america divided the civil war of the 1960s nov 1999

[...]... “dream of freedom incarnated in a more perfect union” bequeathed to Americans by the founding fathers had yet to be “submitted to the test of history”: There was little awareness of the cost of having a history The anguished scrutiny of the meaning of the vision in experience had not become a national reality It became a reality, and we became a nation, only with the Civil War. 11 In the 1960s, Americans... at the time And the most profound and lasting effects of the 1960s are to be found in the realm of the personal” rather than the political.” Living through a period of intense historical change has its costs, as the distinguished essayist, poet, and novelist Robert Penn Warren observed in 1961 Until the 1860s, Penn Warren argued, Americans “had no history in the deepest and most inward sense.” The. .. its northern and southern supporters, the civil rights movement was a “second Civil War, ” or a “second Reconstruction.” To its southern opponents, it was a second war of northern aggression.” Civil rights demonstrators in the South carried the stars and stripes on their marches; counterdemonstrators waved the Confederate stars and bars 4 America Divided The resurrection of the battle cries of 1861–1865... Governor Wallace had thrown down the gauntlet of segregation There, before an audience of 25,000 supporters of voting rights, King ended his speech with the exaltedly defiant words of the Battle Hymn of the Republic: Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword His... in the United States, the harassment of dissenters violated the nation’s most cherished values, while in the USSR, the routine silencing and jailing of political opponents conformed with Communist doctrine By the late ’50s, the death of Joseph Stalin and the end of the Korean War had diminished the possibility of a new world war But anxiety still ran high The United States, a commission funded by the. .. recessions, was accompa- Gathering of the Forces 13 A white working-class family outside their suburban home in the late 1950s Source: George Meany Memorial Archives nied by a steady increase in the number of women entering the paid labor force Women over 45 led the way, swelling the professions and the ranks of office workers The number of married women with jobs had risen since the war But the family “breadwinner”... dubbed braceros (from the Spanish word for “arms”) The end of the war alleviated the labor shortage, but the political clout of agribusiness kept the bracero program going—and it severely hampered the ability of native-born farmworkers to better their lot These problems remained all but invisible in the business and political centers of the East Outside the Southwest, Americans regarded themselves as living... for the vigorous community their parents had found either in the Orthodox faith or in the socialist left In the “return to God,” one could glimpse elements of both the pride and the anxiety emblematic of the U.S at the dawn of the ’60s No area of national life was more highly charged than the relationship between black and white Americans Racial segregation was still firmly established in much of the. .. single history of the decade will satisfy every reader Perhaps by the time centennial observances roll around for John Kennedy’s inauguration, the Selma voting rights march, the Tet Offensive, and the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention, Americans will have achieved consensus in their interpretation of the causes, events, and legacies of the 1960s But at the start of the twenty-first century, there seems... set of values different from those of the men who ruled from the White House, corporate headquarters, and the offices of metropolitan newspapers The dissenters advocated pacifism instead of Cold War, racial and class equality instead of a hierarchy of wealth and status, a politics that prized direct democracy over the clash of interest groups, a frankness toward sex instead of a rigid split between the . LIVE. —Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War, 1961 1 As the 1950s drew to a close, the organizers of the official centennial obser- vances for the Civil War were determined not to allow their project,. Americans in the 1960s of the messy political issues that had divided their ancestors into warring camps a century earlier. “Facts About the Civil War included neither the word “Negro” nor the. bring Americans together in a sense of com- mon cause and identity. As Betts explained: The story of the devotion and loyalty of Southern Negroes is one of the outstand- ing things of the Civil War.