the political challenges that lay ahead—the rise of Reagan, the collapse of Communism, the new wars on the horizon. Nixon’s remark, “Get rid of the war, there’ll be another one,” proved all too prescient.
Writing this book has taken me on a long journey—back to my past, but also toward the future. My generation’s apocalyptic terrors and utopian dreams were my starting point, but I realized that to understand them I had to look much further back in American history. Our apocalyptic mindset was less the exception than the rule.
Today apocalypse is again in the air Americans breathe, blown on a swirling wind of religious prophesies, sci-fi movies, doomsday prepper TV shows, environmental predictions, and worst-case national security scenarios. A young college student recently told me she didn’t see any point in having children since the planet is headed toward collapse. To ride out the coming apocalypse in style, a number of super-wealthy American tech executives and hedge-fund managers are buying up land in New Zealand or investing in luxury survival condos in old underground nuclear missile silos. The latter feature sniper posts so armed militia can protect against unwanted intruders.3 And now we have a president whose apocalyptic rhetoric is calculated to raise fear to a fever pitch. Trump’s policies also heighten insecurities about the future. The more his administration slows progress on environmentalism, for example, the worse the long-term impacts of climate change will likely be. While it’s hard not to be anxious and pessimistic in the present moment, we need to resist the temptation to become apocalyptic.
In the course of writing this book, I spent four months in New Delhi, India as a Fulbright Scholar. There’s so much more there than here to induce doomsday despair—deadly pollution, nightmarish traffic congestion, unconscionable rates of poverty and disease. Not a pretty picture, in other words. Yet people in Delhi seemingly went about their lives without fear that the world would soon end. They didn’t shoulder that unnecessary burden. Why do so many Americans shoulder it, then? What’s so appealing about the burden that we can’t lay it down?
My hope is that this book challenges Americans to think beyond the apocalypse, sparking fresh thinking and opening new windows on the world. In writing it, I have felt the burden of apocalypse slip slowly from my own shoulders. It’s a big relief.
Amherst, Massachusetts—December 2016