SOCIOCULTURAL EVENTS

        The take-off period: 1890--1930.Despite the often brash self-confidence of leaders in both North America and Europe at the outset of the 1890s, the Gilded Age manifested an increasing cacophony of discordant trends. Intellectually, a revolt began against Enlightenment rationality. Economically, the robber barons reached their pinnacle of power, and muckraking exposures prompted reforms of large corporations. Politically, nationalism emerged, leading to schemes of imperialistic expansion, while populist dissent challenged the hegemony of established party and machine politicians.
        Religiously, American Protestants vacillated between evangelical revivalism and liberal theology. There was an effort to accommodate modern thought forms and--through the social gospel movement--to deal with the problems of rapid industrialization, urbanization, unionization, and immigrant assimilation. Roman Catholicism wrestled with the question of whether it was better to enter into a passive accommodation to or a full acceptance of American culture.
        Demographically, American society experienced a spurt of rapid urbanization, based on many native rural folk flooding into the cities and a massive influx of immigrants. Ethnically, assimilation processes instilled in foreign-born citizens a new identity as Americans in ever-increasing numbers and fostered the formation of powerful ethnic subcommunities. Educationally, the American collegiate population increased by a staggering 38.4 percent between 1890 and 1895, and reached one million by 1930. There was a corresponding relaxation of administrative controls over the lifestyles and moral attitudes of the student peer group and an explosion of extracurricular diversions--ranging from sporting events to the expansion of the sorority-fraternity system, debating clubs, student government, and YMCA/YWCAs.
        For families, the 1890s marked the beginning of the end of that distinctly Victorian pattern of the husband-dominant power structure within the nuclear family. This occurred especially as women began to slough off the virtuous woman ideal that had effectively defined a woman's proper place as a subservient housewife, mother, and wife, isolated from the workplace, from political power structures, and from leadership roles within the church, and granted only limited access to educational opportunities.
        Collectively, these changes challenged the foundations of the reigning Victorian social order and redirected the cultural and structural features of American social life. The efforts of many--the labor movement, feminist vanguards, politicians of the progressive era, ethnic community lobbyists, religious reformers, and student activists--served to empower more people to behave as they wished.
        The overriding trend was to emphasize a set of identities formed around class, ethnic, religious, gender, and political interests. Each of these was sharply opposed to the conservative sociocultural order of the nineteenth century. Although the role of the student peer group was not nearly so pronounced then as it was during the mid-1960s, it was nonetheless a formidable influence in delegitimating Establishment authorities, ideologies, and institutions.
        The trends pertaining to student peer groups' lifestyles and behavioral codes prefigured the subsequent ideological and generational conflicts. Participants in the rebel or bohemian subculture that blossomed forth after 1910 were at once excited about ideas and hedonistic--like their fraternity-sorority counterparts--but they also recognized that beyond campus there existed a world of economics, politics, labor unrest, and the arts. So the trends launched by members of the student subculture quickly began to penetrate into the larger social order as bohemian enclaves like Greenwich Village sprang up as a direct challenge to the dominant culture, movements that soon exercised influence far in excess of their actual numbers.
        The interregnum years: 1930--1945.The inroads achieved by the student movement against the stultifying intellectual-moral forms of Victorian culture--combined with the deep structural changes brought about by industrial growth, ethnic assimilation, political reforms, and familial transformations--were all effectively immobilized by the worsening effects of the Depression. Even World War I had not produced so drastic a consequence.
        The Depression also rekindled isolationist and antiglobal sentiments among the American populace. Historian Paul Kennedy has claimed that, had the American response to the economic crisis of world capitalism been less parochial, the Depression in the United States would have been less severe and of shorter duration. But with a large portion of our productive capacity standing idle, we reacted defensively by erecting tariff barriers to protect indigenous industries. Thus, at precisely the wrong time, access to foreign markets was cut off, causing the Depression to intensify.
        This experience was emblematic for the whole decade of the 1930s. Emerging international contacts for the United States were summarily cut by the rise of isolationist ideologies based on a wide range of economic, political, cultural, or antimilitaristic views. International relations shriveled in the face of U.S. efforts to limit its foreign commitments--especially after a succession of ill-conceived attempts to manipulate currency and exchange agreements designed to promote American interests. Abroad, similar movements for student, religious, intellectual, and ethnic contacts were curtailed because of bad economic conditions. Only the labor movement enjoyed something of a resurgence of international relations as advocates of socialist and communist ideologies streamed into the nation to urge unionists to forsake the bread-and-butter orientation of market unionism in favor of a more aggressive stance that sought a role for workers in management. Ultimately, even this effort failed as Americans circled the wagons and turned inward for the resources to weather out the storm of the Depression.
        Perhaps nowhere was the stubborn resistance to globalizing tendencies more pronounced than in the response of rank-and-file American citizens to the gathering storm of fascism in Europe and Asia that would eventually usher in World War II. The rise of totalitarian regimes--often out of soil where liberal democratic experiments had previously begun to germinate--readily awakened in the American people a sense of political revulsion. Yet disdain for fascism could not be translated into aggressive opposition; Americans blithely acquiesced to voracious gains recorded abroad on the extreme right of the political spectrum. Mounting a vigorous critique against totalitarianism seemed all but futile, given the collapse of liberal, capitalist economies and the demise of modernism's dream of evolutionary progress.
        The crises of the Depression and of fascism convinced much of the American public that the only reasonable response was a defensive retreat from the global arena. That stance proved impossible to maintain, of course, after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Against its will, the United States was forced back into the global arena as a principal player in geopolitical and military affairs, a role that it found impossible to slough off after the war had ended, even though some isolationist sentiment persisted and continued to manifest itself periodically all through the Cold War and into the present day. Thus, while the Depression intensified American isolationism, World War II ended any serious consideration of withdrawal from global involvements.
        The aberrant fifties: 1946--1964.With the successful prosecution of the war and with the American economy spiraling to new levels of affluence thereafter, it could reasonably be expected that the liberalizing cultural patterns put on hold after the 1930s would resurface with a vengeance in the late '40s or early '50s. Instead, America experienced an elongated decade of social conservatism (1946--1964) that can best be described as the aberrant fifties. The culture of American society after the mid-1940s did not return to normal; rather, we were visited by a period of political conservatism, familism, religiosity, renewed patriotism, a passion for a sense of belonging, a quest for economic security, and a commitment to traditional gender roles. What needs to be explained relative to the postwar period is not why we experienced the radical sixties but why we entered into the conservative fifties prior to returning to the liberalizing agenda of the early part of the century.
        The powerful influence of middle America, or the working class, was, in part, a direct but hidden consequence of governmental policies initiated following World War II. The GI Bill placed an otherwise inaccessible university education within the reach of a substantial segment of the lower middle-class population. The overriding ambition among these returning veterans (and later the Korean contingent as well), who were understandably anxious about time lost, was to convert higher education into better-paying occupations and, in turn, realize upward mobility. Accordingly, the size of the university population doubled twice between 1945 and 1965, creating a critical mass for the support of an independent youth peer group by the mid-1960s. Simultaneously, liberal loan programs administered through the FHA and VHA permitted blue-collar workers to emigrate en masse to the suburbs after World War II, creating in the process one of the major demographic shifts in American history, rivaled only by the movement of Afro-Americans from the South into the urbanized North and West.
        A college degree, material success, and the crowning achievement of owning "a home of one's own" in the greenbelt suburbs, along with the ancillary accoutrements, were simply not the sort of aspirations that could ignite a new round of cultural innovations along the lines of the Roaring Twenties. Moreover, the sheer numbers of those in the working class who were moving through the process of becoming middle class help account for part of their influence. The rest of the story is that this rising class group was discovered by merchandisers, manufacturers, media programmers, politicians, and a whole succession of service-sector entrepreneurs. Although individual family earnings remained relatively modest during the fifties, collectively the accelerating affluence of the working class represented a vast reservoir of wealth waiting to be tapped. The American dream of success--for producers and consumers--now appeared closer at hand than at perhaps any time in our relatively short history.
        One of the enduring ironies of the fifties was that not only was the avant-garde--the members of the rising blue-collar class--socially conservative but so, too, were the leading critics of the era. The most widely read among the critics were Will Herberg, William H. Whyte Jr., and David Reisman. Herberg denounced the upsurge in religious participation in the fifties on the basis that ethnic assimilation had created a situation whereby each of the major religious traditions--Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish--was transformed into a means for identifying oneself as an American. The very fact of belonging to one of these religious traditions displaced in importance any substantive commitment to biblical faith. Thus, the widely heralded religious revival of the fifties was, in Herberg's assessment, a colossal expression of apostasy.
        Similar critiques of secular culture were given by Whyte and Reisman. Although the ostensible target of Whyte's excoriating commentary was the bureaucratic environment of corporations, the real locus of the dominant social perspective of the fifties was suburbia. Corporations rewarded conformity, belongingness, and skill in manipulating social relationships, but in suburban institutions and communities one could pursue with a vengeance the norms of togetherness, inconspicuous consumption, the web of friendship, spirituality without intellectual substance, child-centered socialization, gemŸtlichkeit among transients, and education designed for the reproduction of the next generation's conforming consumers.
        Riesman's critique dealt less with an appraisal of the institutional sectors responsible for framing the mind-set of the fifties and more with the transformation of American character structure from an "inner-directed" to an "other-directed" orientation. The shallow, conformist, and enervating style of other-directedness did not originate in the fifties, to be sure, but Riesman was convinced that this decade witnessed its maturation to full flower and--more importantly from his point of view--with the full approval of the body politic.
        Although none of these critics expressed it in precisely these terms at the time, collectively they perceived that what was at stake was the emergence of a dominant ideology grounded in working-class values and normative commitments, an ideology whose very seductiveness and vacuity threatened to lead the social-moral culture of American society into decline. But the alternatives prescribed in slightly different terms by Herberg, Whyte, and Reisman did not suggest picking up the modern, liberalization project that had lain in repose since the 1930s. Rather, their conservative proposal was to return to the rugged individualism, self-reliance, and fervent faith of nostalgic imagination in the American past.
        Thus, both the working class's trend toward becoming bourgeois and the countertrend advanced by Herberg, Whyte, and Reisman were conservative and remained distinct from what had prompted a whole series of modernizing tendencies before 1930. There was, therefore, scant opportunity for rekindling the liberalizing program of social transformation dormant since the thirties.
        The radical sixties: 1965--1998.The fifties ended not with a whimper but a bang. Rarely has there been a break in sociocultural continuity so abrupt and incontestable as the one that appeared in the mid-1960s. In rapid order, the Berkeley student revolt (the Free Speech Movement) of 1964 was followed by an upsurge in SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) demonstrations against the Vietnam War in 1965, the sexual revolution, and the emergence of the drug subculture with widespread experimentation with marijuana and hallucinogens. This was accompanied by revolutions in lifestyle, language usage (with a dramatic rise in profane and obscene words), musical taste (with the popularity of hard rock), dress codes and hair styles, and rebelliousness in public behavior.
        The incredibly swift transformation of the youth peer group into a counterculture could lead to the inference that the movement was an ex nihilo creation of American youth between 1964 and 1965. But preparatory stirrings on the left had appeared with increasing frequency since the late 1950s. Before his untimely death, C. Wright Mills devoted considerable energy to the task of awakening the fifties generation from what he saw as its moral-intellectual lethargy. Meanwhile, the civil rights movement inflamed youthful passions with an idealist sense of moral outrage and an activist zeal to eradicate injustice. Finally, there may well be something to Kenneth Keniston's observation that sixties youth were the first generation to relate to the American dream, not as a utopian vision, but as a reality.
        Structural conditions were also a factor. By the mid-1960s, the United States had experienced almost twenty years of unprecedented economic growth and an increase in affluence unmatched in its history. Moreover, the university population more than doubled in less than a decade during the early sixties, throwing extraordinarily large numbers of youth into the most liberal and benign institution of American society, where they could interact freely as well as control the mechanisms for their own socialization. Like all unplanned groups, however, the youth peer group was largely a self-regulating entity. The matter of setting standards--moral,intellectual, aesthetic--was a collective endeavor undertaken frequently in an environment lacking overt leaders, although Todd Gitlin suggested that politicized members of the "early New Left" were "the small motor that later turned the larger motor of the mass student movement of the late Sixties."
        The Vietnam War had the strongest symbolic significance. The prospect of being drafted and subsequently killed or wounded in a military conflict many regarded as unwise and unjust was sufficient to drive endless numbers of otherwise quiescent youth into the ranks of the war-opposing counterculture. While this explanation may appear to some to be merely manifesting self-interested motivations for the antiwar movement, which necessarily denigrate the moral integrity of sixties youth, this is not necessarily the case. It leaves the larger problem that it does not account for why young men in the fifties did not react in a similar manner to the Korean War.
        To respond by asserting that fifties youth went obsequiously to their fate after being drafted because "times were different then" is at once both a tautological and a profoundly discerning statement. The cultural mores of the fifties would almost certainly not have tolerated the sort of virulent social critique of American democratic ideology, social institutions, military activity, and socially prescribed behavior patterns given by youth of the sixties. Yet, the question remains: What brought about the sudden delegitimation of the dominant conservative ideology of the fifties?
        One place to begin an answer is with the class composition of those students who first comprised the hard-core leadership cadre of the New Student Left. Disproportionately large numbers of the original student activists were drawn from the ranks of the upper middle class. Many of the early leadership were "red diaper babies," that is, the offspring of Old Left parents, while others were merely the children of liberal, well-to-do parents whose overprivileged backgrounds placed them in line to inherit comfortable places in American social life. These youth were, in effect, reclaiming the reins controlling the cultural apparatus of the youth peer culture as rightful heirs to the liberalizing tradition all but abandoned since the early 1930s.
        The New Left's rejection of the technological, bureaucratic, materialistic world of nouveau affluence in which most of its adherents had spent their adolescence was typically couched in terms that accentuated their alienation from many of the strategies of the Old Left. Therefore, although their rejection of labor unions, higher education, liberal religion, and even organized political parties as viable instruments for social change launched them early on toward goals not markedly different culturally from those of the Old Left, their strategies were quite different. The peaceful nonviolence of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement swiftly gave way to the confrontational tactics of the SDS and the Black Power movement, followed in short order by the violence of the Weathermen faction. Fewer and fewer members of the New Left found themselves in sympathy with this level of orchestrated violence. Over time, in fact, the whole matter of institutional reform faded perceptively from the New Left agenda as cultural matters pertaining to self-fulfillment and lifestyle behaviors loomed ever larger as the focal point of concern.
        Indeed, according to historian Terry Anderson, sixties radicalism evolved through two distinct stages: The first wave, from the early 1960s through about 1968, focused on civil rights, free speech in the university, antiwar demonstrations, feminist liberation, and lifestyle changes, all under the leadership of red diaper babies and their liberal cohorts. The second wave, from 1968 into the early 1970s, represented the dramatic popularization of the cultural trends introduced by the first wave, especially lifestyle behaviors. The early movement (which was really several distinct yet overlapping reform efforts) was transformed into a broad-based counterculture among the sixties generation. The new lifestyle and moral norms introduced by college youth in the sixties had, by the early seventies, trickled down to inform the social outlook of blue-collar youth as well. Long hair, drug use, premarital sexual experimentation, language replete with four-letter words, rock music, cohabitation, and other features of the counterculture lifestyle were assimilated rapidly by working-class adolescents and young adults.
        Furthermore, from a cultural perspective, the sixties have not ended. That is to say, while the confrontational political style and antiwar demonstrations abated in the early seventies, other campaigns for societal reform--the ecology, feminist, gay rights, and multicultural movements--have persisted along with the cultural trends and lifestyle experiments introduced by the sixties generation. Although some opponents of these countercultural trends sought refuge in new religious movements or antiglobal, right-wing groups, the fact is that American society generally has yet to be saved from the sixties.

MAKING SENSE OF THE SIXTIES

        One of the leading claims of this analysis holds that the sixties represent the reclamation of that liberalization project first launched nearly a century earlier as the opening dynamics toward the realization of a global order. Contemporary assessments of what the sixties meant and what they accomplished vary widely and dramatically. Some participants of the generation that celebrated drugs, sex, and rock and roll are now having second thoughts, while others have aptly been described by pollster Peter Hart: "These people did a lot, regret very little, and don't want their kids to do any of it." Certainly, there were casualties along the way toward self-liberation, with many youths succumbing to drug addiction, limiting their life opportunities by dropping out of higher education, experiencing premarital pregnancy, becoming fugitives from legal authorities and draft boards, and enduring alienation from family and friends.
        Offsetting these personal costs were broader cultural gains, including more freedom for individual behavior and relaxation of previously prescribed statuses and roles. This led to a fuller enfranchisement of the self and to a fuller expansion of our understanding of the meaning of humanity in terms of the global order.
        Two observations are in order. The first is that the counterculture movement of the sixties was a global, and not simply an American, phenomenon. Although the American case has been emphasized here, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, Australia, Italy, and, indeed, most industrialized nations--which had also enjoyed prolonged economic prosperity, industrial development, a substantial university population, political stability, extensive media exposure, and rapid rates of upward social mobility--also experienced youth revolts. The leftist political agendas of the student radicals failed to gain popular support almost everywhere--although student protesters did contribute to the resignation of de Gaulle in France in 1969--but the lifestyle and cultural changes persisted into the seventies and after in a manner similar to that in the United States.
        A second observation pertains to the linkage between the 1890--1930 era and the period from the mid-1960s to the present. Numerous analysts have indicated the generational continuity between the 1920--30s leftists and the leadership of the early New Student Left. Few have lingered, however, to contemplate the larger cultural significance of that continuity, for the demographic linkage actually serves as a kind of exterior index to deeper cultural processes.
        Family sociologist Andrew Cherlin was one of the first scholars to assert that the sixties represented a return to normal insofar as family patterns were concerned, after the abnormal trends precipitated by the Depression, World War II, and the fifties. Early in this century, he argues, the age at which people entered their first marriage was relatively high, the number of children per household was dropping, the divorce rate was rising rapidly (as was the remarriage rate after marital dissolution), and women were beginning to enter the workforce in increasing numbers. During the fifties almost all these trends were reversed or retarded in their growth rates: The age at first marriage declined sharply for both men and women, the birthrate increased to produce the baby boom, the divorce rate held relatively steady, and movement of women into the paid labor force outside the home rose only moderately. Indeed, Cherlin contended that, if one took a measure like the divorce rate and compared 1890--1930 with 1960--1980--omitting in the process the 1930 to 1960 period--what one observed was smooth curve development; hence, the claim that the sixties represented a return to normal. By extension, what is being suggested here is that smooth curve development obtains for more than the divorce rate and that, in fact, trends in cultural liberation between 1890--1930 and 1965 to the present follow a similar trajectory.
        The enfranchisement of the self.Although globalization theory is still being developed, considerable consensus appears to be forming around the proposition that the self, under conditions of globality, is emerging as an active, stable unit that is being called upon to define itself against the otherness of the nation-state, global collectivities, and humanity. Moreover, the production and reproduction of selfhood occurs in a situation of reflexivity wherein statuses, roles, and collective norms are constantly examined and reformed in light of the infusion of new information attained from others. Unlike earlier selves--whose identity was largely framed by the heavy hand of tradition, extended family, and village groups or by age and gender cohorts--the modern self under conditions of globality finds that his challenge to discover his identity as a mature individual is thrust upon him as a personal responsibility. No longer, for example, is being female a justification for not aspiring to become a physician, dock worker, master plumber, mathematician, or astronaut.
        Moreover, the responsibility for defining one's own identity has emerged as not simply a necessity but also a right. Self-determination is regarded more and more as a personal prerogative that others ought to respect as a matter of principle. This perspective was an intimate theme of youth subcultures in both the early twentieth century and in the sixties revolution.
        Critics on both occasions frequently interpreted such claims as merely flagrant attempts to legitimate bohemian hedonism and pursue a range of narcissistic experiences that were, no doubt, pleasurable but also illegal or immoral, and often both. Certainly, it is often difficult to discern the difference between self-indulgent and self-fulfilling conduct, but it would be a serious mistake to dismiss the campaign of the counterculture as simply an exercise in promulgating permissiveness. Real gains were made in giving the individual self the responsibility for his own identity formation, even to the point of now making gender orientation a matter of personal election. If nothing else, the youth peer groups in both eras constituted an avant-garde for creating a new, proactive conception of the self and empowering people to explore new roles and experiences in the process of constructing their own identities.
        The strength of humanity.The emergence of the importance of humanity in the global field enjoys intricate analytical connections to the renovated conceptions of selfhood. The "movement" in the sixties was concerned not only with lifestyle changes but also with equality, justice, freedom, and self-determination for all humankind. That students enter colleges and universities today with a potent belief in equality and a firm commitment to fairness is to a large extent a testament to the success of the sixties generation in promoting the recognition that no one can be rightfully excluded from, or their privileges limited in, the global community. While empirically the sixties revolution achieved more in the acceptance of civil rights than it attained in terms of equality, nonetheless, the premise was firmly institutionalized that no one should be denied full participation in the various domains of social life on the basis of such ascribed characteristics as race, ethnicity, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, and so forth.
        Implicitly, meanwhile, the emerging significance of the notion of humanity as a constellation of rights collides against another deeply held commitment among contemporary college students: the strong conviction that ethnocentrism constitutes the worst of intellectual sins. When confronted with the ongoing practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) in Africa, for example, students are outraged, but they are also loath to condemn what is a cultural tradition of long standing in the indigenous societies in question. The growing chorus of individuals, nation-states, and international nongovernmental organizations that condemn what are taken to be inhumane practices--FGM, ethnic cleansing, the repression of religious or ethnic minorities, the exploitative use of child labor, and myriad other inhumane practices around the globe--is indicative of the emerging worldwide consciousness that we participate in a common destiny as a part of humanity.
        One notable consequence of the increasing solidarity of selves around the notion of humanity has been the relativization of the nation-state. No longer can regimes declare that they alone are responsible for what transpires within their boundaries. Now noncitizens feel perfectly justified in condemning abuses on the grounds that to harm another is the legitimate concern of everyone on earth. Moreover, this conclusion is the rational outcome of trends toward inclusion and equality that initially took on form and substance in the countercultural movements of the sixties, where the rights to freedom, self-determination, gender equity, fairness, and more found renewed support.
        A caveat is in order, lest the impression be created that all things bright and beautiful arose full-blossom out of the sixties revolution. I am making a much more modest and circumspect claim here: Lifestyle experimentation, for example, signified not merely a search for pleasure but also a search for authentic identity. While there were casualties in the drug subculture, spoiled academic careers, alienation of parents from children, and the like, nonetheless, the groundwork was laid for addressing such impediments to full self-development as gender repression, racial discrimination, unfulfilling marriages, educational irrelevance, and class barriers, which resulted in stultified lives. Thus, despite its often raucous, irreverent, and sometimes violent demeanor, the youth peer culture provided, on balance, an impetus toward the realization of a new solidarity grounded in the notion of humanity.

IMPLICATIONS FOR CHARACTER AND IDENTITY FORMATION