What We’re Reading: Kevin Boyle and Ron Howard both wrote books about the forgotten parts of the 1960s

I’ve been reading a couple of books about the 1960s.

But it’s not the ‘60s you know, it’s not the highlight reel you see in your head whenever someone just mentions the ‘60s. It’s not Stones and Dylan, astronauts and MLK Jr. It’s the other ‘60s, those less dramatic but jus as influential reels we rarely see. It’s why, after I finished “The Shattering” (Norton, $32), Kevin Boyle’s eagerly anticipated new history, I drove to the 6100 block of West Eddy, on the Northwest Side. Just to peek. It’s a bungalow strip, like a thousand bungalow strips in Chicago. Yet Eddy Street plays the bookends in “The Shattering” for a thoughtful reason: It was spectacularly unspectacular throughout the ‘60s. And it was not unique. Except for one thing: Ed Cahill, an Eddy resident and World War II vet, was so annoyed at seeing American flags flying in tatters or streaked with dirt that, in 1961, he began a July Fourth campaign to nearly blanket Eddy Street in Old Glory.

Cahill was not shy about attention.

So on July 5th, 1961, a large photo of Eddy Street residents, posing beneath a forest of flags and bunting, landed in the Tribune. It’s not an unknown story, but to Boyle — a Detroit native whose history of race relations there, “Arc of Justice,” gathered the 2005 National Book Award — that image was imprinted on his brain, long before he knew why.

“Then suddenly I knew,” he told me. “It was this way into a world that’s rarely explained, which is not a triumphant world. It’s a fragile world. Peel the story back and you see the roots of ordinary people during extraordinary change who continue with ordinary lives.

“Because that’s history, too.”

“The Shattering” is like a portrait of the decade in which everyone turned their head slightly to the right and noticed another world, there all along, beneath the famous one. In this ‘60s, Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis — the need to not look appeasing, the lack of appetite for U.S. casualties — explains the trajectory of Vietnam. In this ‘60s, the conservative anti-war movement — large, happy to bomb, but averse to casualties — is huge. In this ‘60s, the civil rights movement does not begin in the 1950s but earlier, in the actions of little-known activists. Here, the civil rights movement is revolutionary but, as Boyle put it, “when it dares to tell people your kids will carry the burden of racial change (in the form of school busing), walls go up and real integration stalls out.”

Boyle teaches history at Northwestern University; in fact, his office is directly next door to Daniel Immerwahr, whose own celebrated 2019 history, “How to Hide an Empire,” considered the history of the United States through the lens of its overseas holdings. Neither write revisionist histories but rather, like good historians, they re-contextualize.

Eddy Street, for Boyle, comes to represent a decade’s ambiguity.

And ambiguity is not exactly the word I think of when I think of the ‘60s.

“I started on Eddy because, just do the math, the people who lived there in 1961, many were in their 40s when the ‘60s began. They lived through the influenza epidemic, the Great Depression. Cahill’s wife, she comes from a Polish working class Chicago family. Cahill’s gone two and a half years, serving in World War II. They live through massive upheavals and are finally in a postwar era, the world solidifies into a level of security they never knew. But it’s also a security based on exclusion. A lot of Eddy Street is completely white. Ed also works for a Chicago company that makes coffee pots — for the military. He’s also working for the military industrial complex in a way we don’t think about. There’s a straight traditional middle class society for them in the 1950s, and after 1961, change comes crashing through. Important changes. I argue for them. But it’s also how you get, at the other end of the 1960s, someone like President Richard Nixon.”

Which, in history class, always did seem incongruous to the decade proceeding him.

“Yes, but it comes from somewhere.”

It is not a glitch in the narrative.

“No. The world of Eddy Street is disrupted by the ‘60s and Nixon is at the other end to meet it. He says, I’m going to bring you folks back, to before this. Which is the Silent Majority thing. People might see Nixon now looking forward to Reagan but he’s thinking of Eisenhower. Except so much has changed by then that he can’t restore that world.”

I mentioned Rick Perlstein, a Chicago-based historian of contemporary conservatism who made his life’s work a narrative tracing the nation from Barry Goldwater to Reagan.

“I love his books,” Boyle said. “I have them all.”

His argument is influential.

“Absolutely, but Nixon is a problem. I’m not trashing Perlstein — he’s terrific. Nixon is clearly conservative, yet his administration begins affirmative action. It takes way too many dead people to do it, but he pulls out of Vietnam. During his administration there is the highest level of school integration in the American experience. He’s no straight line. But he does want to recreate Eisenhower. I like what you said about Ron Howard.”

I had told Boyle that, by chance, as I was reading “The Shattering,” I was also reading “The Boys” (Morrow, $29), the joint memoir of Ron and Clint Howard, about their early days in Hollywood. Poignant and touching, it’s an alt-history of the ‘60s, in this case, as seen from the production sets of popular TV shows, with a Depression-era Howard family that might have fit comfortably on Eddy. Consider that Ron co-starred in “The Andy Griffith Show,” which was hugely popular for nearly the length of the decade, 1960 to 1968. It gave us a utopian shorthand for America named Mayberry. As Ron writes: “It’s important to realize that even then, it was an evocation of a bygone era, and an idealized evocation.” Griffith himself deliberately wanted to recreate a sanitized view of the 1930s.

Exactly, Boyles said, because of the appetite in the 1960s for security.

Right, I said, so a decade later Ron Howard is in “Happy Days,” a sanitized ‘50s; a few years before that, he’s also starring in “American Graffiti,” set in 1962 and told with more edge, but it startled in 1973. As Ron writes, though its story unfolds only a decade earlier, the film played like an exclamation point on just how much the country changed.

That world existed through the 1960s, Boyle said.

We just didn’t celebrate it. He mentioned the enormous popularity in the 1960s of broad nostalgic throwbacks, such as “Sound of Music” (1965) and “The Love Bug” (1968). “We tend to forget that world as well, but there’s a reason it was there. I mean, I managed to write a history of the 1960s without once mentioning Bob Dylan. Yet I did mention Bobby Vinton!”

I should underline something: Boyle is not advocating for this lost world, for that large chunk of America that turned off the nightly news whenever Malcolm X appeared and thought protesting their government was un-American. And yet, it would be easy to see how simply acknowledging the existence of a so-called Silent Majority in 2021 reads like a kind of endorsement of populism.

Instead, “The Shattering” is more curious with the echoes that resound right now. Abortion politics. Police violence. A near-existential insecurity. I mentioned that, in 2020, many heard notes of 1968.

Boyle heard this often.

“And I’m not sure I bought it. For one, immigration had been cut off since the ‘20s, so the ‘60s were the most homogenous period in modern history. This country was 85% white.” (Now, it’s about 60% white.) “Yes, there are echos in the populism of today, but I want to recover the differences. We don’t have a direct thread to the ‘60s. It’s more complicated. But the past always is.”