The 1960s, argues art historian James Meyer in The Art of Return: The Sixties and Contemporary Culture, is “the beginning of the time we are in.” By this Meyer means that our ongoing fascination with that turbulent decade serves, whether positively or negatively, as an index of our disappointment with our own era. And while there was a historical 1960s—a real decade that we can study and seek to understand—there’s also the “Sixties” in scare quotes: a mythologized era that’s held our imagination ever since. This myth, Meyer argues, deserves to be pushed back against.
Yet the myth is harder to pin down than one might expect. Take the case discussed in political scientist Nicholas Buccola’s new book on the 1960s, The Fire Is upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America. Buccola presents a wealth of historical scholarship to paint a detailed picture of the brewing racial tensions in the United States in that decade. In a captivating montage, the book alternates between the burgeoning careers of writers James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. before their paths finally crossed in 1965 at a debate at the famed Cambridge Union in the UK. They were asked to address the motion “The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro.
What The Fire Is upon Us possesses in historical richness, it squanders in mythologizing the period. Buccola puts too much weight on the debate and infers from it how we got to where we are now, as if most American history of the last 50 years could be simply traced back to this butting of heads between Baldwin and Buckley and its surrounding political situation.
In the process, he treats broad categories like “white supremacy” and the “black freedom struggle” as convenient catch-alls that could explain all the complexities of the past half century. But complexities are exactly that, complex. To wager an interpretation of our present moment on two oversimplified concepts likely means to interpret very little in the end.
Thus, whereas Meyer shows nuance in distinguishing between the historical ’60s and what our present cultural imagination has made of the decade, Buccola seems somewhat stuck in time, as if the terms by which we debate American politics today have essentially been settled since 1965. On the one side are millions of unrepentant white supremacists who can’t wait to don their Klan hoods publicly again; on the other are those who valiantly “resist” this deplorable majority. Of course, the danger in mythologizing the ’60s in this way is that we lose sight of what’s truly ahead of us, which may be quite different from an eternal repeat of Mississippi Burning.