Why did the involvement of younger people in the civil rights movement, student activism, opposing the Vietnam War, or even hippie styles provoke such fear in so many older people? I don't know. Reading some of those reactions now makes you wonder if a lot of the older people didn't need to just chill out and think things over a bit more clearly.
But here's a take that adds an important aspect to looking at the generation gap of that time. It's from Michael Harrington, the author of an influential book on poverty called The Other America (1962) and the National Chairman of the Socialist Party U.S.A. at the time. Yes, trolls, he was an overt socialist. It's from an essay of his in a book called The Con III Controversy (1971). (If you want anyone to believe that you're younger than 45, you'd best pretend that you have no clue at all what "Con III" might mean. Trust me on this.)
Basing his figures on the 1971 US Census Bureau population study, Harrington looked at the demographic composition of college students at that time. Keeping in mind that these are dollar values of nearly four decades ago, he writes:
In 1969 the number of dependent family members - of young people dependent on their family in college - was about five million. And of that group, 23% were the children of college graduates; 14.5% were the children of family heads who had had one to three years of college; 35.2% were the children of high school graduates; and 26.6% were the children of family heads having less than a high school education. Therefore, this enormous increase in the college population is by more than 50% from families headed by individuals with only a high school education or less. Or if I can put that in simpler terms, it's from working class or lower middle class families - because certainly in the last generation if you did not have a college education, you would not have been in that generation placed in the middle class. ...Since categories like the "youth movement" and the "student movement" were vague and fluid in practice, I'm not sure what is the quality level of the available survey data about the participants in those movements.
... If you came from a family in 1969 winch had more than $15,000 a year in income. 66% of individuals in that category went to college. If you came from a family which had under $3,000 of income, 16.4% went to college. Therefore a college population is still enormously class-biased; obviously middle class children go to college much more than poor children.
But the change in the substance under the froth is that in 1969, of the young people in college, 74% of them came from families with less than $15,000 a year income, and 64% with less than $10,000 a year. Ten thousand dollars a year is about the median income in the United States. So a profound change is taking place ...
But Harrington defines an important part of the background here. College had largely been an experience for the children of the relatively wealthy. It was only in the post-Second World War era that it became the standard expectation that corporate executives would hold at least a university-level degree. Nobody worried in those days that the lack of an MBA would impede their business careers.
By the 1960s, though, college-level education had become a mass phenomenon. So many of the fearful polemics about the student and youth movements of the time assume with condescending sanctimony that the activists were narcissistic children of the wealthy. But it's not clear that students from the wealthiest families that drove those phenemena.
But there is a tension in many families whose children are the first to attend college in their families. On the one hand, the families place great hope and ambitions in the college careers of the children. On the other, there was also often a fear that the children would reject the habits and values of the family, along with a great deal of uncertainty about just what the college experience would really mean for the children. College also cost a lot, though relatively not as much as today. But it was a substantial investment for very many families in the future opportunities of their kids.
Add into this picture the fact that defenders of the racial status quo, of the Vietnam War, of conservative university administration, of short hair for men, of sexual abstinence before marriage, often directed some ferocious invective at those who actively challenged those standards in any active way. The George Wallaces and Spiro Agnews of the world and their radical supporters - as well as many good Democratic liberals - told people they should fear that their children at college could be sucked into anti-American movement led by Communists and Manson cultists and drug-out freaks and so on and so forth.
Think of the invective that OxyContin radio, FOX News and most Republican members of Congress have been directed at opponents of the Iraq War for years now. And then picture it being spewed by both Republicans and Democrats and even many liberal intellectuals who surely knew better, and directed not against Democrats of all ages but against young people specifically.
The result was that many parents found themselves fearing any signs of deviance in their college-age offspring from conventional assumptions as they understood them.
It's important to remember in this context that just as today, older people have generally been more opposed to the Iraq War than younger ones, the same demographic difference was true also with the Vietnam War. So it wasn't just criticism of the young of the Vietnam War that drove this unusually sharp "generation gap". Because the parents were more likely to be opposed to the Vietnam War than the college-age children.
Still, the intensity of the reaction by older people is amazing. And scary.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., also appears to have not totally lost his head over youth eccentricity in those days. In The Crisis of Confidence: Ideas, Power and Violence in America (1969), he makes a couple of sensible observations like the following:
It is understandably difficult for parents, who have worked hard for their children and their communities, to see themselves as smug and fraudulent. But it is also understandable that the children of the sixties should have grown sensitive to the gap between what their parents claim their values to be and what (as they see it) their values really are — the gap made vivid in a land of freedom and equality which has so long, so unthinkingly and so shamefully condemned a tenth of the population to tenth-class citizenship. "It is quite right that the young should talk about us as hypocrites," Judge Charles E. Wyzanski, Jr., recently said at Lake Forest College. "We are."A decade or so later, Republican pamphleteer George Gilder would declare that hyporcrisy is a virtue, because it somehow makes us better than we are. (It doesn't make any sense to me, either.)
Also from Schlesinger:
No, the boys and girls of the nineteen-sixties, unlike the heroes and heroines of Dreiser, Lewis and Wolfe, are not generally mad at their families. Often they regard their father and mother with a certain compassion as the casualties of the system that they themselves are determined to resist. In many cases — and this is even true of the militant students — they are trying to live the values their parents affirmed; they are not so much rebelling against their parents' attitudes as applying them. They reject their families much less than they do the dominating social institutions — the "structures" — of which they consider their parents as fellow victims. And the nearest structure for them to reject, at least in its present form, is the college itself — the instrument they see as ordained by society to tame and bridle the young and turn them into faithful servants of the great organizations. (my emphasis)In "culture war" demonology, those parents whose values produced activists young men and women among their children were being "permissive", therefore guiding their children to make "bad choices".
By the standards of the days in academia, it would seem that anyone who managed to discuss the strange and mysterious behavior of the nonconformist young without total condension and sneering sanctimony would have sounded downright sympathetic to the troubling errant youth, who dared to criticize the ways and wars of what sanctimonious spokesmen of a later time would call "the greatest country in the world".
Tags: 1968, michael harrington, sixties
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