As the 1960s dawned, Cal-Berkeley's Greatest president Clark Kerr visited local high schools and concluded that the coming crop of students "are going to be easy to handle." "There aren't going to be any riots," he predicted.47
"I Am a Student! Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate!" read the signs of pickets outside Berkeley's Sproul Hall in 1964, mocking the computer punch-card treatment the faculty was supposedly giving them. Where student movements had once been the work of a lonely (and polite) few, masses of youths began swarming to angry rallies. Coffeehouse poets gave way to bullhorn-toting radicals, in what Silent ex-activists Peter Collier and David Horowitz recall as a generational shift. "Those of us who had come of age in the fifties" and "were more comfortable thinking or talking about it" gave way to a later-born "second wave of activists" more likely to heed the simple motto: "Do It!"48
The Silent-led but Boom-energized "Free Speech Movement" rioters despised the life of "sterilized, automated contentment" that America's "intellectual and moral wastelands" were preparing for young graduates. As Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" shot to the top of pop charts, students at Berkeley resolved to "throw our bodies on the gears" to stop the Greatest machine.49
These undergraduates served first notice of what would, by 1967, become the most emotionally intense and culturally influential youth rebellion in American history. Within a few years, America's finest universities were, like its inner cities and military depots, awash in youth violence. The next four years brought a series of angry youth uprisings joined by a mixture of students and like-minded "nonstudents" who hung around campuses. Wealthy kids dressed down, donned unisex styles, and became self-declared "freaks"--as if to reject the affluence and ordered family lives of their parents. As James Kunen put it in The Strawberry Statement, "I want everyone to see me and say 'There goes an enemy of the state,' because that's where I'm at, as we say in the revolution biz."50
"STRIKE!" became the summons, the clenched fist the emblem, T-shirts and jeans the uniform, and "corporate liberalism" the enemy. "Who are these people?" asked the Silent Generation's Daniel Moynihan, then on the Harvard faculty. "I suggest to you they are Christians arrived on the scene of Second Century Rome." Born as the inheritors of the Greatest triumph, Boomers came of age as what Michael Harrington termed "mystical militants" whose mission was neither to build nor to improve institutions but rather to purify them with righteous fire.51
Screaming radicals and freaked-out "hippies" represented just 10 to 15 percent of their generation, but the righteous often prevailed in youth culture where purity of moral position counted most. In sharp contrast to the Depression-era days of Greatest student "isms," organization counted for little. Keniston noted how the "young radicals" of the late 1960s, having grown up with "feelings of loneliness, solitude, and isolation," were profoundly mature by measures of ego strength and self-esteem, yet still childlike in their social skills.52
Where Silent nonconformists had feared blotches on their permanent records, Boomers perceived few real risks. Amnesty was often the student strikers' first "nonnegotiable" demand, and--usually--it was granted. More important, a supercharged Greatest-built economy offered good jobs and careers to all comers. Most campus rioters assumed that the instant they deigned to do so, they could drop back into the American Dream machine. Planning for tomorrow was no big deal. Did Boomers expect to find better jobs, make more money, and live in better houses than their parents? "Certainly," recalled Robert Reich of his student activist days--that is, if Boomers wished it, and maybe they didn't.
Pervasive affluence also meant that that class conflict counted for little. The arguments of the New Left (led by "red diaper" babies who were waging their own battle against Old Left Greatest fathers) tended to be moral and cultural, rather than economic and political, with virtually no appeal off-campus. As Irving Howe noted, Boomer radicals differed from the Greatest's 1930s-era facsimiles in that they asked "how to live individually within this society, rather than how to change it collectively." Given how little the youth rage hinged on economics, many leading radicals were themselves children of the elite--a "Patty Hearst syndrome" that terrified elder Greatest.53
Nor was the thirst for confrontation limited to the student elite or radical left. Arrayed against the Ivy Leaguers who occupied administration buildings and young blacks who set cities afire were the like-aged police who clubbed them and the like-aged National Guardsmen who fired on them. In the 1968 election, noncollege white Boomers were twice as likely as their elders to vote for George Wallace.54
With the economy still purring, the youth frenzy congealed around the Vietnam War--a policy construction almost perfectly designed to create conflict between rationalist elders and spiritualist juniors. Waging it as a limited, scientifically managed form of international pest control, Greatest leaders supported a morally questionable ally and avoided asking for any contribution from noncombatants (LBJ's "guns and butter"). Though not pacifist by nature, Boomers had been raised to question, argue, and ultimately disobey orders not comporting with self-felt standards and ultimate sacrifices. As much as Boomers hated the war, what they hated worst was the draft--its intrusion on privacy, its stated policy of "channeling" their lives in government-approved directions. With help from Silent counsel, Boomers did a good job of bollixing it.55
The effort to avoid service in Vietnam was a more pervasive generational bond than service in the war itself. Only one Boomer man in sixteen ever saw combat. Among all the rest, two-thirds attributed their avoidance to some deliberate dodge. One Boomer in six accelerated marriage or fatherhood (and one in ten juggled jobs) to win a deferment, while one in twenty-five abused his body to flunk a physical. One percent of Boomer men committed draft-law felonies (mostly failure to register)--ten times the percentage killed in combat. Less than one of every hundred offenders was ever jailed. The 1943-1947 cohorts provided the bulk of the draft avoiders, the 1947-1953 cohorts most of the combat troops. The median soldier age during the Vietnam War (19) was the lowest in American history.56
For those who came of age in Southeast Asia, war offered little glory and few fond memories. The war's most celebrated heroes were Greatest POWs like Jeremiah Denton, the most famous firefight was the My Lai atrocity, and the most publicized Boom soldier was the murderous William Calley. On film, John Wayne's get-it-done Green Beret fit the Greatest's Vietnam fantasy, while Sylvester Stallone's blow-it-up Rambo fit the Boomers'. Coming home, young Boomer "vets" faced more opprobrium from peers than any other ex-soldiers in U.S. history. Moreover, they had a defeat to haunt them, not a victory to empower them.57
Vietnam casualties peaked in the same year (1969) that the Boomer rebellion turned bloody, with an eighteen-month spate of radical bombings and shootings--and a surge in street crime. Youths then felt what Gitlin described as "a tolerance, a fascination, even a taste" for violence. By almost any standard of social pathology, the Boom was a generation of worsening trends. From first-wave to last-wave teenagers, death rates for every form of accidental death rose sharply--and the rates of drunk driving, suicide, illegitimate births, and teen unemployment all doubled or tripled. Crime rates also mounted with each successive cohort, giving rise after the mid-1960s to "crime waves" that seemed to worsen with each passing year. During the 1970s, the incidence of serious youth crime grew twice as fast as the number of youths. Criminals born in 1958, moreover, were 80 percent more likely than criminals born in 1945 to commit multiple crimes--and 80 percent more likely to send their victims to the hospital or morgue.58
Back in 1962, the Silent-founded Students for a Democratic Society had promoted social "interchange" and considered violence "abhorrent." By the late 1960s, a radicalized SDS screamed at the "pigs" who tried to keep order. According to a Gallup Poll in 1970, 44 percent of all college students (versus only 14 percent of the public at large) believed that violence was justified to bring about social change. Rap Brown called violence "as American as apple pie," Angela Davis used it to great media effect, and the photo of Patty Hearst staging a bank holdup made older generations fear the latent urges in the most normal-looking people her age. From the Boom perspective, the most successful student strikes were those in which force was either threatened by strikers (as at Cornell) or used against them (by Greatest presidents Kerr, Kirk, and Pusey at Berkeley, Columbia, and Harvard).59
The draft's enormous class bias created festering divisions between Boomers who went to Vietnam and Boomers who didn't. The Boom's only consensus "lesson" about Vietnam was that it was badly handled by Greatest leaders. Before 1970, Boomer opinion split roughly in half over the basic issue of U.S. presence in Southeast Asia.60
In the end, violence the youth had not wanted broke the antiwar Boomer fever: The killing of six students at Kent State and Jackson State in 1970, though briefly mobilizing the generation with "Days of Rage" (when students at hundreds of colleges went on strike), was the apogee of the turmoil.61
After this climax most college-attending Boomers clearly opposed the war--although noncollege Boomers remained more prowar than any elder group (college-educated or not). Today, one Boomer in four considers Vietnam to have been a "noble cause" (the highest proportion for any generation), and the generation splits roughly 50-50 between those who think the United States should have stayed out and those who would have fought to win. (Following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Boomers were more inclined than any other generation to believe that sending American troops to the Gulf was "the right thing" to do.)62
Following the "Days of Rage," polls showed campus unrest leading the nation's list of problems, and older generations showed a fixation on youth opinion unlike anything since the days of the young Missionaries. Eighteen-year-olds were awarded the vote, and national political conventions quadrupled the number of under-thirty delegates.63
Having hounded Lyndon Johnson out of office and having poisoned the campaign of his chosen successor Hubert Humphrey, Boomer zealots proceeded to turn on Richard Nixon. Even the Presidential candidates who courted young supporters invariably saw their campaigns get wrecked on the shoals of this generation's weak civic instincts; in one antiestablishment election challenge after another, Boomer interest surged briefly before weakening by election day. In 1972, a year in which nearly 25 million newly eligible Boomers were expected to turn the tide, they did not. Half failed to vote, and Nixon outpolled McGovern among Boomers who did.64
By then, the war was winding down, the new draft lottery was kicking in, and Boomers began heeding their Beatle mentors' "simple words of wisdom: Let It Be." The rest of the 1970s were studded with successful candidates (such as Ronald Reagan and S. I. Hayakawa) who launched their political careers by running against the youth culture. After the economy had gone sour in 1973 and entry-level jobs became hard to find, the Boomer mood turned to a grinding pessimism. The storm having passed, last-wavers came of age amid a gray generational drizzle of sex, drugs, unemployment, and what Lansing Lamont called a "lost civility" on campus.65
Within the Boom, the "sexual revolution" was more a women's than a men's movement. Comparing the 1970s with the 1950s, one survey showed Boomer men with only a 3 percent increase in sexual activity over what the Silent had done at like age--the smallest increase for any age bracket over that span. Similarly, the proportion of male youths experiencing premarital sex rose only slightly from the Silent to Boom eras. By contrast, Boomer women doubled the rate of premarital sex over the Silent (from 41 percent to 81 percent) and tripled their relative propensity to commit adultery (from one-fourth to three-fourths of the rate for men).66
In politics, the Boom settled in as more apathetic and just plain illiberal than their Greatest parents could ever have imagined. As the Boom showed an air of resignation about government and business, aging Greatest began acquiescing to the youth cult of self--and America's consumption binge was off and running.67
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