01:512:104 Lecture Notes - Lecture 32: Free Speech Movement, Watergate Scandal, Strategic Arms Limitation Talks

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Chapter 32 - The Crisis of Authority
The Youth Culture
The New Left
·The postwar baby-boom generation, the unprecedented number of
people born in a few years just after World War II, was growing
up.
·One of the most visible results of the increasingly assertive youth
movement was a radicalization of many American college and
university students, who in the course of the 1960s formed what
became known as the New Left- a large, diverse group of men
and women energized by the polarizing developments of their
time to challenge the political system.
·The New Left embraced the cause of African Americans and other
minorities, but its own ranks consisted overwhelmingly of white
people.
·The New Left drew from many sources.
·The New Left drew as well from the writings of some of the important
social critics of the 1950s-among them C. Wright Mills, a soci
ologist at Columbia University who wrote a series of scathing and
brilliant critiques of modern bureaucracies.
·The New Left drew its inspiration above all from the civil rights
movement, in which many idealistic young white Americans had
become involved in the early 1960s.
·In 1962, a group of students, most of them from prestigious
universities, gathered in Michigan to form an organization to give
voice to their demands: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
·A 1964 dispute at the University of California at Berkeley over the
rights of students to engage in political activities on campus
gained national attention.
·The Free Speech Movement, created turmoil at Berkeley as students
challenged campus police, occupied administrative offices, and
produced a strike in which nearly ¾ of the Berkeley students
participated.
·The revolt at Berkeley was the first outburst of what was to be nearly
a decade of campus turmoil.
·Also in 1969, Berkeley became the scene of perhaps the most
prolonged and traumatic conflict of any American college
campus in the 1960s: a battle over the efforts of a few students
to build a “People’s Park” on a vacant lot the university planned
to use to build a parking garage.
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·By the end of the People’s Park battle, which lasted for more than a
week, the Berkeley campus was completely polarized.
·Student radicals were, for the20first time, winning large audiences for
their extravagant rhetoric linking together university
administrators, the police, and the larger political and economic
system, describing them all as part of one united, oppressive
force.
·As time went on, moreover, the student fringe groups became
increasingly militant.
·Student activists tried to drive out training programs for military
officers (ROTC) and bar military recruiters from college
campuses.
·The October 1967 march on the Pentagon, where demonstrators were
met by a solid line of armed troops; the “spring mobilization” of
April 1968, which attracted hundreds of thousands of
demonstrators in cities around the country.
·Many draft-age Americans simply refused induction, accepting what
occasionally what were long terms in jail as a result.
The Counterculture
·The most visible characteristic of the counterculture was a change in
lifestyle.
·Young Americans flaunted long hair, shabby or flamboyant clothing,
and a rebellious disdain for traditional speech and decorum,
which they replaced with their own “hippie” idiom.
·Also central to the counterculture were drugs: marijuana smokingwhich
after 1966 became almost as common a youthful diversion
as b eer drinking-and the less widespread but still substantial use
of other, more potent hallucinogens, such as LSD.
·To some degree, the emergence of more relaxed approaches to
sexuality was a result less of the counterculture than of the new
accessibility of effective contraceptives, most notably the birthcontrol
pill and, after 1973, legalized abortion.
·The counterculture’s rejection of traditional values and its open
embrace of sensual pleasure sometimes masked its philosophy,
which offered a fundamental challenge to the American middleclass
mainstream.
·The most adherents of the counterculture-the hippies, who came to
dominate the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco and
other places, and the social dropouts, many of whom retreated to
rural communes-rejected modern society altogether and
attempted to find refuge in a simpler, more “natural” existence.
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·Theodore Roszak, whose book the Making of a Counter Culture(1969)
became a significant document of the era, captured much of the
spirit of the movement in his frank admission that “the primary
project of our counterculture is to proclaim a new heaven and a
new earth so vast, so marvelous that the inordinate claims of
technical expertise must of necessity withdraw to a subordinate
and marginal status in the lives of men.
·The use of marijuana, the freer attitudes toward sex, the iconoclastic
(and sometimes obscene) language- all spread far beyond the
realm of the true devotes of the counterculture.
·Rock n Roll first achieved wide popularity in the 1950s, on the
strength of such early performers as Buddy Holly and Elvis
Presley.
·Early in the 1960s, its influence began to spread, a result in large part
of the phenomenal popularity of the Beatles, the English group
whose first visit to the United States in 1964 created a
remarkable sensation, “Beatlemania”.
·Other groups such as the Rolling Stones turned even more openly to
themes of anger, frustration, and rebelliousness.
·Television began to turn to programming that reflected social and
cultural conflict- as exemplified by the enormously popular All in
the Family, whose protagonist, Archie Bunker, was a lowermiddle-
class bigot.
The Mobilization of Minorities
Seeds of Indian Militancy
·Indians were the least prosperous, least healthy, and least stable
group in the nation.
·They constituted less than one percent of the population.
·The Native American unemployment rate was ten times the national
rate.
·Life expectancy among Indians was more than twenty years less than
the national average.
·For much of the postwar era, and particularly after the resignation of
John Collier as commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1946, federal
policy toward the tribes had been shaped by a determination to
incorporate Indians into mainstream American society, whether
Indians wanted to assimilate or not.
·Through termination, the federal government withdrew all official
recognition of the tribes as legal entities, administratively
separate from state governments, and made them subject to the
same local jurisdictions as white residents.
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Document Summary

The postwar baby-boom generation, the unprecedented number of people born in a few years just after world war ii, was growing up. The new left embraced the cause of african americans and other minorities, but its own ranks consisted overwhelmingly of white people. The new left drew its inspiration above all from the civil rights movement, in which many idealistic young white americans had become involved in the early 1960s. In 1962, a group of students, most of them from prestigious universities, gathered in michigan to form an organization to give voice to their demands: students for a democratic society (sds). A 1964 dispute at the university of california at berkeley over the rights of students to engage in political activities on campus gained national attention. The free speech movement, created turmoil at berkeley as students challenged campus police, occupied administrative offices, and produced a strike in which nearly of the berkeley students participated.

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