Well, Maybe Not the Eve

1965 was one of the more notably transformative years for me personally. The year one turns 13 is for most people: one falls from the apex of childhood to the lowliest rank of teenager, a change commonly driven home by the start of high school. It was the year I became very self-conscious in both good and bad ways. Much of the “feel” of the year is still very real to me. I have many strong sense memories from the year including smells from such various sources as horse stalls, mimeograph paper, and (permeating nearly all interior spaces) tobacco smoke. My favorite album that year was Animal Tracks. (I still like Eric Burden and the Animals; I caught a concert by the septuagenarian last year.) To my classmates back then I pretended my favorite was Highway 61 Revisited because that was a cooler answer. I did, in fact, like that album (and Dylan in general), but not as much as more straightforward rock. (A quick look shows that the vintage Highway 61 Revisited vinyl is still on my shelf.) My first fumbling attempt at a flirtation was deliberately ignored or honestly unnoticed – either is possible. Meantime the world was turning on its head. To be sure, I was aware of the cultural milieu to the extent someone that age ever is, but it seemed normal to me. The fish, as the adage goes, does not notice the water in which it swims.

My mom noticed. I remember her saying in 1968 that in the previous few years “the world just went crazy.” This was from someone who had been a teenager during World War 2. Still, I knew what she meant. (By then I had evolved a little beyond a fish apparently.) The presuppositions of the very Leave It to Beaver era of my childhood (I even looked a little like Jerry Mathers) had shredded – quickly. Anyone who lived through the 60s knows just how distinct the two halves of the decade were. 60-64 were just the 50s amped up a little. “The Sixties,” as we usually think of them, were the second half of the decade, which spilled over into the early 70s. A minor example of the shift: compare the Beatles albums Meet the Beatles (64) and Sgt Pepper (67).

My mom’s assessment (stated somewhat more academically) is shared by many from across the philosophical spectrum.  Nicholas Leman, Professor at Columbia University, says that the 60s “turned as if on a hinge” in 1965. George Will independently uses the same hinge metaphor. Charles Murray in Coming Apart identifies the year as the moment when the country began to…well…come apart in the ways that are all too obvious today. Cultural critic Luc Sante (The New York Review of Books) comments that western culture reached some sort of peak in 1965 and has been in decline since. Even crime became qualitatively different (see my review of Evil by Michael H. Stone and Gary Brucato) as standards shifted. Major social changes don’t really happen without a prelude, and the roots of The Sixties are discoverable in the subcultures of The Fifties if you look for them. Nonetheless, politically, socially, and culturally the country reached a tipping point in ’65, and from there the rapidity of change was dizzying. We are still dealing with the aftermath in innumerable ways.

James T Patterson aims to capture those twelve months in The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America." The author, who was a 30-y.o. (as in don’t-trust-anyone-over) professor at the time, has a perspective different from mine (not a criticism, just an observation) but does a pretty good job covering many of the key elements. The title refers to a 1965 hit song that never would have charted just a year or two earlier. Patterson details a busy year for national and world events. President Johnson openly committed US combat troops to Vietnam thereby missing the last chance to avoid Americanizing the war. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (outlawing public and commercial discrimination “because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin”) and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 took hold and promised real improvements. Yet on the street there were racial confrontations in Selma and all out riots in Watts. Great Society programs coupled benefits with unintended social consequences. Patterson writes of the role of youth culture, of student organizations such as SDS, of the generation gap, of the credibility gap, of sexual politics, and of the environmental movement. The easy confidence about the future that had been so much a part of American psychology for a century fled as political divisions deepened in ways that haven’t healed since.

The book is worth a read. If I have a reservation, it is the short shrift he gives to the apolitical (and, some would argue, more important) aspect of the counterculture that flowered (bad pun intended) mid-decade: the part about personal enlightenment and alternate ways of living. Timothy Leary: “When the individual's behavior and consciousness get hooked to a routine sequence of external actions, he is a dead robot, and it is time for him to die and be reborn. Time to ‘drop out,’ ‘turn on,’ and ‘tune in.’" This, admittedly, was a Revolution that failed (regrettably) in broader social terms, but it still has a legacy that matters on another level.

Why care about 1965 in 2019?  There is always something to be learned from watershed moments of the past. As Professor Joseph Wittreich (not Mark Twain despite the common misattribution) remarked, history doesn’t repeat but it often rhymes. A little prep work helps us to sing along.

Thumbs Up on the book – not way up but up.

Barry McGuire – Eve of Destruction (1965)