A deeply divided nation, at virtual and sometimes actual war with itself. Protests on college campuses and in the streets. Crackdowns by police and politicians. Civil disobedience, marches, campus and government-office sit-ins and takeovers. A steady stream of political manifestos and public pronouncements aimed at changing people’s minds and radically transforming the course of the nation.

No, it’s not today, although it easily could be. What Oregon author Richard Hertzberg is bringing back into the public eye in his book Fists & Flowers: Leaflets from the Sixties is a fading cultural revolution from more than half a century ago: the 1960s, which Hertzberg defines as 1963 to 1973.

It was a decade of ferment, revolt, and idealistic shifting of cultural and political norms. There was plenty to be upset about. John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. The rights of Black and other minority-group Americans, women, and LGBTQ+ people (a term that didn’t yet exist) were suppressed, often ruthlessly. Poverty was an ever-present problem. The Vietnam War was ballooning into a major and deadly confrontation on all sides.

Left: Cover of “Fists & Flowers.” The Publishing Circle, 172 pages, 2023. Right: Author Richard Hertzberg.

And the “leaflets” of the book’s title were just that: not today’s Internet memes and talk-show or podcast rants but quickly printed statements tacked on walls and telephone poles and bulletin boards or handed out one at a time, imploring an action or announcing an event. Fleeting and of-the-moment as they usually were, the leaflets prompted person-to-person, in-the-flesh encounters: a passing of passion from one human to the next.

“Leaflets were quick, easy, and cheap to produce,” Hertzberg writes. “They cost nothing to disseminate. They were readily accessible and not subject to censorship or external control. They were, in short, the ideal means of publishing all types of anti-establishment messages and pronouncements.”

The vital issues in the air were separate movements and yet interlinked, often overlapping. “Two basic factors turned the Sixties anti-war movement into a spawning ground for a multitude of social, political, and cultural causes,” Hertzberg writes. “First, the examination of U.S. intervention in Vietnam was preceded and stimulated by the challenge to our national mythology of equal opportunity and justice arising from the civil rights movement. Second, the anti-war movement generated a vigorous, relentless questioning of American actions in Vietnam.”

Sponsor

Civil rights, poverty, and Vietnam prompted the creation of many 1960s leaflets.

Hertzberg breaks Fists & Flowers into seven main sections, discussing the continuation and advancement of the civil rights and Black power movements, opposition to the military draft and the Vietnam war, the rise of ethnic identity and solidarity, the push for women’s liberation, the gay rights and sexual freedom movements, the quest for ecological and environmental action, and the hippie counterculture movement. Each section is liberally illustrated with the leaflets that were the movements’ news releases and calling cards, and that run as a kind of organizing spine through the book.

Hertzberg’s recounting of these turbulent times roams from the nation’s capital for civil rights and antiwar mass marches, to New York and the Stonewall uprising against police persecution of gay citizens, to the Kent State University campus in Ohio where four protesting students were slain and nine were wounded by National Guard bullets, to the brawling 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, to the American Indian Movement and the occupation of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, and beyond.

Hot issues in the 1960s are still major issues, or have returned in today’s political climate.

And much of his account of the decade comes from the free-speech cauldron of the University of California, Berkeley, where Hertzberg was a student from 1963 to 1968. He continued to live in Berkeley until 1971. The radicalization of Berkeley students and the growth of the free speech movement came in spite of (and perhaps prodded by) opposition from the university administration and even California Gov. Pat Brown, who ordered student occupiers arrested and hauled away.

Yet the movement took root, and spread rapidly. And as Hertzberg points out, it didn’t spring only from the left. The 18 groups that joined the United Front to oppose the university’s suppression tactics “encompassed a wide spectrum of viewpoints, from Students for a Democratic Society and the Young Socialist Alliance to California Students for Goldwater and University Young Republicans.”

They demanded, in brief, the full rights of U.S. citizens. Members of Berkeley’s United Front, Hertzberg writes, “asserted that the First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and assembly, along with the due-process and equal-protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, should be applicable on university property and for students on campus.”

Sponsor

The leaflets of the decade brought attention to issues ranging from labor and agricultural worker rights to opposition to the Southeast Asian war and the atrocities that came with it.

The leaflets that Hertzberg includes in Fists & Flowers were outcries of advocacy, and they rarely pulled their punches. “Women are getting fed up!” declares one for International Women’s Day in 1970. “We are getting together to take control of our lives. Women’s Liberation is fighting for equal wages, child care, birth control and jobs. We are fighting against oppression on the job, in the home, and in the society. We are fighting for our recognition as equal human beings and for a society that is run in the interests of people not profits.”

Hertzberg’s section on the effect of the counterculture movement and its immersion in “hallucinogenic drugs, clothing styles, communal living, rock-music concerts and festivals, sexual liberation” and more is measured. “To a certain extent, the counterculture was a rejection of political action,” Hertzberg writes, adding, “At its best, the counterculture, even though fleeting, was a positive life force responding to the death machine unleashed by the American military in Vietnam. … The dilemma became how to keep what originated as a transformation in consciousness from being reduced to the block letters of a newspaper headline or the trinkets and curios available at the local ‘head shop.'”

Among the issues addressed in “Fists & Flowers” are corporate pollution damaging the environment, and the suppression of voting rights, especially the rights of Black citizens.

Hertzberg lays out his arguments in Fists & Flowers with admirable precision and straightforward tone, and the many illustrations of leaflets from the period underscore the potency of the issues that were being argued over and fought for. Many among us experienced the ’60s first-hand; for them Hertzberg’s book will be a brisk reminder of the battles of the times. For younger readers, the book will be a revealing and eloquent introduction to a time not so long ago when the nation was deeply divided over issues of urgent concern.

And for both groups, Fists & Flowers will seem almost as much about current events as about cultural history. Set amid the turmoil of a bare half-century ago, Hertzberg’s book reads like something of a not-so-distant mirror: A startling number of the urgent issues of the time are still with us, or have returned with a vengeance.

Abortion rights, guaranteed in 1973 by the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, were stripped away for large numbers of women by a more right-wing dominated Supreme Court in 2022. In 1973 President Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency, and gave it teeth: In the years since, many of its teeth have been extracted.

Sponsor

Voter suppression is rampant, and the environmental crisis has spiraled upward. Poverty is, if anything, deeper and steeper, and the threat of autocracy, as Project 2025 makes clear, is very real. Racial divides remain deep, and the world is still at war. What goes around comes around, and in many ways Hertzberg’s study of the 1960s is also a study for today.

Is there a leaflet for that?