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The Sixties' False Dawn: Awakenings, Movements, and Postmodern Policy-making

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Hugh Hečlo
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Extract

Writing in 1978 about the 1960s, William McLoughlin saw America in the midst of the fourth Great Awakening in our history. Awakenings are “periods of cultural revitalization that begin in a general crisis of beliefs and values and extend over a generation or so, during which time a profound reorientation in beliefs and values takes place. Revivals alter the lives of individuals; awakenings alter the world view of a whole people or culture.” To put it another way, awakenings are revelatory times when large numbers of people anguish over and eventually search out new self-understandings as individuals and as a society. They are like a convulsive quickening in the cultural womb.

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Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 8 , Special Issue 1: Integrating the Sixties: The Origins Structures, and Legitimacy of Public Policy in a Turbulent Decade , January 1996 , pp. 34 - 63
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Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1996

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References

Notes

1. McLoughlin, William G., Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform (Chicago, 1978), 169.Google Scholar

2. Ibid., xiii.

3. “SNCC: Founding Statement,” in Albert, Judith C. and Albert, Stewart E., The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (New York, 1984), 113Google Scholar. More generally, see Burns, Stewart, Social Movements of the 1960s: Searching for Democracy (Boston, 1990), 188ff.Google Scholar; Morgan, Edward P., The 60s Experience (Philadelphia, 1991), 37.Google Scholar

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6. McLoughlin, Revivals, p. 2.

7. In 1994 the Louis Harris poll reported the lowest level of confidence in government institutions since the question began to be asked in 1966. Other polls show those trusting the government to do what is right all or most of the time declined from 76 percent in 1964 to 19 percent in 1994. Those seeing government run by a few big interests looking out for themselves rather than run for the benefit of all the people had risen from 29 percent in 1964 to 80 percent in 1992. Lipset, S. M., “American Democracy in Comparative Perspective” (reproduced), 3 November 1994.Google Scholar

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23. Bums, Social Movements of the 1960s, xii. For a rich evocation of this distressed passage of 1960s youth, see Cheever, Susan, A Woman's Life (New York, 1994)Google Scholar. Estimates of protest participation are from a 1989 Gallup poll of thirty- to forty-nine-year-olds, Washington Post, 24 July 1994, C5.

24. A good survey of recent thinking on social movements generally is Cohen, Jean L., ed., “Social Movements” (Special Issue), Social Research 52:4 (Winter 1985)Google Scholar. For the Sixties, see Jackson, Rebecca, The 1960s: An Annotated Bibliography of Social and Political Movements in the United States (Westport, Conn., 1992).Google Scholar

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The Government is my shepard/ Therefore I need not work./ It alloweth me to lie down on a good job./ It leadeth me beside still factories;/ It destroyeth my initiative./ It leadesth me in the path of a parasite for politic's sake./Yea, though I walk through the valley of laziness and deficit-spending,/I will fear no evil, for the Government is with me./ It prepareth an economic Utopia for me, by appropriating the earnings of my own grandchildren./It filleth my head with false security;/My inefficiency runneth over./Surely the Government should care for me for all the days of my life!!/And I shall dwell in a fool's paradise for ever.

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31. Flacks, Making History, 186.

32. John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IX, line 825. Eve is pondering the reason why not to give Adam the forbidden fruit she has eaten: “But keep the odds of Knowledge in my power without Copartner? So to add what is wanting in Female Sex, the more to draw his Love, and render me more equal, and perhaps, a thing not undesirable, sometime Superior: for inferior who is free?”

33. Burns, Social Movements of the 1960s, 199.

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36. The same rhetoric would be repeated in the 1990s by conservatives such as presidential candidate Pat Buchanan (e.g., in his celebrated speech at the 1992 Republican convention). But in this place and time, the idea and phrase came from one of the precursors and inspirations for the Sixties' Left, Goodman, Paul: “How is it possible to have more meaning and honor in work? To put wealth to some real use? To have a high standard of living of whose quality we are not ashamed? To get social justice for those who have been shamefully left out … ? If 10 thousand people in all walks of life will stand up on their two feet and talk out and insist, we shall get back our country.” Growing Up Absurd (New York, 1956), x–xvi.Google Scholar

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