Mar 9, 2013 3 min read

It’s a reflex as old as humanity to paint the past in a golden glow.

Think of the nostalgia that surrounds World War II – the country was unified, the “greatest generation” was saving democracy and, when they weren’t on battlefields or furiously pumping out materiel in factories, they were swinging to Glenn Miller’s band or swooning over Frank Sinatra’s silken baritone.

The uncertainty and terror of that time is forgotten. The chillingly tangible prospect of German or Japanese fighter planes dropping bombs on Middle America is barely recalled. The fact that African Americans and other minorities faced systematic discrimination is a footnote. Of the estimated 60 million people killed in World War II, 418,000 of them were Americans. Scan the obituary pages from those days, and most people fell prey to heart failure, cancer or other maladies of the aged in their 50s and 60s.

The same goes for the 1960s. We look back on that eventful decade now and remember Flower Power, peace signs, bell bottoms and the Beatles. The tumult and tragedy of those times is glossed over or rendered dry and dusty, a kind of abstraction.

An engaging and thoughtful exhibit at Pittsburgh’s Senator John Heinz History Center, “1968: The Year That Rocked America,” indulges in its share of hey-wasn’t-that-fun wistfulness. The vintage furnishings, colorful clothes and great movies and music that were produced that year are recalled and are sure to warm the cockles of many a baby-boomer heart. But “1968: The Year That Rocked America” is also a bracing reminder that years rarely get as dire as that one.

Look at it this way: Every time you think 2013, with its stubbornly high unemployment, high gasoline prices, political dogfighting and litany of other headaches, is a bummer, consider 1968. Now that, to paraphrase Sinatra, was not a very good year.

By the start of 1968, American casualties in the Vietnam War had climbed to about 1,200 a month. During the Tet Offensive in February 1968, 543 American troops were killed and 2,547 were wounded. To put that in perspective, the Iraq War claimed 4,400 American lives in total. President Lyndon Johnson’s standing was so diminished by the Vietnamese quagmire he declined to run for re-election in 1968, despite having won in what was, at that point, the greatest electoral landslide the country had ever seen just three years before.

Just four days after Johnson bowed out of the race, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. That was followed two months later by the murder of Robert F. Kennedy on the campaign trail, a horrific reprise of his brother’s killing a little over four years before.

Then there were the riots outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the strikes and riots that shut down France in 1968, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, ending the brief “Prague Spring,” more urban unrest, more boycotts, more protest and increasing crime.

America, and much of the rest of the world, appeared to be spinning out of control.

And, yet, through all of 1968’s sturm und drang, the unemployment rate averaged 3.6 percent. At the end of the year it reached 3.3 percent, the lowest it had been in 15 years and a level almost unimaginable in today’s more economically straitened environment.

But economic statistics are not the only indicators of a stable, prosperous society, and “1968: The Year That Rocked America,” which will be at the History Center through May 12, is a stark reminder that no matter how intractable we think our problems are today, things have indeed been worse. And we have survived.