Slouching Towards Gomorrah Read online

  Yet to this day, many contend that the radicals’ protests against the war were honorable. Professor James Miller of the New School for Social Research, for example, argues that there were substantial benefits from the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention because of the “dissent, confrontation, the passionate expression of moral outrage at a war that was, after all, morally reprehensible and unjust in its brutality, as well as strategically mistaken.”1 Those who speak in this fashion, and there are many, realize that something is still at stake in the argument over Vietnam. Indeed there is. The debate about that war is a contest between two opposed ways of viewing the world, whose current form is the war in the culture. That makes Vietnam worth a word or two.

  It may be doubted, to begin with, that a difference of opinion about strategy brought the radicals into the streets. SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) did not arrive at its position on the war through a close study of Clausewitz and Jomini. Nor has anyone persuasively explained why the war was morally reprehensible or unjust in its brutality. It was a time of very worrisome communist expansion by force around the world. The United States had succeeded in saving South Korea by force of arms but had seen China and Cuba fall and was facing an aggressive and heavily armed Soviet Union. Attempting to contain communist dictatorships was hardly an immoral project. It was known at the time that Ho Chi Minh’s triumph in the North had resulted in the killing of about 100,000 people, and it was certainly reasonable to anticipate a larger slaughter in the South if we lost the war.

  The subsequent fate of the South Vietnamese people ought to convince anyone that the war should have been fought and won. We know of the tortures and murders in the re-education camps, and of the “postwar terror which destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, and which produced over a million refugees.”2 To anyone with the slightest knowledge of communist takeovers in other countries, these things were entirely foreseeable. The almost complete indifference of American antiwar radicals to the terrible fate of the South Vietnamese after the Communists’ victory demonstrates that the protests were not motivated by concern for the people of Vietnam. The protests were primarily about the moral superiority of the protesters and their rage against their own country.

  What was morally reprehensible were the New Lefts attempts to ensure the American and South Vietnamese defeat. North Vietnam’s resolve was greatly increased by the demonstrations against the war in the United States. Bui Tin, a former colonel on the general staff of the North Vietnamese army who left after the war because he became disillusioned with his country’s communism, said in an interview that Hanoi intended to defeat the United States by fighting a long war to break America’s will. The American antiwar movement was “essential to our strategy. Support for the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, and various clergy gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and that she would struggle along with us.”3

  Reprehensible as well were the timid strategies of President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara…their refusal to bomb the North, allowing sanctuaries for enemy troops, absurd limitations on the bombing of enemy missile sites, even in the South; and generally fighting a half-hearted war. Bui Tin said that Hanoi could not have won if Johnson had approved General William Westmoreland’s requests to enter Laos and block the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Instead, our political leadership ensured that the war could not be won. By the time Richard Nixon came to office, the opportunity, to win was gone, and he sought only to get out on honorable terms. But Congress, now cowed and sick of the effort, refused assistance to the South Vietnamese after American troops were brought home. It may or may not have been a mistake to get involved in Vietnam; it was most certainly a mistake, and worse, having gotten involved, not to fight to win. As for brutality, there was no more than is inseparable from any major armed conflict. Accounts of ground combat in the Second World War in Europe and the Pacific, not to mention the destruction of Dresden and Hiroshima, are sufficient to demonstrate that proposition.

  The true basis of student opposition, in addition to personal concern for safety and convenience, was that the war was being waged by the United States. That was the major reason radical students did not merely call for our withdrawal but openly hoped for America’s defeat. “The common bond between the New Left and the NLF [the National Liberation Front, or Vietcong],” Christopher Jencks wrote, “is not, then, a common dream or a common experience but a common enemy: the US government, the system, the Establishment. The young radicals’ admiration for the NLF stems from the feeling that the NLF is resisting the enemy successfully, whereas they are not.”4

  We recently passed the twentieth anniversary of our defeat, and some commentators expressed surprise that the war continues to arouse strong feelings on both sides, that there has not been a more complete “healing.” The reason so many still feel anger is not far to seek. It is not merely the number of American lives thrown away in a war that was lost and could have been won. Nor is it simply the memory of the atrocious behavior of the resisters. The reason is that we see at work in today’s culture the same attitudes, indeed many of the same people, that undermined America then. Our division over the Vietnam conflict has been called America’s second Civil War. “Healing” will not happen until the people who remember have passed from this world.

  THE GESTATION OF THE SIXTIES

  I have discussed Vietnam only to show that the war does not explain the Sixties. The questions remain: What was the student radicalism about and where did it come from? Why should the brightest, best-educated, most affluent members of the baby boom generation hate the culture that lavished privileges on them? Why did that age cohort turn to dreams of revolution and the destruction of institutions? There are several obvious answers: the very size of the generation; its concentration in the universities; its affluence; the pampering of its parents; new technologies of entertainment; the creation of an industry to cater to youth’s discontents; the need to find meaning in life; the liberalism of their elders, which played into the natural romanticism and absolutism of the young; and the abnormal power drives of radical leaders.

  Every new generation constitutes a wave of savages who must be civilized by their families, schools, and churches. An exceptionally large generation can swamp the institutions responsible for teaching traditions and standards. This was a problem well before the Sixties generation arrived. Ortega y Gassett in 1930 described the rapid increase in population that occurred in Europe between 1800 and 1914: “a gigantic mass of humanity which, launched like a torrent over the historic area, has inundated it.”5 He was impressed by the “dizzy rapidity” of that increase. “For that rapidity means that heap after heap of human beings have been dumped on to the historic scene at such an accelerated rate, that it has been difficult to saturate them with traditional culture.”6 This was what “Rathenau called ‘the vertical invasion of the barbarians.”7 The baby boomers were a generation so large that they formed their own culture rather than being assimilated into the existing one. The so-called silent generation, born between 1922 and 1947, numbered 43.6 million. The boomers, by contrast, born between 1946 and 1964, had 79 million persons still living in 1974. The “baby bust” generation, born between 1965 and 1983, had 67.9 million births. The culture the boomers formed was, as is natural for adolescents, opposed to that of their parents.

  After World War II, universities expanded and multiplied, fattened by a surge of veterans added to the normal component of students. Though professors were often highly critical of American society, the university culture as a whole was not initially adversarial. The veter
ans were too mature, too anxious to get on with their careers, for that. But the combined effects of population growth and the new idea that virtually everyone should go to college caused a phenomenal growth in the size of universities. In 1930, as Seymour Martin Lipset noted, there were about 1,000,000 students and 80,000 faculty. By the end of World War II, the comparable numbers were 1,675,000 and 165,000. But in 1970, there were 7,000,000 students and over 500,000 full-time faculty. Thus, in twenty-five years the number of faculty tripled and the number of students quadrupled.8 Written at a time when the campuses were still in turmoil, Lipset’s analysis remains well worth reading.

  The university archipelago was now able to create its own cultural enclaves, ones ever more distinct from the surrounding bourgeois culture. When the youths of the Sixties generation got out of their homes, away from their parents, listened to liberal and often leftist faculty members, and were concentrated in unprecedented numbers in the universities, it was inevitable that they would incite one another so that their natural rebelliousness was magnified many times over. Hence, we had our vertical invasion of the barbarians; barbarians they were, and many of them still are. Only now they are tenured barbarians.

  The Sixties university students were exceptionally affluent. After the war the United States entered a period of unprecedented prosperity. The effects of affluence were compounded by parents who, having known the hardships of the Depression and World War II, were determined to give their children every comfort they could. One of the SDS leaders wrote later, “Without thinking about it, we all took the fat of the land for granted.”9 Assuming there would always be money, unlike previous generations they did not worry that either lack of study or unacceptable behavior would jeopardize their futures. This freed them for political action. A major strength of the radicals was that they had money to travel from campus to campus, inciting and organizing, and from campuses to rallies around the country.

  The absence of economic pressure and the assumption that there would never be want in their futures led the young to boredom. Life stretched before them as a wasteland of suburbia and consumerism. One young idiot later said that “hell is growing up in Scarsdale.” Boredom is a much underrated emotion. The young, especially the very intelligent and vigorous, who have not yet found a path in life, are particularly susceptible to boredom’s relentless ache. It is an emotion that is dangerous for individuals and for society because a lot of the cures are anti-social: alcohol, narcotics, cruelty, pornography, violence, zealotry in a political cause. Many of the Sixties generation shopped that list. The rhetoric of revolution, which was to be heard on campuses continuously, was, as Peter Berger said, “not so much motivated by sympathy with black people in slums and yellow people in rice paddies as by boredom with Connecticut.”10

  Technology, a new music, and entrepreneurs’ feel for a new mass market intensified the rebelliousness of the young. Portable radios became widely available so that youths could choose their music without parental supervision. No longer must they sit in the living room with their parents and siblings to listen to the radio together. The music they listened to now was rock and roll, which their parents hated. It would be difficult to overstate the cultural importance of that music. Visiting Yugoslavia in that era, Irving Kristol learned that the regime banned rock because it was subversive of authority. In a personal communication he remarked that rock and roll is subversive of all authority, that of Western democracies, bourgeois families, schools, and churches as well as communist dictatorships.

  Those in the rock business understood very well that the music’s subversion of authority was a large part of its appeal to the young. An impresario who developed one star after another was asked how he did it. He said, “I look for someone their parents will hate.” As Professor Todd Gitlin notes, the blues had been music for adults, but rock was about teenage problems. Its “incoherence, primitive regression, was indeed part of the music’s appeal” to the young.11 Gerald Howard wrote: “Rock ‘n’ roll, a raw and powerful new form of music, crystallized all the youthfulness, dynamism and hypersexuality on the loose…the Pied Pipers tune of the new freedoms.”12 An apt metaphor: I have read that the historical Pied Piper led the children into the forest, where he massacred and dismembered them.

  Gitlin, once a leader in SDS, stresses many of these factors as shaping his generation, and adds another: the “rock-bottom fact that life ends.”13 To adolescents without religious belief, that realization can be devastating. Radical politics can then become a substitute for a religion, a way to seek meaning in life, and even, one can hope, a form of immortality. To lead or to be part of a movement that changes the world is, perhaps, to be remembered forever. For many, modern liberalism is a religion.

  Sixties generation attitudes were also shaped by the severe critiques of America offered by their liberal-to-left elders. If that criticism was taken more seriously than the elders intended, the logical (or emotional) conclusions that followed went well beyond moderate liberalism. Many in the younger generation leaped to those conclusions. A justly celebrated professor at Columbia urged his colleagues not to be hostile to the rampaging students, for “these are our proper children.” And he was right. As the title of Midge Decter’s book put it, Liberal Parents, Radical Children.14 It wasn’t just traditional liberalism. Though admirers of the Sixties prefer to pass over the point, some of the radical core were “red diaper babies,” the children of Communist Party members whose radicalism was passed down in the family.15

  There was, of course, a strong psychological component to student radicalism. Stanley Rothman, professor of government at Smith College, and S. Robert Lichter, co-director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, studied the New Left and found that radicalism correlated with a personal drive for power. Moreover, while “most student radicals were not authoritarians…. we found a larger number of authoritarians among the student radicals than we did in our comparison groups. We believe that these young people exercised an influence far beyond their numbers….”16 That could be observed during any of the campus disturbances of that era. The condition of the youth culture gave the radicals and authoritarians opportunities they would have been denied in more normal times.

  Sympathizers with the New Left said the radicals were a new, healthier, more expressive generation of Americans, in contrast to the authoritarianism and repression of traditional American society. But Rothman and his colleagues, in a series of studies of student and adult radicals, found that “rather than exhibiting the liberating themes, both radical adults and students exhibit marked narcissism and enhanced needs for power.”17 They also showed a higher fear of power than traditionals or nonradicals.

  There is another factor in student radicalism that deserves mention, however. At the time, I read that an Israeli visitor to the United States said of those students something to this effect: “Their fathers gave them prosperity and freedom, and so they hate their fathers.” It seemed merely a biting comment on the ingratitude of that generation. It was that, but now it seems to have conveyed a deeper insight. In his superb work on envy, sociologist Helmut Schoeck18 recounts the findings of psychiatrist Robert Seidenberg about a young man whose repressed envy of his hosts and their possessions made him so acutely uncomfortable that any dinner party was an ordeal for him.

  “Probably this personality type,” Schoeck comments, “can help us to understand the world-wide rebellion of youth since 1966. As the ‘envious guest,’ Seidenberg’s clinical case, these young people lack the maturity to be the ‘guests of our affluent society.’ The overprivileged youngsters, from California to West Berlin, from Stockholm to Rome, strike out in senseless acts of vandalism as a result of their vague envy of a world of affluence they did not create but enjoyed with a sense of guilt as a matter of course. For years they were urged to compare guiltily their lot with that of the underprivileged abroad and at home. Since the poor will not vanish fast enough for their guilt to subside, they can ease their tensions only by symbolic act
s of aggression against all that is thought dear and important to the envied elders.”19

  These factors operating together produced the restless, rebellious Sixties, and what former radicals Peter Collier and David Horowitz aptly called a “destructive generation.”20

  THE BIRTH OF THE SIXTIES

  The Sixties were born at a particular time and place: June, 1962, the AFL-CIO camp at Port Huron, Michigan. (There were preliminary stirrings in parts of the civil rights movement and in the Free Speech movement at Berkeley.) Though most Americans have never heard of the proceedings at Port Huron, they were crucial, for the authentic spirit of Sixties radicalism issued there. That spirit spread and evolved afterwards, but its later malignant stages, including its violence, were implicit in its birth.

  Port Huron was an early convention of SDS, then a small group of alienated, left-wing college students. There were fifty-nine delegates from eleven campus chapters. One of them described their mood: “four-square against anti-Communism, eight-square against American culture, twelve-square against sellout unions, one-hundred-twenty square against an interpretation of the Cold War that saw it as a Soviet plot and identified American policy fondly.”21 In short, they rejected America. Worse, as their statement of principles made clear, they were also foursquare against the nature of human beings and features of the world that are unchangeable. That is the Utopian impulse. It has produced disasters in the past, just as it was to do with the Sixties generation.

  Starting from a draft by Tom Hayden (heavily influenced by the writings of the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills), the convention wrangled out the Port Huron Statement,22† a lengthy, stupefyingly dull manifesto, setting forth the SDS agenda for changing human beings, the nation, and the world. Like the wider student radicalism that ensued, the document displayed the ignorance and arrogance proper to adolescents. These youths were in a state of euphoria about their own wisdom, moral purity, and power to change everything. They were short on specifics about how they would reform the world, what the end product would look like, and what was to be done if the world proved intractable.