[sixties-l] 'A Generation Divided': book review

From: radman (resist@best.com)
Date: Wed May 31 2000 - 03:04:16 CUT

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    From:
    <http://www.reason.com/0006/bk.jw.category.html>

    A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s, by
    Rebecca E. Klatch, Berkeley: University of California Press, 386 pages,
    $22.95

    Category Killers
    By Jesse Walker
    Reason, June 2000

    Those who believe in stable, immutable political categories will have a
    hard time interpreting the career of Cindy Decker (a pseudonym).
    Decker's mother belonged to the John Birch Society, and Cindy's earliest
    political views, formed as a teen in the early 1960s, reflected those of
    the radical right. Another Bircher arranged for Cindy to spend two weeks
    at the Freedom School, an academy in Colorado Springs run by free market
    guru Robert LeFevre. There, Birchite skepticism about socialism veered
    into skepticism about any sort of state, and she found herself taking in
    lectures espousing anarchism, atheism, and pacifism.

    Decker got involved with a fellow she met there, and he drew her into
    the Minutemen, an anti-communist paramilitary group. At the same
    time--1964--she started going to the University of Kansas, where she got
    involved in the civil rights, antiwar, and hippie movements.
    Increasingly disturbed by the racist element in the Minutemen, she wound
    up moving to Berkeley and joining the national council of Students for a
    Democratic Society. There, among socialists, she espoused
    libertarianism--even as she joined a drive to organize tuna cannery
    workers.

    There must have been something in the Kansas air: Gus diZerega studied
    there too, and through a series of odd events managed simultaneously to
    chair the campus chapters of SDS and the conservative Young Americans
    for Freedom. DiZerega's introduction to non-Euclidean politics came at
    the YAF chapter's third meeting, when a beautiful young woman--perhaps
    Decker, though diZerega doesn't identify her--arrived and sat in the
    back of the room. She turned out to be the secretary of the local SDS,
    and after the meeting she told diZerega that his group was a bunch of
    "fascists."

    "Fascists believe in big government," she said. "You believe in the
    draft, don't you?"

    "Well, yeah," replied diZerega.

    "Doesn't the draft mean big government controlling people?" she asked.

    Suddenly on the defensive, diZerega decided, after a little more back
    and forth, that he should try attacking instead. "Well, you socialists
    believe in big government," he said.

    "I'm not a socialist," she replied. "I'm an anarchist." And that,
    diZerega reports, was when things started "to get real bent."

    * * * * *

    Both of the above stories come fromA Generation Divided: The New Left,
    the New Right, and the 1960s, a remarkable book by Rebecca Klatch, a
    sociologist at the University of California at San Diego. Many histories
    of SDS have been written, and lately there have been several volumes
    about YAF as well. Klatch is one of the few scholars to look at both.
    The result is a study that is complex, textured, and three-dimensional.

    Klatch's book was inspired by Karl Mannheim's essay "The Problem of
    Generations," which, she writes, "argues that people in the same age
    group share a historical location in the same way that people of the
    same class share a social location." Within these generations, she
    continues, "there exist separate and even antagonistic
    generation-units," which "form a dynamic relationship of tension. At the
    same time that they are in conflict, they are also oriented toward one
    another; their antagonisms are part of an ongoing conversation." Curious
    how people "could have lived through the same events and interpreted
    them in such radically different ways," Klatch applied Mannheim's model
    to those who came of age in the '60s, interviewing 74 veterans of SDS
    and YAF.

    Klatch entered her project understanding that generations aren't
    monolithic. She emerged understanding that "left" and "right" aren't
    monolithic either. Many pictures emerge from her book, but the clearest
    image is one of openness, even adventure: of young people trying to make
    sense of the world around them, exploring it, trying out ideas without
    much regard for rigid categories.

    Yes, the book contains a lot of the life stories you'd expect: SDSers
    who became professors or therapists, YAFers who took a direct route to
    button-down Beltway jobs. But what to make of Decker (whose path
    eventually earned her a master's in public health) or diZerega (now a
    professor of political science, an environmentalist, and a Wiccan
    elder)?

    Or Rob Tyler (another pseudonym), a former Youth for Goldwater who
    turned to anarchism, got purged from YAF, and bitterly "spent the whole
    summer afterward smoking hashish and listening to Dylan records"? In the
    '70s, Tyler moved to Los Angeles' Venice Beach, got into Rastafarianism,
    inhaled a lot of weed, started talking with Vietnamese and Cambodian
    refugees, was horrified by their stories of Communist atrocities, and
    ended up working for the Reagan campaign. These days he's a lawyer. Got
    that?

    And what about SDSer Barry Skolnick? (Yes, that's another pseudonym.) A
    red-diaper baby, in the '70s he joined the October League, a Leninist
    group, and set to "organizing" the factories. The League fell apart in
    1979, and Skolnick passed through a series of jobs--cabbie, teacher,
    reporter--before starting work at a company that manufactures truck
    parts. Now he runs his own business, where, he told Klatch, he's
    "ironically...trying to develop joint ventures between American truck
    manufacturers and transportation companies and Soviet companies." (This
    was in 1990.) He is disillusioned with Marxism--he's "down on genocide
    and mass executions and gulags, reform through labor, and those kinds of
    things." But he's still a leftist, though he believes that "without the
    free market, you can't have democracy."

    * * * * *

    These people aren't Hollywood-hatched ciphers la Forrest Gump,
    trekking through each standard station of the '60s cross. These are
    lives that actual people actually led, each with its own eccentric
    detours. Even the well-known interviewees--Weatherman terrorist turned
    Democratic activist Bernardine Dohrn, libertarian folksinger turned
    conservative congressman Dana Rohrabacher --took unusual paths. If
    anything, their careers seem stranger than the rest.

    None of this is to suggest that SDS and YAF weren't very different
    groups, or that they weren't generally opposed to one another. Klatch
    finds several clear distinctions between them--and, within YAF, between
    the libertarian and traditionalist factions. (Today the word
    *traditionalist* has an agrarian aura, but back then it simply denoted
    support for relatively free markets, the Cold War, and "ordered
    liberty.") Besides the obvious ideological differences, there are
    recurrent sociological patterns: Most of the interviewees came from
    privileged backgrounds, but the leftists tended to come from the highest
    crust, with the libertarians in turn enjoying more privileges than the
    trads. Younger radicals were more likely to join the hippie subculture
    than were those who joined the New Left in the early '60s; libertarians,
    similarly, were more likely to go psychedelic than traditionalists were.

    * * * * *

    But these are broad statements, more a background against which people
    can move than a set of rules that everyone is obliged to follow. And
    even these generalizations were no doubt fuzzier among '60s youth than
    Klatch's book implies. Her sample, after all, consists of committed
    activists, people who were far more ideological than their peers. What
    about the freshman who flirts with socialism, reads Ayn Rand, and joins
    a bowdlerized Buddhist group, without committing to any particular
    vision? What about the hard-working community college student who plans
    to be a nurse, usually votes Republican--and experiments with LSD? What
    about the vaguely liberal 20-year-old who goes to peace marches to pick
    up women? The activists Klatch interviewed helped launch the sweeping
    social transformations of the past 35 years, putting such notions as
    cohabitation and gay rights onto the agenda. But it was these other
    people--less visible and more eclectic--who integrated those changes
    into everyday life. (And it was they who let other ideas of the era,
    from rural communes to geodesic domes, rot in history's dustbin.)

    There are other inevitable distortions, characteristics that distinguish
    this book's activists from most of their peers. Most, as I mentioned,
    came from relatively privileged backgrounds: For more than half, both
    parents had completed at least some college. Many were raised by people
    who cared deeply about politics. Only three of the SDSers and one of the
    YAFers are black. This may be a fair sample of those two organizations,
    but it does not represent a whole generation.

    I don't fault Klatch for this--despite A Generation Divided's sweeping
    title, most Americans who reached adulthood in the '60s simply lay
    outside her study's boundaries. But her book opens the door to those
    other stories, to a near-infinite range of events and intersections that
    our historical stereotypes ignore. Klatch's book might inspire another
    scholar to explore those other strains of '60s youth. Or perhaps stories
    such as Decker's and Tyler's will inspire someone to look for more
    ideological border crossers of the era--and not just among young people.
    For instance: It's well established, though rarely remembered, that many
    of the most militant labor dissidents of the '60s--angry rank-and-filers
    who thought their unions were too supine--voted for George Wallace.

    Pacifism and the Cold War, traditional families and feminism, Reaganism
    and the counterculture: Klatch's book doesn't dissolve these seeming
    opposites, but it does force us to consider the unpredictable ways
    they've influenced each other. The categories we impose on the past
    aren't as stable as we sometimes assume. History, after all, is not the
    sum of our theories; it is the sum of our chaotic lives.



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