A Hard Rain: America in the 1960’s, Our Decade of Hope, Possibility, and Innocence Lost

    I have a love-hate relationship with history’s retelling of the 1960’s. I can’t decide if the decade was one of hope and success, or another dead body in the grave of youthful idealism. What is it that made the 1960’s so great? Was it The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and Motown? Was it the protests? Was it the crazy fashion? Was it the attitude of sticking it to the authority and defying the pecking order? The photographs of the colorful hippies in their gypsy dresses and beads make the decade look wonderful, but how many of them ended up on drugs? Then there’s the huge 1969 concert at Woodstock, New York; it may live on in our hearts forever as the ultimate “peace and love” of the decade, but a few months later that image would be countered at Altamont. So how shall we remember the 60’s? This is where Gaillard’s book begins.

    The author, in the book’s preface, describes his personal connection to the 1960’s. He met William F. Buckley during a debate with Julian Bond, graduated in 1968, and describes it as a bad year (two assassinations didn’t make things optimistic.) But eight years earlier, five college students defied the norm (and ended up int eh history books) by sitting at a Woolworth’s lunch counter. Does Woolworth’s still exist? If it does, do the stores still have a dining area? Back then the store was inconsequential, but it was segregated, and to those students it was a symbol of legalized discrimination. They knew that they’d be making history, because all other attempts met with national attention. They knew what they were getting into, they would be harassed like the Little Rock Nine, or worse, have their houses bombed. They were afraid, but then their fear turned to anger, and anger can be a lot stronger than fear.

    Cesar Chavez was another well-known figure of the time, but unlike other leaders, he was not well-educated, nor the product of the East Coast liberal establishment. A dirt-poor Mexican American farmer from Arizona, he’d been seen as an invader all his life. Here’s where the author makes a comparison; California is the setting for The Grapes of Wrath, about a migrant family struggling on the farms, and unlike the Depression-era migrants, Chavez was dealing with racism as well as poverty. Like Dr. King, he understood how to use the media to his advantage, and unlike the Depression-era migrants, he led California’s migrant farmers to unionize. I also have to wonder how much the post-WWII economy had to do with it; fresh grapes have almost no shelf-life, and they weren’t commonly eaten until the invention of the refrigerator, which almost every post-war family had in their home. When millions of Americans agreed to boycott grapes, did they replace them with another luxury on the table? Maybe they opted for oranges, harvested with badly paid Black American workers.

    Next, we have San Francisco and the Summer of Love. The author retells the story of the city’s folk music scene, the funny clothes that the hippies wore, and the long-time Beatnik residents, and Ken Kesey, and all the other colorful characters from the city’s hippy scene. However, the author doesn’t go into much exploration as to why the city became a hotbed of the counterculture. What did it have that Miami and New York didn’t? California was NOT especially liberal, it always had a very conservative government, and was not as tolerant as it was stereotyped to be. The author implies that the JFk assassination may have had something to do with it, but that doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t explain why San Francisco, a run-down port city, would attract eccentrics.

    The final chapter confirms what I always suspected – that the 60’s weren’t that great. The decade didn’t “die” at Altamont, but was already a gangrenous limb and needed to be cut loose. The cities burned in race riots, drug use increased, women got a raw deal (even in hippie communes, they had to do the laundry and cooking) and the Vietnam war left thousands disabled and on drugs. 400,000 young people went to Woodstock, but just as many were shipped off to Vietnam. The JFK assassination, the RFK assassination, Dr. King’s assassination, the Manson Family murders, the killing by Hell’s Angels at Altamont – among other acts of violence in the decade – didn’t kill the decade of “peace and love” because the violence was already there. People just didn’t expect to see it at a Rolling Stones concert or the home of a Hollywood actress.

    My father, 20 years old in 1969, wasn’t a hippy, didn’t smoke pot, didn’t drop out, and wasn’t at Woodstock. Over the years I asked him why, and his reasons were either work, inconvenience, non-interest, or all three. But years later, he said to me “I had to work so I could go to college, and I needed a well-paid summer job, and my boss wouldn’t give me the weekend off.” It all makes sense, not every Baby-Boomer could get to Woodstock, but keep something else in mind. 400,000 people attended that concert, but ten times that many were serving in the military at the time. Then you have all the people who had to work, like my Dad, and couldn’t get the time off to go. Finally, Woodstock is in New York State, and all those young people in Florida, California, and the Midwest couldn’t possibly get there. How many young people had the money for an airline ticket?

   Of those college students, who (according to the author) kicked off the decade with a sit-in at a dirty lunch counter, one became a General in the US Army. In the end, it doesn’t surprise me; he was tough enough to stand up to racists in the south, and tough enough for the military. Another member of the Greensboro sit-in became a special education teacher, devoting his life to helping kids get through school. The anti-establishment protestors, with their tie-dyed shirts and long hair, were sitting on the shoulders of those brave men. Yet in typical American fashion, we ignore the ones who work the hardest, and lionize the ones who complain the loudest.