The 1960S: Cultural and Social Revolutions

The 1960s: Cultural and Social Revolutions:

Kennedy in Office:
Kennedy and Nixon:
The presidential campaign of 1960 turned out to be one of the closest in American history.
John F. Kennedy was a Catholic and the youngest presidential candidate in history.
Both Kennedy and Nixon were ardent Cold Warriors.
Missile gap
Television debate
Kennedy's agenda envisioned new initiatives aimed at countering communist influence in the world.
Peace Corps
Space program
Kennedy failed at ousting Castro from power in Cuba.
Bay of Pigs
The Missile Crisis:
The most dangerous crisis of the Kennedy administration came in October 1962, when American spy planes discovered that the Soviet Union was installing missiles in Cuba capable of reaching the United States with nuclear weapons.
In 1963, Kennedy moved to reduce Cold War tensions.
Limited Test-Ban Treaty
Civil Rights:
The Rising Tide of Protest
The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized the Freedom Rides in 1961.
As protests escalated, so did the resistance of local authorities.
Birmingham:
The high point of protest came in the spring of 1963.
In one week in June, there were 15,000 arrests in 186 cities.
Martin Luther King Jr. led a demonstration in Birmingham, Alabama.
"Letter from Birmingham Jail"-King spoke of the plight of black peoples, highlighting the problem facing children. Called on white moderates to put aside fear of disorder and commit to racial justice.
King made the bold decision to send black school children into the streets of Birmingham.
Bull Connor unleashed his forces against the children. The images on TV (beatings, fire hoses, attack dogs) caused international outrage. Led Kennedy to endorse the movements goals (clown), and caused business leaders to broker an end to demonstrations in return for promising to desegregate and hire black workers.
The events in Birmingham forced white Americans to decide whether they had more in common with fellow citizens demanding their basic rights or violent segregationists.
The March on Washington:
The March on Washington was organized by a coalition of civil rights, labor, and church organizations
The March on Washington reflected an unprecedented degree of black-white cooperation in support of racial and economic justice, while revealing some of the movement's limitations and the tensions within it.
Kennedy and Civil Rights:
Kennedy failed to protect civil rights workers from violence, insisting that law enforcement was a local matter.
The events in Birmingham in 1963 forced Kennedy to take more action.
Kennedy was shot on November 22, 1963, in Dallas.
Lyndon Johnson's Presidency:
The 1964 Election:
Lyndon B. Johnson's opponent was Barry Goldwater, who was portrayed as pro-nuclear war and anti-civil rights.
He was stigmatized by the Democrats as an extremist who would repeal Social Security and risk nuclear war.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964
Immediately after becoming president, Lyndon Johnson identified himself with the black movement more passionately than any previous president.
In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act.
Freedom Summer
The 1964 law did not address a major concern of the civil rights movement-the right to vote in the South.
Freedom Summer was a voter registration drive in Mississippi.
Freedom Summer led directly to the campaign by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)- to take the seats of the State’s all white delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
The Voting Rights Act:
In 1965, King led a group in a march from Selma to Montgomery.
The federal government took action when there was violence against nonviolent demonstrators.
1965 Voting Rights Act
Twenty-fourth Amendment
Johnson’s Domestic Policies:
The Great Society:
Johnson outlined the most sweeping proposal for government action to promote the general welfare since the New Deal.
Unlike the New Deal, however, the Great Society was a response to prosperity, not depression.
The War on Poverty:
The centerpiece of the Great Society was the crusade to eradicate poverty.
Michael Harrington's The Other America (1962)-40-50 million Americans living in poverty.
In the 1960s, the administration attributed poverty to an absence of skills and a lack of proper attitudes and work habits.
The War on Poverty concentrated on equipping the poor with skills and rebuilding their spirits and motivation.
Immigration Reform:
The belief that racism should no longer serve as a basis of public policy spilled over into other realms.
Overturned the law from the 1920s, which severely limited immigration from East and Southern Europe and excluded Asians. Those quotas were removed, but quotas were established for migrants from the Western Hemisphere, based on growing tensions in the Southwest.
This led to a major increase in immigration.
Taken together, the civil rights revolution and immigration reform marked the triumph of a pluralist conception of Americanism.
Freedom and Equality:
Johnson's Great Society may not have achieved equality as a fact, but it represented a remarkable reaffirmation of the idea of social citizenship.
Coupled with the decade's high rate of economic growth, the War on Poverty succeeded in reducing the incidence of poverty from 22 percent to 13 percent of American families during the 1960s.
Movement for Equality:
Despite the recent success of the Civil Rights movement, the plight of African Americans remained largely unchanged as the economic and social inequalities that existed prior to the ‘60s continued.
This created greater tensions as many whites assumed that the civil rights legislation had fulfilled the nation’s obligation of ensuring equality of all citizens.
These issues were forced onto the national scene through violent outbreaks in ghettos outside the South, drawing attention to the scope of racial injustice and to inequalities in jobs, education, and housing that persisted.
The Ghetto Uprisings:
The 1965 Watts uprising left 35 dead, 900 injured, and $30 million in property damage.
50,000 people participated and the police and National Guard were required to end the uproar
By the summer of 1967, violence had become so widespread that some feared racial civil war.
Kerner Report-commissioned to study the causes of the rioting. Report blamed the violence on “segregation and poverty” and offered a powerful indictment of “white racism”. The report even cautioned that the country could be torn apart by racial antagonisms, but offered little in terms of how to improve the situation.
With black unemployment twice that of whites and average black family income little more than half the white norm, the movement looked for ways to "make freedom real" for black Americans.
Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged-MLK-to abolish economic deprivation.
In 1966, King launched the Chicago Freedom Movement, with demands quite different from its predecessors in the South.
Called for an end to discrimination by employers and unions, equal access to mortgages, integration of public housing, and construction of low-income housing.
The movement failed. King realized that solving the economic segregation of America was more difficult than the civil, and became more radicalized.
Malcolm X:
Malcolm X had insisted that blacks must control the political and economic resources of their communities and rely on their own efforts rather than working with whites.
After a trip to Mecca, Malcolm X began to speak of the possibility of interracial cooperation for radical change in the United States.
The Rise of Black Power:
Black Power immediately became a rallying cry for those bitter over: the federal government's failure to stop violence against civil rights workers, white attempts to determine movement strategy, and the civil rights movement's failure to have any impact on the economic problems of black ghettos.
The idea of Black Power reflected the radicalization of young civil rights activists and sparked an explosion of racial self-assertion.
Inspired by the idea of black self-determination, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and CORE repudiated their previous interracialism, and new militant groups sprang into existence.
Black Panther Party
The Vietnam War:
Origins of the Vietnam War
Following WWII, the French reoccupied Southeast Asia in an attempt to preserve their empire.
Anticommunism led the United States into deeper involvement in Vietnam.
US sent billions to aid French effort.
Eisenhower was reluctant to get further involved for fear of being bogged down in another land war in Asia.
A peace conference in Geneva divided Vietnam temporarily at the 17th parallel.
Elections were to be held in 1965, but the South’s leader, Diem, with US insistence refused to hold elections as he most certainly would have lost.
America and Vietnam:
Fear that the public would not forgive them for losing Vietnam made it impossible for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to remove the United States from an increasingly untenable situation.
The US found itself committed to the survival of Diem’s regime
Kennedy tried to influence the region through counterinsurgency and funneled money, supplies, and sent military advisors to the region.
Lyndon Johnson's War:
Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964, authorizing the president to take "all necessary measures to repel armed attack" in Vietnam.
Although Johnson campaigned in 1964 against sending U.S. troops to Vietnam, troops arrived in 1965.
By 1968, the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam exceeded half a million and the conduct of the war had become more and more brutal.
Old and New Lefts:
What made the New Left new was its rejection of the intellectual and political categories that had shaped radicalism for most of the twentieth century.
The New Left's greatest inspiration was the black freedom movement.
The Fading Consensus:
The years 1962 and 1963 witnessed the appearance of several path breaking books that challenged one or another aspect of the 1950s consensus.
More specifically, the younger generation of Americans began to challenge the traditional social constructs of American society, pushing for a more equal society
The Port Huron Statement offered a new vision of social change.
Freedom meant participatory democracy. Developed by SDS it proclaimed “We seek the establishment [of] a democracy of individual participation, [in which] the individual shares in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life.”
In 1964, events at the University of California at Berkeley revealed the possibility of a far broader mobilization of students in the name of participatory democracy.
The Antiwar Movement:
As casualties mounted and U.S. bombs poured down on North and South Vietnam, the Cold War foreign policy consensus began to unravel.
Opposition to the war became the organizing theme that united all kinds of doubts and discontents.
The burden of fighting fell on the working class and the poor.
SDS began antiwar demonstrations in 1965.
1968-A Year of Turmoil:
The sixties reached their climax in 1968, a year when momentous events succeeded each other with such rapidity that the foundations of society seemed to be dissolving.
Tet offensive
Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the 1968 election.
Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
Robert Kennedy was assassinated.
Chicago Democratic National Convention
The Global 1968:
1968 was a year of worldwide upheaval.
Massive antiwar demonstrations took place.
Nixon's Comeback:
The year's events opened the door for a conservative reaction.
Richard Nixon campaigned as the champion of the silent majority.
Social Transformations of the 1960s:
Women's Liberation:
Many women in the civil rights movement concluded that the treatment of women in society was not much better than society's treatment of blacks.
The same complaints arose in SDS.
By 1967, women throughout the country were establishing consciousness-raising groups to discuss the sources of their discontent.
The new feminism burst onto the national scene at the Miss America beauty pageant of 1968.
Bra burners
The law slowly began to address feminist concerns.
1966 saw the formation of the National Organization for Women (NOW), with Friedan as president.
Personal Freedom:
Women believed that "the personal is political," thus permanently changing Americans' definition of freedom.
Radical feminists' first public campaign demanded the repeal of state laws that underscored women's lack of self-determination by banning abortions or leaving it up to physicians to decide whether a pregnancy should be terminated.
Gay Liberation:
Gay men and lesbians had long been stigmatized as sinful or mentally disordered.
The sixties transformed the gay movement.
Stonewall bar
Latino Activism:
The movement emphasized pride in both the Mexican past and the new Chicano culture that had arisen in the United States.
Cesar Chavez
Red Power:
Truman and Eisenhower had sought a policy known as "termination," meant to integrate Native Americans into the American mainstream; but it was abandoned by Kennedy.
Indian activists demanded not simply economic aid but greater self-determination.
American Indian Movement
Indians of All Nations
Red Power movement
Silent Spring:
The new environmentalism was more activist and youth-oriented and spoke the language of empowering citizens to participate in decisions that affected their lives.
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) spurred the movement.
Environmentalism attracted the broadest bipartisan support of any of the new social movements, despite vigorous opposition from business groups that considered its proposals a violation of property rights.
April 22, 1970: Earth Day
Closely related to environmentalism was the consumer movement, spearheaded by the lawyer Ralph Nader.
The Rights Revolution:
Under the guidance of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Court vastly expanded the rights enjoyed by all Americans.
In 1957, the Court moved to rein in the anticommunist crusade.
The Court continued to guard civil liberties in the 1950s and 1960s.
In the 1960s, the Court continued to push toward racial equality.
Loving v. Virginia (1967)
The Court simultaneously pushed forward the process of imposing on the states the obligation to respect the liberties outlined in the Bill of Rights.
Miranda v. Arizona (1966)
Baker v. Carr (1962)
The Right to Privacy:
The Warren Court outlined entirely new rights in response to the rapidly changing contours of American society.
Griswold v. Connecticut (1965)
Roe v. Wade (1973)
The Legacy of the Sixties:
The 1960s produced new rights and new understandings of freedom.