Left Turn, Right Turn: Legacies of the 1960s

William Berman’s America’s Right Turn describes the counterattack by American conservatives against the insurgencies associated with the civil rights, antiwar, feminist, and countercultural movements that David Farber describes in The Age of Great Dreams. Both books are thus grounded in the seismic upheavals of the 1960s. Berman’s rightward turn begins with the Goldwater crusade of 1964, and Farber’s story of the 1960s reaches into the early 1970s. Both books are synthetic interpretations of recent American history commissioned by series editors to reach a nonspecialist audience. The bibliographic essays discuss the most useful secondary literature, but there are no footnotes (unfortunately, especially for The Age of Great Dreams, there are no illustrations as well). Farber’s book is part of Eric Foner’s American Century series, Berman’s is in Stanley Kutler’s American Moment series.

David Farber, a 1979 graduate of the University of Michigan, did not live through the 1960s as an adult. Unlike such students of the 1960s as William Chafe, David Chalmers, Allen Matusow, Todd Gitlin, William O’Neill, or myself — who were born before World War II and whose interpretations have been refracted through powerful prisms of memory — Farber speaks for a successor generation. A member of the history faculty at Barnard College with a Ph.D. from Chicago (1985), he is the author of Chicago ‘68 (1988) and coauthor of The First Strange Place: The Alchemy of Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii (1992).

In Farber’s view, the explosive events of the 1960s were an outgrowth of tensions that had been building since the Great Depression, when the nation’s “rapidly developing, consumer-based, expert-oriented, nationally managed and internationally integrated economic and political system” brought under national purview much of American life that had long been left under the control of local elites (p. 4). The grand structural projects of the 1940s and 1950s included the forging of a national system of social provision, the emergence of America as a global superpower, the creation of the national security state, and “the maturation of a national, consumer-driven, mass-mediated marketplace” (p. 3). These developments however were impelled by two contradictory sets of values.

One was necessary for efficient economic production: discipline, delayed gratification, good character, and the acceptance of hard work done in rigidly hierarchical workplaces. The other set of values justified the expansive personal consumption on which economic growth increasingly depended: license, immediate gratification, mutable lifestyle, and an egalitarian, hedonistic pursuit of self-expression.

(p. 4)

Acknowledging his debt to Daniel Bell’s The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Farber sees the culture wars of the 1960s as a consequence of clashing values compounded by generational change and magnified by the mass immediacy of television.

The clash between values keyed to production and consumption helps account for the social and cultural turmoil of the 1960s, but it cannot adequately account for the “Great Dreams” of Farber’s title. The theme of Great Dreams is not developed explicitly, but Farber clearly means less the dreams of political elites, like the justices of the Warren Court or the Democratic leaders in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, than the dreams of justice that animated the civil rights, liberation, antiwar, and student rights movements. These mobilizations converged and exploded in the 1960s in part because the expanding postwar role of Washington elites in economic policy, global security, and social provision nationalized issues that previously had remained local or private. The postwar baby-boom generation, coming of age in a consumer economy dominated by television, questioned the legitimacy of received institutional arrangements and challenged the authority of leaders.

Farber’s organization and narrative follow a familiar pattern. The “Good Times” of the prosperous 1950s are seen as smug, complacent, dominated...