Talking with Alex Bloom
History Professor Alex Bloom is well known for his expertise on 20th-century American intellectual and cultural life and, in particular, on the 1960s. He has several books and papers to his credit, among them Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World, a work that won a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Bloom recently spoke to interviewer Nancy Bianchi Norton '78 about his latest projects, his interest in the 1960s and what we might expect from him in the future.
Tell me about your new book.
It's called For What It's Worth: Looking Back at '60s America. Oxford University Press is my publisher, as they have been on my last two books. They're starting a new series called "Viewpoints in American Culture" and they asked me to edit the one on the 1960s. The idea is to have a set of original essays written for the book around a single topic.
Did you write any of the essays?
Yes. I co-wrote the essay on Vietnam.
What's the anthology about? What's included?
Oxford's idea about this series was that they wanted to mix established and younger scholars. My idea was to add several people who had more personal connections. I came up with a list of areas I wanted covered and my first choices for each area. I assumed some of them would turn me down. But only one person did.
So, for example, the woman doing the chapter on the women's movement, Sara Evans, is one of the leading women's historians. John D'Emilio, who is doing the chapter on gay rights, is probably the outstanding historian of the gay rights movement.
But I also brought in a couple of people who had a more personal perspective, who were more personally involved. Julian Bond, the former civil rights activist who now heads up the NAACP, is writing the chapter on the civil rights movement. An old friend of mine, somebody I knew when I was a kid, Barry Melton, was the lead guitarist with the '60s rock band Country Joe and The Fish. He's now a lawyer in California and is writing one of the two counterculture chapters. And then Tom Wicker, who as Washington bureau chief of the New York Times and covered the Johnson and Nixon White Houses, is writing the chapter on politics.
When is it due to come out?
It will be out next spring.
I understand you are also working in something else, a manuscript you call "The End of the Tunnel." What is that about?
That's a larger project. In fact, it connects to my essay in For What It's Worth. A friend who is a Vietnam War scholar wrote the first part of the essay, which is about the war, while my part of the essay is how Vietnam has shaped American life since 1975. It's a kind of brief summary of what this next book will be about it.
That book will begin in 1975 with the fall of Saigon and come up to the present. I initially thought it would end in 1995 with the publication of Robert McNamara's memoirs. Now I'm thinking that maybe it should end with the 25-year anniversary remembrances and, perhaps, with the McCain campaign. The book covers a lot of different stuff - politics, culture, movies, music, literature...
How long have you been working on it?
I started thinking about it four or five years ago. I've been doing research for it, but I was also finishing Takin' It To The Streets: A Sixties Reader when this other '60s book came along. So I've piled up a lot of research. Some of it I've used in talks and presentations, plus the chapter in For What It's Worth. So I've been thinking about it for a while. I plan to work on it when I go on sabbatical in the fall. That and a second edition of Takin' It To the Streets are what I plan to work on while I'm on leave.
What made you decide to write it?
In former Secretary of Defense McNamara's memoirs, he essentially said that the U.S. didn't have a clue about how to fight the war in Vietnam, something he never said at the time. In 1995, when the memoir was published, he was traveling around the country giving talks and people would show up and scream at him when it was time for questions. These weren't anti-war people, but many whom had been pro-war. They would berate him, asking "How dare the government send my son, my father, my brother off to fight and die without a plan?" That made me realize that Vietnam is like an open wound. The Vietnam experience is alive in the culture 25 years after it was over. It's not alive like that in Vietnam now; it's history there. They talk about it, they have memorials to it, but they're done with it. We're not done with it.
Is it because we lost?
It's because we lost, it's because of the way we lost, because of what was revealed, because we were lied to, because we supposedly went there for these idealistic reasons that were revealed to be less than idealistic. There are a million reasons.
Do you view Vietman as one of the country's biggest mistakes of the 20th century?
I think it is. I think it's a scar across the century. And then when you compound it with Watergate, which had a Vietnam connection, those two things turned Americans cynical and we are still living with that sense.
The Civil War was like that. It lived on in the culture for years after it ended and it wasn't until the early part of the 20th century, when all of the Civil War veterans finally died, that it faded.
How long will it take for Vietnam to be over for this country?
I think when the generation that fought it and fought against it dies - and they're not likely to die for a while - it will end. It's still very much alive. We keep trying to get over what the experts have come to call "the Vietnam Syndrome." We thought the Gulf War would get us over it. We sent troops to Kuwait, won with only a few casualties, gave the veterans parades and support when they returned home. Bush and others declared that Vietnam was now behind. But nothing changed. Vietnam is still in the American consciousness.
That's what prompted me to do this book - because, I thought, it's just not going away. All our attempts to deal with it have only made it more complicated. For instance, consider how we treated the Vietnam Vets in the '70s. They were ignored or blamed for fighting and losing the war or stereotyped as whackos or malcontents. Then they were lauded and memorialized in the early 1980s. So we came to hate the war but love the vets. That's kind of paradoxical in itself. We don't like what we sent them to do but we now ennoble them as a way to make us feel better about the experience. We just keep trying in all kinds of different ways to get over Vietnam. We've even tried it in the movies. In the '80s the movies turned so heroic. The movies of the '70s - like "Coming Home" and "Apocalypse Now" were replaced with movies where we sent Rambo and Chuck Norris back to Vietnam to win. The '80s movies are all about individual moments of heroism, or as Rambo says, "doing the job right this time."
The '60s and the '70s put Americans near the boiling point. Do you think the times did any good for society?
I honestly think they did. To be cynical is not necessarily bad. I mean, not taking what the government says at face value can be good. It brings with it a sense of realism. I don't think being cynical and analytic and even in some sense untrusting is necessarily bad. It just makes us be less optimistic a people.
Why do you think so many young people are drawn to the '60s? Is there a message somewhere in that?
I think it's part of the idea, without it being explicitly stated, that it was better to be young in the '60s than it is now. That is never fully articulated because it would turn them off. There's a desire for the kind of community that grew up around young people of that era.
What I think has happened, however, is that the '60s have been split into different memory areas. The cultural things are off by themselves: Woodstock, the hippies, rock 'n roll... In that memory area there's nothing about the draft, Vietnam, violence in the streets and the more tumultuous side. That's a different memory area. At the time, though, they were all totally integrated. Our '60s nostalgia has disconnected them.
It was such a volatile time in history. Is it a cyclical sort of societal behavior? Can historians possibly predict when something similar might occur?
Well, yes and no. History never repeats itself despite people who say it does. Things never come the same way again. I think that what people can identify is that there is a kind of waxing and waning - or coming and going - around kinds of activity. People are sometimes more socially active than at other times. The motivations are usually very different.
Your interests have so many facets. What brought you to teaching?
I grew up on the West Coast and came from teachers. Both my mother and father were public school teachers. My mother taught elementary school and my father taught high school. I was always interested in teaching and even taught for a while on the West Coast and at North Attleboro (Mass.) High School. But I realized I didn't want to continue with that type of teaching because even though I really liked teaching kids, I liked being involved in the study of history too much.
Have the '60s and '70s always been your primary areas of interest?
Actually, no. My focus in graduate school and for years after was actually the '30s, '40s and '50s. I'm trained as an intellectual historian, which means studying ideas and the way people evaluate their worlds. The first book I wrote, which came out of my Ph.D. dissertation, was about a group of well-known writers and critics, The New York Intellectuals, who banded together in New York in the 1930s. They were very politically focused and they emerged into prominence in the 1950s. So it was a book covering the intellectual and cultural life from the '30s through the '50s, with the last sections following their dispersal in the '60s and '70s. Since my initial interests were around the '30s and '50s, I had envisioned a subsequent project along those lines. But then these '60s books popped up.
Is there another side to Alex Bloom? Do you have any interests that keep you going outside of academia?
Oh, sure, there are lots of things! Teaching and scholarship are only one part of me, of what I do. I used to love to play basketball, but I hung up my shoes about two years ago. I looked around at this pickup game one day and thought "Gee, I'm the oldest person here by a longshot!" So I've taken up golf. It's good for teaching patience. I also hang out with my kids a lot. All three of us play guitar...although, not always together!
What's your favorite kind of music?
Rock n' roll, of course. Our house is filled with electric guitars. Sometimes it's my therapy. You know, Keith Richards once said that if you have a guitar you're never bored.
Any other hobbies?
I also like to cook, bike ride and do photography. In college I worked as a photographer and once thought of photojournalism as a potential career.
Do you have a favorite dish?
Well, we're just changing seasons now and it's heading into grill season. Being from California, I'm a big believer in grills.
Gas or charcoal?
Charcoal. I'm a purist.
Favorite recipe?
Not really. It varies, actually. For the past six months I've been really into East-West fusion cooking.
How about a favorite food?
It sort of moves around whatever I'm interested in at the moment. For a time it was Mediterranean influenced things, then it was Southwestern. Now it's the Euro-Asian focus. By next year it will probably be something new.
So how do you rate Wheaton's food?
For institutional food it's not bad at all. It's actually pretty decent, I think.
What's up for you for the long term? Do you have any plans?
Personally, I want to travel more, especially because my children are older and I am more flexible. Professionally, I think I'm done with the '60s. This Vietnam book is really a kind of '70s and '80s project. After that I don't really know. I've stopped predicting. When you're working on something you always seem to get these great ideas and say to yourself, "Oh, I should do a book on that." I think someone has to do something about the Clinton years; they are more complex than we think. But maybe that just sounds like a good idea right now because I am working on something else.