Cornell Class of 1966
Photo:Herb
Fontecilla
Since We Left Cornell
by Ron Berenbeim
ronald.berenbeim@conference-board.org
(From the 25th Reunion "Reflections" book.)
In the quarter of a century since we left Cornell, Americans reluctantly accepted the need for basic social change, but they also expressed their ambivalence toward the direction in which the country moved through consistent majorities for conservative presidential standard bearers. If King Canute had run for president during this period he undoubtedly would have won. Americans wanted presidents who would order the waves of history to retreat. But the waves rolled on and the result is a community in which conservative men have presided over the evolution to a society that 1966 liberals would not have thought possible.
The three fault lines in the public's perception of its national identity that produced this result were already apparent in 1966. Each "movement" as they eventually came to be known, would enjoy success and suffer failure. Taken together they had more of an impact on our lives than the formal political process that those of us schooled in the civics textbooks of the 1950s looked to as the primary engine of historical change.
The most readily identifiable of these projects in 1966 was civil rights. The Civil and Voting Rights legislation enacted shortly before our graduation gave rise to unfulfilled expectations of an integrated color blind society. In 1989 two news stories came to symbolize both the promise and the disappoint- ments that were prefigured in 1966. Due in large measure to the forces set in motion by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, L. Douglas Wilder was elected Governor of Virginia. Only a few months before Wilder's election, Yusuf Hawkins was murdered in Bensonhurst -- victim of the tribalism in northern American cities that became evident when Dr. Martin Luther King visited Cicero, Illinois in the summer of 1966.
The second important development of the mid 1960s was the effort to disengage America from the Cold War garrison state. Protests against the war in Vietnam built upon the earlier ban-the-bomb constituency. The success of this initiative waxed and waned. A generation of Republican presidents denounced the Soviet system as a prelude to reaching accommodations with its leaders. By 1990 it appeared that the Communist party of the Soviet Union was more effective in helping to elect Republican presidents in the United States than in organizing support for its apparatchiks in Leningrad or Moscow. The U.S. disengagement from the Cold War was achieved by those politicians who questioned the patriotism of the people who had advocated it.
The least visible developing trend in 1966 was the movement toward greater equality for women. Although Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, few would have predicted in 1966 that women entrants in the professions would reach the proportions that they had attained by the 1990s. In 1968, for example, Harvard Business School used an aggressive recruitment program to boost their female enrollment to 4 percent -- an unheard of level at the time. Today, twenty-seven percent of the students in MBA classes are women. The issue is no longer the economic inclusion of women, but, rather how businesses that cannot operate efficiently without them will restructure so that women and their husbands can be both effective parents and workers. Yet during the same period that this progress was achieved, the equal rights amendment, the women's movement's most important priority, failed to achieve ratification.
What did Americans really want? In his magisterial investigation into the workings of eighteenth century British Parliaments, Sir Lewis Namier told his generation of historians that "what matters most about political ideas is the underlying emotions, the music to which the ideas are a mere libretto, often of very inferior quality." In this quarter of a century, the music consisted of two persistent themes. At home, Americans came to believe in the need to include all of their countrymen in the nation's civic and economic life. Abroad, they concluded that their security ultimately depended on a peaceful evolution to Jefferson's vision of "Empire of Liberty" stretching from Prague to Manila in which citizens of all nations would enjoy the distinctly American benefits of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Conservatives, liberals, and more than a few opportunists talked, wrote, and argued about a good many other things, but this is what was achieved.
From the "Reflections" Book, 25th Reunion