“If I can remember it, it ain’t history.”
One of my professors told me that in 1963 when I was a history graduate student working on a dissertation on the New Deal era. I don’t think he meant it literally; history is about the present and future, not just the past. But now that I am much older than he was then, I think I get his point. History and memory are related, but different, and too much memory is bad for historians.
Like our memory, helpful history may bend the truth to make it usable, and the closer it is to the present, the more people there are who have their own memories, their own stories—people who may regard our history as unhelpful, untrue or both. In the spirit of that professor long ago, I sometimes told my own students that, paraphrasing something Elizabethan courtier Sir Walter Raleigh purportedly said: “He who follows history too close at its heels is bound to get kicked in the teeth.”
And so it is with me and, I suspect, many of my generation. Public events take place today in 2024 that are eerily comparable to situations in another critical year: 1968.
Remembering 1968
When there are student demonstrations and encampments on campuses, I recall the takeovers of university buildings I observed and helped respond to a half century or more ago. When peacemaking friends advocate cease-fires in Palestine or Ukraine, a step many of us demanded for the Vietnam War in 1968, I recall some that worked (as in Ireland and South Africa) and some that did not (in Central America, Columbia and the Middle East). When the United States made a painful mess of its withdrawal from Afghanistan, I recalled another war when we stayed too long after knowing we could not win.
So too today, in 2024, events make many of my generation remember 1968. War was raging in Vietnam. The Tet offensive in February indicated it was being lost, and news and photos of atrocities raised unfamiliar moral questions. On this and closer-to-home questions about race, poverty and violence, our country was deeply divided. A popular and effective president, Lyndon Johnson, had become unpopular and withdrew from his campaign for re-election. Weeks later Martin Luther King Jr. was taken from us. Violence broke out in many cities. Soon after, we lost Robert Kennedy.
American athletes gave a Black Power salute at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City. In August, police brutally attacked demonstrators in Chicago as Democrats nominated Hubert Humphrey as their presidential candidate. The vice president had supported President Johnson’s wartime policies and, because of Johnson’s unexpected decision to drop out of presidential contention, he had not run in any primaries.
Segregationist Governor George Wallace ran a strong third party campaign, stirring passions across the country and eventually carrying the electoral votes of five southern states. Republican Richard Nixon had a “southern strategy” to break up the long Democratic hold on the region, while also aiming for what he called the “silent majority,” people upset with civil rights agitation, anti-war protests, crime and urban riots.
After Chicago, many voters who were anti-war and committed to social justice, disgusted with the Democratic Party’s conduct, said they could not vote for Humphrey. In the end, many came back. As we enter the final months of another campaign, with a stalled war in Ukraine and prospect of a wider war in the Middle East, we might recall how unwinnable wars seem to help the opposition party. In 1968, the popular vote was very close (43.4 percent to 42.7 percent), but Nixon was elected.
To be fair, Nixon’s four-year leadership of continued war in Vietnam and the subsequent exposure of his disgraceful and illegal political conduct had not yet happened. We—most people I knew—thought he and legislative candidates from his party were wrong on the issues, but they were responsible and experienced public officials who could be entrusted with power. My memories, like the memories of Ms. Kearns and Mr. Goodwin, reveal traces of a long-standing American innocence. That innocence is much harder to find in the America of 2024.
The Catholic moment
1968 was hugely important for our country. 1968 was also a crucial year for American Catholics. In the wake of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), change was everywhere: English was replacing Latin in worship, and lay people were invited to share responsibility with once-all-powerful pastors for their parishes and schools. Even more surprising, bishops, priests and sisters were calling for solidarity with African American demands for equal justice while launching their own “war on poverty” inspired by encounters with injustice in urban neighborhoods, rural Appalachia and mega-farms from Florida to California.
They were not alone. Bishops in Latin America, meeting that August in Medellin, Colombia, announced their decision to emphasize a “preferential option for the poor” based on a pastoral theology of liberation.
In the United States, church leaders were uncertain about Vietnam, allowing that U.S. policy in Southeast Asia could be justified, but (and this was new) making clear that decisions about war and military service were matters of personal conscience. Events in 1968 inserted those open questions about the morality of war into personal and community deliberations, particularly with the draft still in place.
Consciences were also stirred around questions of love and human sexuality. For a few years during and after Vatican II, married couples thought that they would soon be free to make their own conscientious decisions about birth control. But in July, 1968, Pope Paul VI declared in “Humanae Vitae” that the use of any form of “artificial” birth control was sinful. That decision was resisted, then ignored, by most Catholics and many priests, starting a process of division over these matters that is well advanced now in 2024.
And all this was happening during the American moment known as “the Sixties”: In 1968, priests and nuns marched with African Americans into heavily Catholic neighborhoods, and in May, in Catonsville, Md., a group of Catholics led by Josephite priest Phil Berrigan and his brother Dan, a Jesuit, seized draft records, burned them in an almost liturgical ceremony, then awaited arrest. A Catholic peace movement also drew national attention as some young Catholic men requested recognition as conscientious objectors; some burned their draft cards, and a few were sent to prison.
Catholics had been overwhelmingly Democrats since the New Deal, but in 1968 that solid voting bloc began to crack. Wallace won some early support in northern cities, and Nixon reached out to Catholic voters and courted bishops. The majority of Catholics in November of 1968 voted for Humphrey, but the traditional bond between the Democratic Party and ethnic, working-class Catholics had weakened; meanwhile, their increasingly middle-class and suburban descendants were asking new questions about their shared public responsibilities, well before abortion became a national political issue in 1973.
Can we learn from our history?
So what of 1968? And what of us? In U.S. society and in the American church, history was turning in 1968. Like those of the Goodwin couple, my memories were tuned into what later seemed like the losing side. For many of us, John F. Kennedy’s call in 1961 to ask what you could do for your country, Martin Luther King Jr.’s summons in 1963 to engage and overcome racism and the realization by 1968 that we shared responsibility for the war in Vietnam were personal as well as public challenges.
Some among us responded heroically, in small southern towns and tough urban neighborhoods. The historian Gary Wills insisted that these years were the “age of King.” Many served with equal courage in the jungles of Indochina, a few in alternative service or even jails back home after refusing military service. More of us participated in less personally costly marches and rallies.
Now, in 2024, we know it did not all work out as well as we had hoped. The Vietnam War continued for over four more years, more brutal than ever. Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign failed. Societal divisions became deeper. Federal officials lost their ability—or willingness—to address the serious questions of violence and injustice raised in the 1960s. Segregation and racism and the nation’s disgraceful poverty persisted. Now in 2024, the American experiment in self-government has reached a moment of genuine crisis.
The seriousness of the present time is obvious when we imagine the day after the 1968 election, when hope still burned bright, and compare it to the coming morning after the 2024 presidential election next November, whoever wins. After a bitter fall campaign, how will any of us, Republican or Democrat or independent, feel about the results? Will the new president be seen as legitimate? Will Congress be able to address the enormous problems facing the country, the human family and our common home? And will we as citizens accept any longer the shared responsibilities required by self-government? Do our memories help? Can we learn from our history?
What really matters
There are three things we can learn from what happened in 1968. But these are suggestions, not certainties, knowing now in 2024 that in democratic self-government, insisting on being right and lacking all doubt remain formulas for polarization and paralysis.
First, politics matters. It mattered who was at the table when decisions were made about civil rights legislation, about the move from advising to combat in Vietnam, about selecting candidates and soliciting votes in the spring, summer and fall of 1968. Faithful citizenship, and its absence, mattered. It still does.
For Christians, faith often—perhaps too often—appraises politics and finds it unworthy at best. There was a lot of that in 1968. But in democratic self-government, politics measures and assesses religion, and looking back, religion did not do so well. Christians tended to blame other Americans and their secularism for public problems, as if they were not here when those problems festered. In fact, in free societies, most of the things that Christian churches speak of as public goods—like human dignity, social justice, peace or human liberation from suffering and oppression—require good citizenship and good government, and the practice of politics is the way that determines outcomes on such matters.
If we decide that how America turns out truly matters, there is no retreat from politics.
Second, solidarity matters. In the 1960s, we talked a lot about rights: civil rights for those long excluded by violent and velvet racisms; equal rights for women, long left out of our memories of history and our strategies for making history; rights for young people, long told to postpone their acceptance of responsibility; rights for, options for, the poor everywhere. Liberation was the name of most games.
For many Americans in the 1960s, our “rights talk” was habitual, and sometimes but not always admirable. Immigrant Catholic families, mostly white, experienced genuine liberation in the post-Vatican II years, and, encouraged by that council and their own pastors, many joined movements for civil rights and social justice. Unfortunately, we were good at movements, not so good at organizing for power. We missed a big part of Dr. King’s message—that the dream, the “beloved community,” is about everybody.
That is what drew him from marches and protests to courtrooms and government offices and to the sometimes discouraging work of organizing. In 2024, Pope Francis keeps telling us about the importance of encounter with one another; he also reminds us that we are one family living in a common home and sharing responsibility with one another for how history turns out. We Americans are almost programmed for personalism, aspiring to individual authenticity—and on that score the Sixties turned out pretty good for many, but not most, people. On common goods and shared responsibilities, we do less well, not just in government but at work and at school, in marketplaces and at church. Helping each other find ways to practice solidarity, organizing and negotiating, as we try to promote human dignity, is an agenda left behind by memories of 1968.
Finally, civil religion matters. One of my mentors in the Sixties told me that free societies can only work if their citizens love them. Love of country informed my experience at the University of Notre Dame (class of 1960), and it was all around us in the 60’s. But I was also waking up to my country’s shortcomings on questions of race, war and inequality. I began using historical research and teaching to share with students and my fellow American Catholics stories about our shared history that would help us better realize the many promises of American life that were going unkept.
What I missed at the time was the prophetic voice of Dr. King and so many other African American leaders who lived as well as talked about faith, hope and love. Faith in the promise of liberty and justice for all, hope that together we could live toward “the beloved community” and love as the key to social as well as personal relationships. For King and, at the time, younger civil rights leaders like the late politician John Lewis, love was and is the best way to make a little history, not only in our own vocations but in the shared public work required by our times.
Our current situation, like 1968, is a moment when that kind of faith can make a difference in history and in our own memories. Drawing on such memories, let us try to make some history.
