8.12 - Youth Culture of the 1960s

Baby Boom Generation

• During the 1960s, the first wave of the baby boom generation began graduating from high school and entering college.

• College and university enrollments quadrupled between 1945 and 1970.

• This generation, unlike those before them, had not experienced the Great Depression or World War II and were influenced by the civil rights movements and demands for justice, freedom, and equality.

Student Movement and the New Left

• In the early 1960s, liberal groups started identifying with the struggles of African Americans against oppressive controls.

• College students were among the first to rebel against established authority.

• In 1962, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was formed, and at a meeting in Port Huron, Michigan, they issued the Port Huron Statement.

• The statement called for participatory democracy, where students would have a voice in university decisions.

• Activists supporting these ideas became known as the New Left.

• The first major protest was at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, led by the Free Speech Movement, which demanded an end to university restrictions on political activities and more student involvement in university governance.

Students Against the Vietnam War

• Student demonstrations increased with the escalation of the Vietnam War and the rise in military draft numbers.

• College students, who could defer the draft while in school, became increasingly active in protesting the war.

• Antiwar protests, including draft-card burning, sit-ins, and opposition to military recruiters and ROTC programs, disrupted campuses nationwide.

• The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy in 1968 intensified the protests, with significant actions like the sit-in at Columbia University against racial discrimination.

The Chicago Convention (1968)

• The most notable off-campus protest in 1968 occurred during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

• A mix of peaceful and radical antiwar protesters, along with anarchists and Yippies, engaged in demonstrations that led to property damage and confrontations with police.

• Mayor Richard Daley ordered the police to break up the demonstrations, leading to what some media outlets described as a "police riot."

The Weather Underground

• The most radical faction of the SDS, known as the Weather Underground, embraced violence and vandalism to attack "the system."

• Their actions escalated from riots to stealing weapons and bombings from 1969 through the 1970s.

• More than 280 Weathermen were arrested during the "Days of Rage" riots in Chicago in 1969.

• The Weather Underground set off about 25 bombs, including at the Capitol, Pentagon, and State Department, leading to their placement on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

• Their extremist actions discredited the early idealism of the New Left in the eyes of most Americans.

The Counterculture

• The New Left's political protests were linked to a youth counterculture that expressed itself through rebellious dress, music, drug use, and communal living.

• "Hippies" and "flower children" adopted long hair, beards, beads, and jeans as part of their style.

• Folk music by Joan Baez and Bob Dylan voiced the generation's protests, while rock music from the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jim Morrison, and Janis Joplin became the soundtrack of the counterculture.

Sexual Revolution

• The counterculture influenced a shift in attitudes towards sexual expression, which continued beyond the 1960s.

• Alfred Kinsey’s research in the 1940s and 1950s revealed that premarital sex, marital infidelity, and homosexuality were more common than previously believed.

• The introduction of the birth-control pill in 1960 and the use of antibiotics for sexually transmitted diseases contributed to changing attitudes toward casual sex.

• Sexual themes became more visible in advertisements, magazines, and movies, making sex appear as another consumer product.

• Premarital sex, contraception, abortion, and homosexuality became more visible and accepted, though the true depth of change is debatable.

• In the 1980s, there was a backlash against these loosened moral codes, as they were blamed for an increase in illegitimate births, rape, sexual abuse, and the spread of AIDS.