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Histories I: The Sixties, Then and Now
“Our long national nightmare is over.” These are the words spoken by Gerald
Ford, newly sworn in if never nationally elected President, in reference to the Watergate
scandal which paralyzed and polarized the nation for more than two years, ultimately
resulting in the only Presidential resignation in American history. Yet in 1974, following
a dozen years of ever increasingly violent challenges to what had long been considered
fundamental social, political, and moral tenets of the great American nation, these words
could just as easily been understood to refer to “The Sixties.” Moreover, for those
Americans who came of age after Nixon’s fateful final helicopter ride, this image of the
Sixties as a frightful dream thankfully passed and better left forgotten, whether presented
in political rhetoric, on screen, or by self-reactionary parents hoping their own children
won’t have make the same ‘mistakes’ they did, is often times the only available
interpretation of that much disputed decade. Thus it should come as little surprise that
many young Americans with no first hand experiences with or remembrances of the
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Sixties should still maintain a negative opinion of the decade, as well as of a
counterculture which invariable plays the villain in this memorial melodrama.
From sea to shining sea, and from parent (or TV) to child, mainstream memories
of a distinctionless counterculture continually circulate and reinforce the idea of a
corrupted youthful elite simultaneously preaching radicalism and practicing excess, both
as a means of disrupting the dominant culture. Yet in reality this opposition to the
mainstream, which defined this multi-pronged movement as counter, was the only truly
uniting factor amongst groups of protesters with starkly diverging goals, and often very
different ideas about how to arrive at them. This chapter shall provide a brief sketch of
the cultural conflict of the Sixties with an eye towards delineating the distinctions and
disputes within the counterculture. Then, beginning with the Nixon’s successful attacks
upon the perceived lawlessness and disorder which accompanied the movement, we shall
trace the ways in which the Sixties have been politically remembered, especially by
conservative rhetoricians seeking to blanketly condemn the radical political and cultural
aspects of the movement, in the decades since. It shall be the overall goal of this chapter
to analyze how the counterculture and the Sixties generally came to be popularly
understood and remembered in certain contemporary politically consequential ways.
Before we proceed it is necessary to deal directly with two matters of analytic
definition. The terms “the Sixties” and “Sixties Era” shall be used and understood
throughout this work (unless otherwise indicated) to signify a ‘cultural decade’ ranging
roughly from John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 to Richard Nixon’s resignation in
1974. Though this periodization varies somewhat from the oft expressed idea of a ‘long
1960’s’ (stretching from 1960 sometimes as far up as 1976), it shares with it a concern
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with ascertaining and outlining those shared cultural characteristics which make such a
convenient temporal construction useful even as it remains debatable. Indeed, though
undercurrents of protest were present even before the thousand days of JFK, this
periodization contains an implicit argument1 that a single dark day in Dallas helped
enable a chain of events which would significantly (and perhaps permanently) alter
America’s relations with, and conception of, itself. Moreover, while convenient
bookmarking of an end date is less precise, the resignation of Richard Nixon works
effectively in large part because the period of his Presidency (which began amidst the
highest tide of Sixties protest) coincided with and even fostered the gradual dissolution of
those cultural traits, practices, and beliefs which had marked the Sixties. Despite its
lacking a similar historiographical lineage, the term “1990’s era” will be similarly used to
discuss the period between the elections of the George Bush senior and junior, though the
transitional period between 1974 and 1988, during which a distinctive flavor of
politicized memory of the counterculture took form and then firm hold among many,
lacks any such convenient nomenclature.
It is equally important to lay out what is meant by the terms political, cultural, and
moral as aspects of the counterculture. In brief, the terms political and culture and here
understood to refer to those explicit challenges to the established socio-political system,
and will encompass movements as divergent as women’s rights, radical theatre, and the
New Left. These aspects of the movement all share an express concern with altering the
extent social structure and remaking the world in an image better matching
countercultural perceptions of American ideals. The term “moral” aspects of the
1
Derived from, among others, that offered by Jon Margolis in The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964:
The Beginning of the “Sixties” (New York, William Morrow and Co. 1999)
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counterculture here signifies open sexual activity and illicit drug use exclusively and is
posited as a means towards better understanding the ways in which the cultural and
political messages of the movement (which might otherwise find receptive audiences)
have been discredited through their implied connection to activities which have been
explicitly condemned among the American mainstream since Ronald Reagan. But before
turning to the issue of how the Sixties have been remembered, we must first examine the
contentious cultural decade itself.
---Sixties Countercultures and Social Conflict--In express contrast to the Sixties, the decade of the 1950’s has been popularly
remembered as a time of peace, prosperity, and widespread social consensus in favor of
‘traditional’ values. In this narrative the cultural conflict of the Sixties emerges almost
out of nowhere, in direct response to events like the Civil Rights movement and the
Vietnam War rather than from longstanding if formerly underlying societal divisions.
Such a conception of this conflict has twofold consequences for contemporary communal
memory of the Sixties. In the first place, by placing the ‘blame’ for Sixties social conflict
on specific events which are now long past, it becomes considerably easier to assert that
the conflict itself and the social divisions underlying it are themselves dead and buried.
Yet, perhaps more significantly, such a straightforward story functions to minimize the
distinctions amongst the counterculture by minimizing (or wholly extinguishing) the roles
played by precursor protests in the years before Kennedy’s election. In reality, many
aspects of 1960’s countercultural revolt grew out of earlier questionings of the status quo
that then evolved separately into the myriad of movements united in opposition to a
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mainstream they had long viewed as corrupt. It is only through the recognition of a
complex progression from Beat to Hippie, from Southern Christian marcher to Black
Panther, from malaise stricken housewife to bra burning crusader against patriarchy, that
an understanding of the Sixties counterculture in all its richness and complication can
begin.
Social unrest in the 1950’s, long underecognized because of a strong mainstream
drive for conformity during the period that pushed dissent outside the newspapers, public
reports, and media representations which serve as the basis of much contemporary
cultural and historical understanding, took a number of forms just as its decadal
descendant would. The presence of an urban and more militant arm of a Civil Rights
movement generally conceived of as peaceful, Southern, and Christian during the 1950’s,
only to become violent later, can be scene in the literary accounts of post-war Harlem of
Ralph Ellison and Claude Brown. Both Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Brown’s
Manchild in the Promised Land (1965 but chronicling the Fifties era) present images of a
structurally and economically disenfranchised African-American underclass in search of
identity and always just short of boiling over with frustration at white society, deep
seated emotions on which 1960’s militant movements like the Black Panthers would be
built. The “Hippie” culture of Grenwich Village and San Francisco, which exploded on
the media scene and American historical conscious in 1965, owed a great deal to the
Beatniks who had squatted in their lofts and raised similar questions about America and
the status quo ten years before. Indeed, the progression from Beat to Hippie may have
been as much a shift drug of choice from dexedrine and pot to peyote and LSD as it was
an overall movement in social and interpersonal philosophy, from fifties public
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intellectuals like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg to Sixties counterculture pundits like
Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary. The ultimate roots of radical second wave feminism can
also be found in the 1950’s, even before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique publicly
raised the issue of strict gender roles and unforthcoming if ideological expected personal
fulfillment. Legal and cultural double standards, both of the straightforward gendered
variety and between the ideology and actuality of women’s lives, prompted many women
to question whether the problem wasn’t with themselves so much as a system which
controlled women’s lives through Biblical notions of ‘morality’ and contemporarily
constructed ideas about nature and femininity promulgated by a powerful patriarchy.2
These streams, at least, of 1960’s protest had firms roots in the previous decade,
exploding on the public consciousness perhaps only in the wake of divisive issues and
events like Vietnam, but present and working silently counter to the cultural mainstream
long before.
What they bumped up against, what can be called the American “mainstream”
1960’s had really forged its cultural identity in the years before and after WWII. For the
generation that fought the war, and had grown up through the Depression years before it,
‘America’ was unquestionably the greatest nation in the world, able to do no wrong
domestically, and blessed with a divine historical mission to spread democracy,
prosperity, and modernity throughout the world. Having raised their children in a
peaceful and prosperous world diametrically opposed to the relative poverty and
widespread conflict most of them had known in their youth, they worked to pass on their
values, and their unerring faith, to the next generation. Indeed, contrary to popular
conceptions both then and now, a majority of Sixties youth did in fact largely adopt their
2
Terry H. Anderson. The Movement and the Sixties (New York, Oxford University Press 1999), 24-26
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parents worldviews and core values, insuring that while the cultural battles of the decade
would be fought partly along generational lines, the cultural mainstream would always
encompass an absolute majority of all generations of that era.3
This Silent Majority, which would catapult Nixon to electoral victory in 1968
(with a popular vote strikingly similar in size to that which he’d received eight years
prior), was built upon a quiet resentment of guiding government elites, unappreciative
civil disobeyers, challenges to traditional values, all of which supported a burgeoning
New Right whose legacy may be that of the most powerful and permanent, if long
unrecognized, of all Sixties social movements.4 The ire of these individuals, who also
tended to uphold dominant religious and economic ideologies of God and capitalism
especially against perceived threats from communists and other ‘freedom hating’
subversives at home and abroad, would often become especially aroused by actions of
protest like flag burning, which to them represented a malicious and ungrateful attack on
America by those very individuals who ostensibly enjoyed its benefits. Yet it was
precisely because they were acutely aware of the power of the symbol, having emerged
from the same post-war cultural roots as the Sixties mainstream, that protesters burned
flags. Indeed, much of social conflict of the 1960’s, and especially its ferocity, was
precipitated by disputes over the precise meaning and appropriate contemporary
embodiment of these shared deep cultural values, as different factions accused their
opponents of hypocrisy, treachery, and the corruption of ideologically powerful if much
disputed terms and concepts like ‘freedom’, ’democracy’, and even ‘America’ itself.
3
Todd Gitlin. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York, Bantam Books 1993),
David Farber. “The Silent Majority and Talk about Revolution” in The Sixties: From Memory to History
ed. David Farber (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press 1994), 299-301
4
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Many of the sharpest and most heated arguments during the Sixties over whether
the dominant power structure was fostering or impeding the attainment of the high
American ideals of individual freedom and responsive self government, in which both the
mainstream and much of the counterculture continued to believe, centered around those
twin events often scene as precipitating the decade’s societal splintering, the Civil Rights
Movement and the Vietnam War. Indeed, many students of the New Left learned to see
the laws and legal instruments of the state as standing in the way of, rather than aiding,
the quest for true personal freedom and political power not in their Ivory tower
classrooms but during summer vacation on the muddy dirt roads and church basement
floors of Dixie. Returning to their classrooms, however, this Northern youthful outrage
over the legal and supra-legal treatment of Southern blacks turned to socio-political
critiques of cultural systems that marginalized and disempowered young people, women,
and minority groups, helping to spur along disparate and formerly disorganized strands of
protest. Yet even if Southern schoolroom experiences may have precipitated active
critiques of extent power relations by the educated elite of various Sixties era movements,
it is the Vietnam War which is most often conceived of as that watershed event on which
Americans divided themselves into competing mainstream and countercultural camps.
While the explicit split between Hawks and Doves provides the most clear cut Vietnam
related ideological division of the period, it is the harsh attacks on the intelligence and
integrity of government officials by protesters which illuminate the deeper division
between those who believed, often passionately, in the system and whose who had long
since lost faith. So long as the war dragged on and the highest levels of American
government faced accusations of lying outrightly to both their constituents and the world
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about what they knew and had ordered done, the strong consensus and sense of
collectivity which had permeated Fifties culture would be lost, at least until the cessation
of war abroad could allow the arrival of peace at home. Indeed, while there is some truth
to this narrative of Vietnam and Civil Rights as the cause of and solution to all of the
problems of Sixties America, the fact remains that while the cultural politics surrounding
these events surely fostered the growth of and prompted shared foci among some Sixties
protest groups, internal conflictions and divergent conceptions of these very events in
many cases encouraged even further segmentation of an already complicated
counterculture.
Encompassing movements as radical theatre and film making, Black power, and
California countryside communes, the term counterculture itself is inherently problematic
in that it “falsely reifies what should never properly be construed” as a unified front
composed of individuals “who defined themselves first by what they were not,” namely
an accepted member of a mainstream culture they too accepted.5 While the shared
opposition to mainstream culture, especially highlighted during culturally divisive events
like those in 1964 Mississippi, 1967 Vietnam, or 1968 Chicago, did encourage exchanges
of ideas and experiences between differing groups of counterculturalists, these very
experiential and ideological differences, among those who might logically expect
themselves to largely agree on many matters, prompted some to abandon all notions of
power through coalition in favor of the emotional and intellectual authenticity of a small
committed cadre. Even if, for example, Northern white liberal students may have learned
to distrust authority during Southern summers, the fact that they could escape back to
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learn pampered dorm rooms in the fall fostered ill feelings among the African-Americans
with whom they’d protested side by side and especially among those urban blacks in the
North and West who saw nothing being done to combat the social and economic
disenfranchisement they experienced everyday.6 While more mainstream leaders such as
Martin Luther King called for peaceful attempts at change, while appearing on Meet the
Press in the wake of the 1965 Watts riots, lest the violence of a few discredit the
aspirations of many with similar goals, his calls fell on the deaf ears of those who’d
already abandoned his integrationist thinking for a more radical separation from the
systems of their oppression.7 The emergence of a strong women’s movement too owed
much to internal conflict among young protesters in the early 1960’s, where women
working side by side with their male counterparts on projects of personal liberation and
political empowerment began to notice, reflect up, and then actively critique the fact that
it was only these men who enjoyed positions of power within the movement while they
themselves were often relegated to pseudo-secretarial duties.8 Yet it was the divergent
responses by individuals and groups united in opposition to Vietnam, a war for ‘freedom’
that they saw as actually encouraging violent abridgments of this key concept both at
home and abroad, which ultimately prevented counter cultural cohesion and prompted its
Peter Braunstein and Joseph Paul Doyle. “Historicizing the American Counterculture of the 1960’s and
70’s” in Imagine Nation: The American CounterCulture of the 1960’s and 70’s edited by Peter Braunstein
and Joseph Paul Doyle (New York, Routledge 2002), 10
6
David R. Colburn and George E. Pozzetta. “Race, Ethnicity, and the Evolution of Political Legitimacy”
in The Sixties: From Memory to History edited by David Farber (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina
Press 1994), 121-24
7
Rick Ball and NBC News. Meet the Press: Fifty Years of History in the Making (McGraw-Hill, New
York 1998)
8
Alice Echols. “Nothing Distant about It: Women’s Liberation and Sixties Radicalism” in The Sixties:
From Memory to History edited by David Farber (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press 1994),
153
5
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eventual fragmentation “into a number of cultural liberation movements during the
1970’s that were different in tone and constituency,” motivations, methods, and aims.
A loose coalition of protest groups who came together in the late 1960’s in
opposition disputes over differing conceptions of what was being protested, the war itself,
the political powers guiding it, or the cultural systems which underpin the entire venture,
the anti-Vietnam movement was able to gain a mass following only at the expense of a
unified program. While a great many individuals responded to war by participating in
mass demonstrations and other avenues of traditional political action, others choose to
drop out of a society they saw as unsalvageable, while still others responded with acts of
sabotage and calls for revolution. Those who advocated peaceful protest, by far the
largest segment and the ‘most reasonable’ by mainstream standards, worried about being
discredited by actions of both groups with whom they were popularly associated. Just as
advocates of marijuana and LSD use for cultural, political, and spiritual purposes has
worried about being classed with those in search of a simple high, many protesters feared
that those who dropped back into society for anti-war marches dressed in tattered rags
and long unshaven would discredit those with a more expressly political bent who
organized and oversaw the movement and conceived of themselves as struggling for a
noble if perhaps lost cause.9
Alternatively, and an increasing concern as the geopolitical actions of Richard
Nixon encouraged more and more ideologically committed young people to carry out
ostensibly criminal acts, this ‘mainstream’ of the movement worried (just as Martin
Luther King had) about the violent actions and revolutionary rhetoric of small groups,
David Farber. “Intoxicated State: Illegal Nation” in The Sixties: From Memory to History edited by
David Farber (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press 1994), 18-20
9
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(for example in this case, the Weathermen, an offshoot of the Students for a Democratic
Society, famous for bomb throwing and calls for the destruction of Western imperialism)
working to sully their cause in the eyes of a mainstream public who might be sympathetic
to bringing home American boys, but would shy away from the associates and views of
those who would commit illegal actions at home to bring about this admittedly desirable
goal.10 Indeed, “Richard Nixon preyed upon the sixties protesters who talked about a
revolution that offered most Americans nothing but heartache,” successfully calling upon
that majority of the populace who worked hard, loved their family, and took to the streets
only for shopping during that tumultuous decade. In so doing he would set a pattern later
conservative candidates would follow, placing the blame for the social conflicts of the
Sixties squarely on those who challenged the legitimacy and propriety of the extent
system, while promising a return to law and order, peace and prosperity, in exchange for
political power.
---Political Symbols and Rhetorical Memory--Mediated remembrances of the 1960’s have been with us since the beginning of
the end of that turbulent decade, with news stories, magazine articles, novels, films, and
television shows from various political perspectives recalling and ‘coming to terms with’
the social conflict of the era. A film like 1983’s The Big Chill, where aged and
deradicalized former student protesters reunite for the funeral of the only member of their
group who’d retained their youthful idealism, in the process coming to terms with the
progression and present direction of their lives, paints a picture of the past as a spectre
Doug Rossinow. “The Revolution is About Our Lives: The New Left’s Counterculture” in The Sixties:
From Memory to History edited by David Farber (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press 1994),
10
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which will haunt us forever unless we can create closure and move on. In contrast, a
novel like Thomas Pyncheon’s Vineland (1990 but set in 1984), where federal agents
play upon the complicated countercultural pasts of individuals trying to move on with
their lives, using drug charges, sexual desire, and police power to discredit, detain, and
ultimately ‘reeducate’ old radicals, suggests that the past is home to important lessons for
and connections to the present which are often consciously obscured for contemporary
political purposes. Yet on screen, in paperback, or elsewhere it does seem largely the
case that, in the words of George F. Will, “Since the sixties our national life has been a
running argument about, and with, the sixties.”11 Even America’s longest running and oft
most culturally critically comedy, The Simpsons, has dealt with the Sixties, through the
character of Homer’s long absentee mother who was forced to flee her husband and child
lest she be prosecuted for her involvement in the sabotage of Mr. Burn’s germ warfare
laboratory. In a follow-up episode in which Homer journeys to his mother’s old Hippie
compound he ponders what his life might have been like had he accompanied her and
adopted their lifestyle, mentally imaging a world in which beautiful women ask him how
he manages to take such good care of his “long luxurious Hippie hair.” Yet while a
balding Homer might see these locks as symbols of youthful vitality and freedom, for
conservative rhetoricians from Nixon to Gingrich, and the voters who elevate them to
office, long hair, unkempt beards, unshaven legs, and all they represent, have held a far
different meaning.
Long hair was a political symbol for both the counterculture and its mainstream
opposition during the late 1960’s, with the major divide being whether one favored or
100-01
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opposed the individualist rebellion which it was popularly understood to represent. This
coif concern translated to actions like the forced barberism of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry
Rubin, and Tom Hayden following their ‘Chicago Seven’ conspiracy conviction, and the
subsequent press conference at which “the radicals’ shorn locks” were “triumphantly
displayed,” as a symbol of political victory and the restoration of law and social order.12
Such actions be the legal establishment played into existing “Middle American” sociopolitical conceptions and opinions of the counterculture, who “focused on long hair and
hippie garb as symbols of moral breakdown and potential social disorder,” criticized the
“antiwar activists as unpatriotic,” and in general viewed the movement as composed
exclusively of “the children of ‘liberal’ and ‘influential parents” who’d “passed to their
children a legacy of grasping aggressive ill-mannered egoism.”13 This mainstream
conception of precisely who a protester was, namely someone with long hair and no
respect for legality or traditional values advocating violent revolution and the destruction
or confiscation of the scant hard earned property of hard working long governmentally
forgotten Americans, was turned to political advantage by Richard Nixon. Asserting that
“the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence” Nixon
decried the Great Society programs, and the billions in federal expenditures they
required, for yielding nothing but “an ugly harvest of frustrations, violence and failure
across the land.”14 Inherent in these lines, and indeed in the viewpoints of Nixon
supporters, are the germs of the two most commonly used rhetorical strategies for
George F. Will. “Foreward” to Reassessing the Sixties: Debating the Political and Cultural Legacy (New
York, Norton and Co. 1997), 3
12
Dominick Cavallo. A Fiction of the Past: The Sixties in American History (New York, St. Martin’s
Press 1999), 90-91
13
Ibid, 91
1414
Richard Nixon’s acceptance speech at the 1968 Republican Nation convention, available via the World
Wide Web at http://www.watergate.info/nixon/speeches.shtml
11
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condemning the counterculture and the liberal political environment of the Sixties in
which it prospered, namely the highlighting of violent social unrest as the paradigmatic
actions of all counterculturalists and the creation of a linkage between the socio-political
polices of Lyndon Johnson and the moral collapse of society. Both of these strategies
would be utilized with considerable degrees success by later conservative candidates,
most especially Ronald Reagan in the 1980’s and Newt Gingrich a decade later.
While Ronald Reagan had won the governorship in California in 1966 partly by
“incessantly warning voters that the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964 and the
hippies of San Francisco were harbingers of anarchy and moral degeneration,” he rarely
spoke explicitly about the counterculture in the years after the Sixties.15 Yet the subtext
of many of Reagan’s later speeches, dealing with welfare, the size and spending of the
federal government, crime, and contemporary American morality, is that the extent
problems of the Eighties were the result of the ‘mistakes’ made by the nation and its
government during the era of the 1960’s. Adopting a party line created by conservative
intellectuals and popularized during his presidency, Reagan argued “that feminist
overkill,” meaning the rise of the women’s movement ‘out of’ the counterculture in the
late 1960s was “the principal cause of family instability,” in a nation experiencing
increasing divorce rate, and of the sustained slaughter of countless unborn lives as a
result of Roe v. Wade. Yet even more than decrying the counterculture through its
apparent connection to the problems of the present, Reagan cited the social policies of the
Sixties as responsible for the urban and economic issues facing his administration. “For
Reagan in the 1980’s the problem was not poverty at all, but wasteful and
counterproductive poverty policy” which had been around since the Great Society and
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that robbed the middle class of their hard earned money and the poor of their desire to
find a job, work hard, and achieve personal fulfillment through providing for their
families.16 The use of politically potent concepts like the “welfare queen” and the
“culture of poverty,” presented Reagan supporters with a dual motivation for revamping
the system by suggesting that both the recipients and providers of government aid would
benefit from a reversal of the legacy of Sixties social policy. Yet for many conservatives
Reagan’s attacks on the counterculture did not go far enough, as that group, and the
moral degeneration it was viewed as having prompted, often escaped explicit rhetorical
condemnation. This would not be the case for long, as Newt Gingrich and a new
generation of Republicans, who had grown up amidst and often opposed to the
counterculture, came of age and made their political memories heard.
Reagan’s immediate successor, the first President Bush was more eager to paint
his opponents as “remnants of the 1960’s, the New Left, campus radicals grown old,” and
as such unable to lead the nation out of the troubled cultural times in which it was
presently mired. Moreover, since the late 1980’s when books like Allan Bloom’s The
Closing of the American Mind (1987) placed the blame for “an ongoing drug problem,
moral relativism, political correctness, multiculturalism, sexual promiscuity” and host of
other contemporary “social pathologies” on the counterculture, these problems
increasingly became scene as moral, rather than economic.17 This turn toward viewing
the “central myth” and most negative lasting legacy of the Sixties as the idea “that the
wretched excess was actually a quest for new values,” rather than simply a destruction of
15
Cavallo, 10
Michael Weiler. “The Reagan Attack on Welfare” in Reagan and Public Discourse in America edited by
Michael Weiler and W. Barnett Pearce (Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press 1992), 239
17
Cavallo, 10
16
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existing and proper ones, inspired increasing calls for a fundamental reversal of history
and return to the an America which “before the mid 1960’s” maintained “an explicit long
term commitment to character” which included a strong “work ethic,” a notion of
“honesty, right and wrong,” and a commitment to “not harming others.”18 And though
“he predicted a ten- to twelve- year battle against ‘liberal elites’ to put the country back
on the right track” Newt Gingrich promised that he and his conservative Congressional
cohorts could accomplish this task provided the necessary electoral mandate.19 Indeed,
Gingrich went to great lengths to portray the 1994 midterm elections “as a referendum on
the ‘Great Society, Counterculture, McGovernik’ legacy of the sixties,” a strategy which
ultimately proved successful in elevating him to the first Republican House Speakership
in decades.20
The presence in the White House of William Clinton, an admitted draft dodger
widely suspected using drugs in his 1960’s youth, allowed Congressional campaigners to
attack the man himself as a symbol of his generation as well as the policies, views, and
actions of the counterculture in the abstract. While campaigning against a sitting
president in mid-term elections is an age old American political strategy, the labeling of
both Clinton and his first lady Hillary as “counterculture McGoverniks,” standing in the
way of and indeed opposed to the needed return to ante-Sixties normalcy, was only part
of a grander strategy of victory through politicized remembrances. Gingrich argued that
there were “profound things that went wrong with the Great Society and the
Counterculture, and until we address them head on we’re going to have these problems”
18
Quoted in Meta Mendel Reyes. Reclaiming Democracy: The Sixties in Politics and Memory (New York,
Routledge 1995), xiv, 11
19
Ibid, xiv
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of poverty, drug abuse, familial discord, to name but a few.21 On the upside Gingrich
asserted that we as American’s “simply need to erase the slate and start over,”
communally agreeing that “the counterculture is a momentary aberration in American
history that will be looked back upon as a quaint period of Bohemianism” luckily long
past.22 For Gingrich, his Congressionally followers who swarmed into office on his
coattails in 1994, and likely many of those Americans who put them there, America’s
long national nightmare had not yet ended, as the many of the demons who’d inhabited it
all along remained to be slain.
Stephen Macado. “Introduction to Reassessing the Sixties” in Reassessing the Sixties: Debating the
Political and Cultural Legacy (New York, Norton and Co. 1997), 9
21
Quoted in Mendel-Reyes, xiii-iv
22
Quoted in Macado, 129, 283
20