Most Americans think of the 1960s as a time of deep and passionate conflicts, whose consequences were profound and durable. That judgment seems particularly accurate about the Ivy League — the highest circle of higher education, both then and now. The occupation of campus buildings and “nonnegotiable” demands about such issues as abolishing ROTC and establishing black-studies departments divided most elite campuses into hostile camps. Radicals pushed deans around, police beat up and arrested protesters, strikes shut down universities.
All that turmoil helped catalyze a far more diverse student body and a liberal-arts faculty crammed with progressives who teach a multicultural curriculum.
Take Yale College, which did not admit women until 1969 and where a student of color was as rare as a boisterous Harvard fan on the 50-yard line at the Yale Bowl. By 2014, in stark contrast, whites made up just about half of the undergraduates, even less than the proportion in the United States as a whole; nearly half the student body was female. Scholarship recipients at Yale are now as numerous as students who pay full tuition. And the history department, perhaps the best in the land, boasts premier scholars of such subjects as LGBT people and Native Americans, which were completely absent from the course catalog 50 years ago. Whether you love “the ’60s” or revile them, it’s hard to deny the big differences they made in the most coveted universities in the land.
Yet conventional wisdom omits one essential fact about Yale College and its gilded counterparts that has changed not at all over the past half-century: They remain prime sites for the reproduction of what the sociologist C. Wright Mills famously called a “power elite.”
Only the most clueless reactionary would want to revert to the demographics of the Yale student body in the early 1960s, or to revive history courses like one taught there at the time, in which a book that called African-American slaves “more or less savage” was required reading.
But as Ivy League institutions became gloriously multicultural and co-ed, the larger society their graduates helped to lead became increasingly divided by income and class. As the Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank (Yale Class of 1990) wrote recently: “The gap in wealth and income between rich and poor is the worst since the Great Depression, and the gap between the rich and the middle class is at its highest since the government began keeping such statistics 30 years ago. After more than three decades of income growth for the wealthiest 10 percent and stagnation for everybody else, the top 3 percent now has more wealth than the bottom 90 percent.”
As Ivy League institutions became gloriously multicultural and co-ed, the larger society their graduates helped to lead became increasingly divided by income and class.
Milbank has no need to state the obvious: That lofty 3 percent includes a sizable share of Yale graduates.
As historians on the left, Daniel Horowitz and Howard Gillette Jr. would surely bemoan those statistics. Yet their new books, each of which tells dozens of fascinating stories about the lives of their Yale classmates (gleaned through interviews), describe the changes that took place during the ’60s in almost entirely rosy and self-congratulatory terms. Horowitz, in On the Cusp: The Yale College Class of 1960 and a World on the Verge of Change (University of Massachusetts Press), writes that for his class of 1960, the “cusp” was “where transitions begin, locations of awakenings where dawning consciousness was often unformed.”
Gillette, in Class Divide: Yale ’64 and the Conflicted Legacy of the Sixties (Cornell University Press), prefers the metaphor of “a hinge generation” for his fellow Yalies of 1964. “Like it or not,” he writes, “this class was going to be part of a major transition.”
In their telling, a typical student arrived in New Haven eager to take his place in the comfortable elite of perhaps the most self-comforted nation in world history. “Remarkably few of us wanted to change the world, except as a byproduct of our making money or succeeding professionally,” writes Horowitz.
But then, while at Yale or soon after, they threw themselves into one or more facets of the great upheaval, shifting their adult plans in permanent ways. Obeying their consciences and/or the call of the zeitgeist, dozens became partisans of one cause or another. They embraced “the goal of advancing not just individual but the larger public welfare,” writes Gillette approvingly. The world was being transformed, and these men did what they could to transform it and themselves.
Horowitz and Gillette are hardly the only scholars too besotted with “transition” for their own good. We tend to herald any era about which we write extensively as one in which, to paraphrase a cultural icon of the ’60s, the new is busy being born and the old is busy dying. Marxists point to transitions between feudalism and capitalism, professors of culture analyze transitions between the premodern and modern, sociologists trace the shift from traditional communities to cosmopolitan societies.
But continuities in history are as tenacious as their opposites, and elites can augment their legitimacy by broadening their ranks and rushing ahead of waves of reform that might otherwise roll over them. “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change,” Tancredi, a young Sicilian aristocrat in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s great novel The Leopard, counsels his uncle, a feudal prince, as Garibaldi’s volunteer army of Italian unification sweeps across the island in 1860. Tancredi joins the invaders in order to retain his lofty status in the emerging new nation.
Few of the men who attended Yale in the early ’60s made their political choices with such a craftily conservative motive in mind. Most genuinely wanted to create a more inclusive and tolerant society; some were critical of their own university for standing in the way. As chairman of the Yale Daily News, Joseph Lieberman (’64) campaigned to open the college to women and wrote editorials in favor of civil rights. Then he traveled down to Mississippi to register black voters.
Photo illustration by Alex Williamson for The Chronicle Review
But Lieberman’s fervor for progressive reform also helped bolster the renown of Yale and other top colleges as the only sure places from which to launch a brilliant career in politics or business. By democratizing the student body (and faculty) with women and people of color, Yale stayed atop a class system that otherwise changed little, if at all. Lieberman’s own undergraduate statements advocating an end to Jim Crow laws implicitly endorsed that very outcome. “We envision Yale as a training ground for a democratic elite,” he wrote in an open letter to alumni in 1963. “If Yale graduates do not act from their positions of importance in the North and South, who will act?”
Lieberman knew that thousands of Americans who had never seen the inside of a Yale classroom (or perhaps that of any college) were organizing, marching, and going to jail for the cause of racial equality. But, eager to gain a position of importance himself, he was glad to pamper the egos of those who had come before. Later, as a four-term U.S. senator from Connecticut, Lieberman kept to a scrupulously moderate path, seeking to manage or tamp down future outbursts of discontent. He helped lead, with Bill Clinton (Yale Law ’73), the pro-corporate Democratic Leadership Council, enthusiastically supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, abandoned his party to endorse John McCain in 2008, and voted for Obamacare in 2010 only after helping to kill the “public option” that would have competed with plans offered by the insurance giants headquartered in his state.
As an observant Jew at Yale, Lieberman belonged to what was, at the time, a double minority. But in his future political vocation, he had more in common with his 1964 classmate John Ashcroft, a devout Pentecostalist and GOP senator who became attorney general in George W. Bush’s first administration, than he did with the activists, both black and white, whose nonviolent disruptions led to passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. “If he had arrived in 1960 as an outsider to Yale and the establishment,” writes Gillette, “he quickly took on the cloak of the new upper class.”
Elites can augment their legitimacy by broadening their ranks and rushing ahead of waves of reform that might otherwise roll over them.
One anecdote Gillette tells reveals how limited was the break even a radical Yale graduate was willing to make with his elite status. In the fall of 1967, Angus Macbeth participated in the huge antiwar protest that attempted to shut down the Pentagon. Gillette writes: “Having made his way to the front lines of the march, only to be turned back by National Guardsmen armed with bayonets, he subsequently ended his day at a cocktail party at the home of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, thanks to an invitation from McNamara’s son-in-law, a Yale Law School classmate.”
Macbeth went on to become a partner at Sidley Austin, one of the largest and most prestigious corporate law firms in America (and the same one where Michelle Obama met her future husband). Macbeth did, however, specialize in environmental law. Writes Gillette, “Even as their privileged position was frontally tested,” men like him “remained ideally positioned to guide the transition from the old set of rules to the new.”
The 1960s was not the first time an American elite had successfully recreated itself during an era of intense social conflict. Take the final years of the 19th century. Instead of battles about black equality, Americans fought over the rights and power of wage-earners and of the small farmers who formed the People’s Party. Instead of debating the morality of a war against an army led by Communists in Vietnam, they disputed whether U.S. soldiers should be trying to crush independence forces in the Philippines.
Hoping to bridge or transcend those divisions, a segment of wealthy Americans threw themselves into the political fray with a vigorous espousal of reform at home and an aggressive policy abroad. In his classic 1973 essay, the historian Christopher Lasch called this leap into public life “The Moral and Intellectual Rehabilitation of the Ruling Class.”
Theodore Roosevelt parlayed the celebrity he had gained for his military exploits in Cuba in 1898 into a spot on the Republican ticket two years later. When he became president after the assassination of William McKinley, Roosevelt regulated the trusts, endorsed an income tax, and dealt fairly with labor unions, which his GOP predecessors had often vilified. He and his close friend (and fellow Harvard graduate) Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge also advocated building an army and navy large enough to ensure that the United States would always be able to get its way in the world. “By war alone,” declared Roosevelt, “can we acquire those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life.”
Other well-born figures — for example, Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management — zealously promoted efficient methods in industry and replacing corrupt party bosses at the helm of big-city government with nonpartisan professionals.
Photo illustration by Alex Williamson for The Chronicle Review
Men like these did much to turn the nation away from the bitter social conflicts of the Gilded Age and embrace the meaningful, if modest, social and political changes of the Progressive Era. Every president in the early 20th century — Roosevelt, William Howard Taft (Yale, class of 1878), and Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, class of 1879) — believed in compelling the corporate rich to obey certain rules and donate a small portion of their wealth, in taxes, to fund a somewhat larger federal state. In so doing, they helped to stem the popularity of Socialists and other radicals who wanted to destroy the “money power.” As Lasch wrote about Roosevelt, “He had left his class … with vigorous traditions of public service and with renewed determination to impose its will on the nation and the world.”
The men who attended Yale in the early 1960s did not “rehabilitate” the elite so much as they, and their counterparts from similar universities, opened its ranks to individuals from racial and ethnic groups that had been present only as tokens before. The upsurge of feminism later in the decade tore down the wall of separation for women, too.
But I suspect most Yalies in 2015 are no more willing to question the class privileges their academic affiliation bestows on them than were the men profiled by Horowitz and Gillette. Whatever their political leanings or social backgrounds, current undergraduates — unlike many of the well-born preppies in the early ’60s — worked furiously in high school to gain admission to Yale and other top colleges. Most of their parents were at least as obsessed about gaining that prize as were their children. If the young meritocrats do not become leaders in one field or another, both generations will be extremely disappointed.
Ten years after the graduation of my own 1970 class at Harvard, a friend announced, in the class report, that he had struggled through a series of part-time jobs and was pretty much resigned to being “a low-yield dude.” It was a courageous admission. Other than an early death, few Ivy League grads, at least after a spell in the wilds of the counterculture, could imagine a fate worse than that.
Meanwhile, Yale increasingly resembles a large corporation rather than the quiet, if haughty, academic institution that Horowitz and Gillette attended. With an endowment of nearly $24 billion, administrators are constantly expanding their hospital complex and real-estate holdings in New Haven. Recently they awarded the departing President Richard Levin, who had swelled the treasury, a whopping bonus of $8.5 million. As the university grows, its “officials seek to contain unionism and, if possible, shrink its base,” writes Jennifer Klein, a history professor at Yale. When “full-time employees retire or leave, they are often not replaced. New corporate vice presidents (from companies such as PepsiCo) work to de-skill jobs as well as to downsize staff.”
Whether ivory tower or big business or a fusion of both, Yale continues to provide its chosen ones with the same self-confidence and cultural capital it did during the 1960s. Whatever a student’s race, gender, or sexual identity, she or he has an excellent chance to win a race that most other citizens can barely afford to enter. Unless that begins to change, both Yale and the society its graduates help to rule will stay much as they are.
Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown University and is co-editor of Dissent. His most recent book is American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (Knopf, 2011).
