Shannon Hubble

Dr. Cary

Politics of the Sixties: ​Take Home Final

7 December 2018

Part 1: Structural Factors of the 60’s

1. Structural factors leading to the Vietnam War included the Red Scare and urbanization.

The Red Scare was a national fear of communism spreading. Citizens feared communism

because it threatened their way of governing and were said by the media and politicians

to be set on world domination. Urbanization and the creation of more businesses led to a

dire need for social services as well.

2. The Civil Rights Movement gained ground in the 1950s when citizens realized that after

fighting WW2 because of racism, we were being extremely racist in our own country. It

spread with events such as the trial Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, which

challenged the separate but equal schooling and other services of the time by ruling that

the schools were most certainly not equal, thus overturning Plessy vs. Ferguson of 1896

legalizing separate schools for blacks.

3. The Civil Rights Act of 1954 was passed solely because of the tremendous work done by

African Americans to gain equal rights in the Civil Rights Movement of the 60’s. It

gained political ground through President JFK and soon paid off under his successor

President Johnson.

4. The sixties became a decade noted for increasing sexual permissiveness mostly due to the

work of the Sexual Revolution and feminism of the ’60s. The fashion industry took a turn
 at this time, granting the younger generation and the supporters of this social

transformation the ability to wear things like jeans and t-shirts, rather than the traditional

attire of suits. Not only did fashion change the idea of sexual behavior, but so did

medicine, especially birth control. The addition of birth control meant that people were

having sex for fun, not just to have kids, sparking a widely debated topic of premarital

sex. The rise of premarital children and teenage pregnancy also rose around this time,

proving that there was a Sexual Revolution upon the people of the ’60s.

5. The reason that most of the protestors were young, college-aged kids were due to their

parents pushing the “father knows best” traditional family values on them while they

truly did not want to submit. In this age, feminism was on a quick rise shedding light on

the fact that women wanted to go to school to be more than just housewives or

secretaries. These students and younger kids did not want to dress certain ways and work

at certain places that conformed to the traditional family values they had been taught.

Drugs also played a role in this way of thinking by raising a sense of spirituality among

those who partook.

6. The “politics of resentment” began in the 1960s due to political polarization and

expanding government power. Resentment towards the government for going into war

with Vietnam set in around this time because some citizens began to realize that

communism was no real threat. The social and racial movements of the time were

creating immense political polarization forcing people to decide if they conformed with

the traditional family values of the time or if they would radically oppose.

Part 2: The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act
 While some actions were taken to diminish heavy discrimination with laws such as the

13th amendment, there was still heavy discrimination among public sectors. Through use of the

Jim Crow Laws and poll taxes, African Americans were still kept from voting and participating

in their own civil rights, even within schooling. Because of the intense discrimination and unfair

treatment still occurring, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, outlawing segregation in

public sectors based on race, ethnicity, religion, or sex. Facing much opposition from southerners

and many congress members at the time, the passing of this law is seen as one of the best

outcomes of the Civil Rights Movement of the 60’s giving the opportunity for more reform of

current systems. In 1965, congress passed the Voting Rights Act adding that no state shall

continue using discriminatory voting operations that many southern states used to prevent

African Americans from voting. Both of these acts were revolutionary in the decline of

discrimination in the 1960s.

Part 3: The Silent Majority

The “Silent Majority” in the ’60s was heavily used by Nixon to describe those that were

silenced by the media who supported the Vietnam War and Nixon’s other various policies.

Nixon believed that these people were the majority of the American population who were

silenced due to the overbearing liberal media constantly attacking his policies and the Vietnam

War. He believed the press focused mostly on the “noisy minority” who consisted of the

Vietnam War protestors and the many advocates for change at the time. Some people supported

the war because they compared it to WW2 and the fight against Nazi communists. They bought

into the supposed “domino effect”, granting the government the ability to war with the

Vietnamese over communism. By using the “Silent Majority” idea, Nixon gathered support to
expand the war into Cambodia and shut down the critics of the war. This strategy was supposed

to show the Vietnamese and heavy amounts of foreign doubters the large support he had for the

war by the Americans against the loud media.