I read somewhere (can’t recall where) that the 60’s started with JFK’s assassination and ended with Nixon’s resignation.
JFK’s death didn’t realliy ahve anything to do with the 60s excpe that LBJ ratcheted things up in Vietnam. But Kennedy might have done the same. I’m still going with Berkely Free Speech Movement(1964) as the real starting point, although it’s not like a switch was flipped. Dylan released Blowin in the Wind in early/mid 1963, as one point of reference. Beatles arrive in US in 1964.
Not only that, I cannot recall a single black character, even a bit-part or a walk-on or an extra, in The Andy Griffith Show.
Which might actually be Truth in Television. Mayberry might have been a Sundown Town.
The Andy Griffith Show wasn’t much about the counter culture. It was anything about the counter culture. It was the culture.
None of the rest of the “Sixties” happens without the Civil Rights movement. None of it. The Sixties were not about hippies. There were very few hippies anywhere in the 60s, and I include metro San Francisco. What we remember is how the culture swerved in the 70s because of Vietnam and Nixon and rock. Still, the riots in inner cities that started in 1964 - earlier than everybody remembers - were a much bigger topic when I was in high school, i.e. through 1968, than Vietnam was. King’s assassination was the major event after Kennedy.
As a loose generalization, I do agree with the OP on this. You can’t ask for a perfect correlation - there aren’t any in anything.
I disagree with Oyl on one thing. The country was never really liberal during the 60s. The 1964 election was a total anomaly, driven by the continuing trauma of Kennedy’s assassination and Goldwater’s successful impersonation of a crazy man. The country started turning right after Johnson got the Civil Rights Act passed in 1965 and it stayed there. The Republicans won every presidential election until 1996, with the exception of the Watergate anomaly of Carter in 1976.
Civil Rights. Civil Rights. Civil Rights. That changed everything and that’s the key issue that brought the rest of the changes along in its wake, including the politics of the country.
Nope. Vietnam War, birth control, and rock music. Oh, and drugs. None had anything to do with the civil rights movement. Rock n roll certain was influence, if not derived from, black music, but that wasn’t about civil rights.
The US was still a very segregated society in the mid 60s, and the whole counter culture thing had very little intersection with the civil rights movement.
The Midwest college I attended had an active Civil Rights contingent, of both Black and White persons, by 1967. And for the first time in my memory of this area people of color were taking leadership positions and speaking out.
VietNam protestors were turning out for marches by the thousands (as compared to our recent OWS march which consisted of about fifty people.)
And the second-wave feminists ideas were being tested.
Maybe these things were more apparent in contrast than for those of you who lived in more diverse areas. But for many young people in the Midwest it was a time of introduction to new ideas. And new cultures.
Well, actually the country was liberal – not liberal suddenly, but liberal still – in the sense that most white Americans still believed in the “American Consensus” that had prevailed ever since FDR, and that consensus placed a high level of confidence in government to solve problems. Even the GOP mostly accepted the New Deal as a fait accompli – the likes of Senator Robert Taft, who saw it as “socialism” and wanted to roll it back, were regarded by most as cranky. What changed in the '60s, among many other things, was the rise-to-respectability of the new movement conservatism – at least, that process began in the '60s (not really completed until 1980). See Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, by Rick Perlstein.
I was present for the 60s, am now retired and am still a Democrat. But, I didn’t really learn to intensely dislike Republicans, or the Republican party at least, as i do like a few individual Republicans , until relatively lately. Specifically, the G.W. Bush era and nothing about the current Republican attitudes has a chance in hell of changing my mind.
Until relatively lately, the partisan divide in America did not map so closely onto the ideological divide. Before the 1970s, each party had its liberal and conservative wings, and “Democrat” and “Republican” were more in the nature of tribal affilliations than ideological labels. But Nixon’s successful “Southern Strategy” in 1972 began the process by which white conservative Democrats migrated to the GOP (many of them by way of George Wallace’ American Independence Party – Nixon, in '72, picked up Wallace’s voters/states from '68), and liberal “Rockefeller Republicans” were driven out of it or marginalized.
I don’t think that’s the case. Anyway, there was only one speaking part played by a black actor on the Andy Griffith show. In one episode, “Opie’s Piano Lessons”, Rockne Tarkington played a former pro football player who comes back to Mayberry to run his father’s store. There were a bunch of black extras, though, in crowd scenes. See here:
http://www.bookguy.com/Mayberry/BlacksInMayberry.htm
I think part of it is just that there aren’t, in real life, many blacks in Western North Carolina, and were even fewer in the 60s. It’s a pretty white part of the country.
No. I think it’s overly simplistic and tells you little. I know a lot of hard line Democrats who don’t have a positive take from the 60’s. I can’t say I know any Republicans who have a positive take on the 60’s, but then I don’t actually know all that many Republicans, so it’s a pretty small sample size.
Personally, I was a kid in the 60’s, and my main memories were decidedly mixed. What I remember most was snapshot memories of the Vietnam war (very negative for me, since most of them were of the news and fighting, which always seemed very scary to me as a kid) and the space program and moon landing (very positive), all of which I saw on neighbors TVs, since we didn’t have one of our own until (IIRC) sometime in the 70’s. Other than those two impressions, I don’t really recall a lot of the iconic 60’s stuff (there weren’t a lot of hippies in South Tucson in the 60’s, for instance :p).
-XT
IMO, answer to OP’s question is Yes. But the Phenomenon of “The Sixties” too complicated to summarize easily; it varied in time and space. A powerful Civil Rights movement emerged long before Flower Power; and the Hippies followed, to some extent, in the footsteps of the Fifties’ “Beat Generation.”
And “Flower Power” ended all too quickly. It seemed that the gentle hippies of the late 60’s were partly replaced with thugs in the 70’s. (Indeed the Altamont Concert of December 1969 might be a convenient dividing point.)
In my own memories of that time, it’s hard to be sure how much was the era’s true uniqueness, and how much was typical for any impressionable University Freshman. Can anyone recommend good on-line article(s) summarizing this era, for me to read 45 years after I lived through it? :dubious:
I agree with most of this, but with two nitpicks. Average hair-length may have continued to grow during the early 70’s, but there were plenty of hippies appearing in the Bay Area starting about 1967. I myself recall standing on the corner of Haight and Ashbury, with Dylan songs playing and free LSD on offer.
And the President elected 1992 was a registered Democrat. 
Haight-Ashbury, sure. But that’s why I specified **metro **San Francisco, which contained 4,000,000 people about 1% of whom were hippies.
D’oh! Stupid typo.
The comments about the moon landing and the Vietnam War on TV prompted a thought. For the first time in history, unless they had been physically present, people were actually able to see the decisions their politicians were making right in their living rooms.
Whether that affected support or disapproval for their politicians it must have had an influence on their choices.
Vietnam was considered the 1st “living room” war, going a long way toward public approval.
I really hope this is sarcasm.
It seems to me that in so far as we in the U.S. are still divided along ideological lines over some of the same core issues that dominated the 1960’s, there is a correlation between one’s view of that decade and one’s ideology.
Just pay attention to how “liberals” and “conservatives” of today respectively characterize the 60s.
The Left tends to see the period as a time of great social, political, and environmental progress, achieved against the backdrop of racism, war, police abuses, sexism, assasinations, and general violent resistance to change on the part of the “establishment” and “mainstream” society.
The Right tends to view (and bemoan) the time as a decade-long attack on decency, morality, and the social order. I have heard them many times characterize the 60s as the beginning of the collapse of the country, a process they consider to be on-going.
So many of the issues/things the current Right-wing in the United States widely stands in opposition to (overtly or not) are straight out of the 60’s; feminism, desegregation/civil rights, gay rights, the pill, sexual liberation in general, drug use, the “welfare state”, unionization/economic/workplace activism, anti-militarist sentiment, protest, the environmental movement, spiritual exploration, a rejection of the old institutions and conventions…
Here in 2012, the Right in the U.S. is still, to a large degree, fixated on sexuality/birth control/abortion, “morality/decency”, promotion of “conventional” Christianity/opposition to other religious/spiritual practice, drug use, workplace/economic rights, government powers of environmental regulation and social program administration, and yes, racial issues (e.g. the near universal hostility from the Right towards the OWS “dirty hippies” who should take a bath, cut their hair, and get a job, and the likewise near universal scorn for Trevon Martin and support for George Zimmerman on the Right.)
It’s not just the old geezers who lived through the 60’s and didn’t like what they saw then…if it were, we could just wait for them to all die off. 
The Right-wing view of history is constantly perpetuated and passed on to the next generation(s), much in the same way the revisionist history of the U.S. having been founded as a “Christian nation” or the still common interpretation of de-segregation as a violation of states rights.
People like Newt Gingrich and Glenn Beck teach this version of history to all who will listen. The ideological divisions represented by such interpretations of history comprise the core of the “conservative” identity (and, though possibly to a lesser extent, the core of the “liberal” identity).
These basic ideological divisions still exist and in virtually the same form as they did 40-50 years ago. We are still, as a nation and as individuals, having the SAME arguments. :smack:
It certainly was an exciting time to be alive.
Much idealism gone to waste in that decade. Cynicism had completely taken over by the end of 1972. Overall I’m not particularily proud of my baby boomer generation and it started going wrong in the 60’s.
I hope the world never sees the turmoil of 1968 again. The Tet offensive, the assignations (Andy Warhol, MLK, RFK), My Lai massacre, the Chicago convention, Prague Spring, unrest in Paris and Mexico City, etc.
Great music in '68. Probably the very best year for rock music.
I feel ambivalent about the 1960s. I feel ambivalent about many things. I like ambivalence. It prevents fanaticism.
What is depressing to me is that the end result of the hope, enthusiasm, and idealism of the 1960s has been a country dominated by the Republican Party. 