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

Journal of Policy History

Volumn 8, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 34-63

  Hečlo, Hugh ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 85011507193     PISSN: 08980306     EISSN: 15284190     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0898030600005029     Document Type: Article

References (130)

1. William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform (Chicago, 1978), 169.
2. Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform, xiii.
3. “SNCC: Founding Statement,” in Judith C. Albert and Stewart E. Albert, The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (New York, 1984), 113.
4. More generally, see Stewart Burns, Social Movements of the 1960s: Searching for Democracy (Boston, 1990), 188ff.
5. Edward P. Morgan, The 60s Experience (Philadelphia, 1991), 37.
6. For information on the spiritual/political quests of those who came of age in the 1960s, see Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers (San Francisco, 1993)
7. Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York, 1988)
8. Philip Hammond, Religion and Personal Autonomy (Columbia, S.C., 1992).
9. Others have occasionally and rather unsystematically applied the concept of an “awakening” to the 1960s. For example: Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass., 1981)
10. Walter Anderson, The Upstart Spring: Esakn and the American Awakening (Reading, Mass., 1983)
11. Richard Ellwood, The 60s Spiritual Awakening (New Brunswick, 1994)
12. Morgan, The 60s Experience, chap. 7
13. “A New Awakening?” Characteristically enough, Sixties activists may remember their movement participation as “a holy time,” or a discovery time of letting their “light shine.” Quoted in Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties (New York, 1995), 86.
14. McLoughlin, Revivals, p.2.
15. 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. S. M. Lipset, “American Democracy in Comparative Perspective” (reproduced), 3 November 1994.
16. E. J. Dionne Jr., Why Americans Hate Politics, 2d ed. (New York, 1992).
17. Kenneth Cauthen, The Impact of Religious Liberalism (New York, 1962)
18. Allen Davis, Spearheads for Reform (New York, 1967)
19. B. M. G. Reardon, Liberal Protestantism (Stanford, 1968). It was in this tum-of-the-century intra-Protestant conflict that the term “fundamentalist” was itself coined to identify those supposedly antimodernist forces determined to do battle for the fundamentals of the faith and its worldview.
20. Nancy T. Ammerman, “North American Protestant Fundamentalism,” in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, Fundamentalisms Observed (Chicago, 1991), 2–27.
21. Eldon J. Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Lawrence, Kan., 1994), 45–46
22. more generally, Gertrude Himmelfarb, The De-Moralization of Society (New York, 1994).
23. This in turn recalled the spiritual quest of social reformers from the prior Great Awakening before the civil war, when New Lights were confident that “that is the only true church organization, when heads and hearts united in working for the welfare of the human-race.” Lydia Maria Child quoted in Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York, 1994), 229.
24. Surely among the more portentous seeds was the young Oliver Wendell Holmes and his war-induced skepticism toward all causes based on claims of morality or justice. His later judicial support for Progressive economic and social legislation would be grounded in acknowledging no higher law than the democratic community's demands for action, anticipating what others would embrace as interest-group liberalism. G. Edward White, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self (New York, 1995).
25. However, for a vivid account of how at the nonelite level America was still functioning as an “ought culture” in the 1930s, see David Gelernter, 1939: The Lost World of the Fair (New York, 1995).
26. The focus here is on modernity in terms of socioeconomic changes and popular thought, not on the richer philosophical discussion of modernity, modernism, and postmodemism among intellectuals and artists. Modernity in its Enlightenment guise of secular rationalism encompasses its own romantic reactions throughout the last two centuries, and these have profound relevance to the 1960s. A useful overview of the terms is in Philip Selznick, The Moral Commonwealth (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992), 3–16.
27. Philosophical accounts of modernity in the American context are reviewed in John P. Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism (Chicago, 1994)
28. the inner conflicts are discussed with great subtlety in Thelma Levine, “American Philosophy, Socialism, and the Contradictions of Modernity,” in John Stuhr, ed., Philosophy and the Construction of Culture (New York, 1992)
29. idem, “America and the Contestations of Modernity,” in Herman Saatkamp, ed., Pragmatism and Rorty (Vanderbilt, Tenn., 1995).
30. Robert Booth Fowler, Unconventional Partners: Religion and Liberal Culture in the United States (Grand Rapids, 1989), chaps. 1–3.
31. See, for example, Ruth Elson, Guardians of Tradition (Lincoln, 1964)
32. Sara Goodman Zimet, What Children Read in School (New York, 1972)
33. George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University (New York, 1994). The claim here runs to the presumptive self-confidence in a culture asserting such authority, not that college students have morally changed much over the centuries.
34. Cf. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York, 1994).
35. Ellwood, The 60s Spiritual Awakening, chap. 3, 104–175.
36. Writing in 1955, Will Herberg described being Protestant, Catholic, or Jew as “the alternative ways of being an American,” with the underlying culture-religion represented by “the American way of life.” Protestant, Catholic, few (Garden City, N.Y., 1960).
37. Peter Berger, “Religion in Post-Protestant America,” Commentary, May 1986.
38. Morton Keller, Regulating a New Economy (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)
39. Regulating a New Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).
40. Richard Flacks, Making History: The American Left and the American Mind (New York, 1988), 53–67.
41. For an account of how the liberal consensus emerged in the give-and-take of New Deal policy-making, see Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York, 1995).
42. James L. Sundquist, Politics and Policy (Washington, D.C., 1968), 46–54.
43. For typically self-confident expositions of the national agenda, see Kermit Gordon, ed., Agenda for the Nation (Washington, D.C., 1968)
44. as well as the Nixon administration version: Report of the National Goals Research Staff, Toward Balanced Growth: Quantity with Quality (Washington, D.C., 1970).
45. Robert C. Wood, Whatever Possessed the President? Academic Experts and Presidential Policy, 1960–1988 (Amherst, 1993).
46. Andre Jamison, Seeds of the Sixties (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994)
47. John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York, 1994).
48. Washington Post, 4 July 1994, C5.
49. A 1969 poll found 13 percent of college students identifying with the “new left,” compared to 3 percent of noncollege youth. The largest U.S. college protest was occasioned by the 1970 Kent State shootings, and it engaged 2 million of the some 8 million students in the nation. The nonstudent, general population was even less supportive of what would become known as “sixties-type people.” After the spring 1970 U.S. invasion of Cambodia, surveys showed that three-fourths of Americans opposed protests against the government and would support restricting basic freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights to that end. Survey analysis in the late 1980s suggested that the ethics of about 30 million Americans were altered in a meaningful way (a quintessential Sixties term) by the 1960s events, particularly civil rights, women's liberation, and the Vietnam War. Some 16 million also stated that the counterculture of the time resulted in personal changes in their lives. Cf. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties, xvi-xx, 351, 422.
50. Burns, Social Movements of the 1960s, xii.
51. For a rich evocation of this distressed passage of 1960s youth, see Susan Cheever, A Woman's Life (New York, 1994).
52. Estimates of protest participation are from a 1989 Gallup poll of thirty to forty-nine-year-olds, Washington Post, 24 July 1994, C5.
53. A good survey of recent thinking on social movements generally is Jean L. Cohen, ed., “Social Movements” (Special Issue), Social Research 52:4 (Winter 1985).
54. For the Sixties, see Rebecca Jackson, The 1960s: An Annotated Bibliography of Social and Political Movements in the United States (Westport, Conn., 1992).
55. Peter Viereck, Conservatism Revisited (London, 1950)
56. William F. Buckley, God and Man at Yak (Chicago, 1951)
57. Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind (Chicago, 1953).
58. Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (Shepherdsville, Ky., 1960).
59. The sense of conservative momentum is nicely captured in the cover story in Time, 10 April 1960
60. “The Great Debate of the Year: Does America's Best Hope for the Future Lie in Political Conservatism?” (a printed debate between Senators Barry Goldwater and Jacob Javits), in Robert M Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler, eds., The Great Ideas Today 1962 (Chicago, 1962).
61. Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation (New York, 1989) 262
62. Morgan, The 60s Experience, 273.
63. Sara Evans, Personal Politics (New York, 1980).
64. A representative summary of the indictment in keeping with the spirit of the times is the series of articles in The New Yorker, appearing later in Richard N. Goodwin's, The American Condition (New York, 1974).
65. Michael J. Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy (New York, 1975), 74–76.
66. Flacks, Making History, 186.
67. 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?”
68. Burns, Social Movements of the 1960s, 199.
69. David Vogel, “The Public-Interest Movement and the American Reform Tradition,” Political Science Quarterly 95 (Winter 1980–1981)
70. Benjamin Ginsberg, The Captive Public (New York, 1986).
71. Andrew Arato and Jean L. Cohen, “Social Movements, Civil Society, and the Problem of Sovereignty,” Praxis International 4 (October 1984): 266–283.
72. The concept is argued far more fully in Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Boyte, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America (New York, 1986).
73. 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, Paul Goodman: “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.
74. Some did try to fashion a “rational, humanist moral code” to replace traditional standards. See Michael Harrington, The Twilight of Capitalism (New York, 1976).
75. For a bittersweet account of his life in a self-described movement of “historic failure,” see Michael Harrington, The Long-Distance Runner: An Autobiography (New York, 1989).
76. Thus there was virtually no Sixties “activism” at traditional religiously-based universities such as Baylor and Brigham Young; by contrast, social activism was strongly emphasized by the radical theologists of the time in their freer and more flexible “new morality,” publicized most vividly in the “death of God” writings. Ronald B. Flowers, Religion in Strange Times: The 1960s and 1970s (Macon, Ga., 1984)
77. a lively account is in Ellwood, The 60s Spiritual Awakening, 122–142.
78. Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (New York, 1994).
79. Ronald Fraser, ed., 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (New York, 1988)
80. Burns, Social Movements of the 1960s, 184–185.
81. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York, 1963), 46–47.
82. Steven Tipton, Getting Saved from the Sixties (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982)
83. Phillip Hammond, Religion and Personal Autonomy (Columbia, S.C., 1992).
84. According to Wade Roofs study, more than two in every three Baby Boomers raised in a religious tradition stopped attending church or synagogue during their teens or early twenties; of those, one in four would return, generally when having children of their own, only to drop out again as child-rearing ended and the already weak institutional attachments faded. Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (San Francisco, 1993).
85. H. Richard Niebuhr, Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (New York, 1960)
86. John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths (New York, 1960)
87. Martin E. Marty, The New Shape of American Religion (New York, 1959).
88. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York, 1987).
89. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” in Michael B. Levy, ed., Political Thought in America, 2d ed. (Prospect Heights, Ill., 1988), 458.
90. Harvey Cox, The Secular City (New York, 1965).
91. Sara Evans, Personal Politics, 61
92. Sidney Milkis and Richard Harris, The Politics of Regulatory Change (Oxford, 1989), 62–81.
93. Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement (New York, 1984).
94. Ellwood, The 60s Spiritual Awakening, 80.
95. Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York, 1988)
96. James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Washington, D.C., 1985)
97. Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested (Harmondsworth, 1983).
98. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston, 1968), 158–159.
99. Charles Tilly et al., The Rebellious Century: 1830–1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975)
100. idem, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, Mass., 1978).
101. Subsequent points about the identity orientation in collective action draw upon Alain Touraine, The Voice and the Eye (New York, 1982)
102. “An Introduction to the Study of Social Movements,” in Cohen, “Social Movements.”
103. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass., 1989)
104. for applications to the American legal and constitutional system, see Hadley Arkes, Beyond the Constitution (Princeton, 1990)
105. Thomas C. Grey, “Do We Have an Unwritten Constitution?” 27 Stanford Law Review 703 (February 1975).
106. By the 1950s, for example, the Social Security Administration had established 15,000 local offices to promote its programs; the number of federal income taxpayers had risen from 7 million in 1940 to almost 50 million by the 1950s. Historic Statistics of the United States, Series Y, 402–411.
107. Bruce Ladd, Crisis in Credibility (New York, 1968)
108. Robert J. Goldstein, Political Repression in Modem America from 1870 to the Present (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), chap. 11.
109. Andrew Kopkind, The Thirty Years' Wars: Dispatches and Diversions of a Radical Journalist, 1965–1994 (New York, 1995).
110. Martha Derthick, Agency Under Stress (Washington, D.C., 1990)
111. James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy (New York, 1989), chap. 10
112. Constance Ewing Cook, Nuclear Power and Legal Advocacy (Lexington, Mass., 1980)
113. Michael Lacey, ed., Government and Environmental Politics (Washington, D.C., 1989).
114. Richard Stewart, “The Reformation of American Administrative Law,” Harvard Law Review 88 (1975)
115. R. Shep Melnick, Regulation and the Courts (Washington, D.C., 1983)
116. Between the Lines (Washington, D.C., 1994)
117. Sidney Milkis and Richard Harris, The Politics of Regulatory Change (New York, 1989)
118. George Hoberg, Pluralism by Design (New York, 1992).
119. Allen Schick, “From the Old Politics of Budgeting to the New,” in Naomi Caiden and Joseph White, Budgeting, Policy, Politics (New Brunswick, 1995).
120. Budgeting, Policy, Politics, 137.
121. Stephen L. Carter, The Confirmation Mess (New York, 1994).
122. Kim McQuaid, Uneasy Partners: Big Business in American Politics, 1945–1990 (Baltimore, 1994).
123. Peter Edelman, “The Next Century of Our Constitution,” Hastings Law Journal (November 1987)
124. The Republican Contract with America, (November 1994)
125. both reported on the same page in the Washington Post, 18 December 1994, C7.
126. Arkes, Beyond the Constitution.
127. Andrew S. McFarland, Cooperative Pluralism: The National Coal Policy Experiment (Lawrence, Kan., 1993).
128. Aaron Wildavsky, The Politics of the Budgetary Process (Boston, 1964), 129.
129. Disparities between activists and nonactivists are surveyed in Sidney Verba et al., “Citizen Activity: Who Participates? What Do They Say?” American Political Science Review 87:2 (June 1993): 303–318.
130. Jean Johnson and John Immerwahr, First Things First: What Americans Expect from the Public Schools (New York, 1994).