Word: dissent
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...TIME'S editors decided-as did a number of readers-that the events of 1969 transcended specific individuals. In a time of dissent and "confrontation," the most striking new factor was the emergence of the so-called "Silent Majority" as a powerfully assertive force in U.S. society. Mr. and Mrs. Middle America are the ones who sent President Nixon to the White House and the astronauts to the moon, who feel most threatened by the attacks on traditional values, who, as TIME says, "shaped the course of legislation, and thus began to shape the course of the nation...
...Supreme Court had forbidden it, but they prayed defiantly in a school in Netcong, N.J., reading the morning invocation from the Congressional Record. In the state legislatures, they introduced more than 100 Draconian bills to put down campus dissent. In West Virginia, they passed a law absolving police in advance of guilt in any riot deaths. In Minneapolis they elected a police detective to be mayor. Everywhere, they flew the colors of assertive patriotism. Their car windows were plastered with American-flag decals, their ideological totems. In the bumper-sticker dialogue of the freeways, they answered MAKE LOVE...
...taking over ?the liberals, the radicals, the defiant young, a communications industry that they often believed was lying to them. The Saturday Evening Post folded, but the older world of Norman Rockwell icons was long gone anyway. No one celebrated them; intellectuals dismissed their lore as banality. Pornography, dissent and drugs seemed to wash over them in waves, bearing some of their children away...
...culture no longer seems to supply many heroes, but Middle Americans admire men like Neil Armstrong and, to some extent, Spiro Agnew. California Governor Ronald Reagan and San Francisco State College President S. I. Hayakawa have won approval for their hard line on dissent. Before his death last year, Dwight Eisenhower was listed as the most admired man in the nation ?and Middle America cast much of the vote. In death, John Kennedy is also a hero. Ironically, Robert Kennedy had the allegiance of much of Middle America along with his constituency of blacks and the young. Whatever their...
...unquestionably calmer than it was in 1968, which seemed to be the violent crescendo of the '60s. A new Administration given to understatement?on the part of the President if not the Vice President?soothed the national psyche. When Spiro Agnew erupted against television and newspaper commentators and against dissent's "effete corps of impudent snobs," Middle America was further comforted?and also aroused to an intimation of its own potential strength. The flights of Apollo 11 and 12 were a quintessential adventure of American technology and daring; the "triumph of the squares" is what Eric Hoffer, the forklift philosopher...