(4 of 10)
In the '50s. "coolness" became emblematic of national life. Jack and Jackie Kennedy caused a brief romantic thaw in 1960, but assassination glazed open displays of feelings. In the middle and latter '60s, romanticism became "camp." Old movies were appreciated because the emotion was behind glass, and confined to a 20-inch screen. On that scale, a kid could safely dig Bogart's telling Sam to play As Time Goes By without being accused of emotionalism. Sentiment, no matter how florid, was permissible if it was ancient: westerns, turn-of-the-century valentines, revivals of theater period pieces like The Front Page or Harvey (preferably with period stars like James Stewart and Helen Hayes). Novels could be as old-fashioned as Silas Marner, provided that they shared the joke with the readers, as did John Fowles in The French Lieutenant's Woman.
Feeling, Not Action
Only in popular music did the romantic strain run unabashed. In Milt Okun's Great Songs of the Sixties, almost every number exerts a romantic appeal. To be sure, there are no moony love numbers. But there are long glances at the rear-view mirror (Yesterday; It Was a Very Good Year; Those Were the Days; Try to Remember), hymns to individuality in a societal crush (Little Boxes; We Shall Overcome; The Times They Are A-Changin'), and—most surprisingly in a secular era—a strong, if unspecific theology: Bridge Over Troubled Water; The Weight; Turn! Turn! Turn!. It continues to the present with Bob Dylan's New Morning.
Feelings, in short, could be sung but not said. Not in public. Not on campus. Surely not in a contemporary book or a film. Herman Hesse, yes; he was safely Nobel-prized—and safely dead. But Love Story?
The success would have been as unthinkable during the rages and outrages of 1969 as it seems inevitable in 1971. "The mood today," says Dr. Ernest Van Den Haag, a New York University social philosopher, "particularly on campus, is toward personal relationships rather than politics, love rather than sex, feeling rather than action. Not by accident does this mood coincide with the Nixon era. We've had two Presidents with activist images; they didn't solve our problems. Now the era of causes is practically over. Two years ago, we had a great number of mass actions: peace marches, college demonstrations, etc. They weren't successful. Today we're entering an era not of radical advances, but of consolidation. We're turning inside rather than outside."
The American public, suffering through assassinations, war, technocracy, revolt and recession, had eventually to suffer metal fatigue. "Systems die, instincts remain" observed Oliver Wendell Holmes. Unable and unwilling to rely on institutions or revolution, the U.S. has fallen back on pure feeling. The reaction is ominously reminiscent of the '30s and '40s, an epoch beyond the memory of the young—who nonetheless repeat its rhythms.
If it all heralds moral exhaustion, an inability to care, then the new romanticism