For What It’s Worth

There’s battle lines being drawn

Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong

– For What It’s Worth, by Stephen Stills, 1966/7

Falling asleep the other night, I was suddenly fearful that a spring and summer of epic disorder is imminent. I’d been reading this week’s Economist. On the cover, Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump stare balefully at each other in profile, under the headline “Battle Lines”. Immediately, the mid-sixties theme song, “For What It’s Worth”, by the Buffalo Springfield, routed through my neural circuits, trailed by a convincing realization that the most disruptive year in my lifetime, 1968, might be about to play out all over again.

I was 19 that year, in my second and third year of college. It may have been just the normal sense of teen-age growth, but looking back, it really does seem that tectonic shifts in the order of the world were culminating. After a few years of slow boil, rapid fire plot twists seized our country, even the planet, re-arranging, and then solidifying the zeitgeist for a generation. I get the sense we may be at a similar tipping point.

First, a random review of some of the ways in which the times were a-changing, starting with the college environment. For decades, at the elite training grounds in the northeast, and their imitators elsewhere, strict rules had applied. In loco parentis was the byword: colleges were seen and acted as surrogate parents for their students. Throughout the ‘60s, that standard was found to be inapplicable, first in public universities, then in private. By 1971, with the passage of the 26th Amendment to the Constitution, lowering the voting age to 18, it officially became a relic of the past.

Two other important threads weave through that story. The first cases which set legal precedent involved African-American students who were expelled with no reason given. The first landmark was Dixon v Alabama in 1961. Alabama State College, then a segregated black college, expelled six students for unspecified reasons, which were presumed by some to be cover for “kicking them out because they participated in civil rights demonstrations.” The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that a public college could not expel students without at least minimal due process.

By 1968, other cases had been decided, all coming down on the side of students being free from arbitrary parental-type decisions concerning speech and behavior. The mid-sixties saw the beginning of student protests at colleges and universities across the country. At first, they were simply demands for the right to speak freely – the “Free Speech” movement at Berkley, California, for example. Next, various groups sought more recognition of their particular interests and educational desires: black students arriving in much larger numbers after the Brown v Board of Education  (1954) Supreme Court decision; female students who likewise were increasingly seeking higher education. And anti-war protests, spread throughout the student bodies. None of that push-back against authority could have taken place without the change in attitude within college administrations resulting in the loss of their role “in the place of parents” for their student body.

Women’s roles and attitudes were also quickly changing. Single-sex colleges disappeared seemingly overnight during the late ‘60s, either through mergers or the direct admission of the previously excluded gender at both all-male and all-female colleges.

Less important, yet critically symbolic changes were also occurring. For example, when I arrived in 1966, we were required to wear a coat and tie to dinner. By 1968, that rule was gone, and the college uniform changed almost overnight from  button down shirts and slacks to jeans, pea coats and army surplus.

Major policy changes in voting rights and integration of public accommodations (the civil rights laws of 1964/5) ratcheted up the racial tensions which activists in the early years of the decade had first raised. Passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1966 set in motion a boom in health care pricing which has not relented to this day. And the escalation of American military involvement in Indochina (Vietnam) caused extreme pushback, especially from the young men who were at risk of being drafted into the armed services, possibly to be sent to fight and die in a war few really understood.

By 1968, the nation had already been through years of protests, marches, and riots flowing from these changes, exacerbated by the coming of age of the baby-boomers. By 1968, half of all Americans were under the age of 28 – the lowest figure from 1939 to the present. And half of them seemed to be following the lead of California’s hippies – “Peace, Love, and Understanding” would rule the future, we would sweep all before us with the sheer power of our demographic bulge and vision of what was right.

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Young people speaking their minds

Getting so much resistance from behind

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Both at the time, and now in retrospect, that year, 1968, seems like such a fulcrum to me. Waves which had been building for years seemed ready to break. It felt as if revolution were in the air – not a revolution of guns and violence, but a radical change in attitudes and culture seemed imminent. What actually followed was sobering and in some ways shocking.

[Next: the pressure cooker that is 2016]