The New Statesman
5 July 1968
In this 1968 article for the New Statesman, the highly respected veteran journalist James Cameron offered a unique analysis of the uprisings of that year: a tongue-in-cheek description of an imagined, middle-aged revolt against the cult of youth. His artful satire skewered not just the habits of his own generation and the student protests that inspired him to create this fictional uprising, but also the breathless media response to events of the previous May.Selected by Robert Taylor
For a long time after the event discerning people with a sense of history were trying to define and analyse the sudden phenomenon of unrest that erupted — spontaneously, it seemed — at a great variety of centres throughout the world. Abruptly one saw all values challenged, assumptions rejected, and for a while one could have felt the accepted attitudes of the great Youth Establishment itself were under siege. On all sides were heard the urgent voices protesting that for too long society had been dominated by the powerful and endlessly-renewable forces of youth, and somehow the yearnings of the mature minority briefly found a corporate voice. The strange and short-lived uprising became known as the Revolt of the Middle-Aged Men. Suddenly one saw a new phantom striving to make itself felt and appreciated throughout the civilised world: the phantom of middle-aged power.
As in 1968, when the coup des étudiants shook a score of communities and prepared the ground for the Teenage Takeover, so did each gallant middle-aged outbreak contain the seeds of another elsewhere, as the elderly activists drew strength from the brief successes of their peers. Thus it became clear how the spectacular Sit-In at the Athenaeum (practised so long in the past, but never with this revolutionary discipline) led directly to the great Rally of the Rentiers outside the Paris Bourse. Without the striking success of the White Minority demo in the long bar of the Johannesburg Rand Club, it is possible that there would not have been the moving March of the Men of Modest Means down Wall Street.
It was easy to deride these early manifestations of the pent-up and inexperienced emotions of the middle-aged. Groping and inchoate as they were, they argued that they had a right to be taken seriously, that the 50-year-olds were entitled to be heard, however disorganised their cry. All they demanded was that they should have a say in the conduct of their world, that they should at last raise their voices over the suffocating patronage of youth.
Odd they may have sometimes looked, with their farouche short hair and the eccentricities of their costume. Too much will always be made by one generation of the garish dress of another’s. To anyone sympathetic to the middle-aged need for some form of self-expression there was something almost appealing in the defiant gesture of those black jackets and bowler hats, the fancifully turned-up trousers, the picturesque plastic macs.
Some of us, not rooted in the reactionary values of the classroom, could understand and even admire the challenge of those weird garments, representing as they did the classic confrontation of hot-blooded middle-age, trapped in the sterile conventions of the flowered shirts and the puce pyjamas. Why - it was often demanded in those eager-eyed and stimulating little ad hoc gatherings in the bistros of Cheapside - should a man not shave his chin, if he feels it necessary for the expression of this personality? If our masters can demonstrate their mastery with the conventional strings of beads, can we not prove our individuality with our umbrellas? Should we not answer the guitars with the galoshes?
Even then, of course, it had to be recognised that the conflict of the generations was not a phenomenon wholly new. All parents have to free themselves from their children, though rarely had the process so vividly involved society as a whole. But, as Mr Toynbee mysteriously explained, the extent of the middle-aged revolt ‘involved one of those Marxist changes of quantity into quality rather than the mere intensification of a perennial phenomenon’. And, in amplification: ‘These battle-cries are pseudo-causal explanations in reality, partisan descriptions.’ It was characteristic of the times that this clarification left even the most earnest of the middle-aged activists wondering what the hell they were revolting about.
Yet those days had their own dreamlike inspiration. Who will forget those exhilarating processions down Pall Mall to the classic marching-songs from No No Nanette and The Desert Song? Those banners proclaiming "Down With Marcuse!" and "Is It a Crime To Be Bald?" and "In Praise of Older Gentlemen"? There was no point in "explaining" the uprising by arguing that the middle-aged had become more outrageous and irresponsible than the other middle-aged of previous generations. The entrenched establishment of youth has always argued thus: that parents were less uppish and demanding in their day.
Not all their arguments were the obvious emotional development of swinging middle-age; their complaint had a sound economic basis. Prestige and not welfare, they protested, had been the guiding principle of the dominant youth-classes - a cynical emphasis on medical services, housing subsidies, student grants and the like, while the more mundane and necessary reforms were neglected, such as taxi fares, golf-club subscriptions, new cars and the price of gin. More than anything it was the inequity of the system that drove the middle-aged into revolt in the first place - and which, of course, crushed them in the end.
It could be said, and was, that the middle-aged were themselves in some way to blame - they were divided amongst themselves, their demands were uncorrelated, their wind was too bad. For a while, however, beneath the down-to-earth squabbles over income-tax remissions and expense-account allowances, one saw a kind of desperate search by the leaderless hordes of the middle-aged for a more profound significance in their existing malaise, a protest against the manipulation of the breadwinners to fit the needs of the modern jugendpolitik.
As we now know, it came to nothing. The indomitable barricades of Belgrave Square fell, like the bastions of Jericho, before the cry: "What's in it for you, Dad?" By and by the militant bishops shambled out abashed from their Athenaeum Occupation, the Stock Exchange again rang with quotations for Beatle Bonds and Apple Equities; the rest was silence. As with one voice, every leading article in every one of the swiftly diminishing catalogue of newspapers concluded with the phrase: Things will never be the same again.
But of course they were.
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