526 The American Century: Literature since 1945demonstration in Washington, DC involving over a quarter of a million people, who
heard Martin Luther King, the movement’s inspired leader, talk of his dream of a
multiracial society. The demonstration was notably and triumphantly peaceful but,
in this respect, it marked the end of an era. Within a few years, King himself had
been assassinated and the ghettos of Los Angeles, Detroit, New York, Washington,
and many other cities were aflame. During the late 1960s it seemed as if rioting in
the streets of the cities had become an annual event, as black people expressed their
anger with a social and economic order that tended to deprive them of their basic
rights. At the same time, the nation’s universities were the scene of almost equally
violent confrontations, as students expressed their resistance to local university
authorities and the power of the state.
For university students, as for many other protest groups of the time, the central
issue was the Vietnam War. In the summer of 1964, President Lyndon Johnson
persuaded Congress to give him almost unlimited powers to wage war against what
was perceived as the communist threat from North Vietnam. American troops were
committed to a massive land war against an indigenous guerilla movement; the
American military was involved in saturation bombing and what was euphemistically
known as “defoliation” – that is, destruction of the forests, the vegetation, and plant
life of a country situated about 12,000 miles from Washington; and American policy
was, effectively, to bleed the nation’s human and economic resources in support of
what was little more than a puppet government in South Vietnam. By 1967, millions
of Americans were beginning to feel that the war was not only useless but obscene,
and took to the streets in protest: these included novelists like Norman Mailer, and
poets like Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg. Simultaneously with this, in response
to what looked like the obscenity of the official culture, a vigorous alternative culture
developed. Much of this alternative culture was specifically political in its direction.
Young men burned their draft cards; and, when the Democratic Party met in Chicago
in 1968 to nominate their candidate for president, young people upstaged the
proceedings by engaging in pitched battles with the police in the streets. But
much of it, too, had to do with styles of life and styles of art. Hair was worn
unconventionally long, skirts unconventionally short; hallucinogenic drugs,
psychedelic art, and hugely amplified rock concerts all became part of an instinctive
strategy for challenging standard versions of social reality, accepted notions of
behavior and gender. The analytical mode was supplanted by the expressive, the
intellectual by the imaginative; artists as a whole went even further toward embracing
a sense of the provisional, a fluid, unstructured reality; and artistic eclecticism
became the norm, as writers in general hit upon unexpected aesthetic mixtures –
mingling fantasy and commitment, myth and social protest, high and popular art.
One of the paradoxes of the year 1968 was that it witnessed alternative culture at
its zenith and the election of Richard Nixon, self-proclaimed spokesman for the
“silent majority” of white, middle-class Americans, to the office of president. To the
extent that “the Sixties” have become a convenient label for a particular frame of
mind – radical, experimental, subversive, and even confrontational – they did not
end in 1970 any more than they began in 1960. Many aspects of the alternativeGGray_c05.indd 526ray_c 05 .indd 526 8 8/1/2011 7:31:29 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 29 PM