The 60's - like wow, what happend ?

Great Debates
1

Rightly or wrongly, I’ve always carried the notion that the flower children of 60’s America were not dissimilar in social origins to their European kindred spirits. As this era had passed by the time I gained a grasp of the world outside under 11’s soccer and been (finally !) struck by the way girls looked at you differently from fellow midfield players, I thought I’d ask those who might have been there – at least in body.

Was the whole Hippie thing a largely white, middle-class, metropolitan, East and West coast, university based experience (as it was here, in my view) or did the movement genuinely find equal resonance in blue-collar Middle America as well ?

Also, (hopefully, the ‘Great Debate’ part) was the 60’s social revolution a potential but, crucially, disparate social upheaval that couldn’t have achieved the radical change it did without the Hippie movement or, would those protesting Vietnam, gender and racial inequality, (and rather a lot more) have generated the kinds of social change had those groups remained fragmented and marginalized (without the middle-class kids to act as some kind of cosmic social gel, far out) ?
p.s. I’m not suggesting all is now well, just that social change is historically not always the fastest of movers and so, in that context, the 60’s / 70’s did seem to achieve a radical realignment of attitudes in relatively quickish time.

2

IMHO, whilst much of the push came from the white college students, there was also a great deal of support from the black community. If you want to be cynical about it, you’d say both groups were trying not to have the arses sent to Vietnam. If you want to be an optimist, you’d say both groups felt disenfranchised, pawns of the system.

I don’t think there was a lot of white blue-collar support, however.

3

To understand the 60s in America, you have to understand that, in the abstract, if enough people-participants in any social system start dismissing that social system’s structures and processes as irrelevant, that social system loses a lot of its authority and may not be long for this world. This is a difficult concept for many people to grasp: they think of authoritative institutions such as nations to have an existence independent of folks’ opinions of them, as if it would require a military conquest of the United States of America or an Official Act of Congress to pose a threat to the power weilded by the nation as an institution.

OK, in the 60s, for a brief period, a unknown but probably pretty large percentage of well-educated people did NOT take it for granted that any traditional system of authority had any intrinsic right to weild it, and thought it entirely possible that we were at the dawn of the beginnings of some new way of doing things. Many of the most visible and official manifestations of those traditional power systems were generally stamping their feet and blustering and looking rather impotent even when they resorted to violence. Those who were most convinced that the day of these institutions had come and gone were laughing at them and dismissing them rather than arguing with them. Meanwhile, a decent number among those who were PART of these systems seemed to be paying close and serious (and non-dismissive) attention to whatever changes might be in the air.

There were people who took it for granted that they personally would outlive the money system, the existence of nations and armies, the political systems of vertical authority, the enforcement of laws and punishment of lawbreakers, and a host of other social forms that they thought of as unnecessary and socially harmful. They made their decisions, drew their conclusions, and conducted their lives from that belief system. Less radical folks who merely refrained from assuming the continuing hegemony of the existing systems, did likewise.

So the social environment, on a very large scale, was open to new ideas. New ideas were actively EXPECTED, and folks were if anything way to ready to hop on board whatever trendy new concept came along because almost anything that hadn’t been tried to their knowledge might be the NEW WAY.

You got a lot of really ditzy stuff from this, as well as a lot of shallow amoral callousness, but you also had an environment in which a great many truly idealistic social change movements found interested ears on the average head.

I still find it impossible to adjust to a general belief system of “But that’s just the way it is” or “But that’s the way it’s always been”, as if people are incapable of realizing that the world belongs to us for the changing.

And unfortunately, when most people don’t realize it, it is only true in theory, and everything fossilizes as it once was fossilized.

4

It would also be well to remember that the various upheavals
of the 1960s did not appear ex nihilo, but had antecedents in the decade before.

The civil rights movement was born in 1954 in Montgomery, Alabama, when a 29 year old minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. led a yearlong boycott of the municpal bus system to protest segregation. In the same year, the Supreme Court
ruled in Brown vs. Topeka that segregation was unconstitutional, thereby opening the demand of black Americans to be treated as full citizens.

In that same year of 1954, the French defenders of Dien Bien Phu were overwhelmed by the forces of the Viet-Minh, led by
Ho Chi Min. The Geneva Accords that year divided the country into North and South Vietnam, and due to American interference, the stage was set for civil war in Vietnam.

The cultural transformation of the 1960s was prefigured by the twin appearances of rock and roll and the Beats.
Rock and roll showed whitebread America the cultural vitality of black music and soon middle-class American youth were bopping to and, more importantly, looking up to, black entertainers. Intially, black or “race” music was covered by white artists to tone down the frank sexual suggestiveness of the lyrics and make it more palatable to white audiences.

Rock and roll helped cross the gulf between black and white America, and the Beats questioned the foundations of America
itself. The poetry of the Beats was a howl of angst and anomie in comfortable, sleepy post-war America. The Beats said literature, sex, drugs, music, and hedonism were the goals of life, and material success was nothing if it killed the soul. Allan Ginsberg’s incandescent “Howl” said it best:

5

Well, by the time the '60’s were over, I wasn’t even a twinkle in my father’s eye. However, I’ve read and studied the period a good bit, so I’ll throw my opinion in.
I think the ‘social change’ of the '60’s is vastly over-stated. The Vietnam war was not ended by mass protests and marches; it was ended by a lack of support from the ‘silent majority’ (to use Nixon’s term). The ‘Stop-The-War’ actions by the Baby Boomers had little effect on the government’s policies, or on the general public opinion of the war (for every person swayed towards thinking “the war is bad” by a flower child, there was usually another who refused to change positions because that would mean being on the same side as “those dirty kids”. What changed people’s opinions on the war was a combination of press reports coming back on the status of the war, and of increasing belief that the government was being dishonest with the American public. Had the flower children never taken a step against the war, likely it would have taken roughly the same course.

In addition, the civil rights movement was mostly over by the time the ‘60’s’ as we generally define it began; the marches had been made, the Civil Rights Bill had been passed, and what remained was a general cluelessness as to how to proceed next (government assistance? up-by-the-bootstraps self-reliance? militant seperatism?) which still hasn’t really been resolved.

Now, there have been some social movements that the 'Hippies" created that have had general success- feminism & free love spring to mind- but I think their successes were less “we showed up and changed the world” than “we showed up, became the world, and carried our attitudes with us”.

But generally, I consider the “Hippy” movement of the '60’s as vastly over-rated, supported mostly by Baby Boomer nostalgia and self-delusion over actually having “changed the world”. Then again, I’m a bitter, cynical slacking Generation Xer, so what do I know?

6

Having been a teenager in the 60s and having had 30 years to reflect on it, I have to conclude that there was not a single “Hippie” movement, but a number of movements that came under the general category of us vs. them.

Politically, there was a movement for the U.S. to get out of Vietnam, and a quieter movement to extend the vote to 18-year olds. At the far fringe of this movement was the “underground” of revolutionaries.

Socially there was a “liberation” movement that included blacks, hispanics and women, and the first stirrings of a gay rights movement.

There were several “lifestyle” movements that included legalization of drugs, sexual liberation, progressive music, new clothing styles, etc. Somehow, these seemed very important at the time, not so much a few years later.

And at the very fringe of society, there was a “drop out” or hippie movement, that was primarily composed of affluent white youths.

While most of these people sympathized/agreed with each other, it was entirely possible to be anti-war and anti-droug, pro civil rights for blacks and against women’s rights, etc.

Looking back now, I’d argue that the liberation movement probably had the greatest long-term impact. But I’d partially disagree with John Corrado. I agree that Nixon listened to the middle class, not the antiwar movement, about Vietnam, but I’d argue that the middle-class woke up and realized one day that THEIR sons had no real wish or sense of duty to serve in the military. This caused innumerable dinner-table arguments, but I think, in the end, the parents decided the kids were at least a little right.