# What Led to the Radical Sixties? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [May 21, 2020, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-led-to-the-radical-sixties/854239 "2020-05-21T13:35:43Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Jim\_B](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jim_b/32/4338_2.png) [@Jim\_B](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jim_B)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-led-to-the-radical-sixties/854239/1 "2020-05-21T13:35:43Z")
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:). :):):):):):)🙂 ---
**Author:** ![bob\_2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bob_2/32/3341_2.png) [@bob\_2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bob_2)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-led-to-the-radical-sixties/854239/2 "2020-05-21T14:06:00Z")
On this side of the Atlantic, we had “The Swinging Sixties”. They were a direct result of WW" and the depression that followed it. ---
**Author:** ![kayaker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kayaker/32/441_2.png) [@kayaker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kayaker)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 2:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-led-to-the-radical-sixties/854239/3 "2020-05-21T14:07:14Z")
> [@Jim\_B](#): > > Women’s rights, gay rights, pornography even. [Pornography has existed since at least 7200 BC.](https://www.liveabout.com/history-of-pornography-721217) ---
**Author:** ![Crane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crane/32/3495_2.png) [@Crane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crane)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 3:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-led-to-the-radical-sixties/854239/4 "2020-05-21T15:34:54Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 3:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-led-to-the-radical-sixties/854239/5 "2020-05-21T15:36:10Z")
Gross hypocrisy. ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 3:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-led-to-the-radical-sixties/854239/6 "2020-05-21T15:39:40Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![madsircool](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/madsircool/32/3432_2.png) [@madsircool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/madsircool)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 3:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-led-to-the-radical-sixties/854239/7 "2020-05-21T15:44:33Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Sitnam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Sitnam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sitnam)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 4:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-led-to-the-radical-sixties/854239/8 "2020-05-21T16:00:39Z")
Suburbs, new middle class, and Benjamin Spock. ---
**Author:** ![carrps](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carrps/32/2957_2.png) [@carrps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carrps)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 4:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-led-to-the-radical-sixties/854239/9 "2020-05-21T16:12:35Z")
> [@Crane](#): > > 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. And that affluence was a result of things like a 90% top marginal tax rate…under a Republican president! 'Tis ever thus, you get what you pay for. ---
**Author:** ![DrCube](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a3d4f5/32.png) [@DrCube](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrCube)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 4:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-led-to-the-radical-sixties/854239/10 "2020-05-21T16:16:17Z")
The television. 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. ---
**Author:** ![madsircool](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/madsircool/32/3432_2.png) [@madsircool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/madsircool)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-led-to-the-radical-sixties/854239/11 "2020-05-21T16:21:23Z")
> [@carrps](#): > > And that affluence was a result of things like a 90% top marginal tax rate…under a Republican president! 'Tis ever thus, you get what you pay for. Which no one ever paid anything close to because of tax loopholes and shelters. > **[1950s Hollywood forged a golden age of tax avoidance](https://www.accountingtoday.com/articles/1950s-hollywood-forged-a-golden-age-of-tax-avoidance-by-movie-stars)** > > Prior to the Tax Reform Act of 1986, the tax code was full of loopholes that individuals could take advantage of, especially movie stars. > [@](#): > > Prior to the Tax Reform Act of 1986, the tax code was full of loopholes that individuals could take advantage of. One favorite was buying rental properties. In 1954, Congress passed a law allowing for accelerated depreciation on any income-producing real estate — meaning that wealthy taxpayers could deduct from their income tax a percentage of the value of the property each year. What made it even better was that more often than not, the property appreciated in value, even as the government provided its generous depreciation schedule. The tax break was used not only by actors making millions but also by lawyers and doctors making $50,000 or $60,000 a year. > > Another common practice was to push income generated in year 1 into years 2, 3, 4 and beyond. In 1957, for instance, William Holden was signed by Columbia Pictures to act in “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” The company agreed to give the 39-year-old actor 10 percent of the gross profits. To keep his taxes down, Holden insisted that Columbia pay him no more than $50,000 a year. The movie, of course, was a huge hit, with domestic box office receipts exceeding $27 million ($241 million in 2019 dollars). > [@](#): > > There were two other tax loopholes favored by actors and other entertainers — loopholes that were largely out of reach for the merely well-to-do. The first was the oil depletion allowance. The second was the collapsible corporation. > > The oil depletion allowance was created by Congress in 1926. Meant to give incentives to drill for oil, it reduced the taxable income generated by an oil well by 27½ percent. It was, writes Yuxun Willie Tan in the Iowa Historical Review, “the biggest tax loophole in U.S. history.” ---
**Author:** ![Odesio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/odesio/32/20003_2.png) [@Odesio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Odesio)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 4:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-led-to-the-radical-sixties/854239/12 "2020-05-21T16:43:22Z")
> [@kayaker](#): > > [Pornography has existed since at least 7200 BC.](https://www.liveabout.com/history-of-pornography-721217) 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. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-led-to-the-radical-sixties/854239/13 "2020-05-21T16:50:46Z")
> [@kayaker](#): > > [Pornography has existed since at least 7200 BC.](https://www.liveabout.com/history-of-pornography-721217) 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. > [@madsircool](#): > > 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. 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. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 4:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-led-to-the-radical-sixties/854239/14 "2020-05-21T16:51:27Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Lantern](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/d26b3c/32.png) [@Lantern](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lantern)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 7:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-led-to-the-radical-sixties/854239/15 "2020-05-21T19:05:05Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![F.U.Shakespeare](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/aca169/32.png) [@F.U.Shakespeare](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/F.U.Shakespeare)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 7:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-led-to-the-radical-sixties/854239/16 "2020-05-21T19:50:49Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > 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. Very true. 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. ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 8:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-led-to-the-radical-sixties/854239/17 "2020-05-21T20:15:53Z")
> [@DrCube](#): > > The television. > > 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. But of the dozen or more forms of birth control why was the pill so influential? ---
**Author:** ![MortSahlFan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/3bc359/32.png) [@MortSahlFan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MortSahlFan)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-led-to-the-radical-sixties/854239/18 "2020-05-21T20:36:58Z")
> [@carrps](#): > > And that affluence was a result of things like a 90% top marginal tax rate…under a Republican president! 'Tis ever thus, you get what you pay for. Democratic Presidents seem to get away with doing the most Republican-stuff, and vice-versa. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 8:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-led-to-the-radical-sixties/854239/19 "2020-05-21T20:42:53Z")
> [@F.U.Shakespeare](#): > > Very true. 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. ---
**Author:** ![MortSahlFan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/3bc359/32.png) [@MortSahlFan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MortSahlFan)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 8:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-led-to-the-radical-sixties/854239/20 "2020-05-21T20:57:23Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > Mort Sahl Major contributor [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-led-to-the-radical-sixties/854239.md?page=2)