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Beyond the Barricades: The Sixties Generation Grows Up
"What happens to youthful idealism as people leave their youth behind? ...Where do young revolutionaries go when the revolution doesn’t happen?"
Amid the social and political turmoil of the late 1960s, student demonstrations on college campuses and in nearby communities looked like a prelude to apocalypse. By 1970 radical students at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), were involved in burning the Bank of America branch in Isla Vista and a series of riots and demonstrations that culminated in hundreds of arrests, numerous injuries, and one student death. To some campus observers, the violence and property damage were nothing more than a meaningless rampage—privileged students running amok. To those actively involved in the student movement and the Radical Union, the second American revolution was at hand. The disparate views of these events persist some twenty years later.
In Beyond the Barricades, Whalen and Flacks challenge the conventional wisdom, which holds that the Sixties Generation soon outgrew their political ideals and channeled their energies into building lucrative careers and accumulating material goods. For nine years, the authors have maintained contact with eighteen men and women who participated in the UCSB student movement, asking probing questions about the long-term significance of political commitment to individual lives. They have also tracked fourteen former students who were part of the sorority/fraternity subculture in an attempt to discern whether the paths of the two student groups tend to converge as they grow older.
This study grows out of the student activists’ own assessments of the events at UCSB and the lives they have shaped in subsequent years. It demonstrates that student activists did not abandon their beliefs or become disillusioned with the prospects for social change as they left the university and ventured into the adult world. Indeed, their present political convictions and vocational commitments are largely consistent with their past views—even as they have had to adapt to changes in their personal needs and in the social climate.
In asking where the students are now, the authors illuminate something about how our society has been affected culturally, institutionally, psychologically by the movements and conflicts of the sixties. Whalen and Flacks "offer these stories in the same spirit that apparently guided (the) respondents: as contributions to the ongoing discourse on how we might live according to our dreams!"
Amid the social and political turmoil of the late 1960s, student demonstrations on college campuses and in nearby communities looked like a prelude to apocalypse. By 1970 radical students at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), were involved in burning the Bank of America branch in Isla Vista and a series of riots and demonstrations that culminated in hundreds of arrests, numerous injuries, and one student death. To some campus observers, the violence and property damage were nothing more than a meaningless rampage—privileged students running amok. To those actively involved in the student movement and the Radical Union, the second American revolution was at hand. The disparate views of these events persist some twenty years later.
In Beyond the Barricades, Whalen and Flacks challenge the conventional wisdom, which holds that the Sixties Generation soon outgrew their political ideals and channeled their energies into building lucrative careers and accumulating material goods. For nine years, the authors have maintained contact with eighteen men and women who participated in the UCSB student movement, asking probing questions about the long-term significance of political commitment to individual lives. They have also tracked fourteen former students who were part of the sorority/fraternity subculture in an attempt to discern whether the paths of the two student groups tend to converge as they grow older.
This study grows out of the student activists’ own assessments of the events at UCSB and the lives they have shaped in subsequent years. It demonstrates that student activists did not abandon their beliefs or become disillusioned with the prospects for social change as they left the university and ventured into the adult world. Indeed, their present political convictions and vocational commitments are largely consistent with their past views—even as they have had to adapt to changes in their personal needs and in the social climate.
In asking where the students are now, the authors illuminate something about how our society has been affected culturally, institutionally, psychologically by the movements and conflicts of the sixties. Whalen and Flacks "offer these stories in the same spirit that apparently guided (the) respondents: as contributions to the ongoing discourse on how we might live according to our dreams!"
324 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 16, 2009
I came to this book after doing some research for a poem I was writing (see: http://web.me.com/bebop49/BrianBuni/P... which will link you to it during the month of August 2009) trying to recapture and express my experience of the February 1970 rebellion in the streets of Isla Vista, California that resulted, among other things, in the burning of the Bank of America branch in that community. The book, presumably rewritten primarily from Jack Whalen's PhD dissertation, worries a bit too much for my tastes about its sociological objectivity, but the personal narrative approach it takes to its "data gathering" provided a satisfying set of portraits from the period in question. It tackles big issues like what happened to the 60s activists, did the idealism die as they got older, and the relationship between revolutionary politics and the counterculture movement of the late 60s/early 70s. I think it has helped me reconsider that experience in terms of the person I have become (I recognized bits of myself in several of the case studies presented), especially in terms of the political collective living experiences that many of us attempted. So much of what I wanted out of that experience (including a revolution) remains at the core of my consciousness. The authors end with: "The spirit of the sixties did not die as its bearers got older, nor did they betray that spirit. Perhaps the spirit waits for a new opportunity that will permit the tide of collective action once more to rise." One can hope...
May 6, 2010
Focusing on the UC Santa Barbara students that experienced the riots of Isla Vista in the 1960s - whether as participants, sympathizers, onlookers, or hostile parties - this book asks the question: does youthful experience in a movement influence a person's adult life? The shocking conclusion: it does.
Sarcasm aside, Whalen does make this point in a political milieu that is ever trying to erase the "excesses" of the 1960s and relegate it all to "youthful rebellion."
Sarcasm aside, Whalen does make this point in a political milieu that is ever trying to erase the "excesses" of the 1960s and relegate it all to "youthful rebellion."
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews