Background:

Student Rebellion in the Sixties(Edited)

© 2001 Donald J. Mabry

In the 1946-64 period, the number of college students in the United States doubled. By 1968, 50% of all 18- and 19-year olds were in college. Their sheer numbers gave them potential impact of society.

INFLUENCES

1. These were the baby boomers, the children of affluence and privilege, who were accustomed to having their way.
2. The sheer magnitude of students and of universities was important. Higher education was becoming democratized.
3. The necessity of the civil rights movement and the violent reaction to it created disillusionment with the system.
4. The Vietnam War bothered students as a morality issue and, for males, because they might get drafted and be killed.

It began with the Free Speech Movement in 1964 at the University of California at Berkeley. The administration forbade the distribution of protest materials outside campus gates. Students refused to obey. the administration called in the police. The California Regents decided to punish the students. The students took over Sproul Hall, the administration building.

The idea that students did not have to obey authority simply because it was authority spread. Anti-establishment sentiment became prevalent. Some of this was ordinary adolescent rebellion, of course.

Anti war Movement

In March, 1965, students as the University of Michigan held the first teach-in, trying to convince people (including each other) that the Vietnam War was immoral and that the US should withdraw.

The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was formed in 1960. Issued its Port Huron statement in 1962 in which it said "we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation..."

The SDS became more radical as time passed, perhaps because of frustration at not being able to change much, and never dominated the student protest movement. It helped radicalize other students, at least by defining issues. It began a campaign against the draft, Reserve Officer Training Corp units being on college campuses, and campus recruiting efforts by such US governmental agencies as the Central Intelligence Agency. These issues resonated with millions of college students, even many who opposed activism.

As the war in Vietnam escalated, student protests escalated as well. In 1967, 300,000 marched on New York City to protest the war and 100,000 marched on the Pentagon. In 1968, between January 1 and June 15, there were 221 major demonstrations on over one hundred campuses. Few were in the South, where people are raised to obey authority and where fear of racial integration among whites discouraged and tampering with the status quo for fear that black people would somehow benefit. Instead, the leadership tended to be the most privileged students and the closing of campuses in protest of the war or supposed wrongs tended to occur on the prestigious campuses. Students who had family financial backing and had always had their way tended to be the leaders.

The TET Offensive in 1968 shocked the nation because the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong came close to taking control most of the major cities in South Vietnam. That they were beaten didn't matter; it was the realization that the war was being lost that unnerved many in the US. On March 11th, Eugene McCarthy, the peace Democrat, won the New Hampshire primary against President Lyndon Baines Johnson. On March 31st, LBJ stunned the nation by withdrawing from the presidential race to devote himself, as he said, to the peace effort.

In April, 1968 at Columbia University in New York City, the SDS tried to get Columbia to break its ties to Institute of Defense Analysis and black students tried to stop the building of a gymnasium which would encroach on black housing in Harlem. The two groups marched together on Low Memorial Library but then split because they had distinct goals. The black students took one building and the whites another. Police were called in to clear the buildings. Columbia closed early.

In 1968, it seemed that the world had gone crazy. In April, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee and riots broke out in many cities. In May, French students, who were opposing the very conservative government of Charles de Gaulle, rioted. The French students came reasonably close to bringing down the government. In June, Robert F. Kennedy, probably the most popular Democratic Party candidate who was perceived as opposed to the Vietnam War, was assassinated in Los Angeles by an Arab fanatic. In August, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia to squash liberalism there. The Mexican student movement had grown in size and scope since July but was brought to an abrupt end on October 2nd when the army and police slaughtered peaceful demonstrators at the Tlatelolco housing project in Mexico City.

Worse, perhaps, was the change in the behavior of young people. Instead of crew cuts, males were wearing long hair, sometimes longer than the females who, themselves, were wearing their hair in odd ways. Instead of the carefully coiffured look, some young women were wearing their hair long and stringy! Clothing among the young began to defy conventions. Regardless of their political views, students began wearing working men's clothes (blue jeans) and underwear as outerwear (T-shirts). Established practices of coloring clothing were abandoned in many instances; students, for example, began to tie-dye clothing. They started using delivery vans for transportation instead of cars. Whereas popular music has usually been about sex and love, the rock'n'roll revolution was characterized by much more flagrant sexuality. Shortly after 1965, the music became much more sexual and, sometimes, laced with references to the taking of drugs. Some young people, probably a minority, began smoking marijuana or dabbling in drugs. The most shocking change was the sexual revolution as the ideal of no sexual intercourse outside of marriage seemed to go by the wayside. Although the ideal had never been absolutely observed, as the Kinsey Reports revealed, the idea that people could have sex with anyone they wanted at any time was startling. Moralists could not accept this change (which wasn't as pervasive as they thought). No doubt some married people were jealous at the new freedom. More than the civil rights movements and the anti-war movements, it was the social conventions being overturned that upset people.

The average American was very upset with all this upheaval. Many believed that students had a very easy life, living on someone else's money, and should spend their time on studying, sports, and finding a mate of the opposite sex. Shutting down universities made no sense to them, especially to those who had to work to support themselves and others. The students seemed like ingrates, like spoiled brats. Although anti-war sentiment was growing, the majority still supported the war effort.

They wanted a return to the old values. They wanted students to study not protest. They believed that any war the US fought should be supported. They wanted order. Many were upset about the changes, actual and proposed, in the relationship between blacks and whites. And they wanted their children to cut their hair, dress conservatively, stop using drugs, and follow the same paths to maturity as they had.

Ironically, it was conservatives who were responsible for all this. They had created the cult of womanhood in order to get women out of the labor force at the end of World War II in order to return jobs to the who had been forced into the military during the war. Governments and private institutions bombarded society with the argument that a woman's proper place in the home, preferably raising children. As a corollary to this, they created a cult of childhood. According to this view, parents should have as many children as possible. The population boomed with babies. Parents and society could not do enough for children and should sacrifice almost everything to give them what they needed and wanted. Children, not adults, had priority in society. Suddenly, children had lots of money to spend. By the 1960s, they had more discretionary income than their parents and had become one of the richest, if not the richest, social groups in the world. Capitalists quickly understood this and exploited the opportunities inherent. Magazines, radio, movies, and television focused on young people as never before. Television, owned and operated by rich conservatives, grew parallel to the rise of the baby boomers. One soft drink manufacturer made it clear that it was the drink of the new, young generation. On the political front, the propaganda machine argued that the United States was free and democratic--the hope of the world--as opposed to Communism and the Soviet Union. The incessant barrage about democracy caused many students to look around and see the undemocratic parts of US life. They believed that they had been lied to by their elders. With all this attention and wealth, no wonder many young people abandoned the old ways. That American business created new markets from the student changes was a further irony.

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1960s Counterculture in the USA

Though parallel movements existed elsewhere, the 1960s counterculture began in the United States as a reaction against the conservative social norms of the 1950s, the political conservatism (and social repression) of the Cold War period, and the US government's extensive military intervention in Vietnam. It is sometimes discussed as the inheritor of "Beat Generation" sensibilities of the late 1940s and 1950s.

In one view, the 1960s counterculture largely originated on college campuses. The 1964 Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, which had its roots in the Civil Rights Movement of the American South, was one early example. At Berkeley a socially privileged group of students began to identify themselves as having interests as a class that were at odds with the interests and practices of the University and its corporate sponsors. However, other rebellious young people who had never been college students also contributed to counterculture development. The beatnik café and bar scene was a tributary stream.

Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters helped shape the developing character of the 1960s counterculture when they embarked on a cross-country voyage during the summer of 1964 in a psychedelic school bus named "Furthur." Beginning in 1959, Kesey had volunteered as a research subject for medical trials financed by the CIA's MK ULTRA project. These trials tested the effects of LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and other psychedelic drugs. After the medical trials, Kesey continued experimening on his own, and involved many close friends; collectively they became known as "The Pranksters." The Pranksters visited Harvard LSD proponent Timothy Leary at his Millbrook, New York retreat, and experimentation with LSD and other psychedelic drugs, primarily as a means for internal reflection and personal growth, became a constant during the Prankster trip. The bus was driven by Beat icon Neal Cassady, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was onboard for a time, and the Pranksters dropped in on Cassady's friend, Beat author Jack Kerouac, thereby creating a direct link between the 1950s Beat Generation and the 1960's psychedelic scene. After the Pranksters returned to California, they popularized the use of LSD at so-called "Acid Tests," which initially were held at Kesey's home in La Honda, California, and then at many other West Coast venues. Experimentation with LSD and other psychedelic drugs became a major component of 1960s counterculture, influencing philosophy, art, music and styles of dress.

As the 1960s progressed, widespread tensions developed in American society that tended to flow along generational lines regarding the war in Vietnam, race relations, sexual mores, women's rights, traditional modes of authority, experimentation with psychedelic drugs and a predominantly materialist interpretation of the American dream. The Vietnam war became an increasingly high-profile object of criticism, and opposition to the war was exacerbated by the compulsory military draft.

In 1967 Scott McKenzie's rendition of the song "San Francisco" brought as many as 75,000 young people from all over the world to celebrate San Francisco's "Summer of Love." While the song had originally been written by John Phillips of The Mamas & The Papas to promote the June, 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, it became an instant hit worldwide (#4 in the United States, #1 in Europe) and quickly transcended its original purpose. San Francisco's Flower Children, also called "hippies" by local newspaper columnist Herb Caen, adopted new styles of dress, experimented with psychedelic drugs, lived communally and developed a vibrant music scene. When people returned home from "The Summer of Love" these styles and behaviors spread quickly from San Francisco and Berkeley to all major U.S. cities and European capitals. A counterculture movement gained momentum in which the younger generation began to define itself as a class that aimed to create a new kind of society.

The counterculture movement took hold in Western Europe, with London, Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin and Rome rivaling San Francisco and New York as counterculture centers. One manifestation of this was the general strike that took place in Paris in May 1968, which nearly toppled the French government.

In Eastern Europe, young people adopted the song "San Francisco" as an anthem for freedom, and it was widely played during Czechoslovakia's 1968 "Prague Spring," a premature attempt to break away from Soviet repression.

As this newly emergent youth class began to criticize the established social order, new theories about cultural and personal identity began to spread, and traditional non-Western ideas – particularly with regard to religion, social organization and spiritual enlightenment – were more frequently embraced. A number of new social movements had countercultural beginnings, including civil rights, environmentalism and feminism.

The above introduces one way of looking at mid-1960s to mid-1970s counterculture development– simply (or mainly) an upwelling of youth. A quip from Winston Churchill is often paraphrased these days; it goes: "If you are not a socialist at 20, you have no heart, if you are one at 40, you have no brain"—indicating the anti-conventionalism of youth (and the typical disapproval of older citizens).

During the period in question, new cultural forms emerged, including the pop music of the Beatles, which rapidly evolved to shape and reflect the youth culture's emphasis on change and experimentation. This was accelerated after 1964, when the Beatles were introduced to marijuana in a New York hotel room by Bob Dylan, another youth culture icon. Underground newspapers sprang up in most cities and college towns, serving to define and communicate the range of phenomena that defined the counterculture: radical political opposition to "the establishment," colorful experimental (and often explicitly drug-influenced) approaches to art, music and cinema, and uninhibited indulgence in sex and drugs as a symbol of freedom.

Another way of viewing the counterculture is as 'the principle of expansion' as applied not to economies or political spheres of influence but to aspects of personal life and to creativity.

The most visible radical element of this counterculture was the hippie. Some hippies formed communes to live as far outside of the established system as possible. This aspect of the counterculture rejected active political engagement with the mainstream and, following the dictate of Timothy Leary to "turn on, tune in, and drop out", hoped to change society by dropping out of it. Looking back on his own life (as a Harvard professor) prior to 1960, Leary interpreted it to have been that of "an anonymous institutional employee who drove to work each morning in a long line of commuter cars and drove home each night and drank martinis .... like several million middle-class, liberal, intellectual robots."

The hippie ethic posed a considerable impediment to the success of alternative movements growing within the counterculture. At the extremes, "doing one's own thing" could lead to rejection of values imposed from without and adamant avoidance of other people's expectations. As a result, the individual tends to be isolated, which may or may not be much of a problem for that individual – but it does threaten collaborative actions or accomplishments.

Musical and other performing groups formed within the counterculture. Many had a far shorter active existence than, say, the Grateful Dead (a rather unusual example of countercultural longevity). Of course, ephemerality has long been the case in the performing arts, and a short lifespan does not in itself indicate failure.

Not all counterculture attempts to "think outside the box" or blaze new trails were restricted to art, music, literature and so on. The counterculture had representatives in the sciences, the trades, business, and law. Many counterculture participants were stable, dedicated, and persistent. Much was done in the area of the human interface with the natural environment (in connection with science, technologies, community planning, parks, and other spheres). While ad hoc action groups sprang up frequently, usually fading away just as quickly, some established themselves as ongoing non-governmental organizations (NGOs) dedicated to working toward particular goals. The counterculture gave rise to many lasting NGOs.

Counterculture's environmentalist component was quick to grasp the early (i.e., 1970s) analyses of the reality and the import of the Hubbert "peak oil" prediction — more broadly that the dilemmas of energy derivation would have implications for geo politics, lifestyle, environment, and other dimensions of the life of modern society.

Social anthropologist Jentri Anders, based in California, has observed that a number of freedoms were endorsed within a countercultural community which she lived in and studied: "freedom to explore one’s potential, freedom to create one’s Self, freedom of personal expression, freedom from scheduling, freedom from rigidly defined roles and hierarchical statuses…" Additionally, Anders believed these people wished to modify childrens' education so that it didn't discourage "aesthetic sense, love of nature, passion for music, desire for reflection, or strongly marked independence…"

In his 1986 essay From Satori to Silicon Valley, cultural historian Theodore Roszak pointed out that Apple Computer emerged from within the West Coast counterculture. Roszak outlines the Apple computer's development, and the evolution of 'the two Steves' (Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, the Apple's developers) into businessmen. Like them, many early computing and networking pioneers – after discovering LSD and roaming the campuses of UC Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT in the late 60s and early 70s – would emerge from this caste of social "misfits" to shape the modern world.

Like any culture, the 1960's counterculture produced its share of misfits. However, most people involved with the counterculture were not dedicated iconoclasts lacking qualities like loyalty or conscience. Most people engaged in conscious experimentation — with psychedelic drugs, with Eastern spirituality, with alternative lifestyles — while retaining many core values and social norms of their (often middle-class) upbringings.

Then too, some individuals may not have identified with "the counterculture", despite the conclusions of outside observers. Perhaps some people who successfully achieved something in cooperation with others — or who, as '60s individualists were able to find a niche and pursue some career — never identified with the counterculture, or slowly distanced themselves from it.

In any case, as members of the hippie movement grew older and moderated their lives and their views, and especially after all US involvement in the Vietnam War ground to a halt in the mid 70s, the counterculture was largely absorbed by the mainstream, leaving a lasting impact on philosophy, morality, music, art, lifestyle and fashion.

The legacy of the 1960s Counterculture is still actively contested in debates that are sometimes framed, in the U.S., in terms of a "culture war." Jay Walljasper, a commentator and the editor of Utne Reader — though not himself from the so-called '60s Generation, and having grown up in American-Heartland farming country — has written, "From the great gyrations of the counterculture would come a movement dedicated to the greening of America. While many once-ardent advocates of radical ideas now live in the suburbs and vote Republican, others have held fast to the dream of creating a new kind of American society and they've been joined by fresh streams of younger idealists."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterculture