People Are Not Decades

January/February 2008 Historically Speaking 15 resistance to the theory of evolution were things of the past. After all, Inherit the Wind-was a contemporary of Kennedy's Camelot, when it appeared that the United States was ready to assume the mande of cultural sophistication—Jackie's White House tours, performances by Pablo Casals and Robert Frost, the ambiance of what seemed like an alliance of Harvard , Broadway, Hollywood, and Washington. Imagine a time when folks were delighted that the First Lady spoke such eloquent French as to charm Parisians! Who anticipated the rise of a politicized religious Right and a political culture that criticizedJohn Kerry for being "French" and, at least for a time, admired a president who mangled the language and seemed to take pride in his philistinism? Indeed, there is no consideration within Whitfield's model of the unanticipated successes of conservatism, indeed for the ways in which we have too often conceptualized the Sixties as the moment of radical and countercultural challenges when it can be persuasively argued that it marked the birth of what became the Reagan Revolution. The period from 1946 to 1973 was the golden age of American capitalism, driven by a combination of new industries and technologies and government incentives such as the G.I. Bill and the Federal Highway Act, as well as the longer-term impact on consumer demand of Social Security and the rise of organized labor. This certainly distinguished the upsurge of the 1960s and early 1970s from that of the Depression era. In the latter many people became radicalized because they believed that capitalism had failed; in the former it was because the successes of the system were perceived to be fundamentally bogus, alienating, corrupt, and shallow. One of the problems with fixating on decades is that it is particularly inadequate in making sense of the past forty years. It obscures larger patterns and exaggerates the importance of style and fashion. Mailer's "The White Negro," despite playing into a romantic and nihilistic stereotype of African Americans , is more usefully understood as part of a longer-term tendency of affluent white youth to experience ambivalence about the American Dream and to seek alternative models of self-expression in the non-Western "other." The road from Carl Van Vechten's "Nigger Heaven" in the 1920s to the white suburban love affair with hip-hop music and culture should be apparent. That Betty Friedan concealed "her radical past" in writing The FeminineMystique should only reinforce the historian's emphasis on unraveling the more significant continuities and discontinuities between time periods. Her inappropriate metaphor of the "concentration camp" to characterize suburbia tells us how her Old Left sensibility leaked into her narrative and how complicated it is to unpack influences that include but should not be limited to decades and generations. PaulLyons isprofessor of social work at Richard Stockton College. His most recent book is People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). People Are Not Decades David Färber Stephen Whitfield offers a witty account of the Fifties and Sixties. I enjoyed his suggestive history but it does not fit very well with my own understanding of this era. In this brief reconsideration of two complex decades, Whitfield relies on a few cultural icons to do a lot of historical work. His essay put to mind what Clinton Rossiter famously wrote in his review of Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind: "The historian of ideas has a deep obligation not to put too much faith in the power of ideas." Whitfield's focus on sources that essentially range all the way from what midtown Manhattan publishers disseminated to what midtown Manhattan producers staged is, I think, not the best way to explore what the great majority of Americans believed , understood, or felt—or what caused them to act. His approach could tell us something significant about cultural arbiters and cultural production in the era, but without a greater sense of how the cultural field he alludes to worked in the 1950s and 1960s I don't diink we learn much about what motivated Americans politically or what moved...