The Other Side of the 1960s or "This Is My Country and I Know that I'm RIGHT"

Randall Stephens

There was another side of the turbulent 1960s and 70s era. New conservatism and membership in the Young American for Freedom gained steadily after 1964. The "silent majority" became a slogan for all those Americans who had enough of tear gas, long hair, and endless protests. Yet in the popular imagination this seldom registers. Host a 1960s party and see who comes dressed up as a John Bircher. Who else will arrive sporting beehive wigs and flattops and carrying "Get US Out of the UN" signs or wearing "AUH20" buttons. The popular history of the sixties, still, has probably been told too often in a prescriptive rather than a descriptive fashion. Even historians perhaps have sided with the young marchers who shook their fists at "the man."

However, recent trends in history are starting to change these perceptions and the way of telling the story of the 1960s and 70s. See for example the insightful books that have appeared in recent years on grassroots conservatism, the rise of the new right, and evangelical conservatism:

Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (W. W. Norton, 2010)

Jefferson R. Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (2010)

Daniel Williams, God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (Oxford, 2010)

Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, 2002)

Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, 2007)

Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, 2007)

Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Harvard, 2008)

Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, 2009)

Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (W. W. Norton, 2009)

David T. Courtwright, No Right Turn: Conservative Politics in a Liberal America (Harvard, 2010)

Donald T. Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History (Harvard, 2007)

I've been tooling around with the idea of making a compilation of conservative country/folk songs, sorta anti-protest numbers, that express the other, fightin' side of the 1960s and 1970s. The criteria does not have to do with the quality of the music, but with the tone of the message. Do the lyrics call for flag-waving, god-fearing, patriotism and support for the local

police? Does the singer lament the state of America's cities and shout down the feral hippies running shoeless through the streets clutching their bongs and incense sticks? Long, long before the Tea Party raised its collective complaint and before Lee Greenwood made grammarians sick with lines like "And I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free," others were charting out a conservative protest genre.

So, here's what I've got so far. (Thanks to Scott Hovey for some wonderful suggestions). This is only a start! There's so much more out there.

Merle Haggard - The Fightin' Side Of Me (1968)

Merle Haggard - Okie from Muskogee (1969)

Jimmy D Bennett - Sapadelic (197?)

Don Hinson - The Protest Singer (197?)

The Goldwaters - Down in Havana (1964)

Up with People - Which Way America? (1966)

Lynyrd Skynyrd - Sweet Home Alabama (1974)

Robin Moore and Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler - The Ballad of The Green Berets (1966)

Eating My Words (while Uncovering My Eyes)

Heather Cox Richardson

A while back, when the Texas curriculum flap was in full swing, I wrote about the Texas legislature’s potential undercutting of the curriculum committee that was pushing Texas history standards so far to the right. The legislature had voted to permit schools to spend money allotted for curriculum materials on non-textbook sources. That might actually help, rather than hurt, American history, I wrote, as schools turned to the free primary sources available on the web rather than being tied to the textbook choices of the radicals on the curriculum committee.

Today I fess up to my naiveté. There was a completely different way to approach this funding change, and it’s now underway. It is a way that raises troubling educational issues, but also, perhaps, even more disturbing political ones.

On Wednesday evening, former Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee announced his new educational company, “Learn Our History.” The company’s mission is to “combat major shortcomings in current methods of teaching American history.” It claims it will tell “America’s most influential stories, without the filters or biases that too often infiltrate history and social studies classes across the country today.” The company’s first product is a new video series of cartoons about American history: “The Time Travel Academy Video Series.” The series features time-traveling teenagers who visit important events in the nation’s past.

Governor Huckabee’s promotional materials begin with a full-throated attack on history teachers that echoes the Texas curriculum committee. History today is “force-fed” to students “through dry text books, monotonous lectures and boring lessons,” the website announces. Worse, “our children's classes and learning materials are often filled with misrepresentations, including historical inaccuracies, personal biases and political correctness.” Huckabee’s walk-on website character amplifies: “When it comes to American history, our nation is facing an epidemic. Schools across the country have turned their backs on our children by distorting facts, imposing political biases, and changing the message behind the important lessons of our history. As a result, our children aren’t learning what makes America great.”

The video series will combat this travesty with “unbiased” history, promising “to correct the ‘blame America first’ attitude prevalent in today’s teaching.” It celebrates America’s greatness and recognizes and celebrates “faith, religion and the role of God in America's founding and making our country the greatest place on Earth.” The first video available is “The Reagan Revolution.” The second is about World War II.

It should come as no surprise that the lead scholarly advisor to the series is Larry Schweikart, author of 48 Liberal Lies about American History, and A Patriot’s History of the United States, one of Glenn Beck’s favorite history books.

So my sunny optimism that the Texas curriculum funding law would bring primary sources and honest historical inquiry into Texas classrooms was probably naïve.

But now my training as a political historian makes me see something more than an educational culture war in this struggle. Here’s why: The videos are designed partly for the huge Christian homeschooling market, but also for classroom use. Apparently,* they cost $19.95 (plus $3.95 shipping and handling). The website promises that the company envisions more than seventy-five of them.

If they do become a staple in Texas schools, which make up the nation’s largest curriculum market, Governor Huckabee’s new company looks to do pretty well.

Governor Huckabee, of course, is a current front-runner for the Republican nomination for president in 2012.

While I hasten to say that I can’t imagine that anyone in the Texas legislature foresaw the way this has played out, doesn’t the Texas curriculum law, plus the new video series, plus Governor Huckabee’s candidacy equal a situation in which public school funds can be funneled to a specific political candidate?

Kind of flies in the face of the company’s purported mission to keep public schools from “imposing political biases,” doesn’t it?
____________

* The cost is a little hard to figure out from the website, and calling the company telephone number didn’t yield a person.

Look Back in Anger: The 1960s and Evangelical Conservatives

Randall Stephens

The rightward turn of voters in the 2010 elections and the traction that conservative candidates have gained has a variety causes. Certainly, a number of Americans are unhappy with health care reform, unemployment, and a president that they feel is far too liberal. But one group, white conservative Christians, is particularly up in arms.

The Pew Research Center reports that "Two of the largest religious groups in the electorate followed the same basic voting patterns in the 2010 elections for the U.S. House of Representatives as they have in prior elections: white Protestants voted overwhelmingly Republican and religiously unaffiliated voters cast their ballots overwhelmingly for Democrats. . . . However, among all white voters who describe themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians -- a group that includes Catholics and members of other faiths in addition to Protestants -- 78% voted Republican in 2010, compared with 70% in the last midterm election."

At least since the 1960s, many evangelical and fundamentalist Christians have felt besieged by new currents in the larger American culture. The upheaval of the swinging sixties shocked and frightened believers. Evangelicals and fundamentalists were horrified by campus riots, the counter culture, and what they saw as the excesses of the liberal political establishment. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Christianity Today, the chief magazine of American evangelicalism, published article after article on the terrors of the Left and the end of Christian civilization. Their world, so it seemed, was crumbling around them. (See Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sunbelt and Dan Williams recent God's Own Party for excellent insight into these and earlier developments.) The 1970s bestselling work of nonfiction, Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth, wove an evangelical end-times drama out of the explosive issues of the age. (Though Jesus People wore beads and Roman sandals and grew their hair "all long and shaggy," as Merle Haggard put it, they were in step with the apocalyptic temper of the times and drank in the anti-60s brew of the day.)

James Dobson, one of the most influential evangelical leaders of the modern era, described this anti-1960s view bluntly in 2008. Much of the wickedness of modern society, Dobson thundered, could be traced to that era of moral decline. The so-called Summer of Love in 1967 unleashed a whirlwind of hedonism and vice, he said. In his multi-million selling parenting manual, Dare to Discipline (1970), Dobson wrote: "In a day of widespread drug usage, immorality, civil disobedience, vandalism, and violence, we must not depend on hope and luck to fashion the critical attitudes we value in our children. That unstructured technique was applied during the childhood of the generation which is now in college, and the outcome has been quite discouraging. Permissiveness has not just been a failure; it’s been a disaster!"

Long after the bong smoke and tear gas have cleared, conservative American Christians--some in the Tea Party and many more who are happy enough with the Republican Party--continue to register post-60s fears. A number want to reclaim their America from secularists and godless liberals. They fear that an overpowering government wants to curtail their rights to raise their children as they see fit. They worry that their freedom to express their religious beliefs in the public sphere continues to come under attack. In other words, many are uncomfortable with a post-60s pluralism that has reshaped the nation and with a secular notion of the public good.

Such concerns are not lost on savvy politicians. Christine O'Donnell, Sarah Palin, Rand Paul, Ken Buck, and a host of others are intimately aware of constituents' fears. When such candidates lash out at secular experts and laud commonsense Christianity, they know perfectly well that they are tapping into a powerful counter ideology, one that has been decades in the making.

History, Politics, and the Art of Compromise

Heather Cox Richardson

On Saturday, September 19, the New York Times published an article titled: “Hey, Political Zealots; Listen to a Conversation from 1963.” It reveals the contents of a conversation between President Kennedy and Everett Dirksen, a senator from Illinois, captured on a tape that has recently been released by the JFK Library in Boston. In the recording, the president and Dirksen—and others, including Robert S. McNamara—are discussing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Dirksen, a Republican, counsels Kennedy, a Democrat, on how to sell the treaty to anxious Republican senators, even offering language that would allay those anxieties. Kennedy thanks Dirksen, adopts his suggestions, and the treaty passed.

The article was about the conversation, but its point was to emphasize to today’s political partisans the value of political compromise in achieving important national goals.

The article is of interest to historians because it underscores an approaching sea change in national politics. A political historian watching closely can see a quiet swell of Burkean conservatism in American political language. It is an ideological shift that has enormous implications for the Republican Party and for the nation.

It also has important implications for historians.

As pundits on the right have become increasingly shrill and doctrinaire, more traditional conservatives have begun to push back against Republican Party leaders. Conservative thinkers are increasingly distinguishing between the movement conservatism that endorsed the Republican Party and actual conservative beliefs. In The Death of Conservatism (2009), Sam Tanenhaus explores how the pursuit of political dominance made movement conservatives in the Republican Party abandon their advocacy of the small government and fiscal austerity so important to traditional conservatism. More important, though, he emphasizes that they had abandoned true conservatism, since traditional conservative governance works through compromise to embrace changes demanded by the community.

Tanenhaus was excoriated by right-wing pundits for his observations, but they did not disappear. On his popular blog at The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan hammers daily on extremism both right and left, and calls for political compromise to achieve national ends. As the New York Times piece about Dirksen and Kennedy indicates, such a call is also beginning to crop up more and more often in national newspapers.

And this emphasis on debate and political compromise has begun to show up in the writings of historians. Two new biographies of Henry Clay celebrate him as “The Great Compromiser” and denigrate the shrill partisans who tore his compromises to shreds and brought on a devastating war with their hyperbole and violence.

The growing momentum behind this language change suggests a political realignment, to be sure, but it also suggests that tomorrow’s historians are going to weigh the past with a different scale than their recent predecessors did.

Uses of the Past

Randall Stephens

Historians, pundits, and activists are commenting on the Saturday Tea Party rally, called "Restoring Honor," at the Lincoln Memorial. The event--on the anniversary of MLK's 1963 march--brings up some important questions about the legacy and purposes of the past. Here are some of the comments, reflections on the 8/28 gathering:

Kate Zernike, "Where Dr. King Stood, Tea Party Claims His Mantle," New York Times, August 28, 2010.
WASHINGTON — It seems the ultimate thumb in the eye: that Glenn Beck would summon the Tea Party faithful to a rally on the anniversary of the March on Washington, and address them from the very place where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech 47 years ago. After all, the Tea Party and its critics have been facing off for months over accusations of racism. >>>

Eugene Robinson, "Even Beck Can't Mar King's Legacy," Washington Post, August 27, 2010.
The majestic grounds of the Lincoln Memorial belong to all Americans -- even to egomaniacal talk-show hosts who profit handsomely from stoking fear, resentment and anger. So let me state clearly that Glenn Beck has every right to hold his absurdly titled "Restoring Honor" rally on Saturday. >>>

Martin Luther King III, "Still Striving for MLK's Dream in the 21st Century," Washington Post, August 25, 2010.
Forty-seven years ago this weekend, on a sweltering August day often remembered simply as the March on Washington, my father delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial. A memorial to him is being erected at the Tidal Basin, not far from where he shared his vision of a nation united in justice, equality and brotherhood. >>>

Robert Costa, "Armey: Glenn Beck’s ‘Serious, Scholarly Work,’" National Review, August 28, 2010.
Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R., Texas) spoke with National Review Online on Friday at FreedomWork’s “Take Back America” conference in Washington. The evening rally, which was attended by thousands of conservative activists, was a precursor of sorts to Saturday’s “Restoring Honor” event at the Lincoln Memorial. Armey calls “Restoring Honor,” which will be hosted by Glenn Beck of Fox News, an “important moment for America.” >>>

"Beck rally Saturday at Lincoln Memorial on anniversary of King's 'I Have a Dream' speech," The Guardian (Canada), August 28, 2010.
. . . . Beck, a Fox News personality and a conservative favourite, insists it's just a coincidence that his "Restoring Honor" rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial is overlapping with the 47th anniversary of King's speech. Potential 2012 presidential candidate Sarah Palin is expected to attend along with some 100,000 people. >>>

Philip Elliott, "Glenn Beck Lincoln Memorial rally draws criticism," Christian Science Monitor, August 26, 2010.
. . . . Beck, a popular figure among tea party activists and a polarizing Fox News Channel personality, has said it is merely a coincidence that the event is taking place on the 47th anniversary of King's plea for racial equality. Beck has called President Barack Obama a racist. >>>

Julie Ingersoll, "Beck’s 'Dream'—Our Nightmare," Religion Dispatches, August 25, 2010.
David Barton, Glenn Beck’s favorite history “professor,” is the creator and purveyor of a revisionist history of race in America that is rapidly gaining traction in conservative and Tea Party circles. That history, drawn in part from the writings of Christian Reconstructionists, recasts modern-day Republicans as the racially inclusive party, and modern-day Democrats as the racists supportive of slavery and post-Emancipation racist policies. >>>