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