Democratic National Protests, 1968. Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society; photograph by Earl Seubert.
In February of 1968 a LIFE magazine writer wrote, “Wherever we look, something’s wrong.”
That quote, displayed prominently in The 1968 Exhibit at the Missouri History Museum, encapsulates the time of Bobby, Martin, Vietnam, the Black Panthers, Nixon, George Wallace, the Chicago Democratic Convention riot, bra-burning and a moment when the hippies genuinely thought American revolution was in the air.
The exhibition is not all gloom and doom. Kiosks and displays also cover Twiggy, Janis Joplin, beanbags, the space program and even Bob Gibson’s dominant (and kinda terrifying, actually) 1.12-ERA season.
(Speaking of terrifying, there is also macramé.)
The 1968 Exhibit, though, is largely about upheaval. The Vietnam War, the draft, and war protests were in full swing. The American Indian Movement, labor-organizing deity Cesar Chavez and the Black Panthers were all fighting the man. The raised-fist protest at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City sent a reminder: the path to peace is not necessarily a peaceful path.
The birth of modern feminism was highlighted by a protest at the Miss America Pageant, the dawn of birth-control pills, and the death of some social mores about “living in sin” that seem positively quaint today.
Giant-screen video presentations on killing of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago are affecting. The concentration of public violence during that year must have felt like things were ramping up to some moment of god-only-knows-what terror.
The pop culture of the time seems to function, then, as a relief from the specter of doom—or as yet another reminder of it.
The music of Hendrix, Dylan, Joni Mitchell, the Supremes, Cream, the Hair soundtrack, the Grateful Dead and a lot of crappy, dental-chair folk and easy listening sometimes references the war, and sometimes blithely ignores it. A game-show-style video game on music trivia is interactive fun.
Visitors can grok TV shows like Get Smart, Mission Impossible, and Star Trek, and clips from movies like Night of the Living Dead and Psych-Out in a funky lounge with beanbag chairs. There are also two living-room areas with period coffee tables, hutches and massive, burglar-braining ashtrays; the set-ups fairly smell like the era.
Other prop displays include an actual ’68 voting booth that’s not only not digital, it’s not even electric. It operates with a mechanical arm, a bit like a slot machine [snicker]. Some clothes that belonged to Jimi Hendrix seem to glow with his otherworldly talent, and a truncheon wielded by the original Chicago bulls (i.e., cops) at the Democratic Convention riots has its own, less savory aura.
An emotional video slide show offers scenes from Bobby Kennedy’s “funeral train,” which brought his body from his funeral in New York to be buried next to his brother Jack at Arlington Cemetery. For mile after mile, mourners lined the tracks, and photos taken from the train show a thoroughly diverse cross-section of Americans in somber shock.
The exhibition ends with a showstopper. Short, diaristic films about the horrors of Vietnam are actually projected within a vintage “huey” military helicopter. Nearby, an actual flag-draped coffin seals the darkness of the era.
Sure, in ’68 there were was Star Trek and peppy Simon and Garfunkel music and thigh-length tunic dresses in the funkiest patterns yet known; but larger forces conspired to make Thanatos the death-god triumphant over any of this frippery, it seems. And how did America respond to the madness in the fall of ’68? By electing Richard Nixon the President. It was like opening the chamber and adding a second bullet, just to make the Russian roulette more fun.
What does it all mean, now? In one sense, it’s a reminder of a societal urgency we don’t always feel these days. A war with a draft, the assassination of progressive leaders, and a galvanized civil-rights struggle sent a frisson, to say the least, through everyone. What would it be like, we might wonder, to feel a bit more panic over the headlines in the newspaper today? Need we wait for that kind of extremity to mount a protest, write a letter, participate in our democracy?
The exhibit also puts the division of our current do-nothing Congress in relief; in 1968, an openly segregationist former state governor, Alabama’s George Wallace, ran for president (for the second of what would eventually be four times), progressive peacemakers were dropping from assassins’ bullets and protests bubbled up from college campuses, riling up the youth everywhere. You wanna talk about a country divided? Would the next war be a civil war, an imperialist war, a generational war? Take your pick. Armageddon must have seemed that much more imminent for the religious zealots who lust for the “end times.”
When fissures in society begin to crack open around us, what do we do? Forty-five years down the road, we may not have a lot more answers, but we’re still here. See The 1968 Exhibit while you can; there are just over two weeks left in its run at the Missouri History Museum. And consider attending tonight’s lecture by Pete Coogan of the Institute for Comics Studies, “1968: The Year Comics Met the World,” in conjunction with the show.
The 1968 Exhibit runs through January 5 at the Missouri History Museum, 5700 Lindell, 314-746-4599, mohistory.orghttp://mohistory.org.
