That Was The Year That Wasn't

As this is written we're surrounded by 1968. It seems to be the 25th anniversary of everything--from the assassinations and the riots to the White Album. From the Catonsville 9 to the Chicago Conspiracy, everyone is marking the silver anniversary of what was, in fact, the most overrated year of postwar American history.

I concede a lot did happen in 1968. The year was a maddening roller coaster of events, starting with the Vietnamese Tet offensive. At the time, Tet seemed like a turning point in a war that, in fact, ground on for seven more long, long years. The year staggered to a halt shortly after the November election of Richard Nixon, seemingly ensuring a permanent counter-revolution. But then the Trickster himself got his ticket cancelled early in his second term.

Events in Paris and Prague that year left a legacy of what might have been, if only....In Paris during that long-ago spring, students went on strike, as they were doing the world over. But things got serious when the students were joined by factory workers, who defied their own unions to demand a voice in a new self-managing, participatory democracy.

Meanwhile, in Czechoslovakia, Communist Party head Alexander Dubcek led a grand experiment in democracy, a full 17 years before glasnost. Dubcek aimed to build "socialism with a human face."

But the grand hopes of Paris and Prague couldn't survive the heat of summer. Those brief, tantalizing glimpses of a workable, grassroots, decentralized socialism vanished like the mist. In the blink of an eye the French ran back to De Gaulle and the Russian tanks took back Czechoslovakia.

The Democratic Convention in Chicago in August 1968 seemed like a big deal at the time, at least to my pubescent self watching on TV as the cops cracked skulls and the party bosses coronated Hubert Humphrey. But in reality the Chicago events meant little for the anti-war movement and less for the country.

It is too little remembered today that the demonstrator turnout at Chicago was only a very disappointing 10,000 or so. The counter-convention was a naked failure in organizing terms. That failure would have killed off the whole pseudo-revolutionary delusion then sweeping The Movement, if Mayor Daley's cops had kept their peace.

In the long run, the 1968 Chicago convention was mainly important for the way that it defined political party conventions as television events. After that year, the networks covered the conventions wall-to-wall, hoping that something exciting or scandalous would again erupt. And the political parties adapted by turning their confabs into carefully stage-managed made-for-TV events. Never again would a major American party allow itself to be so embarrassed on camera as the Dems were in Chicago.

By 1992 these developments had come full circle. The conventions had become totally boring and predictable, and the networks had stopped covering them. They had become TV events that were not even seen on TV, except for a quick, nightly 90-minute prime-time recap.

Meanwhile the anti-war events in the Chicago streets turned out to be one of the key events that introduced a permanent and crippling alienation between the American white working class and the so-called progressive wing of American politics. When the anti-war movement became frozen in public perception as an anti-cop thing, it also became an anti-American-worker thing. Thus the anti-war movement, and its successors for the next two decades, became identified with counter-cultural faddishness and with exotic allegiances to foreign causes.

This has played as a general indifference to the concerns of the ordinary people of the American majority. And that's no way to make social change, in anybody's book.

ON THE ARTISTIC front, 1968 was the year that John Lennon began his partnership with Yoko Ono. And it was thanks in large part to their prescient example that, in the late 1970s, rock-and-roll culture was resurrected as an egalitarian voice for the voiceless and weird. Then Mark David Chapman did his bit to douse that flicker.

In fact, all discussions of 1968 seem to lead back to assassinations. Retrospect makes it clear that the only political events of real lasting importance to occur in 1968, on the American scene anyhow, were the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. All of American history in the quarter century hence has reverberated with their absence. They should have been, respectively, the "Mr. Outside" and "Mr. Inside" of the remaking of America--one in the White House and the other in the streets.

If those two men had lived, they would today both still be younger than, for instance, George Bush. They would only now be entering the autumn of their grand public lives--lives that would probably have left us with a country worthy of its own best promises.

That is the maddening thing about 1968, and about those two gaping losses. Part of us secretly knows that by now this could have been the America of Woody Guthrie and Langston Hughes and Alice Paul (look her up). And we could have been well on the way to becoming the America of Eugene V. Debs and Emma Goldman.

We could have been a contender, instead of what we are, which is broke, divided, and demoralized.

Danny Duncan Collum is a contributing editor of Sojourners.