1968: People divided, nation on edge
Fifty years ago, the US was divided against itself, polarised by politics and race. Has much really changed, asks Marc Fisher.
It was the year the centre did not hold, the year many Americans saw their country spinning out of control. It was a shocking time, a moment of danger, destruction and division – yet also a time of passion and possibility.
The polarisation that plagues the United States half a century later was born, in many ways, in
1968.
Two of the nation’s most cherished leaders, a King and a Kennedy, were assassinated. Americans watched terrible things happen on television – shattered shop windows and burning buildings after the murder of the Rev Martin Luther King Jr, the heaving grief of mourners alongside railroad tracks as Robert Kennedy’s casket passed by. In downtowns where people once came together, looters stole groceries and liquor and TV sets and, for many Americans, their sense of security.
But 1968 was also a shining moment, a year packed with the progress that made today better than yesterday.
Human beings for the first time saw what our planet looks like from space. The Defence Department granted a contract to a company to build the first router, a key step toward connecting computers in different locations.
A white man kissed a black woman on national television for the first time. They were in outer space, and they lived in the future, and they were the fictional Star Trek characters Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura, but they were also on NBC, in millions of homes, in
1968.
Above all, the year divided Americans from one another, to the point that many believed the country was on the verge of chaos. Every day brought new confrontations – students against administrators, blacks against whites, workers against bosses. It was a cacophony of demonstrations, picket lines, radical manifestos, underground publications, sit-ins, be-ins.
On campuses and in underground political cells, in places as different as Brooklyn, Berkeley and Birmingham, a striking number of people concluded that revolution was at hand, that the US and probably the entire industrialised West were on the verge of collapse.
Hardly a week went by without reports of bombings and arson attacks from the Left and Right: San Francisco suffered a rash of explosions and bomb threats by revolutionary groups, resulting in severed phone lines, damaged electrical towers and paralysed traffic. In Mississippi, the Ku Klux Klan bombed a synagogue. Antiwar radicals burned files at a military draft centre in Maryland.
Races clashed, college kids faced off against blue-collar workers, the young turned against the old. Parents roamed city streets searching for teenagers who’d run away to be hippies or antiwar activists, or just to reject their elders and find the new thing.
The ostensible cause of the division often appeared to be the nation’s dispiriting trudge through a war 8000 miles away, in Southeast Asia – a conflict mainly fought by working-class and poor draftees. Young men who enrolled in college got a bye, and they were generally more affluent and whiter.
The culture war was about race: a white supremacist murdered black America’s strongest voice for equality and grace. At the Olympics, blackgloved fists, held up by two African-American athletes for all the world to see, asserted a new dynamic in the country’s oldest, deepest conflict.
The culture war was also about sex: from the simple call to ‘‘make love, not war’’ to the growing rift among antiwar activists over the role of women in the movement, the children of the baby boom led the country towards new attitudes about sex and sexuality. Women’s liberation magazines issued a battle cry: ‘‘Smash monogamy!’’ And in January, the government approved the IUD – intrauterine device – another big step for a sexual revolution in which lovemaking and childbirth were partially decoupled.
By 1968, the antiwar activism initiated mostly by elite intellectuals had merged with a broader countercultural youth movement that celebrated music, drugs, fashion, sexual mores and alternative media all crafted in opposition to their parents’ generation. This was ‘‘the dawning of the Age of Aquarius’’, a time of ‘‘sympathy and trust abounding’’ when ‘‘love will steer the stars’’ – or so insisted the hit musical Hair ,a show about antiwar hippies that broke Broadway taboos by featuring nudity, drug use, a racially mixed cast and a rock score.
‘‘They call themselves flower children,’’ Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate for president, said that year. ‘‘I call them spoiled rotten.’’
Curiously, the culture war broke out when, on paper at least, things were supposedly going well for many Americans. Unemployment was unusually low. Fuel was cheap. Cities were bursting out into suburbs, driven, in part, by the possibilities of bigger homes, safer streets and a more bucolic life.
More Americans were going to college, science and technology were making major advances, man was about to walk on the Moon.
But progress left many behind. Those suburbs bloomed in good part because white parents decided they would rather commute long distances than have their children go to schools experiencing rapid racial change.
Anxiety and fear were palpable, made worse by what felt like a dizzying fall from one of the most optimistic periods in US history. To the generation that had lived through that time of victory and rising satisfaction, 1968 felt like a collapse into moral decadence, political turmoil and physical decay.
Through most of the year, the nation watched in humiliation as North Korea captured the US Navy ship Pueblo, put its 83 crewmen in prison camps, tortured them and displayed them as propaganda trophies before finally releasing them shortly before Christmas.
Inside the radical movements, efforts to paper over differences between the races in goals and methods mostly failed. During a takeover of buildings at Columbia University in New York, white students tried to win support from black schoolmates by adopting the slogans of black
nationalists. But black activists had their own concept of what needed to change, and when black students took over a university building, they asked white students to leave, saying they needed to lead their own revolt.
The old unities were crumbling. America’s divisions were at once serious and silly, searing and superficial.
Soldiers came home scarred by battle, and some were stunned to find themselves greeted not by parades but by strangers’ slurs and sneers. They saw their peers who had stayed home as coddled, entitled, almost criminally isolated from the realities of war.
The line between political show and the far harsher realities of war, poverty and racial discord blurred in 1968. While The Yippies – the Youth International Party – danced in the streets, those same streets ran with blood at the Democratic convention in Chicago and in riots in Washington and other big cities.
The scale of the confrontation was hard to fathom – thousands of police officers beating thousands of unarmed young people – but what was most novel, what oddly made it all so painfully real, was that the entire encounter, 17 excruciating minutes, was broadcast on network television.
Throughout the year, in Chicago and across the country, demonstrators chanted, ‘‘Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?’’ The power of the crowd was palpable. President Lyndon Baines Johnson faced jeers wherever he travelled; he ended up making many of his speeches on military bases because they were the only places where he could avoid the anger of the people.
On the Left, activists boasted of sowing chaos, which they believed would force the end of the war and the beginning of a new society. At Columbia, after student occupiers finally left the administration building, a sign was found taped to a wall: ‘‘We Want the World and We Want It Now!’’
On the Right, a vengeful anger elbowed out old debates about policy. ‘‘If any demonstrator lies down in front of my car when I’m president, that’ll be the last car he lays down in front of,’’ said George Wallace, the segregationist who was running for president as a third-party candidate.
He won 13.5 per cent of the vote and five Southern states with an appeal – railing against elites, government and the media – that would become a mainstay of Republican campaigns from Nixon to Donald Trump.
Fear metastasised that year. A Gallup Poll found the number of people who called crime or violence during racial unrest the country’s most important problem tripled over the course of the year. An average of 46 Americans a day were dying in Vietnam, and 1968 was the first year that a majority of Americans told Gallup that the war was a mistake.
Fifty years ago, in ways that echo today, the nation was divided against itself, polarised by politics and geography, race and class. Increasingly, people subscribed to different versions of reality, ascribing venal intent to leaders of the other side. People who had never been involved in politics before took to the streets. If Americans shared anything, it was a sense that the country was in deep trouble, perhaps doomed.
A few days after King was killed, Jackie Kennedy, the president’s widow, told a historian that a virus of violence had overtaken the country. ‘‘Do you know what I think will happen to Bobby?’’ she asked. ‘‘The same thing that happened to Jack. There is so much hatred in this country.’’ Two months later, it happened.
‘‘America is in trouble,’’ Nixon said in a campaign ad jammed with images of bayonets, gutted buildings, soldiers in anguish, burning cities. ‘‘We see Americans hating each other, fighting each other, killing each other at home. We see cities enveloped in smoke and flame . . .’’
But Nixon won not only with such portraits of American carnage. Against the chaos of 1968, he also posited a different America, one that pushed back against discord and disorder.
In a time of anxiety and division, Nixon chose a surprisingly gentle appeal to the people’s belief in themselves. Over photos of smiling workers and families, he summoned ‘‘the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators . . . They are black, and they are white, native-born and foreign-born, young and old . . . They are good people, decent people . . . They know that this country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless it is a good place for all of us to live in.’’
Was this Madison Avenue trickery, an expression of faux empathy, or a genuine appeal to America’s better angels? In 1968, a year of violence and flower power, delirium and demons, it was hard to trust the words of a man who would be remembered as a cynical practitioner of the darkest arts of politics.
Sales job or plea for unity? Who could tell, especially in a year when everything changed, and yet people wondered: had anything really changed?
‘‘They call themselves flower children,’’ Richard Nixon said. ‘‘I call them spoiled rotten.’’