Todd Gitlin was born in 1943 and grew up in the Bronx, where he attended the prestigious Bronx High School of Science in the late 1950s. By the end of the decade, Gitlin had started questioning American domestic and foreign policies and began moving in the direction of the radicalism that he would embrace in the 1960s. In this excerpt from his book on the 1960s, Gitlin recalls the political disillusionment he was beginning to feel as a teenager.
On New Year’s Eve, as 1958 slipped into 1959, I wasn’t especially aware I was living in the dead, dreary Fifties. I was a high school senior about to turn sixteen. I had little sense of living in any kind of “Fifties” at all; I wasn’t old enough to think in decades. I was simply living my life: striving for grades, wondering about sex, matching my exploits against those—real and imagined—of my rivals, watching the tides of adolescence rip through me. The only threshold I thought about was the one I would cross later that year, on the way to college. I was not living in history, but in biography.
Which is not to say I was devoid of political interests. I read The New York Times and my parents were liberal. I stayed up late on election nights and rooted for Democrats almost as passionately as I followed the New York Giants baseball team (until they broke my heart by running off to San Francisco in 1958). I thought President Dwight David Eisenhower was a genial deadhead, a semiliterate fuddy-duddy who deserved to be chastised almost as much for excessive golfing and tangled sentences as for embracing Generalísimo Franco [Spanish dictator Francisco Franco]. I thought Richard Nixon was sinister. I delighted in Jules Feiffer’s [a cartoonist and writer] worldly spoofs of Eisenhower’s syntax, the phone company’s arrogance, and the middle class’s clichés. I liked Herblock’s liberal cartoons, including one in which [presidential adviser] Bernard Baruch said that Eisenhower’s stinginess with the military budget would make the United States “the richest man in the graveyard.” A friend introduced me to H. L. Mencken’s tilts at the philistine American “booboisie,” and when I wrote the valedictory speech at the Bronx High School of Science later that year, the only quotation was from Mencken: “We live in a land of abounding quackeries.”
My closest friends, the children of Jewish civil servants and skilled workers, held similar opinions. As we celebrated the coming of 1959, around midnight, in a fragment of news squeezed into Guy Lombardo’s orchestral schmaltz, we saw the black-and-white footage of bearded Cubans wearing fatigues, smoking big cigars, grinning big grins to the cheers of throngs deliriously happy at the news that Batista had fled; and we cheered too. The overthrow of a brutal dictator, yes. But more, on the faces of the striding, strutting barbudos [bearded men] surrounded by adoring crowds we read redemption—a revolt of young people, underdogs, who might just cleanse one scrap of earth of the bloodletting and misery we had heard about all our lives. From a living room in the Bronx we saluted our unruly champions.
Source: Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987), 1–2.