However, the book does provide a significant amount of information and helps with background for any further study of the time period. There are, of course, overlaps between the groups and within each group there are different issues. Together, the conflicting groups prevented President Johnson from implementing his Great Society. Isserman and Kazin make it clear in their introduction that the s was a complex period that defies any attempt at neat categorization.
The largest source of conflict during the broad s was race. The belief that the North was more receptive to them was quickly proven ill-founded. In cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Boston, African Americans faced just as much, if not more, discrimination. In many urban areas, whites fled to the suburban areas, leaving the cities rotting for African Americans. It was not long before people were referring to these as the ghettos. Lyndon Johnson believed that it was the duty of every American to reach out and help those who are suffering.
Nobody was suffering more than the poor blacks. Johnson truly believed that the Voting Rights Act and other parts of his Great Society would help lift African Americans out of poverty. Events proved him wrong. Since the s, African Americans had been quietly organizing resistance groups. They led successful non-violent demonstrations that forced the desegregation of busses and lunch counters.
By the middle of the s, the civil rights movement could look back on a number of accomplishments. But a younger generation of blacks was coming to power and they were not content with small progress. In the end, two separate observances were held, an integrated one on federal property, and a segregated one in downtown Charleston.
In the dozen or so years that followed, Americans of all regions and political persuasions were to invoke imagery of the Civil War-to illustrate what divided rather than united the nation. I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny…and I say…segregation now…segregation tomorrow…segregation forever!
There, before an audience of 25, supporters of voting rights, King ended his seech with the exaltedly defiant words of the Battle Hymn of the Republic:. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. He has loosed the fateful lightening of his terrible swift sword. His truth is marching on… Glory, glory hallelujah! Glory, glory hallelujah! The resurrection of the battle cries of was not restricted to those who fought on one or another side of the civil rights struggle.
Whites versus blacks, liberals versus conservatives as well as liberals versus radicals , young versus old, men versus women, hawks versus doves, rich versus poor, taxpayers versus welfare recipients, the religious versus the secular, the hip versus the straight, the gay versus the straight-everywhere one looked, new battalions took the field, in a spirit ranging from that of redemptive sacrifice to vengeful defiance. When liberal delegates to the Democratic convention in Chicago lost an impassioned floor debate over a proposed antiwar plank in the party platform, they left their seats to march around the convention hall singing the Battle Hymn of the republic.
Contemporary history continues to influence historical memory. And although as the authors of America Divided we had tried to avoid political and general partisanship in our interpretation of the s, we realize how unlikely it is that any single history of the decade will satisfy every reader. Perhaps by the time centennial observances roll around for John F. We do, however, wish to suggest some larger interpretive guidelines for understanding the decade.
We believe the s are best understood not as an aberration, but as an integral part of American history. It was a time of intense conflict and millennial expectations, similar in many respects to the one Americans endured a century earlier-with results as mixed, ambiguous, and frustrating as those produced by the Civil War.
Liberalism was not as powerful in the s as is often assumed; nor, equally, was conservatism as much on the defensive. The insurgent political and social movements of the decade-including civil rights and black power, the New Left, environmentalism and feminism-drew upon even as they sought to transform values and beliefs deeply rooted in American political culture.
The youthful adherents of the counterculture shared more in common with the loyalists of the dominant culture than either would have acknowledged at the time. Living through a period of intense historical change has its costs, as the distinguished essayist, poet, and novelist Robert Penn Warren observed in There was little awareness of the cost of having a history.
It became a reality, and we became a nation, only with the Civil War. Accompanies: In this story of the movement that came close to keeping the United States out of the First World War, Kazin brings us into the ranks of the largest, most diverse, and most sophisticated peace coalition up to that point in US history.
Indeed , in a book of over pages , Hunter discusses African Americans or race in only fifteen non The contributors to this volume recognize Americanism in all its complexity--as an ideology, an articulation of the nation's rightful place in the world, a set of traditions, a political language, and a cultural style imbued with political A panoramic history of liberal politics in America by a forefront historian and author of A Godly Hero analyzes the impact of major movements throughout the past two centuries, from abolitionism and industrial-age labor disputes to the Written by two top experts on the era - Maurice Isserman, a historian of American radicalism, and Michael Kazin, a specialist insocial movements - this book provides a compelling tale of this tumultuous era filled with fresh and persuasive insights.
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