The Counterculture
The agitation for equal opportunity sparked other forms of upheaval. Young people in particular rejected the stable patterns of middle-class life their parents had created in the decades after World War II. Some plunged into radical political activity; many more embraced new standards of dress and sexual behavior.
The visible signs of the counterculture spread through parts of American society in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Hair grew longer and beards became common. Blue jeans and tee shirts took the place of slacks, jackets, and ties. The use of illegal drugs increased. Rock and roll grew, proliferated, and transformed into many musical variations. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and other British groups took the country by storm. “Hard rock” grew popular, and songs with a political or social commentary, such as those by singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, became common. The youth counterculture reached its apogee in August 1969 at Woodstock, a three-day music festival in rural New York State attended by almost half-a-million persons. The festival, mythologized in films and record albums, gave its name to the era, the Woodstock Generation.
A parallel manifestation of the new sensibility of the young was the rise of the New Left, a group of young, college-age radicals. The New Leftists, who had close counterparts in Western Europe, were in many instances the children of the older generation of radicals. Nonetheless, they rejected old-style Marxist rhetoric. Instead, they depicted university students as themselves an oppressed class that possessed special insights into the struggle of other oppressed groups in American society.
The Counterculture of the 1960s defies strict generalization. Protest touched virtually every US campus during that turbulent period, but each experienced it a unique way. Case studies provide a better understanding of the movement by examining the distinctive ways in which it evolved, peaked, and ultimately receded. As historians Robbie Lieberman and David Cochran put it, "the evidence suggests that there is no dominant narrative that fits every case; what local stories tell us is that the supposed anomalies are the stories."
Students throughout the country generally saw themselves as part of a "counterculture" that had infused American society to every corner. The spirit of the Human Be-in, which proclaimed "Make Love Not War", and Summer of Love in 1967 San Francisco had made its way to middle America by the summer of 1969 for "3 Days of Peace & Music" at the Woodstock festival. Grounding her study of the sixties generation on Karl Mannheim's 'The Problem of Generations," Rebecca Klatch asserts, "Like classes, generations represent an objective condition, regardless of whether individuals consciously recognize their commonality." Those that, "develop a subjective consciousness of their location, thereby becom[e] a potential force of social change"). A generation that attended college in unprecedented numbers, students in the sixties entered an environment that supported the questioning of traditional values and bonded with others who were experiencing the same changes.
"Other significant factors in the formation of the 1960s leftist youth protest include the effects of affluence on the development of 'post-materialist values, the significance of growing up in the nuclear age, and the spread of youth culture... To be seen as a hippie in the mid-sixties was ... not simply to be part of a new fashion trend; it was instead interpreted by many as a commitment to an alternative life course, a sign that one had made a break with the values and ways of life defined by one's parents, school, and community".
"Music was an integral part of the counterculture, a further expression of opposition to established rules and institutions". Music, "gave people a sense of generational solidarity and a sense that they were different and a sense different from the rest of the country, different from any other generation in American history, that they were in some ways special and blessed and it gave them a sense of being embattled, of ... being considered outsiders, reprobates, bad people".
"[T]he counterculture was able to reach a much larger audience because of postwar America1 s middle-class affluence." Young people had more disposable income to spend on clothes and music and mass media had a new ability, "to promote and disseminate youth culture [, thereby] further accelerat[ing] this generation's collective identity".
Another component of the youth culture that, "acted to unite individuals in opposition to straight society" was drugs. Both drug use and the loose "range of beliefs and practices" caused the counterculture to be dismissed or damned by at least the earlier SDS members, though other activist groups and individuals would embrace it. For the average college student, harassment for appearance and suspected drug use was more immediate than any disapproval by somewhat older activist members of the generation. "Such repression led to the delegitimation of institutional authority, radicalizing youth along the way".
"If you had started out smoking dope, growing your hair, discarding your bra partly to join the crowd and partly to shock adults ... only to end up getting harassed and busted, it was natural to ask questions about the society that was treating you like a freak." The police, restaurateurs, landlords, city officials, discriminated actively against, "people whose looks they didn't like."
The classical serotonergic psychedelics LSD, psilocybin, mescaline are not known to cause brain damage and are regarded as non-addictive. Clinical studies do not suggest that psychedelics cause long-term mental health problems. Psychedelics have been used in the Americas for thousands of years. By 2013, over 30 million people currently living in the US had used LSD, psilocybin, or mescaline.
Since the discovery of its psychedelic properties in 1943, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) has been explored by psychiatric/therapeutic researchers, military/intelligence agencies, and a significant portion of the general population. The U.S. Army and CIA dropped their research after finding it unreliable for their purposes.
Lysergic acid diethylamide-125 arrived in the United States in 1949 and was originally perceived as a psychotomimetic capable of producing a model psychosis. But in the mid 1950s intellectuals in Southern California redefined LSD as a psychedelic capable of producing mystical enlightenment. Though LSD was an investigational drug, authorized only for experimental use, by the late 1950s psychiatrists and psychologists were administering it to cure neuroses and alcoholism and to enhance creativity. Dr. Sidney Cohen's 1960 study of LSD effects concluded that the drug was safe if given in a supervised medical setting, but by 1962 his concern about popularization, nonmedical use, black market LSD, and patients harmed by the drug led him to warn that the spread of LSD was dangerous.
The psychologist Timothy Leary (1920-1996), an iconic cultural figure in the United States in the 1960s and afterward. The 1968 prohibition of psilocybin in the U.S. was largely a product of duelling moral entrepreneurs - Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Babas Ram Dass). The "Harvard drug scandal" was followed by their transformation from Harvard professors to countercultural icons. They tested the substance on a variety of human subjects and in doing so piqued the interest of Harvard undergraduates while drawing condemnation from other faculty and Harvard administrators.
Subsequent studies found no significant associations between lifetime use of psychedelics and increased likelihood of past year serious psychological distress, mental health treatment, suicidal thoughts, suicidal plans and suicide attempt, depression and anxiety. Psychedelics are not known to harm the brain or other body organs or to cause addiction or compulsive use; serious adverse events involving psychedelics are extremely rare. Overall, it was difficult to see how prohibition of psychedelics can be justified as a public health measure.
The Natural Mind, written in 1972, was Dr. Andrew Weil’s frst book and the philosophical basis for all of his resulting beliefs and tenets on health, healing, and the mind. Weil discusses the universal human urge to experience different states of consciousness either through drugs or with no drug. Weil asserted that people take drugs in order to alter consciousness. Most people who experienced consciousness altering drugs loved the book. Strong anti drug people hated the book, but the idea that humans search for highs is something the U.S. government would have to come to terms with before they can treat drug users as normal humans, not criminals. Weil wrote "I cannot help feeling that what we are now doing in the name of stopping the drug problem IS the drug problem." (Pg. 191)
"As old authorities lost their hold, politicians got mileage out of denouncing student radicals and hippies and black militants, all clumped together as battalions undermining the rule of the father-state and the family's own father"). True radicalization had its limits, however, even for the Left, as the rejection of the revolutionary and violent Weathermen faction by the mainstream SDS illustrated. Activist Lynn Dykstra noted of the time when SDS was approaching complete dissolution at its 1969 convention, "It was more of a martyrdom feeling that we were right and they were wrong and if they shot us, it would just help our cause. But we weren't trying to get killed.... None of us were that crazy".
In 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project saw 1000 students from all over the country organized by SNCC, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and other civil rights groups arrive in the South to conduct a massive voter registration and summer school program. Mario Savio, the future leader of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, was one of these students.
According to the President's Commission on Campus Unrest, university protests that originated in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley "altered the character of American student activism in a fundamental way". The main characteristics of the "Berkeley Invention" were: the initiation by a core group of activists; the meshing of major social and political issues with local university issues; the disruption of the administration of the university; police intervention, which, in turn, rallied moderate students; and decision-making among the protestors through consensus. "The high spirits and defiance of authority that had characterized the traditional school riot were now joined to youthful idealism and to social objectives of the highest importance".
However, the central concern of the authorities was the issue of civil disturbance, not civil disobedience directed at social injustice. They steeled themselves for an escalation of events and vowed to act forcefully. In May 1968, Governor Ronald Reagan of California ordered the destruction of People's Park at UC Berkeley. "The repression was so brutal. For those who paid attention to Berkeley, the sense of white exemption died there, a full year before Kent State," Todd Gitlin says in his chronicle of the sixties.
Two years later, on April 7, 1970, Reagan tried to rally support when addressing an audience of alumni of the University of California system by pronouncing that radical student protestors should be told, "If it takes a bloodbath now let's get it over with." The 'bloodbath' statement caught nationwide attention, and was interpreted as Reagan's desire to have a confrontation with students".
The young men (and a few women) who made up the conservative Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), a group inspired by Barry Goldwaters 1964 bid for the presidency, were the children of privilege; in this respect they mirrored their counterparts on the left, the young members of Students for a Democratic Society. But rather than preserve the Republican status quo, they broke from the politics of their elders at many critical junctures. Notable among them, in the later 1960s, was YAFs growing criticism of the Vietnam War and especially of military conscription, which they believed violated the most fundamental principle of individual liberty.
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