I don’t think I need a cite. One way or another, things changed considerably by the end of the 1960’s.
Women’s rights, gay rights, pornography even. People were talking and even thinking in a considerably new way.
But what led to it? And was it a variety of factors? And (I just had to ask this), did JFK’s assassination have anything to do with it (the ‘radical sixties’’)? It did immediately precipitate it, so I had to ask.
Thank you all in advance for your kindly and civil replies:).
There were two major factors - affluence and Earl Warren.
Chevrolet ran an ad in the 50s - ‘today a family can expect to have a home or car and sometimes both’. By the 60s good paying jobs were common, education was cheap and developers were begging you to buy a house. My first house purchase was $10 down and $90 closing in what is now Silicon Valley. The Warren court provided a broadening social background.
One argument I heard is that the boomers were the first generation where financial stability was more or less guaranteed. You could drop out of society and do acid for a couple years, then show up and get a factory job in a week if you wanted one. Because financial stability was pretty much assured, people focused on higher needs like self actualization instead.
Also supposedly the civil rights movement wasn’t nearly as influential until after Brown.
Woman’s rights were a thing since Susan B Anthony; Gay rights were not a thing for the larger community, in the Gay community it started to become a thing with the Stonewall Riots in 1969. The Vietnam War and the draft protests started a strong counter-cultural movement that might be considered radical and spawned some radical groups. But none of this is strictly 60s.
Contrary to what you might think, there was plenty of unrest, radical activism, protests and countercultural lifestyles going on at any time you care to name throughout human history. But it got very little press, and what press there was was generally negative. Once there was a TV in nearly every home, though, people with different ideas knew they weren’t alone. And people who might have been opposed to those “dirty weirdos” will think differently when they see the weirdos on TV and find out that they’re a lot like them.
Also, don’t underestimate the importance of the Pill. Women being able to take control of their reproductive functions was an absolutely huge game changer. In fact it might be one of the most important inventions of the 20th Century, surpassing the influence of penicillin and nuclear bombs.
I think the comment was more about the acceptance of pornography rather than it’s invention. Pornographic movies like Behind the Green Door,Deep Throat, and The Devil in Miss Jones received attention from mainstream press, some of it positive, and they were known throughout American households. These movies were released in the early 70s but the radical sixties actually went into the seventies.
The difference in the 1960s wasn’t that pornography suddenly poped up of nowhere, having never been heard of before. The issue is when changes became acceptable in public. These reductionist answers derail thought, and add nothing.
Pornography is an example of this as well. Soft core nudity became acceptable in magazines and movies in the 60s but the 70s brought The Devil in Miss Jones, and Behind the Green Door, and Deep Throat. [ninjaed by Odesio while I wrote too much]
The answer to What Led to the Radical Sixties? is The Pre-Radical Fifties. (All references are to America only.) Porno chic was the flowering of a seed planted in the 50s, which grew tall in the 60s.
Playboy happened in the 50s. Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl started in the 50s. The Beat movement was from the 50s. Rock ‘n’ Roll started in the 50s. The big social concern of the 50s was juvenile delinquency. That and rock had nothing to do with one another, but people paired them anyway, creating an attractive menace. The biggest protest was the civil rights movement, a gigantic change. And television, which went national in the 50s and brought all these images of change into peoples’ living rooms, transformed how Americans looked at the world.
It wasn’t Kennedy’s assassination that caused change - Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique appeared in 1963 - but his election. The first 20th century born president, he symbolized a generational change that can hardly be overestimated. The old and tired and boring and staid was to be tossed out. Everything would be different in the New Frontier.
I’d rate The Beatles as a bigger cultural change effect than Kennedy’s death. The Beatles broke all the rules. You cannot believe how radical their hair was unless you lived through it. Rock joined the “new wave” movements in a dozen other arts, from mainstream fiction to movies to science fiction to architecture to op and op art.
Johnson used Kennedy’s death to push through sweeping bills changing the relation of government to the people. But he also got swamped by Vietnam, which made political protest legitimate in a way unthinkable under Eisenhower. The civil rights movement turned militant itself after its several assassinations of major figures.
Change always happens. The sixties were special because decades of changes blocked by the Depression, the War, and the Recovery were loosened all at once, so that the pace of change speeded up. That was too much for people, one big reason why the majority wanted old man Reagan to slow things down again.
Just on a personal note, I need to correct Wesley Clark. The seventies were a terrible financial decade. There was a recession from 1973-1975 after the first round of oil price hikes. The second round made it worse, with inflation spiking over 20 percent. Jobs were impossible to find. It was so bad that Nixon signed the The Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) to fund jobs, and CETA benefits had to keep lengthening because even after a year people still couldn’t get a job. I took a couple of CETA jobs myself and I had been on food stamps for a few months in that blasted 1973. It was my worst decade as an adult and I would have laughed in your face if you told me the boomers had it easy.
The fear of young people that we were going to be sent to Vietnam to have our asses shot off might have had a tiny bit to do with it.
The Civil Rights movement, before this, demonstrated that in many cases government should not be respected, especially the racist southern governors. Plus it had some success - and generated martyrs.
Mass affluence, mass education and mass media. Affluence raises your expectations and your sense of possibility. Education exposes you to new ideas and values. The media feeds you new trends at a much faster pace than anything before. All three came together in an unprecedented way with the boomers. Of course Vietnam also played a role but it is striking how the fairly similar Korean war had such a massively different level of impact. That’s because the youth of the early 50s was very different from that of the late 60s.
And vestiges of this attitude were still lingering a decade or more later. I remember when I decided to go to college (in the early 1980s) to become an engineer, some friends and acquaintances were mildly disparaging. “Why you wanna do that? The money, right?” Fellow musicians suggested that I should “stick with (my) guitar playing”. And I wasn’t talking about getting rich, just making a good, steady living. But it seemed (for some) that I had crossed over to the dark side.
You saw it in works of fiction from that era too. The ‘cool’ guest characters on TV shows like Route 66 were often penniless hitchhikers who spouted all the wisdom.
I imagine it’s pretty hard to get wound up about social change when your first concern is feeding and sheltering your family, especially if it takes a lot of hard work to do that.
The 1960s were the era in which the first generation to come of age AFTER WWII were young and in college. They’d never had to endure the privation their parents and grandparents had known from the world wars and the Depression, so there was a notion that things could be better and that they could make that change happen I suspect.
