The 1960s History

At the beginning of the 1960s, many Americans believed they were standing at the dawn of a golden age. On January 20,
1961, the handsome and charismatic John F. Kennedy became president of the United States. His confidence that, as
one historian put it, “the government possessed big answers to big problems” seemed to set the tone for the rest of the
decade. However, that golden age never materialized. On the contrary, by the end of the 1960s it seemed that the
nation was falling apart.

The Great Society

During his presidential campaign in 1960, John F. Kennedy had promised the most ambitious domestic agenda since the
New Deal: the “New Frontier,” a package of laws and reforms that sought to eliminate injustice and inequality in the
United States. But the New Frontier ran into problems right away: The Democrats’ Congressional majority depended on
a group of Southerners who loathed the plan’s interventionist liberalism and did all they could to block it.

Did you know? On June 27, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village. The
bar’s patrons, sick of being subjected to harassment and discrimination, fought back: For five days, rioters took to the
streets in protest. “The word is out,” one protester said. “[We] have had it with oppression.” Historians believe that this
“Stonewall Rebellion” marked the beginning of the gay rights movement.

It was not until 1964, after Kennedy was shot, that President Lyndon B. Johnson could muster the political capital to
enact his own expansive program of reforms. That year, Johnson declared that he would make the United States into a
“Great Society” in which poverty and racial injustice had no place. He developed a set of programs that would give poor
people “a hand up, not a handout.” These included Medicare and Medicaid, which helped elderly and low-income
people pay for health care; Head Start, which prepared young children for school; and a Job Corps that trained unskilled
workers for jobs in the deindustrializing economy. Meanwhile, Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity encouraged
disadvantaged people to participate in the design and implementation of the government’s programs on their behalf,
while his Model Cities program offered federal subsidies for urban redevelopment and community projects.

The War in Vietnam

Unfortunately, the War on Poverty was expensive–too expensive, especially as the war in Vietnam became the
government’s top priority. There was simply not enough money to pay for the War on Poverty and the war in Vietnam.
Conflict in Southeast Asia had been going on since the 1950s, and President Johnson had inherited a substantial
American commitment to anti-communist South Vietnam. Soon after he took office, he escalated that commitment into
a full-scale war. In 1964, Congress authorized the president to take “all necessary measures” to protect American
soldiers and their allies from the communist Viet Cong. Within days, the draft began.

The war dragged on, and it divided the nation. Some young people took to the streets in protest, while others fled to
Canada to avoid the draft. Meanwhile, many of their parents and peers formed a “silent majority” in support of the war.

The Fight for Civil Rights

The struggle for civil rights had defined the ‘60s ever since four black students sat down at a whites-only lunch counter
in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960 and refused to leave. Their movement spread: Hundreds of
demonstrators went back to that lunch counter every day, and tens of thousands clogged segregated restaurants and
shops across the upper South. The protesters drew the nation’s attention to the injustice, brutality and capriciousness
that characterized Jim Crow.

In general, the federal government stayed out of the civil rights struggle until 1964, when President Johnson pushed a
Civil Rights Act through Congress that prohibited discrimination in public places, gave the Justice Department permission
to sue states that discriminated against women and minorities and promised equal opportunities in the workplace to all.
The next year, the Voting Rights Act eliminated poll taxes, literacy requirements and other tools that southern whites
had traditionally used to keep blacks from voting.
But these laws did not solve the problems facing African Americans: They did not eliminate racism or poverty and they
did not improve the conditions in many black urban neighborhoods. Many black leaders began to rethink their goals,
and some embraced a more militant ideology of separatism and self-defense.

The Radical ’60s

Just as black power became the new focus of the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, other groups were growing
similarly impatient with incremental reforms. Student activists grew more radical. They took over college campuses,
organized massive antiwar demonstrations and occupied parks and other public places. Some even made bombs and set
campus buildings on fire. At the same time, young women who had read The Feminine Mystique, celebrated the passage
of the 1963 Equal Pay Act and joined the moderate National Organization for Women were also increasingly annoyed
with the slow progress of reform. They too became more militant.

The counterculture also seemed to grow more outlandish as the decade wore on. Some young people “dropped out” of
political life altogether. These “hippies” grew their hair long and practiced “free love.” Some moved to communes, away
from the turbulence that had come to define everyday life in the 1960s.

The Death of the 1960s

The optimistic ‘60s went sour in 1968. That year, the brutal North Vietnamese Tet Offensive convinced many people that
the Vietnam War would be impossible to win. The Democratic Party split, and at the end of March, Johnson went on
television to announce that he was ending his reelection campaign. (Richard Nixon, chief spokesman for the silent
majority, won the election that fall.) Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, the two most visible leftists in American
politics, were assassinated. Police used tear gas and billy clubs to break up protests at the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago. Furious antiwar protestors took over Columbia University in New York as well as the Sorbonne in
Paris and the Free University in Berlin. And the urban riots that had erupted across the country every summer since
1964 continued and intensified.

Shreds of the hopeful ‘60s remained. In the summer of 1969, for example, more than 400,000 young people trooped to
the Woodstock music festival in upstate New York, a harmonious three days that seemed to represent the best of the
peace-and-love generation. By the end of the decade, however, community and consensus lay in tatters. The era’s
legacy remains mixed–it brought us empowerment and polarization, resentment and liberation–but it has certainly
become a permanent part of our political and cultural lives.

Popular culture

The counterculture movement dominated the second half of the 1960s, its most famous moments being the Summer of
Love in San Francisco in 1967, and the Woodstock Festival in upstate New York in 1969. Psychedelic drugs, especially
LSD, were widely used medicinally, spiritually and recreationally throughout the late 1960s, and were popularized by
Timothy Leary with his slogan "Turn on, tune in, drop out". Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters also played a part in the
role of "turning heads on". Psychedelic influenced the music, artwork and films of the decade, and a number of
prominent musicians died of drug overdoses (see 27 Club). There was a growing interest in Eastern religions and
philosophy, and many attempts were made to found communes, which varied from supporting free love to religious
puritanism.

Music

The rock-and-roll movement of the 1950s quickly came to an end in 1959 as explained in the song American Pie, the
revelation that Jerry Lee Lewis had married his 13 year old cousin, and the induction of Elvis Presley into the US Army. As
the 1960s began, the major rock-and-roll stars of the '50s such as Chuck Berry and Little Richard had dropped off the
charts and popular music in the US came to be dominated by Motown girl groups and novelty pop songs. Another
important change in music during the early 1960s was the American folk music revival which introduced Bob Dylan, Joan
Baez, Pete Seeger, The Kingston Trio, Harry Belafonte, Odetta, and many other Singer-songwriters to the public.
Girl groups and female singers, such as the Shirelles, Betty Everett, Little Eva, the Dixie Cups, the Ronettes, and the
Supremes dominated the charts in the early 1960s. This style consisted typically of light pop themes about teenage
romance, backed by vocal harmonies and a strong rhythm. Most girl groups were African-American, but white girl
groups and singers, such as Lesley Gore, the Angels, and the Shangri-Las also emerged by 1963.

Around the same time, record producer Phil Spector began producing girl groups and created a new kind of pop music
production that came to be known as the Wall of Sound. This style emphasized higher budgets and more elaborate
arrangements, and more melodramatic musical themes in place of a simple, light-hearted pop sound. Spector's
innovations became integral to the growing sophistication of popular music from 1965 onward.

Also during the early '60s, surf rock emerged, a rock subgenre that was centered in Southern California and based on
beach and surfing themes, in addition to the usual songs about teenage romance and innocent fun. The Beach Boys
quickly became the premier surf rock band and almost completely and single-handedly overshadowed the many lesser
artists in the genre. Surf rock reached its peak in 1963–65, then gradually gave way to bands influenced by the
counterculture movement.

The car song also emerged as a rock subgenre in the early 60s, which coupled with the surf rock subgenre. Such notable
songs include "Little Deuce Coupe," "409," and "Shut Down," all by the Beach Boys; Jan and Dean's "Little Old Lady from
Pasadena" and "Drag City," among many others.

The early 60s also saw the golden age of another rock subgenre, the teen tragedy song, which focused on lost teen
romance caused by sudden death, mainly in traffic accidents. Such songs included Mark Dinning's "Teen Angel," Ray
Peterson's "Tell Laura I Love Her," Jan and Dean's "Dead Man's Curve," the Shangri-Las' "Leader of the Pack," and J.
Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers' "Last Kiss."

While rock 'n' roll had 'disappeared' from the US charts in the early '60s, it never died out in Europe and Britain in
particular was a hotbed of rock-and-roll activity during this time. In late 1963, the Beatles embarked on their first US
tour. A few months later, rock-and-roll founding father Chuck Berry emerged from a 2-1/2 year prison stint and resumed
recording and touring. The stage was set for the spectacular revival of rock music.

In the UK, the Beatles played raucous rock 'n' roll – as well as doo wop, girl-group songs, show tunes – and wore leather
jackets. Their manager Brian Epstein encouraged the group to wear suits. Beatlemania abruptly exploded after the
group's appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. Late in 1965, the Beatles released the album Rubber Soul which
marked the beginning of their transition to a sophisticated power pop group with elaborate studio arrangements and
production, and a year after that, they gave up touring entirely to focus only on albums. A host of imitators followed the
Beatles in the so-called British Invasion, including groups like the Rolling Stones and the Kinks who would become
legends in their own right.

As the counterculture movement developed, artists began making new kinds of music influenced by the use of
psychedelic drugs. Guitarist Jimi Hendrix emerged onto the scene in 1967 with a radically new approach to electric guitar
that replaced Chuck Berry, previously seen as the gold standard of rock guitar. Rock artists began to take on serious
themes and social commentary/protest instead of simplistic pop themes.

A major development in popular music during the mid-1960s was the movement away from singles and towards albums.
Previously, popular music was based around the 45 single (or even earlier, the 78 single) and albums such as they
existed were little more than a hit single or two backed with filler tracks, instrumentals, and covers. The development of
the AOR (album oriented rock) format was complicated and involved several concurrent events such as Phil Spector's
Wall of Sound, the introduction by Bob Dylan of "serious" lyrics to rock music, and the Beatles' new studio-based
approach. In any case, after 1965 the vinyl LP had definitively taken over as the primary format for all popular music
styles.

Blues also continued to develop strongly during the '60s, but after 1965, it increasingly shifted to the young white rock
audience and away from its traditional black audience, which moved on to other styles such as soul and funk.
Jazz music during the first half of the '60s was largely a continuation of '50s styles, retaining its core audience of young,
urban, college-educated whites. By 1967, the death of several important jazz figures such as John Coltrane and Nat King
Cole precipitated a decline in the genre. The takeover of rock in the late '60s largely spelled the end of jazz as a
mainstream form of music, after it had dominated much of the first half of the 20th century.

Country music gained popularity on the West Coast, due in large part to the Bakersfield sound, led by Buck Owens and
Merle Haggard. Female country artists were also becoming more mainstream (in a genre dominated by men in prior
decades), with such acts as Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, and Tammy Wynette.

Fashion

Main article: 1960s in fashion

Significant fashion trends of the 1960s include:

 The Beatles exerted an enormous influence on young men's fashions and hairstyles in the 1960s which included
most notably the mop-top haircut, the Beatle boots and the Nehru jacket.
 The hippie movement late in the decade also had a strong influence on clothing styles, including bell-bottom
jeans, tie-dye and batik fabrics, as well as paisley prints.
 The bikini came into fashion in 1963 after being featured in the film Beach Party.
 Mary Quant invented the miniskirt, which became one of the most popular fashion rages in the late 1960s
among young women and teenage girls. Its popularity continued throughout the first half of the 1970s and then
disappeared temporarily from mainstream fashion before making a comeback in the mid-1980s.
 Men's mainstream hairstyles ranged from the pompadour, the crew cut, the flattop hairstyle, the tapered
hairstyle, and short, parted hair in the early part of the decade, to longer parted hairstyles with sideburns
towards the latter half of the decade.
 Women's mainstream hairstyles ranged from beehive hairdos, the bird's nest hairstyle, and the chignon hairstyle
in the early part of the decade, to very short styles popularized by Twiggy and Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby
towards the latter half of the decade.
 African-American hairstyles for men and women included the afro.

Second-wave feminism

Main article: Second-wave feminism

A second wave of feminism in the United States and around the world gained momentum in the early 1960s. While the
first wave of the early 20th century was centered on gaining suffrage and overturning de jure inequalities, the second
wave was focused on changing cultural and social norms and de facto inequalities associated with women. At the time, a
woman's place was generally seen as being in the home, and they were excluded from many jobs and professions. In the
U.S., a Presidential Commission on the Status of Women found discrimination against women in the workplace and
every other aspect of life, a revelation which launched two decades of prominent women-centered legal reforms (i.e.,
the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title IX, etc.) which broke down the last remaining legal barriers to women's personal
freedom and professional success.

Feminists took to the streets, marching and protesting, authoring books and debating to change social and political
views that limited women. In 1963, with Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique, the role of women in society, and
in public and private life was questioned. By 1966, the movement was beginning to grow in size and power as women's
group spread across the country and Friedan, along with other feminists, founded the National Organization for Women.
In 1968, "Women's Liberation" became a household term as, for the first time, the new women's movement eclipsed the
civil rights movement when New York Radical Women, led by Robin Morgan, protested the annual Miss America
pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The movement continued throughout the next decades. Gloria Steinem was a key
feminist.