The Strange Similarities Between 1969 and 2024
In front of the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C., on a statue by Robert Aiken, a young woman gazes into the distance, contemplating things to come. Engraved on the base of the statue is an inspirational quote by William Shakespeare from his play, The Tempest, Act 2, scene 1: What is past is prologue. The phrase conveys the idea that history creates a context for understanding and shaping current events.
Never in American history have social, political, and cultural challenges from the recent past had such eerie similarity and relevance in the present. 1969 and 2024 have disturbing parallels.
Fifty-five years ago in 1969, rebellion reverberated through the Black Hills of South Dakota. Native American activists scaled Mount Rushmore and occupied the memorial for months while demanding that sacred land be returned to the Sioux. Native Americans protested President Donald Trump’s 2020 Fourth of July celebration at Mount Rushmore. Once again, they demanded removal of the national monument from tribal lands, guaranteed through an 1868 treaty.
In 1969, the women’s rights movement received an outspoken new advocate when Hillary Rodham Clinton became the first-ever student to address a Wellesley College graduating class. Clinton then claimed the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, becoming the first U.S. woman to lead the ticket of a major party. Propelling the feminist movement further, Senator Kamala Harris followed Secretary Clinton in 2020 by becoming the first African American, the first Asian American, and the third female vice presidential running mate on a major party ticket. Harris became the first female vice president of the United States. Then she became the 2024 presidential nominee for Democrats.
On July 17, 1969, in York, Pennsylvania, with racial tensions at the boiling point that summer, a Black youth burned himself playing with lighter fluid. He falsely blamed a white gang. Black and white gangs began fighting that afternoon with conflict lasting through the night. The warring mobs set buildings ablaze, and police responded by barricading Black neighborhoods. Police arrested over 100, and city blocks turned to charcoal.
Just a year later, tens of thousands of antiwar demonstrators gathered around the federal courthouse in downtown Seattle, crowding city streets. Vandalism, traffic disruptions, and building occupations took over the city. A police force “Tac Squad” brandished clubs and sprayed tear gas.
In 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American, died while in the custody of Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis police officer, after Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds. Following this brutal killing, protests broke out and spread from Minneapolis to more than 2,000 cities and towns in over 60 countries. Between 15 and 26 million people participated in demonstrations throughout the United States, the largest protests in United States history.
Near the Santa Barbara coast in 1969, an oil well blew out, spilling 235,000 gallons of oil and covering 30 miles of beach with tar. In the past five years, deadly California wildfires have burned millions of acres.
In the same year as his election in 1969, President Richard Nixon became a disrupter of national harmony. After pledging to bring the country together, Nixon intensified divisions by escalating the Vietnam War and driving wedges between races and economic classes.
During the four years of his presidency, beginning in 2016, Donald Trump employed similar tactics to divide Americans on issues such as immigration and security at the border with Mexico.
Nixon appealed to “the silent majority” while Trump appeals to “forgotten Americans.”
American citizens increasingly distrust each other as culture wars pit conservatives against liberals, whites against Blacks, young against old, and the establishment against the counterculture. Social and political disorder rule while the nation’s traditional motto, E Pluribus Unum — translated Out of many, one — seems quaint and unrealistic. Americans have no clear sense of the path forward.
The Open University 60s Research Group summarized that decade with hauntingly familiar observations:
It is right, of course, to give attention to artists and cultural leaders, to movements and sub-cultures, but the ultimate significance of the sixties lies in what happened to ordinary people.
As today’s wounded nation stumbles forward under continuing duress from culture wars between MAGA conservatives and liberals, Americans question what is happening to ordinary people, especially their children and grandchildren.
Shakespeare understood the responsibilities that surface with repeating history. He wrote, “Whereof what’s past is prologue; what to come, in yours and my discharge.”
The past is irreversible, but the future is ours to influence, subject to the choices we now make as a country and as ordinary people.
