Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 89
The Astro-Turf Garden:
Pastoralism in the
Industrial Age
Tom Hayden (1988, p. xiii) recently observed that "There is an
ongoing struggle today to define the sixties. The current wave of
nostalgia has many scholars looking back to a time when many
people were looking toward the future—the sixties.(l) The events of
the sixties are, of course, very well known, but they are still
unassimilated—discussions about causality, interrelation,
significance, and consequence are beginning anew. The significance of
the decade is in the process of being sifted, interpreted, and
appropriated. The recent focus of attention on the sixties raises again
the issue of the meaning and significance of American politics and
culture during that decade.
Interpretations of the sixties have focused on several important
themes: social roots and orientations, political positions, strategy and
tactics, and significant personalities. One of the striking things about
the period that seems to have been forgotten is that most of the major
sixties protest movements and social critiques had a significant
cultural dimension. One of the questions that is not addressed in
these recent works is the relationship of the sixties to American
culture. An unfinished task is to derive sociological insight from the
sixties.
In politics symbols are substance whenever groups take them
seriously—especially when they collide. There was an important
difference (Neustadter, 1989) in the political symbols employed by
the radicalism of the sixties and an earlier American radicalism.
The radicals of the thirties held that technology was a progressive
force. They maintained that the advent of technological know-how
made possible an ideal society which could be fashioned out of
materials already at hand. Socialist theorists such as Lewis
Mumford, Erich Fromm, and Michael Harrington looked to
machinery properly reemployed as both instrument and embodiment
not just of material improvements, but of spiritual uplift.