A Fiction of the Past: The Sixties in American History

by Dominick Cavallo

Few events during that whirlwind of movements, conflicts and upheaval known as "the sixties" took Americans more by surprise, or were more likely to inspire their rage, than the rebellion of those who were young, white, and college educated. Perhaps none have been more maligned or misunderstood since. In A Fiction of the Past , Dominick Cavallo pushes past the contemporary fog of myth, cold disdain and warm nostalgia that shrouds the radical youth culture of the '60s. He explores how the furiously chaotic sixties sprang from the comparatively placid forties and fifties. The book digs beyond the post-World War II decades and seeks the historical sources of the youth culture in the distant American past. Cavallo shows how the sixties' most radical ideas and values were deeply etched in the American soul.

Genres: History

288 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1999

About the author

Dr. Cavallo was a professor of American history at Adelphi University from 1988 until his death in March 2011. He was particularly interested in the history of the 'turbulent 1960s'. He had taught at Adelphi since 1980, having previously held posts at Howard University, the University of Rhode Island, and the University of Dayton.

Reviews

[Samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book has been on my to be read shelf for at least 15 years (published in 1999), glad I finally read it. the 60s have always been the most interesting decade to me; I was a hippie/deadhead in college (in the late 80s/early 90s) but I haven't read a lot of histories of the decade in general. rather than treating it as an exception, which is apparently common, cavallo views it in light of the ongoing struggle between the individual and community - particularly in the american vein, where "freedom" is the greatest national value.

of course, freedom is a broad concept and different people mean different things by it. in particular in the US, it often means economic freedom - freedom to make money with as few restrictions as possible. then there is individual liberty. cavallo remarks that both at once seem to be too much - so you get conservatives who want as few regulations and taxes as possible, but balk at social freedoms, they want to come home to a stable peaceful household (probably one where the labor and childcare is done by women). or you get liberals who want regulations and taxes to create a social safety net and level playing field, but also want freedom of self-expression in gender, sexuality, religion or lack thereof, etc. naturally this is an oversimplification.

cavallo traces concepts like freedom, privacy, isolation and community through the (largely) white radical movements of the 60s - the counterculture, 60s rock, and Students for a Democratic Society. he looks at the american west and the concept of a frontier in the national psyche.

there are some really interesting lenses to look at contemporary US society through here. "thus many americans not only disparage politicians and government. they shy away from all but the most symbolic public representations of their collective existence as a people. this fragmentation is only partially related to the astonishing array of ethnic, class, regional, and religious divisions that separate them. even when they celebrate shared ideals that transcend these divisions, they fall back on those that reinforce their society's unswerving commitments to competitive individualism and privacy: family, self-reliance, hard work, social mobility, individual initiative and equality of opportunity." here you can see the performance of patriotism the US is famous for - the flag everywhere, the national anthem before sporting events - without much fellow feeling for other americans. indeed there is an undercurrent of who and who isn't a "real" american, particularly hypocritical in a nation of immigrants created on the back of stealing land from the indigenous peoples and utilizing chattel slave labor.

cavallo mentions john lewis' famous speech, "where is the compassion? where is the sense of decency?...what does it profit a great nation to conquer the world, only to lose its soul?" and comments, "if his use of the word 'soul' refers to an essence of collective identity, some shared moral principle that binds each American to all Americans, Lewis would have been hard put to locate it (except, it should be added, within the relatively small number of citizens who, like himself, somehow came into possession of that moral rudder)." cavallo also says a "fitting symbol of americans' unstinting dedication to mutual isolation is the country's status as the only affluent western industrial society without a publicly funded system of national health care". he speculates that america's red scares and use of "socialism" as an ill-defined spectre are perhaps unconscious ways of reaffirming americans' isolation from each other, which is interesting (and explains a lot).

he refers to robert bellah's 1986 "habits of the heart" where bellah proclaims that american individualism had become cancerous, that the american concept of freedom turns out to mean "being left alone by others" and is "strangely without content". you can readily see what an empty term it is, as popularly used - those yelling most about freedom are often the same people who want to restrict people's rights over their own bodies.

there is a lot of discussion of the SDS program to promote decentralized, community-based participatory democracy in an effort to mold the republic into a more democratic format, more responsive to coalitions of citizenry whether locally-based, labor-based, demographically-based, etc., and how such a project is doomed to fail in the US, because intense participatory democracy requires dedication to civic relationships rather than privacy. he also remarks that "its criticisms of social elites were pointless in a country in which the private use of power, however arbitrarily exercised, is seen as morally legitimate as long as it is "earned" through the competitive crucible of equality and opportunity." here you can see our recent battles over affirmative action and the depiction of millionaires and billionaires as "self-made" even when they got their start with inherited wealth.

I found it interesting that I disagreed with a lot of SDS platforms. they disliked the prominence of "experts" in society - there was a leveling feeling that highly educated professionals like academics, doctors, lawyers, etc. shouldn't wield power, that the "common man" could do just as well at decision-making. having seen male politicians in the anti-abortion movement struggle to understand the basics of how the female reproductive system works - and crafting extremely harmful legislation based on that (thinking of "the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down" and not get pregnant from rape), not to mention the battles over masking and vaccines in favor of bleach and invermectin in the covid pandemic, I'm not inclined to privilege john or jane doe over an expert. they also had a program where they went into inner city neighborhoods to try and foment democratic activism. their hearts were in the right place but how naive are you to think that people struggling to survive have the collective energy to dedicate to meetings guided by white savior youth? but in general, cavallo frames their quest as searching "for the elusive moral juncture where liberty and community might converge in america". one ex-SDS member wrote in his memoir of his ideal society where "no one would have a highway built through his neighborhood unless he wanted it. but no one would think of not wanting it if the society needed it. the correlative of that would be that the society would not think it needed it unless it really needed it. a difference of opinion between one man and the community over whether a highway was needed would be a clear sign to everyone that things had to be worked out very carefully." except if you've spent much time thinking about human nature, this is not at all the way things work. this is closer to a quaker model of decision making, where one person can "stand in the way" of something happening - if they are moved by the divine to do so, and the community respect that as a message from the divine. it doesn't even work perfectly in quaker communities with a shared spiritual foundation, never mind in broader society where rather than being restrained by spiritual concerns, people are gung ho for profit.

cavallo goes back to the battle over instituting the constitution, where critics insisted that the country was too big and diverse to have a uniform set of federal law over it. I don't feel like I ever really learned about the battle over having the constitution. in the end, a lot of it comes down to idealism. "the republican image of a virtuous, civic-minded citizenry held by many during the Revolution seemed to be a mirage. as george washington put it, the country's leaders 'had too good an opinion of human nature in forming our confederation' of 1781. as it turned out, people seemed far more avaricious and self-interested than they were civic-minded." yep. agree with george. and I see a lot of this today, particularly in calls for decentralized small self-governed units - russell brand was promoting this at one point, before he went full right-wing click bait - this idea that you would have your little town and decide how you wanted to set things up (presumably anyone excluded by your set-up would go find another little town to live in). all you have to do is watch the walking dead to understand that this would never work. even if 90% of people are peaceful and just want to farm and make candles to trade, 10% of people see weakness, come in guns ablazing, and take over.

[Gary Land · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume provided a very interesting look at the 1960s counterculture and political radicalism. Examining such topics as the Diggers, music, and SDS, Cavallo argues that these phenomena operated on long-standing American myths of democracy, community, and liberty that actually had little relationship to the nation's actual history. The author believes that the sixties movements almost inevitably failed because of American's commitment to individualism and privacy and lack of concern for the public sphere. Although not a fan of rock music, I found that chapter the most interesting as Cavallo examines the emergence of the singer-songwriter who sought to wrest control over their music from the large corporations.