Reply #19: The Democratic Party platform of 1972

[Lydia Leftcoast]

is available online. Due to a hard disk crash, I no longer have the link, but I found it by by the time-honored (?) method of googling.

McGovern lost because the Nixonites painted him as the "hippie candidate," and a lot of socially conservative people who would have actually liked McGovern's economic policies voted against him.

It's perhaps hard for anyone who wasnt' around at the time to fathom how utterly shocked and horrified Middle American types were by long hair, unconventional clothes, unashamed premarital sex, marijuana, and refusing to enter the military, which the parents of that time saw *solely* as the savior of civilization.

When I was in high school in the 1960s, a boy who had long hair risked being dragged out of lunch by the coaches and being given a crude "heinie" cut. Around that same time, a student was kicked out of Barnard College for living with her boyfriend.

When I was a college freshman, professors called students by their last names: "Mr. Smith, Miss Jones." Women students had curfews, and males were not allowed in the women's dorms except on moving-in day, when fathers and brothers could help carry the stereo.

By the time I was a senior, professors called students by their first names. There were no curfews, and even my Lutheran college had a coed dorm.

Even more striking, someone nowadays seeing photos of the first Free Speech protestors at Berkeley in 1964-65 could be forgiven for thinking that they were on their way to a job interview, not carrying out a protest. The women wore dresses and bouffant hairdos, and the men wore coats and ties. A mere four years later, Berkeley students looked like everyone's popular image of anti-Vietnam War protestors.

Every aspect of society changed incredibly fast between 1964 and 1972. Compared to those times, nothing changed at all between 1994 and 2002. Being young, I just accepted the changes. But older people thought the world was going to hell. They griped constantly about the "dirty, lazy, immoral hippies," the black people who "didn't know their place anymore," and "Commie, pinko cowards" who fought the draft.
The voters weren't so much rejecting McGovern as they were expressing their shock and dismay at the way the world had changed in just eight years.