SS310 – Exploring the 1960s: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Week 5 Seminar

Instructor: Nicole Darling

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Agenda• Social Movements

• Counter Culture• Free Speech Student Movement• Anti war Movement• Women’s Movement• The Counter-response

• Wrap Up

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Social MovementsFour main types of social movements

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Social MovementsUnderstand what a social movement is,

how they are structured, and how influential they are in our society for effecting change

What Is a Social Movement?

What other social movements took place during the 1960s?

The Counter Culture

What is it and what created it?

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The War at Home

• The rise of the counterculture

reflected a loss of faith in the

liberal reforms promoted by John

Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

• As faith and idealism toward

liberal reforms declined,

radicalism grew among specific

elements of American society.

Many of these late 1960s radicals

came from the frustrated civil

rights advocates, frustrated war

protestors, college students,

Hispanic youth, feminists, gays,

and youth culture in general.

Street riot by members of the counterculture in Berkeley, California. By the late 1960s, the counterculture had shifted away from liberal democratic reforms and toward radicalism.

The Student Movement

• White students paid attention– SNCC had become a role

model organization for white activists, too.

• College students were initially idealistic about changing the world.

• Students were also influenced by youth culture themes that pitted the older generation’s values against the emerging values of the youth culture.

Student protest buttons from the Berkeley campus of the University of California.

These students were disturbed by many features of American life:• The Bomb, the Cold War, militarism and

imperialism• Bureaucracy and over-rationalization• The concentration and centralization of

power in Big Government and Big Business, and the corresponding authoritarianism that comes with concentration of power

• The blind conformity found on college campuses along with administrative authoritarianism

• The injustice of racism and the exploitation of people and the environment by powerful corporations and governments

What the counterculture was about:

• To achieve universal disarmament, demilitarization, and peace

• To use diplomacy rather than militancy as the basis of foreign policy

• To work to eliminate poverty and exploitation

• To work for civil rights and to respect the natural dignity of all humans

• To revitalize American democracy• To create communities with meaningful

work and leisure activities• To make corporations more publicly

accountable• To respect the environment

The Student Movement• In 1962, the baby boomers were

attending universities in huge,

numbers.

• A college degree was now required

for many middle class jobs.

• Given their affluence, these students

were more free to think critically

about the shortcomings of the

consumer society.

The Student Movement

• Having been exposed to the civil rights

movement, the prevailing JFK-style

idealism, and humanistic ideas taught

in college classrooms, students began

to push for reforms – at first within the

university itself.

• Given the popularity of the civil rights

movement in the early 1960s, white

college students saw an opportunity to

take a stand.

The Free Speech Movement• The free speech movement

came out of the student movement and began in Berkeley in 1964. It involved the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

• Colleges had become over-rationalized administrative bureaucracies, with lots of formal rules and regulations imposed on students.

• This seemed an open violation of academic ideals, so students dug in, just as the administrators did.

The Free Speech Movement• Berkeley became a rallying

point for other college campuses to protest the “absence” of free speech (or more specifically the censorship policies of the university).

• The SDS embarked on a campaign across Northern urban regions to organize people, and eventually they succeeded in winning many of these free speech campaigns.

The Anti-War Movement

• By 1966, antiwar protestors were matching the government’s escalation of the war with their own escalation of strategy: a draft resistance movement

• Throughout 1966-1967, antiwar confrontations escalated. Government officials were confronted with mass protestors wherever they went.

The Rise of the Counterculture

• The Vietnam War provided the galvanizing element that united the various protestors of the 1960s.

• The counterculture was very broad. It was a loose group of single-interest subcultures which came together because of rising alienation from established institutions.

The Counterculture

• The counterculture developed its

own music, fashion and lifestyles

to symbolize its alternative value

system.

• More than anything else, the

counterculture stood for freedom

and empowerment (against the

authoritarian establishment).

The Counterculture• The music of the counterculture

had become increasingly political

with anti-establishment

messages.

• The capital of the counterculture

was San Francisco, with Haight &

Ashbury the center of the hippie

element and Oakland, only 20

miles away, the center of the

antiwar radical element.

The Counterculture

• Drugs represented another

countercultural sacrament.

Smoking pot became a ritual

symbolizing shared

membership, with the joint

passed from person to person

in a communal manner.

The Women’s Movement

• The women’s movement was

another element of the

counterculture that emerged

in the early 1960s but which

did not clearly galvanize

until the late 1960s and

early 1970s.

The Women’s Movement

• In the 1960s, most jobs were still sex-

segregated. Women suffered under a

system that paid men higher wages.

• By the 1960s, most middle class women

had at least a part-time job, yet these

jobs continued to be “women’s jobs”

that paid low wages and offered little

upward mobility.

The Counterculture• In 1967, the women’s movement was

viewed largely as a side-show. The

ultimate impact of women’s liberation

would not be felt until the 1970s.

• William Chafe argues that there were

three pivotal movements during the

1960s that would shape the society:

the civil rights movement, the

student-antiwar movement, and the

women’s movement.

Summary of Value DifferencesMainstream Culture VS The Counterculture

• Emphasis on Individual• Competition• Achievement• Group superiority values• Conformity/obedience• Materialism and money• Authoritarianism• Militarism/imperialism• Rationality/bureaucracy• Self-discipline• Delayed gratification

• Community• Cooperation• Happiness• Equality & social justice• Freedom• Spiritualism, sharing• Democracy• Diplomacy/sovereignty• Emotionality/tribalism• Laid back, go with the flow• Immediate gratification

The Counter-response

• Inevitably the protestors sparked a backlash of resentment.

• There was never a time during the 1960s when the protestor activists represented a majority of the American population.

The Counter-response• The “Silent Majority” of Americans

sensed a crisis in values.

• By 1968 they began to rally around

the flag with messages like “America

– love it or leave it.”

Wrap Up!

What did you learn from the seminar that you found interesting?

Questions?

Don’t forget… you can contact me:Email:

ndarling@kaplan.eduAIM: NicoleDarling44