The year 1968 was one of tumult, chaos, uncertainty, and disruption on a global scale. In America, it was particularly fraught, something that Patchett mentions several times during the sections on Danny’s college years. In The Dutch House, the reader encounters references to the Vietnam War, the draft, economic and racial tensions in New York, and a Columbia student uprising. In this section, we will take a broader look at what was going on in the country that year.
The Vietnam War was in full swing and was growing increasingly unpopular with the American public. The war seemed to be further spiraling out of America and South Vietnam’s hands as the January Tet Offensive revealed both the lengths to which the Viet Cong would go to defend themselves and the lack of progress made against them. The draft was, unsurprisingly, reviled, and it illuminated class and racial differences in America (note Danny’s awareness that being in college is his deferment, with the unspoken reality that poor boys who could not afford college could consequently not receive a deferment).
Protests had begun earlier in the decade, but they now grew larger and more frequent, convulsing college campuses and filling the streets of cities. Columbia University students, angered by the University’s connections with the military apparatus running the war as well as the proposed Morningside Heights gymnasium’s separate entrance for neighborhood residents—most of whom were black—occupied Hamilton Hall and other spaces, held demonstrations, made speeches, and demanded change.
President Johnson, who had escalated the war in 1965 with “Operation Rolling Thunder,” decided not to run for reelection that year on account of his profound unpopularity. By then, his earlier accomplishments in the areas of civil rights and social welfare had been eclipsed by the costs of the war.
In regard to civil rights, the earlier movement’s emphasis on civil disobedience and nonviolence, which had proven helpful in procuring judicial and legislative victories ending segregation, no longer seemed tenable to activists in light of the insidious racism that still permeated the country regardless of what any new law dictated. Groups like the Black Panthers were openly assertive, claiming that white America was corrupt and rotted and that black Americans needed to stop cooperating with a society that did not want them. The Panthers’ more militaristic rhetoric, all-black clothing, and “aggressive” behavior unnerved many white Americans, who preferred to give in to their racialized fears rather than acknowledge the veracity of the Panthers’ views and what a positive force they were in urban black communities, in which they provided food and other necessities.
Regardless of how more militant black activists felt about the mainstream movement’s perceived capitulation to white America’s norms, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April of 1968 was a staggering blow to black Americans (not just black Americans, of course, but the loss pierced them especially deeply). Riots broke out in major cities, including the capital, as the sense of hopelessness and aborted change spread.
The Democrats and progressives’ hope for a presidential candidate who could unite the country and get out of Vietnam were increasingly embodied in Bobby Kennedy, but he, too, was assassinated, adding to the climate of despair and fear.
The milquetoast Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president, became the Democratic nominee at the Democratic National Convention held in Chicago. The city was filled with protestors, who were met with violence by the city’s police force, as ordered by the notoriously tough Mayor Daley. While the Democrats were in disarray, the Republicans easily nominated the conservative Richard Nixon, whose appeal to the “Silent Majority” cloaked a subtle stoking of racial tensions. In November, Nixon won the election, convincing many Americans that the gains of the sixties were not guaranteed to endure.
