Simon Hall disagrees with Richard Hofstadter, the great historian of American reform, that the 1960s was the “Age of Rubbish” (2). Hall demonstrates the continuing historical significance of the 1960s on the social movements, progressive and conservative, that followed in the 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, he emphasizes the efforts of protesters to cloak their causes in patriotic garb (in many cases literally the American flag) and articulate their demands in the language of the nation's most hallowed documents – the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Hall focusses on five social movements – gay rights, second-wave feminism, anti-busing, tax revolt, and anti-abortion – that “invoked the nation's founding ideals in service to their respective, if very different, causes” (5). He shows how conservative movements cleverly appropriated instruments of 1960s protest – sit-ins, marches, civil disobedience, and street theater – during the last three decades of the twentieth century.

As Hall contends, these conservative movements also generously borrowed ideas from the 1960s. For example, opponents of school busing transformed the notion of participatory democracy into community control and thereby found a legitimate way of preserving racial purity in their neighborhood schools. In this way, conservatives, whether challenging busing, taxes, or abortion, turned the language of rights, so recently identified with the civil rights movement, into a defense of individual freedom, hostility toward government, and restrictions on women's reproductive choices. They also stole a page from the anti-authoritarian playbook of the new left and counterculture in waging a cultural war against political and cultural elites. In fact, 1960s radicals and conservatives in the 1970s and beyond shared more than language and tactics; they both expressed a deep antipathy toward liberals.

Hall marshals abundant evidence detailing how conservative and progressive activists voiced patriotic appeals and tied their causes to the generation of the Founding Fathers. Examples of patriotic conservative protests abound, but more surprising are the numerous attempts by feminists and gay activists to identify themselves with patriotic symbols. This use of patriotism came in sharp contrast to late-1960s protesters whose contempt for their country was displayed in their spelling of “Amerika,” with its fascist implications. Because we expect conservatives to identify with patriotism, Hall should have added more progressive groups to the list he studied, such as those in support of Native American, Latino, environmental, antinuclear, or antiapartheid causes, which flourished beyond the 1960s. This would have allowed readers to evaluate more fully the extent to which left-wing protesters drew upon patriotism to rally the public behind them.

Still, for the protest movements Hall discusses, his presentation is clear and filled with lively quotes. This slim volume, which makes it ideal for classroom adoption, draws less on primary sources than on the growing secondary literature on the subject, which the author deftly synthesizes to show that the protest tradition of the 1960s did not abruptly end with the rise of a new decade. In fact, some of the most important causes – feminism and gay rights – were yet to reach fruition. More problematic, however, Hall links the conservative protest movements that followed those of the 1960s to the most identifiable uprisings of that decade, including civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War. He does not fully recognize the extent to which these later movements emerged from conservative rather than progressive roots in the 1960s. The Young Americans for Freedom, the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, and the right-wing populism of George Wallace did much more to mobilize conservative activists and supporters at both local and national levels than did the new left (except in backlash to it). Hall's attempts to uncover the progressive origins of the right-wing social movements of the 1970s and 1980s distort their more direct connections to the conservative revolt of the 1960s. Although correct in highlighting the importance of the 1960s, he emphasizes the wrong source for its impact on conservative ascendency in the late twentieth century.