AP U.S. History 8.12: Youth Culture of the 1960s

Since 1945, policies meant to contain communism had faced little opposition at home. Vietnam changed that. In August 1964 Congress gave Johnson authority to widen the war: "Congress approves and supports the determination of the President, as Commander in Chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." Only two senators voted no.

Then the war escalated, meaning it grew in size and cost. U.S. military deaths rose from 216 in 1964 to 1,928 in 1965 and 16,899 in 1968. Protest grew with them. The course framework, in one of its optional sources, notes that in April 1965 a student group, Students for a Democratic Society, led a march on Washington of up to 25,000 people, the largest peace protest in the country to that point. It puts the October 1967 march at as many as 100,000, half of whom went on to the Pentagon; estimates of that crowd varied. The National Archives calls 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive, a year of heightened social unrest over the war, values and race.

The draft made the war personal for young men. On December 1, 1969, the Selective Service held a lottery to set the order in which they would be called.

Sources: Tonkin Gulf Resolution; casualty statistics; 1968; Selective Service records (all National Archives).

Antiwar protest sometimes led to violence. In 1970, after President Nixon announced that American and allied troops had been sent into Cambodia, the Ohio National Guard was sent to Kent State University to put down unrest. On May 4, 1970, Guardsmen fired on students there, killing four and wounding nine. Days later, at Jackson State College, a historically Black college in Mississippi, city and state police fired on a dormitory, killing two young Black men. The unrest at Jackson State mixed protest against the war with anger over racism.

On June 13, 1970, an executive order created the President's Commission on Campus Unrest, chaired by former Pennsylvania governor William Scranton, to identify the main causes of campus disorder. The National Archives describes the rest of its charge as "suggesting nonviolent means of resolving grievances while protecting the right to dissent." The charge named the right to dissent as something to protect, and asked how grievances could be settled without violence.

Sources: Records of the President's Commission on Campus Unrest (National Archives); the AP U.S. History course framework, for the Cambodia announcement and the Guard's mission.

Opposition did not come only from the right. Some groups on the left rejected liberal policies too. They argued that liberal leaders did too little to change the racial and economic order at home, and pursued immoral policies abroad.

The course framework points to the New Left, a movement of young radicals. In June 1962, about 60 college students from Students for a Democratic Society met at Port Huron, Michigan, and, led by Tom Hayden of the University of Michigan, wrote the Port Huron Statement, a document closely tied to the New Left. In 1965 the same group organized the march against the war.

Notice who the target was. The war these students marched against was being fought by a liberal president, Johnson, the same man who signed the civil rights and antipoverty laws. In his 1965 inaugural he had accepted that American lives might be spent "in countries we barely know." To his critics on the left, the Great Society at home did not excuse the war abroad, and it did not go far enough. Martin Luther King Jr. became one such critic: the National Archives notes that in the later 1960s he "turned his attention to poverty, capitalism, and the war in Vietnam."

Sources: the AP U.S. History course framework; Johnson's inaugural address (Avalon Project); Martin Luther King, Jr. (National Archives).

A counterculture is a way of living set against the main culture of its time. In the 1960s young people in the counterculture rejected many of the social, economic and political values of their parents' generation. They brought greater informality into American culture: jeans and long hair at school and at work, first names where titles had been the rule. In August 1969 hundreds of thousands gathered for the Woodstock music festival in New York. With the birth control pill, sold since 1960, many pushed for changes in sexual norms. It grew out of the challenges to postwar conformity that artists, intellectuals and rebellious youth had already raised in the 1950s.

The counterculture and the antiwar movement were different things, but they met. The course framework describes a 1967 photograph from the Pentagon in which a protester places a flower in a soldier's rifle barrel.

Nixon's first inaugural, in January 1969, shows how an older American could see both sides of the young. He praised them: "We see the hope of tomorrow in the youth of today." He called them "more passionately driven by conscience than any generation in our history." In the same speech he warned, "We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another."

Sources: the AP U.S. History course framework; Nixon's first inaugural address (Avalon Project).