2At the start of World War II, members of the first community believed that the political stance of a nation reflected the psychological condition of its people. That is, fascist Germany represented the triumph not only of Hitler's party, but of what would later be called the "authoritarian personality." In 1941, more than fifty of America's leading social scientists and journalists gathered in Manhattan to promulgate a democratic alternative to that personality as members of the newly formed Committee for National Morale. Though largely forgotten today, the committee was very influential in its time. Its members published widely in the popular press and advised numerous government officials including President Roosevelt.
5 Explore the rise of "managerial control."When analysts at the time compared the surround to the one-to-many dynamics of mass media and of fascism, many found it to be enormously liberating. Even so, from the distance of our own time, the surround clearly represented the rise of a managerial mode of a control: a mode in which people might be free to choose their own experiences, but only from a menu written by experts.
16Now analysts worried that mass media drew individual citizens into protofascistic relationships with the centers of political and commercial power and with one another. In the one-to-many communication pattern of mass media they saw a model of political dictatorship. In mass media audiences, they saw the shadows of the German masses turning their collective eyes toward a single podium and a single leader. To enter such a relationship with media, many worried, was to rehearse the psychology of fascism.
37In perhaps the most widely circulated contemporary response to the panic, nationally syndicated columnist Dorothy Thompson argued that the War of the Worlds broadcast had proven "how easy it is to start a mass delusion." Its producers, she explained, "have uncovered the primeval fears lying under the thinnest surface of the so-called civilized man." According to Thompson, the radio broadcast had circumvented and thus subverted the reason of listeners. It had triggered their deepest fears. And it had left them crazed for some sort of salvation by those in authority. By revealing this process, she argued, "Mr. Orson Welles and his theater have made a greater contribution to an understanding of Hitlerism, Mussolinism, Stanlism, anti-Semitism and all the other terrorisms of our times than all the words about them that have been written by reasonable men.
39 Good context for the WWII section of the brainstorming paper.As America edged closer to World War II, the fear that mass media could make mass men forced intellectuals and policy makers to confront two questions: First, how could they convince democratic Americans to go to war without turning them into the sort of unthinking authoritarians they would be trying to defeat? And second, what kinds of media could they use to do it? These questions in turn raised the question of national character.
41One of the most influential of these was the Committee for National Morale. Founded in the summer of 1940 by Arthur Upham Pope, a Manhattan-based curator of Persian art, the committee gathered many of the era's leading psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and journalists into a single organization. Members included journalists Edmond Taylor and Ladislas Farago, psychologists Gordon Allport and Kurt Lewin, and anthropologists Ruth Benedict, Gregory Bateson, and Margaret Mead, among more than sixty others.
42In a 1941 article, Arthur Upham Pope articulated the consensus view when he wrote, "High morale shows itself by enthusiasm, confidence, teamwork, endurance....In essence morale is a state produced by a clearly envisaged value of such commanding power and authority that it evokes all the capacities of a man or a group, fusing them into an intense and durable emotional and ideational unity that increases, sustains, and organizes all effort." AT an everyday level, this sort of formulation must have been quite appealing to Americans working their way out of the Great Depression. The vision of a nation united behind a single optimistic purpose presented a glowing alternative to the fact of ongoing labor and racial strife. But to ears tuned to the threat of totalitarianism, visions of a force that might melt the nation into a single mass must have been frightening as well. Pope acknowledged as much later in his essay when hew rote, "Above all, it must be remembered that...morale is not something to be imposed by a central organization, but something that demands the initiative and response of the people in every time of activity and grouping." In other words, propagandists needed to be careful not to make Americans too obedient. Only with the active engagement of the people could American leaders knit together a "resilient fabric of morale that represents the whole character of the whole nation and involves the total personality of each citizen."
44Perhaps for that reason, Farago aimed to distinguish fascist from democratic unity in terms of its effect on the psyche of the individual. The Nazi type of morale resulted in "conformity" but not in an "inner strength" that might outlive the regime itself, he argued. Nazi morale might have looked like the sort of national unity that Americans needed, but it wasn't: it was too brittle.
44 The "whole" personality becomes a central preoccupation of American and democratic moraleGordon Allport grounded his critique of Nazi morale even more thoroughly in its relationship to personality. In the early years of World War II, Allport was one of the most visible analysts of morale. He compiled bibliographies on the subject, ran a seminar on morale at Harvard, and wrote numerous essays on the theme. In a 1942 volume edited by a fellow member of the Committee for National Morale, he summed up many of his views in an essay entitled "The Nature of Democratic Morale." "In a democracy," he wrote, "every personality can be a citadel of resistance to tyranny. In the co-ordination of the intelligences and wills of one hundred million 'whole' men and women lies the formula for an invincible American morale.
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A person with democratic morale could fuse emotion and intellect into a powerful form of principle-driven agency. But Allport's democratic morale also pointed to ward the concerns with personal fulfillment that would come to dominate both humanistic psychology and the American counterculture of the 1960s. To boost American morale was to help make individual personalities "whole" and "integrated" in Allport's terms. Only a coalition of such whole people, linked in voluntary cooperation and not managed from above, could sustain American democracy in the face of the fascist threat.
47To understand the appeal of their prescriptions early in the war and their power in the decades after it, we need to first explore what the psychologists associated with the Committee and with Mead and Bateson meant by "personality," and especially by its democratic variant. In the early years of World War II, the notion of "personality" was still relatively young. In the later decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth, intellectuals talked more often of "character"--that is, of the notion of what Emerson called the "moral order seen through the medium of individual nature."
48Allport preoccupied himself with a question that had also engaged nineteenth0century theorists of character: How did an individual achieve autonomy, in a given moment and over a lifetime? His 1937 definition of personality provided an answer to that question. "Personality," he wrote, "is a dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine his unique adjustments to his environment." To Americans today, the word "adjustment" may smack of psychology's role in enforcing Cold War conformity. But in 1937, Allport's definition of the self allowed the individual to emerge as a creative being.
57Though they disagreed somewhat on the mechanics of the process, they agreed that culture shaped personality, that childhood represented a particularly influential period for that work, and that the patterns of personality in a culture shaped its institutions, its development over time, and the forms of mental illness its citizens endured.
58Maslow's vision of the democratic personality would echo down across the 1950s and well into the 1960s. So too would his focus on the importance of perception in shaping social relations. But at the start of World War II, tolerance was only one element of the kind of psyche that could stand in opposition to the Nazis. Under Hitler the Germans appeared to have become blindly obedient machines. The democratic personality, by contrast, would be an organic whole, independent and creative. Erich Fromm put this view succinctly, if abstractly, in his 1941 bestseller Escape from Freedom. In the modern world, he explained, individuals found themselves freed from the strictures of church and village that had constrained the individual in the pre-industrial era. This freedom, however, bewildered many and caused them to seek shelter under the powerful wing of authoritarian leaders.
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Fromm believed that it was the role of the state to facilitate individual self-realization and the forms of political unity it sustained. The Nazis had become automata in large part because of hierarchical structure of their society. The authoritarian personalities of wartime Germany reflected the authoritarian structures of fascist society and, behind that, the authoritarian socialization practices of German culture. The American state would need to create structural conditions that could simultaneously sustain the individuality of its citizens and their power to act collectively toward the common good. Fromm did not advocate that the state abandon its authority. Rather, he argued that it should use its power to plan an economic system in which citizens could "share responsibility and use creative intelligence." The key, he wrote, was to avoid the rigid hierarchies of fascism. A democracy must aim to blend planning from above with the "active participation" of its citizens."
60By 1941 a broad consensus had emerged: a democratic personality was psychologically whole and able to make rational, independent choices. It acted spontaneously, it changed in response to life circumstances, and it recognized and accepted cultural and racial differences. It also required a different form of government: not rule from above, but the creation of structures within which individuals could act independently for the common good, from below.
In 1942 Margaret Mead took up this vision, fused it with the political ideals embodied in her own work, and presented it to the American public as a definition of their national character. In her widely read book And Keep Your Powder Dry..., Mead argued that the Nazis had brought forth a new and total kind of warfare. As German Panzers rolled across Europe they attacked civilians and soldiers alike. So too did the fascist propaganda apparatus. Under these conditions, the cultural personality of the American people took on a new importance. "The strengths and weaknesses of the American character," she wrote, are "the psychological equipment with which we can win the war."
65Bateson and Mead nevertheless strongly supported government promotion of American morale. Like Fromm, they sought to balance the need to produce spontaneous, creative individuals with the political imperative of taking concerted national action against fascism. And like Fromm, they suggested that the state could best strike this balance with a mode of communication oriented toward setting a stage for action. If propaganda was a system of messages sent down from above and aimed at shattering the psyche, then the system Mead and Bateson sought was its opposite. "The essential thing," they wrote, "is that this central [state] agency [for morale building] shall not see itself as 'manipulating people.' The moment the central agency begins... to see itself as a manipulator of puppets, propaganda becomes inevitable. The only way to avoid this result is to organize the whole system so that the central agency is firmly oriented toward discovering, encouraging, and servicing the local initiative."
67To transform individuals into the spontaneous actors of democratic personality theory meant to transform the communicative settings in which they lived. For examples on how to do this, researchers could look to foreign cultures that had succeeded in inculcating democratic habits. Or they could turn to the laboratory. As Bateson put it, "We may be able to get a more definite--more operational--definition of such habits as 'free-will' if we ask about each, 'What sort of experimental learning context would we devise in order to inculcate this habit?' 'How would we rig the maze or problem-box so that the anthropomorphic rat shall obtain a repeated and reinforced impression of his own free-will?
74By 1943 Mead and Bateson were part of an enormous wartime transfusion of social scientists into the business of analyzing and making propaganda. Yet they sought not so much to influence the attitudes of citizens by delivering pro-American messages as to build symbolic environments in which Americans could make meanings for themselves.
93Having linked the intellectual mission of the German Bauhaus to the practical, industrial orientation of the school's original backers, Moholy went on to stress the importance of personal psychological development. "To reach this objective one of the problems of Bauhaus education is to keep alive in grown-ups the child's sincerity of emotion, his truth of observation, his fantasy and his creativeness."
107Of all the reviewers to celebrate this achievement, Elizabeth McCausland explained it most clearly: "The exhibition may be thought of as a movie in three dimensions, with the difference that it is the spectator who moves, not the pictures. In this kinesthetic relation between the one who sees and what it seen lies the explanation of the moving psychological effect of the exhibition. It has visual activity, as life has. It speaks with a variety of accents, and it shows the various faces of remembered experience." In other words, to enter the physical environment of the exhibition was to enter a place in which one could move back and forth between the external world and one's internal state of mind, integrating the two. The medium of photography, coupled with the extended field of vision technique, provided evidence with which the visitor could simultaneously reason and feel.
154In 1943, for instance, Edwin Boring and Gordon Allport, professors of psychology at Harvard University, collaborated with forty-eight doctors, professors, and military officials to produce a bright orange Penguin paperback entitled Psychology for the Fighting Man: What You Should Know About Yourself and Others. The short book offered instruction on managing everything from the uses of one's senses on the battlefield to desires for food and sex. It sold more than four hundred thousand copies at twenty-five cents each. Two years later, Boring and his team produced another widely distributed Penguin paperback, Psychology for the Returning Serviceman, this time offering advice on choosing a job, reentering the family, and dealing with "combat nerve.s" By the final years of the war, books like these, together with military testing, had introduced millions of Americans to the field of psychology and to the habit of monitoring their inner lives in psychological terms.
156 Creativity precisely satisfies this need for "collective individualism."In both cases, writers sought to answer the sort of question put forward by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard philosophy professor Ralph Barton Perry at the start of his 1949 volume Characteristically American. "What of ourselves?" he asked. "What is it to be American--in thought and deed and feeling?"
For Perry, the answer lay in reclaiming the individuality and unity-in-diversity idealized by World War II proponents of democratic morale for a newly powerful postwar America. The ideal American personality, he argued, stood sufficiently apart from others as to be able to reason independently and choose among alternative courses of action. At the same time, it did not stand alone. American individualism, he wrote, required "a togetherness of several and not the isolation of one, or the absorption of all into a higher unity....Americans do not take naturally to mechanized discipline. They remain an aggregate of spontaneities." Lest the reader misunderstand, Perry hammered home the importance of preserving the diversity of individuals and groups within the American nation. He argued for a nation bound by "collective individualism" and a public consisting of "many nests of distinct individuals, and not their fusion, or their control or replacement by any kind of corporate entity or institution such as race, nation, state, or hostorical or social force."
157For Morris, the rebuilding of postwar America, and indeed of the world as a whole, depended on the same promotion of the individual personality that lay behind earlier campaigns for democratic morale. "If an 'implacable opponent' is destroying man, that opponent is man himself," he explained in his 1948 book The Open Self. "We sense acutely the dark powers in ourselves.... We have new engines, new fabrics, new buildings, new headaches. We need new selves. And new relationships between selves..
158Morris's views are worth quoting at length, both because they represent the utopian optimism shared by many Americans int he late 1940s and because they so clearly presage the person-centered social movements of later decades. The totalitarian society, he explained, was a close society of closed selves.... For Morris, as for many others at this moment, fascism and modernity appeared to be dangerously entwined. The solution: a flexible, highly interactive society, united in its heterogeneity. Such a society, eh wrote, would "accept and dignify diversity. It would repudiate all attempts to pour its members into a common mold. It will be a society in which all varieties of persons can attain their own unique forms of integrity."
169As Horkheimer argued, in words that could have bene spoken by Erich Fromm, "the Germans were conditioned for fascist regimentation by the general structure of modern society. They were used to accepting the models submitted to them by radio, motion pictures, and the illustrated weekly long before they heard of the Führer himself." Thus, the group's common statement argued that communication between individuals and nations must always be "two-way." Like the citizens and governors of Norbert Wiener's cybernetic ideal, they must learn to interact and shape one another's destinies through a process of mutual feedback--that is, of communication.
172 Pairs nicely with Clark's conception of brainstorming as a sort of channeling of the subconscious mind.Potential totalitarians craved order in large part because they could not access their own unconscious. Just as they could not recognize or sympathize with other people, they could not recognize or sympathize with their own unconscious desires. By contrast, the authors argued, the prodemocratic personality drew on its unconscious desires, managed them with the ego ,and so engaged in unified, rational action.
173The impact of The Authoritarian Personality on American psychologists of the 1950s and 1960s was profound. It provided what appeared to be a scientific basis for the widely shared view that nations shared and fostered certain personality types and that the psyche itself, as much as any economic or political concerns, could lead to war.
174In 1951, political scientist Harold Lasswell summed up what they saw in his book-length essay Democratic Character. Lasswell had traveled extensively across the social worlds of American psychology and sociology, and his book reflects the consensus then emerging among his colleagues.
175But what might that civilization look like? And how would it hold together against the threat of communism abroad and totalitarian tendencies home?
In 1949 and 1950, two volumes answered these questions in ways that would define debates about the nature of American society for a decade to come. The first was Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s best-selling polemic, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, in 1949.
177For Schlesinger, the personal was already political. Long before the feminists of the early 1970s or even the civil rights marchers of the late 1950s linked their sense of self to the political order around them, Schlesinger and other liberal intellectuals had imagined a society focused precisely on the development of independent, collaborative, and unique individuals. In Schlesinger's somewhat hazy analysis, order in such a society would emerge largely out of the benevolent interactions of its members. Voluntary organizations, spontaneous collaborations--only such grassroots interactions, he suggested, could ultimately save democracy. The job of government was to create the conditions within which such interactions could occur.
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By January 1943, the Museum of Modern Art had mounted an entire exhibition on the theme, called Art Education in Wartime. In a draft press release, museum officials argued that art educators were helping to win the war from kindergarten through college by helping children avoid become authoritarians. Rigidity, obedience, uniformity--these were the psychological characteristics of fascists, the pamphlet suggested. Art classes encouraged flexibility, creativity, and individuality, the psychological characteristics on which democracy depended.
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At this time, art therapy did not exist as the discipline it is today. Rather, the arts were used largely by occupational therapists to aid the injured in passing the time and recovering lost motor skills. Therapists encouraged soldiers to work with craft kits and to copy established models when they painted or sculpted. Free expression played little role in this work. In the wake of the Freudian revolution of the 1920s and 1930s, however, psychiatrists had turned their patients toward the arts and particularly toward painting and drawing. These doctors believed that when done with the proper degree of independence, such work revealed the inner state of its maker and so could aid in diagnosis. At the same time, they thought it could speed the amateur artist on the way to health by releasing the internal psychological pressure of traumatic memories and so reducing the intrapsychic tensions they caused.
188In an essay for the museum's Bulletin, Dr. Edward Liss, a practicing psychiatrist and one of James Soby's primary consultants, argued that psychologically therapeutic art did more than simply restore skills for living. It made the personality whole again by fusing "thought and action" in a single "psychosomatic unit." The arts and the sciences, he wrote, worked together, on the shared principle of "creativity," to reunify the fractured psyche.
191 "Creativity" becomes the basis for a new mode of authority, in both the factory and the family, replacing earlier, more explicitly authoritarian forms of control. The application of "brainstorming" to marital and child-rearing issues underscores this. In both cases, this shift anticipates later developments toward people-centered movements of the 1960s.In a preface to the 1959 reissue of a widely read 1949 collection of essays entitled The Family: Its Function and Destiny, for instance, popular journalist and editor Ruth Nanda Anshen made this point explicitly. The family must be a bulwark against the threat of nuclear war, she argued. But the source of its power would have to be "creative work, nourished by the nexus between parents and children." Creativity could bring about a new sense of global responsibility in child and parent alike.... The alternative to such a highly American vision was the mechanical unity of fascism. In his essay for the volume, Max Horkheimer described how the authoritarian family could breed future Nazis.
192In 1948, when the Museum of Modern Art opened its People's Art Center, the national push for creative play was just getting under way. D'Amico and his staff at the center met it with a political an aesthetic sensibility formed by the museum's earlier push against fascism. When D'Amico and his colleagues looked out into the landscape of American art teaching, they saw "a proliferation of school contests and competitions, paint-by-numbers kits" and the like, all of which taught "art through copying." As D'Amico put it, "these devices...are all based on a method of imitation that is slavish and dictatorial. They deny the right of individual choice and freedom and sow the seed for a dictator type of society. They threaten the creative life of our country because they strike at the heart of creative education. How can anyone who believes himself to be creative, whether he be artist or amateur, or anyone who respects individuality, endure these methods or fail to see the inherent menace?"
212In comparison to fascist alternatives, the world brought to life at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955 must have looked enormously individualistic, varied, and free. But even as it challenged the hierarchies of totalitarianism, the exhibition modeled the emergence of a society whose citizens were to manage themselves in terms set by the systems within which they lived--and by the experts who developed those systems.
218President Eisenhower agreed and made People's Capitalism the unifying theme of all American exhibitions in 1956. When he did, he also internationalized a vision of the American psyche articulated two years earlier by Yale historian David Potter. In his extraordinarily popular volume People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character, Potter brought together Frederick Jackson Turner's famous "frontier thesis" of American development with work on culture and character published by Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, David Riesman, and others.
219For Repplier and the Advertising Council, Potter's logic and prestige were unassailable. In November 1956, the council convened a roundtable to discuss the ideas behind the "People's Capitalism" slogan, and asked Potter to chair it. Over two days, in a forum later transcribed and published as a pamphlet, a dozen notables ranging from the editor of Fortune magazine and the president of the Bristol-Meyers Company to Yale professor Harold Lasswell sought consensus on the relationship between America's economic system and the psychological and political benefits it conveyed.
227American designers took pains to show that this consumer cornucopia depended on and helped to produce the creative, individualistic personality types associated with political democracy. In 1957, American officials invited Victor D'Amico of the Museum of Modern Art to bring his Children's Holiday Carnival--rechristened the Children's Carnival of Modern Art--to two exceptionally large and important trade fairs, the Triennale in Milan and the Feria Internacional de Muestras in Barcelona. American exhibitions at both fairs focused on the benefits of consumer capitalism for children. Yet they also revealed the importance of cultivating particular personality traits so as to promote economic productivity. As they had at the Museum of Mdoern Art, D'Amico's installations celebrated individual creativity, driven form within and practiced in an egalitarian collective, as a basis of psychological, economic, and political security.
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In retrospect, it may seem strange that the Department of Commerce should have gone to such lengths to bring a children's art program to trade fairs. But in Milan, the department created a pamphlet in English and Italian, illustrated with pictures from D'Amico's classroom at the Museum of Modern Art, that explained the connection. "This is an exhibit about increased productivity," it said. "Productivity means the more you produce the more there is for everybody to share. Those who benefit most from productivity are the children." In keeping with the tenets of People's Capitalism, the pamphlet argued that the capitalist system freed individuals of all ages to pursue individual psychological satisfaction. By implication, it also suggested that carefully guided creativity was the basis of America's productivity. In the early years of World War II, Margaret Mead had linked American individualism and American national morale. In the wake of World War II, Victor D'Amico argued that the use of Bauhaus-derived art training techniques could reindividuate and so democratize American veterans. Now, the Children's Paradise offered a living example of how the production of a creative, individuated psyche helped drive the production of diverse consumer goods and a more peaceful globe.
232In the years before the Brussels fair, the leaders of CENIs had developed a simultaneously psychological and economic approach to international influence. "We became convinced," recalled one member some years later, "that our strongest psychological weapon was our potential ability to help the nations of the free world achieve political stability by helping them to expand their productivity and their standards of living.
234Like American pavilions at earlier trade fairs, the Brussels display paid particular attention to the domestic sphere, to the body and to the child. If science and technology had dehumanized the world, the American pavilion promised to rehumanize it in the terms set by the People's Capitalism campaign and its associated theories of the democratic personality. On the second floor of the pavilion, Harnden installed Victor D'Amico's Carnival of Modern Art--now called the Children's Creative Center. Brought from Barcelona, the center featured the same two rooms, sense-stimulating toys, and teaching methodology. Once again, as the American guidebook put it, "the imagination and spontaneous inventiveness of [children of all nations] are given free play."
241Elsewhere in the exhibition, visitors toyed with voting machines and a stock market demonstration and saw themselves on closed-circuit television. In each case, visitors were enjoined to express themselves--imaginatively, through identification, or mechanically and imaginatively, by voting or picking stocks. As they did, they simultaneously produced themselves as new, creative citizens of a massively abundant world and practiced engaging with democratic politics, market capitalism, and progressive child-rearing techniques that were thought to produce people who would thrive in those systems.
260 The Happening as a link between the creativity of the 1950s and that of the 1960s.[Cage's] students, in turn, transformed it into a foundational framework for the quintessential mode of 1960s performance and protest: the Happening.
When they did, they helped infuse an emerging counterculture with elements of the person-centered collectively called for by promoters of democratic morale twenty years before. In Happenings and later be-ins, organizers asked individuals to come together of their own volition, to work collectively, to unite across previously impermeable social boundaries, and, in the process, to become newly sensitized and more psychologically whole human beings.
264To Americans of Cage's generation, submitting control over one's identity to a powerful individual--even temporarily--smacked of fascism, not freedom. But for Kaprow, the reverse was true. Long conversant with surrealism and Dada and their desire to help audiences break free from the chains of routine consciousness, Kaprow believed that giving up one's reason could in fact liberate the individual psyche. He thus went on to marry the aesthetics of antifascist surround--originally designed to enhance viewers' analytical and choice-making faculties-to efforts to disable the reason.
267Very few Americans saw a Happening in person. Yet, by the early 1960s, thanks to nearly constant hype in the press, the word "happening" had become both an adjective and a noun for all things forward-looking. By 1967, Allan Kaprow was amazed at the ubiquity of a word that he had first chosen precisely for its blandness: "hippie groups, discotheques, PTA meetings, Rotary club outings, a popular rock 'n roll band, a hit record by the Supremes, a party game kit, and at least two regular run movies--are all called Happenings," he marveled.
291At the start of World War II, a generation of social scientists and artists had imagined an American mode of unity that paradoxically drew its strength from the individuality of its members. They imagined an environmental mode of a media making that would promote the development of that individuality, and which would offer Americans opportunities to practice it together.
293But as I hope this book has shown, the children of the 1960s did not only overthrow their parents' expectations. They also fulfilled them.