THE DON QUIXOTE GENERATION

     

All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender [to mass movements] are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled selves.                         

                                      -Eric Hoffer- 1951 - [i]  

The primary purpose of CRISIS is to understand the transformation of

the United States from the political and social stability of 1949 to the

vitriolic divisions of 2024. If you are among the recent flurry of new

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At a three day “War Council” of the Weather Underground in December, 1969, the charismatic JJ Jacobs, who was white, declared, “We’re against everything that’s ‘good and decent’ in honky America.  We will loot and burn and destroy.  We are the incubation of your mothers’ nightmares.” [ii]

 In 1967, writer and ant-war activist, Susan Sontag, wrote, “America has become a criminal, sinister country – swollen with priggishness, numbed by affluence, bemused by the monstrous conceit that it has the mandate to dispose of the destiny of the world.” [iii] 

 Where did this come from, this visceral hatred of the United States by its own people?   How did we go from the pleasant Eisenhower fifties to America as a “criminal, sinister country of monstrous conceit”?  How did the country that saved world civilization from the brutality of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, become within a generation, “the enemy of life itself,” as Charles Reich wrote in the very influential, The Greening of America?

The answer is an admixture of generational change and existential angst.   For the grandparents of we Baby Boomers, pursuing the American Dream meant leaving the old European world behind and emigrating to the new one, with its promise of freedom and opportunity.  For our parents (The Greatest Generation), having met the challenges of the Depression and World War II, it meant education through the GI Bill, more money, a television, a car in the garage and an escape from the city to the greener suburbs.  Our parents moved to the suburbs, bought inexpensive, mass-produced homes, purchased cars, and watched the interstate highway system exploded across the country.   The view from the front window of our suburban homes looked sunny indeed. 

 But if anyone had been paying attention, social critics in the fifties were planting seeds of discord.   Filmmakers, playwrights, psychologists and fiction writers took a condescending pleasure in questioning those pursuing the American dream. 

In his 1956 book, The Crack in the Picture Window, John Keats bitterly criticized the values of post war America.  The cookie cutter suburban communities, he wrote, were, “conceived in error, nurtured in greed, corroding everything they touch.”  Keats’ disgust with suburban living was uncompromising.  The rows of “identical boxes [were] spreading like gangrene.”  Suburban mothers were living in a “homogenous, post war, Hell.”[iv]  Feminist, Betty Friedan, called the suburbs “comfortable concentration camps.”[v]  Social critics looked down their noses at these upwardly mobile, bourgeois pretensions. 

Meanwhile, some of the most influential novels, films, and plays of the decade cast a jaundiced eye on all that peace and prosperity. Death of a Salesman, written by thirty-three-year-old Arthur Miller in 1949, depicted capitalism as crushing the human spirit.  Willie Loman, the salesman, looks back on his life and concludes, “After all the highways, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.”  Holden Caulfield, the troubled adolescent protagonist of J.D. Salinger’s 1950 novel, The Catcher in the Rye, searched for meaning in a world of “phonies.”   

Peyton Place, perhaps the hottest book of the fifties, depicted a picturesque New England town with white church steeples and shady streets.   But lurking beneath the lovely façade, every social pathology was rampant – rape, murder, infidelity, incest, pregnancy, abortion, and murder.  The point was that small-town America [like perhaps America itself] was a pleasant fantasy beneath which hypocrisy and darkness loomed.  Sociologist, C. Wright Mills, wrote in the fifties that America was becoming “a great salesroom, an enormous file, and incorporated brain, and a new universe of management and manipulation.” [vi]   In his 1958 study, historian, Robert C. Wood, took a dim view of Suburban Man.  “The old images of national life seem to…have disappeared; the stern Puritan, the sturdy [famer], the hard-working capitalist are gone.  In their place is a prototype whom it is difficult to idealize: a man without direction or ambition except for his desire for a certain portion of material security, a man so conscious of his fellows that he has no convictions of his own.”[vii]

Disdain for money-making, dislike of the corporate life, the vacuousness of suburbanites, disgust with bourgeoise values, and the need for genuine meaning were all on display in Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.  Tom Rath {wrath – he’s angry about something} is a family man living in the suburbs.  He is moving up the corporate ladder but feels uneasy.   “I’m probably halfway through my life.  What am I going to do during the other half, ride the commenters’ train, and read annual reports, and write endless letters for Hopkins (his boss) or someone like him, and pride myself on working every weekend?” Tom Rath felt fully alive as a paratrooper during World War II.  He risked his life; he killed seventeen men.  Although married, he had an affair with an Italian woman.  Life was raw, intense and uncertain, but there was genuine clarity and significance in his wartime experiences.  Life on suburban Greentree Avenue seemed empty by comparison.

In the classic 1955 film, Rebel Without a Cause, brooding James Dean, personified a strange restlessness among the youth of the day.  The film, wrote Jeffery Hart in When the Going Was Good, “was a movie about senseless violence among directionless teenagers…The image was one of a tough but – importantly – vulnerable young man who nevertheless makes the leap out of meaninglessness to courage and authenticity.”[viii] 

Psychologists in the fifties, sixties and seventies, added to the cacophony of societal criticism by urging us to live lives of meaning.  Known collectively as The Human Potential Movement, the rising generation of Boomers were advised to do more than just make money.  “From Tokyo to Paris to Columbia,” wrote Marshall McLuhan, “youth mindlessly acts its identity quest in the streets searching not for goals but for roles, striving for an identity that eludes them.”[ix]  Abraham Maslow told us that the pinnacle of human needs is to be “self-actualized,” to do what we were meant to do.

THE AUDACIOUS GOAL OF CHANGING THE WORLD

 The message seeping into the consciousness of we Baby Boomers had a certain consistency to it: meaninglessness is bad; authenticity is good.  Goals implied crass moneymaking.  Roles imply something more noble, more genuine, more altruistic.   The seeds planted by social critics in the fifties, sprouted in the sixties.  For Boomers heading off to college, there would be no more Holden Caulfield’s, no more Tom Raths, no more Willie Lomans.  Our lives were going to be authentic.  But where were suburban white kids going to find authenticity?

 The answers they were looking for were already swirling around them - at the lunch counters of Birmingham, at the schools in Little Rock, and in the halls of the Supreme Court.  They could see it clearly enough on the little black and white TVs in the kitchen corner.

The Modern civil rights movement began in 1954 when the Supreme Court’s Brown decision ruled that separate but equal schools for blacks and whites was unconstitutional.  Historians have long-noted that revolutions begin, not when people are downtrodden and bereft of hope, but when change is already taking place.  Once people realize that change is possible, that it is within their power to effect events, they are encouraged to take action. The Brown decision was the spark igniting the explosion. The government was bending; the time was right.

The civil rights movement took on a spiritual quality. Led by reverends and ministers and accompanied by marches, songs, slogans and prayers, it had a righteous and revivalist feel.  It was an idea that would not be stopped.  And it served as a model for others to mimic.  There was a certain romantic quality to the “struggle.”  It gave otherwise powerless people a sense of efficacy and vital purpose.  It galvanized African-Americans into a community; it solidified identity; it provided a noble and righteous cause which promised political, economic and social improvement.  And to many young whites sitting home watching it all play out on their little rabbit ears TVs, it looked authentic.  It looked meaningful. It looked like fun.  And they wanted to get in on the action.

Boomers could join the movement, march, and sing, but we wanted a cause to call our own.   We were seekers after struggle. The rebel without a cause in the fifties, found it in the student movement of the sixties.  As writer Rick Perlstein wrote, “At the beginning of the Sixties, students went south to fight for civil rights…and came back to elite universities with the audacious goal of changing the world.” ^[x] 

The attempt by students to copy the Black movement is illustrated by the phrase, “The Student as N_ _ _ _ _ ,” which was the title of an essay by Berkeley professor Jerry Farber, appearing in the late sixties.  Farber argued that students had as much right to hate school as blacks did hating slavery.  The student, he argued, is a second-rate citizen with no rights who is expected to “know his place.”  Dress codes are restrictive, student newspapers are censored, and student lockers can be searched at will.  “A student should be able to change his schedule when necessary,” complained an anonymous writer.  Even worse, said another, slipping into Marxist jargon, when a boy grows his hair long, “this constitutes a crime anywhere in the bourgeois American society…”

The analogy is strained.  Not being allowed to change one’s schedule hardly constitutes slavery.  The reason for their complaints is that they wanted to be “n- - - - - - -” so they could chant and sing and fight the good fight.  They wanted to be victims – underdogs – heroically speaking truth to power. 

The student movement, and the others that followed, were smudged carbon copies of the noble civil rights crusade.  Going into “hell for a heavenly cause,” was empowering and invigorating.   The psycho/social/ spiritual movement known as the “Sixties” was an attempt by a cohort of Baby Boomers [Baby Bombers?] to infuse their lives with an abiding sense of purpose.  Boomers, aching for the trendy promised land of authenticity, and hungering to make a difference - saw only malevolence in the American dragon.  These latter-day Don Quixotes tilted at windmills and saw “a world-wide monster.”   

They were protests – not against racism, or the stifling of free speech, or nuclear weapons, or World War II internment camps, or any of their favorite shibboleths – but against inconsequentiality; they were protests against insignificance and the eternal void that awaits us all.  The journey was the destination.  

 The opening gun of the rebellion against The United States and its values, was fashioned in Port Huron, Michigan in June, 1962, by a conclave of Students for a Democratic Society.  “The goal of man and society,” they wrote, “should be…finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic.”  People who think they are happy, really aren’t.   The “contentment” and “prosperity” that many people feel is really “a haze above deeply felt anxieties…”  Most Americans “have closed their minds to the future.”  Their lives are empty.  Work is “meaningless.”  People are apathetic and afraid of change.  These kids with minimal life experience were telling us how to live and how to think.

 At the end of the conclave, they stayed up all night to draft the Final Statement.  Delegate Steve Max looked up at the aurora borealis in the midnight sky and reported that “It seemed prophetic – there was this enormous display going on in the sky over Port Huron.” The next morning, intoxicated by fatigue and their sense of transcendent purpose, the students walked down to the lake, held hands and watched the sun come up.  Sharon Jeffrey wrote, “It was exalting.  We felt that we were different [i.e. smarter, wiser, idealistic, and genuine]…We thought we knew what had to be done, and how we were going to do it.  It felt like the dawn of a new age.”[xi] 

 Indeed, it was.  The Age of Aquarius was upon us.  Almost overnight, we Boomers altered the optics of the American landscape.  Mustaches and sideburns crept down our faces.  Afros helped establish the Black identity.  Hair became a political and cultural fashion statement.   We burned our bras and our draft cards.  We slipped on bell bottoms, love beads, head bands, granny glasses and sandals.  We marched, we sang, we raised our consciousness with pot and acid trips, took “the pill” and created the sexual revolution.  We could not be ignored because there were so many of us; we had a lot of money and made a hell-of-a-lot of noise.

By the time the decade of the sixties was over, the country did not look the same; it did not feel the same.  Drugs, hippies, Viet Nam, race riots, assassinations and the radical left with its Weathermen persona had transformed us.  Polite political tracts like the Port Huron Statement were replaced by an almost inexplicable, elemental hatred of the United States.   The Weather Underground called for the destruction of Amerika.  The United States had become unequivocally evil – racist, imperialist, expansionist, capitalist, sexist.   “We are,” wrote the Weathermen in 1969, “within the heartland of a world-wide monster, a country so rich from its world-wide plunder…the goal is the destruction of U.S. imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism.”[xii]

DAYS OF VIBRANCY AND PASSION

 I remember those days.  On April 30, 1968, I drove past Columbia University where barricades and police were everywhere.  Students had taken over several university offices and imprisoned the Dean.  I recall being bewildered.  The student movement left me with more questions than answers.   What exactly are these students looking for? I wrote in my journal.  The kids at Columbia are protesting, but for what?  They don’t like capitalism?  Are they ashamed of the wealth they have?  They say they’re not free, but what does that mean exactly? I feel free, why don’t they?  Are they reacting against a world that has relegated them to a number, a cog in a gigantic wheel?  Revolution in the midst of prosperity.  How will history explain this? 

     Good question.

   We have now had over fifty years of history to try to explain their rage.  The United States once had slavery, they told us.  We continue to be racist, they said. Our fear of Communism, they wrote, was misguided.  We interred Japanese Americans in camps during World War II.  We dropped two atomic bombs on Japan.  But the galvanizing force of the sixties was the war in Viet Nam.  The war was easy to hate.  Every day a hundred American boys were killed.  The war was labelled “imperialist.”  We destroyed Viet Nam with Napalm.  The My Lai massacre was a blot on the American record.  However, when the war ended in American defeat in 1974, the left found itself somehow disappointed, adrift, disoriented.  The wind was taken out of their protesting sails because the object of their rage had been removed.   In 1986, Hippie Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, said wistfully, “It is hard to have an anti-war movement without a war.” [xiii] The truth is that they missed the war. “For them,” wrote Peter Collier and David Horowitz, two former Sixties radicals, “this hatred (of the war) had become a sort of addiction.  They could not do without the rush of seeing themselves as a moral vanguard.” [xiv]

 In the late eighties, columnist Anne Taylor Fleming recalled the Sixties fondly as “an often-unaccountable springtime,” and as a time of “vibrancy” and “passion,” when it was “somehow lovely to be young.”  Fleming quoted a friend who said, “Remember the sixties, the promise, the hope?  We stopped a war then.  But now everything is different.”[xv]

Think about that for a moment.  The days of My Lai, napalm, Kent state, assassinations, racial conflicts, drugs and the carnage of Viet Nam are remembered as an “unaccountable springtime.”   It doesn’t make sense unless we understand that they didn’t hate the war, they loved it because the struggle, the camaraderie, the sense of power, of efficacy, and the expansive feeling one gets from making a difference, can be gratifying, if not intoxicating.  They loved to hate it because it justified their anger, their activism, their sense of moral outrage, their sense of righteous indignation.  

THE DON QUIXOTE GENERATION

The psycho/social/ spiritual movement known as the “Sixties” was an attempt by a cohort of Baby Boomers [better named Baby Bombers] to infuse their lives with an abiding sense of purpose.   It was a generational stab at meaning.  A Grand Delusion. The Don Quixote Generation - aching for the trendy promised land of authenticity, and hungering to make a difference - saw only malevolence in the American windmill.  Like Don Quixote, they fabricated causes to fight for and demons to destroy in order to raise their lives to transcendence.  Their need for heroism was, as psychologist Ernest Becker wrote in 1973 in another context, “a blind divineness that burns people up…a screaming for glory as uncritical and reflexive as the howling of a dog.”[xvi]  

A classic example of the self-centered focus of sixties radicals was Weatherman Susan Stern, who tells us she grew up feeling “stupid and ugly.”  She tried on several identities, topless dancer, feminist and hippie, but when she discovered the Weathermen, she “fell in love with the concept.” ^[xvii]

       My white knight materialized into a vision of world-wide liberation.  I

       ceased to think of Susan Stern as a woman; I saw myself as a

       revolutionary tool.  Impetuously and compulsively, I flung myself at

      the feet of the revolution and debauched in its whirlwind for the next

     few years…my family, my past all faded into dreary insignificance. 

The revolutionary persona was so gratifying that she ceased to be a person, and became the revolution; she psychologically fused with it.  She was drunk with the heady feeling of having found her purpose in life.  “I felt,” she wrote, “that I had finally connected with my own personal destiny; that I had a place, a function in life.”   Or to use sixties speak, she was now self-actualized.

For Stern, as for many of these sixties radicals, it was never about the cause; it was about what the cause could do for them.  American soldiers fighting against the Japanese in World War II did not “fall in love with the concept.”  Their counterparts on the beaches of Normandy did not “debauch in its whirlwind.”  Unlike the” Greatest Generation,” the Don Quixote generation, didn’t manufacture their heroism; they lived it. 

David Horowitz, who had been deeply committed to radical left causes in his youth, eloquently and powerfully explained the difficulty of discarding the spiritual nature of the anti-American weltanschauung.

       The moment I gave up my radical beliefs was the moment I had to

       look at myself for the very first time.  At me.  As I really was – not

       suspended above everyone else as an avatar of their future salvation

      but standing beside them as an equal, as one of them.  Not one whom   

      History had chosen for its vanguard but a speck of ordinary human dust.

      I had to look at the life ahead of me no longer guided and buoyed by a

      redeeming purpose, no longer justified by a missionary faith.  Just a drop in

     the flow to the common oblivion.  Mortal. Insignificant, inconceivably small.[xviii]    

Horowitz clearly understood the grandiose, spiritual pretentions in the foaming anger of the so-called New Left.  Purpose.  Missionary faith.  Mortality.   Fear of death.  Eternal insignificance.  Oblivion.  Salvation.  These latter-day Don Quixotes, tilted at the hated American windmill with a missionary faith, in order to fill their lives with purpose, respect, heroism, and importance.  They hungered for the promised land of authenticity. It was all about them; all about their egos; all about their sense of personal worth, all about strutting one’s stuff on life’s stage.  All that sound and fury was generated by a fear that their lives might be nothing more than a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.   

The student movement was really a protest – not against racism, or the stifling of free speech, or nuclear weapons, or any of their favorite shibboleths – but against inconsequentiality; they were protests against insignificance and the eternal void that awaits us all.  

It has now been fifty years since that “unaccountable springtime.” We continue to fight the culture wars and remain bitterly divided because  - at least in part - of the artificial, grandiose fantasies started by a cohort of the Don Quixote Generation.    All of their collective blather, their hatred, their uncontrollable hunger for a heroic life, their pretentious political tracts, and their screams for glory weren’t about evil Amerika.  They were about their blind howls for attention; they derive from the sickness in their souls and from a warped and destructive need for posterity’s affirmation and eternity’s deliverance.

 The post-war generation wanted to be heroes.  But heroes need dragons to defeat.  If there are no dragons, then (to paraphrase Voltaire) they would have to invent them. 

We are feeling the effects today.

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[i] Hoffer, Eric, The True Believer, Harper & Row, Perennial edition, New York, 1951, p. 24

[ii] Collier, Peter, Horowitz, David. Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the

Sixties, Encounter Books, San Francisco, 1989, p. 94.

[iii] Kimball, Roger, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America, Encounter books, San Francisco, 2000, p. 96.

[iv] Keats, John, The Crack in the Picture Window, 1956.   Quoted in Tindall, George Brown, and David E. Shi, America, Brief Fourth Edition, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1997, p. 996.

[v] Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique,  W.W. Norton & Company, NY, 1963

[vi] Mills,. C. Wright,

[vii] Wood, Robert C., Suburbia, Their People and Their Politics,  Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1958.

[viii] Hart, Jeffery, When The Going Was Good, Crown Publishers, New York, 1982,  p. 281.

[ix] Quoted in, Glasser, William, The Identity Society, Harper & Row Publishers, Perennial Library, New York, 1972, p.2

[x]  “Who Owns the Sixties, by Rick Perlstein, from Lingua Franca, The Review of Academic Life, (May/June, 1996),  New York.

[xi] Fleming, Anne Taylor,

[xii] From New Left Notes, June 18, 1969, Weathermen, by Harold Jacobs, Ramparts Press, 1970, pp. 51-53

[xiii]  Collier, P. 360

[xiv] Ibid. p. 362

[xv]

[xvi] Becker, Ernest, The Denial of Death, The Free Press, New York, New York, 1973,  p.6.

[xvii] Stern, Susan, With The Weathermen, Doubleday,  Garden City, New York, 1975pages 2-11

[xviii] Collier and Horowitz, p. 344.