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.