| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Democracy's Children: The Young Rebels of the 1960s and the Power of Ideals. By Edward K. Spann. (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2003. xii, 185 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 0-8420-5140-6. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8420-5141-4.)

Edward K. Spann, emeritus professor of history at Indiana State University, argues that baby boomers born during the 1940s who were raised within "democratic" middle-class families (pp. 9–10 and passim) became the vanguard of youthful radicalism in the 1960s. According to Spann, these children were deliberately molded by their parents "to a special sense of democratic mission" and imbued with the democratic ideals spawned by the New Deal and the struggle against totalitarianism during World War II (p. xi). When this slice of the baby boom generation grew into the young radicals who challenged the status quo in the 1960s, they did so "in the name of democratic changes that their parents had conceived but did not realize" (p. 3). In addition, Spann claims that baby boomers born in the forties rather than the fifties became radicals in the sixties and that their ideas and values were not their own creations but were gleaned from their parents. In eleven chapters and an epilogue, Spann discusses the family life, education, alienation, radicalization, and eventual "reintegration" (p. xii) into American society of what he calls "democracy's children."

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