From The New York Review of Books:
Certain years acquire an almost numinous quality in collective memory—1789, 1861, 1914. One of the more recent additions to the list is 1968. Its fiftieth anniversary has brought a flood of attempts to recapture it—local, national, and transnational histories, anthologies, memoirs, even performance art and musical theater. Immersion in this literature soon produces a feeling of déjà vu, particularly if one was politically conscious at the time (as I was).
Up to a point, repetition is inevitable. Certain public figures and events are inescapable: the tormented Lyndon Johnson, enmeshed in an unpopular, unwinnable war and choosing to withdraw from the presidential stage; the antiwar candidacies of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy; the intensifying moral challenges posed by Martin Luther King; the assassinations of King and Kennedy; the racially charged violence in most major cities; the police riot against antiwar protesters (and anyone else who got in their way) at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; the emergence of right-wing candidates—George Wallace, Richard Nixon—appealing to a “silent majority” whose silence was somehow construed as civic virtue. And the anticlimactic election: the narrow defeat of Hubert Humphrey by Nixon, who promised to “bring us together” without specifying how.
What togetherness turned out to mean was an excruciating prolongation of the war in Vietnam, accompanied by an accelerating animosity toward dissent. The effort to satisfy the silent majority by exorcising the demons of 1968 would eventually lead to the resurgence of an interventionist military policy, the dismantling of what passed for a welfare state, and the prosecution of a “war on drugs” that would imprison more Americans than had ever been behind bars before.
Revisiting this story is important and necessary. But difficulties arise when one tries to identify who those demons actually were. The conventional accounts of radical protest all feature the usual suspects: Tom Hayden, Mark Rudd, Abbie Hoffman, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Black Panthers, the Maoists, the Yippies, the devotees of Che. According to this narrative, nearly all the white protesters are privileged draft dodgers from a northern tier of universities that stretched from Cambridge and New York through Ann Arbor and Madison to Berkeley. As hopes for electing an antiwar president fade, they descend into pseudo-Marxist posturing and self-destructive fantasies of violent revolution. A few hapless Weathermen, sectarian spinoffs from the SDS, provide a coda to this story by blowing themselves up in a Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970.
This account provides a comforting balm for supporters of status quo politics, but it misses the larger meanings of radical protest—its pervasiveness, its heterogeneity, above all its religious roots and significance. The religious dimension of American radicalism was what separated it from the student uprisings in Paris and other European cities during the spring of 1968. American radicals lacked the anticlerical animus of Europeans; priests, rabbis, and ministers enlisted in the front ranks of the civil rights and antiwar movements. King’s decision to bear witness against the war was central to legitimating resistance to it, while provoking government counterattacks as well as denunciations from both liberals and conservatives.
Link to the rest at The New York Review of Books
Perhaps he’s not accompanied by many, but for PG, 1968 was anything but numinous.
He could go on for a long time, but the end of the Johnson presidency and the beginning of the Nixon presidency, the death and mental destruction of friends in Vietnam did and do not give PG warm fuzzies. For him, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius seemed like a product of a drug-filled party that lasted too long and became really weird at the end.
But others remember the time differently.
I was in law school in St. Louis and arrived at the law building one morning to find a human chain blocking entrance–the war protesters who were there to shut down the university. As I stepped between them, I heard the catcalls, the cursing, and the epithets. To which I replied, “I come from a poor family. I can’t blow what’s probably the only chance I’m actually going to get to improve my life.” With that, I stepped through them, pulled open the door even though two scudded aside on their butts, and went into school. Later that afternoon there was teargas outside our building the streets were filled with protesters and police fighting back and forth, teargas coming and going, and handheld PA units clamoring for our attention. Again, pushing through, going back to my jalopy and a drive out of the city to the Burger King where I would get to spend my daily allotment of $3.00 on the one meal I would get that day (school loans only went so far). Again, I just couldn’t afford to protest and to this day I know I did what was right for me. Was it right for all the guys who went to Vietnam to die? My best friend died there. I cried and cried but I went back to law school, knowing that I could effect change in the world only by getting myself in a position where I could sue the world on behalf of real people who had been injured and suffered yet. That never changed.
It was a time of amazing reforms in Czechoslovakia – or at least it would have been if the Russians had not sent their tanks in to ensure that everyone stayed as miserable as they were.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Spring
In the fall of 1967 I took a train ride from Ferndale Washington to the South Side of Chicago. By 1968, I was a different person. A better person? I was immersed in an intellectual culture inhabited by people far different from the northern European immigrants I grew up with.
I lived in a dormitory filled with folks from New York, Chicago, and all points north, south, east, and west, and from strata of society that I had no idea existed a year before. I lived surrounded by a black ghetto and learned of dangers and virtues I had never imagined. I developed a taste for the blues. And I learned to question: authority, myself, everything.
Was I better for it? Beats the electric eels out of MY pants.
Not a good year in many ways. But…
…it gave us Apollo 8, a sign of better times to come.
Some people were actually working to build a future.
None of which had anything to do with astrology.
Or “THE FIFTH DIMENSION”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_in_science
So far I don’t see many people celebrating these:
Astronomy
Thomas Gold explains the recently discovered radio pulsars as rapidly rotating neutron stars; subsequent observations confirm the suggestion.[1]
Computer science
April – First book printed completely using electronic composition, the United States edition of Andrew Garve’s thriller The Long Short Cut.[2][3]
July 18 – The semiconductor chip company Intel is founded by Gordon E. Moore and Robert Noyce in Mountain View, California.
December 9 – In what becomes retrospectively known as “The Mother of All Demos”, Douglas Engelbart of Stanford Research Institute’s Augmentation Research Center demonstrates for the first time the computer mouse, the video conference, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing, the dynamic linker and a collaborative real-time editor using NLS.[4][5][6]
Medicine
January 2 – Dr. Christiaan Barnard performs the second successful human heart transplant, in South Africa, on Philip Blaiberg, who survives for nineteen months.
November – Outbreak of acute gastroenteritis among schoolchildren in Norwalk, Ohio, caused by “Norwalk agent”, the first identified norovirus.
Publication of a Harvard committee report on irreversible coma establishes a paradigm for defining brain death.[8][9]
Doctors perform the first successful bone marrow transplant, to treat severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID).
DiGeorge syndrome is first described by pediatric endocrinologist Angelo DiGeorge.[10][11]
Psychology
John Darley and Bibb Latané demonstrate the bystander effect.[13]
Walter Mischel publishes Personality and Assessment.
Robotics
January – Miomir Vukobratović proposes Zero Moment Point, a theoretical model to explain biped locomotion.
Space exploration
September 15–22 – Zond program: Soviet spacecraft Zond 5 becomes the first vehicle to circle the Moon (September 18) and return to splashdown on Earth. It also carries the first living organisms to circle the Moon, including two Russian tortoises, Piophila, mealworms, plants and bacteria.
October 11 – Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo mission, with astronauts Wally Schirra, Donn Fulton Eisele and R. Walter Cunningham aboard. Goals for the mission include the first live television broadcast from orbit and testing the lunar module docking maneuver.
December 24 – Apollo 8 enters Moon orbit. Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William A. Anders are the first humans to see the far side of the Moon and planet Earth as a whole. Anders photographs Earthrise.
Technology
June 6 – Roy Jacuzzi is granted a patent for the Jacuzzi whirlpool hot tub in the United States.[14]
Film
April 4 – United States theatrical release of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on a story by Arthur C. Clarke.
Thank you for the positive list.
You’re welcome.
I just think we should all remember that despite all the discord sown across the media, most of the people being vilified are just trying to get by in peace, not actively looking to mess up other people’s lives, and that of those many are actively working day and night to leave the world in better shape than they found it instead of “getting while the getting is good”, “I got mine”, or, “I left it as I found it”.
Times are always tough.
Times are always good.
1968, 1978, 2008, 2018…
The Beatles.
Dan
I was 10 in ’68. I grew up in a blue collar white neighborhood in the Bronx filled w/ devout Roman Catholics. It was my first year as an altar boy.
I was 10.
I clearly recall that year because I got out of class so many times during the day. To serve Mass at funerals.
I was 10.
I can still recall the broken and shattered mothers and fathers of those young men in the flag draped coffins. I can still see that one grandfather…so riven with grief that as I type this tears come to my eyes from that memory from a half century ago.
I was 10.
And I knew, I knew in my heart and soul that one day I too would go to Viet Nam.
And die in that war that had lasted my entire life.
I was 10.
Amen, PG, and again I say, Amen.
What a bunch of cowardly phonies they were, and obviously so, at the time.
“For him, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius seemed like a product of a drug-filled party that lasted too long and became really weird at the end.”
Let me think. Me was ten in ’68, so wasn’t offered any drugs or other fun … Hmm, I think the only thing I got out of it was liking the ‘Age of Aquarius’ song … 😉
I’m just offended that they missed the most important event of the year in my household…my birth 🙂 Go pick on another year, PG! hehhee
P.