Gates of Eden

Abstract

During the years roughly between 1960 and 1970 America experienced a radical insurgency of unprecedented intensity and strange, unconventional forms. It was a political movement that had all the trappings of a spiritual crusade, a blend of rebellion and revival, and though it eventually fell short of achieving anything like power or lasting institutional change it had deep and pervasive effects on the emotional tone of the country — the way people lived and felt about their lives. In our common language, that insurgency is the very definition of the era; it is what we mean when we say “the sixties,” just as the depression, the onslaught of Fascism, and the fellow-traveling of Western intellectuals are what we mean when we invoke “the thirties”. Though bound closely to the vicissitudes of American politics, the movement was by no means a uniquely domestic upheaval, for it drew upon international energies and had global reverberations: the Cuban revolution, the uprising of Parisian students in 1968, Czechoslovakia’s canceled experiment in socialism with a human face, the Chinese cultural revolution, and above all, the Vietnamese struggle for independence, which spanned the decade and was, more than anything else, the galvanic force behind the movement.