Do you remember the iconic photograph by Robert Cohen for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of Edward Crawford wearing an American flag shirt as he tossed the tear gas canister back at Ferguson police while retaining his hold on a bag of chips? In the late 1960s and early 1970s, that was still considered a daring thing to do, and photographer Ken Light managed to capture one young man doing it anyway in Columbus, Ohio.
Those of us who came of age during the half-decade covered by Ken Light’s latest book, What’s Going On?, will find much of our youth in its pages.
The 20 years after the end of World War II saw an explosion of the birth rate as men came home to the women who waited for them, and they all did what comes naturally. And it had to be natural, as there was little available in the way of birth control.
In addition to all of that pent-up sexual desire, there was a pent-up spending spree waiting to happen as American industry turned from war manufacturing to consumer products. And Americans had been saving their money, since wartime shortages and rationing limited spending. That fueled one of the greatest economic booms we had ever experienced, and by the late 1950s it seemed that there was no limit to the growth of our economy and our opportunity. Yet by the late ‘60s, cracks were beginning to appear in the American Dream.
There was a dark side, as Ken Light explains in the mini-memoir that follows his photographs of the era. The duck-and-cover nuclear attack drills in schools, the assassinations of our heroes—the Kennedy brothers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.—during that tumultuous decade. By the time Light hit high school, there was also an unpopular war going on, and “long hair, rock and roll, and rebellion were now in the mix.”