The Radical Sixties

To start with a banality: a lot happened in the 1960s. And the historiography of the era has come to mirror that banal observation. The Sixties has become a capacious subject, so much so that, I have come to think, we have lost “the Sixties” in writing about the Sixties. On this topic, as I have contributed to that capacious banality, I am a man in a glass house.

Right now historians seem to be taking the Sixties in several different directions, all at the same time. Many of us are invested in writing a history of the transnational Sixties, which is not surprising given the herd-like movement in the transnational direction by historians-at-large. And cattiness aside, I am convinced that the “transnational Sixties” will prove to be a fruitful approach.¹ Similarly, I think (obviously, given my own work) that a “Conservative Sixties” is a useful angle.² At the same time, a few historians have begun to re-emphasize the liberal triumphs of the era, with a focus on national civil rights policy and the war on poverty. Given the long conservative policy ascendency that followed the Kennedy-Johnson years, I think these historians are right to argue that liberals were not the soulless, sell-out compromisers some have made them out to be. They were not just impediments, in other words, to greater social justice.³ Then, too, we are all now convinced that the social changes and political challenges associated with the “Sixties” really transpired over a much longer time frame, making the events that happened to occur in the 1960s less important, or at least less causal, than earlier accounts often made them seem. So we all now acknowledge that the civil rights movement was a “long” movement and not a historical subject best understood as being just of the 1960s or best characterized by the now-legendary Southern protests of the 1960–65 years. Similarly, historians are convincing us to see many of the other classic Sixties-identified historical processes, such as the sexual revolution, as being born of a longer, decade-defying process.⁴ A “long” Sixties, then, extending from World War II through the 1970s, makes a certain amount of sense—although why the “Sixties” label should be retained, in that case, is hard to defend.⁵ In my own course on “The American Sixties,” I find myself beginning with the New Deal and ending sometime during the Reagan years. It seems to make sense when I do it, but I worry that, in my attempt to contextualize and explain historical trajectory, I have begun to forget the point of talking about a historical subject called “The Sixties.”

Robert Cohen, in his new work, Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s, wants to remind us what that point might be, what it should be. And given his provocative, even mysterious use of the word radical in his book title to modify the word legacy, I think he wants us to think what the meaning of “the Sixties” could be even now and ever after. In specific, Robby Cohen tells us how and why a brilliant young man born into a conventional Catholic American family in New York City in 1942 became a self-described radical and why the kind of radicalism he championed made the “Sixties” seem so exciting and threatening and explosive to many Americans living through those years. Here is the Sixties as a time of radical thought and radical action consciously pursued by young, white, self-identified radicals out to remake the world. This approach to the history of the Sixties is so old it is new.

I read Freedom’s Orator while I was also reading a collection of essays on the 1970s that treated “the Sixties” as something like a carnival that came to town and left right before everyone began to reach for their wallets. This particular collection was...