Introduction: An Old White Man

“It’s the old white men,” my daughter Julia explained.

She hadn’t received her California absentee ballot. I said the problem was her address: “You don’t live in California anymore. You live in Washington D.C.”

“No,” she insisted. “It’s the old white men. They don’t want young people to vote.”

“The old white men?” I responded, incredulous. “Like me?”

Julia considered me an ally to her causes: workers’ rights, minority rights, immigrant rights, feminism, environmentalism, youth empowerment, opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. When the Occupy Wall Street movement emerged a year later in 2011, Julia at 23 took to the barricades--in this case, camping with her comrades in Washington D.C.’s McPherson Square--while doing her day job for the AFL-CIO. She was in the epicenter of the new upheaval, trying to unite the Washington D.C. movements, labor and Occupy, in a united struggle for fair distribution of wealth to the 99%.

“That’s my daughter,” I thought, proudly. “Exactly where she should be.”

I was an ideological comrade, one who gave money but slept at home in his own bed. I supported Julia’s causes, particularly Occupy Washington D.C., which I recognized as a distant cousin to my own youth rebellion in the 1960s. When Julia made a beeline to the new Occupy movement, instantly recognizing its significance, I recalled my own fateful move from Chicago to Berkeley in 1966 to reach the Free Speech Movement a few months after it exploded into existence on the UC Berkeley campus. And I certainly agreed with Julia that the Republican Party, led by old white men, promoted a national conspiracy to suppress the vote of opposition groups, particularly youth.

But I also knew something else. Now, I was one of the old white men who ran things. I was indisputably male and white. I was 65 at the time, an aging baby boomer with a bald top and a fringe of white hair, old by any criteria but how I felt.

Most telling, I was in top management, a director in the public agency that administered the California state court system. I presided over a division of some 75 people and a $15 million budget, with endless responsibilities and worries for many court programs. I had a huge corner office, large enough to include a conference table, windows floor to ceiling, guarded by my secretary, and surrounded by my people in a dense hive of cubicles. Every work day, I wore a dark suit and colorful tie, marking myself as one of the bosses.

True, I was one of the old white men. “But,” I thought, ”I’m an old white man with history. History from the Sixties.

I knew that meant everything.

I Meet the Sixties

These are stories of the baby boom generation, just a slice of it, the slice who joined in the political and cultural upheavals of the 1960s. The stories are my personal accounts of my generation’s experience. This experience ranged across 1950s suburban origins, rebellion in the 1960s, and counter culture explorations in the 1970s. Then came struggles to re-enter the mainstream, success inside the Establishment, and twenty-first century aging.

Most historians of the baby boom regard 1946 as its beginning, two years after I was born. Others start it earlier. All agree that the baby boom generation was marked by a mid-1940s demographic bulge, unprecedented post war prosperity, and high expectations for future success. Born in 1944, I counted myself among those baby boomers.

The Sixties are at the common thread in these stories, spilling into the 1970s. Those were years of youth revolt, with a culture of dissent and an assault on authority. Those were my years of revolt: radical politics, the movement for racial equality, the movement against the Vietnam War, the challenge to authority on the campuses, and counterculture explorations along with rejection of suburban roots. Long after that era of rebellion ended, the movements and values of the Sixties continued to haunt me and others who had participated.

This book recounts my personal experience with the Sixties, during that decade and the years that followed. These stories will be familiar to others of my generation. Many baby boomers tried to break with 1950s conventions, fashioned new lives in the 1960s, and then held onto many Sixties values and ideas as we made our way back into the center of American life.

My Sixties began in August 1962, orientation week for freshmen at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That’s when I first encountered subversives. They paraded past me in the student union wearing pots on their heads and clanging pans with kitchen utensils, advertising the Anti-Mil Ball. That was an anti-war dance protesting ROTC on campus. I stopped and stared. They were students from New York City, I suspected, more sophisticated than students from Chicago suburbs like me or rural Wisconsin. I had no cultural reference for them, only beatniks, folk singers, James Dean, and Alfred E. Newman from MAD magazine. But these anti-Mil Ball rebels were different. They were somehow political.

I admired their public display. I laughed at their humor. I loved their style. How, I wondered, do you join?

I found my path. That first year in Madison, I scrapped my sure-fire Fifties high school career plan to become a lawyer and certified public accountant, a tax lawyer. Instead, I quit my fraternity and joined the student insurgency: rallies and sit-ins and strikes, mimeograph machines spinning out leaflets, and gushers of words, all for social justice. In sophomore year, self-conscious but determined, I joined my first public demonstration for black civil rights, two dozen of us, black and white, holding signs and marching in a circle outside the university library. During a junior year abroad in Scotland, at the University of Edinburgh, I spoke against the Vietnam War on campus at a Labour Party rally, undaunted by other American students who heckled me. These were the beginnings of my public actions in support of black civil rights and against the war, soon to become normal for me and my generation.

Inspired by a charismatic left-wing professor, I realized that history was the way to understand the world and change it. I immersed myself in nineteenth century European social movements, the great working-class struggles for social transformation in early industrial capitalism. I also took sociology and economics and American literature courses to understand American workers and racial minorities who were excluded from the affluence I enjoyed. I subscribed to The Nation and I.F. Stone’s Weekly, my channels to news reports with extraordinary insight. At the Wisconsin Historical Society, I did original historical research for a senior honors thesis on an American trade union program to weaken French Communist unions at the outset of the Cold War. Borrowing the words of my mentor professor, I found many “contradictions” and “conjunctures” of big historical trends. Become a tax attorney? Inconceivable.

As I became a radicaI, I also remained ambitious, a child of the Fifties, still an academic high achiever after I joined the student movement in Madison. I spent so much time studying in the library that my roommate named a study hall after me: “The Kann Room.” That senior thesis helped me win a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship that supported my first year of graduate school. The first thing I did as a Fellow, as a kind of Sixties thank you, was organize a national protest letter to President Johnson by Woodrow Wilson scholars, demanding an immediate military withdrawal from Vietnam.

A new goal came into focus the summer after my junior year in Edinburgh, when I met with Frank Summers, an audacious high school friend who had left our Chicago suburb to continue undergraduate work in Berkeley, California, twenty-two hundred miles to the west. Frank had been arrested junior year in the already legendary Sproul Hall sit-in during the Free Speech Movement: body limp, the police carried Frank off to jail with student comrades, all political activist heroes. He lived with his Berkeley girlfriend in their own apartment, which was amazing, particularly when she appeared later that summer, just as I imagined, beautiful and brainy, flowing long black hair, a free spirit. And Frank had become a philosophy major, with no other purpose than a deep intellectual life and heady discourse. As we walked, Frank rolled a joint and gave me my first tokes of marijuana.

What was my new goal? Get myself to Berkeley, California. That was where everything new was happening first, fastest, and deepest—political upheaval, social rebellion, cultural transformation. Here was the cutting edge of an emerging new world.

I moved to Berkeley 12 months later, right after undergraduate graduation, August 1966. I enrolled in history graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley.

I planned to get my doctorate degree in French history. I would write incisive left-wing treatises about nineteenth century French revolutions, and become a professor at an eminent university. As a radical, I expected professional success through my writing about working class life, along with liberation in Berkeley, together with a girlfriend I would find and live with. It would all fit together, underwritten by the prosperity I took for granted through the 1950s and 1960s.

When I packed my car for California--the first of many cross-country driving trips in those unsettled years--I was preparing for a big journey. My grandparents, Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine and Poland, had settled in Chicago in the first decade of the 20th century amidst their sprawling extended immigrant families. They survived through their little neighborhood grocery stores open every day 6 am to midnight, never took vacations, and never left Chicago. My parents had lived their entire young lives in West Side immigrant neighborhoods. After my father earned a college degree through night schools in the Depression and had established himself as a chemist, my parents migrated to their own sparkling new house in the northern suburb Skokie during the postwar boom and never left. Standing on the shoulders of these two generations, I was striking out on Interstate 80 to the western edge of the continent. The reason was unfathomable to my family, but entirely clear to me: I was joining the new world.