History Cracked Open: "New" History's Renunciation of the Past

Ellen Fitzpatrick. History's Memory: Writing America's Past, 1880-1980. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. 318 pp. Notes and index. $39.95.

Those of us who study and teach about the 1960s acknowledge the dominance of two major schools of thought regarding the legacy of that controversial decade. The most prevalent perspective—let's call it the party of nostalgia—celebrates the decade as a period of intense and meaningful social and political change. According to this historiographic outlook—promoted in works by movement participants like SDS president Todd Gitlin in The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987)—civil rights leaders, feminists, and student activists were members of a heroic vanguard that exposed the racial injustices, gender imbalances, and human rights violations inherent in American culture. Plotting the sixties as an age in which spirited youths challenged the ideological predispositions and constraints of their elders, contributors to this nostalgic school have tended to view the decade as a privileged period set apart, as an exception to the general rule of American complacency. In such accounts, admittedly brash and even disrespectful activists are lionized for their courageous renunciations of the past and their pursuits of alternative and potentially more satisfying futures. As Lance Morrow noted in a twenty-year retrospective written in this nostalgic vein, the sixties was a "perverse genius" of a decade, a terrifying yet propitious time when "history cracked open" and the past was "severed" from the future. ¹

While this portrait of heroic iconoclasts has been the most popular characterization of sixties' activists over the last thirty years, a revisionist school has emerged of late that challenges the motivations of these youthful reformers and calls into question the value of their denunciatory rebellions. Among the most outspoken of this revisionist school—let's call it the party of skepticism—has been David Burner, whose Making Peace with the Sixties (1996) condemns the dismissiveness with which New Left activists abandoned and betrayed their Old Left progenitors who might have protected them from the hedonistic self-aggrandizement that jeopardized the work of the sixties. "The revolution of the sixties brought an arrogantly facile notion that the past was irrelevant, the present unique, its new upheavals self-sufficient," Burner writes in repudiation of this outlook. Former activists Peter Collier and David Horowitz agree, noting in Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the '60s (1989) that the era's considerable potential was limited severely by "the tragic consequences of [an] everything-goes hedonism and the destructiveness of [a] revolutionary passion" that would not admit of intellectual debts or political obligations. According to Dominick Cavallo in A Fiction of the Past: The Sixties in American History (1999), the "most radical ideas and values" of the decade were not new to the '60s at all as some historiographers aver but "were deeply etched in the American grain," so much so in fact that in Cavallo's tellingthe sixties youth culture "reasserted pre-twentieth-century American myths and values of work, self-reliance and democracy" and "suture[d] the youth culture to American history." This latter interpretation suggests that we should remember the sixties more for what it borrowed from historythan for what it rejected of the past. ²

A similar disagreement between nostalgic and skeptical approaches exists with respect to the evaluation of historical scholarship in the sixties, particularly with regard to "New History." A group of young scholars who centered their investigations of the past on issues of race, class, gender, and ethnicity, New Historians wrote history from the "bottom up" as it were with an emphasis on the experiences (especially the contemporary social history) of "ordinary" Americans. Like their counterparts in the social revolutions of the sixties, these New Historians were experimental, introducing innovative analytic and social scientific strategies of historical explanation into the historian's repertoire and substituting "statistical tables, oral interviews, sociological models, and psychoanalytic theories" for traditional "constitutions...