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The counterculture of the 1960s refers to an anti-establishment cultural phenomenon that developed first in the United States and in the United Kingdom and then spread throughout much of the Western world between the early 1960s and the early 1970s. The aggregate movement gained momentum as the African-American Civil Rights Movement continued to grow, and became revolutionary with the expansion of the US government's extensive military intervention in Vietnam.[3][4][5]
As the 1960s progressed, widespread social tensions also developed concerning other issues, and tended to flow along generational lines regarding human sexuality, women's rights, traditional modes of authority, experimentation with psychoactive drugs, and differing interpretations of the American Dream.
New cultural forms emerged, including the music of the UK band The Beatles, films by directors who were far less restricted by censorship, and the rise of hippie and other alternative lifestyles. As the era unfolded, a dynamic subculture celebrating creativity, experimentation and modern incarnations of bohemian lifestyles emerged. In addition to the trendsetting Beatles, many other creative artists, authors, and thinkers, within and across many disciplines, contributed to the counterculture movement.
Several factors distinguished the counterculture of the 1960s from the anti-authoritarian movements of previous eras. The post-World War II "baby boom"[6][7] generated an unprecedented number of potentially disaffected young people as prospective participants in a rethinking of the direction of American and other democratic societies.[8] Post-war affluence allowed many of the counterculture generation to move beyond a focus on the provision of the material necessities of life that had preoccupied their Depression-era parents.[9] The era was also notable in that a significant portion of the array of behaviors and "causes" within the larger movement were quickly assimilated within mainstream society, particularly in the US.[10][11]
In the broadest sense, 1960s counterculture grew from a confluence of people, events, issues, circumstances, and technological developments which served as intellectual and social catalysts for exceptionally rapid change during the era.
The [20][21] Internal political disagreements concerning treaty obligations in Southeast Asia (SEATO), especially in Vietnam, and debate as to how other communist insurgencies should be challenged, also created a rift of dissent within the establishment.[22][23][24] In the UK, the Profumo Affair also involved establishment leaders being caught in deception, leading to disillusionment and serving as a catalyst for liberal activism.[25] The Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in October 1962, was largely fomented by duplicitous speech and actions on the part of the Soviet Union.[26][27] The assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, and the attendant theories concerning the event, led to further diminished trust in government, including among younger people.[28][29][30]
Many sociological issues fueled the growth of the larger counterculture movement. One was a nonviolent movement in the United States seeking to resolve constitutional civil rights illegalities, especially regarding general racial segregation, longstanding disfranchisement of blacks in the South by white-dominated state government, and ongoing racial discrimination in jobs, housing, and access to public places in both the North and the South.
On college and university campuses, student activists fought for the right to exercise their basic constitutional rights, especially freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.[31]
Many counterculture activists became aware of the plight of the poor, and anti-poverty programs, particularly in the South and within inner city areas in the United States.[32][33]
Environmentalism grew from a greater understanding of the ongoing damage caused by industrialization, resultant pollution, and the misguided use of chemicals such as pesticides in well-meaning efforts to improve the quality of life for the rapidly growing population.[34] Authors such as Rachel Carson played key roles in developing a new awareness among the global population of the fragility of planet earth, despite resistance from elements of the establishment in many countries.[35]
The need to address minority rights of women, gays, the handicapped, and many other neglected constituencies within the larger population came to the forefront as an increasing number of primarily younger people broke free from the constraints of 1950s orthodoxy and struggled to create a more inclusive and tolerant social landscape.[36][37]
The availability of new and more effective forms of birth control was a key underpinning of the sexual revolution. The notion of "recreational sex" without the threat of unwanted pregnancy radically changed the social dynamic and permitted both women and men much greater freedom in the selection of sexual lifestyles outside the confines of traditional marriage.[38] With this change in attitude, by the 1990s the ratio of children born out of wedlock rose from 5% to 25% for Whites and from 25% to 66% for African-Americans.[39]
For those born after World War II, the emergence of television as a source of entertainment and information - as well as the associated massive expansion of consumerism afforded by post-war affluence and encouraged by TV advertising - were key components in youthful disillusionment and the formulation of new social behaviours, even as ad agencies heavily courted the "hip" youth market.[40][41] In the US, nearly real-time TV news coverage of the civil rights era's Birmingham Campaign, the "Bloody Sunday" event of the Selma to Montgomery marches, and graphic news footage from Vietnam brought horrifying, moving images of the bloody reality of armed conflict into living rooms for the first time.
The breakdown of enforcement of the US Hays Code[42] concerning censorship in motion picture production, the use of new forms of artistic expression in European and Asian cinema, and the advent of modern production values heralded a new era of art-house, pornographic, and mainstream film production, distribution, and exhibition. The end of censorship resulted in a complete reformation of the western film industry. With new-found artistic freedom, a generation of exceptionally talented New Wave film makers working across all genres brought realistic depictions of previously prohibited subject matter to neighborhood theater screens for the first time, even as Hollywood film studios were still considered a part of the establishment by some elements of the counterculture.
By the later 1960s, previously under-regarded FM radio replaced AM radio as the focal point for the ongoing explosion of rock and roll music, and became the nexus of youth-oriented news and advertising for the counterculture generation.[43][44]
Communes, collectives, and intentional communities regained popularity during this era.[45] Early communities, such as the Hog Farm, Quarry Hill, and Drop City[46] in the US were established as straightforward agrarian attempts to return to the land and live free of interference from outside influences. As the era progressed, many people established and populated new communities in response to not only disillusionment with standard community forms, but also dissatisfaction with certain elements of the counterculture itself. Some of these self-sustaining communities have been credited with the birth and propagation of the international Green Movement.
The emergence of an interest in expanded spiritual consciousness, Gallup said religion was increasing in influence. By the late 1960s, polls indicated less than 20% still held that belief.[47]
The "Generation Gap", or the inevitable perceived divide in worldview between the old and young, was perhaps never greater than during the counterculture era.[48] A large measure of the generational chasm of the 1960s and early 1970s was born of rapidly evolving fashion and hairstyle trends that were readily adopted by the young, but often misunderstood and ridiculed by the old. These included the wearing of very long hair by men,[49] the wearing of natural or "Afro" hairstyles by Blacks, the donning of revealing clothing by women in public, and the mainstreaming of the psychedelic clothing and regalia of the short-lived hippie culture. Ultimately, practical and comfortable casual apparel, namely updated forms of T-shirts (often tie-dyed, or emblazoned with political or advertising statements), and Levi Strauss-branded blue denim jeans[50] became the enduring uniform of the generation. The fashion dominance of the counterculture effectively ended with the rise of the Disco and Punk Rock eras in the later 1970s, even as the global popularity of T-shirts, denim jean pants, and casual clothing in general have continued to grow.
In the western world, the ongoing criminal legal status of the recreational drug industry was instrumental in the formation of an anti-establishment social dynamic by some of those coming of age during the counterculture era. The explosion of marijuana use during the era, in large part by students on fast-expanding college campuses,[51] created an attendant need for increasing numbers of people to conduct their personal affairs in secret in the procurement and use of banned substances. The classification of marijuana as a narcotic, and the attachment of severe criminal penalties for its use, drove the act of smoking marijuana, and experimentation with substances in general, deep underground. Many began to live largely clandestine lives because of their choice to use such drugs and substances, fearing retribution from their governments.[52][53]
The often violent confrontations between college students (and other activists) and law enforcement officials became one of the hallmarks of the era. Many younger people began to show deep distrust of police, and terms such as "fuzz" and "pig" as derogatory epithets for police reappeared, and became key words within the counterculture lexicon. The distrust of police was based not only on fear of police brutality during political protests, but also on generalized police corruption - especially police manufacture of false evidence, and outright entrapment, in drug cases. In the US, the social tension between elements of the counterculture and law enforcement reached the breaking point in many notable cases, including: the Columbia University protests of 1968 in New York City,[54][55][56] the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests in Chicago,[57][58][59] the arrest and imprisonment of John Sinclair in Ann Arbor, Michigan,[60] and the Kent State shootings at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio.[61] Police malfeasance was also an ongoing issue in the UK during the era.[62]
The Vietnam War, and the protracted national divide between supporters and opponents of the war, were arguably the most important factors contributing to the rise of the larger counterculture movement.
The widely accepted assertion that anti-war opinion was held only among the young is a myth,[63][64] but enormous war protests consisting of thousands of mostly younger people in every major US city effectively united millions against the war, and against the war policy that prevailed under five congresses and during two presidential administrations.
The counterculture era essentially commenced in earnest with the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy. It ended with the termination of US combat military involvement in the communist insurgencies of Southeast Asia and the end of the draft in 1973, and ultimately with the resignation of disgraced President Richard M. Nixon in August 1974.
Many key movements were born of, or were advanced within, the counterculture of the 1960s. Each movement is relevant to the larger era. The most important stand alone, irrespective of the larger counterculture.[65]
The UK Underground was a movement linked to the growing subculture in the US and associated with the hippie phenomenon, generating its own magazines and newspapers, fashion, music groups, and clubs. Underground figure Barry Miles said, "The underground was a catch-all sobriquet for a community of like-minded anti-establishment, anti-war, pro-rock'n'roll individuals, most of whom had a common interest in recreational drugs. They saw peace, exploring a widened area of consciousness, love and sexual experimentation as more worthy of their attention than entering the rat race. The straight, consumerist lifestyle was not to their liking, but they did not object to others living it. But at that time the middle classes still felt they had the right to impose their values on everyone else, which resulted in conflict."[66]
In the Netherlands, Provo was a counterculture movement that focused on "provoking violent responses from authorities using non-violent bait."[67]
In France, the General Strike centered in Paris in May 1968 united French students, and nearly toppled the government.[68]
Kommune 1 or K1 was a commune in West Germany, and was known for its bizarre staged events that fluctuated between satire and provocation. These events served as inspiration for the "Sponti" movement and other leftist groups. In the late summer of 1968, the commune moved into a deserted factory on Stephanstraße in order to reorient. This second phase of Kommune 1 was characterized by sex, music and drugs. Soon, the commune was receiving visitors from all over the world, including Jimi Hendrix.[69][70]
Oz Magazine was first published as a satirical humour magazine between 1963 and 1969 in Sydney, Australia, and, in its second and better known incarnation, became a "psychedelic hippy" magazine from 1967 to 1973 in London. Strongly identified as part of the underground press, it was the subject of two celebrated obscenity trials, one in Australia in 1964 and the other in the United Kingdom in 1971.[71][72]
In Mexico, rock music was tied into the youth revolt of the 1960s. Mexico City, as well as northern cities such as Toluca, a town neighboring Mexico City, and became known as "The Mexican Woodstock". Nudity, drug use, and the presence of the US flag scandalized conservative Mexican society to such an extent that the government clamped down on rock and roll performances for the rest of the decade. The festival, marketed as proof of Mexico's modernization, was never expected to attract the masses it did, and the government had to evacuate stranded attendees en masse at the end. This occurred during the era of President Luis Echeverría, an extremely repressive era in Mexican history. Anything that could be connected to the counterculture or student protests was prohibited from being broadcast on public airwaves, with the government fearing a repeat of the student protests of 1968. Few bands survived the prohibition; though the ones that did, like Three Souls in My Mind (now El Tri), remained popular due in part to their adoption of Spanish for their lyrics, but mostly as a result of a dedicated underground following. While Mexican rock groups were eventually able to perform publicly by the mid-1980s, the ban prohibiting tours of Mexico by foreign acts lasted until 1989.[73]
The Cordobazo was a civil uprising in the city of Córdoba, Argentina, in the end of May 1969, during the military dictatorship of General Juan Carlos Onganía, which occurred a few days after the Rosariazo, and a year after the French May '68. Contrary to previous protests, the Cordobazo did not correspond to previous struggles, headed by Marxist workers' leaders, but associated students and workers in the same struggle against the military government.[74]
The US Civil Rights Movement, a key element of the larger counterculture movement, involved the use of applied nonviolence to assure that equal rights guaranteed under the US Constitution would apply to all citizens. Many states illegally denied many of these rights to African-Americans, and this was successfully addressed in the early and mid-1960s in several major nonviolent movements.[75][76]
Much of the 1960s counterculture 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 US South, was one early example. At Berkeley a 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. Other rebellious young people, who were not students, also contributed to the Free Speech Movement.[77]
The New Left is a term used in different countries to describe identity politics or alternative lifestyles, or became politically inactive.[78][79][80]
A surge of popular interest in anarchism occurred in western nations during the 1960s and 1970s.[85] Anarchism was influential in the counterculture of the 1960s[86][87][88] and anarchists actively participated in the Émile Armand.
The New Left in the United States also included anarchist,
Annotated Chart of 20th Century US Birth Rates
This unit focuses on student protest in the 60s
The world of espionage lies at the heart of the mythology of the Cold War.
This is a review of the book of same name by John Ehrman, a winner of Studies in Intelligence Annual awards. At pub date, Ehrman was an officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence
The international Peace Movement played an essential role throughout the Cold War in keeping the public informed on issues of disarmament and pressuring governments to negotiate arms control treaties
1963–77: Limits on nuclear testing
Learning from the past
(JFK's) first reaction on hearing the news from National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy was to accuse the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev of a double-cross
Sources: Pew Research Center, National Election Studies, Gallup, ABC/Washington Post, CBS/New York Times, and CNN Polls. From 1976 to 2010 the trend line represents a three-survey moving average. For party analysis, selected datasets obtained from searches of the iPOLL Databank provided by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut
JFK Assassination Records
The world population growth rate rose from about 1.5 percent per year from 1950 to 1951, to a peak of over 2 percent in the early 1960s due to reductions in mortality. Growth rates thereafter started to decline due to rising age at marriage as well as increasing availability and use of effective contraceptive methods. Note that changes in population growth have not always been steady. A dip in the growth rate from 1959 to 1960, for instance, was due to the Great Leap Forward in China. During that time, both natural disasters and decreased agricultural output in the wake of massive social reorganization caused China's death rate to rise sharply and its fertility rate to fall by almost half
Then, things began to temper the enthusiasm for pesticides. Notable among these was the publication of Rachel Carson's best selling book "Silent Spring," which was published in 1962. She (a scientist) issued grave warnings about pesticides, and predicted massive destruction of the planet's fragile ecosystems unless more was done to halt what she called the "rain of chemicals." In retrospect, this book really launched the environmental movement.
... It took just two years...for Midnight Cowboy to be re-rated from X to R, without a single frame being altered. Community standards had changed — as they invariably do
It was not until the 1960's...that the quality advantage of FM combined with stereo was enjoyed by most Americans
Like the utopian societies of the 1840s, over 2000 rural communes formed during these turbulent times. Completely rejecting the capitalist system, many communes rotated duties, made their own laws, and elected their own leaders. Some were philosophically based, but others were influenced by new religions. Earth-centered religions, astrological beliefs, and Eastern faiths proliferated across American campuses. Some scholars labeled this trend as the Third Great Awakening.
Explore the existence of the generation gap that took place in the 1960's through this Ask Steve video. Steve Gillon explains there was even a larger gap between the Baby Boomers themselves than the Baby Boomers and the Greatest Generation. The massive Baby Boomers Generation was born between 1946 and 1964, consisting of nearly 78 million people. The Baby Boomers were coming of age in the 1960's, and held different cultural values than the Greatest Generation. The Greatest Generation lived in a time of self-denial, while the Baby Boomers were always seeking immediate gratification. However, the Baby Boomers were more divided amongst themselves. Not all of them were considered hippies and protesters. In fact, people under the age of 28 supported the Vietnam War in greater numbers than their parents. These divisions continue to play out today.
Within the last five years the ingestion of various drugs has become widespread on the American campus.
from 1951 to 1956 stricter sentencing laws set mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related offenses. In the 1950s the beatniks appropriated the use of marijuana from the black hepsters and the drug moved into middle-class white America in the 1960s.
Regrettably or not, the fire of 1968 has died down. The memory has not.
Founded Feb. 12. 1909, the NAACP is the nation's oldest, largest and most widely recognized grassroots-based civil rights organization. Its more than half-million members and supporters throughout the United States and the world are the premier advocates for civil rights in their communities, campaigning for equal opportunity and conducting voter mobilization.
1960s: Doctors in San Francisco drug clinics prescribe injections of methamphetamine to treat heroin addiction. Illegal abuse occurs in subcultures such as outlaw biker gangs and students, which cook and use the drug.
The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was founded in 1942 as the Committee of Racial Equality by an interracial group of students in Chicago-Bernice Fisher, James R. Robinson, James L. Farmer, Jr., Joe Guinn, George Houser, and Homer Jack.. Many of these students were members of the Chicago branch of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a pacifist organization seeking to change racist attitudes. The founders of CORE were deeply influenced by Mahatma Gandhi's teachings of nonviolent resistance.
Public lAw 253, 80th Congress, July 26, 1947 (61 Stat. 495)
The Supreme Court found that while racially-based restrictive covenants are not themselves unconstitutional, enforcement of the covenants is: *Private parties may voluntarily adhere to racially-based restrictive covenants. *State enforcement of racially-based restrictive covenants, however, is discriminatory as it violates the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment
Shelley's attribution logic threatened to dissolve the distinction between state action, to which Fourteenth Amendment limitations apply, and private action, which falls outside the Fourteenth Amendment.
They were so adaptable, you could turn them into a dune buggy, you could hop it up, you could paint it wildly," he said. "It was the car of the hippie movement and of the counterculture - Leslie Kendall, curator of the Petersen Automotive Museum
Multi-Media Resources from "the American Experience"
When a ceasefire was eventually signed, on 27 July 1953, no-one could have guessed that 50 years later, the two Koreas would remain technically at war. A peace treaty has never been signed, and the border continues to bristle with mines, artillery and hundreds of troops.
TOTAL IN-THEATER DEATHS: 36,574 (updated as of 2014-09-19).
Adapted from Is It Still a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World?" by Edward Rothstein, The Times, Sept. 18, 1999, and other Times articles
Winner: Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Joint Hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence, etal, 95 Congress, 1st Session. Includes testimony, appendices, and copies of documents.
The VENONA files are most famous for exposing Julius (code named LIBERAL) and Ethel Rosenberg and help give indisputable evidence of their involvement with the Soviet spy ring.
NYT Editorial Note on PDF attached to web article: The C.I.A.'s history of the 1953 coup in Iran is made up of the following documents: a historian's note, a summary introduction, a lengthy narrative account written by Dr. Donald N. Wilber, and, as appendices, five planning documents he attached. On April 16, 2000, The New York Times on the Web published the introduction and several of the appendices. (from: http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/iran-cia-intro.pdf)
The Geneva Accords stated that Vietnam was to become an independent nation. Elections were to be held in July 1956, under international supervision, to choose a government for Vietnam. During the two-year interval until the elections, the country would be split into two parts; the North and the South. The dividing line chosen, at the seventeenth parallel a little north of the city of Hue, was quite close to the line that had separated the two halves of Vietnam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but this was purely a coincidence. This line no longer corresponded to any natural division in Vietnamese society, in economy, political structure, religion, or dialect. It was an arbitrary compromise between French proposals for a line further north and Viet Minh proposals for a line further south.
On May 17, 1954, the Court unanimously ruled that "separate but equal" public schools for blacks and whites were unconstitutional. The Brown case served as a catalyst for the modern civil rights movement, inspiring education reform everywhere and forming the legal means of challenging segregation in all areas of society. After Brown, the nation made great strides toward opening the doors of education to all students. With court orders and active enforcement of federal civil rights laws, progress toward integrated schools continued through the late 1980s. Since then, many states have been resegregating and educational achievement and opportunity have been falling for minorities.
In 1955, Emmett Till—a 14-year-old African-American visiting Mississippi from Chicago—was murdered after whistling at a white woman. His mother insisted that her son be displayed in a glass-topped casket, so the world could see his beaten body. Till's murder became a rallying point for the civil rights movement, and his family recently donated the casket in which he was buried to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Short abstract Psychiatrist who investigated LSD, “turned on” Aldous Huxley, and coined the word “psychedelic”
Chronicle columnist Herb Caen coined the word "beatnik" on April 2, 1958, six months after the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite into space.
The march bore the signs of careful planning. The column with its banners - "Which is to be banned, the H-bomb or the human race?" - got off on time, and the long snake that slid down Piccadilly, Kensington High Street, and Chiswick High Road, managed with only discreet help from the police, not to obstruct what little traffic there was.
On 15 November 1957, SANE ran a full-page advertisement in the New York Times warning Americans: ‘‘We are facing a danger unlike any danger that has ever existed.’’ Inspired by the enthusiastic response to its Times advertisement, SANE redefined itself as a mass membership organization, gaining 130 chapters and 25,000 members by the following summer.
SLATE officially organizes. Temporary SLATE Coordinating Committee includes Charleen Rains, Owen Hill Pat Hallinan, Peter Franck, Fritjof Thygeson and Mike Miller.
He was called El Hombre, "the Man," and for three decades he was one of Cuba's most controversial leaders. It would take Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution to unseat him.
ISBN 1-56432-234-3 ; Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-63561
This section provides General Background inform ation on the recent human rights situation in Cuba. The subcategory of Spanish Resources includes eight books on human rights in Cuba. The Socialism subcategory includes sources discussing th e changing political environment in Cuba since the Cold War and the impact of the instability of Cuba's socialist system.
Although the beginnings of the 1965 March on Washington can be located in a number of places, it is perhaps best to begin with the origins of the chief organization behind the march: the Students for a Democratic Society. As a social movement organization, the SDS grew out of a parent group founded in 1905 called the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). The LID embraced a largely socialist orientation toward democratic governance; the organization was initially called the Intercollegiate Socialist Society before changing its name in 1921. Many prominent political thinkers were members of the LID, including Upton Sinclair, Walter Lippmann, Michael Harrington, and John Dewey (who was president for a short time). Growing out of the larger organization, the student section of the LID--aptly titled the Student League for Industrial Democracy, or SLID--existed in early 1960 on only three campuses: Yale, Columbia, and the University of Michigan. As SDS historian Kirkpatrick Sale notes, the chapters at Columbia and Yale called themselves the "John Dewey Discussion Club," and all three existed with minimal recognition.
From: The American Political Science Review, Vol. 77, No. 2, (Jun., 1983), pp. 390-406
The original broacast air date of the report has not been verified.
Original article was updated on 2014-01-27
On February 1, 1960, four African American college students sat down at a lunch counter at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, and politely asked for service. Their request was refused. When asked to leave, they remained in their seats. Their passive resistance and peaceful sit-down demand helped ignite a youth-led movement to challenge racial inequality throughout the South. (text and photos)
Governor Buford Ellington ordered today a full investigation into the activities of a television network camera crew...
SNCC evolved out of that Easter weekend at Shaw University. Students in the SCLC had wished, for some time, for a student-led organization. (There were student chapters within the SCLC, but Martin Luther King, Jr. had not been pushing for an official student organization). Students wanted leadership opportunities and had different strategies than the SCLC leadership, which they believed moved toward progress at a glacial speed. At the 1960 Shaw meeting, students also expressed a fear that a strong centralized organization (even if student-led) would be a foe of democracy. Therefore, Baker and others established SNCC as a decentralized organization, with the national headquarters providing support and literature, including a newspaper, but not the strategy and leadership.
Here, told for the first time, is the remarkable story behind the most explosive espionage case of the 20th century...
The birth control pill arrived on the market in 1960. Within two years, 1.2 million American women were “on the pill.” By 1964, it was the most popular contraceptive in the country. Looking back, Americans credit—or blame—the pill with unleashing the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The pill is widely believed to have loosened sexual mores, including the double standard that sanctioned premarital sex for men but not for women. But, according to historian Elaine Tyler May, this idea is largely a myth. As May explained to a Stanford audience, the pill’s impact on the sexual revolution is unclear. What is clear is that the drug had a far greater impact within marriage itself. - See more at: http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/pill-and-marriage-revolution#sthash.irTtLo8A.dpuf
Before his inauguration, John F. Kennedy was briefed on a plan by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) developed during the Eisenhower administration to train Cuban exiles for an invasion of their homeland. The plan anticipated that the Cuban people and elements of the Cuban military would support the invasion. The ultimate goal was the overthrow of Castro and the establishment of a non-communist government friendly to the United States.
In 1961 CORE undertook a new tactic aimed at desegregating public transportation throughout the south. These tactics became know as the "Freedom Rides". The first Freedom Ride took place on May 4, 1961 when seven blacks and six whites left Washington, D.C., on two public buses bound for the Deep South. They intended to test the Supreme Court's ruling in Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which declared segregation in interstate bus and rail stations unconstitutional. In the first few days, the riders encountered only minor hostility, but in the second week the riders were severely beaten. Outside Anniston, Alabama, one of their buses was burned, and in Birmingham several dozen whites attacked the riders only two blocks from the sheriff's office. With the intervention of the U.S. Justice Department, most of CORE's Freedom Riders were evacuated from Birmingham, Alabama to New Orleans. John Lewis, a former seminary student who would later lead SNCC and become a US congressman, stayed in Birmingham. CORE Leaders decided that letting violence end the trip would send the wrong signal to the country. They reinforced the pair of remaining riders with volunteers, and the trip continued. The group traveled from Birmingham to Montgomery without incident, but on their arrival in Montgomery they were savagely attacked by a mob of more than 1000 whites. The extreme violence and the indifference of local police prompted a national outcry of support for the riders, putting pressure on President Kennedy to end the violence. The riders continued to Mississippi, where they endured further brutality and jail terms but generated more publicity and inspired dozens more Freedom Rides. By the end of the summer, the protests had spread to train stations and airports across the South, and in November, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued rules prohibiting segregated transportation facilities.
At the Vienna Summit in June 1961, Khrushchev reiterated his threat to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany if the West did not come to terms over Berlin by the end of the year. Rather than submit to such pressure, President John F. Kennedy replied that it would be a "cold winter." When he returned to the United States, Kennedy faced instead a summer of decision. On July 25 he announced plans to meet the Soviet challenge in Berlin, including a dramatic buildup of American conventional forces and drawing the line on interference with Allied access to West Berlin. This warning, in fact, contained the basis for resolving the crisis. On August 13 the East German Government, supported by Khrushchev, finally closed the border between East and West Berlin by erecting what eventually became the most concrete symbol of the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. Although the citizens of Berlin reacted to the wall with outrage, many in the West--certainly within the Kennedy administration--reacted with relief. The wall interfered with the personal lives of the people but not with the political position of the Allies in Berlin. The result was a "satisfactory" stalemate--the Soviets did not challenge the legality of Allied rights, and the Allies did not challenge the reality of Soviet power.
So long as the Communists insist that they are preparing to end by themselves unilaterally our rights in West Berlin and our commitments to its people, we must be prepared to defend those rights and those commitments. We will at all times be ready to talk, if talk will help. But we must also be ready to resist with force, if force is used upon us. Either alone would fail. Together, they can serve the cause of freedom and peace.
On November 1, 1961, Women Strike For Peace (WSP) was inaugurated with a day-long strike by an estimated 50,000 women in 60 cities, all pressing for nuclear disarmament. The organization was composed primarily of mothers who feared the effects of nuclear proliferation on the short- and long-term health of their children. They were particularly concerned with levels of irradiation in milk and the increase in nuclear testing. WSP had the slogan “End the Arms Race – Not the Human Race,” as well as “Pure Milk, Not Poison.” Bella Abzug joined the group in its early organizational stages as an active participant in the New York contingent and as creator and chairperson of WSP’s legislative committee. By pushing the organization to incorporate legislative lobbying into its efforts, she helped it to become an effective political force. By 1964, the emphasis of Women Strike for Peace had shifted to focus as much on the Vietnam War as on disarmament, protesting against the draft and the war’s effects on Vietnamese children. Abzug remained active in WSP until she was elected to Congress in 1970.
Women Strike for Peace (WSP) was formed in 1961 after over 50,000 women across the country marched for peace and against above ground testing of nuclear weapons. By the mid 1960s the focus of the organization shifted to working against the Vietnam war. Dorothy Marder took photographs at many WSP demonstrations on the East Coast and her images appeared in WSP publications. Her photographs show the women behind WSP who wanted to protect their families from nuclear testing and a male-dominated militarism. Leaders of the organization include Dagmar Wilson, Bella Abzug, Amy Swerdlow, Cora Weiss, and many more are featured in Dorothy Marder's photography.
Text & Video
Google digitized pdf from U-M library
The Port Huron Statement was the declaration of principles issued June 15, 1962, by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a major radical student organization in the United States during the 1960s. Having only a few hundred members across the country at the time the Statement was drafted, SDS drew tens of thousands of students into its ranks as the movement against the Vietnam War grew—before a deep factional split destroyed the organization in 1969. During SDS’s history of activism, 60,000 copies of the Statement were distributed. It has become a historical landmark of American leftwing radicalism and a widely influential discourse on the meaning of democracy in modern society.
In relation to the frequent cases of death by overdose, given the small therapeutic margin of these substances, it should be pointed out that this was a common method in suicide attempts. It suffices to recall, in this regard, the famous case of Marilyn Monroe, on whose death certificate it clearly states “acute poisoning by overdose of barbiturates” (Figure 7). The lethal effect of these compounds was such that a mixture of barbiturates with other substances was even employed in some USA states for the execution of prisoners sentenced to death. Furthermore, there are classic reports of fatal overdose due to the “automatism phenomenon”, whereby the patient would take his or her dose, only to forget that he or she had already taken it, given the amnesic effect of the drug, and take it again, this process being repeated several times (Richards 1934). Figure 8 shows the evolution of number of deaths (accidental or suicide) by barbiturate overdose in England and Wales for the period 1905–1960. In this regard, and in the city of New York alone, in the period 1957–1963, there were 8469 cases of barbiturate overdose, with 1165 deaths (Sharpless 1970), whilst in the United Kingdom, between 1965 and 1970, there were 12 354 deaths attributed directly to barbiturates (Barraclough 1974). These data should not surprise us, since in a period of just one year (1968), 24.7 million prescriptions for barbiturates were issued in the United Kingdom (Plant 1981). In view of these data, the Advisory Council Campaign in Britain took measures restricting the prescription of these drugs. Meanwhile, the prescription of prolonged-acting sedative barbiturates was strongly opposed through citizens’ action campaigns such as CURB (Campaign on the Use and Restrictions of Barbiturates), especially active during the 1970s.
Monroe died later in 1962 of a drug overdose, but tales about her alleged fling with the President grew increasingly tall. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover tried to prove that the man on a secret FBI sex tape of Monroe was Kennedy, but he lacked definitive proof. Others claim Kennedy was involved in her death. Needless to say, the rumors are even less substantiated than the affair itself.
Among the book’s readers, reputedly, was John F. Kennedy, who in the fall of 1963 began thinking about proposing antipoverty legislation. After Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson took up the issue, calling in his 1964 State of the Union address for an “unconditional war on poverty.” Sargent Shriver headed the task force charged with drawing up the legislation, and invited Harrington to Washington as a consultant.
Ken Kesey, the Pied Piper of the psychedelic era, who was best known as the author of the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, died yesterday in a hospital in Eugene, Ore., said his wife, Faye. He was 66 and lived in Pleasant Hill, Ore.
Legendary jock entertained and informed New Yorkers in the '60s and '70s by bringing on guests like Bob Dylan and Abbie Hoffman.
In its June 28, 1963, issue, LIFE confronted the assassination with a combination of scorn (for the Klan and for white supremacists in general), anger (at the waste of such a life as Evers’) and an occasionally sardonic venom.
In 1965, the Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut legalized contraception for married couples.
New York hippies have a new kick - baking marijuana in cookies...
“Things they do look awful c-cold,” Daltry continued stuttering, “Hope I die before I get old.” Daltry then screamed, drilling the purpose of the song into everyone’s heads, “This is my generation!” And this truly was the youths’ generation. All the years of old men from bygone eras had to pave way to Roger Daltry’s generation, for the young men and women of the Western world were finally speaking up and letting their voices be heard. “It’s my generation, baby,” Daltry repeated his mantra.
#89 of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time
Malcolm X predicted that he would not live to see its publication, a prophecy fulfilled as friction between himself and the Nation of Islam, and a subsequent falling-out culminated in his 1965 assassination. But the pages chronicling the years leading up to it reveal the world of a man who had gone from being a hustler to being one of history’s most controversial civil rights icons.
But what we do know that is true is that when Malcolm is assassinated on February 21, 1965, within two-and-a-half weeks the original publisher, Doubleday, exes the deal on the book. And in early March '65, they cancel the contract. That's why the book is published at the end of the year by Grove, not Doubleday. It was the most disastrous decision in corporate publishing history. They lost millions of dollars on this.
Article includes video of Nader reflecting on auto safety legislation.
The Black Panther Party, formed in 1966 in Oakland, California by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, was a revolutionary socialist organization that strove to end the oppression of black people in the United States. It adopted a ten-point plan that called for autonomy, employment, free healthcare, decent housing, financial reparations for slavery, the end of police brutality against black people, the release of black prisoners from jails, fair trials, and black nationalism. In practice, the Panthers focused much of their attention on policing the police, often resorting to violence. The FBI had taken notice. J. Edgar Hoover said in 1968 that the Black Panther Party was “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country." By 1969, the Black Panther Party was well known nationally and had spread across the country.
Young rock fans take to the streets after the shuttering of Pandora's Box in 1966. The unrest inspired Stephen Stills' landmark anthem.
Rather than cut nude scenes from Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni chooses to release it without an MPAA seal.
On the night of Feb. 11, 1967, hundreds — maybe thousands — of people congregated in the international terminal of Kennedy Airport, not to embark on flights to far-flung places but rather, well, it isn’t entirely clear or relevant. The gathering was an impromptu party, a nonpolitical demonstration, a happening named, in the spirit of the times, a fly-in. Now we might be inclined to see it as a prehistoric flash mob, an example of the power of communication technology to create instantaneous, ephemeral but nonetheless meaningful communities.
From the Archives
Life Magazine via Google Books
After the elections, the committee became the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, which organized major anti-war demonstrations that took place in April 1967. In New York City, 400,000 protesters marched from Central Park to the United Nations, with speakers including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Stokely Carmichael. 75,000 gathered for a similar rally in San Francisco.
(Report with photos) Forty-seven years ago today, Muhammad Ali made headlines for refusing to be drafted into the U.S. Army on the grounds of being a conscientious objector, and it all happened here in Houston. It would set off a chain of events that wouldn't cease until a 1971 Supreme Court decision reversed his conviction.
It was May 2, 1967, and the Black Panthers’ invasion of the California statehouse launched the modern gun-rights movement.
Twelve issues of Yarrowstalks were published in Philadelphia from 1967 until 1975. Most of the activity was concentrated at the beginning of the period, in the heyday of underground press activity. The “summer of love” in 1967 saw the birth of about 100 underground publications nationwide, and Yarrowstalks was one of the first. It was the most physically appealing of the first wave in its creative use of color and artwork. In contrast to the other Philadelphia papers, Yarrowstalks leaned away from the politics. Like New York’s East Village Other and the San Francisco Oracle, Yarrowstalks was among the first underground paper to explore the graphic possibilities of cold-type offset printing. Color was splashed over pages with sketches and text. The Oracle, particularly, was responsible for making newspaper graphics an art form, and it published some of the most beautiful and trend-setting psychedelic art of the 1960s.Yarrowstalks was Philadelphia’s Oracle. It was the first of the undergrounds to publish the cartoons of Robert Crumb, an ex-Hallmark illustrator who has become the leading artist of underground “commix.” In his character, Mr. Natural, he captured the feeling of the movement. Mr. Natural graced Yarrowstalks that summer and subsequently appeared in most of the alternative publications in the country.
An unknown number of slayings haven't gotten a look because the law doesn't cover any killings after 1969. That saddens people like Gloria Green-McCray, whose brother James Earl Green was shot to death on May 14, 1970, by police during a student demonstration at Jackson State University. The family never learned the name of the shooter, and no one was ever prosecuted. "We've never really got any closure because of the investigation not being thorough and everything just being kicked out," said Green-McCray. "It was like, 'Just another black person dead. I mean, so what?' "
Since this article was written, the situation at Texas Southern has become even worse. A policeman was killed in rioting last week, and 488 people were arrested.
At 2:20 a.m., a group of officers were near the northwest corner of the University Center, lined up along a wall awaiting directions from supervisors at the scene. Chief Short, like all of the other officers, took cover wherever possible. The chief directed officers to fire only when fired upon and only above the building or directly at a known source of the gunfire. Reporters Charley Schneider of The Houston Post and Nick Gearhardt of KHOU-TV (Channel 11), were with this group of officers. Schneider said that there were two officers and a TV newsman in front of him. He said that Officer Louis Kuba was directly behind him with his hand on Schneider's shoulder. Heavy fire continued from the dorm and Schneider suddenly felt Kuba's hand become limp. Turning, he saw the officer slumping backward into Gearhardt's outstretched arms, an expressionless look on his face and blood pouring from his forehead. Schneider reported in a Post article the following day, "There was no riot at TSU. It was war." An ambulance rushed the wounded officer to Ben Taub General Hospital. He died at 8:38 a.m. from a bullet wound above his right eye. Quiet, easy-going, even-tempered, Officer Louis Raymond Kuba, only thirty-four days out of Class No. 34, was only twenty-five.
On June 1, 1967, six Vietnam veterans gathered in Barry's apartment to form VVAW. Another vet associated with the early days of VVAW is Carl Rogers. Rogers held a press conference upon his return from his Vietnam service as a chaplain's assistant announcing his opposition to the war. Barry recruited him and at some point he became "vice president" of VVAW. Other early influential members who are mentioned are David Braum, John Talbot, and Art Blank. Jan Barry also lists Steve Greene and Frank (Rocky) Rocks
It was billed as “the Summer of Love,” a blast of glamour, ecstasy, and Utopianism that drew some 75,000 young people to the San Francisco streets in 1967. Who were the true movers behind the Haight-Ashbury happening that turned America on to a whole new age?
At the same time, Sgt. Pepper formally ushered in an unforgettable season of hope, upheaval and achievement: the late 1960s and, in particular, 1967's Summer of Love. In its iridescent instrumentation, lyric fantasias and eye-popping packaging, Sgt. Pepper defined the opulent revolutionary optimism of psychedelia and instantly spread the gospel of love, acid, Eastern spirituality and electric guitars around the globe. No other pop record of that era, or since, has had such an immediate, titanic impact. This music documents the world's biggest rock band at the very height of its influence and ambition.
"July 1967: A 'Legalise Pot' rally is held in London's Hyde Park; an advertisement in The Times, sponsored by SOMA, a drug research organisation, states: 'The law against marijuana is immoral in principle and unworkable in practice.' Signatories include the Beatles, RD Laing and Graham Greene." - from 100 Years of Altered States, The Guardian Newspaper (July 21, 2002)
Hippies stage a mock funeral to signal the end of San Francisco's overhyped, overattended hippie scene. As Mary Ellen Kasper will later recall, the message was, "Stay where you are! Bring the revolution to where you live."
Rumours of disagreements with Castro grew. After months of mystery Castro announced that Guevara, who was known to have a garibaldian yearning to liberate the entire Latin American land mass, had resigned Cuban citizenship and left for "a new field of battle in the struggle against imperialism". [web story is reprint of original article]
Photos & Text: top the Draft Week in December, 1967 at the Oakland Army Induction Center on Clay Street in downtown Oakland, California had many of the same actions that happened in October, 1967, just two months earlier. There was civil disobedience. Protesters blocked the doorway of the Center and were arrested. This time, protesters also sat down in front of the buses full of draftees. Draft eligible protesters publicly burned their draft cards in an open show of defiance against the draft and the laws that made it illegal to burn your draft card. Noticeably different in these photos is moderation of the police response. The streets were not cleared of protesters. Police did not stand with billy clubs at the ready. In the end, the draftees went into the center and the war machine continued.
Rallies across America have taken place in 30 US cities, from Boston to Atlanta, to protest against the continuing war in Vietnam. In Oakland, California, at least 40 anti-war protesters, including the folk singer Joan Baez, were arrested for taking part in a sit-in at a military induction centre. As many as 250 demonstrators had gathered to try and prevent conscripts from entering the building when the arrests were made. The 'Stop the Draft Week' protests are forming part of a nationwide initiative organised by a group calling itself 'the Resistance'. Accompanied by singing from Ms Baez and others, the sitting protesters forced draftees to climb over them in order to get inside the building. As they entered they were handed leaflets asking them to change their minds, refuse induction and join the protests. Human barricade Police formed a human barricade to enable inductees to pass and then made their arrests. In New York, around 500 demonstrators marched to protest against the draft. Young men placed draft cards into boxes marked 'Resisters'. 181 draft cards and several hundred protest cards were presented to a US Marshal but he refused to accept them. The group then marched to a post office and posted them directly to the Attorney General in Washington. The anti-war movement took on an added gravity yesterday when Florence Beaumont, mother of two, burned herself to death. After soaking herself in petrol she set herself alight in front of the Federal Building, Los Angeles. Counter-demonstrations have been planned by the National Committee for Responsible Patriotism, based in New York. Parades have been scheduled for the weekend in support of "our boys in Vietnam".
The Pentagon march was the culmination of five days of nationwide anti-draft protests organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam -- "the Mobe." But a singular spark was provided by the Youth International Party (Yippies), a fringe group whose leaders, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, had announced that they planned an "exorcism" of the Pentagon. They would encircle the building, chant incantations, "levitate" the structure and drive out the evil war spirits.
Newton himself was arrested in 1967 for allegedly killing an Oakland police officer during a traffic stop. He was later convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to two to 15 years in prison. But public pressure—"Free Huey" became a popular slogan of the day—helped Newton's cause. The case was eventually dismissed after two retrials ended with hung juries.
Hippies' Free Store Not So Popular With Thugs (headline from Ortega's excerpt of original article, published by Village Voice 2010-03-24)
Fresh Air: Text & Audio of Interview w/Wolfe
Blue Cheer appeared in spring 1968 with a thunderously loud remake of Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues" that many regard as the first true heavy-metal record. One of the first hard-rock power trios, the group was named for an especially high-quality strain of LSD. Its manager, Gut, was an ex-Hell's Angel. (This biography originally appeared in The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (Simon & Schuster, 2001))
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/tet-who-won-99179501/
Campus killings of black students received little news coverage in 1968, but a book about them keeps their memory alive.
...the Kerner Report, with its stark conclusion that "Our nation is moving towards two societies — one white, one black — separate and unequal" — was a best-seller. It was also the source of great controversy and remains so today.
This lecture was held at The Heritage Foundation on March 13, 1998.
Thirty years after one of the darkest moments in United States military history, three soldiers who happened upon the My Lai massacre and risked their lives to save Vietnamese civilians by aiming their weapons at fellow Americans were proclaimed heroes today by the Army.
The trouble followed a big rally in Trafalgar square, when an estimated 10,000 demonstrated against American action in Vietnam and British support for the United States.
I don't want to be part of a government, I don't want to be part of the United States, I don't want to be part of the American people, and have them write of us as they wrote of Rome: "They made a desert and they called it peace."
Clip Job: Yip-In Turns Into Bloody Mess as Police Riot at Grand Central (headline from archived article published 2010-04-10)
Caption:Members of the Youth International Party, or Yippies, gathering Grand Central Station for a sit-down demonstration New York, New York, March 22, 1968. (Photo by Tim Boxer/Pictorial Parade/Getty Images)
I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.
The song he recorded at Dodd's Studio One was Nanny Goat which some musicologists and reggae historians say is the first reggae song. Others argue that Toots and the Maytals' Do The Reggay, also done in 1968, and Games People Play by Bob Andy the following year, marked the transition from rocksteady to reggae. But for most, Nanny Goat was the game-changer.
Report of the Fact Finding Commission Appointed to Investigate the Disturbances at Columbia University in April and May 1968
The Bureau of Narcotics, a Treasury Department agency established in 1930, was combined in 1968 with the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control, a unit of the Food and Drug Administration, to form the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, within the Justice Department. Then, with the transfer of more than 500 narcotics investigators from the Treasury's old Bureau of Customs, the Drug Enforcement Administration was created in 1973.
After King’s death, riots spread through Memphis. Some 4,000 National Guard troops were ordered into the city, and a curfew was imposed on the city...The riots soon spread across the nation— to Chicago, Baltimore, Kansas City and Washington, D.C.
Bobby Hutton didn't get wounded during the shootout, but they murdered him after we were in custody.
April 5, 1968. Vol. 91 No. 41
Audio, Text & Photos
The skirmish escalated, growing into a full-fledged riot in the West End, lasting for almost a week. Six units of the national guard, over 2,000 guardsmen, were ordered to Louisville. Looting and shooting occurred, buildings were burned, two teens were killed, and 472 people were arrested
1968: Stewart Brand initiates The Whole Earth Catalog as "a Low Maintenance, High Yield, Self Sustaining, Critical Information Service." Self-published, with no advertising, it sold 1000 copies at $5 each.
Forty years ago, the world was on the brink of revolution. But while Mick was urging insurrection on the streets of London, John was preaching peace and love. In a series of incendiary, rediscovered interviews, Jagger and Lennon reveal themselves as never before or since: battling one another for the soul of rock'n'roll
This list highlights several key files that contain material on the October 31, 1968, bombing halt.
25 years ago...
The five-month event defined the University's core values of equity and social justice, laid the groundwork for establishment of the College of Ethnic Studies...
Pioneer in ethnic studies: Early in 1969, the university agreed to many of the student demands, including the establishment of the nation's first and only college of ethnic studies. The strike ended March 20.
Release Date: November 22, 1968
From the (Anthony Fawcett) book One Day at a Time
Gen. William Westmoreland, senior U.S. military commander in Vietnam, sends a new troop request to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Westmoreland stated that he needed 542,588 troops for the war in Vietnam in 1967--an increase of 111,588 men to the number already serving there. In the end, President Johnson acceded to Westmoreland's wishes and dispatched the additional troops to South Vietnam, but the increases were done in an incremental fashion. The highest number of U.S. troops in South Vietnam was 543,500, which was reached in 1969.
In 1969, John and I were so naïve to think that doing the Bed-In would help change the world. Well, it might have. But at the time, we didn’t know. It was good that we filmed it, though. The film is powerful now. What we said then could have been said now...-Yoko Ono Lennon, 2014.(Film hosted on Youtube.)
The Rolling Stones are to perform in London's Hyde Park for the first time since a legendary free concert for an estimated 250,000 people in 1969. The outdoor gig will take place on 6 July, a week after the group's first appearance at the Glastonbury festival. The rock legends famously played in the park just two days after death of guitarist Brian Jones in July 1969.
In the frigid fall of 1969, more than 500,000 people marched on Washington to protest U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. It remains the largest political rally in the nation's history.
Re: release of 'Gimme Shelter'
1969 was an interesting turning point in American cinema and no film better reflects that than Midnight Cowboy. Not only was it the first X-rated film to win the Best Picture Oscar but it presented a view of New York City that was the most bleak and depressing portrait since Ray Milland hit every seedy Manhattan bar in The Lost Weekend (1945).
Students gather to protest the invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State massacre. (Archival footage including speeches by Benjamin Spock, Jane Fonda, and Ron Young).
Later in life, Ellis, who ultimately got straight and became a drug counselor, expressed shame about what he had done. While the LSD no-hitter kept him in the public eye, he came to see it not as a point of pride, but as a sign that his drug use might have robbed him of his greatest professional memory.
But it was Ellis’s claim, after he retired, that he threw his no-hitter while under the influence of LSD that cemented his standing as an icon of the sport’s counterculture era, making him an intriguing figure to artists, musicians, filmmakers and journalists — even after his death.
From the Archives: A bizarre encounter between the president and the king of rock and roll
The country was split between those supporting our efforts in Vietnam and those opposed to the war. Hawks, doves, hard hats, flower children, black power, Woodstock, Kent State and the silent majority were bywords for the most divisive American decade since the American Civil War some 100 years earlier.
People forget the intensity of opposing passions in 1971. No one was neutral. Friends and families were bitterly divided. If you supported the Vietnam War, you supported Frazier. And if you opposed it, you were in the corner of Ali, who had forfeited his title for refusing military induction in 1967.
Long before the first bell of their March 1971 fight sounded, the contest was billed as “The Fight of the Century” and, amazingly, it lived up to the hype. That night, a star-studded crowd watched two of the greatest fighters who ever lived battle for supremacy in the world’s premier sports arena. Read more: Ali-Frazier: Rare and Classic Photos From the ‘Fight of the Century’
The Secret History of the Vietnam War. The Complete and Unabridged Series as Published in the New York Times. With key documents and 64 page of photographs
The premise of our action was the strongly held view within certain precincts of the White House that the president and those functioning on his behalf could carry out illegal acts with impunity if they were convinced that the nation’s security demanded it. As President Nixon himself said to David Frost during an interview six years later, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” To this day the implications of this statement are staggering.
The Polytechnic Uprising, as it has come to be known, dealt a blow to the self-confidence of the junta leaders and led directly to the toppling of the dictator and chief putschist of the April 21, 1967, coup d'etat that brought the junta to power, Colonel George Papadopoulos.
More than any other man, Elvis Presley has been assigned ultimate paternity for the children of the '60s. He introduced the beat to everything and changed everything -- music, language, clothes; it's a whole new social revolution -- the '60s come from it, said composer Leonard Bernstein. Before Elvis, there was nothing, the decade's most representative child, John Lennon, once said. But Elvis repudiated his progeny. Religious, anti-communist, unconflicted capitalist to the end, he neither aligned himself with the Woodstock generation's politics nor joined their countercultural party.
But on December 8, 1980, Lennon, returning with Ono to their Dakota apartment on New York City's Upper West Side, was shot seven times by a 25-year-old drifter and Beatles fan to whom Lennon had given an autograph a few hours earlier. Lennon was pronounced dead on arrival at Roosevelt Hospital. On December 14, at Ono's request, a 10-minute silent vigil was held at 2 p.m. EST in which millions around the world participated.
(See also: Opposition to the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War: Timeline; Timeline of the African-American Civil Rights Movement)
The following people are well known for their involvement in 1960s era counterculture. Some are key incidental or contextual figures, such as Beat Generation figures who also participated directly in the later counterculture era. The primary area(s) of each figure's notability are indicated, per these figures' WorldHeritage pages. Although many of the people listed are known for civil rights activism, some figures whose primary notability was within the realm of the civil rights movement are listed elsewhere. (see also: List of civil rights leaders; Key figures of the New Left).
In 2007, Merry Prankster Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Garcia commented, "I see remnants of that movement everywhere. It's sort of like the nuts in Ben and Jerry's ice cream -- it's so thoroughly mixed in, we sort of expect it. The nice thing is that eccentricity is no longer so foreign. We've embraced diversity in a lot of ways in this country. I do think it's done us a tremendous service."[198]
Free Speech advocate and social anthropologist Jentri Anders observed that a number of freedoms were endorsed within a countercultural community in which she lived 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 some in the counterculture wished to modify children's education so that it didn't discourage, but rather encouraged, "aesthetic sense, love of nature, passion for music, desire for reflection, or strongly marked independence."[196][197]
When asked about the prospects of the counterculture movement moving forward in the digital age, former Grateful Dead lyricist and self-styled "cyberlibertarian" John Perry Barlow said, "I started out as a teenage beatnik and then became a hippie and then became a cyberpunk. And now I'm still a member of the counterculture, but I don't know what to call that. And I'd been inclined to think that that was a good thing, because once the counterculture in America gets a name then the media can coopt it, and the advertising industry can turn it into a marketing foil. But you know, right now I'm not sure that it is a good thing, because we don't have any flag to rally around. Without a name there may be no coherent movement." [195]
In the UK, commentator Peter Hitchens identifies the counterculture as one of the contributing factors to what he sees as the current malaise in British politics.[194]
Even before the counterculture movement reached its peak of influence, the concept of the adoption of socially-responsible policies by establishment corporations was discussed by economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman (1962), "Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundation of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible. This is a fundamentally subversive doctrine. If businessmen do have a social responsibility other than making maximum profits for stockholders, how are they to know what it is? Can self-selected private individuals decide what the social interest is?"[193]
In economic terms, it has been contended that the counterculture really only amounted to creating new marketing segments for the "hip" crowd.[192]
The "generation gap" between the affluent young and their often poverty-scarred parents was a critical component of 1960s culture. In an interview with journalist Gloria Steinem during the 1968 US presidential campaign, soon-to-be First Lady Pat Nixon exposed the generational chasm in worldview between Steinem, 20 years her junior, and herself after Steinen probed Mrs. Nixon as to her youth, role models, and lifestyle. A hardscrabble child of the Great Depression, Pat Nixon told Steinem, "I never had time to think about things like that, who I wanted to be, or who I admired, or to have ideas. I never had time to dream about being anyone else. I had to work. I haven't just sat back and thought of myself or my ideas or what I wanted to do...I've kept working. I don't have time to worry about who I admire or who I identify with. I never had it easy. I'm not at all like you...all those people who had it easy."[191]
Former liberal democrat Ronald Reagan, who later became a conservative Governor of California and 40th President of the US, remarked about one group of protesters carrying signs, "The last bunch of pickets were carrying signs that said 'Make love, not war.' The only trouble was they didn't look capable of doing either."[189][190]
Screen legend John Wayne equated aspects of 1960s social programs with the rise of the welfare state, "…I know all about that. In the late Twenties, when I was a sophomore at USC, I was a socialist myself—but not when I left. The average college kid idealistically wishes everybody could have ice cream and cake for every meal. But as he gets older and gives more thought to his and his fellow man's responsibilities, he finds that it can't work out that way—that some people just won't carry their load ... I believe in welfare—a welfare work program. I don't think a fella should be able to sit on his backside and receive welfare. I'd like to know why well-educated idiots keep apologizing for lazy and complaining people who think the world owes them a living. I'd like to know why they make excuses for cowards who spit in the faces of the police and then run behind the judicial sob sisters. I can't understand these people who carry placards to save the life of some criminal, yet have no thought for the innocent victim."[188]
In 2003, author and former Free Speech activist Greil Marcus was quoted, "What happened four decades ago is history. It's not just a blip in the history of trends. Whoever shows up at a march against war in Iraq, it always takes place with a memory of the efficacy and joy and gratification of similar protests that took place in years before…It doesn't matter that there is no counterculture, because counterculture of the past gives people a sense that their own difference matters." [187]
A Columbia University teaching unit on the counterculture era notes: "Although historians disagree over the influence of the counterculture on American politics and society, most describe the counterculture in similar terms. Virtually all authors—for example, on the right, Robert Bork in Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York: Regan Books,1996) and, on the left, Todd Gitlin in The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987)—characterize the counterculture as self-indulgent, childish, irrational, narcissistic, and even dangerous. Even so, many liberal and leftist historians find constructive elements in it, while those on the right tend not to."[186]
Even the notions of "when" the counterculture subsumed the Beat Generation, when it gave way to the successor generation, and what happened in between are open for debate. According to notable UK Underground and counterculture author Barry Miles, "It seemed to me that the Seventies was when most of the things that people attribute to the sixties really happened: this was the age of extremes, people took more drugs, had longer hair, weirder clothes, had more sex, protested more violently and encountered more opposition from the establishment. It was the era of sex and drugs and rock’n’roll as Ian Drury said. The countercultural explosion of the 1960s really only involved a few thousand people in the UK and perhaps ten times that in the USA – largely because of opposition to the Vietnam war, whereas in the Seventies the ideas had spread out scross (sic) the world.[185]
The lasting impact, including unintended consequences, creative output and general legacy of the counterculture era continue to be actively discussed, debated, despised and celebrated.
The English magician Aleister Crowley became an influential icon to the new alternative spiritual movements of the decade as well as for rock musicians. The Beatles included him as one of the many figures on the cover sleeve of their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band while Jimmy Page, the guitarist and co-founder of 1970s rock band Led Zeppelin was fascinated by Crowley, and owned some of his clothing, manuscripts and ritual objects, and during the 1970s bought Boleskine House, which also appears in the band's movie The Song Remains the Same. On the back cover of the Doors' album 13, Jim Morrison and the other members of the Doors are shown posing with a bust of Aleister Crowley. Timothy Leary openly acknowledged the inspiration of Crowley.[184]
The Principia Discordia is the founding text of Discordianism written by Greg Hill (Malaclypse the Younger) and Kerry Wendell Thornley (Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst). It was originally published under the title "Principia Discordia or How The West Was Lost" in a limited edition of five copies in 1965. The title, literally meaning "Discordant Principles", is in keeping with the tendency of Latin to prefer hypotactic grammatical arrangements. In English, one would expect the title to be "Principles of Discord."[183]
Timothy Leary was an American psychologist and writer, known for his advocacy of psychedelic drugs. On September 19, 1966, Leary founded the League for Spiritual Discovery, a religion declaring LSD as its holy sacrament, in part as an unsuccessful attempt to maintain legal status for the use of LSD and other psychedelics for the religion's adherents based on a "freedom of religion" argument. The Psychedelic Experience was the inspiration for John Lennon's song "Tomorrow Never Knows" in The Beatles' album Revolver.[181] He published a pamphlet in 1967 called Start Your Own Religion to encourage just that (see below under "writings") and was invited to attend the January 14, 1967 Human Be-In a gathering of 30,000 hippies in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park In speaking to the group, he coined the famous phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out".[182]
One such hippie "high priest" was San Francisco State University Professor Stephen Gaskin. Beginning in 1966, Gaskin's "Monday Night Class" eventually outgrew the lecture hall, and attracted 1,500 hippie followers in an open discussion of spiritual values, drawing from Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu teachings. In 1970 Gaskin founded a Tennessee community called The Farm, and he still lists his religion as "Hippie."[178][179][180]
In his 1991 book, Hippies and American Values, Timothy Miller described the hippie ethos as essentially a "religious movement" whose goal was to transcend the limitations of mainstream religious institutions. "Like many dissenting religions, the hippies were enormously hostile to the religious institutions of the dominant culture, and they tried to find new and adequate ways to do the tasks the dominant religions failed to perform."[176] In his seminal, contemporaneous work, The Hippie Trip, author Lewis Yablonsky notes that those who were most respected in hippie settings were the spiritual leaders, the so-called "high priests" who emerged during that era.[177]
Many hippies rejected mainstream organized religion in favor of a more personal spiritual experience, often drawing on indigenous and folk beliefs. If they adhered to mainstream faiths, hippies were likely to embrace Buddhism, Unitarian Universalism, Hinduism and the restorationist Christianity of the Jesus Movement. Some hippies embraced neo-paganism, especially Wicca.
In his 1986 essay "From Satori to Silicon Valley",[175] 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 1960s and early 1970s - would emerge from this caste of social "misfits" to shape the modern world.
In France the iconoclasm and is an example of European art cinema. Many also engaged in their work with the social and political upheavals of the era, making their radical experiments with editing, visual style and narrative part of a general break with the conservative paradigm. The Left Bank, or Rive Gauche, group is a contingent of filmmakers associated with the French New Wave, first identified as such by Richard Roud.[174] The corresponding "right bank" group is constituted of the more famous and financially successful New Wave directors associated with Cahiers du cinéma (Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard).[174] Left Bank directors include Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda.[174] Roud described a distinctive "fondness for a kind of Bohemian life and an impatience with the conformity of the Right Bank, a high degree of involvement in literature and the plastic arts, and a consequent interest in experimental filmmaking", as well as an identification with the political left wing.[174] Other film "new waves" from around the world associated with the 1960s are New German Cinema, Czechoslovak New Wave, Brazilian Cinema Novo and Japanese New Wave. During the 1960s, the term "art film" began to be much more widely used in the United States than in Europe. In the U.S., the term is often defined very broadly, to include foreign-language (non-English) "auteur" films, independent films, experimental films, documentaries and short films. In the 1960s "art film" became a euphemism in the U.S. for racy Italian and French B-movies. By the 1970s, the term was used to describe sexually explicit European films with artistic structure such as the Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow). The 1960s was an important period in art film; the release of a number of groundbreaking films giving rise to the European art cinema which had countercultural traits in filmmakers such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luis Buñuel and Bernardo Bertolucci.
Allmusic Guide states that "until around 1967, the worlds of jazz and rock were nearly completely separate".[160] The term, "jazz-rock" (or "jazz/rock") is often used as a synonym for the term "jazz fusion". However, some make a distinction between the two terms. The Free Spirits have sometimes been cited as the earliest jazz-rock band.[161] During the late 1960s, at the same time that jazz musicians were experimenting with rock rhythms and electric instruments, rock groups such as Cream and the Grateful Dead were "beginning to incorporate elements of jazz into their music" by "experimenting with extended free-form improvisation". Other "groups such as Blood, Sweat & Tears directly borrowed harmonic, melodic, rhythmic and instrumentational elements from the jazz tradition".[162] The rock groups that drew on jazz ideas (like Soft Machine, Colosseum, Caravan, Nucleus, Chicago, Spirit and Frank Zappa) turned the blend of the two styles with electric instruments.[163] Since rock often emphasized directness and simplicity over virtuosity, jazz-rock generally grew out of the most artistically ambitious rock subgenres of the late '60s and early '70s: psychedelia, progressive rock, and the singer/songwriter movement."[164] Miles Davis' Bitches Brew sessions, recorded in August 1969 and released the following year, mostly abandoned jazz's usual swing beat in favor of a rock-style backbeat anchored by electric bass grooves. The recording "...mixed free jazz blowing by a large ensemble with electronic keyboards and guitar, plus a dense mix of percussion."[165] Davis also drew on the rock influence by playing his trumpet through electronic effects and pedals. While the album gave Davis a gold record, the use of electric instruments and rock beats created a great deal of consternation amongst some more conservative jazz critics
Derek Bailey, Henry Kaiser and Fred Frith and the improvising groups The Art Ensemble of Chicago and AMM.
The 1960s saw the protest song gain a sense of political self-importance, with Phil Ochs's "I Ain't Marching Anymore" and Country Joe and the Fish's "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die-Rag" among the many anti-war anthems that were important to the era.[156]
As the psychedelic revolution progressed, lyrics grew more complex, (such as Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit"[158]). Long-playing albums enabled artists to make more in-depth statements than could be made in just a single song (such as the Mothers of Invention's satirical Freak Out![159]). Even the rules governing single songs were stretched, and singles lasting longer than three minutes emerged, such as Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone", Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant", and Iron Butterfly's 17-minute-long "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.".[139]
The 1960s was also an era of rock festivals, which played an important role in spreading the counterculture across the US.[152] The Monterey Pop Festival, which launched Jimi Hendrix's career in the US, was one of the first of these festivals.[153] Britain's 1968–1970 Isle of Wight Festivals drew big names such as The Who, The Doors, Joni Mitchell, Hendrix, Dylan, and others.[154] The 1969 Woodstock Festival in New York state became a symbol of the movement,[155] although the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival drew a larger crowd.[156] Some believe the era came to an abrupt end with the infamous Altamont Free Concert held by The Rolling Stones, in which heavy-handed security from the Hells Angels resulted in the stabbing of an audience member, apparently in self-defense, as the show descended into chaos.[157]
Another hotbed of the 1960s counterculture was Austin, Texas, with two of the era's legendary music venues-the Vulcan Gas Company and the Armadillo World Headquarters-and musical talent like Janis Joplin, the 13th Floor Elevators, Shiva's Headband, the Conqueroo, and, later, Stevie Ray Vaughan. Austin was also home to a large New Left activist movement, one of the earliest underground papers, The Rag, and cutting edge graphic artists like Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers creator Gilbert Shelton, underground comix pioneer Jack Jackson (Jaxon), and surrealist armadillo artist Jim Franklin.[151]
Detroit's Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers" and John Sinclair's White Panther Party,[148] and MC5 performed a lengthy set before the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where an infamous riot subsequently broke out between police and students protesting the Vietnam War and the recent assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy.[149] MC5, The Stooges and the aforementioned Velvet Underground, are now seen as an influence on the protopunk sound that would lead to punk rock and heavy metal music in the late 1970s.[150]
While the hippie scene was born in California,[145] an edgier scene emerged in New York City[146] that put more emphasis on avant-garde and art music. Bands such as The Velvet Underground came out of this underground music scene, which was predominantly centered at Andy Warhol's legendary Factory. The Velvet Underground supplied the music for the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a series of multimedia events staged by Warhol and his collaborators in 1966 and 1967. The Velvet Underground's lyrics were considered risqué for the era, since they discussed sexual fetishism, transgender identities, and the use of drugs associated with Warhol's Factory and its superstars.[147]
The Beatles went on to become the most prominent commercial exponents of the "psychedelic revolution" (e.g., Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour) in the late 1960s.[143] In the United States, bands that exemplified the counterculture were becoming huge commercial and mainstream successes. These included The Mamas & the Papas (If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears), Big Brother and the Holding Company (Cheap Thrills), Jimi Hendrix (Are You Experienced), Jefferson Airplane (Surrealistic Pillow), The Doors and Sly and the Family Stone (Stand!).[144] Bands and other musicians, such as the Grateful Dead, Phil Ochs, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Melanie, Frank Zappa, Santana, and the Blues Project were considered key to the counterculture movement.
The music of the 1960s moved towards an electric, psychedelic version of rock, thanks largely to Bob Dylan's decision to play an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.[139] The newly popularized electric sound of rock was then built upon and molded into psychedelic rock by artists like The 13th Floor Elevators[140] and British bands Pink Floyd and the Beatles.[141] The Beach Boys' 1966 album Pet Sounds also paved the way for later hippie acts, with Brian Wilson's writing interpreted as a "plea for love and understanding."[142] Pet Sounds served as a major source of inspiration for other contemporary acts, most notably directly inspiring the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The single "Good Vibrations" soared to number one globally, completely changing the perception of what a record could be. It was during this period that the highly anticipated album Smile was to be released. However, the project collapsed and The Beach Boys released a downgraded version called Smiley Smile, which failed to make a big commercial impact but was also highly influential, most notably on The Who's Pete Townshend.
During the early 1960s, Britain's new wave of musicians gained popularity and fame in the United States. Artists such as the Beatles paved the way for their compatriots to enter the US market.[134] The Beatles themselves were influenced by many artists, among them US singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, who was a lyrical inspiration as well as their introduction to marijuana.[135] Dylan's early career as a protest singer had been inspired by artists like Pete Seeger[136] and his hero Woody Guthrie.[137] Other folksingers, like Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary, took the songs of the era to new audiences and public recognition.[138]
"The 60's were a leap in human consciousness. Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Che Guevara, Mother Teresa, they led a revolution of conscience. the Beatles, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix created revolution and evolution themes. The music was like Dalí, with many colors and revolutionary ways. The youth of today must go there to find themselves."
In the 1960s, the Dada-influenced art group Black Mask declared that revolutionary art should be "an integral part of life, as in primitive society, and not an appendage to wealth."[131] Black Mask disrupted cultural events in New York by giving made up flyers of art events to the homeless with the lure of free drinks.[132] After, the Motherfuckers grew out of a combination of Black Mask and another group called Angry Arts. Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers (often referred to as simply "the Motherfuckers", or UAW/MF) was an anarchist affinity group based in New York City.
Fluxus - a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow" - is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music, visual art, literature, urban planning, architecture, and design. Fluxus is often described as intermedia, a term coined by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins in a famous 1966 essay. Fluxus encouraged a "do-it-yourself" aesthetic, and valued simplicity over complexity. Like Dada before it, Fluxus included a strong current of anti-commercialism and an anti-art sensibility, disparaging the conventional market-driven art world in favor of an artist-centered creative practice. As Fluxus artist Robert Filliou wrote, however, Fluxus differed from Dada in its richer set of aspirations, and the positive social and communitarian aspirations of Fluxus far outweighed the anti-art tendency that also marked the group.
The Situationist International was a restricted group of international revolutionaries founded in 1957, and which had its peak in its influence on the unprecedented general wildcat strikes of May 1968 in France. With their ideas rooted in Marxism and the 20th-century European artistic avant-gardes, they advocated experiences of life being alternative to those admitted by the capitalist order, for the fulfillment of human primitive desires and the pursuing of a superior passional quality. For this purpose they suggested and experimented with the construction of situations, namely the setting up of environments favorable for the fulfillment of such desires. Using methods drawn from the arts, they developed a series of experimental fields of study for the construction of such situations, like unitary urbanism and psychogeography. They fought against the main obstacle on the fulfillment of such superior passional living, identified by them in advanced capitalism. Their theoretical work peaked on the highly influential book The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. Debord argued in 1967 that spectacular features like mass media and advertising have a central role in an advanced capitalist society, which is to show a fake reality in order to mask the real capitalist degradation of human life. Raoul Vaneigem wrote The Revolution of Everyday Life which takes the field of "everyday life" as the ground upon which communication and participation can occur, or, as is more commonly the case, be perverted and abstracted into pseud