The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee

Provides an interesting and useful collage of activism in the 1960s. His lively discussion of the 1950s is more about how the members of the movement, growing up in the period, would think of the time in retrospect. His account of the civil rights movement, which provides "a boot camp" for the movement, is cut loose from much good work that has been done (Dittmer's Local People) on the interconnections between the local people who had been fighting Mississippi white supremacy since the 40s. The impressionistic view of 1968 is an enjoyable read, with very readable portraits of the student protest at Columbia, the campaigns of RFK, McCarthy and Nixon. The conventions in Miami and Chicago. And the devastating murders of RFK and MLK. But show more were did all of this come from? It would seem that Anderson's view of this "reform" movement is like his view of all reform movements in American history, somewhat spontaneous in which the grievances are sufficient cause for the existence of protest. His portrait of women's liberation that follows in the second wave is interesting in that he throws out opposition to the ERA by Phyllis Schlafly without contextualizing this within debates surrounding women's empowerment stretching back to the early 20th C. Both the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the Women's Liberation Movement in the 1970s have long histories stretching back into at least the early 20th C. The massive parallelism that Anderson uses tends to obscure these discrete histories. At bottom, the problem with Anderson's account, entertaining though it may be is that this reader, at least, remains unconvinced that history really works that way. How do we explain the persistence of racial tensions today, or the gender contest in the workplace, or the class conflicts which are visible in a society in which a sinking tide is lowering all boats. Perhaps as Sara Evans points out this is best seen as the companion book to the documentary Making Sense of the Sixties?

David Chalmers defines Anderson's contribution this way:

Defining "movement" as "all the activists who demonstrated for social change" between 1960 and the end of the Vietnam War, Anderson finds it too volatile and amorphous to be understood through leadership, organizational history, or ideology. Favoring the term "kaleidoscopic," he rejects tracing themes in favor of a chronological unfolding. His metaphor is properly oceanic, the surge of the earlier sixties yields to the rip tides of 1968, with the second wave flowing along the currents of empowerment and liberation, cresting and then receding after having brought a sea change to the American Cold War Culture. (p. 1289)

And on the impact of the sixties, Chalmers points out that

Anderson credits the sixties with altering the Cold War culture and creating an ethic more flexible and tolerant, more skeptical of experts, leaders and institutions, and more open about feelings, more compassionate, and more liberated sexually. (p. 1289)

Sara Evans credits his book with challenging "the declension narrative about the late 1960s activism offered by a number of other authors (see for example Todd Gitlin The Sixties [1987]." (p. 941) but then she goes on to point out that he has ignored issues of race, class and gender in his narrative and acts as if these streams in the movement come out of nowhere. As she points out "each of the issues and constituencies mobilized during the 1960s had its own history and dynamic. Anderson tends to skim over these, describing in each case the wrongs they set out to right as sufficient cause." (p. 942) show less

A very good summary for a wide readership.