William L. O'Neill > Quotes

“Large-scale enthusiasm for folk music began in 1958 when the Kingston Trio recorded a song, “Tom Dooley,” that sold two million records. This opened the way for less slickly commercial performers. Some, like Pete Seeger, who had been singing since the depression, were veteran performers. Others, like Joan Baez, were newcomers. It was conventional for folk songs to tell a story. Hence the idiom had always lent itself to propaganda. Seeger possessed an enormous repertoire of message songs that had gotten him blacklisted by the mass media years before. Joan Baez cared more for the message than the music, and after a few years devoted herself mainly to peace work.”
― William L. O'Neill, Dawning of the Counter-culture: The 1960s

“The fabulous boom of the late 199os produced modest to no income gains for most Americans.”
― William L. O'Neill, A Bubble in Time: America During the Interwar Years, 1989–2001

“Bob Dylan was different. Where most folk singers were either clean-cut or homey looking, Dylan had wild long hair. He resembled a poor white dropout of questionable morals. His songs were hard-driving, powerful, intense. It was hard to be neutral about them. “The Times They Are a-Changing” was perhaps the first song to exploit the generation gap. Dylan’s life was as controversial as his ideology.”
― William L. O'Neill, Dawning of the Counter-culture: The 1960s

“Students saw traditional religion as a point of departure rather than a place for answers.”
― William L. O'Neill, Dawning of the Counter-culture: The 1960s

“Even in the 1950s and very early sixties, when people still worried about conformity and the silent generation, there were different drummers to whose beat millions would one day march. The bohemians of that era (called “beatniks” or “beats”) were only a handful, but they practiced free love, took drugs, repudiated the straight world, and generally showed which way the wind was blowing. They were highly publicized, so when the bohemian impulse strengthened, dropouts knew what was expected of them.”
― William L. O'Neill, Dawning of the Counter-culture: The 1960s

“Such a small place-with its snobbery of wealth and station, its sadistic teachers and bullying classmates, its cult of team sports, and its unremitting anti-intellectualism-becomes, for children immured in it, an entire cosmos of danger and significance,”
― William L. O'Neill, A Bubble in Time: America During the Interwar Years, 1989–2001

“As rock became less a movement and more a business, its impact, though not its popularity, declined. It seemed unlikely that rock would soon become a television staple. But some day its fans would be middle-aged, so even that possibility could not be permanently excluded.”
― William L. O'Neill, Dawning of the Counter-culture: The 1960s

“The most striking aspect of the “religious revival” of the 1950s, after all, had been the absence of devotion. Going to church then was more a social than a religious act. In the late sixties faith was expressed by not going to church.”
― William L. O'Neill, Dawning of the Counter-culture: The 1960s

“Largely because of the boom, the projected deficit had shrunk to $75 billion, leading Clinton to indulge the GOP's obsessive desire to cut rich people's taxes. As always the cuts were described as tax relief for the middle class, but 68 percent went to the top i percent of taxpayers,”
― William L. O'Neill, A Bubble in Time: America During the Interwar Years, 1989–2001