The Legacy of the Sixties

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Table of Contents

Introduction
The protest movements
The hippie movement
The civil rights movement
Women’s Liberation movement
Demonstrations against the Vietnam War
Conclusion
Work Cited

Introduction

I agree with the judgment of the historian that the social upheaval of the 1960s brought conservatism back into the political arena. While I believe that sixties protest movements produced great advances in civil rights, women’s liberation, and the general freeing-up of a culture that had been stiflingly conformist before the 1960s, the fact is that the New Left and the counterculture helped get Richard M. Nixon elected as president of the United States.

The protest movements

It is a terrible irony that the people who tried to make life better should have created the backlash that helped the Republic Party reestablish its dominance. The protest movements have deep roots but the New Left may be said to originate at Port Huron where a group of students met to found Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and to draw up a manifesto declaring their demands for instant and radical change. As Mary Beth Norton says, “SDS sought nothing less than the revitalization of democracy by taking power from the corporations, the military, and the politicians and returning it to the people” (1003).

The Statement reflects the shock many of these students experienced when they left the suburbs to attend university and first discovered that there was poverty and injustice in America. It also reflects their political naivety in expecting the government to respond to their demands. It is this factor more than any other that led the protest movement to become increasingly frustrated and to resort to more attention-getting tactics culminating in the bombings by Weatherman which, in turn, led to the great backlash that swept the conservatives to power. The Free Speech Movement

The Free Speech Movement was organized two years after Pt. Huron, inspiring students on campuses throughout the country. Its members learned a great deal from the civil rights movement in the South where many of them spent their summers, and they brought this knowledge to their organizations. Their protests against racial injustice and the escalation of the war in Vietnam led to clashes with the police, which only fueled their revolutionary fervor. This led to the formation of a loose coalition grouped under the term the New Left which was united in the struggle against racism and the Vietnam War, as well as the hippie movement which chose to turn its back on the “moral bankruptcy and materialism” (1004) of mainstream society.

The hippie movement

Like the SDS, the hippie movement began peacefully and with high expectations of changing the world very shortly. The young people who “turned on, tuned in and dropped out” to flock to Haight-Ashbury intended to “redefine reality and create a more just and joyful society” (1004) through rock n’ roll, drugs, and love but soon after the summer of love of 1967 the hippie movement was destroyed by all the attention it got from the media, and the influx of lost souls it brought into the district. Middle-class parents were horrified by the sight of their children destroying their prospects and even their lives and began to question just how “permissive” society should be, to use a term later popularized by Vice President Spiro Agnew.

The civil rights movement

The civil rights movement followed the same gradient from peaceful protest to violent revolution. The high point of the civil rights movement, after decades of barely perceptible progress, came in August 1963 when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his memorable “I Have a Dream” speech before 250,000 people, black and white, during the March on Washington. When Lyndon B. Johnson succeeded the assassinated President John F. Kennedy, African Americans had every right to think that equal rights were within their reach. Johnson was committed to his idea of a Great Society in which civil rights were an integral part of the war against poverty.

Within months of taking office, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law and a few months later established an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Norton 995). It would seem that King’s dream had come true; and yet it was during these years that black unrest caused the ghetto riots, radicalized the Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and created the Black Panthers.

The reason for this is that reforms had had a Southern focus, according to Norton, while the problems in the North went unnoticed until the long hot summer riots brought them to the nation’s attention (909). Inspired by the revolutionary violence preached by Malcolm X and the black nationalism of the Black Panthers, African Americans in the ghettoes chose to take action rather than wait patiently for the reforms to take effect. The looting, the arson, and the violent clashes between rioters and police alarmed white America and added to the backlash.

Women’s Liberation movement

Women’s Liberation also progressed from a peaceful, reasonable movement to radical feminism during this time. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique confined itself to demanding “equal rights in partnership with men,” but the National Organization for Women (NOW) was soon superseded by radical feminists who fought against “women’s economic and political inequality to sexual double standards and sex-role stereotypes” (Norton 1010).

Women who joined civil rights and other protest groups found themselves making coffee and providing sexual favors instead of making policy decisions (Norton 1010), and eventually the more radical among them began to formulate separatist ideas along the same lines as the radical civil rights groups. The resultant backlash led to a surge of anti-feminism among right-wing voters and a strong demand for a return to traditional values.

Demonstrations against the Vietnam War

For the “silent majority” of Americans, the sight of their children attending love-ins, of blacks setting fire to their neighborhoods, entering the California legislature with loaded shotguns, and attacking the police, was deeply disturbing. What unsettled them most, however, were the massive demonstrations against the Vietnam War which made it seem as though the country was in a civil war. The protest movement which had started as a peaceful attempt at persuading the government to withdraw from Vietnam became inflamed with every heavy-handed response on the part of the authorities.

Police brutality, counter-demonstrations by hard hats, and most of all the failure to change the government’s policy made the demonstrators look for more effective tactics, culminating in the antics of the Youth International Party (“Yippies”) who had traveled to Chicago to “embarrass the Democrats” (Norton 1007) during the 1968 Democratic Convention. The resultant street fight between protesters and police played right into the hands of the “law and order” candidate, Richard Nixon, all the more so since the Republican Convention in Miami was relatively untroubled.

Conclusion

After the pitched battle fought in front of the Chicago Hilton in full view of the delegates and the international media, many Americans decided they had had enough and began to look to Nixon to restore peace and unity to America. Nixon was elected by a slender margin over Hubert Humphreys, ending the hopes of social reform that Kennedy and Johnson had once engendered in people’s hearts. The backlash had taken its effect.

White voters, even those who had been sympathetic to social reform, decided that what the country needed most were stability and order. The combined vote for Nixon and the American Independent Party candidate, George Wallace, came to 57% (Norton 1009) while Hubert Humphrey, who was strongly identified with civil rights, got 35% of the white vote (Norton 1009). The New Left, by increasingly by-passing the political process, had alienated the people they most needed, and from Nixon’s inauguration on they became less and less effective until they ceased to be a factor in American politics.

Work Cited

Norton, Mary Beth et al. A People and a Nation: A History of the United States Vol. II: Since 1865. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

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