Folk Music and the New Left in the Sixties by Michael Scott Cain

Author:Michael Scott Cain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2019-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

Why a Generation Gap?

One reason would lie in sheer numbers. According to Todd Gitlin, the first generation of baby boomers turned eighteen in 1964. Between 1964 and 1970, 20,000,000 more reached the age of eighteen. These numbers are important because, as Gitlin says, “America’s young were not only multiplying, not only relatively rich, not only concentrated on campuses and, thanks to the mass media—visible as never before. Suppose they were, en masse, in motion, breaking out of the postwar consensus, out of complacency, out of good behavior and middle-class mores, out of bureaucratic order and the cold war mood. Then the unthinkable might be actual, the unprecedented possible. You could safely kick out the jams, dissolve the old hesitations, break with adults, be done with compromises, be done with it.”6

Because these young radicals had grown up in a postfigurative culture, where all power and authority were top-down, their parents had held the role of old wise men; what they said was the operational truth, even if it turned out to be, as was frequently the case, wrong. The problem was that the parents of these new eighteen-year-olds were as riddled with nothingness and nihilism as their children were, but they could not admit they were empty and were trying to cover their emptiness with the correct suburban lives, whiskey and tranquilizers, cocktail parties and television, career climbing for the men and homemaking for the women. It was a life in which conspicuous consumption tried to cover a lack of meaning, where suburban churches sold the good life and rural churches maintained the racism and sexism that characterized the age. When the civil rights movement began to take hold, most churches railed against the granting of rights to minorities.

When the young grew up in situations like these, could they do anything else but revolt? Could there be anything other than a generation gap? Parents had preached to their children to be idealistic, and when their children tried to live up to what they’d been taught, the parents were horrified.

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