Youth Culture of the 1960s in two minutes
- The baby boom generation, about 76 million Americans born from 1946 to 1964, filled colleges, and by 1970 more than twice as many people were enrolled as in 1959.
- In June 1962 Students for a Democratic Society, inspired by Black sit-ins, issued the Port Huron Statement, which called for participatory democracy and criticized racism and the nuclear arms race.
- At Berkeley the Free Speech Movement of 1964 challenged university limits on political activity, and young conservatives also organized, founding Young Americans for Freedom in 1960.
- As Johnson sent ground troops to Vietnam in 1965, students held teach-ins and marches against the war and the draft, and police and protesters clashed outside the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.
- A counterculture of rock music, communal living, drug use and the sexual revolution rejected mainstream values, and the Summer of Love in 1967 and Woodstock in 1969 became its symbols.
- A draft lottery began in December 1969, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State in May 1970, and the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age to 18 in 1971.
- On the exam: Questions ask you to explain 1960s youth protest, compare the New Left, the counterculture and young conservatives, and connect them to Vietnam and the backlash of 1968.
Topic 8.12 key terms
- Baby boom
The jump in U.S. births after World War II, usually dated 1946 to 1964. Its first children reached college in the mid-1960s and crowded campuses built for far fewer students.
- Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
The main student organization of the New Left. Its 1962 manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, called for participatory democracy.
- New Left
A movement of young radicals in the 1960s, many of them students. The name set them apart from the Old Left of the 1930s, which had organized workers. The New Left took up civil rights, peace and participatory democracy, and it criticized liberals as well as conservatives.
- Participatory democracy
The idea that ordinary people should take part directly in the decisions that shape their own lives. The Port Huron Statement made it the New Left's central goal, and students first used it to demand a voice in how universities were run.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
Bred in Modest Comfort
1960–1962
Key terms: Baby boom, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), New Left, Participatory democracy
About 76 million Americans were born between 1946 and 1964. By 1970, more than twice as many Americans were in college as in 1959.
They learned protest from Black college students, who sat in at lunch counters across the South in 1960.
Not all of them turned left. In 1960, about ninety young conservatives founded Young Americans for Freedom.
In June 1962, fifty-nine members of Students for a Democratic Society met at a union camp near Port Huron, Michigan.
The Port Huron Statement
We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.
Two things made them uncomfortable: racism, and the Bomb.
They called their answer participatory democracy. And they aimed it at the liberals in charge.