Artists & Activists of the 1960s

1. Artists & Activists of the 1960s “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” –SDS statement

2. The Ones Who Didn’t Drop Out • Port Huron Statement (1962) • SDS founded in Michigan (why?) • Two great student causes of 1960s • Civil Rights Movement (1955-1964) • MLK Jr. too “moderate”? Is voting enough? • Civil disobedience vs. fighting back • Radical challenges from Malcolm (1965) & Stokely (1966) – Black Power explodes • Civil Rights Act of 1963: “LBJ All the Way” • Berkeley Free Speech Movement, 1964 • Mario Savio (1943-1996)

4. The Ones Who Dropped Out • Beats at first an obscure artistic movement • Mainly writing, some music, painting & film • Self-exiled from mainstream society & culture • like many 20th-century artistic movements • “Deprogramming” with sex, drugs, music, motion • Ginsberg & Snyder later become politically active • Ginsberg in anti-war movement • Snyder as environmental poet, prophet of deep ecology • Kerouac pays price of fame – dies a fat old drunk • More traditional than the “roman candles” he follows • Many sequels never equal success of On the Road

5. West Coast Renaissance • Beat culture quickly mainstreams via media • First “hippies” (Ken Kesey & Co. at Stanford in the mid-60s) trying to live On the Road (w/”Dean”at the wheel!) • San Francisco’s North Beach scene • Old California mystique, Beat writers, Diggers, UC Berkeley influence? • 1967, Haight Ashbury “Summer of Love”

6. On the Road -- end of the West • America: motion, relocation, running away • Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road” (1856) • Sal: the artist in search of a vision • Torn between East and West, tradition & innovation • Dean: the “cowboy crashing” • All jacked up and nowhere to go • Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992)