Boomer Nostalgia or Boomer Idealism?
The origins of the song are somewhat obscure. Its lineage probably goes back to a hymn composed in 1900 by Charles Tundley, I’ll Overcome Someday, but it was published in a hymnal in 1947 as We Shall Overcome. Within the next decade it began to be used regularly in the growing civil rights movement, recorded by Pete Seeger in 1963, and in that same year was sung by Joan Baez in Washington D.C. with 300,000 people joining her as they gathered between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. What happened and what was said there still inspire us over sixty years later.
A quick review of other songs being sung in the early 1960’s convey not just an energy and a desire for change, but a preoccupation with righting wrongs, seeking justice, and establishing peace. Go listen to Blowing’ in the Wind, If I Had a Hammer, The Times They Are A-Changin’, Where Have All the Flowers Gone? and other songs of the early ‘60’s. These songs accompanied a major cultural shift happening in the country ushered in by the election of a young president who declared, “The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans …” and further, “Now the trumpet summons us again--not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need--not as a call to battle, though embattled we are-- but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"--a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.”
Those were heady times indeed. And the idealism that set the 1960’s spinning did not die with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. A very different president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, picked up that torch and engineered the passage of some of the most significant legislation of the twentieth century: the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the programs of the Great Society that were the weapons of the War on Poverty. Johnson was not a great public speaker like Kennedy, but what he said was equally inspiring: "Let us close the springs of racial poison. Let us pray for wise and understanding hearts. let us lay aside irrelevant differences and make our Nation whole. Let us hasten the day when our unmeasured strength and our unbounded spirit will be free to do the great works ordained for this Nation by the just and wise God who is the Father of us all."
The great hopes of the early sixties were tested by the growing conflict in Vietnam, the racial violence in major cities across the country, and the rising consciousness of the women’s and gay rights movements. The protests that marked the late 1960’s and early 70’s were the angry children of the idealism of the early ‘60’s. The tone and content of the music changed at the same time. The group Chicago plaintively asked in 1969, “Where do we go from here?” In 1971 Graham Nash recalled the protests that surrounded the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago in a song using the name of that city as its title and invited people to come witness and protest the trial of the Chicago Seven by reminding his listeners that “We can change the world, rearrange the world; It’s dying to get better.” That same year, the group Ten Years After actually released a song entitled, I’d Love To Change the World. However, in these years despair was crowding hope and desperation was quieting optimism.
It is difficult to discern exactly what deflated the Boomers’ idealism in the years that followed leading to the present day. The murder of respected leaders? The cynicism sprung from Watergate? The everyday burdens of earning a living and raising families? The power struggles generated by competing interest groups that replaced alliances and compromise? The exposure of political leaders’ inadequacies due to 24/7 news and unquenchable social media? Whatever the causes, the aspirations of Boomers coming of age in the early ‘60’s seem like so many fairy tales when viewed through the lens of 2026 American public life. In the face of forces far more powerful than any generation’s wish list, poverty, divisions, and war persist.
My memory of those “fairly tale years” was awakened by reading a book by Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s. Doris Kearns Goodwin was married to Richard Goodwin who was a speech writer and policy maker for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson. The material of the book was harvested from a huge library of notes, memoranda, speeches, policy papers, legislation, and personal memories of those years.
As I read the book, I could not help but be struck by the glaring contrast between the public spirit of those years and what characterizes our civic life today when the aspirations of most politicians and their camps are limited to defeating their rivals and hoarding as much power as possible. No more talk of shared goals or the common good. No more appeals to values that transcend the motivations of interest groups. No more debates that, though heated, yield compromise. No more “us”, only “us against them”. Instead, we have local and national administrations catering to powerful entities at the expense of others. We have national virtues stripped down to political talk full of sloganeering employed to gin up party bases. We have speech that demonizes, divides, derides, and destroys. We have a ship of state that only has room for passengers who agree with each other.
Some boomers have been pushed too far by this state of affairs. I have seen them at “No Kings” marches. I have seen them praying outside immigrant detention centers. In the crowds of grey heads, I search for a younger presence, but it is hard to find. Are boomers just being nostalgic, longing for the years of their lives when everything seemed possible? Or is their rekindled activism a sign that the faint voice of idealism is being heard once again?
I am hoping it is the latter. I am hoping that there is a renewed desire to engage in the “struggle against the common enemies of humanity: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.” This struggle and the righting of wrongs, the seeking of justice, and establishing peace are trans-generational undertakings. Maybe the example of the elders will lead the next generations to take up the cause and make slow but meaningful progress.