All they wanted was to be free,
And that's the way it turned out to be
“What the hell’s wrong with freedom, man? That’s what it’s all about!” With these words, Billy, the Dennis Hopper character in the 1969 film Easy Rider, seemingly captured the essence of the decade that was coming to an end. But filling in the unclear antecedents to pronouns is the key to understanding this movie and the decade it represents. Like they in the lines from “The Ballad of Easy Rider” quoted above and we in Captain America’s summation of the movie, “We blew it,” it refers not only to the sixties and to the Counterculture, but to America itself. Freedom is what America has always been all about, but just what sort of freedom, how much, and for whom have been—along with the related issues of the implications of freedom for individualism, community, responsibility, equality, and an ethnically diverse society—the fundamental questions around which American history has revolved.—Roger McGuinn,“The Ballad of Easy Rider” (1969)
When the decade’s story is seen as one
about freedom its irony becomes apparent. Forms of freedom had become segregated. Black people, most of whom
were still far from free in the usual senses of the word at the beginning of the decade, had become symbols of
freedom to many whites. They appeared to be free because they were largely outside of or on the periphery of the
consumer culture that had come to dominate twentieth century America. They didn’t have money, but they knew how to
get ‘kicks.’ Lynching hadn’t yet disappeared, and black people were still subject to being hanged— but they didn’t
seem to be hung up. Their freedom was in just the areas that many affluent young whites felt deprived, most
significantly, sex. As the Sixties began, sex, drugs, and rock and roll were all seen as “Negro things.”
But while the sort of freedom that African-Americans appeared to have was attractive to many young whites
who did not have it, many blacks sought precisely the sort of freedom that whites had and from which many of
them were trying to escape: political participation and material abundance. Freedom appeared to some of those
who had grown up in affluence to consist, as Kris Kristofferson put it, of having “nothing left to lose.”
But to many of those who already had that sort of freedom, freedom appeared to consist of obtaining access to an
abundance of material things and trying not to lose them. Both were, to use the phrase of Erich Fromm, trying to
“escape from freedom,” but in almost opposite ways.
Indeed, an oversimplified but instructive way to summarize important aspects of the decade is to say that if one
could take a photograph of what discontented Americans of the 1960s were seeking to achieve, it would turn out as
a negative, black would be white, and white would be black. One might even go further and say that, for some people
in the decade, the negative photograph that captured their goals would also show women as men and men as women.
As a major theme of the sixties was the struggle to integrate the races and sexes, so, too, was a attempt to achieve
integration of the freedoms that had been segregated through most of American history.
This course will be organized around the examination of two different, but often conflated, visions of freedom as
the motive force in the events of the 1960s. It will seek to bring together the American experience of the sixties
by placing within a unified interpretive framework such seemingly diverse topics as the civil rights movement,
the New Frontier and Great Society, the economic boom of the decade, the war in Vietnam, the sexual revolution,
the birth of what would later come to be known as the New Right, the women's movement, literature, film, music,
and other art forms, and the hedonism that had become so prevalent by the decade's last years.
The course will utilize literature, film, and music from the sixties as a means of exploring the competing
visions of freedom in the period.
"The Sixties." The name brings up all sorts of images: Sex, drugs, and rock `n' roll, civil
rights, Vietnam, student protest, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Betty
Friedan, Tom Hayden, Chicago, Norman Mailer, Hippies, Yippies, street theater, Allen Ginsberg,
the Free Speech Movement, Freedom Rides, the New Frontier, the Great Society, Janis Joplin,
the Beatles, the Doors, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, the Stones,
Peter, Paul and Mary . . . The list could go on indefinitely.
What does it all mean? In this course we shall begin to
explore the diverse experiences of Americans in this
turbulent decade--a decade that shaped the remainder
of the twentieth century, much as did the sixties of the
nineteenth century. There was a civil war in the 1960s,
albeit of a different sort than THE Civil War of the 1860s.
The nation came apart during the 1960s to a greater degree
than at any time since the Civil War a century earlier. Some of the questions were the same,
involving the unfinished business of the nineteenth century conflict: full participation by African Americans
in American society. Other fault lines along which the nation split in the 1960s were
new. Dominating the experience of the decade was the coming of age of a generation born after
World War II. This "Baby Boom" generation was of unprecedented size, and much of it had
grown up in unprecedented material prosperity coupled with rigid conformity imposed because
of the fear of communism in the 1950s. Taught that everything Americans had ever done was
right, many of these young people reacted strongly to the rediscovery of racial injustice and
poverty, and to a war of questionable motivation, goals, and tactics. For the first time since the
War of 1812 (forgetting, as almost everyone did, the Filipino Insurrection), Americans confronted
a war that they could not win, at least within acceptable bounds of military conduct. The decade
also coincided with long-term social and economic changes that helped to bring about the re-birth
of feminism.
A decade that began with idealistic self-sacrifice, community orientation, and a
commitment to nonviolence seemingly ended with cynical self-indulgence, extreme individualism, and violence. What happened?
The course will focus on the question of whether there
were, in fact, two sixties, emphasizing two different concepts of freedom: one concentrated in the early
part of the decade and centering on civil rights and
political and economic justice; the other rising in
prominence as the decade proceeded and essentially
cultural, emphasizing complete individual freedom.
The basic writing assignments for the course will be one short response paper (about 1- 2 pages) each week, beginning
on Thursday, January 15. In these papers, you should react to one or more of the week's reading assignments.
In those weeks in which an entire book is the main assignment, that book should be the focus of your reponse paper.
In weeks when there are several readings, e.g. from the Takin' It to the Streets reader, you may choose one or more
of the readins on which to focus your response paper.
These response papers allow you to think more deeply about what you have read and should make our discussions more focused and lively.
As the semester progresses, you will asked to choose one of your response papers (or possibly a combination of two or more of them) to rewrite and expand
for a final paper that will be published in our LS5000 Reader.
David Halberstam, THE FIFTIES.
Alexander Bloom & Wini Breines, eds., TAKIN' IT TO THE STREETS: A SIXTIES READER, second edition.
David Burner, MAKING PEACE WITH THE 60s.
Anne Moody, COMING OF AGE IN MISSISSIPPI.
Joseph Heller, CATCH-22.
Tim O'Brien, THE THINGS THEY CARRIED.
Joan Didion, SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM.
Norman Mailer, THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT.
Ten feature films and four documentaries will constitute an integral part of this course.
If some students are interested in viewing the films together on a large screen, the films will be shown
on Wednesday evenings at 7:00 PM in Sullivan Harrell, Room 221. In most cases, the
films will also be available at local video stores, for those who prefer to view on their own.
Films will usually be discussed in the class immediately following the Wednesday showing.
MUSIC: James Brown, "I Feel Good"