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CHAPTER SIX
Copyright 2001. Columbia University Press.
All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.
Sixties Culture
In the Sixties era, Americans challenged cultural boundaries as they sought to
build better lives amid general economic prosperity. Young people reaped the
whirlwind of material affluence and led society into new consumer fads and a
more forthrightly hedonistic lifestyle. Others found America’s material rewards
spiritually insubstantial and sought to build a counterculture based on alternative values. Black Power advocates looked on mainstream culture with disdain.
They worked to sustain and to foster their own cultural heritage.
THE GOOD LIFE
During the Sixties era, racial justice and the Vietnam War were not the only
sources of conflict in American society. People from all walks of life often
heatedly debated how to lead a good life amid national prosperity. While the
majority celebrated the material abundance that prosperity made possible, some
young people scorned what they regarded as the soulless materialism of
America’s consumer society. As one cultural radical commented: “Why
should we work 12 or 16 hours a day now when we don’t have to? For a color
TV? For wall-to-wall carpeting? An automatic ice-cube maker?”1
It was not just the young rebels who questioned the value of rampant materialism. In a speech given in May 1964 at the University of Michigan, President Lyndon Johnson, too, asked “whether we have the wisdom to use . . .
[our] wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the equality of
our American civilization.” Americans, he insisted, must “prove that our material
progress is only the foundation on which we will build a richer life in mind and
spirit.”2
While politicians, cultural rebels, and many others questioned the societal
meaning of material abundance, most middle-class people simply reveled in the
opportunities consumer capitalism provided them. Every single month between
1961 and 1969, the United States economy continued to grow. It was the longest
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Beth Bailey.; The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s
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the american sixties: a brief history
period of continuous economic growth in American history, only exceeded by
the expansion that began later in 1991.
Unemployment hovered around 4 percent for much of the decade. Per
capita income soared while the official poverty rate dropped from more than 22
percent of Americans in 1960 to just 12 percent by 1969. Millions more had extra
money in their pockets, and tens of millions had disposable incomes that were
unimaginable during the catastrophic Great Depression of the 1930s.
As a result of this increasingly widespread affluence, people found new opportunities to have more fun. Traditional activities like bowling, hunting, fishing,
and boating experienced boom times as millions more people had both the
money and time enough away from work to enjoy leisure activities. More people
than ever bought tickets to professional sporting events; baseball, foot- ball and
basketball teams expanded throughout the nation, moving south and west, with
new franchises and new stadiums. Between 1960 and 1970, attendance at majorleague baseball games alone grew by over ten million people. Foreign travel, once
the nearly exclusive preserve of the wealthy, became a normal rite of passage for
middle-class Americans. Passport applications rose from a mere 300,000 in 1950
to 2,219,000 in 1970. Domestically, too, Americans were vacationing as never
before, flying in new jet-propelled passenger liners like the Boeing 747
(introduced in 1969), which could seat 374 passengers; or they were driving their
new cars on the recently built interstate highway system.
American prosperity seemed to be symbolized by Americans’ love affair
with the automobile. Whereas in the late 1940s a majority of working-class
Americans did not own one car, 29.3 percent of American families had two or
more cars by the end of the 1960s—an increase of more than 50 percent in a
single decade.
Emblematic of Sixties-era vehicles were a series of so-called “muscle cars,”
which were sold overwhelmingly to young men: the Pontiac GTO, the Plymouth Road Runner, the Mercury Cougar Eliminator, and most successful of all,
the Ford Mustang. These vehicles could be bought with huge engines (the
Road Runner could handle a 426-cubic-inch engine) that would allow their
drivers to hurtle down American highways with rocket-like speed. Even as some
people, most famously consumer advocate Ralph Nader in 1965, began to voice
doubts about the safety, reliability, and social costs (such as pollution) of
American automobiles, throughout the 1960s a majority of Ameri- cans took
special pride in their stylish and powerful automobiles.
Just as auto ownership had become an American birthright in the 1960s,
television had become Americans’ favorite form of entertainment. Commer-
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cial television broadcasting had begun only in 1947; by 1970, though, 96 percent
of American families had at least one TV set in their homes. For most of the
1960s, the most popular TV shows revealed a nostalgia for a simpler, rural or smalltown way of life. Favorites like The Andy Griffith Show, Gomer Pyle, and The
Beverly Hillbillies showed good-hearted country folk upholding traditional values
like neighborliness and love of family, even as they were some- times gently
made objects of fun for their slow-mindedness and lack of familiarity with the
rapidly changing world around them.
Even if most popular TV shows eschewed the political controversies of the
1960s, throughout the era America’s most popular mass medium increasingly
began to reflect the nation’s concerns. In 1965, television history was made
when white actor Robert Culp and black actor Bill Cosby costarred as American intelligence agents in the hit action series I Spy. Never before had television portrayed a white man and a black man as friends and as equals. That
Cosby played the smart partner and Culp the brawnier partner—going against
contemporary stereotypes—made the show seem even more daring.
By the late 1960s a few popular TV shows began to grapple with the nation’s cultural and political divisions. In February 1967 The Smothers Brothers
Comedy Hour premiered on CBS. It regularly featured humorous but pointed
political commentary, and it contested network censorship rules. The Smothers
Brothers invited folksinger Pete Seeger to appear on their show, ignoring the TV
taboo against blacklisted performers accused in the 1950s of being
communists. At first, CBS censored Seeger, refusing to broadcast his performance of the anti–Vietnam War song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.” Under
pressure from the Smothers Brothers and their fans, CBS relented, and the
performance was aired amid great controversy.
In 1969, however, CBS executives decided the Smothers Brothers’ political
brand of humor was too controversial and canceled the show.
A lighter take on the nation’s controversies, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,
first aired in January 1968. Marijuana jokes, comedy sketches about the sexual
revolution (“Sock it to me!”), and a general spirit of irreverence about society’s
sacred cows animated the show, which had a huge appeal for youthful
audiences.
YOUTH CULTURE
The combined social forces of economic prosperity and political controversy
were most visibly reflected by the fads, consumer choices, and serious com-
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the american sixties: a brief history
mitments of America’s burgeoning population of young people. The “Baby
Boomers,” defined by demographers as those born between 1946 and 1964, and
numbering some 76 million people, rolled through America with the force of
a cultural tidal wave, leaving a changed society in their wake.
By the late 1950s, the buying power of America’s post–World War II baby
boom was already being reckoned with by the business community. Life magazine quantified the matter in a sensational feature story titled, “A Young $10
Billion Power: The US Teen-Age Consumer Has Become a Major Factor in
the Nation’s Economy.”3 As this huge generation of young people, born amid
prosperity and a general optimism about the nation’s future, moved through
American society, their desires shaped both the marketplace of goods and services and their own new lifestyles.
In the 1960s, young people made popular music—above all rock ‘n’ roll—
the center of their cultural universe. Already by the Fifties (and some historians
would point back to the “bobby soxer” music crazes of the Forties, which
included Frank Sinatra) young people had enough buying power to make
their favorite music stars into national celebrities.
Most famously, Elvis Presley, with his gyrating hips, sneering lips, and
pounding vocals had became a teen idol in the 1950s. Blending African-American rhythm ‘n’ blues, white-Southern country and western, gospel music, and
his own unique style, Presley helped to create the rock ‘n’ roll sound. Sav- aged
by most older listeners as a “sexhibitionist” and hated by many racists for his
“mongrel” music, Presley’s record sales demonstrated that young people had the
money to make their tastes count at the cash register.
By the early 1960s, white teenagers had fallen into a decade-long love affair
with a very different kind of rock music. In February 1964 the number-one hit
song in the United States was “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” by a British group
called the Beatles. Until they announced their break-up in 1970, the Beatles
were the most popular music group in the United States, selling records almost exclusively to young people. Each of the record albums they released
over the course of the Sixties managed simultaneously to mirror and to shape the
cutting edge of youth culture, from the sunny, rebellious antics of Meet the
Beatles in 1964 to the drug-influenced, mystical, and antiestablishment
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967 to the elegiac uncertainties of Let It Be in 1970.
Young people cherished the Beatles not only because they were brilliant pop
musicians but because their confident, rebellious, adventurous style perfectly
expressed the spirit of their times. Almost completely apolitical (though at the
end of the decade John Lennon did speak out against the Vietnam
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War), the Beatles offered a youthful insouciance that entertained and inspired their
fans. When John Lennon announced in 1966 that the Beatles were more popular
than Jesus, he appalled most adults, but Beatles fans heard in his words an
acknowledgment of their own power to bend American culture to their desires
and aspirations.
By the early 1970s, rock music accounted for about 80 percent of all record
sales. Youths in the Sixties—at a time when society was wracked by conflict
over civil rights and, increasingly, the Vietnam War—used rock music as a
proud emblem of their rebellion against the more staid and conservative aspects of the society they were poised to inherit. For most of these young people,
that rebellion was little more than a demand that their consumer-lifestyle
choices—“mod,” and then later “hippie”-style clothes, scruffier hairdos, and
loud, pulsating music—be accorded respect from their elders. They wanted to be
able “to do their own thing.” For some young people, however, cultural rebellion became a more overtly political and radical challenge to societal
norms.
COUNTERCULTURE
For most Americans in the Sixties, the term “counterculture” referred to the
lifestyle of those whom they generally called “hippies.” At least some of these
hippies, also known as “freaks” and “longhairs,” sought to create an alternative
way of life that overlapped with the more general youth culture but which
went much further in its alienation from middle-class consumer society.
These young men and women struggled to set up their own economic, cultural, and even political structures. Many hoped to become relatively independent from mainstream America.
The most visible manifestations of the counterculture took shape by the
mid-1960s in numerous cities and towns around the country. Hippie districts—like the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, Old Town in Chicago, the
Lower East Side in New York City, and Dinkytown in Minneapolis—began to
flower. In these places young people ranging in age from their late teens to
their late twenties—many of them runaways—began to congregate. They set up
“crash pads,” “communal” houses, food co-ops, and an array of restaurants, rock
clubs, bookstores, and “head shops.” The most successful among them built
semi-separate urban enclaves in which they could pursue an alternative way of
life.
These lifestyle experiments challenged most Americans’ values. In San
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Francisco, the Diggers, an edgy, loosely affiliated group of men and women,
scorned consumer society and attempted to create a subculture independent of the
monetary economy. They believed that everything should be “free,” with
goods and services bartered, exchanged, or simply given away. In 1967 and
1968, they and their allies set up a free-food giveaway in Golden Gate Park,
and also established a free store, a free transportation network, free medical care,
and free concerts featuring rock groups like the Grateful Dead. They, and
many others like them around the country, set up rural communes and a variety of
co-ops that fostered a collective, nonmaterialistic way of life.
Rejecting traditional standards of behavior and seeking new experiences, the
young people of the counterculture openly embraced drug use and often
practiced a far more open and “liberated” sexuality than the norm. They used
marijuana and hallucinogenics such as LSD and peyote. Cheered on by visionaries as diverse as ex-Harvard professor and “acid guru” Timothy Leary, the
acclaimed writer Ken Kesey, and the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, members of the
counterculture sought to establish new lifestyles in which cooperation replaced
competition and in which Eastern spiritual practices often replaced traditional
Christianity.
Most older Americans, and many young people as well, looked with horror at
the drug-using, anti-materialist, sexually promiscuous counterculture that was so
visibly springing up across the country by the late 1960s. Some young women
involved in the counterculture also began to find fault with this alter- native way
of life. Too often they found themselves being sexually exploited, finding they
were expected by their male counterparts to do all the traditional “women’s
work” such as housekeeping, cooking, and child care.
By 1970, almost all of the countercultural urban enclaves had fallen apart. Too
many criminals (most famously, the vicious Charles Manson, who would later
be jailed as the ringleader of a mass-murder crime spree) and too many
emotionally disturbed young people had been drawn to hippie communities by
the promise of sex, drugs, and an “anything goes” atmosphere.
The counterculture did not completely disappear, however, as many seek- ers
of an alternative way of life moved into rural parts of America in a “back- to-theland movement.”
Even as the counterculture retreated, much of its energy and style was
repackaged by clothing manufacturers and the entertainment industry. Young
people who had little interest in directly challenging social norms but who
wished to partake of the rebellious and hedonistic impulses of the counterculture eagerly consumed the countercultural lifestyle, buying psychedelic
rock albums and “groovy” clothes.
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BLACK CULTURE
The hippies were not the only alternative cultural movement in the United
States in the 1960s. While their actions were less publicized, many African
Americans also deliberately turned away from so-called mainstream culture. They
rejected “white” society and built on generations of ancestral struggle to create a
black cultural-nationalism.
Evoking an African-American worldview, this cultural struggle was a key
component of the Black Power movement. While aspects of this movement,
like that of the primarily white counterculture, would be co-opted by mainstream America, the black nationalists of the 1960s offered African Americans a
distinctly alternative set of cultural expressions and practices.
The purpose and power of the African-American cultural movement was
best articulated and promoted by Malcolm X, who was, until shortly before his
assassination in 1965, a leader of the Nation of Islam (popularly known as the
Black Muslims). Speaking before a large crowd in Harlem in 1964, he explained: “We must recapture our heritage and our identity if we are ever to
liberate ourselves from the bonds of white supremacy. We must launch a cultural revolution to unbrainwash an entire people.”4
Malcolm X and other black nationalists believed that African Americans
needed to take pride in their African heritage, hold up their own standards of
beauty and culture, and create black-controlled and community-based institutions. Through these actions, African Americans could gain greater control over
their individual lives and their communities. Black cultural nationalism was a
pointedly political ideology.
In practice, black cultural nationalism took multiple forms. Most visibly,
African Americans in the 1960s began to reject white standards of appearance. Prior to the mid-1960s, many black men and women used harsh chemicals to straighten their hair so that it would look like white people’s hair. And
many within the African-American community placed a premium on having
light skin and Euro-American features. In 1966, Black Power leader Stokely
Carmichael expressed the changing attitude held by an increasing number of
young African Americans: “We have to stop being ashamed of being black. A
broad nose, a thick lip and nappy hair is us, and we are going to call that
beautiful whether they like it or not. We are not going to fry our hair
anymore.”5
By the late 1960s, as black men and women let their hair grow naturally into
“Afros” and donned dashikis and other African-inspired clothing, the phrase
“Black is Beautiful” reverberated throughout the United States.
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Black cultural nationalists tried, too, to build alternative institutions and
cultural practices that would promote what they called an African-American
worldview. As one radical activist stated: “To leave the education of black children in the hands of the people who are white and who are racists is tantamount to suicide.”6
Some cultural nationalists believed that it was necessary to create an entirely new school curriculum that featured black achievements and prepared
African-American young people to challenge the political and economic system that had made them second-class citizens from birth. Maulana Ron
Karenga, a Los Angeles–based activist, invented a new African-inspired set of
beliefs, the Nguzu Saba, and a new holiday, Kwanzaa, to help African Americans create a cultural alternative to mainstream white society.
Insistently political, black cultural nationalism was popular among African
Americans of all ages, particularly the young. By the early 1970s, most young
African Americans had let their hair grow naturally, spoke proudly of black
“Soul,” and demanded more respect for their culture in the wider society.
This movement directly affected white Americans as well. African Americans, with support from some whites, successfully pressed for the inclusion of
black history and African-American literature into school curriculums, at all
levels and in all districts. Over time, many Americans would come to accept the
idea of multiculturalism, in which it is assumed that the heritages and traditions of
all racial and ethnic groups in the United States should be shown equal respect.
While some of the political rage that animated Black Power leaders like
Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael in the mid-1960s was dissipated by the
mid-1970s, the black cultural-nationalist movement did not end with the Sixties.
CONCLUSION
Sixties culture took many forms. Much divided the countercultural hippies,
black cultural nationalists, and the exuberant consumers of Detroit’s muscle cars.
Yet, in some ways, these very different cultural expressions were linked. All
expressed a growing acceptance of cultural pluralism in the United States. To
some extent, this cultural pluralism was a natural outgrowth of America’s
expanding consumer marketplace, in which people—at least those with disposable income—were free to purchase an extraordinary array of goods and
services that were expressive of whatever lifestyle they wished to pursue.
In addition, Americans’ turn toward greater cultural diversity and social ex-
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perimentation was a part of a larger societal trend. More and more Americans
accepted the idea that personal expression and individual freedom were a crit- ical
aspect of the American way of life. While this notion sounds like it could be a
“hippie” credo, it was very much at the core of mainstream culture as well.
The Supreme Court, in a series of rulings in the late 1960s and early 1970s,
gave Constitutional protection to a far more open society. In a 1971 ruling, Cohen v. California, the Court struck down most government obscenity laws,
ruling: “One man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric,” and that since the government
“cannot make principled decisions in this area,” state authorities should leave
“matters of taste and style largely to the individual.”7
The Sixties were a time of tremendous consumer power, racial unrest, civ- il
disorder, and cultural rebellion. All these forces combined to create a far more
open, pluralistic, individualistic, and chaotic culture, the effects of which
Americans are still confronting.
NOTES
1. Terry Anderson, The Sixties (New York: Longman, 1999), 140.
2. Lyndon Johnson, “Remarks at the University of Michigan,” May 22, 1964, in
Schulman, Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism, 174, 177.
3. The article is reprinted, under the title “Life Magazine Identifies the New TeenAge Market, 1959,” in Griffith, Major Problems in American History Since 1945, 203.
4. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, 5.
5. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, 201.
6. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, 124.
7. Ken Cmiel, “The Politics of Civility,” in David Farber, ed., The Sixties (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 279.
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