Agreed. I find it simply astounding that anyone old enough to have some historical perspective, and certainly any native-born American, can blithely dismiss the impact of the 1960s cultural revolution. The change in the status of women, and the upheaval in long-established relations and attitudes in regard to sex and gender, are _by themselves alone_ of world-historic significance. The American form of apartheid, which grew out of chattel slavery and thus had a continuous existence of some 300 years, largely collapsed in the space of about a decade. It is precisely in the reformation of "mere" everyday life and in doing away with ascriptive status _within_ the existing political structure of society that the American reformist tradition has been most distinctive--like it or not. It is thus characteristic that American reform in its formative period focused on race and gender--"abolition" and "suffrage," to put it in the 19th century shorthand. The 1960s represent the almost literally incredible reappearance on the American scene of a "spirit," if you will, of revolt and questioning that was very much alive from the collapse of the Federalist neo-classical civic ideal at the end of the 18th century until the Civil War, but repressed during the post-bellum iron age. The 1960s saw the sudden, lurching advance, if not the completion, of the two great revolutions begun between 1800 and 1860, along with a more diffuse but nevertheless real loosening up of everyday life.
During the first half of the 19th century, between the two most significant military clashes of arms on American soil, for a large section of the northern white "middle class" then taking shape, society was quite fluid, and it is impossible to mistake the sense of possibility that people felt. It was widely and sincerely believed that the American experiment truly was a "new order of the ages." Having spent most of my winter in various archives reading letters and diaries of the period, I can attest that this sentiment was quite widespread among ordinary people, whatever "monumental condescension" (a famous phrase of E. P. Thompson's) we may today bestow on them. Everything was up for grabs, and it is not surprising that along with the big political movements for women's rights, the abolition of slavery, and (in the 1840s) opposition to the Mexican War, went a host of communalist experiments; a proliferation of religious sects, "spiritualist" movements, and pseudo-science; the growth of a distinctively American literature; and such things as "dress reform"--the effort to liberate women from confining and restrictive clothing. It was, at least seen from our distance in time, all of a piece: phrenology, transcendentalism, and abolition walked hand in hand, not always amicably. This period also saw the growth of an American form of small-scale entrepreneurial capitalism, which in its populist, indeed plebeian character, differed considerably from the European variety. Early American capitalism too, partook in some way of the exuberant utopianism of the era. This has also never gone away, and persists in the "small is beautiful" mentality. How utterly typical that when continental Marxism appeared on the scene in the 1870s, the American reformers who had cut their political teeth in the movements for abolition and suffrage, and who found their way into the International Working Men's Association, couldn't see eye to eye with the early Marxists, many of them immigrants. The IWA, of course, collapsed in short order. Francis Wheen, in his recent biography of Marx, condescendingly but all too typically, crystallizes American reformism in the figure of the preposterous adventuress Victoria Woodhull. The simple-minded Yanks, pragmatic and unphilosophical, but at the same time flighty and utopian, couldn't see that all they desired would follow naturally--or "logically"--from the application of a few reductionist formulae developed in Europe, where they order things better. Moreover, focusing on such trivialities as the subordination of women alienated the workers, usw. usw.
One can perhaps begin to appreciate the significance of the 1960s cultural revolution by considering the sustained fury of the reaction, which has continued unabated for a good 30 years. If some people on the left don't understand the importance of the 60s, the right certainly does.
Jacob Conrad
PS I don't mean to dismiss the international dimension of the 60s. A couple of interesting takes from this perspective are Arthur Marwick's huge _The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958-c. 1974_ (Oxford UP 1998) and Jeremi Suri's _Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente_ (Harvard UP 2003).