Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up (21 page)

Rather than Establishment policy separating Boomers from adults, the war much more clearly divided postwar children
among themselves. By 1968 many long-term friendships had foundered on the rocks of partisan politics and related attitudes toward the war. A litmus test for anything from a first date to a steady relationship was some level of harmony over attitudes on Vietnam. Sometimes collegians who agreed on their opposition to the conflict watched enmity grow as one person supported Robert Kennedy and the other Eugene McCarthy, both anti-war presidential candidates in 1968 but each seen as the “true” candidate by one faction and a fraud by their opponents.

The spring of 1968 was a season of revolt and confrontation across American campuses. Two hundred major demonstrations greeted the change of seasons, but the college that became the scene of the highest-profile media event was Columbia University in New York. The Ivy League school had one of the most politically active student bodies in the nation, as nearly five hundred of the university's three thousand undergraduates belonged to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a major organization of student protest. But the institution also enrolled a large number of fraternity members and was in the process of building a very good basketball team. The team's success produced an indirect spark for a campus revolution when the board of trustees voted to replace the Lions' tiny turn-of-the-century gym with a state-of-the-art arena to be constructed in university-owned Morningside Park. The park had been open for the use of the primarily minority population of adjoining Harlem neighborhoods, and SDS leaders saw a golden opportunity to forge an alliance with emerging black radical groups over the gymnasium issue.

On April 23, 1968, two hundred students occupied President Grayson Kirk's office in the Lowe Library building while militant members of the Columbia Student Afro-American
Society occupied Hamilton Hall and took three white administrators hostage. In effect, two parallel occupations were under way. A large number of faculty members initially backed police attempts to enter the buildings; many of their colleagues and a substantial number of non-SDS students launched counterdemonstrations against the occupation. One of the SDS organizers, James Simon Kunen, saw the revolt as alternately serious and humorous. While admitting, “We're unhappy because of the war and because of poverty and the hopelessness of politics or because we feel lonely and alone and lost,” he also took great pleasure in shaving with the president's razor and using his after-shave lotion and toothpaste, and regularly slipped out of Kirk's office to get the latest baseball scores.

The student revolt at Columbia University in the spring of 1968 was the most prominent event in a tumultuous year of youthful challenges to the adult Establishment. Similar confrontations in France, Germany, and Mexico added an international dimension to the generation gap.
(Bettmann/CORBIS)

The national media, however, saw little humor in a violent uprising in the wake of the assassination of Martin
Luther King a few weeks earlier.
Life
magazine called it “A Great University Under Siege,” observing that “Students have usurped the seat of power at Columbia University through a six-day uprising as, with the brashness of a victorious banana republic revolutionary, the mustachioed undergraduates sat in the chair of the University President and puffed on expropriated cigars. For six turbulent days the university was effectively out of business.”

As supporters attempted to supply the occupiers with food and supplies, fraternity members, athletes, and others attempted to block their way. When occupation sympathizers attempted to throw food bags up toward the windows of the buildings under siege, opponents used “an improvised air defense system” of trash can lids to bring the parcels crashing to the ground. A proliferation of armbands seemed to illustrate hardening attitudes: orange among supporters, blue among opponents, green among neutral advocates of amnesty. A campus statue of Rodin's
The Thinker
soon was outfitted in all three colors as one writer suggested, “He looked as if even he was having a hard time making up his mind.”

After Columbia's president sent police into the occupied buildings to clear out the students, and then dropped all charges against them, television and print media began a frenzied chronicle of student challenges to the Establishment, now increasingly labeled the “generation gap.” As one writer observed, “These days the more we talk, the more we know we're a generation apart on almost everything. We're fascinated with the problem of how to get through to each other.”

Although attitudes toward the Vietnam War were often based more on geographical location, family background, or academic major than on age, the “generation gap” itself was
not necessarily a myth. Even students who differed violently on the war often agreed that they knew more about many issues than their frequently less-educated parents. Unlike twenty-first-century college students, who more often than not come from homes with college-educated parents, a startlingly high percentage of Boomer college students in the sixties had parents who had not even graduated from high school—a sure setting for heated dinner-table conversations. Most Boomers never occupied a campus building or were booked on police charges. Yet many of these young people looked at increasingly outdated Establishment rules and insisted that now was the time for reform. Amazingly, as Boomers pressed for change, authorities often backtracked, compromised, or waffled, setting up a future round of demands.

During the frigid, snowy winter of 1968–1969, female students in a prestigious suburban Philadelphia middle school confronted an uncomfortable reality in the sixties fashion revolution. School policy called for skirts or dresses, at a time when the mini-skirt was at the peak of popularity. As the school turned down thermostats to save energy, young women would enter the classrooms to sit on frigid plastic seats. A large number of these girls had older siblings in college, many of whom advised them to choose a day when every girl would wear pants, on the assumption that the authorities would not suspend all of them. On the appointed day, the vast majority took this advice and left their skirts at home. The principal initially balked but then conceded that, due to the cold weather, young ladies could wear pants as long as they were not jeans. For a time the victorious students happily complied. Then, several months later, a few girls wore “dressy” jeans. The remainder of the story is
predictable. Challenging the Establishment in the sixties could mean anything from Jim Crow bars to a war in Southeast Asia to a seemingly capricious and outdated dress code. Yet if Boomer kids frequently argued over issues and tactics, virtually an entire generation agreed that “The Times They Are A-Changin' ” was a theme song they had in common.

This questioning would produce, in the short term, an escalating level of confrontation and violence. Only a year after the “summer of love” in San Francisco extolled the virtues of peace and harmony, enraged young people and angry police officers engaged in bloody skirmishes for control of Chicago's Grant Park, which became the violent backdrop of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. As the haze of marijuana had wafted over Haight-Ashbury the summer before, the even more pungent odor of tear gas emerged as the sensory memory of Chicago. Yet if tolerance was at a premium that summer when racial and political epithets crisscrossed the bleeding nation, a new tolerance was just beginning to emerge behind the scenes. Soon white students at newly integrated Southern state universities would be lustily cheering black football and basketball players to defeat the real “adversary,” their rival schools. A progression of African-American-dominated music, from soul to rap to hip-hop, would enter mainstream culture and become the music of choice for large numbers of white teens. Americans of color would move from fringe roles in television and motion pictures to a dominant presence that would rival white actors. By the early twenty-first century, star power was largely colorblind, as for most young people plot and action trumped the racial or ethnic backgrounds of the stars.

The challenge to the Establishment that reached a crescendo of violence in Grant Park in the summer of 1968
would reach a far more peaceful and momentous climax four decades later in exactly the same location. On an unseasonably warm night in November 2008, an enormous crowd occupied Grant Park. Yet this time police officers merely acknowledged the people with smiles and waves. Unlike in 1968, the participants represented a wide range of Americans, from tiny infants to citizens who had already been middle-aged forty years earlier. African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and whites mixed easily, their most visible commonality being campaign buttons supporting a candidate for the American presidency. Then, after a momentary hush at 10
P.M
. Central Time, a twenty-four-hour television satellite news channel (a media venue that would have been almost unthinkable forty years earlier) projected that the candidate favored by these onlookers had effectively won the presidency. The rock throwing and clubbing of 1968 were replaced by warm embraces, which included many of the men and women in blue. Finally, in the last hours of that momentous November 4, a rather young man who had known the sixties only as a child harkened back to the positive accomplishments of that tumultuous decade as he made his first speech as the newly elected president of a nation that had begun to grow more tolerant and accepting in the Boomer era.

THE SUMMER OF
1939 was probably the most pleasant interlude in the often grim decade of the thirties, and the upbeat mood included the nation's children and adolescents. Parents and children lined up to see
The Wizard of Oz
, and more than a few viewers sat mesmerized as the rather bleak black-and-white landscape of Dorothy's Kansas was transformed into the stunning color of the Emerald City. Children at municipal pools and local swimming holes congregated to listen to Little Orphan Annie on the radio and saw the latest installments of the Andy Hardy and Nancy Drew movies in theaters that promised an air-conditioned escape from the heat.

The single largest concentration of young people on any given day that summer was in Flushing Meadows, New York, where the most spectacular World's Fair in history had grabbed the nation's attention. The theme of the exposition was “The World of Tomorrow,” which explored visions of American life in the distant 1960s. To reach the fair, parents,
teenagers, and children boarded special runs of the Broadway Limited or Southern Crescent trains, climbed into narrow berths, or fidgeted in day coaches as the world of the late 1930s sped by. Then, almost like Dorothy's entry to Oz, the pavilions of the World's Fair loomed on the skyline. Boys in shirts and ties with slicked-back hair and girls with stylish hats, gloves, and Mary Jane shoes gasped in excitement as they were offered a taste of a 1960s world of television, superhighways, and monorails. Then this brief escape from the still-grinding economic downturn ended as summer gave way to a sober autumn in which Europe plunged into war. As Hitler's legions swept across the Continent, one by one the lights of foreign pavilions darkened forever, and Americans prepared for the grim possibility of war.

Three decades later the children of those excited young people who sampled the 1960s at Flushing Meadows would celebrate the last summer of the sixties in very different ways. Transistor radios and car speakers blasted out songs that would have shocked the kids of 1939. Two of the most frequently played songs, “Hair” and “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In,” were taken from the smash Broadway musical
Hair
, whose suggestive language and nudity would have landed the producers and actors in jail thirty years earlier.

The children of 1969 had access to the video entertainment world promised at Flushing Meadows, but on a much grander scale than those World's Fair visitors could ever have imagined. Most children now had access to televisions double or triple the screen size imagined in 1939, with color sets largely replacing black-and-white, and new enterprises such as cable networks and the Public Broadcasting System offering a growing variety of attractions designed specifically for children.