On Stumbling Toward Utopia: How the 1960s Turned Into a National Nightmare and How We Can Revive the American Dream by Timothy S. Goeglein.
Seldom have Americans been so beset by history as in the 1960s, when historic events rushed at them at high speed from all directions. There were riots, assassinations, and daily protests on college campuses. Americans dealt with crises by the bucketful: an urban crisis, a racial crisis, a poverty crisis. There was a sexual revolution, aided by by the invention of the birth-control pill; a youth revolution, caused by the coming-of-age of the baby-boom generation; and a civil-rights revolution, sparked by the migration of America’s black population from the South to northern cities.
At the same time, it was a decade of affluence and unprecedented prosperity, in contrast to the destitution of the 1930s. There were breakthroughs in science, medicine, and technology. On television, Americans saw a foreign war unfolding and a landing on the moon, the ultimate achievement of American know-how. It was a decade of progress in many areas, but in many cases the cost was wreckage and ruin to institutions Americans had long taken for granted as fundamental to their way of life.
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James Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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