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THE YEAR THE WORLD WENT DAYGLOW

MEMORIES OF 1968 | November 28th 2007

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Matthew Engel puts on his bell-bottoms and pads back 40 years to ask why the world erupted in 1968, and what was achieved. A longer version of this article appears in the new Intelligent Life magazine ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, December 2007

Any history of 1968 is going to be full of if onlys, what ifs, counterfactuals and might-have-beens. You can construct a zillion parallel universes of what could have happened if a single event had turned out a fraction differently. The reality was astonishing enough. And, as the 40th anniversary approaches, the year continues to maintain a remarkable grip on anyone with a sense of modern history.

There was, quite simply, an eruption: a global explosion of political, cultural and social energy that was at once both thrilling and terrifying. It had been rumbling and spitting for at least five years beforehand (since 1963, the year Philip Larkin said sexual intercourse was invented) and continued to send out lava flows for some time after that.

There was also a short version of '68--that brief period when "the revolution" (whatever that might have meant), as discussed in a thousand French cafés, and dingy student dormitories and flats across the world, felt like an imminent certainty.

Perhaps that even ended on May 30th, when President Charles de Gaulle regained control of France. It was certainly over by the end of summer, when reformers were crushed in places as disparate as Prague and Chicago. By December, enough calm had returned for Time magazine to name as its men of the year the three American astronauts who spent Christmas escaping the increasingly surly bonds of Earth to orbit (but not land on) the moon in Apollo 8: Borman, Lovell and Anders (pictured below). That did seem to miss the point somehow.

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But what was the point? All year, there was a seemingly endless supply of startling global headlines. However, it is still hard to discern a coherent picture in the mosaic.

The unifying factor is that across the developed world and even beyond, people-specifically the young and most specifically students-challenged established authority. Sometimes they did this violently and sometimes this invited violent consequences. Inevitably, American concerns linked in to everyone else's. The United States was obsessed with the intractable war in Vietnam. And there was a very obvious tipping point.

On January 30th nearly 70,000 Communist fighters (North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong guerrillas) broke the truce agreed on for the Vietnamese New Year-Tet-and surged out of the countryside into the cities, including the seemingly immune capital of American-backed South Vietnam, Saigon. Their most spectacular feat was a briefly successful commando raid on the American embassy.

Until this point, the guiding narrative had been provided by American officialdom. President Lyndon Johnson believed the war was necessary and winnable; his commander in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, constantly assured him and the folks back home it was being won. Now even Johnson (pictured below, with vice-president Hubert Humphrey) began to doubt.

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For young Americans, so privileged in many respects, the campaign against the war was not some theoretical cause, any more than the black demands for civil rights were. They were subject to conscription, and liable to be shipped out to Vietnam where their contemporaries were dying (at a rate of 300 a week in 1968, compared with nearly 4,000 in all so far in Iraq).

Elsewhere in the West the grievances were less obvious. Even the British government had the wit to keep its troops out of Vietnam, despite strong pressure from Johnson on the prime minister, Harold Wilson. But opposition to the war was global. And campus rebellion spread globally, sucking up local issues along the way-maybe only Maoist China, then more remote than the moon, marched to a totally different drummer.

It was partly imitative: there had been demos and sit-ins on American campuses in 1967-and American style, as ever, led the way. There were shared icons (notably Che Guevara, the guerrilla leader recently killed in Bolivia, and the largely unread sociologist Herbert Marcuse, author of the anti-capitalist tract "Repressive Tolerance") and a hotchpotch of grievances. A global investigation in the Times headed "Students in Revolt" highlighted "the war in Vietnam, racial discrimination, consensus politics and overstrained educational systems".

As soon as France went quiet, Bobby Kennedy was shot dead by a lone Palestinian gunman, Sirhan Sirhan, moments after delivering an eloquent victory speech in the California primary. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago was a farce, and, on the streets, where police were beating protestors, a bloody disgrace. That same week, the Soviet Union moved its tanks into Prague and asserted control over the government. The Vietnam peace talks stalled.

The leaders of rock culture kept pushing the boundaries of music, drug use and onstage outrage. In 1968 the Who were best known for destroying their instruments; but they were quietly working on the rock opera "Tommy". The Beatles were no longer cuddly moptops, and most of their headlines were bad ones. But "Sergeant Pepper" was still number-one album at the start of the year (vying with "The Sound of Music"), and the White Album came in with the lunarnauts. But the new had not displaced the old at all. Dominic Sandbrook ends his history of 1960s Britain, "White Heat", with a dissertation on the tv comedy hit of 1968, the wartime wallow "Dad's Army", and notes: "Although the Sixties is often seen as a period of Utopian optimism, the culture of the time, from the albums of the Beatles and the Kinks to the poems of Philip Larkin and the novels of John Fowles, was suffused with a powerful sense of nostalgia."

In 1969 Britain gave 18- to 21-year-olds the vote as a sop to generational demand. When the nation indeed returned the Tories at the 1970 election, the new voters marched in step with their elders. On campuses, the protests became more muted, and all the echoes with them. By the early 1970s, Western assumptions of endless prosperity began to look more questionable-the next generation of students would have sterner priorities. The tumult and the shouting died away. So what did it all achieve? What happened to it all?

"What happened to it all? what happened to it all?" Felix Dennis was roaring now. "We changed the fucking world, that's what, you scumbag."

Dennis, connected with the radical magazine Oz in 1968 and later a publishing tycoon in his own very capitalist right, grew a little more respectful once he discovered I was old enough to have my own memories of the year. He remained pretty vehement.

The world did change. But who changed it? It depends on what you mean by "we". Stuck that year in a boarding school in the English countryside, I didn't change much, though I think we successfully agitated for a liberalisation of the rules on leaving the premises.

And out in the big wide world the great legislative reforms of the 1960s came not from the young agitators but the older generation: it was the reviled Johnson who pushed civil rights legislation through a still-reluctant Congress. Anti-homosexuality laws started being repealed across America from 1962; Britain followed five years later.

What didn't change at first was attitude. Casual racism had certainly not disappeared. And the old cultural taboos against homosexuals remained in place: there were no openly gay mainstream pop stars until the late 1970s and, outside the still secretive subculture, the word "gay" continued to mean blithely happy.

Furthermore, the causes-more coherent and achievable than "revolution"-that would eventually flow from the 1960s had not yet shown themselves. The term "women's lib" gained common currency only in 1970, and even then was used by most men with a wry smile. Paul Ehrlich's jeremiad "The Population Bomb" was published in 1968, but environmentalism also did not become fashionable until the next decade before fading again, along with Ehrlich's predictions.

Yet Dennis is not wrong. You can see 1968 as the hinge on which the post-war world hangs; and the screw in that hinge was the screwing. "What everyone forgets is that the pill had just arrived," says Dennis. "There was no aids, no herpes. Syphilis was in absolute retreat and even gonorrhea was very rare. You might get a dose of the crabs. There was free sex with no downside. It was a very small window and it lasted about seven years.

"And women were walking down the street in mini-skirts, in what looked like their underwear. It was almost too much for anyone to stand."

Even so, the sexual implications of the fashion were still publicly discussed only in code. British reticence, American Puritanism, Continental religiosity and Communist repression saw to that. The change towards open discussion developed only very slowly.

The same applies to related social developments: in 1968 most young men still wore pyjamas and white y-fronts, even if they were now readier to take them off; casual drug use slipped only slowly from the avant-garde to the high-school playground; and very long hair for men did not become the norm until the 1970s (all the really serious student revolutionaries I knew in that era kept their hair determinedly short). Social change was far slower than history or selective memory might suggest. But 1968 made it unstoppable.

"In the end, it was a sensational victory," says Felix Dennis, "the hidden victory that set up the 21st century. And on that, the whole Western world floats as it does.

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