Youth Culture of the 1960s

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for the demographic conditions that produced the youth culture of the 1960s, including the baby boom and the fact that roughly half the American population was under thirty by 1964.
• Explain how the New Left, anchored by Students for a Democratic Society and the 1962 Port Huron Statement, differed from earlier American radicalism, and how the Free Speech Movement of 1964 carried New Left ideas into direct action.
• Account for the rise of the antiwar movement on college campuses, including the teach-ins of 1965, the October 1969 Vietnam Moratorium, and the May 1970 shootings at Kent State and Jackson State.
• Describe the counterculture and the sexual revolution, including the Haight-Ashbury district, the Summer of Love of 1967, Woodstock and Altamont in 1969, and the legal and pharmaceutical changes that reshaped sexual norms.
• Use Skill 5.B (Continuity and Change) to account for how the cultural revolts of the 1960s connect to the conservative backlash that organized against them under banners such as the Silent Majority.

The youth culture of the 1960s is, before anything else, a demographic story. Roughly seventy-six million Americans were born between 1946 and 1964, the cohort that contemporaries already called the baby boom. By 1964, half the American population was under thirty, the highest share of young people in the country's history before or since. They arrived at college campuses on a federal scholarship system the postwar government had built for their parents under the GI Bill, and they arrived in numbers no university had been built to absorb. The University of California at Berkeley enrolled roughly twenty-seven thousand students in 1964, more than three times its prewar size; the State University of New York system, the City University of New York, and the public flagships across the Sun Belt and the Midwest all roughly doubled in the same decade. The mass university, more than any other postwar institution, gave the cultural and political revolts of the 1960s their staging ground (KC-8.3.II.B.ii).

The political wing of the youth revolt was the New Left. Its founding text is the Port Huron Statement, drafted in June 1962 by Tom Hayden for the founding convention of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Port Huron, Michigan. The document opens by describing the SDS generation as people bred in modest comfort, housed in universities, and looking with discomfort at the world they had inherited: a racial caste system at home, the threat of nuclear annihilation abroad, and a postwar liberalism whose energy seemed exhausted. Hayden's answer was participatory democracy: a politics in which ordinary people, rather than party professionals or technocratic bureaucrats, would share in the social decisions that shaped their lives. The statement distinguished the New Left from the older Marxist left in two ways. The New Left located the central problem in the bureaucratic state, not in capitalism alone, and it took the lived experience of students, women, and racial minorities as a starting point rather than as a derivative concern (KC-8.2.III.D).

The first sustained New Left action arrived two years later. In October 1964 the University of California, Berkeley administration banned political tabling at the Bancroft and Telegraph entrance, where civil rights groups had been recruiting volunteers for the Mississippi Freedom Summer. The students refused to leave. Mario Savio, a philosophy major who had spent the summer registering Black voters in Mississippi, became the most visible voice of what came to be called the Free Speech Movement. His December 2, 1964 speech on the steps of Sproul Hall, with its image of placing your bodies upon the gears of the machine, framed the postwar university as the prototype of a managerial society that needed to be confronted. The Berkeley administration eventually conceded the political-tabling rule, and the Free Speech Movement became the model for hundreds of campus actions across the second half of the decade. Topic 8.10's chronicle of the Black freedom struggle and Topic 8.12's chronicle of the white New Left are not separate stories. The same Mississippi Freedom Summer that produced the voter-registration tables Berkeley banned also produced the seasoned activists who would lead the campus revolts of the following year.

Music was the cultural connective tissue. The folk revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s, anchored at the Newport Folk Festival and at coffee houses around Greenwich Village, gave the New Left and the early civil rights movement their soundtrack. Bob Dylan's 1963 album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, with "Blowin' in the Wind" and "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," and Joan Baez's appearances at the March on Washington and at SDS conventions, married the Old Left protest tradition of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger to a young, college-educated audience. By 1965, when Dylan went electric at Newport, the politics of the folk audience had begun to migrate into rock and roll. The protest music that followed, from Country Joe and the Fish at Woodstock to Marvin Gaye's 1971 album What's Going On, made popular music itself a vehicle for political argument across the rest of the period.

By 1965, the war in Vietnam had pulled the New Left and the broader student body together into the antiwar movement. The first campus teach-in opened at the University of Michigan in March 1965, a few weeks after President Lyndon Johnson ordered the first sustained American bombing of North Vietnam. Within six weeks, the model had spread to roughly thirty-five campuses. The April 1965 SDS march on Washington drew approximately twenty-five thousand people, the largest peace demonstration in the country to that point. The numbers grew with the war. The October 1967 March on the Pentagon drew roughly one hundred thousand, and the Vietnam Moratorium of October 15, 1969, brought millions of Americans onto the streets of every major American city in coordinated daylong protests. A second Moratorium march on Washington a month later drew roughly half a million people (KC-8.1.II.B).

The most violent moment of the campus antiwar movement arrived in May 1970. President Richard Nixon's announcement on April 30 that American forces had crossed into Cambodia produced a wave of campus strikes. On May 4, Ohio National Guard troops fired on a student demonstration at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four students and wounding nine. Eleven days later, on May 14 and 15, state police and Mississippi Highway Patrol officers fired on students at Jackson State College, a historically Black institution in Mississippi, killing two students and wounding twelve. The Kent State photograph that ran on the cover of Newsweek, taken by student journalist John Filo, became the most reproduced image of the war's domestic cost. Roughly four hundred American campuses closed in response; the publication of the Pentagon Papers in The New York Times in June 1971 deepened the credibility crisis the war had produced for the foreign-policy establishment, and the antiwar movement had effectively achieved its central goal by the time Saigon fell in April 1975 (KC-8.1.II.B).

The cultural wing of the youth revolt is the counterculture, and it took a different path. Where the New Left aimed at political institutions, the counterculture aimed at the conventions of postwar middle-class life: dress, sexuality, family structure, work discipline, and the postwar consumer ideal. Its geographic center was the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, a district of late-Victorian houses near Golden Gate Park where roughly one hundred thousand young people gathered during the Summer of Love of 1967. The hippie subculture organized itself around communal living, recreational drug use (most visibly the synthetic hallucinogen LSD, popularized by the former Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary under the slogan turn on, tune in, drop out), and a deliberate break with the postwar conformity that the Beat writers of the late 1950s had already begun to mock. The San Francisco rock scene, anchored by the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Janis Joplin, gave the Haight its soundtrack and its national reach (KC-8.3.II.B.ii).

The counterculture's most iconic moment arrived in August 1969, when the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, held on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New York, drew roughly four hundred thousand people for three days of performances by Joan Baez, Jimi Hendrix, the Who, the Grateful Dead, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Woodstock has been read since as the high-water mark of the counterculture: a temporary city, twice the size of Albany, that ran on volunteer cooperation and produced no serious violence. Four months later, in December 1969, the Altamont Free Concert at the Altamont Speedway in northern California offered the counterculture's darker counterpoint. The Rolling Stones had hired the Hells Angels motorcycle club to provide stage security; in the crowd in front of the stage during the Stones' performance, Hells Angels member Alan Passaro stabbed an eighteen-year-old Black concertgoer named Meredith Hunter to death. Altamont gave the press the image of a counterculture that could not police itself, and the contrast between Woodstock and Altamont became the conventional shorthand for the unraveling of the cultural revolts of the late 1960s.

The sexual revolution ran on a separate track and outlasted the counterculture by decades. The Food and Drug Administration approved Enovid, the first oral contraceptive pill, for contraceptive use in May 1960; by 1965, roughly six and a half million American women were taking it, and the number doubled again over the next five years. The pill separated sexual activity from reproductive consequence on a scale no earlier contraceptive technology had achieved, and its availability rewrote the sexual norms that had governed American adolescence and early adulthood. In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Supreme Court struck down a Connecticut law that had criminalized the use of contraceptives by married couples, locating in the Constitution a right of marital privacy that would later anchor Roe v. Wade (1973). Survey data from the late 1960s and early 1970s recorded a sharp rise in the share of young Americans who reported premarital sexual activity and a parallel decline in stigma against cohabitation. The same cultural decade also produced an early gay-rights movement that opened with the Stonewall uprising of June 1969 and that Topic 8.11 carries forward.

A smaller cultural wing of the same generation pursued communes and the back-to-the-land movement. Roughly two thousand to three thousand intentional communities were founded across the United States between 1965 and 1975, the largest cluster of communal experiments in American history since the antebellum utopian movements of the 1840s. Communes such as Drop City in Colorado, the Hog Farm in New Mexico, and Twin Oaks in Virginia attempted to build small, cooperative alternatives to the postwar consumer economy. The Whole Earth Catalog, edited by Stewart Brand and first published in 1968, became the movement's reference manual and an early intellectual root of the personal-computing movement that emerged from the same San Francisco Bay Area network in the following decade. Most of the communes dissolved within five years, but the back-to-the-land impulse left durable legacies in organic agriculture, the food cooperative movement, and the early environmental politics of Topic 8.13.

The conservative backlash organized in opposition to the cultural revolts of the 1960s, and the language it used to describe them was deliberately scornful. In a 1969 speech in New Orleans, Vice President Spiro Agnew denounced antiwar critics of the Nixon administration as an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterized themselves as intellectuals, a phrase that lodged itself in the political vocabulary of the next decade. Six months later, in a televised address on November 3, 1969, Nixon appealed to what he called the Silent Majority: the great majority of Americans, his speechwriter Pat Buchanan argued, who supported the administration's Vietnam policy and rejected the cultural and political revolts of the campus left. The phrase organized a political coalition. Hard-hat construction workers attacked antiwar demonstrators in Lower Manhattan in May 1970 with the encouragement of their union local. George Wallace's 1968 third-party presidential campaign, running on opposition to busing, urban unrest, and what he called pseudo-intellectuals, drew nearly fourteen percent of the national vote and carried five Deep South states. Nixon's 1972 reelection, with sixty-one percent of the popular vote and forty-nine of fifty states, drew on the same coalition. The conservative backlash that opened with the Silent Majority speech is the political through-line that connects the cultural revolts of the 1960s to the New Right of the late 1970s and to the Reagan coalition that closes Period 8 in 1980 (KC-8.2.III.D).

The counterculture's longer legacies are easier to see in retrospect than they were at the time. The environmental consciousness that produced the first Earth Day in April 1970 (Topic 8.13) drew on the back-to-the-land movement's critique of postwar consumer society. The food movements that produced organic agriculture, the natural-foods grocery cooperatives, and the farm-to-table restaurant tradition trace their organizational roots to the same network of Bay Area communes. Alternative medicine, yoga, and meditation entered American middle-class life as recognizable practices through the counterculture's interest in non-Western spiritual traditions. Casual fashion, including the displacement of the postwar suit-and-tie standard for white-collar work, ran on a longer timeline but reached the workplace through the same cultural opening. The student-led campus revolts that began at Berkeley in 1964 institutionalized themselves over the following decade as women's studies, ethnic studies, and Black studies programs. The cultural conservatives who attacked the counterculture in the 1970s did so on the grounds that its legacies had become permanent features of American life. They were largely correct, and that fact is the central reason Topic 8.12 belongs in any serious account of how American culture changed across Period 8.

The four sources below sample the youth culture from four different angles: the founding text of the New Left, the Free Speech Movement's defining moment, the antiwar campus mobilization, and the conservative response that organized against all of it.

1. (Continuity and Change) Compare the political vocabulary of the Port Huron Statement of 1962 with the political vocabulary of an earlier American radical text, such as the Populist Omaha Platform of 1892 or Eugene Debs's 1918 antiwar speech in Canton, Ohio. What does the New Left keep, and what does it discard? Where does its language of participatory democracy come from?
2. (Causation) Account for why the Free Speech Movement opened at Berkeley in October 1964 rather than at an Ivy League campus or a state flagship in another part of the country. Which features of postwar California higher education made Berkeley the launch site of the New Left's first sustained direct action?
3. (Comparison) Compare the New Left's political program with the counterculture's cultural program. On which issues did the two movements overlap, and on which issues did they pull in different directions? Is it accurate to treat them as a single phenomenon, or are they two distinct movements with overlapping membership?
4. (Continuity and Change) The sexual revolution outlasted the counterculture by decades. Identify two changes the 1960s produced in American sexual norms and account for one institution or technology, beyond Griswold v. Connecticut and the contraceptive pill, that helped make those changes durable.
5. (Causation) Account for the rise of the Silent Majority as a political concept. Which features of the cultural revolts of the 1960s produced the Silent Majority response, and how did that response feed the conservative coalition that elected Ronald Reagan in 1980?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.