Some people often ask me what it was like to live on a college campus in the late 1960s during the student unrest period of American history. The following is the first of a six-part series, all stolen from the manuscript of a never-published book, “Breadcrusts,” written 20 years ago by me and my long-time trout fishing buddy Jim Wasserman,
by David T. Young and James G. Wasserman
Some people recall the 1960s with great fondness, some regard the era as a one-time obnoxious blip on the screen of American history.
Regardless, virtually everyone agrees there has been no other time like it, before or since.
The 1960s have been romanticized, ostracized, glamorized, trivialized and most alarmingly, they have been depicted erroneously. High schools have special “’60s days,” in which kids deck themselves out in hippie garb, wear headbands, beads, feathers and bells and put on long-haired wigs in hopes of capturing the spirit of “what it was like.” It’s all in good fun, but the process gives young folks only a cosmetic and superficial glimpse of a unique era.
I know, man. I was there. I may have been stoned through some of it, but the ’60s I lived through and remember were much more than just bell bottoms, peace signs and psychedelic posters.
There have been a lot of movies and made-for-TV special events that have tried to give us definitive history lessons on how it was in that particularly special era. But other than a presentation by a PBS documentary on “POV,” virtually all of the lame crap pretending to be history, put out by Madison Avenue, movie producers and television executives, has been appalling.
One of the most important elements of the decade indeed was protest. Things started with the civil rights movement in the early and mid-1960s and picked up a lot of added steam several years later with the anti-war movement. On these two points just about everyone agrees.
These two movements contained the two most important fundamental issues many young people and their allies were bringing to the public arena. For the first time in American history, a large number of folks were advancing the idea that people should not be judged by what they look like and that war is not such a noble process and perhaps should be avoided rather than glorified.
When these ideas were thrust into the public arena, there was fallout, such as the generation gap, an assault on the American ideals of capitalism and materialism, gronks beating up on hippies, use of recreational drugs and campus unrest.
The seemingly relentless march of the new ideas and confrontations were ground to a halt rather quickly, however.
I grade the ’60s era as beginning with Dr. Martin Luther King leading the march on Washington in the summer of 1963 and ending with the Kent State massacre in May 1970.
And I submit that America has never seen anything like those seven years in between. Perhaps America never wants to see it ever again and a few people in high places will make certain it doesn’t.
Since 1970, there have been a few eruptions, a few protests, a few incidences in which people have been moved to gather together to try to call attention to injustice. But they’ve been very few indeed, very feeble and they have looked nothing like that famous seven-year stretch.
I remember showing Fruitport High School students a black and white film in the spring of 1969, in which U.S. Senator William Fullbright suggested that college students and young people were alarmingly conformist, were concerned only about making money and rarely showed compassion about and interest in pressing political and social issues. The movie had been made in 1959, and the high school kids of 10 years later laughed all the way through it. Yet if that film were to be shown any time in the 1980s or 1990s or even since, it would have been entirely accurate again.
What happened to Wasserman and the so-called movement at Grand Vallery State University, a backwoods college in the middle of a cornfield, seemed to mirror national developments. By the summer of 1970, the movement was virtually dead. Wasserman and I knew it while we both were in semi-seclusion.
Looking back after more than 30 years, I have come up with five reasons why the spirit of perhaps the most famous decade in American history died so quickly. These five reasons follow: (To be continued)
