Growing Up in a Land Called Honalee

The Sixties in the Lives of American Children

Joel P. Rhodes

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780826221278
• eBook ISBN: 9780826273857
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This study examines how the multiple social, cultural, and political changes between John Kennedy's inauguration in 1961 and the end of American involvement in Vietnam in 1973 manifested themselves in the lives of preadolescent American children.

Because the preadolescent years are, according to the child development researchers, the most formative, Joel P. Rhodes focuses on the cohort born between 1956 and 1970 who have never been quantitatively defined as a generation, but whose preadolescent world was nonetheless quite distinct from that of the "baby boomers." Rhodes examines how this group understood the historical forces of the 1960s as children, and how they made meaning of these forces based on their developmental age. He is concerned not only with the immediate imprint of the 1960s on their young lives, but with how their perspective on the era influenced them as adults.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honalee

OH, I LOVED that rascal Puff. As a child during the Vietnam era, born in 1967, I remember so affectionately the wonderful story of his bittersweet friendship with little Jackie Paper sung as a lullaby in duet with my mother every night before bed. No other period is more intimately associated with its music as the sixties in our popular imagination and from my diminutive perspective Peter, Paul, and Mary’s Puff (The Magic Dragon)—recorded in 1962 and number two on Billboard’s chart in early 1963—was the absolutely essential song from that decade’s musical catalogue. My mother, a baby boomer herself, was single, recently divorced, and bedtime at our home meant the two of us lying on the bed singing, either by memory or along with AM radio, she in an oversized football jersey and me in hand-made, fire-retardant footie pajamas covered with tiny green mice. We sang other favorites as well, anything from the Mamas and the Papas, the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” (Ringo was my favorite), or Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show’s “The Cover of ‘Rolling Stone,” the latter of which required the deepest bass tone a five-year-old could conceivably muster to really nail the line “I got a freaky ol’ lady name of Cocaine Katy who embroiders on my jeans.” And while I remained wholly oblivious to even those overt drug references, the Kingston Trio’s bawdy “The Tattooed Lady” made me blush with such risqué lyrics as “all around her hips sailed a fleet of battleships” and “what we liked best was upon her chest / My little home in Waikiki!” Puff was always different, though, occupying a singularly elevated place in my young life, not only because of the charming fairy tale imagery and infectious folksy chorus, but something much more profound, a special something that sets it apart from other cherished tunes we all nostalgically enshrine as the soundtrack to life’s narrative. Only later when I became an historian did I come to fully appreciate why Puff resonates so deeply; as a child I had fashioned my understanding of 1960s America in large measure from Peter Yarrow and Lenny Lipton’s enchanting ballad.

In mapping out the features and contours of a distinctive children’s culture, historian Steven Mintz points out that “since the early twentieth century, children have constructed their identities and culture out of symbols, images, and stories from the raw materials provided by popular culture.”¹ “Puff (The Magic Dragon),” indeed, provided many of those essential resources for imaginatively interpreting the adult world of the sixties while further socializing me in what my mother referred to as the “hippy-dippy” sensibilities her generation was experimenting with. And because children naturally blur any clear lines between fantasy and reality during this generational renegotiation, Puff’s magical language helped to articulate a broad range of my otherwise quite confusing emotional development. While some single-minded adults mistakenly heard in the song a sly marijuana allegory, for me the lyrics nourished an enduring appreciation for mirth and whimsy along with a playful wonderment over life’s more mundane strings and sealing wax, as well as its other fancy stuff.

Being raised by a working mother—who managed a clothing boutique offering countercultural-inspired commercial fashion to middle-class women—and with an absent biological father serving in Vietnam, I knew Puff to be at once a childlike playmate, yet somehow genuinely paternal. Unselfishly, the dragon guided another only child through an imaginative world of adventure. Together they would travel on a boat with billowed sail. Jackie kept a lookout perched on Puff’s gigantic tail. Living truly in at least modest comfort, my mother tried rearing me as a pacifist, based on the conclusions she came to honestly during those last awful years of the Vietnam War, but that philosophy never really took root in me, which is why I appreciated Puff’s peaceful nature residing easily within such a formidable fire-breathing presence. Noble kings and princes would bow whene’er they came. Pirate ships would lower their flag when Puff roared out his name. Consider that across the world in Vietnam the awesome firepower brought to bear by the AC-47 gunship earned that particular aircraft the nickname Puff, the Magic Dragon among admiring soldiers.

Looking back, though, probably more so than anything, “Puff (The Magic Dragon)” was steeped in a certain melancholia over what is lost when we grow up and reluctantly leave behind the seemingly simpler and more innocent time of our childhood. A dragon lives forever but not so little boys. Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys. One gray night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more. And Puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar. Even as a preadolescent child I sensed that the tears I shed while singing His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain, were already for me as much as for Puff, who was now without his lifelong friend. At some point soon as a grownup it would be I, not just Jackie, who no longer went to play along the cherry lane.² How much that wistfulness motivates my life’s work reconstructing the history of the Vietnam era I cannot truthfully say.

Clearly my deep personal connections with that time are not so very different from those of the millions of Americans for whom the “sixties experience” is still recognized as a fundamental part of their individual lives. The ubiquitous era remains central to our nation’s collective popular and political culture today, as evidenced by the ceremonial marking of each of its milestones with fiftieth-anniversary observations: John Kennedy’s assassination, the eruption of Beatlemania, Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and soon the Summer of Love, moon landing, and Woodstock. The dark specter of Vietnam tempts casual observers to see similar military quagmires in the Middle East, and candidates for even the nation’s highest office can still be judged by what they did, or did not do, to serve the nation in Southeast Asia during that wrenching conflict. Since Richard Nixon’s successful 1968 campaign demonstrated the value of framing electoral politics as a referendum on the sixties, savvy candidates keep looking to gain political advantage by associating their opponent—as Republican Meg Whitman did with Democrat Jerry Brown during the 2010 California gubernatorial race—with the loaded symbolism of peace signs, George McGovern posters, and free-lovin’ hippies. That same obsession with countercultural craziness continues to rally the troops in our culture wars, fueling fervent jeremiads against the ceaseless erosion of traditional family values, sexual mores, and dutiful patriotism.

Yet, as a political and social historian of the Cold War years my scholarly interests extend well beyond the nostalgia, romance, or condemnation now generally associated with “the sixties,” focusing instead on how that decade represents a profound sea change in American politics, society, culture, and foreign policy. Arguably these exhilarating years of hope and days of rage are the most important era in twentieth-century American history. Scholarship reflects this enduring significance as the proliferation of written and media works continues to come at such a pace that to keep up is a Sisyphean task indeed. And with each passing year the prevailing historiographical trends offer greater appreciation for circumstances and conditions outside the traditional sixties meccas of San Francisco and New York—recognizing that Ann Arbor, Chicago, and Madison were not the only places in between where political radicalism and social experimentation happened, while also, as Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has put it, exploring the more obscure “partial truths” in order to expand our historical perspective of the Vietnam era with a more textured and nuanced appraisal.³

It was in these particular pursuits that I became interested in William Tuttle’s observation that historians might “understand the nature of social change, including the significance of culture, but they generally fail to recognize that social change has differential effects based on whether children, adolescents, or adults are affected.” In his influential, interdisciplinary study of American home front children in World War II, “Daddy’s Gone to War,” Tuttle focused on the intersections between the “shifting configurations of age, culture, and history” during another transformational period in American history to explore these three variables’ impact on individual development and social change. This approach of studying children as historical subjects—still a relatively new discipline, but one embraced by the current generation of historians trained in social history—lends itself particularly well to the Vietnam era. Numerous and extensive studies, of course, have already accounted for the mammoth baby boom of the post-World War II era—crowned “the decisive generation in our history”—which dramatically transformed the demographic landscape of the United States with preadolescents in the 1950s and adolescents in the 1960s. Despite some quibbling on the exact parameters, it appears that in the nineteen years between 1946 and 1964, some 76,441,000 Americans were born. In terms of raw numbers, May 1946 marks the beginning of the boom in earnest, not coincidentally exactly nine months after V-J Day. Almost three and a half million babies arrived in 1946, one every nine seconds—a fertility record at the time—which gave the country its biggest one-year population gain to date and pushed the overall populace to 143 million. Unlike Europe, where the surge of pent-up war babies quickly evaporated, America pressed on, and, in fact, accelerated, with the birthrate outpacing India’s for a time. Eventually reaching four million newborns a year in 1954, annual births did not dip below that staggering number—peaking in 1957 at 4.3 million—until 1964, which is generally accepted as the last real year of the boom. By the time of Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory over Barry Goldwater that year, the U.S. population stood at nearly 192 million. Four out of every ten Americans were under the age of twenty and there were more children under fourteen than there had been people in the country in 1881.⁴

Scholars tend to agree that whether referred to collectively as Spock babies, the Sputnik generation, the Pepsi generation, the rock-n-roll generation, the Emmett Till generation, the Love generation, the Vietnam generation, or the Me generation, the baby boomers remain integral to our understanding of the shifting national dynamics during the sixties as their immense demographic dimensions carried along and intensified the currents of that historical sea change. Yet for all the well-placed attention on adolescent and adult boomers as the agents and actors of such radical change, no one has ever considered the perspectives of their younger brothers and sisters who by virtue of age experienced the 1960s in profoundly different ways. So, inspired by William Tuttle’s work, and embarking like him on a very personal endeavor, I am examining how the multiple social, cultural, and political changes between John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961 and the end of American involvement in Vietnam in 1973—the long view of the sixties—manifested themselves in the lives of preadolescent American children. These earliest years of childhood are the most formative and have significant life-span consequences, and thus I am focusing on the children born between 1956 and 1970—57.5 million in total—who have never been quantitatively defined as a generation, but whose child-centered preadolescent world was nonetheless quite distinct from the early baby boom cohort born prior to 1955, and who likewise contrasted significantly with children raised in more adult-oriented families after the mid-1970s. In adopting an interdisciplinary, age-specific perspective in my analysis of social change in the Vietnam era, I can examine how this cohort understood the historical forces of the sixties as children, and with the use of developmental psychology, how these children made meaning of these forces based on their developmental age. Ultimately, I am concerned not only with the immediate imprint of the historical sixties on the lived experience of children, but the causal developmental results which may have resonated across their life course—in short, how their unique perspective on the sixties has influenced them as adults.

Methodologically, my work is particularly informed by sociological developmentalist Glen Elder’s pioneering application of this “life course perspective” to the study of children and families. The chapters are arranged around the general chronological framework of those phenomena which had the most immediate consequences for preadolescent children. In chapter 2, I begin the study by examining the presidency of John F. Kennedy, a central organizing principle in the process of political socialization for this cohort. Special emphasis is given to the idealistic energy radiating throughout Camelot from his 1960 election—especially for Catholic children—and two of the administration’s initiatives most directly aimed at young Americans: the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and the Maternal and Child Health and Mental Retardation law. Chapter 3 covers those exhilarating early years of the space race—NASA’s Mercury and Gemini projects—and Kennedy’s role in launching the nation on a rocket ride to the moon. These triumphs are juxtaposed with the terrifying prospect of nuclear holocaust, culminating in the thirteen restless days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In chapter 4, the Kennedy presidency comes to an abrupt end with the painful flashbulb nature of the assassination, nearly inseparable from the shared mourning of the funeral, which left so many musing that even to this day, they still look for another JFK. In chapter 5, I discuss the Johnson presidency. Despite the Great Society’s messianic spirit, the relationship between Lyndon B. Johnson and children was less emotive compared to Kennedy. Yet, as I argue, Johnson produced considerably more tangible change through his administration’s sweeping health, education, and welfare policies, especially Medicaid, Head Start, and, indirectly, the television program Sesame Street.

Shifting away from politics, chapter 6 takes a new look at the African-American struggle for civil rights. Focusing on the complexity of race and racism in the lives of preadolescent children, I trace individual participation in school desegregation and other forms of social activism targeting Jim Crow segregation in the former confederacy. Understandably, the civil rights movement appears to have been a much more prominent feature in the childhood of those living in the South, while for preadolescents elsewhere across the United States the protracted war in Vietnam remained the era’s prevailing national experience. Thus, in chapter 7 I discuss how, for this first generation raised in the era of televised combat, Vietnam effected numerous changes in the lives of children. Not only were children burdened with the emotional weight of anxiously watching the nightly televised “box scores” of death tolls and exposed to the divisiveness engendered by the war, but Vietnam also transformed familial relationships through wartime separations from fathers, which concluded with unforgettable reunions and emotionally taxing periods of family reformation.

Beyond Vietnam, the most recognizable images of the sixties involve the vast array of activism, in which millions of socially conscious Americans sought to communicate their stance on the war and other conflicts through public productions of political and cultural protest in what was understood as “the movement.” Children’s participation in this movement was relatively rare and, when it happened, quite controversial. Defenders of allowing preadolescents to join in public protest argued that it taught social responsibility and critical thinking, while critics derided the inclusion of children as nothing more than simple exploitation, if not abuse. Either way, there were really just two interrelated forms of activism which consistently and deeply impacted preadolescent children: the counterculture and women’s liberation. In the search for alternatives to Cold War culture, both began with redefinitions of the middle class, suburban family, and motherhood. Accordingly, chapter 8 explores how living within a “hippie” lifestyle that hoped to create a more meaningful way of life influenced child rearing, socialization, and childhood, including the experiences of those growing up in communal living arrangements. Chapter 9 continues to follow many of these same themes by addressing the much broader childhood implications of social changes in women’s lives. These range from renegotiations of gender roles and increased wage employment of women to divorce and single-parent families, day care, and ideological changes in child rearing.

The study is concluded in chapter 10. After briefly revisiting that journey to the moon by Apollo 11 in 1969, I lay out the prominent changes in children’s experiences and children’s environments which took place in America toward the early 1970s. Rather than a fixed historical event such as Watergate, it was really these years, when the child-centered parenting dynamics of the early baby boom gave way to more contemporary adult-centered conceptions coinciding with an age of narcissism, which mark the proper end of sixties childhood. As such, the remainder of the chapter offers notes and observations on “the sixties” from the perspective of twenty-first-century adults looking back.

We can determine how these historical 1960s forces manifested themselves in the proximal world of children by locating the entry points where social and political changes from the broader adult society permeated the separate sphere of childhood to become changes in the reality of preadolescents. While in other studies of the sixties it is relatively easy to trace the various dialectical conflicts and confrontations which produced the decade’s sociopolitical transformations—whether in the halls of government, college campuses, or on the streets—it is much trickier to follow these paths into the lives of children because of how subtly and indirectly change is diffused at their level. Within the physical and social environments of sixties children, this permeation played out in the cheerfully decorated classrooms where they learned and the undeveloped fields where they romped, sometimes facilitated by imaginative toys and games. Mass media—primarily television’s commercial programming and news coverage—emerged as another chief thoroughfare and played an ever larger role with each passing year.

The most consistently reliable, yet elusive, socialization unfolded in the families, more often than not through the “imperial” practices of parents and “native” practices of the children. Imperial practices can be understood as any number of cultural narratives—bedtime stories, family lore, literature, games, and even songs like Puff (The Magic Dragon)—that parents purposefully recommended, and provided, to children in the hope that they would learn from, and internalize, their adult-sanctioned messages. As a Tennessee woman born in 1961 told me, “I think in retrospect I wasn’t traumatized by the ’60s so much as I was traumatized by adults’ reaction to the ’60s!”⁵

The native practices of preadolescents encompass the unique folkways in which some children—commonly older brothers and sisters—attempted to socialize other children to sixties realities through slang, humor, insults, pranks, games, songs, superstitions, and legends. Take, as an example, a story from that same Tennessee woman, whose older sister incorporated parental polemics against hippies into their preadolescent folk culture, using a time-honored method that made perfect sense to them. When they even thought about it, the children considered hippies to be harmless folks who, for all their eccentricities, were mostly interested in fun. But with adults expressing a variety of serious misgivings about these slackers, particularly condemning their dope use, the children came to understand that whatever “dope” was, it had to be horrible, something you needed to stay far away from lest you end up like those damned hippies. So the older sister invented a make-believe “evil” character who did everything bad around their home. If a vase had broken or something went missing, he was behind it. The imaginary fiend’s name was Dope.⁶

The remaining component of my work is to consider the results and behaviors, or at least the implications, of the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapter One - Introduction
• Chapter Two - John F. Kennedy
• Chapter Three - Space Rockets and Cuban Missiles
• Chapter Four - The Assassination
• Chapter Five - LBJ and the Great Society
• Chapter Six - The Southern Struggle for Civil Rights
• Chapter Seven - The Vietnam War
• Chapter Eight - Hippies
• Chapter Nine - Women’s Liberation
• Chapter Ten - Conclusions
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index