The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again

by Robert D. Putnam

Most historians also agree on an important distinction between the first half of the 1960s and the second half—“years of hope” and “days of rage,” as Todd Gitlin famously put it.38 Widely shared prosperity, the Civil Rights movement (culminating in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act), and progress toward equality, democracy, and tolerance (symbolized by the Great Society of 1964–1965 and the immigration reform of 1965) represented the “years of hope.” By contrast, the Vietnam war protests (1966–1970), urban unrest (1965–1969), the rise of the Black Panthers (1966–1968), the “law and order” counterattack (1968–1972), the convulsions of 1968, and the stagflation and rancorous gas lines of the 1970s represented “days of rage.”