8.12 Youth Culture of the 1960s

The baby boom produced a huge generation that came of age in the 1960s, and college enrollment soared. Many young people grew up in comfort but saw contradictions: racism despite American ideals of equality, poverty amid plenty, the threat of nuclear war, and a draft for a war many considered unjust. The civil rights movement showed them that protest could work, and many white students had joined Freedom Summer in 1964.

The New Left was a loose movement of young activists, distinct from the 'Old Left' of the 1930s, which focused on labor and often on socialism or communism. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), founded in 1960, issued the Port Huron Statement (1962), written mainly by Tom Hayden. It criticized racism, the Cold War and impersonal institutions, and called for 'participatory democracy' in which ordinary people shared in the decisions that shaped their lives.

The Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley (1964), led by Mario Savio, protested a ban on political activity on campus. As Vietnam escalated, students held teach-ins, burned draft cards and organized mass marches. In 1968 students occupied buildings at Columbia University. By 1969 SDS splintered, and a small faction, the Weathermen, turned to bombings. After the killings at Kent State in 1970 (8.8), hundreds of campuses went on strike.

The counterculture was a broader rejection of mainstream values. 'Hippies' grew long hair, wore colorful clothes, experimented with marijuana and LSD, and sometimes lived in communes. San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood drew tens of thousands during the 'Summer of Love' (1967).

Music was central. Bob Dylan's protest songs, the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix gave the movement its soundtrack. The Woodstock festival in New York in August 1969 drew about 400,000 people.

The sexual revolution also changed attitudes. The birth control pill, approved in 1960, made it easier to separate sex from pregnancy, and more open attitudes about sex outside marriage spread.

Many Americans, including many working-class people and veterans, were angered by protesters who burned flags or praised North Vietnam, and by drug use and changing sexual norms. In 1966 Ronald Reagan won California's governorship partly by promising to crack down on Berkeley protesters. Richard Nixon appealed to what he called the 'silent majority' (1969) of Americans who did not protest.

The counterculture's long-term effects were mixed. Many protest groups faded by the early 1970s, but attitudes toward authority, sex, dress, music and lifestyle changed for good, and the backlash against them helped energize the conservative movement (8.14).