Michael Pollak wrote:
>
>
> That seems fair enough. I guess I wondered too far from my original
> point, which is that comparing the disappointment of Kennedy/Johnson with
> Clinton and Obama misses something crucial: the Dems under Kennedy/Johnson
> passed major transformative progressive legislation. Clinton and so far
> Obama didn't. And yet the former is associated with by far the huger
> movement.
The factors Michael describes were certainly important, but they were also quite secondary. One might say that this acdount is Hamlet without the Prince. It leaves out almost everything that constituted the teribly complex phenomenon we know as "The '60s."
I leaves out Watts.
It leaves out the Free Speech Movmeent.
It leaves out the 1000 or so Beulah Thornton's, the most crucial ingredient of all, without whom there would have been no Civil Righs Act.
It leaves out the CPUSA.
And it gives Kennedy/Johnson credit for Everett Dirksen's achievment.
Dirksen called Civil Rights an idea whose time had come, by which he meant, if we don't do someting those people are going to make the United States ungovernable.
In other words LBJ passed Civil Rights because a gun was pointed at his head.
An the success of that triggereed (had already triggered) the explosion of the Black Liberation Movement into the Student Movement (the crucial episode being the Free Speech Movement, which would not have occured except for the BLM.
Probably dissillusionment or, more accurately, a growin sense of discrepancy between "American Ideals" and actuality, has a major share in bringing masses of students into the movement, but had very little to do with the initial developments of the 60s movements.
This is crude and sketchy, but any account of The '60s MUST give primary emphasis to the Black Movement, which developed quite independently of attituds towards the DP. Without that movement almost nothing in that period is really intelligible, not even the dope, the 'Hippies,' or Johnny Carson having Buffy St. Marie on his show!
Carrol
Carrol