Caine's Blog: The Shattering

The Shattering (Norton, 2021) is the most engrossing American history book I've read in recent years, particularly because it focuses on the years I myself came of age. More than that, it is the author's challenge to conventional accounts of the beginnings of "the Movement." Kevin Boyle asserts in his preface:

The United States emerged from World War II the most powerful nation on earth, the argument runs, its diplomatic reach genuinely global, its economy three times the size of its closest competitor, and its military capabilities almost beyond imagining....

"The ideological age has ended," wrote the brilliant social critic Daniel Bell in 1959, the old passions of the Right and the Left having been replaced by a relentlessly modern consensus. A "middle way," "for the middle-aged."

But not for the young... By the time [Bell's] essay appeared, in April 1960, it was already coursing through the South in a wave of sit-ins inspired by four college freshmen, the oldest of them barely nineteen. Over the next few years it surged across the country, pulling young pacifists into the Freedom Rides, young organizers into Mississippi, young protesters into Birmingham's mean streets, young liberals into government service, young hipsters into the avant-garde, and young radicals into the open. In the rush of events that followed, they swept away the measured politics their elders had embraced.

Boyle's narrative begins with an account of a Polish immigrant newly arrived in Chicago, his marriage and family, and the neighborhoods they inhabited. It then proceeds to follow the lives of descendants over two generations, until Independence Day, 1961. On that day this family, along with all their neighbors on the 6100 block of West Eddy Street, celebrated the holiday by adorning their home with the United States flag (the book provides a group photograph outdoors to document their celebration). This family remains a touchstone throughout the book, along with other forgotten heroes of the many-pronged Movement.

As the new decade unfolded, its huge currents and countercurrents affected this family, as it they did with Americans generally. The Shattering explores these forces in detail, including names and events that were new to me along with many I'd long forgotten. Who remembers, for example, the identity of "Jane Roe," her story, or the attorneys who brought her case to the momentous Supreme Court? Boyle has unearthed many other long-forgotten names of the individuals who sparked the decade's multifaceted challenge to the status quo. Within these parameters, Boyle uses an ingenious "top and bottom" strategy, alternating the names of presidents, governors, and other establishment figures with those of the "nobodies" who challenged governments and institutions around the world.

Above all, The Shattering recognizes 1960s as the setting of a revolution, continuing forth from the war for independence from England and the war between the States a century later. The centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963 coincided precisely with the crest of the American civil rights movement. Moreover, Boyle shows how slavery, reactionary Jim Crow laws, and the civil rights struggle of the last century-- the so-called race issue-- has been at the center of American political history, as it remains even now. The parallels between the '60s revolution and the huge political division of the third decade of the twenty-first century are manifest and unmistakable.

My only objection to The Shattering is that it severely mutes the role of the Old Left in organizing and sustaining coalitions to bring about antiwar actionsso massive that even the parents of protesters came to oppose the so-called Silent Majority and turned them into a minority. The Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964 led to mass demonstrations and a great deal of media attention, but the case of the "Bloomington Three," insisting upon the legal right of the Young Socialist Alliance to exist on the campus of Indiana University, though it had more impact on academic free speech but received much less attention than the more spectacular Berkeley movement. The three socialists were in court for three years to ensure the legal right to express unpopular ideas on college campuses.

In our own time, mass demonstrations can be organized on social media in a matter of days or weeks, but in the 1960s they necessarily had to be built over months of gathering endorsements and organizing coalitions independent of Democrats and Republicans, devoted to the single issue of ending the war. It was then, as it remains now, part of the tradition of the old passing their experience and knowledge to the young.

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