Resisting the Complacency Narrative: Sixties Social Unrest and Its Relation to the 1950s

Mark Hamilton Lytle. America's Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 432 pp. Notes and index. $29.95.

The past few years have brought a proliferation of works dealing with the United States during the 1960s. Typically, historians writing about this period have addressed, in a limited way, some of the leading events of the preceding decade. However, in America's Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon, Mark Lytle goes beyond this standard practice. In this sweeping survey of the "sixties era," he covers the period from 1954 to 1974. The end result is an ambitious work that addresses a multitude of topics—from the birth of rock n' roll to the rise of the New Right. Many of the stories Lytle retells are engaging, and much of his analysis is insightful. Unfortunately, some of the assumptions Lytle relies on to frame his narrative, combined with a few noticeable omissions, detract from this otherwise fine work.

Lytle divides his examination of the postwar period into three phases. The first, what Lytle calls "the Era of Consensus," covers the ten-year period between 1954 and 1963. Although there were oppositional undercurrents during these years, Lytle sees the latter half of the 1950s and the early 1960s as primarily a period of social stability when the cold war consensus was at its highest ebb. What Lytle therefore sees as the central question is the task of explaining "how consensus and social conformity gave way to conflict and rebellion along cultural and political fronts" (p. 4). For Lytle, the most important part of his story begins in 1964 and ends in 1968. According to the author, with the commencement of the second phase, "the fifties ended and what most of us think of as the sixties began" (p. 143). In other words, the conflicts surrounding the issues of race, sexual reticence, feminism, the counterculture, and the Vietnam War—or the uncivil wars of the 1960s—took center stage during this five-year period.

The book's third and final section runs from Nixon's inauguration in 1969 to his forced resignation in August 1974. According to Lytle, this six-year period marked the "final stage," or the gradual winding down, of America's uncivil wars. This is not to deny the persistence of deep cultural divisions during the Nixon era. As Lytle points out, more than three decades before Arnold Schwarzenegger belittled his opponents as "girly men," Vice President Spiro Agnew dismissed anti-war protesters as "an effete corps of imprudent snobs," and bashed the news media as "troubadours of trouble" and "nattering nabobs of negativism" (p. 350). In addition, disturbances continued on the nation's campuses, and both the Women's Liberation and the Gay Rights movement attracted a large amount of public attention, which, in turn, provoked the counter-mobilization of conservative forces. But with the withdrawal of the last American troops from Vietnam in 1973, and the resignation of President Nixon the following year, the uncivil wars had unquestionably cooled.

Some historians will take issue with the book's periodization. Few would oppose Lytle's decision to separate the years of the Nixon Presidency from the rest of the 1960s. But is Lytle correct in grouping the early sixties with the latter half of the fifties? Does not the growing awareness of environmental and feminist concerns, aided by the publication of Silent Spring (1962) and The Feminine Mystique (1963), and the civil rights activism of the early sixties, exemplified by the sit-ins (1960) and the Freedom Rides (1961), belong as much to "the sixties era" as to the age of consensus? On this question, serious scholars can disagree. In selecting 1964 as the real beginning of the turbulent sixties, Lytle is able to point to Freedom Summer...