Why the (groovy) 60s still matter

by Brian Mann on February 9th, 2015

This year’s Winter Carnival button created by cartoonist Gary Trudeau

UPDATE:

We’ve had some critical feedback about the lack of discussion, so far, of Vietnam, which obviously was one of the major catalysts for all that happened in the 1960s. I think that’s fair.

We’re trying to establish a balance here between the fun and nostalgia and celebration of a winter carnival and the opportunity to have an interesting conversation about a part of our history that’s still powerfully intimately relevant.

But Vietnam is just too big and too powerful an event in our national experience not to be front and center in a conversation like this one. Rest assured that the topic will be on the table tonight in Saranac Lake and as we continue our discussion here. Hope you’ll join in with your thoughts and memories. — Brian, NCPR

Origional Post

This month, Saranac Lake’s Winter Carnival theme is the Groovy 60s. One of the coolest parts of Carnival season is always the annual theme. People work wonders finding creative ways to bring the Celts or Space Invaders or Medieval Knights to life. (One of my favorite moments in the Adirondacks was encountering two knights in shining armor on horseback next to the old Dew Drop Inn).

But this is year is more special than most. This year for many of us, the theme is a blast and a party and a reason to drag out our old tie-dye, but it’s also living history. We were actually there. The last few weeks, my Facebook page has lit up with people sharing photographs of themselves in the 1960s. We’ve been catching glimpses of each other, wrinkle free, with fresh eyes, our gray hair still decades in the future.

Already as part of this winter’s Carnival we’ve had a revival of “Hair,” the classic 60s musical (which opened in 1967) and coming up this week there will be a revue of music from the period. Also, tonight, a bunch of us are gathering at Historic Saranac Lake (5pm, more information here) to talk more in-depth about what that decade meant.

It should be a great conversation. NCPR’s Ellen Rocco will be there to talk about her work as an organizer and activist. We’ll also hear from George Nagle, a member of Saranac Lake’s clergy who was arrested in the South during the civil rights era. Howard Riley, one of the Adirondacks’ best local historians, will talk about Saranac Lake in the 60s.

George Nagle was an activist during the civil rights era and will speak this evening at Historic Saranac Lake

The goal of the conversation isn’t to set aside the fun and nostalgia. It’s pretty wonderful how the art and music and sense of hope of the 60s still feels alive and relevant. (While writing this, I’m listening to Neil Young’s first album…) But it’s important, I think, to connect the dots between the fun stuff and the big, almost overwhelming shifts that happened between 1960 and 1970.

A fun decade, but also big and challenging and scary

From the invention of the birth control pill to the first televised presidential debate to the civil rights movement and the rise of environmentalism, we still inhabit the big conversation begun in those tumultuous years.

We still idolize the Greatest Generation that came up during the Depression and fought the Second World War. But really, it’s not Eisenhower or Truman who resonate and clang about in our lives. It’s Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. who we still grapple with now.

Here’s why I think the 60s still matter so profoundly. That decade marked the first time that Americans seriously questioned the great consensus of what it meant to be a “real” American. Prior to the movements of that decade, our society tolerated a fair amount of difference. But it was clearly understand what it meant to be “normal.”

Normal was white, Christian (mostly protestant), English-speaking, and heterosexual. Normal was an America where men held positions of nearly unquestioned privilege, where a husband’s dominant role in religious life, commerce, and in the home was considered as natural as gravity.

During the 1960s, we started unpacking those assumptions. We started to experiment not just with new kinds of tolerance, but with actual acceptance. We tested the idea that people living very different lives from our own might be, in their own way, just as normal as ourselves.

It turns out that’s one of the most radical, scary, controversial ideas we humans have ever come up with. It challenges our deep tribal and racial assumptions.

Half a century later, we’re all a lot grayer, a little bit slower off the bench maybe, but those are still the very questions we’re trying to answer. And we’re doing it in very different ways. Some of us have stuck to a fairly traditional set of ideas. They lament the “real” America and see the 60s as a moment when our society went off the rails.

Another group of us are angry that the full idealism of the 60s hasn’t been realized yet. Many see that era as a failure because its full promise is still an ideal, and not a reality.

The American Carnival?

I see it a little differently. I think we live pretty much entirely in the world produced by that revolutionary decade. Even the most conservative of us have passed through a lot of doors, accepted a lot of big new ideas. And the fact that we still argue and debate and yell at each other? I think the loudest voices in the 60s would approve.

After all, they weren’t fighting for a new uniformity. It wasn’t a new dogma they wanted or a new set of rigid definitions of what it means to be American. They were fighting for the freedom to keep exploring and questioning and rebelling.

I suspect that there will never again be a great American consensus. The “culture war” that we inhabit is probably the new normal, though hopefully we’ll come up with a new name for it that doesn’t sound so hostile and ugly. (How about the American Carnival?)

In any event, this is the backdrop to the fun we’re uncorking this month in Saranac Lake. And it’ll help frame our conversation tonight at Historic Saranac Lake. I hope you’ll join us and share your ideas and your memories.