History Cracked Open: "New" History's Renunciation of the Past

Abstract

Those of us who study and teach about the 1960s acknowledge the dominance of two major schools of thought regarding the legacy of that controversial decade. The most prevalent perspective-let's call it the party of nostalgiacelebrates the decade as a period of intense and meaningful social and political change. According to this historiographic outlook-promoted in works by movement participants like SDS president Todd Gitlin in The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987)-civil rights leaders, feminists, and student activists were members of a heroic vanguard that exposed the racial injustices, gender imbalances, and human rights violations inherent in American culture. Plotting the sixties as an age in which spirited youths challenged the ideological predispositions and constraints of their elders, contributors to this nostalgic school have tended to view the decade as a privileged period set apart, as an exception to the general rule of American complacency. In such accounts, admittedly brash and even disrespectful activists are lionized for their courageous renunciations of the past and their pursuits of alternative and potentially more satisfying futures. As Lance Morrow noted in a twentyyear retrospective written in this nostalgic vein, the sixties was a perverse genius of a decade, a terrifying yet propitious time when history cracked open and the past was severed from the future.1 While this portrait of heroic iconoclasts has been the most popular characterization of sixties' activists over the last thirty years, a revisionist school has emerged of late that challenges the motivations of these youthful reformers and calls into question the value of their denunciatory rebellions. Among the most outspoken of this revisionist school-let's call it the party of skepticism-has been David Burner, whose Making Peace with the Sixties (1996) condemns the dismissiveness with which New Left activists abandoned and betrayed their Old Left progenitors who might have protected them from the hedonistic self-aggrandizement that jeopardized the work of