[In the following review of The Sixties, Collins claims that the book suffers from a slow start and an overemphasis on the activities of the Students for a Democratic Society.]

What was the meaning of “the sixties”? More precisely, what was the meaning of those intertwined social movements in the United States that, with typical overestimation, we used to call “the Movement”? Todd Gitlin, a core activist in SDS across the decade, is exceptionally well qualified to attempt an answer. Gitlin is now a sociologist, but the book [The Sixties] is not primarily sociology. It is part autobiography and part history of Students for a Democratic Society from its early days of emancipation from its place as the youth branch of an old socialist organization, until its takeover by the violent Weatherman faction in 1969. At times, the book seems overly SDS-centered, with more consequential events and movements coming in only as expanded background. But in the end this seems both inevitable and right. A main thrust of the sixties mood was to break down the artificiality of the public and formal and to reveal the personal and private within them. Politics aimed at being participatory, culture at turning on the full experience of the subjective self. If in the end these ultrademocratic and antielitist impulses failed, and even lost themselves in their own forms of political and cultural elitism, Gitlin lived through it all at a high level of awareness.

Reading this book poses some problems for those of us of a certain age and experience. We believed in constructing our own reality, whether politically, psychologically, psychedelically, or all three. The boundaries were not at all clear for us between what we really could construct locally (whether by taking things into our own hands with a sudden spurt of direct-action politics, or by freeing the head with one psychological/meditative technique or psychedelic substance or another, or by just plain physically getting the hell out) and what we sometimes felt we could do collectively to change the world. This combination of iconoclastic realism and ideological irrealism was perhaps not too surprising, at a time when a stream of movements were surging, feeding off of each other, spinning off local eddies which sometimes unexpectedly swirled back to make yet another main stream.

The barriers between micro and macro seemed to be breaking down, and there was a tendency to feel that what we did had cosmic significance. Thus, to lapse into the kind of ego-centeredness that was a sixties style, and which Gitlin's book reinvokes, I want to mention the shock that I got from finding that events at Berkeley (where I happened to be) take up small space in Gitlin's narration, and also a little haughty satisfaction at uncovering some small errors in his account of the Free Speech Movement there in 1964. After all, we had our “Berkeley-the-center-of-the-universe” self-image, full of not only the feeling that what we were doing was the most important thing of our own lives, but also the illusion that what we did rippled outwards and catalyzed followers everywhere else. With more detachment, one can say it is precisely that feeling that is the mark of a movement on the rise, and which constitutes one of its strongest attractions.

Gitlin's narration has some of the same tone, but it has a way of overcoming its flaws. The first 100 pages, covering the period up to about 1963, take a while to get going. I felt at first that Gitlin spent too much space on an uninspiring picture of the pop culture of the 1950s, and on the tiny ban-the-bomb and pacifist movements of the early sixties that he happened to be involved with. But even this draggy opening turned out to have the right feel. Gitlin brought back the atmosphere of the very early days of the Civil Rights Movement, when the left was busy calling one another either Stalinist or soft on communism, and everyone was afraid of criticizing the United States about racism or anything else, for fear of not seeming to denounce Soviet totalitarianism strongly enough. The early days of the Movement consisted above all in freeing itself from the fifties. When the slogan “don't trust anybody over thirty” appeared in Berkeley in 1964, it had a special meaning that separated the New Left from the old left: it meant we weren't taking any advice from our older “friends” who kept telling us to shut down civil rights demonstrations lest they call forth the backlash of a Senator Joe McCarthy or his alleged 1964 incarnation, Barry Goldwater.

What finally broke up the logjam on the left was a set of new forces: above all, the militant, nonviolent direct action of the Civil Rights Movement. Gitlin's book suddenly comes alive, just as the 1960s did, when he gets to a chapter on SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), together with CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and SCLC (Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference), and their confrontations with official and unofficial segregationist violence in the South. Gitlin is eloquent on the genuine heroism of this movement. But his writing is more than hagiography, for it carries a double theme: the battles were against not just external enemies, but internal ones.

Some of the most revealing portions of the book are where Gitlin takes us inside Democratic party politics (an arena in which he had good contacts), and its maneuvers to hold the center of the political spectrum. President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, the attorney general, come across as anything but the heroes they became in postassassination civil rights mythology. As was apparent to participants in the movement at that time, the Kennedy administration had written off the South to the segregationists, and constantly tried to dissuade the nonviolent activists from engaging in confrontations that embarrassed the president while he concentrated on a military showdown with the Russians. Gitlin is especially good at describing the maneuvers of the old-liberal Democrats under Hubert Humphrey in excluding black delegates from Mississippi from the 1964 Democratic Convention.

From 1964 on, the book—and the decade—barrels ahead, unstoppable. So much is happening that Gitlin can barely keep hold of it, much less analyze it. Certain themes surface from time to time, such as the dialectic of turning points, usually in three-sided conflicts (like the 1964 Democratic convention conflict, won locally by the anti-civil rights forces but setting off a polarized movement that went far beyond anything that had happened so far). Gitlin himself owns up to his inability to cover it all:

How can I convey the texture of this gone time so that you and I, reader, will be able to grasp, remember, believe that astonishing things actually happened, and made sense to the many who made them happen and were overtaken by them? … The years 1967, 1968, 1969, and 1970 were a cyclone in a wind tunnel.

(p. 242)

At times, all he can do is mention names of successive shocks: the Tet offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and RFK, the Black Panthers, the Charles Manson murders, fraggings in Vietnam, LSD, Woodstock, Columbia sit-ins, the My Lai massacre, and many more.

This kaleidoscopic treatment makes his book a rather imperfect history. Sometimes names are intruded—James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, Eldridge Cleaver—without explanation, that would probably perplex some readers, though they were newspaper headliners at the time. Sometimes truly major events are bypassed or receive only the most marginal attention: above all, the ghetto uprisings from Watts (Los Angeles) in 1965 onward, and especially the huge battles in Detroit and Newark in 1967. This is probably the most serious shortcoming of the book, for it was these events more than anything that brought a sense of urgency to the public and the politicians, and that accounted for much of the apocalyptic mood within the white student movement which Gitlin spends the latter part of the book trying to explain. Similarly, the shift of the civil rights movement from nonviolence to a Black Power stance, with changing relationships among black activists, the suddenly enfranchised black middle class, and the increasingly isolated black underclass, is perhaps the major structural transformation which Gitlin fails to portray.

Some of what Gitlin describes is even more unbelievable now than it was then. Perhaps not so important, but worthy of record, are such events as the intrusion of the Diggers' mind-blowing “guerrilla theater” into the SDS national convention in 1967, prompting one dedicated activist to protest, “If the CIA wanted to disrupt his meeting, they couldn't have done it any better than by sending you” (p. 228). There was worse in store. The story of the street warfare with the police at the Chicago Convention in 1968 leads to the 1969 SDS convention, with the bomb-setting Weatherman faction expelling the Maoist PL (Progressive Labor) faction for being “objectively anticommunist” and “counterrevolutionary” (p. 388). There are ugly scenes as the Black Panthers endorsed “pussy power” (p. 388), and women received obscene catcalls for raising feminist issues in a 1969 meeting of the National Mobilization against the Vietnam war. Small wonder, then, that Gitlin's narration winds down at the end, in a note of near-despair that was shared by most members of the now-old New Left who remained committed to altruistic, nonviolent personal action.

For many participants in the Movement, deactivation from the headlines had already happened earlier. Here is another way that Gitlin's narration loses some of its target. It remains focused on the Yippies and the renovated revolutionary Marxists because they were what remained on the public stage by the end of the sixties. Gitlin does remark from time to time about the burnout already occurring in the early sixties among the most dedicated of the southern civil rights workers, and steadily through the rest of the decade as political activists left a movement with whose tactics and ideology they could no longer identify. But they did not go back to the world they had been rebelling against. The conservative wave came from elsewhere: the neoconservatives were from the older generation of liberals or leftists (those whom the New Left fought against to get their movement going at the beginning of the decade), while the just-plain-new-conservatives were members of the subsequent generation who came of age in the economic downturn of the 1970s. As Gitlin suggests cursorily, the sixties generation of activists kept up at least some version of their vision: spearheading the psychedelic counterculture, with its literary, artistic, and media offshoots that went on well into the seventies; as well as finding their way back into quasi-conventional politics, usually as liberal Democrats, and providing the core of the feminist, environmental, and anti-nuclear weapons movements in the following decades.

One unfinished task is to derive sociological insight from the sixties. It was a time of massive expansion of higher education, and of inflation in the value of educational credentials; this provided the structural basis for mobilizing a major part of the left movements of that time (and not in the United States alone, as Maurice Pinard is currently demonstrating in a comparative study). It was the time of what I once called “the Goffmanian revolution,” a massive shift in deference and demeanor styles, and hence in the fundamental structures through which status and personal identity are staged in everyday life. The effects of these structural shifts are still with us. Here I will comment only on the sociological themes raised by Gitlin's treatment of the dynamics of political mobilization in the sixties.

A massive social movement is really a chain of social movements and countermovements. This is apparent in the way the southern civil rights movements—the Montgomery bus boycott, the local efforts at school integration—spawned northern movements, both black and white; these in turn kicked off campus movements, initially over the right to organize for off-campus causes, and then turned into confrontations over university policies themselves. New events and new causes emerged, building upon or imitating existing organizations: the Vietnam war protests, the Black Power movement, the return of revolutionary Marxism, the rise of militant feminism. It was this vortex of movements that gave the sixties its breathtaking quality. For this reason, no movement could control its own destiny, or even its own tactics; different kinds of recruits, causes, and motivations were constantly being mixed at public events, and the focus of attention (and hence the crucial point of subsequent reactions) went to whomever's action was the most dramatic.

But the structural web spread still wider. Movements were also being shaped by their enemies; and these enemies were both external and internal. The external enemies are the most obvious. The existence of grievances produced by enemies is what gives a movement its realistic basis. The sixties movements also give textbook examples of how the atrocities committed by opponents are the prime source of escalating support for one's own side. Thus the mobilization of racist countermovements in the South, and those few of their murders and beatings that were well publicized, marked the turning point for civil rights victory. What we need to see analytically is that power shifts because the escalation of movement and countermovement is not symmetrical. The actions of each side tend to be viewed as atrocities by the other side, while one's own actions are viewed as justifiable militancy. As Gitlin points out, the campus trashings, the guerrilla theater tactics, and the “unpatriotic” stance of the antiwar movement in general, by the late 1960s, were making the student movement the most hated target of the American population. One is tempted to say that victory goes to the side that wins the “balance of atrocity blaming.”

The dynamics by which public emotions of this sort propagate are not yet well understood. The same wave of cascading emotional energy that was mobilizing a massive student movement (and the hippie dropout movement) was also mobilizing violent ghetto uprisings, politicizing some black gangs (e.g., the Black Panthers), and even spilling over into the armed forces (producing the disintegration of troop discipline that more than anything brought about the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam). This structural/emotional dynamic was simultaneously mobilizing the White Citizens Councils, energizing the vehemence of police countermovement violence, and no doubt creating the atmosphere responsible for the assassinations of political figureheads.

The resulting pattern is full of ironies. I have already commented on how JFK was more of an obstacle to than an ally of the civil rights movement; yet his assassination was just the atrocity, directed against the primary “sacred object” of American political ritual, that began to swing the balance towards the reformers. But, as sociologists, we have to dig beneath the common-sense viewpoint of a factional participant, which is the level at which “irony” resides. For at the deeper level of the structure of conflict dynamics, it is just this redefinition of enemies and the shifting of moral blame that is always crucial. Gitlin's account of the assassination of Robert Kennedy during his presidential campaign in 1968 drives home the point, for this both turned off the antiwar militancy of Senator Eugene McCarthy's campaign, and reignited a stalled student movement towards a massive (and ultimately very ugly) showdown at the Chicago Democratic convention. (Which is to say, it was a showdown in which the atrocities were so badly mixed in public perception that its overall effect was disorder and disgust.)

So we have movement spinning off movement, and movement versus countermovement escalating via each other's perceived atrocities. But that's still not all: to complete the structure we need to capture the logic of internal conflicts. We can take as emblematic the way the New Left in the early sixties had to struggle against the old-liberal/left to get off its anticommunism crusade and address current issues of inequity in America. The deeper structure here was a three-way or even four-way conflict; for the liberal Democrats of the 1950s were heavily on the defensive against right-wing assault linking them with the Soviet Union, as well as carrying the aftermath of the Stalinist versus anti-Stalinist fights in the left itself. This is ultimately the same structure as that underlying President Kennedy versus SNCC in the early sixties (or LBJ and Hubert Humphrey versus the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964); for Kennedy (LBJ) was maneuvering to maintain himself politically against U.S. conservatives, by keeping up a posture of military belligerence against communists of Russia/Cuba (Vietnam). Politics is primarily the art of garnering support from the public for one's own leadership in a conflict; the maneuvering is over which conflict is to be defined as salient, which one a distracting sideshow. There is an ironic—no! structural—repetition of this pattern in the late 1960s, when the feminist movement emerged within the antiwar mobilization, and was greeted with anger for splitting the movement just at the time when it was entering a showdown with its “real” enemies (militarism and racism).

The chaos of the 1960s, then, was not ultimately so chaotic as it may have seemed by the end of the decade. It had the underlying structure that conflict always have. Marx documented the same structure in The Eighteenth Brumaire for the waves of escalating movements and countermovements in France after the revolution of 1848. Here were the same kind of internecine battles and splits, with the power struggle ultimately decided by which enemy was the focal point of the waves of fear stirred up by the political movements themselves. For the participant, in both cases, it felt like traveling through the meat grinder of history. Neither Marx in his day, nor we in our own, really understood what was happening through the lens of his, or our, own ideologies. The conflict structures are still there today, only mobilized at different levels of intensity. Whatever else the sixties accomplished—and in many ways they accomplished a lot—their story gives us an opportunity now to understand that deeper structure with sociological clarity.