AMST 3100 The 1960s The Counterculture

AMST 3100 The 1960sThe Counterculture Powerpoint 11 Read Chafe Chapter 11; Farber Chapter 8

The War at Home • The rise of the counterculture reflected a loss of faith in the liberal reforms promoted by John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. • As faith and idealism toward liberal reforms declined, radicalism grew among specific elements of American society. Many of these late 1960s radicals came from the frustrated civil rights advocates, frustrated war protestors, college students, Hispanic youth, feminists, gays, and youth culture in general. • Radicals believed that the system itself was too corrupt for the changes needed and it was time to tear it down and rebuilt it into a more democratic, inclusive (multicultural), peace-oriented, and egalitarian system. Street riot by members of the counterculture in Berkeley, California. By the late 1960s, the counterculture had shifted away from liberal democratic reforms and toward radicalism.

Blacks: From Civil Rights to Black Power • By the mid-1960s, SNCC had split apart from the SCLC. • The SCLC remained a liberal reform movement with the basic goal of racial assimilation. • At first, the SCLC envisioned SNCC as their own youth group spin-off, but by 1964 SNCC did not agree with this characterization. • SNCC, led by increasingly radicalized people like Stokely Carmichael in 1966, began to reject the American Dream of assimilation to advocate a more rapid and radical change toward black nationalism. • SNCC had become more skeptical toward the system. It had tackled racism in the Deep South and had seen federal agents passively watch SNCC members be brutalized by Southern racists. Stokeley Carmichael addresses a SNCC rally in Florida in 1967. The theme of SNCC rallies during this period was “black power.” Black power advocates rejected the melting pot version of the American Dream, favoring a pluralistic vision of multi-ethnic equality. Rather than deny their “African-ness” they sought to affirm it: “I’m black and I’m proud!” However, the black power movement frightened many whites because it came across as militant.

Rising SNCC Radicalism • The beginning of the split between the SCLC and SNCC probably occurred during the famous 1963 March on Washington where King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. • John Lewis, the leader of SNCC at that time, had written a speech that was critical of the federal government. Lewis’s script asked the question, “Which side is the federal government on?” That sentence and other critical commentary was censored by organizers of the March to avoid offending the JFK administration. • Lewis and others had become frustrated at the passivity of the Kennedy administration. • Then they went through Freedom Summer and proffered the MFDP at the 1964 Democratic Convention, only to be “insulted” by a gesture of 2 token seats. Now it was LBJ who frustrated SNCC, and SNCC stormed out. The system itself was broken, they concluded. John Lewis in the foreground, with King and Andrew Young in the background. This photo was taken during the Selma March of 1965.

James Meredith • SNCC would continue to see a lack of sincere action on the part of the political system. The problem wasn’t just the Dixiecrats, they concluded. It was the system itself, with its entrenched backstage power brokers who were too friendly to the status quo. • On June 5, 1966, James Meredith started a solo march from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi to protest racism. His march was called the “March Against Fear.” Meredith was gunned down by a sniper soon after starting this march. • This event helped galvanize rising black frustration at the system. Stokely Carmichael of SNCC vowed to continue the march in Meredith’s name. When civil rights advocates like Stokeley Carmichael heard Meredith was shot while on his solo march, they formed a massive new “march against fear” and completed Meredith’s march to Jackson.

Black Power! • The March Against Fear continued. On June 16, 1966 Stokely Carmichael arrived with other marchers at Greenwood, Mississippi and was promptly arrested for trespassing when they tried to set up camp. Here, Carmichael delivered a speech in which he said, • "This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested and I ain't going to jail no more! The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin' us is to take over. What we gonna start sayin' now is Black Power!" Stokeley Carmichael calls for Black Power in 1966.

Malcolm X • The father of the Black Power movement was probably Malcolm X. He was a charismatic and influential leader within the Nation of Islam who had already become radicalized by the time of the 1963 March on Washington. • He was a strong advocate of militant self-defense, and the FBI had been watching him for quite a while. • While he mostly adhered to the Nation of Islam (Black Muslim) teachings, Malcolm X also broke from these teachings to embrace black nationalism. • One of his ideological struggles was between black separatism (from all other races) versus a racially integrated black Muslim movement. He was intelligent and ultimately learned to think for himself and not rely on ideological dogma to do his thinking for him. This probably cost him his life, because he was murdered in February, 1965, by members of the Nation of Islam for not being “true” to Nation of Islam dogma. Malcolm X, on the right, with Martin Luther King, Jr. Both were charismatic leaders. Malcolm X rejected the assimilation melting pot ideal that King had seemed to champion in the early 1960s, preferring a more pluralistic vision of America.

Black Power! • The Black Power movement was a rejection of the liberal reformist assimilation ideal promoted by Martin Luther King, Jr.. They argued that assimilation robs black people of their own identity and heritage. • Rather, Black Power advocates sought racial separation in order to preserve their unique African-American identities, which had been robbed by the European colonialists and American slave traders of the past. • This movement was a celebration of black nationalism (or black identity), complete with their own black-run institutions. They argued that blacks had to learn to be self-sufficient and to fight oppression on their own terms. This included organizing community self-help groups in the inner cities, as well as an assertion that Black is Beautiful, a rediscovery of African names, and a celebration of Black culture. The Black Panthers were one of the outcomes of the Black Power movement. Formed in 1966, they advocated a militant defense of their right to determine their own destiny. But the military uniforms and open display of weapons made them a target of J. Edgar Hoover and others who were frightened they might start a race war.

Black Power! • Black power advocates also rejected the nonviolent approach of Dr. King, favoring violence if used for self-defense. • The “peace and love thing” that King advocated was over for most Black Power advocates. It was a time for a new militancy - to stand up and say “I’m black and I’m proud.” • This new militancy was particularly aimed at the police, who patrolled ghettos like Watts in Los Angeles as though they were an occupying colonial army. It was time to fight internal colonization. • This was not a complete rejection of nonviolence. To black power advocates, however, nonviolence was a strategy whereas to Martin Luther King, Jr. it was a principle. • To Stokely Carmichael, blacks needed to unite in solidarity, develop a class consciousness, and become self-reliant.

The Black Panthers • The Black Panther Party (BPP) was formed in October, 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, and was the inner city expression of the Black Power Movement. • It was originally called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, and was founded in Oakland California. • The Party embraced the basic ideals of the black power movement. Essentially it was an expression of this movement by poor young blacks who were frustrated at the failure of the War on Poverty and other reforms of the establishment to make a real difference in the ghetto. • The Black Panthers developed a Ten-Point program calling for “Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice And Peace,” among other things. They instituted a variety of community action programs to alleviate poverty and gave young black teens positive role models of disciplined, responsible behavior. Black Panther founders Huey Newton, on the right, and Bobby Seale on the left. The Panthers were targeted by the FBI’s COINTELPRO (counter-intelligence program), which engaged in illegal activities to try to destroy the Panthers. Bobby Seale was also one of the Chicago Eight.

The Black Panthers • While Stokely Carmichael embraced “Black Power,” Huey Newton and Bobby Seale embraced the Marxist notion of “power to the people!” and considered the black underclass an urban proletariat. • The Black Panthers would aid in their development of a revolutionary class consciousness. • The Black Panthers eventually forged alliances with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Youth International Party (YIPPIES), the Chicago Brown Berets, and even the Gay Liberation Front. • The BPP was most active between 1966 and 1972. In this photo the Black Panthers are in the process of forming a coalition with the Peace and Freedom Party in Berkeley California.

The Black Panthers • The Black Panthers were not very well understood by mainstream whites, however. The corporate media tended to emphasize their militancy (despite the fact that it was mostly self-defensive) and this frightened suburban whites into fears of a race war. • Charles Manson tried to exploit this fear in his 1969 Tate-Labianca murders. These murders, like the Altamont Festival that year, helped signal the death of the idealistic 1960s. • The police were particularly concerned about this new black militancy. J. Edgar Hoover and other white authorities developed COINTELPRO, a secret illegal counter-intelligence program intended to infiltrate and disrupt the BPP, civil rights organizations, and other “subversive” groups of the 1960s. Black Panther members and actor Marlon Brando attend the funeral of Bobby Hutton, a young Panther believed to be murdered by the police two days after the assassination of Martin Luther King. The Panthers were fundamentally an urban, class-conscious proletariat that advocated black nationalism – the right of African Americans to decide for themselves their national destiny and to forge their own institutions.

The Black Panthers • The BPP opposed police brutality in the ghetto. At that time, the police force was not yet integrated and consisted mostly of less-educated conservative white males, many of whom were racists. • One of the reforms advocated by liberal reformers was the integration of the police force. By 1972, the police force would be integrated. • Both the Panthers and the police died in violent confrontations that were shown on the nightly news programs. At least 30 Black Panthers died in such conflicts by 1970. It is likely that both sides initiated conflict, although the Panthers always claimed self-defense. • This was an era of black urban riots. There were more than 130 urban riots between 1965 and 1967, with another hundred or more following the death of Martin Luther King in April, 1968. BPP national headquarters office in Oakland, California, shot out by police bullets. Fall,1968.

The Decline of the Black Panthers • In August, 1967, the FBI instructed COINTELPRO to neutralize what they called black nationalist hate groups and the BPP was targeted for elimination. While the SCLC, SNCC, and the Nation of Islam had also been targeted by COINTELPRO, the Black Panthers were their primary target. • The tactics of COINTELPRO included infiltration, misinformation, to divide and destroy leadership as well as various wings of the movement, and even the instigation of violence. • By 1972, thanks mostly to COINTELPRO in combination with the internal disintegration of the BPP, the Black Panthers were effectively eliminated as a viable “threat” to the establishment. J. Edgar Hoover sought to eliminate the BPP through COINTELPRO. By 1972, he had largely succeeded.

The Student Movement • White students paid attention while SNCC was morphing toward the Black Panther Party. • SNCC had become a role model organization for white activists, too. • Like SNCC, college students were initially idealistic about changing the world. • Students were also influenced by youth culture themes that pitted the older generation’s values against the emerging values of the youth culture. • It would be the Vietnam War along with the restriction of free speech on college campuses that would galvanize the emerging student movement. Student protest buttons from the Berkeley campus of the University of California.

The Port Huron Statement • In 1962, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) met in Ann Arbor, Michigan to produce a manifesto. • The manifesto they produced was very similar to the 1960 statements of SNCC. They were full of hope and idealism, they advocated direct action, and they showed faith in American institutions for humanistic reform. Click the image above to read the Port Huron Statement.

These SDS students were disturbed by many features of American life: • The Bomb, the Cold War, militarism and imperialism • Bureaucracy and over-rationalization • The concentration and centralization of power in Big Government and Big Business, and the corresponding authoritarianism that comes with concentration of power • Organization Man style bland careerism • The blind conformity found on college campuses along with in loco parentis and administrative authoritarianism • Poverty • The injustice of racism and the exploitation of people and the environment by powerful corporations and governments

The 1962 Port Huron Statement pledged to do the following: • To achieve universal disarmament, demilitarization, and peace • To use diplomacy rather than militancy as the basis of foreign policy • To work to eliminate poverty and exploitation • To work for civil rights and to respect the natural dignity of all humans • To revitalize American democracy • To create communities with meaningful work and leisure activities • To make corporations more publicly accountable • To respect the environment These ideas were labeled the “new left” and they became part of the ideological infrastructure of the 1960s counterculture.

The Student Movement • In 1962, the baby boomers were attending universities in huge, galvanizing numbers. • A college degree was now required for many middle class jobs. • Most students came from the growing middle class and had come from economically secure families. They could afford to think big. • They were aiming for something more than mere security – they were aiming for happiness and a humane social world. • Given their affluence, these students were more free to think critically about the shortcomings of the consumer society. In the colleges of the 1960s, there was a strong liberal arts tradition. Students learned about existentialism, classic literature, the Bill of Rights, and other ideas that encouraged a humanistic attitude toward life.

The Student Movement • Having been exposed to the civil rights movement, the prevailing JFK-style idealism, and humanistic ideas taught in college classrooms, students began to push for reforms – at first within the university itself. • Some of their first concerns involved in loco parentis authoritarianism and censorship. In loco parentis means “in place of parent” and it meant that the university had the same power over students that their parents had, including control over housing arrangements and other aspects of students’ personal lives. • Given the popularity of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, white college students saw an opportunity to take a stand. • Many had joined SNCC in the early 1960s and these students brought back the lessons they learned from SNCC. • Most of the former SNCC volunteers also came to share the belief that the problem was not a few bigoted individuals in the South. Rather, it was the larger establishment. It was the system itself. White college students who had volunteered to work for civil rights organizations in the South learned about organizing, leadership, negotiating skills and tactics, procuring resources, use of media, protest tactics, and establishing clear goals. They brought this knowledge back to their universities to share with others. It was empowering.

The Student Movement • Consequently, these idealistic young white students who had participated in SNCC activities in the South returned to their college campuses with a radical message: • Many of the social problems were built into established institutions which function to maintain the status quo and which were being run by a managerial elite, or what C. Wright Mills called the power elite. • Some students, frustrated with their bland school newspaper, began to publish these ideas in their own “underground” newspapers. This was the start of the Free Speech Movement. The American sociologist C. Wright Mills studied American society in the 1950s and found that it was not the pluralistic democracy promoted in American grade schools. There were deep structural problems that required structural solutions.

The Underground Press • One of the main flowers of the free speech movement was the proliferation of underground newspapers across the country – on and off the campus. Virtually every city in the country had at least one underground newspaper by 1969. • Examples of some of the best underground newspapers include the Berkeley Barb, the Great Speckled Bird (Atlanta), the San Francisco Oracle, and the East Village Other (NY City). The Charlotte underground press was called the Inquisition, started in 1969. • The underground newspapers were typically distributed on street corners in the counterculture neighborhoods. Some had huge circulations. The underground press helped sustain all aspects of the emerging counterculture and influenced young writers like Hunter S. Thompson. • Click this link for an assortment of underground newspapers relevant to the African American experience.

The Free Speech Movement • The free speech movement came out of the student movement and began in Berkeley in 1964. It involved the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). • On college campuses, an example of “institutional corruption” involved the rights of the students toward free speech. • Colleges had become over-rationalized administrative bureaucracies, with lots of formal rules and regulations imposed on students. • In loco parentis gave the administrators parental power over students. • At UC-Berkeley, the administration ruled that non-campus political literature could not be distributed on campus. • This seemed an open violation of academic ideals, so students dug in, just as the administrators did. The Free Speech movement started on the Berkeley campus of the University of California in 1964. Students were organized by the SDS, who understood that collective – not individual – actions would be more effective in changing the university’s rules.

The Free Speech Movement • Berkeley became a rallying point for other college campuses to protest the “absence” of free speech (or more specifically the censorship policies of the university). • The SDS embarked on a campaign across Northern urban regions to organize people, and eventually they succeeded in winning many of these free speech campaigns. • This did not involve SNCC, because by 1964 SNCC was already beginning to purge its white membership. By 1965, SDS and SNCC operated as two separate movements, with no dramatic overriding issue linking university life to black culture. • Yet such an issue was just emerging. LBJ had decided to escalate the Vietnam War and by 1965 the draft was becoming an issue. It would be Vietnam that would provide the common galvanizing issue that united various elements of the counterculture into a powerful force. Mario Savio was one of the leaders of the free speech movement. He is seen here at a 1964 free speech rally on the Berkeley campus.

Teach-Ins • Vietnam was becoming increasingly relevant on college campuses for several reasons: • At that time college students were deferred from the draft, so colleges had become “safe havens” • The draft politicized the war and forced young people to learn about Vietnam • College campuses themselves were controversial because they did military research and had Reserve Officer Training Cores (ROTC) offices. • By 1965, many campuses offered teach-ins on Vietnam, often sponsored by SDS. • These teach-ins were initially idealistic, but became futile as the antiwar protestors witnessed the escalation of the war. LBJ wasn’t listening. • By 1965 there were 175,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and Johnson was still rapidly escalating the war. This is a teach-in that occurred at UCLA. Students were frustrated that they were not being taught about Vietnam in their college classrooms. With the help of sympathetic teachers and administrators they organized these extra-curricular teach-ins to learn more about Vietnam history, U.S. policy in Southeast Asia, the Cold War, etc. The teach-ins often exposed the contradictions of U.S. policy in Vietnam.

The Anti-War Movement • By 1966, antiwar protestors were matching the government’s escalation of the war with their own escalation of strategy: a draft resistance movement along with rising radicalism against the military-industrial complex. • Throughout 1966-1967, antiwar confrontations escalated. Government officials were confronted with mass protestors wherever they went. • On college campuses, ROTC programs were being challenged. These protestors were also questioning college military contracts.

The Rise of the Counterculture • The Vietnam War provided the galvanizing element that united the various protestors of the 1960s. • The counterculture was very broad. It was a loose group of single-interest subcultures which came together because of rising alienation from established institutions. • Most of these groups had started out idealistic about the prospects for reform, but had become frustrated with the establishment’s slow pace of change. The escalation of the war provided a dramatic example of the establishment’s failure to change. • Much of this confrontation was over deep core values about what America stood for. Virtually everyone at this late 1960s rock concert had at least some countercultural values in common. Almost all were opposed to U.S. policy in Vietnam, and this united them. Most were also distrustful of establishment authority figures, and most believed in the issue of empowerment, or taking control of one’s own life. But Vietnam had a visceral reality, given the escalation of the war and the draft.

Polarization of Western Culture America, like other Western cultures at this time, was becoming polarized over two different sets of values. • If the dominant culture promoted individualism, the counterculture promoted communalism. • If the dominant culture promoted competition, the counterculture promoted cooperation. • If the dominant culture promoted careerism, the counterculture promoted personal self-discovery.

The Counterculture • The counterculture developed its own music, fashion and lifestyles to symbolize its alternative value system. • Many stopped wearing formal clothing and embraced inexpensive loose-flowing dresses and casual jeans and t-shirts as their “anti-fashion” fashion statements. • More than anything else, the counterculture stood for freedom and empowerment (against the authoritarian establishment). • By the mid-1960s, Vietnam, along with the lifestyle elements symbolizing personal freedom (sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll) united the disparate elements of the counterculture. The counterculture rejected many of the mainstream values and institutions of Western culture, preferring a more humanistic value system. Even the traditional marriage was questioned. This is a photo of a hippie wedding, and you can see that they have reinvented the ceremony.

The Counterculture • The music of the counterculture had become increasingly political with anti-establishment messages. • Folk artists, with their emphasis on substantive lyrics, were at the crest of the wave in the early and mid-1960s. Artists like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and Simon and Garfunkel spoke to youth culture alienation and the alienation of social marginals. • By the mid to late 1960s pop-rock bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones would join in and the counterculture would become a force that could not be ignored. • The capital of the counterculture was San Francisco, with Haight Ashbury the center of the hippie element and Oakland, only 20 miles away, the center of the antiwar radical element. The Grateful Dead at their Haight-Ashbury house. Communal living and sharing created a sense of tribe, which was something missing from the mainstream suburban culture.

The Counterculture • Drugs represented another countercultural sacrament. Smoking pot became a ritual symbolizing shared membership, with the joint passed from person to person in a communal manner. • Smoking pot was also an act of defiance against the law. It symbolized the willingness of a person to take a risk for something they stood for. In American folklore, outlaws are romantic and often symbolize freedom and personal empowerment. • Pot also heightened the senses. The 60s lifestyle promoted self-discovery merged with hedonism. • Being was more important than becoming. • One was to learn by experience – not just by reading books – as Jimi Hendrix captured on his first album (1967), entitled “Are You Experienced.” • By 1967 the countercultural lifestyle was a Western culture sensation and San Francisco had become Mecca. Jimi Hendrix’s ground-breaking 1967 album, Are You Experienced, reflected the swirling creativity, spontaneity, and explosive energy of the psychedelic movement within the counterculture. Click the album cover to hear the title song in mp3 format.

The Counterculture • By the end of 1967, the antiwar movement – a key element of the counterculture - had reached a crossroads. • One the one hand, respectable officials had turned against the war and there was growing debate among the straights. • By the Fall of 1967, public support for the Vietnam war had declined to slightly more than half the public. • On the other hand, many in the counterculture had lost faith in America’s capacity to reform its institutions and had become radicalized. • They saw Vietnam as a symptom of a deeper problem and they sought revolutionary changes. • Which way the movement would go would be decided by the pivotal year of 1968.

The Women’s Movement • The women’s movement was another element of the counterculture that emerged in the early 1960s but which did not clearly galvanize until the late 1960s and early 1970s. • Although women’s roles had changed toward wage work since World War II, there was no corresponding shift in women’s ideals. • Sexism, the belief that women are naturally inferior to men, was still popular during the 1960s. The prevailing attitude was that women belonged in family roles. • Sociologists term this the “cult of domesticity.” Women are viewed as exclusively mothers and wives, with “opposite” characteristics compared with men: If men are rational, then women must be emotional; and if men are strong then women must be weak. If men are the leaders, then women are the followers. Her “natural” place is in the home. Betty Friedan, the author of the 1963 book, The Feminist Mystique, attends a women’s protest march in 1970 as the women’s movement is taking off.

The Women’s Movement • In the 1960s, most jobs were still sex-segregated. Women suffered under a patriarchal system that paid men higher wages. • By the 1960s, most middle class women had at least a part-time job, yet these jobs continued to be “women’s jobs” that paid low wages and offered little upward mobility. • Many women were so deeply ingrained into the ideology of traditional gender roles that they considered it heresy to question them. The woman was supposed to “stand by her man.” • At that time, unlike the civil rights movement, there was no critical mass of protestors to provide an alternative ideology. During the 1940s the government promoted Rosie the Riveter as a symbol of women’s strength in the industrial workforce. Women were getting mixed messages in the post-war period as well.

The Feminine Mystique, 1963 • Unlike the black civil rights movement, women initially tended to see their problems as individual rather than social. Their unhappiness was due to flaws in their own personal lives. • In 1963, Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique.” This book exposed women’s problems as similar to the problems of racial minorities, and not simply the result of the personal troubles. • Like blacks, women had been oppressed because of their ascribed characteristics – their physical differences. • In the Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan explained how she became a good wife and mother, but she felt that she was limited in these two roles and that she could contribute more to society by having additional roles. • This book helped ignite the modern women’s movement. Betty Friedan

The Women’s Movement • The basic principles of the civil rights movement are humanism and equality – and these messages are just as relevant to women as the are to racial minorities. In this way, the civil rights movement helped bring about the women’s movement. • The 1964 Civil Rights Act included sex discrimination as an incidental feature that was not taken very seriously at that time by Congress. Indeed, the government initially failed to act on complaints of sex discrimination, just as they had been slow to act on racial discrimination earlier. • In 1966, a group of activists formed NOW, the National Organization for Women, to pressure for the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act. Shirley Chisholm, first feminist Congresswoman and NOW member in the 1970s.

The Women’s Movement • Many of the early NOW members had experience working with SNCC, the SCLC and SDS and they knew how to build a movement. • Yet they had been frustrated in those other activist groups because even those groups tended to be patriarchal. • Women were routinely steered toward clerical work and away from leadership roles. • In 1964, black women at SNCC even staged a sit-in to protest their sexist treatment by the men of SNCC. Women were beginning to think that they needed their own liberation movement. • The SDS also suffered from patriarchy. This women’s march occurred in 1971 in NY City. The sign in the background on the left says “The women of Vietnam are our sisters.” Feminists have a sense of class consciousness for other women, but this is difficult to achieve in a patriarchal society, where women are socialized to obey the dominant ideologies that define them as “naturally” inferior. The significance of NOW was that they helped instill this feminist class consciousness, and this seeded the women’s liberation movement.

The Women’s Movement • As women came together to share their personal experiences, they developed a new sense of strength and solidarity (class consciousness). • By 1967, many women activists decided they needed to control their own agenda and they began to meet separately from men. • This led to consciousness raising sessions, where small groups of women would gather and discuss their issues. Men were not allowed in these meetings, largely because men tend to interrupt women (another aspect of patriarchy). • In these sessions, women identified a key structural problem in Western society: male-dominated institutions. The goal of the women’s movement was women’s equality. This is a consciousness-raising session. Women take turn sharing their innermost thoughts with each other about any aspect of their lives. As one person talks, everyone listens without interruption. These sessions were empowering for women, who were routinely interrupted and dominated in their everyday lives in patriarchal society. These sessions functioned to de-construct the patriarchal values and ideology instilled in them from birth.

The Counterculture • In 1967, the women’s movement was viewed largely as a side-show. The ultimate impact of women’s liberation would not be felt until the 1970s. • William Chafe argues that there were three pivotal movements during the 1960s that would shape the society: the civil rights movement, the student-antiwar movement, and the women’s movement. • A fourth key movement we will discuss later was the environmental movement, which began in the late 1960s and blossomed in the 1970s.

Emphasis on Individual Competition Achievement Group superiority values Conformity/obedience Materialism and money Authoritarianism Militarism/imperialism Rationality/bureaucracy Self-discipline Delayed gratification Community Cooperation Happiness Equality & social justice Freedom Spiritualism, sharing Democracy Diplomacy/sovereignty Emotionality/tribalism Laid back, go with the flow Immediate gratification Summary of Value DifferencesMainstream Culture VS The Counterculture

The Counter-response • Inevitably the protestors sparked a backlash of resentment. • There was never a time during the 1960s when the protestor activists represented a majority of the American population. • The majority of Americans felt their way of life was under assault. They had devoted their lives to conforming to the dominant culture. • The louder the protestors were, the more resistant and hostile was the backlash. • In 1964, only 34% of whites believed that blacks were seeking too much too fast. By 1966, that figure climbed to 85% as cities were burning and “Black Power!” could be heard from the ghettos. Antiwar posters like this enraged conservative law-abiding patriotic citizens who saw the United States as the greatest nation on Earth. Such behavior wasn’t just rude, it was down right traitorous. Both sides were polarized by the late 1960s.

The Counter-response • Some of the backlash was due to blue collar workers feeling threatened by minority gains. • Now their jobs were less secure because they would have to compete with blacks and women. • By the late-60s, Vietnam had caused inflation which threatened the incomes of Americans. • Some of the blue collar backlash was also due to the nature of the counterculture. Many working class workers resented these middle class “spoiled” students who were not taking school seriously. • This helps explain why there were so many police riots directed against the counterculture. Part of this was generational hostility, and part was class hostility. The police tend to be members of the working class and they also tend to be older than students, who tend to be members of the middle class. Class, age, race, and other tensions polarized Americans during the 1960s. The reactionary counter-response tended to come from the working class, older people, traditional values and religious groups, and conservative white males.

The Counter-response • The “Silent Majority” of Americans sensed a crisis in values. • Every day they turned on the TV to see protestors challenging traditional values and beliefs. • Yet during unstable times many people have a tendency to cling to these traditional values. • They believed their sacred values of blind patriotism, religion, monogamy, hard work, consumerism, traditional sexuality, know-your-place ethnicity, conformity to Biblical and political authority, and traditional gender roles were under attack. • By 1968 they began to rally around the flag with messages like “America – love it or leave it.”

AMST 3100 End

AMST 3100 The 1960s The Counterculture