“History never repeats itself, but it rhymes,” said Mark Twain.
—John Robert Colombo
I remember 1969. A flu epidemic, riots, radical politics, changes in race relations. In other words, it was a lot like 2020.
1969 was the year of the Hong Kong flu. To the best of my recollection, it was the last time we had a big, deadly influenza epidemic. There were some major differences, though.
International travel was rarer and more expensive than today. While the numbers vary, from about 20,000 to 120,000 depending on who you read, probably around 40,000 Americans died of the disease. Like today’s Covid-19, it mostly affected those who were older or who had other health problems.
Other countries were hit much harder than the United States. It spread across Europe and Asia. It devastated Germany. People mostly used common sense to deal with it. If you are sick, stay home. There was no social distancing, though I do recall photos of Europeans who worked close to each other wearing surgical masks.
Back then China was pretty much isolated from the rest of the world. No one knew how China was handling it. People could have been dying from it, but no one outside the country would know it. It was first detected in Hong Kong, hence its name, but no one knew what was happening behind the Bamboo Curtain where it no doubt originated. Nowadays people complain that China covered up the Wuhan virus at first and may still be covering up its origins. Back then, China covered up virtually everything. When Harvard grad student and Australian citizen Ross Terrill wrote about his visits to China in The Atlantic that year, that was a big deal and told most Americans all we really knew about the condition of China back then.
At any rate, the virus spread across the Old World and affected the New World, but I recall no panic. The word pandemic existed in the language, but even the 1918 Spanish flu was generally called an epidemic. In the U.S., government did not do much about the Hong Kong flu except at the local level with local health departments. Customs kept out sick people as it still is supposed to do today, but that was about it. The first time I recall the Federal government getting involved with something like an epidemic was under President Ford with the Swine flu around 1976.
In 1969 it seemed like everything—except for the flu—became political. It was really annoying.
In the spring of 1969, I was a freshman living in Harvard Yard. My dormitory was right next door to the main administration office building, University Hall. There was student unrest on many campuses, ostensibly because of the Vietnam War. The war was becoming more unpopular, there had been riots at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago the year before, and young men of college age were primary targets for the draft. Yes, full time college students could get a deferment, but as soon as they graduated or left school, they would be drafted into the military, usually the Army.
However, what happened on the more left-wing college campuses was not mere antiwar protests. It began at Berkeley and moved to Columbia the year before. The protest leaders were radicals. They were promoting revolution, not just withdrawal from Vietnam. One of their chants included the clause, “NLF is going to win!” The NLF, the National Liberation Front, was the official name of the South Vietnamese Communists fighting to overthrow the South Vietnamese government.
Demonstrations continued in front of the administration building for a few days till one day one of the leaders of the SDS—Students for a Democratic Society—announced they were going into the building and take it over. He actually called for a voice vote to the crowd outside the building. Even though the voices for not going in were much louder, he declared, “The ayes have it. We’re going in!”
They were playing revolutionary. They “stormed” University Hall, kicked all the deans and workers out and declared a free university. They called a “strike.” Skip classes and shut down the school until their demands are met. If you saw pictures of the “free zones” in the Northwestern cities or of the mob inside the Capitol (granted that was 2021 but just barely), that was what University Hall looked like for a while.
Why do that to the school? Most of the professors opposed the war. I only recall one student ever saying he wanted America to win the war. The primary demand at the time was to get rid of ROTC, Reserve Officer Training Corps, the military officer training program that appears on many college campuses. “Abolish ROTC!” was one of their slogans.
It was more than just that, though. It was a dry run at what many of the student radicals hoped would happen to America at large. Storming University Hall was like storming the Bastille or the Munich beer hall. It was no secret that the undergraduate leader of the SDS would spend at least one summer in Cuba studying revolution.
A day later shortly after dawn, as University Hall had taken on a kind of party atmosphere, a large contingent of Massachusetts State Police entered Harvard Yard and dragged all the occupiers out of the building. They were taken to jail where they would remain for a little while. If the students resisted, the police used their nightsticks.
A friend had an older brother in Cambridge who was a lawyer. One of the people arrested was Matt, a classmate who lived in our dorm. The three of us went to see him in the jail. The attorney explained different ways he might be able to help. Matt was not interested in any help. There was a cause. They were going to stick together. If he had to suffer for the cause, he would.
I taught high school in 2020. From mid-March to the end of the school year in June in 2020 we did not meet at school. I conducted classes over Zoom from home. Student work at my school was graded, but there were no final exams and we were not normally supposed to take attendance.
Being one of the oldest members of the faculty at my school, I would sometimes be asked about things that happened in the past. An administrator said to me about our Covid-19 experience, “I’ll bet you never had a school year like this.”
“Actually,” I said, “I did. My freshman year of college.”
Harvard went on strike that year. The most common SDS chant was “On strike! Shut it down!” Classes were canceled for a few days, and then many teachers decided to support the strike and refrain from teaching. While final exams were not canceled, they were optional. Few students took them.
I had that 2020 conversation in early April when everyone thought the quarantine would last a few weeks to “flatten the curve.” I figured then we would miss a month or so of school. Little did anyone know… In spite of the longer break from school and the problems with the pandemic, there were still many similarities.
I confess I saw it all in 1969 as a cynic. The weather was getting nice. Wouldn’t you rather be relaxing outdoors showing off your strike T-shirt with a red fist than be taking classes?
The radical times on campus would continue for another year. There was an attempt to have another spring strike after the shooting at Kent State University in 1970 when four students were killed by National Guardsmen who had been called out to try to restrain a potential riot.
I recall a few of our campus radicals saying that it was too bad that no one was killed at Harvard or Columbia. Then we’d really have a cause that people would rally around! I note that this year the Black Lives Matter movement, led by some self-identified Marxists, was really dormant for a few years until they found a victim they could rally around in George Floyd. They had a chance the SDS never had.
The SDS hopes did not come about back then. The last two years at school were typical college academic years. The radicals had become a fringe group. There were several reasons.
The main reason was that the U.S. government instituted a draft lottery. The central draft board drew random lots by birth date. Now at least two thirds of the young men knew they would not be drafted. My number, for example, was over 200 out of 366. I was safe. A couple of friends had numbers under twenty. They would begin to focus on how to deal with their situation when their student deferments were up—get a 4-F by proving that they were physically unfit for duty; make plans to join the military; go to Canada; or join a National Guard or Reserve program that would only be six months active duty.
Most people who sympathized with the radicals did so because of the war—they either opposed it or did not want to fight. With the draft lottery and other moves the Nixon administration was making, it seemed the fighting would be less intense. The State Department was making overtures to China, and peace talks with the North Vietnamese had begun. Before we graduated, Congress would vote to get rid of drafting young men altogether. The peace treaty ending the war would be signed a few months after we graduated.
In 1970 a big antiwar rally in Boston turned violent. It was not as bad as the riots in some cities in 2020, but windows were smashed and a police car was set on fire. A few stores in Harvard Square were looted. A radical women’s group tried to get attention by taking over an outlying building owned by Harvard, but when it was revealed they were lesbians (this was the early seventies) most people lost interest.
To perhaps demonstrate how some of the radical notions lived on, fifteen years later I was taking a graduate school course in American history. The textbook described that 1970 rally in Boston as “peaceful.” I am sure the owners of looted stores and the policemen whose patrol car burned would disagree. I was reminded of that in 2020 with the famous CNN shot of cars burning with the caption “Mostly peaceful demonstrations.”
In 1969 there were the Weathermen, a more radical offshoot of the SDS. In 1969 the Weathermen “sponsored” what they called Days of Rage in Chicago. Still upset at the way demonstrators were treated at the Democratic Convention in 1968, they basically ganged up in downtown Chicago and broke store windows and did some looting. In spite of Neil Young’s song “Chicago” which tried to encourage young people to join the anarchy, it never did result in the prairie fire (their words) the Weathermen (later the Weather Underground) hoped for.
At Harvard, the Weatherman faction of the SDS tried to burn the building in which the ROTC met. It was on the fringes of the campus, and none of them knew where it was. They ended up burning the interior of a science laboratory instead.
In 2020 after one or two generations being told about America’s shortcomings, the anarchists like Antifa and Marxists like Black Lives Matter were more organized than the Weathermen and able to create chaos in a number of cities. Interestingly, one of the 1960s Weathermen was Bill Ayers who became a mentor of President Obama. Probably the biggest difference between 1969 and 2020 is that the anarchists and Marxists were no longer on the fringe. Unlike those in 1969, many or most were never arrested and those who were got bailed out by rich radicals. I also believe 1969 was the first time I heard the word trash used as a verb to describe the deliberate physical destruction caused by such demonstrators.
By 1970 the radicals themselves had split up. The SDS divided into at least two factions, The “original” SDS was pro-Soviet and remained so. On the day of the University Hall takeover there was a black limousine in Harvard Yard with stacks of publications in the Cyrillic alphabet. It may have been just a scheduled delivery to the library, but it looked like a Russian diplomatic vehicle. It has always been an intriguing coincidence to me.
The other faction became the PLP, the People’s Liberation Party. They were Maoists. One radical I knew owned a complete set of the Works of Mao in English. There were also a handful of Trotskyites—the SWP or Socialist Workers’ Party—still trying to find their way. The Weathermen were not much more than a handful.
All factions fantasized about a worker-student alliance. After all, the international cry of Communists was supposed to be “Workers of the world, unite!”
That would never happen. With few exceptions blue collar workers could not identify with people wanted to overthrow America and be ruled by Russians or Chinese. America had given the workers a chance. People still constantly immigrate to the United States. How many people were immigrating to Russia, Cuba, or China? Besides, they saw the campus radicals as spoiled rich kids, and not without reason.
Like today, the radicals were elitists. They were the rich kids. Approximately 110 students, mostly undergrads but including a few graduate students, were arrested on the morning of the police raid of University Hall. The school was trying to find a way to punish them. One way, they thought, was to deny them financial aid.
Back in 1969 about sixty percent of the undergraduates at Harvard were on some kind of financial aid. In other words, they could not afford the room, board, and tuition without some help. I had some scholarship money and also agreed to work on campus to earn money. I ended up as a busboy in a cafeteria. Of the 110 or so arrested, only one graduate student had any kind of financial aid, a $500 loan. Those radicals were the rich kids, the spoiled brats, who wanted to tell everyone else how to live and what to think.
They wanted a worker-student alliance but they really did not respect the workers. I cannot help think of Senator Clinton’s remarks about the basket of deplorables. Recently a book called Despised came out, noting the same pattern in the United Kingdom.
Back then at the university, the absolute worst, most cutting insult, worse than even saying crude things about your mother’s ancestry, was bourgeois. If you were bourgeois, that was contemptible and indefensible. Yes, part of that was Communist rhetoric, but it was also elitist. Still, we did read Franklin, Weber, and others who pointed out that a strong middle class made for a freer and more prosperous society. A vibrant middle class meant that it was possible to improve one’s position. Indeed, by 1969 most union workers were making middle class wages. Why would they want to overthrow a system that helped them get ahead?
It is interesting to note that two of the SDS leaders went on to work in venues where radicals are promoted. One became a Hollywood actor. The other became a college professor. A number of years ago that prof wrote in some alumni notes that he was still teaching and advocating the simplistic Marxist dialectic: that every conflict is economic, the haves vs. the have-nots.
From what I can gather, the reigning insult now is racist rather than bourgeois, but the pattern is the same. I will be honest, it is hard to believe in such “systemic” problems for example, when it seems like most of the institutions of the “the system” are already left-wing: the media, much of the government bureaucracy including the FBI and CIA, entertainment (Broadway, Hollywood, and most sports), academia, most corporations (especially Silicon Valley), even the military now. Who is left? This seems to be more “brain policing” by the system than anything else.
In the late seventies and early eighties I had become acquainted with a classmate who had been one of the radicals who had taken over the administration building. He never graduated because he became too involved with drugs. He died in his early thirties, and it was probably drug related. Drugs were a weakness for many of the radicals back then, and their use also contributed to the decline of the radicals on campus.
What I have described so far is fairly general. Similar things, maybe without the building takeover or police “bust,” were happening around the country. In the summer of 1969, however, I had a different experience. I received an education in race relations, and I could see the beginning of changes to the idealism of the Civil Rights movement.
I spent the summer of 1969 in Detroit, living and mostly working in black neighborhoods. It was less than two years after Martin Luther King had been killed. The urban rioting that happened after his death was over. I believe that most people, both black and white, were trying to believe in Dr. King’s vision of integration. Most black people treated me as fellow human being. I was often addressed as “brother.” I believe I saw them the same way.
I did encounter some racial prejudice. I recall a landlady who told me she had to make sure I was white before renting to me. I did not rent from her very long. A few black people called me names or had a confrontational reaction when they saw me. Those were the exceptions. One black pastor I got to know a little told me, “I believe God created all men brothers.” I sensed pain as he said that, but he was doing his best to live it out.
I confess there were times I was tired of being stared at. People would ask me what I was doing in their neighborhood, not out of hostility but out of curiosity. I told them, but sometimes I got tired of being asked. When my job was done, I could return to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I no longer stood out and could mind my own business without people staring at me.
That experience made me realize what many black Americans have to go through frequently. I stood out in the Detroit ghetto. I lived there for a while, but eventually I left. Black Americans do not have that luxury. They know they will always stand out. If they do not have the grace to handle it, they could grow annoyed and angry. One of the books many freshmen read for class that year was titled Black Rage. I understood it after that summer.
I also noted something else. Not only could I go back to Massachusetts and not stand out physically, but in my life I have rarely thought of myself as a white person. It has nothing to do with being ashamed or fragile about my ancestry, but simply because I did not stand out. I was just another guy. However, I can understand that black Americans might not feel that way because they are a minority that physically stands out.
As I saw the campus radicals take advantage of the antiwar sentiment, it appeared that some of the young black men were becoming radicalized, too. The Black Panthers were in the news, and some of the students began emulating them. Black berets became popular for black students. A few guys I got to know some at the beginning of freshman year started acting separated, as though they were uncomfortable or uncool to talk to a white guy. It seemed like the Civil Rights goal of integration was ending.
Today it appears that the Black Lives Matter movement has been radicalized. The people acting as its spokespeople call themselves “trained Marxists.” So the Black Panthers of the Sixties were attracted to the idea of a Communist revolution. One of their slogans was “Off the pig.” Pig was slang for police. Off as a verb meant to kill. Now we hear from some radicals about defunding the police and that fighting them is justified and noble.
I should note that many of the political and academic leaders in the country in 1969 had dabbled in Communism in the 1930s. Many saw it as an answer to the Great Depression. Like George Orwell or Arthur Koestler, most would abandon Communism when they saw how it played out in history. Many still leaned left, but they were not anti-Americans. They may have sympathized with the student protests, but they did not want a revolution here, either.
Back then, anyone, radical or not, would present his or her view by running off statements on mimeograph machines. If they were sophisticated or artistic, they might do silkscreening for posters and T-shirts. Position papers and editorials would be slid under dorm doors, handed out on the streets, and posted on walls just about anywhere. The radicals commonly tore down posters they did not like. A few times they shouted to drown out speakers they did not like. Not quite as sophisticated as the current “cancel culture,” but the idea was the same.
Nowadays we can go to web sites, if allowed by Google or Twitter, to find out what different groups believe, just as I post book reviews on my web site. I confess I was surprised by a couple of current BLM demands. One promoted public schools and denounced vouchers and charter schools. This was puzzling. Black families are more likely to try to take advantage of voucher programs and charter schools when they are available than white families are. They want their kids to have a better chance. It is telling me that these BLM people believe in government running things—as long as they are running the government—rather than letting black kids excel. (For more on this see my review of An Underground History of American Education.)
Fifty-one years before 2020, the radicals always called for amnesty. Whatever they did, such as taking over the administration building, they demanded no punishment. That was a striking difference from Dr. King and Thoreau’s version of civil disobedience, or even the idealism expressed by Matt in the jail on the day of the mass arrests. So today, one of the BLM demands is to close all prisons. Talk about amnesty!
One of the BLM demands struck me as incongruous. Create a Palestinian state at the expense of Israel. What do Palestinians have to do with Black Americans?
This, though, also took me back almost to 1969. In 1970, Abba Eban, then the foreign minister of Israel, spoke at Harvard. He was very entertaining and effective. Most Americans at that point were still awed by the Six Day War in 1967 when Israel beat back an organized attack from three or four Arab nations and moved their border to the Jordan River and took over Jerusalem.
Eban pointed out that there were fewer than three million Jews in Israel at the time and 115 million Arabs surrounding them. Arab lands spread from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf. Israel was about the size of New Jersey. “I’d trade places with them any day,” he said.
Around the same time, I saw a broadside posted on a wall that asked, “Who are the Palestinians?” It was the first time I had heard that term in referring specifically to Arabs from Israel. One source I read recently said the term Palestinian was first used that way in 1964. Before then, Palestinian just meant any resident of Palestine, be they Arab, Jew, Druze, Copt, or whatever.
The Palestinian cause has always been a radical left cause. When it became clear that Nasser’s pan-Arab socialism was not working, the Soviet Union began backing Communist Arabs to bring about unrest in the Middle East. Even though a number of the student radicals were ethnically Jewish, bringing about a Communist revolution anywhere was more of a priority. Back then it trumped the antiwar effort. The PLO was part of the Communist International.
One thing that was a little different back then was that the two main political parties in the United States worked together more. There were liberal “Rockefeller Republicans.” There were more conservative “Scoop Jackson Democrats.” There was a certain flexibility the parties seem to lack today. Even back then, though, it was clear the Democrats were becoming the party of the elites—wealth, academia, the media, pretty much everything but the military. The Republican Club at Harvard most years I was there hardly had ten members. If anything, that elitism has become more pronounced. When President Clinton wrote in his memoir that the Democrats were the party of the common man, it seemed disingenuous by then.
I note, for example, that the bill that got rid of the draft was sponsored in the Senate by Barry Goldwater and Teddy Kennedy. Goldwater had run for president in 1964 as a conservative and was trounced. Kennedy would be called the liberal lion. I should also note that when Kennedy ran for re-election in 1970, the one issue that divided him and his liberal Republican opponent was abortion. Kennedy opposed it and the Republican Josiah Spaulding supported it. (You read that correctly. Kennedy at that point was still identifying as a believing Catholic.)
I do not really want to go into it, but 1969 was the year that Senator Kennedy was driving a car with a young woman not his wife who drowned. What we learned from that experience we could see perhaps repeated in 2020—in spite of all the lip service paid to women’s rights, Democrat men from blue states can get away with just about anything. The media and the women’s movement still usually, though not always, give them a pass.
Lyndon Johnson had beaten Goldwater in 1964 in a landslide. He said he had a mandate to do even more of what he and John Kennedy before him had been doing. Yes, that meant growing the welfare state and getting to the moon, but it also meant fighting in Vietnam. In spite of his 1964 landslide, Johnson ended up not running for re-election.
There were riots outside the 1968 Democratic convention. Senator Eugene McCarthy was running on an antiwar platform. He had written A Liberal Answer to the Conservative Challenge, a book meant to answer Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative. Johnson’s vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, would receive the nomination as a compromise. As a leader of the Americans for Democratic Action, he was more liberal than Johnson and most Democrats, but not as liberal as McCarthy.
This was a mere three years after the Voting Rights Act and four years after the Civil Rights Act. George Wallace, representing Southern segregationists, would run a third party campaign. This effectively split the Democratic vote. Keep in mind that in 1968 the former Confederacy was still a Democrat stronghold, as it had been for over a hundred years. Wallace had been elected governor of Alabama as a Democrat.
Former vice-president Richard Nixon won. The left wing was upset about McCarthy losing out to Humphrey. The press for the most part disliked Nixon. Just as journalists called President Clinton Slick Willie, Nixon was Tricky Dick.
When Nixon ran on Eisenhower’s ticket in 1952, there were accusations that Nixon had accepted bribes. He went on television (still in its infancy) to deny the charges. He was effective. He was never formally charged, but a lot of people thought he had gotten away with something.
Nixon had been instrumental in providing evidence that Alger Hiss, an advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt, was a Soviet agent. This was before Senator Joseph McCarthy began his “witch hunts.” The evidence against Hiss was pretty solid, but many on the left were in denial or said, “So what?” They blamed Nixon for disrupting things and smearing a civil servant.
Especially in academia and in much of the media, Nixon was hated. It was unusual, almost like he was some kind of enemy.
We saw something similar with President Trump. Since Donald Trump had no political record and had supported both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, he seemed largely apolitical. I was surprised at the visceral reaction to him. Two weeks after the election, there were already pundits writing about impeaching him, and he had not even taken office!
In many ways Trump qualifies as an elitist as much as the Clintons or Obama—wealthy New Yorker, Ivy Leaguer, television celebrity. But he is a nationalist, not an internationalist. Is that why? Don’t most Americans want their country to be great?
Perhaps, but only on certain terms.
I recall a conversation I had with one of the campus radicals after 1969. For the reasons I gave, the antiwar protests were a thing of the past. He was disappointed but still a true believer. He was telling me about what a Utopia Communism would bring to the United States. I noted that he would have to change the Constitution. That is what revolutions do.
“What about our freedoms?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“In the Soviet Union they don’t have freedom of the press or religious liberty.”
“So what?”
I think that pretty much ended the conversation. It seems like we are now closer to that “Utopia” he was imagining. Certainly government is no smaller. Certainly cancel culture, speech codes, government agencies, and Silicon Valley are silencing voices they disagree with. Mainstream publishers no longer publish popular authors because they are afraid of a backlash. Governments are harassing bakers, photographers, Catholic nuns, observant Jews, and others for trying to live by what they believe. Even Jesus has been called a white supremacist. We are told that statues of him ought to be taken down as much as some Confederate general’s.
For me the biggest burden of 1969, especially living and studying on a left-wing campus was that everything had become political: “Why are you eating that? Don’t you know about the boycott?” “What classes are you taking?” “What do you do on a date?” The church near campus that I attended had prayed for Eugene McCarthy to win in the fall of 1968 as a write-in. When the school strike was on, the preacher was calling for a revolutionary transformation of society.
It looks like it is getting that way again. Athletes have to apologize for saying that they will stand for the flag. Twitter calls the Star of David a hate symbol. YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook take down political posts they do not agree with. Everyone, even the NBA and WWE, caves to China.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your [political] philosophy…”
A year later the spring of 1970 was the last semester of the real radicalism on campus. Congress had voted to get rid of the draft. Harvard had gotten rid of ROTC. The school had submitted to most of the SDS demands from the year before. Still, it seems the radicals wanted more. They were interested in power.
After the Kent State shooting, the SDS tried to start another spring strike on campus. For a few days, students were demonstrating peacefully, standing in front of classroom buildings and the libraries to deter students from entering. There was no physical confrontation. Anyone could walk through the line to get to class. The idea was shaming and conformity.
I was walking through Harvard Yard, planning on going to the library. There was a line in front of both entrances. One of the demonstrators was an acquaintance whom I was a little surprised to see there. He was a libertarian and a supporter of the Foundation for Economic Education. He opposed most of the things the radicals stood for, but he did oppose the draft and the use of the National Guard the way it was used in Ohio.
We chatted for a minute or two, exchanged pleasantries, and I went into the building. A young woman’s voice behind me shouted, “If you go in, you’re killing babies in Vietnam.”
No, I wasn’t. I was just going to the library. I never felt guilty about it at all.
Alas, even today this the way some of the radicals are. As Dickens noted in A Tale of Two Cities, like during the French Revolution we were ruled by “the law of the suspected.” Everything is political. It is no way to live or enjoy life. Even if radicalism addresses legitimate injustices, it will never bring about a Utopia. I thought of an “underground” song by Frank Zappa from 1966. It’s title says it all: “Who Are the Brain Police?”
Reflections and Subsequent Events
What happened afterwards?
There is no way of knowing whether history will repeat itself. I do not claim any special knowledge. But there are some patterns that might be worth considering.
Nixon won in 1968 partly because he appealed to what he called the Forgotten American. Trump also ran on a patriotic anti-elitist theme. That probably explains at least part of the visceral reaction to both presidents. I honestly am still baffled by the instant animus towards Trump simply because he had a neutral political record before he ran for office himself.
The Democrat Party turned left in 1972 and nominated George McGovern, a Senate ally of Eugene McCarthy. Nixon was re-elected in a landslide. Things had stabilized. The draft had been abolished. Nixon was making overtures to China. The peace talks concerning Vietnam were progressing. The basic deal was ratified shortly after the election. I suspect the Vietnamese were waiting to see if Nixon was re-elected.
There are some differences, though. Back around 1990 a friend was studying in England. The Kenneth Branagh Henry V film had come out. To this day I think it is the best film of a Shakespeare play. It is also very patriotic, at least if you are British. I wrote him to tell him how I enjoyed the film, and how my students who had seen it had enjoyed it as well.
He wrote back and said that it may have been more popular in America than in Great Britain. “No one is patriotic here any more.”
Compared to even thirty years ago, Americans are less patriotic today. They are getting more like the Western Europeans. As I mentioned earlier, even the people in the older generation in 1969 who dabbled in Communism mostly did it because they thought it would be good for the country. It was really my generation that began the anti-American perspective that is becoming more common in our country. I can think of people who deliberately spelled America as Amerika or even Amerikkka. (It did not begin with Jeremiah Wright.) The rock band Steppenwolf whose biggest hit was “Born to Be Wild” also had a hit with a piece called “Monster/Suicide/America” which compared America to a monster. (The shorter version was titled simply “Monster.”) That also came out in 1969. The seeds of disdain for the country were there.
One difference from 2020 was that 1969 was not an election year. Nixon had been elected in 1968 for reasons that I gave. He was re-elected in 1972 not only because things seemed more stable, but because he was seen as being more moderate than George McGovern, his Democrat challenger. Joe Biden was elected because he came across as more moderate than Donald Trump. Biden himself was not a radical during most of his political career. The question now is how much he can contain the more radical elements in his party.
Hearings on Nixon began because of some irregularities in his 1972 campaign. He eventually resigned, as is well known. It appears that Congress tried something similar with Trump, except there was never any “smoking gun” to point to any irregularity.
At any rate, Gerald Ford, who had been the Minority Leader in the House of Representatives and was confirmed as Vice President according to the 25th Amendment because the previous Veep had resigned in 1973. Ford became President when Nixon resigned in 1974. He ran for office as the incumbent in 1976 and lost to Jimmy Carter.
Carter was an interesting candidate. He was a moderate Democrat. The party did not want a re-hash of 1972; after all, they were the majority party throughout the country. If they were not divided as they had been in 1968 and not as radical as they had been in 1972, they could easily take the presidency. They did. That still appears to be the case.
One thing that perhaps made Ford look bad was his attempt to have the government take more action concerning the swine flu in 1976. There was a sense that it was not necessary and it may have been government overreach. Obviously, those ideas are no longer current concerning epidemics or pandemics.
A distinguishing feature of Jimmy Carter was that he very openly discussed his religious beliefs. He said he was a born again Christian. His sister, Ruth Carter Stapleton, was an evangelist. The media pundits and the academics really did not know how to handle that, but it boosted Christian evangelism because many Americans heard about people being born again for the first time.
Probably the single biggest political transition in the country since 1980 has been the switch among evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics to the Republican Party. A sizeable majority of evangelicals and most Catholics in 1976 were Democrats. For evangelicals, that actually goes back to William Jennings Bryan. I recall reading an article by a well-known Fundamentalist patriarch in the late seventies speaking highly of Bryan even then. John R. Rice was old enough to remember him.
People forget that televangelist Pat Robertson was a supporter of Carter in 1976. Robertson’s father was a Democratic Senator from Virginia. Robertson had been a Democrat all his life. By 1988, he was running for President as a Republican. He exemplified what was happening among the Christians.
The media and academia in particular became more hostile towards anyone who took their religious beliefs seriously, especially Christians. For example, at Harvard when I was there, there were a number of professors including at least one department head who were openly Christian. In 2018, on the other hand, the administration placed a Christian organization (Christian Union) on probation for its position on homosexual relations. Even back in 2008 Bobby Jindal was told by a Harvard admissions officer that they normally did not accept Christians—they had their own schools. And of course, a few Senators have expressed open hostility towards Christian beliefs. Senator Sanders told budget chief Russell Vought he was un-American because of his Christianity, and Senator Feinstein channeled Darth Vader about Amy Coney Barrett’s Catholic “dogma.”
Bill Clinton succeeded in getting elected twice because he was a leader of the Democratic Leadership Council which advocated finding the center of a particular issue. The popular term at the time was triangulation. Obama claimed a heritage from the DLC that may have helped him win although some of his policies were more extreme (single payer healthcare, gun control, or ending all carbon-based energy). Ironically, or perhaps sadly for some readers, the DLC no longer exists. One can argue whether someone like Scoop Jackson or Sam Nunn would even be welcome in the Democrat Party these days. Similarly, someone like Vice President Rockefeller would likely be called a RINO (Republican in name only) by many in his party.
There was something else going on in the country in the late sixties and into the seventies that had little to do with politics. In some cases, it was reflected in certain political and media personalities such as Carter and Robertson mentioned earlier. There was a seldom reported but quite extensive religious revival going on. A film coming this month about it is titled The Jesus Revolution. The trailer says that the film begins in 1969.
The revival had several aspects. Among Catholics and mainline denominations it was largely Charismatic or Neo-Pentecostal. For others, it was more strictly Evangelical. Sometimes people called it a Jesus Movement. A Time Magazine cover story called it the Jesus Revolution. The largest selling book in the country apart from older classics during the 1970s was Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth. It was not widely reviewed in the secular press, but even the New York Times acknowledged its bestselling status. That was a book on Bible prophecy. While some of it is dated, Lindsey and other writers have updated its basic message demonstrating that many world events, especially in the Middle East, are fulfilling prophecies from the Bible.
Another big seller was Chuck Colson’s Born Again. That was about his own experience working for President Nixon and getting caught up in the Watergate scandal. During the hearings, Colson had a born again experience. He went to jail, but when he came out he organized Prison Fellowship, a prison and rehabilitation ministry largely run by prisoners, ex-convicts, and volunteers.
I recall a close relative, a man in his fifties at the time, who had been a mainline churchgoer his entire life asking me about what it meant to be born again. Colson’s book came out around the same time Carter was running for President. It was a chance to talk about the Bible generally, and it exposed many people to the idea of personal commitment to Jesus and taking the Bible more seriously.
Many people affected by that spiritual experience in the sixties, seventies, and early eighties are still around. Some are thriving. Others may have such things more as a memory of something in the past. Nearly all would acknowledge that they know and understand that Jesus is real. Mitch Glaser, leader of Chosen People Ministries, recently wrote about the time: “Revival was in the air. It elevated new institutions and breathed new life into older ones…”
(In North America in the nineties there was a revival or awakening among some churches. These things appeared to be focused on Toronto, Ontario, and Pensacola, Florida. Some people even in their thirties may recall some experiences related to these, though they were not as extensive.)
Back in 1969, I was not aware of any revival going on, though one was. The church I attended in college, as I suggested above, often saw things in political terms. About ten years later I remember having a conversation with a campaign worker for a liberal candidate for Congress. She asked me, “What kind of church do you attend?” I knew what she meant. According to Wolfgang Leonhard’s Child of the Revolution, even the Communists in East Germany kept certain churches open because they saw them as “progressive” allies. (Progressive was the term Leonhard used.)
Because he saw that I attended church, a dorm mate who was evangelical invited me to a Bible study in our dormitory. That was two years after 1969 in 1971. Except for that black pastor in Detroit and maybe one or two other people, it was the first time I had encountered people who spoke like God was involved personally in people’s lives and who prayed like they actually expected God to answer.
It would take about four more years and a number of other events for me to have my own born-again experience, but that is a different story.
Is it time for another revival? That last one in North America was about twenty-five years ago. The big one was around fifty years ago. Certainly as in the sixties, there were riots in cities. As in the sixties there are calls for racial reconciliation—or greater separation. As in the sixties there are demonstrations which reflect cultural and political divisions. Some of those have led to violence. Will the Lord have mercy on our land once again?
Keep in mind that if He does, the elites will not notice it. Or if they do, they will not acknowledge it or they will dismiss it. If they react like the two senators I mentioned earlier, their reaction may be more hostile. I remember being told in a class in college that in the Western world, the middle class is the most religious. The Puritans, Reformed, Baptists, and Quakers who largely settled the Northern colonies were middle class. The very poor could not afford the trip, and the upper classes either tried to create an American feudal system through Southern plantations or simply had no reason to leave Europe.
Note that except for the Vietnam War, all the reactions in 2020 were more extreme than in 1969: how to handle the flu, greater tolerance of rioters and anarchist outposts, greater censorship, greater acceptance of the Marxist dialectic. Perhaps, then, the Lord’s mercy, if it comes, will be greater, too?
There is another potential. Perhaps a few in the government like President Carter or Chuck Colson will be humble enough to let themselves be born again. God is not partisan. He is happy to save Democrats and Republicans, just as He was back then. Even Independents.
Whichever way it goes, we can be sure, as Hal Lindsey ably demonstrated in his book, the God of the Bible knows what is going on. He has a plan. The question to us is simple—will we be a part of his plan?