Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (99 page)

Many of these angry whites could hardly be called "conservative" in a traditional sense. They included millions of struggling, often class-conscious people who raged with almost equal fervor at what they perceived as the special privileges of corporate elites, Establishment priests and ministers, wealthy medical practitioners, liberal school boards, permissive bureaucrats and judges, and "experts" in general. They displayed a mounting unease with much that was "modern," including the teaching of Darwinian theories in the schools, and with much that "know-it-all" social engineers told them to believe. They were disturbed by feminists, sexual liberation, radicals, and anti-war demonstrators, and they were outraged by the "idolatrous" and "criminal-coddling" Warren Court. Many perceived a conspiracy that was masterminded by an eastern Establishment. Threatened by the insouciance of the younger generation, they especially resented the contempt that they received from more secular Americans. By 1966 they were beginning to take part in politics as never before, especially in the South and the Southwest, where population growth was explosive. Reagan was but the best-known of the anti-liberal office-holders who actively politicized their concerns and benefited from what became identified in the 1970s as a new and powerful Religious Right.
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Many other Americans in the mid- and late 1960s, whether religious or not, were repulsed by the attitudes and behavior of the counterculture, as it was called. This, a kin of the student Left, had attracted some earlier attention, especially after 1965. But it reached a new efflorescence in January 1967, when some 20,000 people, most of them young, gathered at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco to celebrate their "hippie" style of life. Timothy Leary was on hand to hail the wonders of LSD, a synthetic hallucinogen, and other mind-enhancing drugs. He urged the young to "turn on, tune in, drop out." Allen Ginsberg chanted Hindu phrases. Jerry Rubin, a radical who had headed a militant Vietnam Day Committee in Berkeley, appealed for bail money. People in the audience passed each other flowers, LSD tablets, and sandwiches, provided free for the occasion by the "acid chemist," Augustus Owsley Stanley III. Reporters and television cameras conveyed the colorful action to the world.
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The Human-Be-in, as organizers called the occasion, was by far the best publicized but not the last of such celebrations. The nearby Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco continued to thrive as one of a number of settings for congregations of "flower people" in the late 1960s. Many of the hippies burned incense, did drugs, created psychedelic art, and walked about garbed in outlandish clothing. Hippie men let their hair grow long; some of the women dispensed with bras. Like millions of other young people, they listened to acid rock, as it was called. (The phrases "acid test" and "freak out" dated from the mid-1960s.) Groups like the Doors, the Rolling Stones, and the Grateful Dead developed great cult followings. Even the Beatles recorded their music after 1965 while under the influence of drugs, especially marijuana and LSD. Other counterculturalists moved to communes, where they ate organic or macrobiotic food and (the media liked to emphasize) practiced various free versions of sex.

Young people who participated actively in such communal experiences were never more than a small minority of their age group at the time. Like the beats, whom they resembled in some ways, they tended to be apolitical. They sought freedom from authority, escape from conventional middle-class conventions, and satisfaction from levels of personal intimacy that they despaired of finding in mainstream society. Most did not attain these blessed states, and the counterculture faded after 1970. Their unconventional ways, moreover, made them easy targets for ridicule by conservative politicians. Governor Reagan delivered perhaps the most famous one-liner. A hippie, he said, is someone who "dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah."

Still, the hippies and "dropouts" attracted considerable media attention while they held the stage, especially between 1967 and 1970.
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And the rise of a self-conscious acid-rock culture beguiled larger numbers of people, most of them young. The apparent rejection by many young people of conventional middle-class styles of life, the assault to the senses of acid rock, and the open use of drugs offered a noisy and discordant counterpoint to a mainstream culture that, thanks in part to divisions widened by the war, seemed increasingly cacophonous by 1967.

"Long-haired hippies," while irritating to many Americans, aroused less backlash than did young radicals who resisted the draft and otherwise impugned the symbols of American patriotism. Many Americans who railed at these "spoiled rich kids" had tired of the war. But they were often deeply patriotic and class-conscious. One expostulated, "The college types, the professors, they go to Washington and tell the government what to do. Do this, they say; do that. But their sons, they don't end up in the swamps over there, in Vietnam. No sir. . . . I think we ought to win that war or pull out. . . . I hate those peace demonstrators. . . . The sooner we get out of there the better." His wife added, "I'm against this war, too—the way a mother is, whose sons are in the army, who has lost a son fighting in it. The world hears those demonstrators making noise. The world doesn't hear me."
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Those who joined the backlash were equally appalled by the personal behavior of people, especially blacks, whom they blamed for what they considered to be the rampant moral degradation of the era. It was then, following in the wake of the Moynihan Report, that the media devoted increasing attention to statistics about "family break-up" in the United States. These statistics were indeed troubling for those Americans—the vast majority—who imagined that the two-parent nuclear family anchored national stability. Contemporary reports indicated that illegitimacy rates began to rise rapidly after 1963. The rates among blacks were around 23 percent in 1963, compared to around 2 percent among whites, and jumped to 36 percent in 1970, compared to 3 percent among whites.
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Divorce rates also increased (after declines from 1946 through 1958), from 9.2 per 1,000 married couples in 1960 to 11.2 in 1968.
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The trends seemed relentless, threatening the stability of neighborhoods, disrupting the schools, and setting loose a tidal wave of laments about social "crises" that crested in later years.
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The sources of these trends, which (along with rapidly rising rates of violent crime) developed suddenly and at much the same time, were complex. One, however, was the coming of age of the baby boomers, many of whom had developed more permissive feelings about sex, illegitimacy, and divorce: the young did much to accelerate the ongoing sexual revolution, which burst into the open at the time.
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Another source was the migration of millions of young people from rural or smalltown settings, where neighborhood sanctions had dominated, to the relative freedom and anonymity of cities. A source of rising divorce rates was the ever-higher percentage of women who worked: more women now had the resources, however meager, to break away from unhappy marriages and strike out on their own. Underlying all these changes was the peaking at the same time of the
Zeitgeist
of freedom, expectations, and rights. These, expanded by the unparallelled affluence of the 1960s, did much to challenge traditional mores.

The Graduate
, an Oscar-winning movie that appeared in late 1967, dramatized these changes. It featured a young man (Dustin Hoffman) who was in no way a hippie, a user of drugs, or a political radical. But he seemed unconnected to traditional values. Alienated from many things, he felt no kinship with fraternity men at his university or with materialistic adults of the older generation. The sound track, featuring the song "Sounds of Silence" by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, emphasized the cleavages (silences) that separated people from one another. Like James Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause
twelve years earlier, the character played by Hoffman seemed to epitomize those young Americans who felt cut off from conventional American civilization.

Family disorganization excited special confusion and alarm among middle-aged and older people. Some felt the whole world was spinning away under their feet, flinging their cherished values into a black hole. They spoke with fear and disgust about the lack of "family" among the younger generation, especially among blacks. "You see, we were poor," an Italian-American parent explained to an interviewer. "But we helped one another. But the colored don't have that family life like we do. I don't know what it is with them. I can't understand these people." A Jewish parent added, "In East New York the Jewish values were passed on from generation to generation. We never dreamed of doing other than those values, and we were aghast when people didn't do as they should. We still talk about those things. A girl having an illegitimate child, or a girl getting a divorce, it was unheard of, you just didn't have it. You knew all on the block, the street was like a small town; you knew who was doing this and who was doing that."
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Many of those who railed against family break-up assailed the rise of welfare, especially the Aid to Families of Dependent Children (AFDC) program, which mainly aided low-income divorced, separated, or single women and their children. The rolls of AFDC, like divorce and illegitimacy, rose rapidly in the 1960s, from 3.1 million recipients in 1960 to 4.4 million in 1965 to 6.1 million in 1968. Costs of the program, which was supported by both the federal and state governments, increased during the same eight years from $3.8 billion to $9.8 billion. Like the rise in divorce and illegitimacy, the upward course of welfare rolls seemed both rapid and escalatory: by 1970 the number of recipients shot up to 9.7 million, and the cost to $14.5 billion.
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The sources of this surge in welfare dependency, while related in part to the rise in family break-up, were rooted especially in the rights-consciousness of the era. The incidence of poverty, which declined throughout the 1960s, was not the primary cause. Rather, the rolls grew because much higher percentages of eligible people demanded to be helped. They expanded also because activists working in community action programs informed potential recipients of their rights and offered them legal aid; this was one area where the war on poverty had significant (though unintended) effects. Some recipients, swept up in the quest for rights, not only insisted on help-from AFDC but also joined the NWRO and demanded a more generous and less intrusive administration of benefits. They proclaimed especially that they and their children had a "right" to a decent life. Their behavior indicated that the stigma of being on welfare, which had been powerful throughout American history—even in the Depression—had lost some of its force. So had the tendency of poor people to defer to people in authority. These were among the most profound and lasting developments of the 1960s.
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The costs of supporting this surge of recipients were never very high even in the late 1960s: federal outlays for AFDC were generally about one-ninth of federal expenditures for social welfare and about 2 to 3 percent of all federal spending. Nor was life on welfare a very enticing prospect for poor people: average aid per family on AFDC rose from $108 per month in 1960 to $168 in 1968, sums that left recipients well below the official poverty lines set by the government. These lines, moreover, were not high. Although they rose to reflect increases in living expenses (the line for a family of four reached $3,350 in 1967), they remained a good deal lower than activists wanted. Still, spending for welfare, supported by taxpayers, was mounting. So by 1970 were costs for a food stamp program, which had been an insignificant federal effort as recently as 1966. And black people, while never a majority of welfare recipients, were disproportionately on the rolls because they had especially high rates of poverty and of family break-up. Backlash against AFDC, much of it racial in nature, grew fierce by the late 1960s.
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Opponents of welfare, moreover, focused on far more than costs. Indeed, they expressed visceral feelings on the subject, complaining indignantly about "leeches," "cheaters," and "welfare bums." Cherishing the work ethic, they grew irate when they thought about blacks and other "loafers" on the dole. One city worker later exploded, "These welfare people get as much as I do and I work my ass off and come home dead tired. They get up late and they can shack up all day long and watch the tube. . . . I go shopping with my wife and I see them with their forty dollars of food stamps in the supermarket, living and eating better than me. . . . Let them tighten their belts like we do."
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Emotions such as these gripped millions of Americans, most of whom were willing to support public assistance only for "deserving" people such as widows, orphans, the elderly poor, and the disabled. By the mid-1960s, however, relatively few AFDC mothers were widows; most were younger women whose marriages had collapsed or who had had children out of wedlock. They did not seem "deserving" at all. Working-class people, many of them poor, seemed especially upset by welfare. Many, to be sure, had themselves gone on relief during the 1930s or when tragedy, such as the loss of a major breadwinner, had hit their families. But they had tried to manage stoically, enduring the intrusions of social workers and the restrictions on possessions—no telephones, no linoleum—that the stringently run system had required. As soon as they had been able to find work, they did so; the young had often left school in their early teens to support their families. "Welfare helped us, and it was right and just that it did," one New Yorker remembered. But "then we could shift for ourselves."
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